And I’ll feel that joy, too, when Jannie, on her twenty-second birthday, in one of her many Special Olympics soccer games, steals the ball off the player she’s defending and sprints down the field with it, dribbling like mad. She’ll weave her way past three defenders, come in on the goalie, fake left and shoot right, an outside of the shoe push into the upper ninety for a goal. It’ll be a great goal, and everybody on both teams will come over to hug her and celebrate, because that’s how it’s done in Special O’s. I’ll beam. That’s my girl.
There’s another tiny bubble, one I imagine every now and then, where after my divorce I’ll spend a lot of time with a woman named Emily. She won’t be bothered by Jannie, she’ll just want me to be me, Jannie to be Jannie, and Emily to be Emily.
In that bubble we’ll make it work. There’ll be a new drug on the market for trisomy 21, and the sun will shine every day and the Yankees will never, ever win the pennant, but the Ticats will be the powerhouse team of the CFL and my knees won’t hurt and my mind will be clear and I’ll keep all my memories as Jannie goes off to college and the sun will shine every day in Hamilton, Ontario.
In one particular spot in one particular tiny bubble, Alene will be a grad student when we meet, and an associate professor by the time she leaves for a post in Quebec. She can’t turn it down, and the stress and strain of raising Jannie, she’ll say in distancing French, is complètement impossible. I’ll have seen it coming for years, but we’ll still do the divorce through lawyers.
As time goes by, she’ll call Jannie often enough, and send her cards and cash on her birthday and Christmas. She’ll even bring Jannie up for a week or two to visit in the summer.
Jannie will do fine. By her sixteenth birthday she’ll be doing third-grade arithmetic and fourth-grade reading and tearing things up in Special Olympics soccer. This will be better than the school-district psychologist thought Jannie would ever do. It will be so good, in fact, that after her birthday party, after the neighbor kids and her special pals are gone, after the cake is eaten, she’ll be sitting on her bed kicking a plastic toy soccer ball off the opposite walclass="underline" shoot it, trap it with her foot, shoot it again, trap it, shoot it, trap it.
I’ll come in to stop the racket and she’ll look at me: that wide face, those eyes. Her language skills aren’t all that great, but from the look on her face I’ll be able to see something’s up. “My father,” she’ll say, “I sixteen now.”
I’ll sit down next to her. “Yeah, young lady. You’re growing up fast,” I’ll say, but what I’ll be thinking about is all the things Jannie I have learned together, often the hard way. Boyfriends, how to handle her periods, what clothes to wear and when to wear them, how to tie her hair in a ponytail and put in a different bow every day, how to ignore some people and pay attention to others, how to be so different and still be so happy. Tricky business, all of that.
“My father,” she’ll say, “I not be like you or Mom-mom.”
I’ll be the lunkhead I am in every one of these bubbles, no question, but I’ll be able to see where this is going: my Jannie, my hard-working girl, is doing so well that she knows how well she isn’t doing. She’s been expecting to grow up, to leave Neverland. But in this bubble… it doesn’t work like that.
“Jannie, Jannie,” I’ll say, lying to her and not for the first time, struggling with how to handle this. “Look,” I’ll say, “We’re all different, Janster, we all have different things we’re good at or bad at.”
She’ll look at me. She’ll trust me. I’ll say, “I wanted to be an astronomer, Jannie; you know, look at the stars and figure out what it all means. I wanted that, Jannie, in the worst way. But I couldn’t do the math.”
“Bet Mom could,” Jannie will say, smiling, getting into it.
“Yeah, Jannie, your mom sure could. She’s one smart lady,” I’ll say, though I’ll be thinking about what I might have said about Jannie’s mother just then. To be kind, she’ll have missed out on a lot of good things.
“Sure, my father. I get it,” Jannie will say. And then she’ll stand up to give me a hug, and I’ll hug her back and then I’ll leave the room. Later, out in the driveway, we’ll shoot hoops and she’ll seem fine. I’ll go out and join her in a game of one-on-one, make it-take it, and she’ll clobber me. I’ll blame it on my bad knees.
In my least favorite bubble I’ll die at age fifty-two of an aneurysm. Alene won’t be around and I’ll have no living relatives. I won’t leave much money behind. Jannie will be stranded. Alone. Unhappy. And there’ll be twenty more years of her own decline into senescence before there’s peace.
In another bubble Jannie will be an intellectual powerhouse. In high school she’ll think calculus is fun and physics is entertaining. She’ll have a perfect score on the science portion of the PSAT. Caltech will come calling, and MIT, and Yale and Stanford and Loyola and Case Western and Harvey Mudd and Duke and the University of Chicago. Astronomy in college? Physics? Biology? She’ll find it hard to decide.
She’ll be patient with me in this bubble. She’ll understand that her father is a decent guy, but not the sharpest tool in the shed. When she walks across the stage for that college degree, and then the next one, and then the next one, I’ll there in the audience, proud as I can be.
In one particular bubble, Jannie and I will be at the Brock Theatre in Hamilton, where we both live; me in a two-bedroom condo, Jannie in a group home that she’s recently moved into after years of living in her own apartment. Down syndrome people slide into early-onset Alzheimer’s, almost all of them. It’s unfair, but there it is.
Jannie will be thirty years old and I’ll be fifty-seven. We’ll be laughing and joking about old age on that January day as we walk through the parking lot’s snow, go into the sudden warmth of the theater, buy our tickets and take our seats. Then we’ll watch a movie, something about memory keepers and cute Down syndrome kids and the sweet and soapy ills of the world. I’ll be squirming in my seat; Jannie will be quiet.
When we walk out of the place people will be staring at Jannie. She’ll not be cute, and she’ll be shuffling some because of some knee trouble that I probably caused her, encouraging all that Special O’s soccer and getting her out on the basketball court with me for all those years. We won’t have played in a while.
It will be snowing lightly as we walk away from the theater and get in the car, a beat-up little Toyota that I’m determined to keep running. You don’t get rich in the CFL, and there are better uses for my retirement money than buying shiny new metal and plastic. As I start the car and get the heater going Jannie will look at me. I’ll see it in her eyes. That movie was a bad idea.
“My father,” she’ll say. “I. Am. Me.” And she’ll punch herself in the chest with her right fist, hard.
“You are that, Jannie, you certainly are,” I’ll say, kicking myself.
“Thank you,” she’ll say, and sit back and relax.
There are all those different bubbles, but right then and right there, this will be the only one that matters. This is it. Reality. We are who we are.