Verbal, Rising

Verbal is fine; he’s a good boy. But these women want to tell Jana what’s wrong. They sit with clipboards and tell her the miracle child born out of her last egg follicle at the age forty-five is an anomaly. They lean towards each other, close ranks, and synchronize their words: He walks out of the classroom during lessons and runs across the field. His b’s are still d’s and d’s are still b’s. His shoes always on the wrong feet, every day his jacket is inside out. He is challenged—so challenged—a special needs expert must sit in on this meeting.

They tell her he talks strange and that he called a girl in class putrid last week. He has a vast vocabulary, Jana wants to say, that’s why I call him Verbal, but the words teeter on the tip of her tongue and fall backwards. The special needs guru weighs in, leans towards Jana and says: Mrs. Mansour, I’m afraid your child might have ADHD. He is emotionally unregulated, disruptive, distracted. We call this a combined type. Her child needs to be assessed by an Educational Psychologist. For the time being, they set up a workspace for him apart from the rest to help him focus.

At pick-up time, Jana makes an exception and lets Verbal sit in the passenger seat of her car, cups his small face, with its glass-cut cheeks in both hands, and looks into his black eyes, so black on a bad day, they do not reflect the light. Only when she smiles at him does he smile back, exposing an amalgamation of teeth. The permanent ones have forced their way out while the milk ones defiantly hold on. The ten stitches on his brow from when he tried to chase a bird through a glass door crease as they always do when he smiles. When she buries her nose in his hair, she does not smell gravel, grass, or the skin of other kids. She does not smell the earth. She ruffles his black locks raised like a cock’s comb. How was your day? she asks. Abhorrent, is his word of choice. She drives home with one arm around his bones.

Over the next couple of months, Jana says nothing about the school’s diagnosis to an educational psychologist or Verbal. She introduces chess, Monopoly, and games to help with his focus, but the boy will not sit still. She watches him spin on the floor like a Frisbee. His legs zap, jerk in midair, and copy his brain’s short circuit like a filament burning bright, gone haywire, and she wants to scream. She screams to shock him into stillness, to make him stop. Stop wearing your shoes on the wrong feet, your jacket inside out. Stop talking and moving. Just stop. All Verbal can do to stop her from screaming is to cup her face with his small hands and say, Mama, I love you.

She gives him colors, white sheets, rolls the rug away, and he sits. He sits still with only his hand moving over the paper. He draws wolves with wings, popcorn for clouds, and mummies bursting out of their bandages. He comes back with stories about unicorns galloping all the way to the Arctic Ocean to meet the narwhals. At night while he sleeps, he grinds his teeth while his legs chase his dreams. They kick the earth and jam into her body. They tear through dogged scenery. His long black lashes twitch like fluttering curtains. His eyes like windows about to shatter in a brainstorm.

In the daylight, Verbal comes to her with a dream of a man he has never met and yet somehow knows. The man’s feet are yet to tread the Earth, still he stands tall and upright, his face glows with reflections of the ground he stands upon, his black locks are raised like the squiggles of an ancient code. When he opens his arms calling Verbal to him, a flock of pigeons flies overhead. Jana knows that somewhere inside, Verbal understands what this dream means. She knows because he smiles, and the stitches on his brow crease.

How was your day, sweetheart? (Typical) How was your day? (Tolerable). How was your day? (Adequate). How was your day? It’s the end of the school term and he hands her a bulky envelope; a twelve-page report card with color-coded rows and columns for emotional, behavioral, and cognitive benchmarks. His place pinned down in each box. Charts with frames and hinges, but no exit doors. Numbered grids, like white glaciers on the cold page. She doesn’t read it to him, but Verbal knows. He knows because despite the narwhals, the dream, and her prayers, he turns to her in the night and says, Mama, I don’t belong.

At bedtime, Verbal curls by the window until his tears shore up against sleep. At dawn the clouds dab the inky skies in white. Verbal rises, looks straight through the curtain parting towards the vertical line of twilight. Tall and upright, he carefully picks his words, calling the man, the birds. Suddenly, there is a trill on the tip of every twig, a thousand riffs on every branch. They send a delicate tremor over the leaves; the ones tapered by the wind and the ones burnt by the sun. Verbal’s heels begin to rock. Back and forth they rock, back and forth on a floor now aglow, until his verbs are timeless wings that drift through windows and doors, over the trilling twigs, higher than white glaciers, than popcorn clouds. Back and forth he rocks, back and forth until his heels lift off, then his toes. Together, his feet slowly levitate, like a fledgling bird dipping and lifting its feathers for the first time before it levels off, steady over a pool of light.