A Beach for Thomas

What struck me most was how weird the light was. Steely and raw. The cold wind blew turgid waves upon the shore at an unfriendly angle. Low clouds raced west to east beneath a timid sun, both thick and willowy, and I kept hoping they would part for just a second. Give me a little light and warmth. I’m embarrassed because I’ve been a meteorologist, and now I’m walking down this low-light beach unprepared on an early March morning having forgotten a jacket. I’ve pulled my arms down inside my tee shirt, shivering against this damn wind. Amy and Thomas are a bit ahead, and they’re holding hands, walking at break’s edge, almost daring the water to surge onto their feet before they jump away.

The light is dim. The sun is weird. The wind is cold.

But my son is laughing. Unbothered. Because he’s holding his mother’s hand, jumping out of the way of encroaching water.

50 degrees on a windy beach is way colder than 20 degrees on a still mountainside.

I shiver and all around the seagulls squawk. Up ahead, Thomas is now running ahead of Amy. His legs are not short little chubby stumps anymore but are now long and lean. He keeps running and turning around to look at us, to urge us on toward something he’s seen or just to remind us that we need to be moving as fast as he is. Because he’s never seen the ocean before and by God there was so much to see.

He says he’s looking for seashells. Every time he sees something sticking up out of the sand, he thinks he’s found a treasure. But most of the time it’s just piece of garbage and we have to tell him to go put it in one of the trash barrels. After some searching, however, he manages to find a trove of shells and examines them all. The wide assortment and high concentration indicates that it had been a tourist’s satchel of shells purchased from a nearby shop and either purposefully or inadvertently dumped there. But I say nothing of this. Thomas eagerly picks a handful of his favorites and wants us to take them home to give to the neighbors back in Amarillo, so they will know he’s still here and that he still thinks about them. We promise we will.

My God, he seems happy.

It’s spring break, but it sure doesn’t feel that way. The beach is littered with high school and college kids sitting in the sand in full sweat suits, gripping cans of beer, looking at the hostile waves beating up the shoreline. They all look like they’d rather be in Cancun.

“Dad?” he hollers. “Dad!”

“Yeah buddy?” He has stopped running on a cold and empty section of the beach, and the wind is working hard to drown out our words.

“Help me build this!” he yells.

He starts to dig at the sand with a stick. Amy has found a similar implement and is following suit. I look around for a chunk of driftwood. “Ok!” I respond. “What’re we digging?”

“You’ll see!”

***

Like most couples, Amy and I like to watch a little TV after dinner and before bed. The girls are usually up in their rooms doing teenager things (mostly ignoring us and on their phones). The dishes are, for the most part, cleaned up, and the extra food is put into Tupperware for tomorrow’s lunch. Neat and orderly.

Things are quiet.

We briefly decide which of our shows we want to watch, then promptly go through the inevitable dance of trying to remember which show is on which streaming app. We eventually find what we are looking for, settle in on the couch, pour a glass of wine, and hit “play.” It is not uncommon for one of our legs to be in the other’s lap. The girls get flabbergasted when they come down and see us mindlessly rubbing each other’s feet.

“You guys are GROSS.”

Yeah, well. What can I say. It’s our evening ritual. We watch true crime procedurals and rub each other’s feet. It’s called getting older.

And we love one another.

I don’t know how we would get through all this if we didn’t.

Amy says, “One day I hope you’ll find someone to rub your feet. It’s pretty great.”

The sentiment is met with an eyeroll so dramatic I don’t know how she remains upright.

Not too long ago, Amy and I were on the couch, positions established. Wine poured. TV show playing. My leg was in her lap, and she was just running her fingernails up and down my shin. I noticed she kept stopping at the reddish dimple in the middle of my shinbone as she watched the TV, tracing the rim of the nearly perfect circle. The circle that has since transformed first from an open wound, then a gross scab, then an angry bruised crater. Now, it is just a small, discolored dimple. A dimple that will probably never completely go away.

A scar.

A scar from the last night Thomas was with us. Where he had kicked my shin bloody as he howled in the bathroom and tried to tear the toilet up out of the ground. From when we had realized we were out of our depth, and he needed more help than what we could provide.

Amy and I looked at one another and understood.

She said, “We need to get tickets to go see Thomas. It’s been a month.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll look into it tomorrow.”

And the house is quiet.

The house is quiet but not without weight. Because it shouldn’t be quiet. It should be bath time. It should be story time. It should be filled with the commotion of a little boy wanting to stay up just a little bit longer. To play one more game. To eat just a little more dessert.

But it’s quiet. And there’s nothing we can do about it except examine our scars.

Amy and I have made an unspoken deal where we talk about Thomas whenever the other is experiencing strong feelings.

Feelings of failure.

Of guilt.

Of loss.

But also, of hope. Because all we have is hope.

We both understand that a discussion about Thomas can be jarring to the other, particularly if it’s out of the blue. But there are tons of feelings that come flying in from out of nowhere, and if we are afraid to speak them to one another for not wanting to ruin the other’s mood…well, we’d never talk about him, and that’s a road to resentment.

Because there are so, so many scars to go around, and their weight is heavy.

Thomas has scars upon his brain from physical abuse as a baby.

The girls have emotional scars from previous trauma.

Amy and I have scars from which we will never truly be unburdened. Like that beautiful, sunny day last June when we had to let Thomas go and send him into treatment.

And like my leg, we heal the best way we can. But knotted, discolored marks remain.

I know I’m not as funny or jovial as I used to be. When speaking to friends or family, and they ask how I am, I tend to hold back a lot. I can hear myself frantically trying to put positive spins on everything, and not let on how the absence of Thomas is a chasm. And there ARE a lot of positive things going on with us.

We are starting a business we believe will be successful, a dream 10 years in the making.

Amy is doing great things at her university, getting published right and left.

There are so many exciting things on the horizon, so many cool things we are looking forward to.

But our house is so.

Damn.

Quiet.

And the scars tend to scream in that silence. When waking up. When in the shower. When watching TV. Driving. Whenever.

His absence festers.

We speak to Thomas twice a week over Zoom. Often times he doesn’t want to talk because he has been pulled away from a game he is playing and is annoyed he has been interrupted. And that’s ok with us because he seems to be settled in down there. He has friends. The staff seem to care deeply about him and want him to get better. The strict daily routine of the RTC suits him, helps keep him stable. Comfortable. Somewhat at home even.

But his monumental struggles persist. His “bad guys” still often “take over the headquarters.”

He can usually last on the call about 10 minutes, then he asks if he can go back to what he was doing. We praise him for being patient with us, for talking with us. We tell him how much we love him; how proud we are of him. Remind him to keep doing “his job,” which is to keep participating in therapy and being calm on the bus and at school — which he can do some of the time but not all of the time right now. He still struggles with this daily. We remind him that we will be coming down to see him soon.

It has been 9 months since Thomas left our home for the residential treatment center. We have been down to Houston to see him 4 times since then, spacing it every 2 months the best we can. Sometimes we drive, sometimes we fly. It’s a long, long drive from Amarillo to Houston. Good Lord Texas is big.

The lead up to our visits can be excruciating. We are always SO excited to see our son. To hold him. To smell the top of his head. To feel his warmth. To play with him and hear him voice his boundless imagination. To watch him eat. To hold his hand on the street. To have him climb in our laps. To just listen to him breathe.

But we are also always SO nervous. And frankly, scared.

How will it go? Will he have a violent meltdown? At a restaurant? In the car on the highway? Will he hit another kid out of the blue for simply existing near him? Will I need to restrain him in front of a crowd?

Can we keep him safe?

The scars start to murmur, then scream.

For each of our visits so far, Thomas has been perfect. No issues. They’ve been joyful and healing. The first visit we did not take him “off campus,” but stayed at the RTC and played with him. We came back the next day and did the same. Because the first visit went well, the second visit we took him back to our hotel to swim in the pool and go to a movie. The third visit was much like the second, but we took him to downtown Houston to several parks and to a seafood restaurant. He ordered fried alligator bites and loved them.

He says that’s his favorite food now.

The staff tells us that our visits are helping him a great deal, and that they have found successes when reminding him that if he continues to do well, when we come visit, he can do more and more fun things with us, stay out longer, maybe even one day spend the night out with us. He really, really wants to spend the night out, and mentions it often.

When we drop him off that final day of our visit and start heading home, whether to the airport or back north on the interstate, Amy and I are gutted. It’s impossible to overstate how retraumatizing it is to say goodbye to him.

Scar tissue willingly reopened.

***

“Dad!” he says. “Start digging!”

We all take our sticks and begin our task, taking frantic orders from our 10-year-old foreman. It doesn’t matter that the slope of the beach makes what he has in his mind impossible. He has a vision and proper hydrology is not going to ruin it.

So, we dig.

And finally, a large wave comes in and the water runs up and fills the bottom part of Thomas’s earthwork, and he’s excited to see the water rush up his channel and retreat back to the surf.

It is cold. It is windy.

Thomas stands up and runs to another point of his construct, brushing sand from his knees and hands, only to plop down and begin digging anew. Sea birds are screeching their encouragement.

And we dig.

And I know that soon I’ll have to take him back, and drive to the airport, and again say goodbye, and return to our quiet house.

And so, I dig against time and wind and cold. Watching my son laugh. Watching my wife laugh with him. My love for both of them driving hitches in my throat, sounds hidden in this wind.

Here on a nondescript stretch of public beach on Galveston Island.

Here on what will forever be Thomas’s Beach, even long after the tide comes and wipes clean our rough cuts in the sand. To heal it.

Scars and all.