Same rhythm. Same speed. Back and forth. He had both of his hands flat on the tile on either side of him. He wasn’t touching her. He was just rocking. And humming. Very softly.
I knew that hum. It was the theme song from his train show.
On the floor next to the little girl, there was a shopping basket tipped over. Apples had rolled across the tile. A carton of eggs was cracked open, yellow yolk leaking out. A jar of tomato sauce had smashed into red pieces near the gum display.
Theo was surrounded by the mess, and he didn’t seem to notice any of it. He was looking at the floor beside the little girl. Not at her face. Just near her.
And very softly, between hums, he was counting.
“Forty-one. Forty-two. Forty-three.”
The little girl’s lips were moving too. Silently. Counting with him.
I took one look at the scene in front of him and my hand flew to my mouth.
“Theo…” I whispered.
He didn’t look up. He just held up one finger. Wait. The same thing I did when he was little, when he was in the middle of calming down and I didn’t want anyone to interrupt.
“Forty-eight. Forty-nine. Fifty.”
The little girl stopped rocking.
She opened her eyes. She looked at the floor where Theo was looking. Her breathing slowed down. Her small hands, which had been clutched against her ears over the headphones, slowly came down into her lap.
Theo stopped rocking too.
“Fifty,” he said quietly. “That’s a good number. That’s halfway to a hundred.”
The little girl looked up at him. Not at his eyes. At his shirt. There was a train on it. A blue steam engine.
She pointed at it.
“Choo choo,” she whispered.
“It’s a Class A4 locomotive,” Theo said. “It’s called the Mallard. It’s the fastest steam train in the world. It went one hundred and twenty-six miles an hour in 1938.”
The little girl kept staring at the train.
“Choo choo,” she said again.
“Yes,” Theo said. “Choo choo is correct.”
Somebody in the crowd let out a sob.
That was when I realized almost everyone around us was crying. The two teenage girls were holding each other. The old man with the cane had his handkerchief out. The security guard was wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.
I looked down at my brother. My brother, who had covered his ears and rocked on the floor of a school hallway while a boy filmed him and four thousand people laughed.
I didn’t understand what was happening. But I knew it was something big.
“Theo,” I said again, quietly. “What did you do?”
He didn’t answer me. He was still watching the little girl.
It was Denise who told me. She’d come back inside and was standing beside me, her mascara running down her face. She kept her voice low, like she was in church.
“It happened so fast,” she said. “That little girl came in with her mom about twenty minutes ago. And something set her off. I don’t know what. Maybe the music. Maybe the lights. Maybe the eggs breaking. All of a sudden she was screaming. On the floor. Kicking. Hitting her own head with her hands.”
I closed my eyes. I knew exactly what that looked like.
“Her mother was trying to pick her up,” Denise said. “Trying to hold her. And the little girl was screaming no, no, no and fighting her. And people started staring. And some man in line started yelling at the mother to control her kid. He said, ‘Some of us have places to be.’ He said something about bad parenting.”
“Who?”
Denise pointed with her chin. Near the end of register three, a man in a golf shirt was standing with a cart full of beer and steaks. His face was bright red. He was staring at the floor. He looked like he wanted to disappear.
“Then the manager came over,” Denise said, “and he was saying maybe they should step outside, and the mother was crying and saying I’m trying, I’m trying, she’s autistic, she can’t help it, and the little girl was screaming so loud, and I was about to call—”
She stopped.
“And then your brother walked up.”
My heart was pounding.
“He came from aisle seven,” Denise said. “He was holding a chocolate bar. He walked right up to the middle of all of it. And he looked at the little girl screaming on the floor. And he looked at the mother. And he looked at the man yelling. And then—”
She pressed her hand against her chest.
“He said, ‘Everybody needs to be quiet.’ Just like that. Not loud. Just very clear. Everybody needs to be quiet.”
“Theo said that?”
“Nobody listened at first. So he said it again. Louder. Everybody needs to be quiet right now. She can’t hear you. It’s too loud inside her.” Denise shook her head. “And the man in the golf shirt said, ‘Who the hell are you?’ And your brother turned around and looked at him and said, ‘I’m autistic too. When I was little, I did that. My brother sat with me. Nobody yelled. Yelling makes it worse. You’re making it worse.’”
I couldn’t breathe.
“Then he turned to Gary, our manager,” Denise said, “and he said, ‘Please turn off the music. And the light over register four is buzzing. It’s very bad. Please turn it off.’”
I looked up. The fluorescent light above register four was dark. The rest of the store was lit, but that one panel was off.
“Gary did it,” Denise said. “He didn’t even argue. He went in the back and turned off the music and flipped off that light. And then your brother took off his headphones and asked the little girl’s mother if he could put them on her. And the mother just—she just nodded. She didn’t know what else to do.”
“And then he sat down,” I said.
“And then he sat down.” Denise wiped her eyes. “He sat down on the floor right in all that broken glass and egg. Didn’t care. He said, ‘Hi. My name is Theo. I’m going to count. You can count if you want. You don’t have to.’ And he started rocking. And humming. And counting.”
She looked at me.
“And the whole store just stopped,” she said. “Everybody. All at once. Nobody told them to. They just stopped. Like they knew.”
I looked at the crowd around us. All these strangers. Standing perfectly still. Barely breathing. For a little girl they didn’t know and a boy they’d never noticed.
“Then I ran outside to find you,” Denise said. “Because he told me to. He said, ‘My brother Marcus is by the door. He should see this.’” She laughed through her tears. “He said, ‘He’s teaching me to do things alone. He’ll want to know I did something.’”
I put my hand over my face.
On the floor, Theo was looking at the little girl’s shoes. They were purple, with light-up soles.
“Your shoes light up,” he said. “Do they light up when you walk or when you jump?”
The little girl thought about it.
“Jump,” she whispered.
“That’s good,” Theo said. “Jumping is good for regulating. I used to jump on a trampoline.”
Then the little girl’s mother stepped forward from where she’d been standing by the register, her hand over her mouth, tears running down her face.
She knelt on the floor beside her daughter. She reached out and touched the girl’s back very gently.
“Lily, baby,” she whispered. “Are you okay now?”
The girl leaned into her mother’s arm. “Choo choo,” she said, pointing at Theo’s shirt.
The mother looked up at Theo.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice breaking. “I don’t know who you are, but thank you. I didn’t know what to do. Nobody ever knows what to do.”
Theo looked at her. At her chin, the way he always did.
Then his whole body went still.
He looked at her chin for a long time. His hands stopped moving. He tilted his head.
“I know who you are,” he said.
The woman frowned. “I’m sorry?”
I looked at her. Really looked at her for the first time. The dark hair, shorter now and streaked with gray. The thin face. The tired eyes.
The tiny mole on her left cheek. The one Theo used to touch when he was a baby.
The floor dropped out from under me.
“Your birthday is March fourteenth,” Theo said.
The woman’s face went white.
Slowly, she turned her head. And she saw me standing there.
“Marcus?” she whispered.
It was our mother.
Nobody in that grocery store knew what was happening. But they all felt it.
The silence changed. It went from soft to sharp. Like a held breath.
Mom stared at me. Then at Theo. Then at me again. Her mouth opened and closed. She had one arm around the little girl, and I watched it tighten.
“Theo?” she said. “Oh my God. Theo?”
“Yes,” Theo said.
“You’re—you’re so big.”
“I’m fifteen,” Theo said. “I’m five feet eight inches. I grew four inches last year. Marcus had to buy me new pants twice.”
Mom made a sound like she’d been punched in the stomach.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. Six years of silence. Six years of birthdays at the window. Six years of disconnected numbers and unanswered calls. And here she was, kneeling on the floor of Fairway Market, in a puddle of broken eggs, holding a little girl in purple light-up shoes.
A little girl named Lily.
A little girl who was five years old.
A little girl who was autistic.
I did the math. It wasn’t hard. Mom had told me she was pregnant on the last phone call. Six years ago.
That little girl was my sister. Our sister.
And Theo had just held her together on the floor of a grocery store while everyone else stood around and watched.
Gary, the manager, cleared his throat. He was a heavy man with a kind face and a bald head that was shining with sweat.
“Folks,” he said gently to the crowd. “Let’s, uh. Let’s give them some space, okay? Registers are opening back up. Take your time.”
The music didn’t come back on. Somebody had decided that without asking. The light over register four stayed dark.
Slowly, the crowd started moving again. Quietly. People went back to their carts. Cashiers went back to their registers. But everyone kept glancing over at us. The two teenage girls kept looking back over their shoulders.
The man in the golf shirt walked past us on his way out. He stopped next to Theo. He looked like he wanted to say something.
“Sorry, kid,” he finally mumbled. “I didn’t know.”
Theo looked at the man’s shoes. Brown loafers.
“You didn’t know she was autistic,” Theo said. “But you knew she was a little kid. And she was scared. You could have known that.”
The man’s face went red again. He nodded once and left without his steaks.
Denise brought paper towels and a mop. She started cleaning up the broken jar and the eggs around Theo. He stood up carefully and stepped out of the mess. He looked down at his jeans. They had egg on the knees and a little red streak of tomato sauce.
“I’m dirty,” he said.
“It’s okay, buddy,” I said. My voice came out strange. “We’ll wash them.”
“Cold water. Tomato sauce needs cold water. Hot water sets the stain.”
“Cold water,” I agreed.
Mom was still on the floor with Lily. She was looking up at Theo like she was seeing a ghost.
“You knew what to do,” she whispered. “How did you know what to do?”
Theo looked at her for a long moment.
“Marcus taught me,” he said.
Mom flinched.
“When I was little,” Theo said, “and I did that, Marcus sat on the floor with me. He didn’t touch me unless I wanted. He made everybody be quiet. He took me away from the light. He counted. He hummed. He waited.” He paused. “He always waited. That’s the most important part. You have to wait until it’s done. You can’t make it be done faster.”
Mom covered her mouth with her hand.
“I did that for her,” Theo said, looking down at Lily. “The same thing Marcus did for me.”
Lily was still wearing his headphones. She was patting the light-up soles of her shoes, watching them blink. She seemed completely calm now. Like the storm had never happened.
“Can I ask a question?” Theo said.
Mom nodded. She couldn’t speak.
“Is Lily my sister?”
Mom’s face crumpled. She nodded again.
Theo thought about this for a long time. I watched him put it together. The pregnancy. The years. The birthday he’d kept track of, March fourteenth. The window he’d stood at.
“Is she autistic?” he asked.
“Yes,” Mom whispered. “They diagnosed her when she was three.”
“Does she go to a place?” Theo said. “A place equipped for kids like her?”
The question hit the air like a slap.
Mom’s eyes went wide. She looked at me. I knew she remembered. Every word. He’ll be better somewhere equipped for kids like him.
Theo had heard it too. Six years ago. Through the kitchen wall, with the train show playing. I’d always hoped he hadn’t. I’d always told myself he was too young, too absorbed in his show, too far away.
But Theo remembers everything.
“No,” Mom said. Her voice was barely a whisper. “No. She lives with me.”
Theo nodded slowly.
“Okay,” he said. “That’s good.”
He didn’t say it mean. He didn’t say it angry. He just said it like a fact. Like it was the answer to a math problem.
Mom started crying so hard her whole body shook. She pulled Lily against her chest and buried her face in the little girl’s curly hair and sobbed.
Lily patted her mother’s arm. “Mama sad,” she said.
“Mama’s okay, baby,” Mom choked. “Mama’s okay.”
I stood there with my hands at my sides. I didn’t know what to do. Part of me wanted to grab Theo and walk out of that store and never look back. Part of me wanted to scream at her. Six years. Six years.
And part of me, a small, quiet part I didn’t want to look at, wanted to kneel down on that floor and let my mother hold me too.
“Marcus,” Theo said.
“Yeah, buddy?”
“I didn’t finish.”
“Finish what?”
He held up the chocolate bar. It was a little squished from when he’d been sitting on the floor. Dark chocolate with sea salt. The fancy kind. The kind that cost three dollars and forty-nine cents, which was more than he usually got.
“Go in. Find chocolate bar. Pay at register. Take receipt. Come back,” he said. “I only did the first two.”
I laughed. It came out like a sob.
“Okay. Go finish.”
He walked over to Denise’s register. She’d finished mopping. She hurried behind the counter and wiped her eyes on her apron.
Theo set the chocolate bar on the belt. He pulled the ten-dollar bill out of his shirt pocket. He held it out.
“Just this, please,” he said.
Denise picked up the chocolate bar. She looked at it. Then she looked at him.
“This one’s on me, honey,” she said.
Theo frowned. “No. I have to pay. That’s the rule. Pay at the register.”
“I know. But I want to give it to you. As a thank-you.”
“That’s not the instructions.”
Denise looked at me. I shrugged helplessly. I’d learned a long time ago not to argue with Theo’s instructions.
“Okay,” Denise said gently. “Okay. Then you pay.”
