An excerpt from the opening chapter of Just There:

“William, it’s happened.”

Those were the words my brother Bob used when he phoned.  Without further explanation, I knew Aunt Edna had died.

And that meant that now I was responsible for my first cousin, Frankie Lou.

It was April 1994, and over twenty years had elapsed since I’d been asked by Frankie Lou’s parents to become their only child’s guardian upon their deaths.  Aunt Edna and Uncle Frank’s will formalized our agreement.

Frankie Lou was a New Year’s baby, born on January 1, 1949, when I was five years old.  That same year, my parents, my two younger brothers and I moved into our new house.  I remembered living nowhere else but Snow Hill Street as a child – my family at 1667 and Frankie Lou’s family directly across the street at 1670.

Frankie Lou was presently forty-five years old – no longer the little blond-haired girl playing on her front porch across the street – and I was no longer the little boy who wondered why she was different.  While growing up, I’d heard a brief story about “somebody” giving Frankie Lou some kind of test.  That had been my only clue that being different was in some way “official.”  As I became older, before my career in the mental health field, I started hearing words like “moron” and “retard.”  I knew they meant difficulty in learning and maybe some other things I didn’t yet understand.

On the phone, Bob asked me the question he knew had been stored away in the corner of the family attic for years. “What are you going to do?”  I had worked so hard to bring that question out into the open, to haul it downstairs from the attic, and to make it the centerpiece of our living room, so that my parents and Frankie Lou’s parents could discuss the answers.  I tried feeling optimistic about Frankie Lou’s future; however, the image that kept crystallizing in my mind was of Frankie Lou living in the back bedroom of her house, rarely interacting with anyone outside her home.  Uncle Frank died in 1975.  Aunt Edna had been her daughter’s sole companion for nearly twenty years.  Now, she was gone, too.  Frankie Lou was alone.

After a momentary pause, I answered Bob’s question.  “I’m not sure yet.  I need to talk to Maija.”  Bob offered his help.  I tried sorting through my initial options, but the unanswered questions had been hidden away in the family attic for too long.

I didn’t even know how to feel, which emotions were the right ones to experience.  Should I be sad?  Sad for whom?  Aunt Edna?  Frankie Lou?  I think I actually felt some kind of relief now that Aunt Edna was gone, and I would finally be able to do what I thought was best for my cousin.  At the same time, experiencing relief also made me feel guilty.

To me, to my brothers, to my parents, and to the townspeople of our small town, Frankie Lou had always been just there – in her house, in her bedroom doing the same things over and over for all those years.  I knew only one thing for sure; I didn’t want that to continue.  I wanted her to be out there; to work, to socialize, to exercise, to dance, to go to movies, to go out to dinner, to travel – to laugh and cry and struggle with life like everyone else.  The crying and struggling had been done by her parents for her until it all had become too overwhelming for them.  After Frankie Lou dropped out of public school and after her Dad died ten years later, Frankie Lou and Aunt Edna’s existence devolved until it resembled individual tumbleweeds rolling down the main street of an old ghost town.

Santa Claus came to see Frankie Lou on Christmas Eve as he did for my brothers and me. She watched the new-fangled gadget called television just like us. She learned to ride her bicycle just as we learned to ride.  BUT, as kids growing up in our neighborhood, we knew Frankie Lou was not like us in many ways.

Frankie Lou’s bike route was considerably shorter than other children her same age.  She rode her bike on the short sidewalk between her front door and Snow Hill Street, and then only when her mother was watching from the kitchen window.  Joe, Bob and I were allowed to ride our bicycles all over town when Momma and Daddy decided we were old enough.  Their instructions were always the same.  “You be careful, watch for cars.”  Frankie Lou and her bicycle were confined to the front yard.

Sometimes Frankie Lou got nervous.  She would flap her hands rapidly, while holding them up in front of her face.  My brothers and I asked questions.  “Why does Frankie Lou act so funny?  Why do we get sent home sometimes when she gets like this?”  We used words like nervous and funny to describe Frankie Lou when she started stuttering, breathing hard and flapping her hands.  When we laughed at her, we were corrected by Momma and Daddy.  “Don’t laugh at Frankie Lou when she gets like that.  She can’t help it.”

My brothers and I didn’t understand.  I only knew Frankie Lou was not like my friends, my brothers, or my other cousins.  I knew she was different.  I wanted to know what different really meant.

“Momma,” I remember saying as Joe and I arrived home, “Aunt Edna got mad at us for no reason.  I know Frankie Lou’s different, but –”

“What happened?” Momma interrupted.

“Joe and me and Frankie Lou, we were over there playing with Snap.  Throwing a stick.”

Frankie Lou and her family had a fenced-in back yard with a garden spot and a small swing set.  The fence was a tall privacy fence.  Frankie Lou sometimes played there by herself.  The hidden back yard was also home to the family’s black Cocker Spaniel, Snap.

“We were trying to teach Snap to go get the stick and bring it back.  We were taking turns throwing it.  When it was Frankie Lou’s turn, she threw it way over to the side. Snap couldn’t even find it.  Aunt Edna came running out the back door.  We had to stop.  So, we came on home.  What’s wrong with that?”

“Can’t tell you, William.  Maybe Edna thought she was gonna get hurt.  Something’s not quite right, but I don’t know what it is.  Edna doesn’t talk about Frankie Lou much.  Frankie Lou seems slower than the rest of the children her age.”

Supper – when our family was together – became a good time to ask questions.  “Why does Frankie Lou spend so much time in her room alone?”

During visits to our aunt and uncle’s house, we could see her in her bedroom as we walked past the hall doorway.  Frankie Lou sometimes appeared to be reading, sometimes watching television, and sometimes talking to herself.  And sometimes all three at once.  Unless prompted by Aunt Edna, Frankie Lou would not acknowledge our presence.  She continued to sit in her room at a card table, facing the small black and white television with her back to the door.  It was easy to ignore her.

“Why does Aunt Edna not let Frankie Lou do the things we like to do?”  My brothers and I had to learn about those things – often through troubling experiences.

Having been born less than a year before Frankie Lou, my youngest brother, Bob, was nearest her age.  My family didn’t take many photographs, but there was one black and white picture taken of Bob, Frankie Lou and Snap, playing on her front porch.  It was during one of those front porch playtimes that Bob learned a lesson – the hard way.  All three of us boys treasured the heavy afternoon thunderstorms so common to eastern North Carolina summers.  Each Harrington son – first me, then Joe and then Bob – took our turns converting our yard into a watery playground.  In our creative imaginations, a mud puddle morphed into a river, a lake, or even an ocean – anything we wanted it to be.  We ran around it.  We jumped over it.  The most fun was running through it, splashing the blackened water in all directions.

One particularly hot summer’s afternoon while Bob, Frankie Lou and Snap were on her front porch, a nasty thunderstorm erupted virtually without warning.

“Y’all come in quick,” Aunt Edna called out from the screened door behind them.  “Look, it’s raining so hard I can hardly see y’all’s house, Bob.”

After the storm had passed over, Bob had an idea.  “Frankie Lou, let’s go over to my house and play.”

Frolicking through the imaginary rivers and lakes didn’t last long.   Aunt Edna came tearing out of the front door.  “Frankie Lou, you come home right this minute.  NO.   WAIT!  I’ll come across the street and get you.  Bob Harrington, you know better.  Frankie Lou can’t play over here.  You have to play in her yard.  Haven’t your Momma and Daddy told you this?”

No they hadn’t.

Only as my brothers and I became older, would Momma and Daddy share more information.  “William, don’t say anything to Frank or Edna.  They got really mad last night when Retha and I were playing bridge over at their house,” Daddy said.

“What happened?” I asked.

“We were playing cards,” Daddy answered.  “Things were going like usual.  Frankie Lou was in her room   I told Frank and Edna, Frankie Lou could be doing a lot more.  I asked why they weren’t getting Frankie Lou some professional help.  Well, Edna didn’t like that.  She told me I didn’t have a child like Frankie Lou … that my boys were nothing like her.  She told us, you tend to yours, and I’ll tend to mine.”

“Bill and I just came on home,” Momma added.

Daddy added a statement made by Uncle Frank during a private conversation between the two.  “Bill, I ain’t gonna see no damn psychiatrist.”  Daddy rolled the card game and the adamant statement by Uncle Frank into one story.  He told it so many times that I could repeat it verbatim before my teen years.

When the questions came up during mealtimes, my brothers and I knew when it was time to move on to the next, less stressful topic.  Daddy would usually lower his head and look down into his plate; he would then pause a moment before starting to eat again.  Daddy ended most of those brief dinner table discussions like that – abruptly.   We knew intuitively that it was time to end the questions even if there had been no answers.  I sometimes rehashed the conversations with Momma, privately.  All those attempts at understanding only seemed to magnify the questions surrounding Frankie Lou and her family’s needs.

The inability to understand and to persuade his sister and her husband to do something – anything – affected my Daddy more than any of us.  His compassion toward his extended family was genuine.  I don’t think Aunt Edna and Uncle Frank believed in his empathy.  Even so, I knew it was real because of the change that would come over him whenever the questions began.  The questions about Frankie Lou could come from any of us, from Momma, or from my brothers and me.  Daddy often asked the first question and then proceeded to try and answer it – while the rest of his family listened.  Sometimes the speculations would come up at inopportune times:  during a television commercial and extending into the program we wanted to watch, or after we’d nearly finished eating, and we kids were in a hurry to go outside to play.  Daddy’s facial expression depicted a mix of emotions:  irritation, anger, bewilderment, and sadness.  The one I remembered the most was sadness; Daddy’s demeanor was not like that at any other time.  It didn’t matter who brought up the subject.  The mysteries remained.