Let's Elope!
by
Jeff Stimpson © 2008
Elope: n. 1. To run away with a lover, esp.
with the intention of getting married. 2. To run away: ABSCOND.
-- Webster's II New College Dictionary
Alex is up at 2:30 in the morning, and he comes to
stand beside our bed, as he often does. I take him back to bed, stay
for a minute to make sure he falls back asleep, then go back to bed
myself. The phone rings at 4 a.m., waking me again. Please God
let it be some drunk guy, I think.
"Alex is in Marie's apartment!" Jill says.
We bolt into the living room, where the lights are
on. Alex sits in front of the TV, watching Elmo with the volume low.
He must have unlocked our front door and left our
apartment soon after I'd gone back to sleep. Marie says Alex came in
and turned on all the lights, including one she herself didn't know
how to work. Then I guess he left. Says Annette, another neighbor
who loves Alex, "I thought I heard my door rattling at about 3, but
I thought it was the wind."
I'm afraid of anything that breaks into - ha! -
the security of my home, afraid of this as much as I am of spiders.
Problems with your home peace of mind aren't things you want
anywhere, but you especially don't want them in New York City. Jill
thinks I've over-reacting a little, but all I know is that anyone to
whom I tell the story of Alex's eloping responds with dropping jaw
and widening eyes.
I hang my head this morning and pray I'm still
asleep. Jill says little, but dives onto the Net to Google
locksmiths and door alarms. "Alex, you CANNOT leave the apartment!"
We snap off Elmo. I tell Jill I could use some comforting at the
moment. She continues to tap the keyboard. Annette and Marie have
daughters at home, I think into my hands. Alex is still a cute
little 10-year-old. What happens when he isn't anymore?
When Jill gets off the computer, I learn the word
elopement at about 5 a.m., on the Internet. It's something that
autistic people and victims of Alzheimer's do. I know of one boy who
did this a lot. He's 14 now, I think, and his parents have put him
in some kind of facility.
So. Locks. Marie points out that Alex would lock
us out with chain locks and deadbolts, even if they're installed
high (he'll simply stand on a chair the same way he once, a lifetime
ago, stood on the open door of the dishwasher to reach the
Pringles). "Of all the stupid things we ever let him play with, the
worst was that baby toy where he had to learn to unlock all the
locks," says Jill. "'Here baby. Now we'll never be safe from your
baby paws!'" We've often thought of a more sophisticated lock on the
inside of our door, but NYC fire regs forbid inside-facing key
locks. Through this day we discover that we'll need a variance from
the fire department -- no, the fire department tells us, we'll need
it from the city Department of Buildings, which doesn't answer its
phone -- to get a combination lock installed what amounts to
backwards. "You want it how?" say the clerks in hardware store after
hardware store, turning the locks upside down to show that they
can't be installed that way no matter how two parents stare at the
Medeco displays like a couple of exhausted RCA/Victor dogs.
"My heart is broken," Jill says at one point,
between hardware stores. "I'm so jangled I can't imagine sleeping
more than three hours straight. For the first time, I see how a
couple could break up over something like this." She likens this day
to a "hospital day" way back when, before even the dishwasher and
the Pringles, days during which Alex used to be fine but when she
and I would walk around dazed and aching.
Can Alex figure out an alarm? We buy three: two
tiny white jobs that stick to the jam and to the door and that when
separated while ON! send their sound right through your skull. We
put one on the front door and another on the door of the boys'
bedroom, and I tell Jill to use the latter during my upcoming few
nights in Vegas. We also get an alarm that looks like a
micro-cassette recorder; it hangs from the knob of the front door
and goes off when jiggled.
"You got a little surprise coming to you, Alex," I
mutter. "There's a new sheriff in town."
On the first night, the hanging alarm chirps every
time somebody opens the door to the porter's closet in the hall. The
sticky stuff on one door-jam alarm lets go while we sleep; next
morning, I find the alarm on the floor, the impact apparently having
jarred its switch into the Off position. I try not to let Alex, who
is up for school already and who I guess decided to just stay home
overnight, see it. I have to fiddle with the hanging alarm to get it
off the knob; it goes off for a second. Alex giggles.
Everyone seems to want to help. Even one neighbor
we had a spat with years ago expressed concern. Marie said that if
somebody had to break into her apartment at 4 a.m., she's happy it
was Alex. I figure it's best to get the building involved. I tell
the head of building security, who is a friend, and he tells the
head of the board, and I ask that maybe the building management can
help us get the variance for the inside lock. E-mails fly. "Young
Alex Stimpson," one e-mail describes him, "who's autistic and almost
10 years old." The subject lines on the e-mails read "small
problem."
Copyright 2007 Jeff Stimpson, all rights reserved
