A Dash of Summer
Kate walks in the door at five-forty pretty pleased with herself. It's Ellery that pops her head up from the living room floor and scrambles to her feet to run for her mother. She flings herself at Kate and mumble something into Kate's thighs, and so Kate has to lean down and pick her up, tossing her keys to the entryway table.
"Hey, my sweet girl. How was lunch with Daddy?"
"Dash throw up."
"Oh, I heard that. But you were kind to him?"
"I was kind, Mommy," she praises herself, hugging Kate around the neck.
"Good job," she says softly, kissing her daughter's cheek. She lowers Ellery to the ground and combs her fingers through the tangles in her hair. "Go and play. I'm gonna find Dash."
"He's upstairs."
"And where's Daddy?"
"He writin'."
"Okay, then, Daddy must be in deep if he didn't hear the door. You want to tell him I'm home?"
Ellery shrieks her father's name and goes running for the study, so Kate turns and climbs the stairs to find her little boy. Poor guy, throwing up at lunch because of the stress of their day. Probably an accumulation of the wedding, being the ring bearer, and then getting in serious trouble on the playground - it has that kind of affect on him. She wants to go through it with him, step by step, help him identify his stressors with the methods that Julie taught them. It's worked for him so far, and she wants him to have the tools to help himself in the future.
She worries about what happens to him in college when she's not there.
Kate knocks on the door as she opens it, finds Dashiell in bed with the covers pulled up to his neck, watching Teen Titans on his television. The light is still on, which kind of ruin his dramatic effect, but his face is appropriately dull and listless, his eyes flat.
"Dash," she calls.
He gaze jerks to her and he sits upright, covers falling off to reveal him in his play clothes still, his smile widening his face. "Mommy," he greets her, throwing up both arms like a toddler.
She gives in and comes to him, takes his embrace with a strong one of her own, kissing his neck and cheeks, treating him like her baby since he's already acting like it. He doesn't even sigh at her, doesn't huff, and she knows that despite the melodrama, it's still pretty serious for him.
He's not sick; he's just affected.
Kate settles on the bed with him, lifts one knee to get at the zipper of her boot. "Help me out, wild man."
Dashiell crawls over her lap to unzip her boot, and then he does the other one while she peels them off. Kate chucks them towards the door and it makes him laugh, which is what she was going for anyway.
She snuggles down with him in his narrow bed, her arms around his torso, feeling his knobby elbows and the wings of his shoulder blades, and she watches Teen Titans long enough for him to settle again. When he seems ready for it, she rubs her hand through his hair and asks about lunch.
"I threw up," he says baldly, his face blanching.
"Not just gagging? You actually threw up."
"I couldn't make it to the bathroom," he whines.
"No, I know. I'm not mad at you for that. Am I ever mad at you for that, Dashiell?"
"No."
"No. Because you know what happened, right?"
"My sensory system got overloaded," he says, turning his face into her neck and wriggling down.
"Yeah, baby, it did. And sometimes when that happens, you can't help it. Your body rejects all that information. And today instead of a meltdown, you threw up. Down, up, gotta come out."
That does make him giggle a little, like he's trying.
She smiles and nudges his chin away from her neck. "Can you tell me what was overloading you?"
"All of it," he whines, his voice going up and his arms squeezing her.
"But not now," she reminds him. "It's not here now, baby. Just you and me and Teen Titans."
"Where's Ellery?"
"Downstairs with Daddy." She curls her fingers across his forehead, scraping his bangs out of his eyes. "Let's think about what was overloading your system today."
"It was too much. It made me gag."
"Lunch? But, sweetheart, you have that for lunch almost every day."
"I couldn't today."
"It was the last straw, I know. But what came before it?" Kate kisses his forehead and rubs his back, soothing circles, firm pressure, and he melts a little against her side.
"The playground."
"The playground," she repeats with a sigh.
"But I wasn't wrong. He wasn't a stranger. He was at my wedding."
"But he wasn't one of our safe people, Dashiell. He was a guest of someone's family, but Dad and I don't actually know him. It's still not okay to talk to him. That doesn't change."
"Mom," he says, sounding stricken. "But I-"
"No," she warns him. "It's over. That was earlier today, and it's gone. You know better now, don't you? And you'll do your best in the future. So let's leave it back there."
"Okay." But he doesn't seem that okay.
"Was that all that overwhelmed you?"
"I was hot and sweaty," he chimes in, getting into the rhythm of it now, giving her answers he knows from previous conversations like this. "And I don't know if I had any water before and then I had too much."
"Oh, I bet you're right. Anything else you think of? Have you been feeling grouchy all weekend?"
"Yeah, kinda," he says, in a tighter voice now, and she knows she's gotten to it.
"Kinda grouchy this weekend."
"And it - it was fun though, Mom. But it was all... it was all over."
"It was kinda crazy, wasn't it? You know that makes me grouchy too sometimes. The game was fun because it had rules-"
"But people didn't follow them right," he bursts out. "And then Dad forgot to take me back to the beach to check my pitfall."
"Oh, really?" she murmurs. She thought it was all about the wedding and being the ring bearer, but it's this instead. "Your pitfall."
"We were catching water horses so they wouldn't mess up Allie's wedding, but then i said maybe a mermaid and it wasn't a deep trap, Mom, you know that I wouldn't hurt them, but Dad was going to take me down to make sure they could get free after the wedding."
"Oh, that's very thoughtful of you," she says, but she's trying not to roll her eyes. Castle and his stupid mythologies, always making up stories and convincing the kids it's all real. "Um, Dash. Your water horse?"
"Yeah?"
"What... how deep was your pit?"
"Up to my pits," he giggles, giving her a sly grin with all the same charm as his father.
"Up to your armpits?" she says, shaking her head at him. "Well, think about how big a water horse is, and then how small you are in comparison. Do you think your water horse is still trapped down there?"
"Oh," he says, leaning his head against her shoulder. "Guess not. But the mermaid. She's real little."
"She is?"
"She's like Ellery's bigness."
Kate rubs the bridge of her nose to keep from laughing. "Well, mermaids are like dolphins and whales, remember? Dad said they swim around with their pod. So if your Ella-sized mermaid got stuck, she has all her family and friends to get her free."
"Oh, oh, that's good, Mom."
The way he says it, Kate thinks he has to know the stories are make-believe, that he does realize, somewhere, that his anxiety over water horses trapped on the beach is unfounded, but he has nowhere else to assign it.
"I think, wild man, you had a big job to do in the wedding, carrying those rings around and then walking down the aisle. And I think you also were really disappointed you didn't beat Miller in swimming. And what happens to you when you don't get enough sleep on top of that is your system gets out of balance-"
"Winky."
"Wink-winky?" she laughs, completely thrown by that word. And then remembers. "Oh, wonky. Yes, your system gets wonky."
"And then it's easy to overload. Everything overloads it."
"Yes, exactly. But do you remember those things that Julie gave you to help?"
"I can count. I tried counting - I even tried counting in the fractions to give me a good distraction, but it didn't work."
"No, I don't know that counting is going to distract you from gagging. What about asking Dad for a sharp hug?"
"I forgot."
"Okay, and Dad probably did too. It's okay." She smooths the blankets over their laps. "What about after?"
"I played video games."
She snorts. "That's not exactly on the list of things that makes you not frustrated, wild man."
"Yeah, but it was the Lego Build and I beat Ellery nine times."
"Oh, well that's different. Congrats on trouncing your sister." She flicks his forehead and he rubs the spot, glancing at her with a curling up grin.
"You're not mad at me."
"I'm never mad at you for this," she says intently, hugging him against her side. "I'm mad at you when you hit Ella. And I'm mad at you when you leave Legos on the stairs where I step on them. But I am never mad at you when you get overloaded."
"I threw up."
"You did," she sighs, brushing her lips across his forehead. Teen Titans is back from commercials and his eyes are fixed there, but she can still feel him here, holding on to it.
The holding on - that she can't rationalize away; that she can't analyze to its death. He will probably always be an anxious kid, but at least they know how to cope.
"Dashiell," she murmurs against the top of his head. "Dash, I love you, kiddo."
"I know."
She grins and squeezes him against her. "Okay then, my work here is done. Time for me to tell Dad hi. You can watch until the end of this episode, and then come downstairs."
She gets out of his bed and leans her fists into the mattress, hovering in front of his face annoyingly until he breaks his trance from the tv screen and huffs at her, ducking around her head.
She kisses him again and hums to herself, goes to find her husband.
Dash knows he's loved. If that's the best she can do, that is totally, completely enough.
