I used to have friends. Back before I had children, when I was working at a textbook publishing company outside of Boston, I’d hang out with some of the other editors after hours. We’d go for sushi, or to see a movie. When I met Henry-he was a technical consultant on a computer programming textbook-my friends were the ones who encouraged me to ask him on a date, since he seemed too shy to ask me. They leaned over my cubicle, laughing, asking if he had a Superman side underneath all that Clark Kent. And when Henry and I got married, they were bridesmaids.
Then I got pregnant, and suddenly the people I could relate to were enrolled in my birthing class, practicing their breathing and talking about the best deals on Diaper Genies. After we had our babies, three of the other mothers and I formed a casual playgroup. We rotated hosting duties. The adults would sit on the couch and gossip while the babies rolled around on the floor with a collection of toys.
Our children got older and started to play with each other instead of beside each other. All of them, that is, except Jacob. My friends’ boys zoomed Matchbox cars all over the carpet, but Jacob lined them up with military precision, bumper to bumper. While the other kids colored outside the lines, Jacob drew neat little blocks in a perfect rainbow spectrum.
I didn’t notice, at first, when my friends forgot to mention at whose house the next playgroup was taking place. I didn’t read between the lines when I hosted and two of the mothers begged off because of previous engagements. But that afternoon, Jacob got frustrated when my friend’s daughter reached for the truck whose wheels he was spinning, and he hit her so hard that she fell against the edge of the coffee table. “I can’t do this anymore,” my friend said, gathering up her shrieking child. “I’m sorry, Emma.”
“But it was an accident! Jacob didn’t understand what he was doing!”
She stared at me. “Do you?”
After that, I didn’t really have friends anymore. Who had time, with all the early intervention specialists that were occupying every minute of Jacob’s life? I spent the entire day on the carpet with him, forcing him to interact, and at night I stayed up reading the latest books about autism research-as if I might find a solution that even the experts couldn’t. Eventually, I met families at Theo’s preschool-who were welcoming at first but distanced themselves when they met Theo’s older brother; when they invited us for dinner and all I could talk about was how a cream of transdermal glutathione had helped some autistic kids, who couldn’t produce enough of the substance themselves to bind to and remove toxins from the body.
Isolation. A fixation on one particular subject. An inability to connect socially.
Jacob was the one diagnosed, but I might as well have Asperger’s, too.
When I come downstairs at seven in the morning, Jacob is already sitting at the kitchen table, showered and dressed. An ordinary teenager would sleep in till noon on a Sunday-Theo will, certainly-but then again, Jacob isn’t ordinary. His routine of getting up for school trumps the fact that it’s a weekend and there’s no urgency to leave the house. Even when it is a snow day and school is canceled, Jacob will get dressed instead of going back to bed.
He is poring over the Sunday paper. “Since when do you read the paper?” I ask.
“What kind of mother doesn’t want her son to be aware of current events?”
“Yeah, I’m not falling for that one. Let me guess-you’re clipping Staples coupons for Krazy Glue?” Jacob goes through that stuff like water; it’s part of the process used to get fingerprints off objects, and it’s a common occurrence in this household for something to go missing-my car keys, Theo’s toothbrush-and then to resurface beneath the overturned fish tank Jacob uses to fume for prints.
I measure out enough coffee into the automatic drip to make me human and then get started on breakfast for Jacob. It’s a challenge: he doesn’t eat glutens and he doesn’t eat caseins-basically, that means no wheat, oat, rye, barley, or dairy. Since there’s no cure yet for Asperger’s, we treat the symptoms, and for some reason, if I regulate his diet his behavior improves. When he cheats, like he did at Christmas, I can see him slipping backward-stimming or having meltdowns. Frankly, with 1 in 100 kids in the United States being diagnosed on the spectrum, I bet I could have a top-rated show on the Food Network: Alimentary Autism. Jacob doesn’t share my culinary enthusiasm. He says that I’m what you’d get if you crossed Jenny Craig with Josef Mengele.
Five days of the week, in addition to having a limited diet, Jacob eats by color. I don’t really remember how this started, but it’s a routine: all Monday food is green, all Tuesday food is red, all Wednesday food is yellow, and so on. For some reason this helped with his sense of structure. Weekends, though, are free-for-alls, so this morning my breakfast spread includes defrosted homemade tapioca rice muffins, and EnviroKidz Koala Crisp cereal with soy milk. I fry up some Applegate Farms turkey bacon and set out Skippy peanut butter and gluten-free bread. I have a three-inch binder full of food labels and toll-free numbers that is my chef’s Bible. I also have grape juice, because Jacob mixes it with his liposome-enclosed glutathione-one teaspoon, plus a quarter teaspoon of vitamin C powder. It still tastes like sulfur, but it’s better than the previous alternative-a cream he rubbed on his feet and covered with socks because it smelled so bad. The downside of the glutathione, though, pales in comparison to its upside: binding and removing toxins that Jacob’s body can’t do itself, and leaving him with better mental acuity.
The food is only part of the buffet.
I take out the tiny silicone bowls we use for Jacob’s supplements. Every day he takes a multivitamin, a taurine capsule, and an omega-3 tablet. The taurine prevents meltdowns; the fatty acids help with mental flexibility. He lifts the newspaper up in front of his face as I set down the two treatments he hates the most: the oxytocin nasal spray and the B12 shot he injects himself, both of which help with anxiety.
“You can hide but you can’t run,” I say, tugging down the edge of the newspaper.
You would think that the shot is the worst for him, but he actually lifts up his shirt and pinches his stomach to inject himself without much fanfare. However, for a kid who’s got sensory issues, using a nasal spray is like waterboarding. Every day I watch Jacob stare down that bottle and finally convince himself he will be able to handle the feeling of the liquid dripping down his throat. And every day, it breaks my heart.
It goes without saying that none of these supplements-which cost hundreds of dollars each month-are covered by medical insurance.
I put a plate of muffins in front of him as he turns another page in the paper. “Did you brush your teeth?”
“Yes,” Jacob mutters.
I put my hand down on the paper so that it blocks his view. “Really?”
The few times Jacob lies, it’s so obvious to me that all I have to do is raise an eyebrow and he caves. The only times I’ve ever even seen him attempt dishonesty are when he’s asked to do something he doesn’t want to do-like take his supplements or brush his teeth-or to avoid conflict. In those cases, he’ll say what he thinks I want to hear. “I’ll do it after I eat,” he promises, and I know he will. “Yes!” he crows suddenly. “It’s in here!”
“What?”
Jacob leans over, reading aloud. “Police in Townsend recovered the body of fifty-three-year-old Wade Deakins in a wooded area off Route 140. Deakins succumbed to hypothermia. No foul play was indicated.” He scoffs, shaking his head. “Can you believe that got buried on page A fourteen?”
“Yes,” I say. “It’s gruesome. Why would anyone want to read about a man who froze to death?” I suddenly pause in the act of stirring half-and-half into my coffee. “How did you know that article was going to be in the paper this morning?”
He hesitates, aware he’s been caught in the act. “It was a lucky guess.”
I fold my arms and stare at him. Even if he won’t look me in the eye, he can feel the heat of my gaze.
“Okay!” he confesses. “I heard about it on the scanner last night.”
I consider the way he’s rocking in his seat and the blush that has continued to work its way up his face. “And?”
“I went there.”
“You what?”
“It was last night. I took my bike-”
“You rode your bike in the freezing cold to Route 140-”
“Do you want to hear the story or not?” Jacob says, and I stop interrupting. “The police found a body in the woods and the detective was leaning toward sexual assault and homicide-”
“Oh my God.”
“-but the evidence didn’t support that.” He beams. “I solved their case for them.”
My jaw drops. “And they were okay with that?”
“Well… no. But they needed help. They were totally going in the wrong direction given the wounds to the body-”
“Jacob, you can’t just crash a crime scene! You’re a civilian!”
“I’m a civilian with a better understanding of forensic science than the local police,” he argues. “I even let the detective take the credit.”
I have visions of the Townsend Police showing up at my house today to berate me (at best) and arrest Jacob (at worst). Isn’t it a misdemeanor to tamper with a police investigation? I imagine the fallout if it becomes public knowledge that Auntie Em, the advice expert, doesn’t even know where her own son is at night.
“Listen to me,” I say. “You are absolutely not to do that again. Ever. What if it was a homicide, Jacob? What if the killer had come after you?”
I watch him consider this. “Well,” he says, entirely literal, “I guess I would have run really fast.”
“Consider it a new house rule. You are not to sneak out of here unless you tell me first.”
“Technically, that wouldn’t be sneaking,” he points out.
“Jacob, so help me-”
He bobs his head. “Don’t sneak out to go to a crime scene. Got it.” Then he looks directly at me, something that happens so infrequently I find myself catching my breath. “But, Mom, seriously, I wish you could have seen it. The crosshatch marks on the guy’s shins and-”
“Jacob, that guy died a horrible, lonely death and deserves a little respect.” But even as I say it, I know he can’t understand. Two years ago, at my father’s funeral, Jacob asked if the casket could be opened before the burial. I thought it was to say good-bye to a relative he’d loved, but instead, Jacob had put his hand against my father’s cold, rice-paper cheek. I just want to know what dead feels like, he had said.
I take the newspaper and fold it up. “You’ll write a note to the detective today apologizing for getting in his way-”
“I don’t know his name!”
“Google it,” I say. “Oh, and you can consider yourself grounded until otherwise notified.”
“Grounded? You mean, like I can’t leave the house?”
“Not unless you’re going to school.”
To my surprise, Jacob shrugs. “I guess you’ll have to call Jess, then.”
Dammit. I’ve forgotten about his social skills tutor. Twice a week, Jacob meets with her to practice social interaction skills. A graduate student at UVM who plans to teach autistic kids, Jess Ogilvy is terrific with Jacob. He adores her, just as much as he dreads what she makes him do: look cashiers in the eye, initiate conversation with strangers on the bus, ask bystanders for directions. Today they have planned to visit a local pizza parlor so that Jacob can practice small talk.
But in order to do that, he’ll have to be allowed out of the house.
“Muffin?” he asks innocently, handing me the platter.
I hate it when he knows he’s right.
Ask the mom of one autistic kid if vaccines had anything to do with her child’s condition, and she will vehemently tell you yes.
Ask another, and she’ll just as vehemently tell you no.
The jury’s still out, literally. Even though a handful of parents have sued the government-alleging that vaccinations caused their children’s autism-I haven’t gotten my class action suit check in the mail, and I’m not banking on it.
Here are the facts:
1. In 1988, the Centers for Disease Control recommended a change to infant immunizations schedules in America, adding three hepatitis B shots (including one at birth) and three haemophilis B shots, all given before the baby is six months old.
2. Drug companies stepped up to the challenge by providing multiple-dose containers of vaccines preserved with thimerosal, an antibacterial made up of 49 percent ethyl mercury.
3. Although the effects of mercury poisoning had been identified in the 1940s, the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC didn’t consider the effects of the dosage that newborns would receive because of these shots. The drug companies didn’t raise a red flag, either, even though the new regimen meant an average two-month-old at a well-baby checkup got a single-day dose of mercury one hundred times greater than the government’s long-term safe exposure level.
4. The symptomology of autism looks an awful lot like the symptomology of mercury poisoning. To give you an example: when scientists studied the migration of mercury into primate brains, they noticed that the primates began to avoid eye contact.
5. Between 1999 and 2002, thimerosal was quietly removed from the majority of childhood vaccines.
There’s the opposing argument, too. That ethyl mercury-the kind in the vaccines-leaves the body faster than methyl mercury, the kind that is a poison. That in spite of the fact that most vaccines are now mercury-free, autism is still on the rise. That the CDC, the World Health Organization, and the Institute of Medicine completed five large studies, none of which have found a link between vaccines and autism. Those facts are compelling, but the next one is all I needed to convince me there’s some sort of connection:
1. My son looked like any other two-year-old until he had a round of shots that included DTaP, Hib, and hepatitis B.
I don’t think it’s a causal link. After all, out of 100 children receiving the same vaccine schedule, 99 will never become autistic. But just like we probably all have markers for cancer in our genes, if you smoke two packs a day you’re more likely to develop it than if you don’t. Kids with a certain predisposition in their genes can’t get rid of mercury as easily as most of us can and, as a result, wind up on the spectrum.
I’m not one of these parents who swings so far to the other side that she eschews immunization. When Theo was born, he had his shots. In my opinion, the benefits of vaccination still outweigh the risks.
I believe in vaccines, I do. I just believe in spreading them out.
It is because of Jess Ogilvy that Jacob went to his junior prom.
It was not something I ever expected him to do, to be honest. There are a lot of moments I used to consider “definites” for a child of mine that, after Jacob’s diagnosis, became “wishes” instead. Going to college. Holding down a job. Finding someone to love him. I suppose Theo bears the brunt of all my dreams. I hope for Jacob to blend into the world more seamlessly, but I hope for his brother to leave his mark.
Which is why, when Jacob announced last spring that he planned to go to his Spring Fling, I was surprised. “With whom?” I asked.
“Well,” Jacob said. “Jess and I haven’t quite worked that out yet.”
I could see why Jess had suggested it: the photographs, the dancing, the table conversation-all of these were skills he needed to know. I agreed with her, but I also didn’t want to see Jacob hurt. What if no one he asked would go with him?
Don’t think I’m a bad mother; I’m just a realistic one. I knew that Jacob was handsome, funny, and so smart it sometimes left me reeling. It was hard, though, for others to see him in that light. To them, he just seemed odd.
That night, I went into Jacob’s room. The pleasure of seeing him excited for once about initiating a social interaction was tempered by the thought of a string of girls laughing in his face. “So,” I said, sitting down on the edge of his bed. I waited for him to put down his reading material-the Journal of Forensic Sciences. “The prom, huh?”
“Yes,” he said. “Jess thinks it’s a good idea.”
“How about you? Do you think it’s a good idea?”
Jacob shrugged. “I guess. But I’m a little worried…”
I seized on this. “About what?”
“My date’s dress,” Jacob said. “If it’s orange, I don’t think I could deal with it.”
A smile tugged at my mouth. “Trust me. No girl wears orange to a prom.” I picked at a thread on his blanket. “Is there any particular girl you’re thinking of asking?”
“No.”
“No?”
“That way I won’t be disappointed,” he said, matter-of-fact.
I hesitated. “I think it’s terrific that you’re trying this. And even if it doesn’t work out-”
“Mom,” Jacob interrupted, “of course it will work out. There are 402 girls in my school. Assuming that one of them finds me remotely attractive, the probability of getting one of them to say yes is statistically in my favor.”
As it was, he had to ask only 83. One finally said yes-Amanda Hillerstein, who had a younger brother with Down syndrome and was kindhearted enough to see past Jacob’s Asperger’s, at least for one night.
What ensued was a two-week crash course in prom etiquette. Jess worked with Jacob to make small talk during dinner. (Appropriate: Are you visiting colleges this summer? Inappropriate: Did you know there’s a place in Tennessee called the Body Farm where you can study how corpses decay?) Me, I worked with him on everything else. We practiced how to walk close to a girl instead of keeping a full foot of space between you. We practiced how to look at the camera when someone takes your photograph. We practiced how to ask your date if she’d like to dance, although Jacob drew the line at slow dancing (“Do I really have to touch her?”).
The day leading up to the prom, a thousand pitfalls raced through my head. Jacob had never worn a tuxedo; what if the bow tie aggravated him and he refused to put it on? He hated to bowl because he disliked the thought of putting his feet in shoes that had housed someone else’s feet moments before. What if he pitched a fit about his rented patent leather loafers for the same reason? What if the prom decorating committee had not gone with an under the sea theme, like they’d planned, but a disco party instead-with flashing lights and mirrored balls that would overstimulate Jacob’s senses? What if Amanda wore her hair loose, and Jacob took one look at her and ran back up to his room?
Amanda, bless her heart, had offered to drive since Jacob couldn’t. She pulled up in her Jeep Cherokee at 7:00 on the dot. Jacob was waiting for her with a wrist corsage he’d picked out at the florist that afternoon. He’d been standing at the window, watching, since 6:00.
Jess had come over with a video camera to record the event for posterity. We all held our breath as Amanda stepped out of her car in a long peach gown.
“You said she wouldn’t wear orange,” Jacob whispered.
“It’s peach,” I corrected.
“It’s in the orange family,” he said, all he had time for before she knocked. Jacob yanked the door open. “You look beautiful,” he announced, just like we’d practiced.
When I took their picture on the front lawn, Jacob even looked at the camera. It remains, to this day, the only photo I have of him where he’s doing that. I admit, I cried a little as I watched him extend his crooked elbow to escort his date to her car. Could I have asked for a better outcome? Could Jacob have done a finer job of remembering every lesson we’d worked on so diligently?
Jacob opened Amanda’s door and then walked around to the passenger side.
Oh no, I thought.
“We totally forgot about that,” Jess said.
And sure enough, Jess and I watched Jacob slide into his usual position in a car, the backseat.
“This is it,” I say, and my mother pulls the car over in front of some random house I’ve never seen before.
“When do you want me to come get you?” she asks.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure how long it’s going to take us to write up the lab report,” I say.
“Well, you have your cell phone. Call me.” I nod and get out of the car. “Theo!” she yells. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
A backpack. If I’m doing schoolwork with an imaginary lab partner, I should at least be smart enough to carry a freaking notebook.
“Leon’s got everything,” I say. “It’s on his computer.”
She peers over my shoulder to the front door of the house. “Are you sure he’s expecting you? It doesn’t look like anyone’s home.”
“Mom, I told you. I talked to Leon ten minutes before we left the house. I’m supposed to go in the back door. Relax, okay?”
“Make sure you’re polite,” she says, as I shut the car door. “Please and thank-”
You, I mutter under my breath.
I start up the driveway and along a path that leads around the house. I have just turned the corner when I hear my mother pull away.
Of course it looks like there’s no one here. I planned it that way.
I don’t have a lab report to do. I don’t even know anyone named Leon.
This is a new neighborhood for me. A lot of professors who work at UVM live here. The houses are old and have little brass plaques on them with the years they were built. The really cool thing about old houses is that they have crappy locks. You can jimmy them open most of the time with a credit card slipped in the right way. I don’t have a credit card, but my school ID works just as well.
I know that no one’s home because there aren’t any footprints on the driveway after last night’s snow-something my mother didn’t notice. On the porch, I kick the snow off my sneakers and walk inside. The house smells like old people-oatmeal and mothballs. There’s a cane propped inside the entryway, too. But-weird-there’s also a Gap hoodie hanging up. Maybe their granddaughter left it behind.
Like last time, I go to the kitchen first.
The first thing I see is a bottle of red wine on the counter. It’s about half full. I pop the cork and take a swig, and nearly spit the shit out all over the countertop. How come people drink if it tastes like this? Wiping my mouth, I rummage through the pantry for something to make me forget the taste of the wine, and find a box of crackers. I rip it open and eat a few. Then I check out the contents of the fridge and make myself a Black Forest ham and sage-cheddar sandwich on a baguette. No ham and cheese for this house. It’s even too fancy for good ol’ yellow mustard-I have to use champagne mustard instead, whatever that is. For a second I worry it will taste like the wine, but if there’s alcohol in it, you could have fooled me.
Trailing crumbs, I walk into the living room. I haven’t taken my sneakers off, so I’m leaving behind a trail of melting snow, too. I pretend I’m superhuman. I can see through walls; I can hear a pin drop. Nobody could ever take me by surprise.
The living room is exactly what you’d be expecting. Couches with crackly leather and stacks of paper everywhere, so many dusty books that even though I don’t have asthma I feel it coming on.
A woman and a man live here. I can tell because there are books on gardening and little glass bottles lined up on the mantel. I wonder if they sit in this room and talk about their kids, way back when. I bet they finish each other’s sentences.
Remember when Louis found a piece of felt on the driveway after Christmas…
… and he took it to show-and-tell as proof of Santa Claus?
I sit down on the couch. The television remote is on the coffee table, so I pick it up. I put my sandwich down beside me on the couch and turn on the entertainment system, which is much nicer than you’d think for ol’ Grandpa and Grandma. They have shelves of CDs, with every kind of music you can imagine. And a state-of-the-art, flat-screen HDTV.
They have TiVo, too. I punch buttons until I reach the screen to show what they’ve recorded.
Antiques Roadshow.
The Three Tenors on Vermont Public TV.
And, like, everything on the History Channel.
They’ve also taped a hockey game on NESN and a movie that aired last weekend-Mission Impossible III.
I double-click that one-because it’s hard to believe Mr. and Mrs. Professor watching Tom Cruise kick ass, but sure enough, there it is.
So I decide to let them have that one. The rest, I delete.
Then I start adding programs to tape.
The Girls Next Door
My Super Sweet 16
South Park
And for good measure, I go to HBO and add a dollop of Borat.
When that movie came out, it was playing at the same theater as Pirates of the Caribbean 3. I wanted to see Borat, but my mother said I had to wait a decade or so. She bought us tickets to Pirates and said she would meet us in the parking lot after the film, because she had to go grocery shopping. I knew that Jacob would never have suggested it, so I told him that I wanted to let him in on a secret-but he had to promise not to tell Mom. He was so psyched about the secret he didn’t even care that we were breaking the rules, and when I sneaked into the other theater after the opening credits, he came along. And in a way, I guess he did keep his promise-he never actually told my mother that we’d gone to see Borat.
She figured it out when he started quoting lines from the film, like he always does. Very nice, very nice, how much? I like to make sexy time!
I think I was grounded for three months.
I have a fleeting vision of Mrs. Professor turning on her TiVoed programs and seeing the Playboy bunnies and having a heart attack. Of her husband having a stroke when he finds her.
Immediately, I feel like shit.
I erase all the programming and put back in the original shows. This is it. This is the last time I’m breaking in somewhere, I tell myself, even though there’s another part of me that knows this won’t be true. I’m an addict, but instead of the rush some people get from shooting up or snorting, I need a fix that feels like home.
I pick up the telephone, intending to call my mother and ask her to come pick me up, but then on second thought I put down the receiver. I don’t want there to be any trace of me. I want it to feel like I was never here.
So I leave the house cleaner than it was when I first entered. And then I start walking home. It’s eight miles, but I can try to hitch once I reach the state highway.
After all, Leon’s got the kind of parents who wouldn’t mind dropping me off.
I’m feeling pretty good, because this Friday, I won my case against the pig.
Okay, so technically, the pig was not the one who filed the lawsuit. That honor belongs to Buff (short for Buffalo, and I swear I am not making this up) Wings, a three-hundred-pound motorcyclist who was riding his vintage Harley down a road in Shelburne when a gigantic rogue pig wandered off the side of the road and directly into his path. As a result of the accident, Mr. Wings lost an eye-something he showed the jury at one point, by lifting up his black satin patch, which of course I objected to.
Anyway, when Wings got out of the hospital, he sued the owner of the land from which the pig wandered. But it turned out to be more complicated than that. Elmer Hodgekiss, the owner of the pig, was only renting the property from a landlord who lived down in Brattleboro-an eighty-year-old lady named Selma Frack. In Elmer’s lease was a direct clause that said no pets, no animals. But Elmer defended his forbidden pig keeping (and his equally subversive chicken keeping for that matter) on the grounds that Selma was in a nursing home and never visited the property and what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.
I was representing Selma Frack. Her caretaker at the Green Willow Assisted Living Facility told me that Selma picked me out of the phone book because of my Yellow Pages ad:
Oliver O. Bond, Esquire, it read, with a graphic that looked like 007’s gun-except it was OOB, my initials. When you need an attorney who won’t be shaken OR stirred.
“Thanks,” I said. “I came up with that myself.”
The caretaker just stared at me blankly. “She liked the fact that she could read the font. Most of them lawyers, their print is too tiny.”
In spite of the fact that Buff Wings wanted Selma’s insurance to cover his medical bills, I had two strikes in my favor.
1. Buff Wings’s convoluted argument was that Selma should be held responsible even though she (a) didn’t know about the pig, (b) had expressly banned the pig, and (c) had evicted Elmer Hodgekiss as soon as she learned that he had loosed his killer pig on the general populace.
2. Buff Wings had chosen to represent himself.
I had trotted out experts to refute Wings’s claims about damages-both emotional and physical. For example, did you know that there is a guy from Ohio who actually is an expert on driving with one eye? And that in almost all states you can continue to drive-even a motorcycle-as long as your other eye has 20/20 vision? And that in certain circumstances, the term blind spot can be politically incorrect?
After the judge had ruled in our favor, I followed Selma and her caretaker to the elevator at the courthouse. “Well,” the caretaker said, “all’s well that ends well.”
I glanced down at Selma, who’d been asleep for most of the proceedings. “It’s all fun and games till somebody loses an eye,” I replied. “Please extend my congratulations to Mrs. Frack on her victory in court.”
Then I ran down the stairs to the parking lot, punching my fist in the air.
I have a hundred percent success rate in my litigation.
So what if I’ve only had one case?
Contrary to popular belief, the ink is not still drying on my bar certificate.
That’s pizza sauce.
But it was an honest accident. I mean, since my office is above the town pizza joint, and Mama Spatakopoulous routinely blocks my ascension on the staircase to thrust a plate of spaghetti or a mushroom-and-onion pie into my hands, it would be downright rude to turn her down. Coupled with that is the fact that I can’t really afford to eat, and turning away free food would be stupid. Granted, it was dumb of me to grab a makeshift napkin from a stack of papers on my desk, but the odds of it being my bar certificate (as opposed to my recent Chinese take-out order) had been pretty slim.
If any new clients ask to see my bar certificate, I’m just going to tell them it’s being framed.
Sure enough, as I am headed back inside, Mama S. meets me with a calzone. “You gotta wear a hat, Oliver.”
My hair is still dripping wet from my shower at the high school locker room. Ice has started to form. “You’ll take care of me when I have pneumonia, won’t you?” I tease.
She laughs and pushes the box at me. As I jog up the stairs, Thor starts barking his head off. I open the door just a crack, so that he doesn’t come flying out. “Relax,” I say. “I was only gone for fifteen minutes.”
He launches all twelve pounds of himself at me.
Thor’s a miniature poodle. He doesn’t like to be called a poodle within hearing distance-he’ll growl, and can you blame him? What guy dog wants to be a poodle? They should only come in female denominations, if you ask me.
I do the best I can for him. I gave him the name of a mighty warrior. I let his hair grow out, but instead of making him look less effeminate, it only makes him look more like a mop head.
I pick him up and tuck him into my arm like a football, and then I notice that there are feathers all over my office. “Oh, crap,” I say. “What’d you do, Thor?”
Setting him down, I survey the damage. “Great. Thank you, mighty guard dog, for protecting me from my own damn pillow.” I drag the vacuum out of the closet and start to suck up the debris. It’s my own fault, I know, for not putting away my bedding before running my errand. My office is currently also doubling as my living quarters. Not permanently, of course, but do you know how expensive it is to pay rent on a law office and an apartment? Plus, being in town, I can walk to the high school every day-and the janitor there has been very cool about letting me use the locker room as my own personal shower. I gave him some free advice about his divorce, and this is his thanks.
Usually, I fold up my blanket and tuck it with my pillow in the closet. I hide my little thirteen-inch TV inside a cavernously empty filing cabinet. That way, if a client comes in to retain my services, they won’t get the vibe that I’m hideously unsuccessful.
I’m just new in town, that’s all. Which is why I spend more time organizing the paper clips on my desk than actually doing any legal work.
I graduated with honors from the University of Vermont seven years ago with a degree in English. Here’s a little nugget of wisdom for you, just in case you’re interested: You can’t practice English in the real world. What skills did I have, honestly? I could outread anyone in a quick draw? I could write a totally smoking analytical essay about the homoerotic overtones of Shakespeare’s sonnets?
Yeah, that and $1.50 will get you a cup of coffee.
So I decided that I needed to stop living in the theoretical and start experiencing the physical. I answered a classified ad I’d found in the Burlington Free Press to be a farrier’s apprentice. I traveled around the countryside and learned to spot what was normal gait for a horse and what wasn’t. I studied how to trim a donkey’s hoof and how to shape a horseshoe around an anvil, nail it into place, file it down, and watch the animal take off again.
I liked being a farrier. I liked the feel of fifteen hundred pounds of horse pressed up against my shoulder as I bent the leg to examine the hoof. But after four years I got restless. I decided to go to law school, for the same reason everyone else goes to law school: because I had no idea what else to do.
I’ll be a good lawyer. Maybe even a great one. But here I am, at twenty-eight, and my secret fear is that I’m going to be just another guy who spends his whole life making money by doing something he’s never really loved to do.
I have just put the vacuum back in the closet when there is a tentative knock at the door. A man stands there in Carhartt coveralls, feeding the seam of a black wool cap through his hands. He reeks of smoke.
“Can I help you?” I ask.
“I’m looking for the lawyer?”
“That’s me.” On the couch, Thor begins to growl. I shoot him a dirty glance. If he starts scaring away my potential clients, he’ll be homeless.
“Really?” the man says, peering at me. “You don’t look old enough to be a lawyer.”
“I’m twenty-eight,” I say. “Wanna see my driver’s license?”
“No, no,” the man says. “I, uh, I got a problem.”
I usher him into the office, closing the door behind him. “Why don’t you have a seat, Mr…”
“Esch,” he says, settling down. “Homer Esch. I was out in my backyard this morning burning brush and the fire got out of control.” He looks up at me as I sit down at my desk. “It kind of burned down my neighbor’s house.”
“Kind of? Or did?”
“Did.” He juts out his jaw. “I had a burn permit, though.”
“Great.” I write that down on a legal pad: LICENSED TO BURN. “Were there any casualties?”
“No. They don’t live there no more. They built another house across the field. This was just a shed, pretty much. My neighbor swears he’s suing me for every penny he put into that place. That’s why I came to you. You’re the first lawyer I found who’s open on a Sunday.”
“Right. Well. I may have to do a little research before I can take your case,” I say, but I’m thinking: He burned the guy’s house down. There’s no way to win this one.
Esch takes a photograph out of the inner pocket of his coveralls and pushes it across the table. “You can see the place in the background here, behind my wife. My neighbor says it’s twenty-five thousand dollars I’ll have to pay out.”
I glance at the photo. Calling this place a shed is generous. Me, I’d have said shack. “Mr. Esch,” I say, “I think we can definitely get that down to fifteen.”
Here are all the reasons I hate Mark, the boyfriend Jess has had since last September.
1. He makes her cry sometimes.
2. Once, I saw bruises on her side, and I think he’s the one who gave them to her.
3. He always wears a big orange Bengals sweatshirt.
4. He calls me Chief, when I have explained multiple times that my name is Jacob.
5. He thinks I am retarded, even though the diagnosis of mental retardation is reserved for people who score lower than 70 on an IQ test, and I myself have scored 162. In my opinion, the very fact that Mark doesn’t know this diagnostic criterion suggests that he’s a lot closer to actual retardation than I am.
6. Last month I saw Mark in CVS with some other guys when Jess was not around. I said hello, but he pretended that he did not know me. When I told Jess and she confronted him, he denied it. Which means that he is both a hypocrite and a liar.
I was not expecting him to be at today’s lesson, and for that reason I start to feel out of control right away, even though being with Jess usually calms me down. The best way I can describe it is like being in the path of a flash flood. You might be able to sense that a catastrophe is imminent; you might feel the faintest mist on your face. But even when you see that wall of water rushing toward you, you know you are powerless to budge an inch.
“Jacob!” Jess says, as soon as I walk in, but I see Mark across the room sitting in a booth, and just like that, I can hardly even hear her voice.
“What’s he doing here?”
“You know he’s my boyfriend, Jacob. And he wanted to come today. To help.”
Right. And I want to be drawn and quartered, just for giggles.
Jess links her arm through mine. It took me a while to get used to that, and to the perfume she wears, which isn’t very strong but to me smelled like an overdose of flowers. “It’s going to be fine,” she says. “Besides, we said we’re going to work on being friendly to people we don’t know, right?”
“I know Mark,” I reply. “And I don’t like him.”
“But I do. And part of being social means being civil to someone you don’t like.”
“That’s stupid. It’s a huge world. Why not get up and walk away?”
“Because that’s rude,” Jess explains.
“I think it’s rude to stick a smile on your face and pretend you like talking to someone when in reality you’d rather be sticking bamboo slivers under your fingernails.”
Jess laughs. “Jacob, one day, when we wake up in the world of the Painfully Honest, you can be my tutor.”
A man comes down the stairs that lead up from the entryway of the pizza place. He has a dog on a leash, a miniature poodle. I step into his path and start patting the dog.
“Thor! Down!” he says, but the dog doesn’t listen.
“Did you know poodles aren’t French? In fact the name poodle comes from the German word Pudel, which is short for Pudelhund, or splashing dog. The breed used to be a water dog.”
“I didn’t know that,” the man says.
I do, because before I used to study forensics, I studied dogs. “A poodle took Best in Show at Westminster in 2002,” I add.
“Right. Well, this poodle’s going to take a whiz if I don’t get him outside,” the man says, and he pushes past me.
“Jacob,” Jess says, “you don’t just accost someone and start rattling off facts.”
“He was interested in poodles! He has one!”
“Right, but you could have started off by saying, ‘Hey, that’s a really cute dog.’”
I snort. “That’s not informative at all.”
“No, but it’s polite…”
At first, when Jess and I started working together, I used to call her a few days before our lesson just to make sure it was still on-that she wasn’t sick, or expecting to have some kind of emergency. I’d call whenever I was obsessing about it, and sometimes that was three in the morning. If she didn’t pick up her cell phone, I’d freak out. Once, I called the police to report her missing, and it turned out that she was just at some party. Eventually, we agreed that I would call her at 10:00 P.M. on Thursdays. Since I meet with her on Sundays and Tuesdays, that means I don’t have to spend four days out of touch and worrying.
This week she moved out of her dorm room and into a professor’s house. She is babysitting for the house, which sounds like an immense waste of time, because it’s not as if the house is going to touch the stove if it’s hot or eat something poisonous or fall down its own stairs. She will be there for the semester, so next week we are going to meet there for our lesson. In my wallet I have the address, and the phone number, and a special map she’s drawn, but I’m a little nervous about it. It will probably smell like someone else, instead of Jess and flowers. Plus I have no idea what it looks like yet, and I hate surprises.
Jess is beautiful, although she says this was not always the case. She lost a lot of weight two years ago after she had an operation. I’ve seen pictures of her before, when she was obese. She says that’s why she wants to work with kids whose disabilities make them targets-because she remembers being one, too. In the pictures, she looks like Jess, but hidden inside someone larger and puffier. Now, she is curvy, but only in the right places. She has blond hair that is always straight, although she has to work hard to make that happen. I have watched her use this contraption called a flat iron that looks like a sandwich press but actually sizzles her curly, wet hair and turns it smooth and silky. When she walks into a room, people look right at her, which I really like, because it means they are not looking at me.
Lately I have been thinking that maybe she should be my girlfriend.
It makes sense:
1. She has seen me wear the same shirt twice in a row and doesn’t make a big deal about it.
2. She is getting a master’s degree in education, and is writing an enormous paper about Asperger’s syndrome, so I am hands-on research for her.
3. She is the only girl, other than my mother, who can put her hand on my arm to get my attention without making me want to jump out of my skin.
4. She ties her hair back into a ponytail without me even having to ask.
5. She is allergic to mangoes and I don’t like them.
6. I could call her whenever I want, not just Thursdays.
7. I would treat her so much better than Mark.
And of course, the most important reason of all:
8. If I had a girlfriend, I’d appear to be more normal.
“Come on,” Jess says, tapping me on the shoulder. “You and I have work to do. Your mom says this place has a gluten-free pizza. They make it on some kind of special crust.”
I know what love is. When you find the person you are supposed to love, bells ring and fireworks go off in your head and you can’t find words to speak and you think about her all the time. When you find the person you are supposed to love, you will know by staring deeply into her eyes.
Well, that’s a deal breaker for me.
It is hard for me to explain why it is so difficult to look into people’s eyes. Imagine what it would be like if someone sliced your chest with a scalpel and rummaged around inside you, squeezing your heart and lungs and kidneys. That level of complete invasion is what it feels like when I make eye contact. The reason I choose not to look at people is that I don’t think it’s polite to rifle through someone’s thoughts, and the eyes might as well be glass windows, they’re that transparent.
I know what love is, but only theoretically. I don’t feel it the way other people do. Instead, I dissect it: Oh, my mother is putting her arms around me and telling me how proud she is of me. She is offering me her last French fry even though I know she wants it. If p then q. If she acts this way, then she must love me.
Jess spends time with me that she could otherwise spend with Mark. She doesn’t get angry with me, except for the time when I took all the clothes out of her closet in her dorm room and tried to organize them like mine. She watches CrimeBusters when we are together, although the sight of blood makes her faint.
If p then q.
Maybe I’ll tell Jess my idea today. And she will say yes to being my girlfriend and I will never have to see Mark again.
In psychoanalytic theory there is a phenomenon called transference. The therapist becomes a blank screen, onto which the patient projects some incident or feeling that began in childhood. For example, a patient who spends sessions silent might be asked by the therapist if there is a reason she doesn’t feel comfortable making free associations. Is it because she is afraid the therapist will find her comments stupid? And then, lo and behold, the patient breaks down. That’s what my father used to call me. Stupid. Suddenly, with the dam broken, the patient will begin to recall all sorts of repressed childhood memories.
My mother never called me stupid; however, it would not be a far reach for someone to look at my feelings for Jess and assume that, in the context of our relationship as tutor and pupil, I am not in love.
I’m just in transference.
“A medium gluten-free pizza,” I say to the mountainous woman at the cash register, who is Greek. If she’s Greek, why does she have an Italian restaurant?
Jess nudges me.
“Please,” I add.
“Eye contact,” Jess murmurs.
I force myself to look at the woman. She has hair growing on her upper lip. “Please,” I repeat, and I hand her the money.
She gives me back my change. “I’ll bring it over when it’s ready,” the woman says, and she turns back to the wide mouth of the oven. She sticks an enormous paddle inside, like a tongue, and pulls out a calzone.
“So how’s school going?” Jess asks.
“It’s okay.”
“Did you do your homework?”
She doesn’t mean my academic homework, which I always do. She means my social skills homework. I grimace, thinking about our last lesson. “Not quite.”
“Jacob, you promised.”
“I didn’t promise. I said I would try to strike up a conversation with someone my own age, and I did.”
“Well, that’s great!” Jess says. “What happened?”
I had been in the library at the bank of computers, and there was a kid sitting next to me. Owen is in my Advanced Placement physics class. He is really quiet and very smart, and if you ask me, he has a little bit of Asperger’s in him. It’s like gaydar; I can tell.
For fun, I had been on a search engine researching fracture pattern interpretation in the skull, and how you can differentiate between blunt-force trauma and ballistic trauma using concentric fractures, and that factoid seemed to be the perfect opening salvo for a conversation. But I remembered Jess saying that not everyone is wowed by someone who’s the human equivalent of a Snapple cap. So instead, I said this:
Me: Are you going to take the AP test in May?
Owen: I don’t know. I guess.
Me (snickering): Well, I sure hope they don’t find semen!
Owen: What the hell?
Me: An AP test-acid phosphatase test-it’s used with a forensic light source to test for presumptive semen. It’s not as conclusive as DNA, but then again, when you get a rapist who’s had a vasectomy, there won’t be any sperm, and if an AP test and a 530-nanometer trispot is all you’ve got-
Owen: Get the fuck away from me, freak.
Jess has gone all red in the face. “The good news,” she says evenly, “is that you tried to initiate a conversation. That’s a really big step. The fact that you chose to discuss semen is unfortunate, but still.”
By now we have reached the table in the back where Mark is waiting for us. He is chewing gum with his mouth wide open, and wearing that stupid orange sweatshirt. “Hey, Chief,” he says.
I shake my head and take a step backward. That sweatshirt, he wasn’t wearing it when I first saw him. I bet he put it on on purpose, because he knows I don’t like it.
“Mark,” Jess says, after glancing at me, “the sweatshirt. Take it off.”
He grins at her. “But it’s more fun when you do it, baby,” he says, and he grabs Jess and tugs her into the booth, practically onto his lap.
Let me just come out and say I don’t get the sex thing. I don’t understand why someone like Mark, who seems completely hell-bent on exchanging bodily fluids with Jess, isn’t equally excited to talk about the fact that snot, bleach, and horseradish can all give you false positives for blood during presumptive tests. And I don’t understand why neurotypical guys are obsessed with girl breasts. I think it would be an enormous pain to have those sticking out in front of you all the time.
Fortunately, Mark does take off the orange sweatshirt, and Jess folds it up and puts it on the seat where I can’t see it. It’s bad enough just knowing it’s there, frankly. “You get me mushroom?” Mark asks.
“You know Jacob isn’t a fan of mushroom…”
There is a lot I’d do for Jess, but not mushrooms. Even if they’re touching the crust on the far side of the pizza, I might have to vomit.
She pulls her cell phone out of her pocket and sets it on the table. It is pink and has my name and number programmed into it. It might be the only cell phone that has my name in it. Even my mother’s cell phone lists our number as HOME.
I stare down at the table, still thinking about Mark’s sweatshirt.
“Mark,” Jess says, sliding his hand out of the back of her shirt. “Come on. We’re in public.” Then she addresses me. “Jacob, while we’re waiting for the food, let’s practice.”
Practice waiting? I don’t really need to. I’m fairly proficient at it.
“When there’s a lull in the conversation, you can toss out a topic that gets people talking again.”
“Yeah,” Mark says. “Like: Chicken nuggets are neither chicken nor nuggets. Discuss.”
“You’re not helping,” Jess mutters. “Are you looking forward to anything this week in school, Jacob?”
Sure. Rampant dismissal and abject humiliation. In other words, the usual.
“In physics I have to explain gravity to the rest of the class,” I say. “The grade’s half on content and half on creativity, and I think I’ve found the perfect solution.”
It took me a while to think of this, and then when I did I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before.
“I’m going to drop my pants,” I tell her.
Mark bursts out laughing, and for a second, I think maybe I’ve misjudged him.
“Jacob,” Jess says, “you will not drop your pants.”
“It completely explains Newton’s law-”
“I don’t care if it explains the meaning of life! Think about how inappropriate that would be. Not only would you embarrass your teacher and make him angry but you’d be teased by other students for doing it.”
“I don’t know, Jess… you know what they say about guys with long IEPs…,” Mark says.
“Well, you don’t have an IEP,” Jess answers, smiling. “So there goes that theory.”
“You know it, baby.”
I have no idea what they’re talking about.
When Jess is my girlfriend, we will eat pizza without mushrooms every Sunday. I’ll show her how to enhance the contrast of fingerprints on packing tape, and I will let her read my CrimeBusters journals. She’ll confide that she has quirks, too, like the fact that she has a tail that she keeps hidden under her jeans.
Okay, maybe not a tail. No one really wants a girlfriend with a tail.
“I have something to talk about,” I say. My heart starts pounding, and my palms are sweaty. I analyze this the way Dr. Henry Lee would analyze any other piece of forensic evidence and store it away for the future: Asking girls out can cause changes to the cardiovascular system. “I would like to know, Jess, if you would like to accompany me to a movie this Friday night.”
“Oh, Jacob-well done! We haven’t practiced that in a whole month!”
“On Thursday I’ll know what’s playing. I can look it up on Moviefone.com.” I fold my napkin into eighths. “I could go out on Saturday instead if it’s better for you.” There is a CrimeBusters marathon, but I am willing to make a sacrifice. Surely that will show her how serious I am about this relationship.
“Holy shit,” Mark says, grinning. I can feel his eyes on me. (That’s the other thing about eyes; they can be hot as lasers, and how would you ever know when they’re about to be turned on full force? Better not to risk it, and to avoid eye contact.) “He isn’t showing you some communication skill, Jess. The retard is actually asking you out.”
“Mark! For God’s sake, don’t call him-”
“I’m not a retard,” I interrupt.
“You’re wrong. Jacob knows we’re just friends,” Jess says.
Mark snorts. “You fucking get paid to be his friend!”
I stand up abruptly. “Is that true?”
I guess I have never thought about it. My mother arranged for me to meet with Jess. I assumed Jess wanted to do it because she (a) is writing that paper and (b) likes my company. But now I can picture my mother ripping another check out of the checkbook and complaining like always that we don’t have enough to cover our expenses. I can picture Jess opening the envelope in her dorm room and tucking that check into the back pocket of her jeans.
I can picture her taking Mark out for pizza, using cash that came from my mother’s bank account.
Gluten-rich mushroom pizza.
“It’s not true,” Jess says. “I am your friend, Jacob-”
“But you wouldn’t be hanging out with Forrest Gump if you didn’t get that sweet check every month,” Mark says.
She turns on him. “Mark, go away.”
“Did you say what I think you said? Are you taking his side?”
I start rocking back and forth. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner,” I quote under my breath.
“This isn’t about sides,” Jess says.
“Right,” Mark snaps. “It’s about priorities. I want to take you skiing for the afternoon and you blow me off-”
“I didn’t blow you off. I invited you along to a standing appointment I had, one that I couldn’t just change at the last minute. I already explained to you how important plans are to someone with Asperger’s.”
Jess grabs Mark’s arm, but he shakes her off. “This is bullshit. I might as well be fucking Mother Teresa.”
He storms out of the pizza place. I don’t understand what Jess likes about him. He is in the graduate school of business and he plays a lot of hockey. But whenever he’s around, the conversation always has to be about him, and I don’t know why that’s okay if it’s Mark talking but not if it’s me.
Jess rests her head on her folded arms. Her hair is spread out over her shoulders like a cape. From the way her shoulders are moving, she is probably crying.
“Annie Sullivan,” I say.
“What?” Jess looks up. Her eyes are red.
“Mother Teresa saved the poor and the sick, and I’m not poor or sick. Annie Sullivan would have been a better example to use, because she’s a famous teacher.”
“Oh, God.” Jess buries her face in her hands. “I can’t handle this.”
There is a lull in the conversation, so I fill it. “Are you free on Friday now?”
“You can’t be serious.”
I consider this. Actually, I am serious all the time. Usually I get accused of not having a sense of humor, although I am capable of that, too.
“Does it matter to you that Mark is the first guy who’s ever told me I’m pretty? Or that I actually love him?” Her voice is climbing, each word another step on a ladder. “Do you even care if I’m happy?”
“No… no… and yes.” I am getting flustered. Why is she asking me all these things? Mark’s gone now; and we can get back to business. “So I made a list of the things people sometimes say that really mean they’re tired of listening to you, but I don’t know if they’re right. Can you check it?”
“Jesus Christ, Jacob!” Jess cries. “Just get lost!”
Her words are huge and fill the entire pizza place. Everyone is watching.
“I have to go talk to him.” She stands up.
“But what about my lesson?”
“Why don’t you think about what you’ve learned,” Jess says, “and get back to me?”
Then she stomps out of the restaurant, leaving me alone at the table.
The pizza lady brings out the pie, which I will have to eat by myself now. “Hope you’re hungry,” she says.
I’m not. But I lift up a slice anyway and take a bite and swallow. It tastes like cardboard.
Something pink winks at me from the other side of the napkin dispenser. Jess has left behind her cell phone. I would call her to tell her I have it, but obviously, that won’t work.
I tuck it into my pocket and make a mental note. I will just bring it to her when we meet on Tuesday, when I have figured out what it is that I am supposed to have learned.
For over a decade now, we have received a Christmas card from a family I do not know. They address it to the Jenningses, who lived in the house before we did. There is usually a snowy scene on the front, and then inside there is printed gold lettering: HAPPY HOLIDAYS. FONDLY, THE STEINBERGS.
The Steinbergs also include a photocopied note that chronicles everything they have been doing over the years. I’ve read about their daughter, Sarah, who went from taking gymnastics lessons to being accepted at Vassar to joining a consulting firm to moving to an ashram in India and adopting a baby. I’ve come to know Marty Steinberg’s big career breaks at Lehman Brothers and his shock at being out of a job in 2008, when the company folded; and how he went on to teach business at a community college in upstate New York. I’ve seen Vicky, his wife, go from being a stay-at-home mom to an entrepreneur selling cookies with the faces of pedigreed dogs on them. (One year there were samples!) This year, Marty took a leave of absence, and he and Vicky went on a cruise to Antarctica-apparently a lifelong dream that was now possible since Eukanuba had bought out Vicky’s company. Sarah and her partner, Inez, got married in California, and there was a picture of Raita, now three, as the flower girl.
Each Christmas season, I try to get to the Steinbergs’ letter before my mother does. She tosses them into the trash, saying things like Don’t these people ever get the message when the Jenningses don’t send a card back? I fish the card out and put it in a shoe box I have reserved specially for the Steinbergs in my closet.
I don’t know why reading their holiday cards makes me feel good, the same way a warm load of laundry does when I’m lying underneath it, or when I take the thesaurus and read through an entire letter’s words in one sitting. But today, after I come home from my meeting with Jess, I suffer through the obligatory conversation with my mother (Mom: How did it go? Me: Fine.) and then go straight up to my room. Like an addict who needs a fix, I go right for the Steinberg letters and I reread them, from the oldest to the most recent.
It gets a little easier to breathe again, and when I close my eyes I don’t see Jess’s face on the backs of my lids, grainy like a drawing on an Etch A Sketch. It’s like some kind of cryptogram, and A really means Q and Z really means S and so on, so the twist of her mouth and the funny note that jumped in her voice are what she really wanted to say, instead of the words she used.
I lie down and imagine showing up on the doorstep of Sarah and Inez.
It is so good to see you, I’d say. You look exactly like I thought you would.
I pretend that Vicky and Marty are sitting on the deck of their ship. Marty is sipping a martini while Vicky writes out a postcard with a picture of Valletta, Malta, on the front.
She scrawls, Wish you were here. And this time, she addresses it directly to me.
Nobody dreams of being an agony aunt when they grow up.
Secretly, we all read advice columns-who hasn’t scanned Dear Abby? But sifting through the problems of other people for a living? No thanks.
I thought that, by now, I’d be a real writer. I’d have books on the New York Times list and I’d be feted by the literati for my ability to combine important issues with books that the masses could relate to. Like many other writer wannabes, I’d gone the back route through editing-textbooks, in my case. I liked editing. There was always a right and a wrong answer. And I had assumed that I’d go back to work when Jacob was in school full-time-but that was before I learned that being an advocate for your autistic child’s education is a forty-hour-a-week profession in and of itself. All sorts of adaptations had to be argued for and vigilantly monitored: a cool-off pass that would allow Jacob to leave a classroom that got too overwhelming for him; a sensory break room; a paraprofessional who could help him, as an elementary school student, put his thoughts into writing; an individualized education plan; a school counselor who didn’t roll her eyes every time Jacob had a meltdown.
I did some freelance editing at night-texts referred to me by a sympathetic former boss-but it wasn’t enough to support us. So when the Burlington Free Press ran a contest for a new column, I wrote one. I didn’t know about photography or chess or gardening, so I picked something I knew: parenting. My first column asked why, no matter how hard we were trying as moms, we always felt like we weren’t doing enough.
The paper got over three hundred letters in response to that test column, and suddenly, I was the parenting advice expert. This blossomed into advice for those without kids, for those who wanted kids, for those who didn’t. Subscriptions increased when my column bumped from once a week to twice a week. And here’s the really remarkable thing: all these people who trust me to sort out their own sorry lives assume that I have a clue when it comes to sorting out my own.
Today’s question comes from Warren, Vermont.
Help! My wonderful, polite, sweet twelve-year-old boy has turned into a monster. I’ve tried punishing him, but nothing works. Why is he acting up?
I lean over my keyboard and start to type.
Whenever a child misbehaves, there’s some deeper issue driving the action. Sure, you can take away privileges, but that’s putting a Band-Aid over a gaping wound. You need to be a detective and figure out what’s really upsetting him.
I reread what I’ve written, then delete the whole paragraph. Who am I kidding?
Well, the greater Burlington area, apparently.
My son sneaks out at night to crime scenes, and do I heed my own advice? No.
I am saved from my hypocrisy by the sound of the telephone ringing. It’s Monday night, just after eight, so I assume it’s for Theo. He picks up on an extension upstairs and a moment later appears in the kitchen. “It’s for you,” Theo says. He waits till I pick up and disappears into the sanctuary of his bedroom again.
“This is Emma,” I say into the receiver.
“Ms. Hunt? This is Jack Thornton… Jacob’s math teacher?”
Inwardly, I cringe. There are some teachers who see the greater good in Jacob, in spite of all his quirks-and there are others who just don’t get him and don’t bother to try. Jack Thornton expected Jacob to be a math savant when that’s not always part of Asperger’s-in spite of what Hollywood seems to think. Instead, he’s been frustrated by a student whose handwriting is messy, who transposes numbers when doing calculations, and who is far too literal to understand some of the theoretical concepts of math, like imaginary numbers and matrices.
If Jack Thornton is calling me, it can’t be good news.
“Did Jacob tell you what happened today?”
Had Jacob mentioned anything? No, I would remember. But then again, he probably wouldn’t confess unless he was directly asked. More likely, I would have read the clues through his behavior, which would have seemed a little off. Usually when Jacob’s even more withdrawn, or stimming, or conversely too talkative or manic, I know something’s wrong. In this way, I am a better forensic scientist than Jacob would ever guess.
“I asked Jacob to come up to the board to write out his homework answer,” Thornton explains, “and when I told him that his work was sloppy, he shoved me.”
“Shoved you?”
“Yes,” the teacher says. “You can imagine the reaction of the rest of the class.”
Well, that explains why I didn’t see a deterioration in Jacob’s behavior. When the class started laughing, he would have assumed he’d done something good.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll talk to him.”
No sooner have I hung up the phone than Jacob appears in the kitchen and takes the carton of milk out of the fridge.
“Did something happen in math class today?” I ask.
Jacob’s eyes widen. “You can’t handle the truth,” he says, in a dead-on imitation of Jack Nicholson, as sure a sign as any that he’s squirming.
“I already talked to Mr. Thornton. Jacob, you cannot go around shoving teachers.”
“He started it.”
“He did not shove you!”
“No, but he said, ‘Jacob, my three-year-old could write more neatly than that.’ And you’re always saying that when someone makes fun of me I should stick up for myself.”
The truth is, I have said that to Jacob. And there’s a piece of me rejoicing in the fact that he initiated an interaction with another human, instead of the other way around-even if the interaction wasn’t socially appropriate.
The world, for Jacob, is truly black and white. Once, when he was younger, his gym teacher called because Jacob had a meltdown during kickball when a kid threw the big red ball at him to tag him out. You don’t throw things at people, Jacob tearfully explained. It’s a rule!
Why should a rule that works in one situation not work in another? If a bully taunts him and I tell him it’s all right to reciprocate-because sometimes that’s the only way to get these kids to leave him alone-why shouldn’t he do the same with a teacher who humiliates him in public?
“Teachers deserve respect,” I explain.
“Why do they get it for free, when everyone else has to earn it?”
I blink at him, speechless. Because the world isn’t fair, I think, but Jacob already knows that better than most of us.
“Are you mad at me?” Unfazed, he reaches for a glass and pours himself some soy milk.
I think that’s the attribute I miss seeing the most in my son: empathy. He worries about hurting my feelings, or making me upset, but that’s not the same as viscerally feeling someone else’s pain. Over the years, he’s learned empathy the way I might learn Greek-translating an image or situation in the clearinghouse of his mind and trying to attach the appropriate sentiment to it, but never really fluent in the language.
Last spring, we were filling one of his prescriptions at the pharmacy and I noticed a rack of Mother’s Day cards. “Just once I’d like you to buy one of those for me,” I said.
“Why?” Jacob asked.
“So I know you love me.”
He shrugged. “You already know that.”
“But it would be nice,” I said, “to wake up on Mother’s Day and, like every other mother in this country, to get a card from her son.”
Jacob thought about this. “What day is Mother’s Day?” he asked.
I told him, and then I forgot about the conversation, until May 10. When I went downstairs and started my Sunday morning coffee-making routine, I found an envelope propped up against the glass carafe. In it was a Mother’s Day card.
It didn’t say Dear Mom. It wasn’t signed. In fact, it wasn’t written on at all-because Jacob had only done what I’d told him to do, and nothing more.
That day, I sat down at the kitchen table and laughed. I laughed until I started to cry.
Now, I look up at my son, who isn’t looking at me. “No, Jacob,” I say. “I’m not mad at you.”
Once, when Jacob was ten, we were walking the aisles of a Toys “R” Us in Williston when a little boy jumped out from an endcap wearing a Darth Vader mask and brandishing a light saber. “Bang, you’re dead!” the boy cried, and Jacob believed him. He started shrieking and rocking, and then he swept his arm through the display on the shelves. He was doing it to make sure he was not a ghost, to make sure he still could leave an impact in this world. He spun and flailed, trampling boxes as he ran away from me.
By the time I tackled him in the doll section, he was completely out of control. I tried singing Marley to him. I shouted at him to make him respond to my voice. But Jacob was in his own little world, and finally the only way I could make him calm was to become a human blanket, to pin him down on the industrial tile with his arms and legs flung wide.
By then, the police had been called on suspicion of child abuse.
It took fifteen minutes to explain to the officers that my son was autistic, and that I wasn’t trying to hurt him-I was trying to help him.
I’ve often thought, since then, about what would happen if Jacob was stopped by the police while he was on his own-like on Sundays, when he bikes into town to meet Jess. Like the parents of many autistic kids, I’ve done what the message boards suggest: In Jacob’s wallet is a card that says he’s autistic, and that explains to the officer that all the behaviors Jacob is exhibiting-flat affect, an inability to look him in the eye, even a flight response-are the hallmarks of Asperger’s syndrome. And yet, I’ve wondered what would happen if the police came in contact with a six-foot, 185-pound, out-of-control boy who reached into his back pocket. Would they wait for him to show his ID card, or would they shoot first?
This is in part why Jacob isn’t allowed to drive. He has had the state drivers’ manual memorized since he was fifteen, and I know he’d follow traffic rules as if his life depended on it. But what if he got pulled over by a state trooper? Do you know what you were doing? the trooper would say, and Jacob would reply: Driving. Immediately, he’d be tagged as a wise guy when, in fact, he was only answering the question literally.
If the trooper asked him if he ran a red light, Jacob would say yes-even if it had happened six months earlier, when the trooper was nowhere nearby.
I know better than to ask him whether my butt looks fat in a particular pair of jeans, because he’ll tell me the truth. A police officer would not have that history to help color Jacob’s answer.
Well, at any rate, they are not likely to stop him while he’s riding into town on his bicycle-unless they take pity on him because it’s so cold. I learned a long time ago to stop asking Jacob if he wants a ride. The temperature matters less to him than his independence, in this one small thing.
Hauling the laundry basket into Jacob’s room, I place his folded clothes on the bed. When he comes home from school, he’ll put them away on his own, with the collars all lined up precisely and the boxer shorts arranged by pattern (stripes, solids, polka dots). On his desk is an overturned fish tank with a small coffee cup warmer, a tinfoil dish, and one of my lipstick containers beneath it. Sighing, I lift the fingerprint fuming chamber and reclaim my makeup, careful not to disturb the rest of the precisely ordered items.
Jacob’s room has the nuclear precision of an Architectural Digest feature: everything has its place; the bed is made neatly; the pencils on the desk sit at perfect right angles to the wood grain. Jacob’s room is the place entropy goes to die.
On the other hand, Theo is messy enough to make up for both of them. I can barely kick my way through the field of dirty clothes tangled on his carpet, and when I set the basket down on Theo’s bed, something squeaks. I don’t put away Theo’s laundry, either-but that’s because I can’t bear to see the drawers haphazardly stuffed with clothes that I distinctly remember folding on the laundry counter.
I glance around and spy a glass with something green festering inside it, beside a half-eaten container of yogurt. I place these into the empty basket to go back downstairs and then, in a fit of kindness, try to pull the bedding into some semblance of order. It’s when I am shaking the pillowcase into position around Theo’s pillow that the plastic case falls down and hits my ankle.
It’s a game-something called Naruto, with a manga cartoon character brandishing a sword.
It’s played on the Wii, a gaming system we’ve never owned.
I could ask Theo why he has this, but something tells me I do not want to hear the answer. Not after this weekend, when I learned that Jacob’s been running away at night. Not after last night, when his math teacher called to tell me he’s acting out in class.
Sometimes I think the human heart is just a simple shelf. There’s only so much you can pile onto it before something falls off an edge and you are left to pick up the pieces.
I stare at the video game for a moment, and then I slip it back into the pillowcase again before leaving Theo’s room.
I taught my brother how to stick up for himself.
It happened when we were younger-I was eleven and he was fourteen. I was on a jungle gym on the playground and he was sitting on the grass, reading a biography that the librarian had purchased just for him about Edmond Locard, the father of fingerprint analysis. Mom was inside, having one of a bazillion IEP meetings to make sure that Jacob’s school could be as safe a place for him as his home.
Apparently, that didn’t include the playground.
Two boys on incredibly sweet skateboards were doing tricks on the stairs when they spotted Jacob. They walked over, and one of them grabbed his book.
“That’s mine,” Jacob said.
“Then come and get it,” the kid said. He tossed the book to his buddy, who tossed it back, playing monkey in the middle with Jacob, who kept grabbing at it. But Jacob isn’t exactly a natural athlete, and he never caught it.
“It’s a library book, you cretins,” Jacob said, as if that might make a difference. “It’s going to get ruined!”
“That would suck.” The boy tossed the book into a huge mud puddle.
“Better rescue it,” his friend added, and Jacob dove for the book.
I called out to him, but it was too late. One of the boys knocked Jacob’s feet out from underneath him, so that he landed facefirst in the puddle. He sat up, soaking wet, spitting dirt.
“Happy reading, ’tard,” the first boy said, and they both laughed and skated away.
Jacob didn’t move. He sat in the puddle, holding the book to his chest. “Get up,” I said, and I held out my hand to help him.
With a grunt, Jacob stood. He tried to turn the pages in the book, but they were glued together with mud. “It’ll dry,” I said. “You want me to get Mom?”
He shook his head. “She’ll be mad at me.”
“No, she won’t,” I said, even though he was probably right. His clothes were totally destroyed. “Jacob, you’ve got to learn to fight back. Do whatever they do, only ten times worse.”
“Push them into a puddle?”
“Well, no. You can just… I don’t know. Call them names.”
“Their names are Sean and Amahl,” Jacob said.
“Not those names. Try You dickhead. Or Cut it out, prick.”
“That’s swearing…”
“Yeah. But it will get them to think twice before they cream you again.”
Jacob started rocking. “During the Vietnam War, the BBC was worried about how to pronounce the name of a bombed village-Phuoc Me-without offending their listeners. They decided to use the name of a nearby village instead. Unfortunately, it was called Ban Me Tuat.”
“Well, maybe the next time a bully is holding your face down in a mud puddle you can shout out the names of Vietnamese villages.”
“I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too!” Jacob quoted.
“You might want to go a little more hard-core,” I suggested.
He thought for a moment. “Yippee kay yay, motherfucker!”
“Nice. So next time a kid like that grabs your book, what do you say?”
“Pussbucket asshole, give it back!”
I burst out laughing. “Jacob,” I said. “You just might be gifted at this.”
I honestly do not have any intention of going into another house. But then on Tuesday I have an absolutely crappy day at school. First, I get a 79 on a math test, and I never get Cs; second, I am the only kid whose yeast doesn’t manage to grow in the lab we’re doing in bio; and third, I think I am getting a cold. I cut last period, because I just want to huddle in bed with a cup of tea. In fact, it’s the craving for tea which makes me think about that professor’s house I was in last week, and as luck would have it, I am only three blocks away when the thought enters my mind.
There’s still no one in the house, and I don’t even have to jimmy the back door; it’s been left unlocked. The cane is still leaning against the entryway wall, and that same hoodie is hanging, but now there’s a wool coat, too, and a pair of work boots. Someone’s finished the bottle of red wine. There’s a Bose stereo on the counter that wasn’t there last week, and a hot pink iPod Nano is charging in its dock.
I push the power button and see that Ne-Yo is cued up.
Either these are the hippest professors ever or their grandkids need to stop leaving their shit lying around.
The teakettle is sitting on the stove, so I fill it up and turn on the burner while I rummage around the cabinets for a tea bag. They are hiding on a shelf behind a roll of tinfoil. I choose Mango Madness, and while my water is heating, I scroll through the iPod. I am impressed. My mom can barely figure out how to use iTunes, and yet here is some elderly professor couple whizzing through technology.
I suppose they might not be that old. I’ve imagined them that way, but maybe the cane is for arthroscopic surgery, because the professor plays hockey on the weekends and blew out his knee as a goalie. Maybe they’re my mom’s age and the hoodie belongs to their daughter, who’s my age. Maybe she goes to my school. Or even sits next to me in biology.
I slip the iPod into my pocket and pour the water from the whistling kettle, and that’s when I realize that I can hear a shower running above me.
Forgetting my tea, I creep into the living room, past the monster entertainment system, and up the stairs.
The water sound is coming from the master bathroom suite.
The bed’s unmade. It’s a quilt with roses embroidered all over it, and there is a pile of clothes on a chair. I pick up a lacy bra and run my hand over the straps.
That’s when I realize that the bathroom door’s ajar, and that I can sort of see the shower reflected in the mirror.
My day has gotten considerably better in the past thirty seconds.
There’s steam, so I can only make out the curves when she turns and the fact that her hair reaches her shoulders. She’s humming, and she’s wicked off-key. Turn, I silently beg. Full frontal.
“Oh, crap,” the woman says, and suddenly she opens the door of the shower. I see her arm emerge as she blindly feels around for her towel, which is hanging on a rack beside the shower door, and wipes her eyes. I hold my breath, staring at her shoulder. Her boob.
Still blinking, she lets go of the towel and turns.
In that second, our eyes meet.
People say things all the time they don’t mean, and neurotypical folks manage to figure out the message all the same. Take, for example, Mimi Scheck in school. She said she’d die if Paul McGrath didn’t ask her to the Winter Formal, but in reality, she would not have died-she would just have been really sad. Or the way Theo sometimes smacks another kid’s shoulder and says “Get out!” when that really means he wants his friend to keep talking. Or that time my mom muttered “Oh, that’s just great” when we got a flat tire on the highway although it clearly was not great; it was a colossal hassle.
So maybe when Jess told me to get lost on Sunday, she really meant something else.
I think I might be dying of spinal meningitis. Headaches, dementia, stiffness of the neck, high fever. I have two out of the four. I don’t know if I should ask my mother to take me for a lumbar puncture or just ride it out until I die. I have already prepared a note explaining how I’d like to be dressed at my funeral, just in case.
It is equally possible, I suppose, that the reason I have a severe headache and stiff neck is I have gotten no sleep since Sunday, when I last saw Jess.
She didn’t send me pictures of her new house in advance, like she promised. I sent her forty-eight emails yesterday to remind her, and she didn’t respond to any of them. I can’t call to remind her to send the pictures because I still have her cell phone.
Last night at about four in the morning, I asked myself what Dr. Henry Lee would do, if confronted with the evidence that:
1. No photos ever arrived by email.
2. None of my forty-eight messages were acknowledged.
Hypothesis One would be that Jess’s email account is not functional, which seems unlikely because it is connected with the entirety of UVM. Hypothesis Two would be that she is actively choosing to not communicate with me, which would indicate anger or frustration (see above: Just get lost). But that doesn’t make sense, since she specifically told me at our last meeting that I should tell her what I’d learned… which implies another meeting.
Incidentally, I have made a list of what I learned at our last meeting:
1. Gluten-free pizza tastes disgusting.
2. Jess is not available to go to a movie this Friday night.
3. Her cell phone sounds like a bird chirping when you power it down.
4. Mark is a dim-witted moron. (Although, in fairness, this is (a) redundant and (b) something I already knew.)
The only reason I went to school today, feeling as awful as I do, is that if I stayed home I know my mother would insist I miss my lesson with Jess, and I can’t do that. I have to give her back her phone, after all. And if I see her face-to-face, I can ask her why she didn’t answer my emails.
Usually it is Theo’s job to walk me to the UVM campus, which is only a half mile from school. He drops me off at Jess’s dorm room, which she has always left unlocked for me, so that I can wait for her until she gets out of her anthropology class. Sometimes I do my homework while I’m waiting, and sometimes I look through the papers on her desk. Once I sprayed her perfume on my clothes and went around smelling like her for the rest of the day. Then Jess shows up and we go to the library to work, or sometimes to the student union or a café on Church Street.
I could probably get to Jess’s dorm while comatose, but today-when I really do need Theo’s help to find my way to a new location-he leaves school because he’s sick. He searches me out after sixth period and tells me he feels like crap and is going home to die.
Don’t, I tell him. That would really upset Mom.
My immediate first instinct is to ask him how I am supposed to get to Jess’s if he goes home sick, but then I remember Jess telling me that not everything is about me, and that putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is part of social interactions. (Not literally. I would not fit in Theo’s shoes. He wears a ten and a half, while I wear a twelve.) So I tell Theo to feel better and then I go to the guidance counselor, Mrs. Grenville. We examine the map Jess has given me and decide that I should take Bus H-5 and get off at the third stop. She even draws a route in highlighter pen from the bus stop to the house.
As it turns out, the map is a very good one, even if it’s not drawn to scale. After I get off the bus, I turn right at the fire hydrant and then count six houses on the left. Jess’s new temporary home is an old brick house with ivy growing up the sides. I wonder if she knows that the tendrils of ivy can break apart mortar and brick. I wonder if I should tell her. If someone told me, I would lie in bed at night wondering if the whole house was going to crumble around me.
I am still very nervous when I ring the front doorbell, because I have never seen the inside of this house before and that makes me feel like my bones have gone to jelly.
No one answers, so I go around the back.
I glance down at the snow and make a mental note of what I see, but it isn’t really important because The Door Is Unlocked, and that must mean Jess is expecting me. I feel myself relaxing already: it’s just like her dorm room; I will go in and wait, and when she returns, everything will be back to normal.
There are only two times that Jess has gotten angry with me, and both occurred while I was waiting for her to show up. The first was when I took all her clothes out of her closet and arranged them according to the electromagnetic color spectrum, like mine. The second time was when I sat down at her desk and noticed the calculus problem set she was working on. She’d done half the problems wrong, so I fixed them for her.
Theo is the person who made me understand that the rules of violence are based on threat. If there is an actual problem, there are only two options:
1. Retaliation
2. Confrontation
It’s gotten me into trouble.
I have been sent to the principal’s office for smacking a boy who threw a paper airplane at me during English class. When Theo ruined one of my forensic experiments-in-progress, I went into his bedroom with a pair of scissors and systematically hacked his comic book collection to bits. Once in eighth grade, I found out that a group of kids were making fun of me, and as if someone had flipped an electrical switch inside me, I went into a frantic rage. I huddled in a cubicle in the school library, crafting a hit list of the people I hated and how I would like their lives to end: knife wound in the locker room at gym, bomb in their locker, cyanide in their Diet Coke. As is the Aspergian nature, I’m fanatically organized about some things and disorganized about others, and as luck would have it I lost that piece of paper. I figured someone (maybe me) had thrown it out, but my history teacher found it and gave it to the principal, who called my mother.
She yelled at me for seventy-nine straight minutes, mostly about how violated she felt by my actions, and then she got even more angry because I couldn’t really understand why something I did had upset her. So she took ten of my CrimeBusters notebooks and ran them through her bill shredder page by page, and suddenly, her point was crystal clear. I was so furious that, that night, I dumped the bin of shredded paper over her head while she was asleep.
Luckily, I didn’t get suspended-most of the administration of the school knew me well enough to know I was not a threat to public safety-but my mother’s lesson was enough to make me see why I could never do anything like that again.
I say all this by way of explanation: Impulsiveness is part of what it means to have Asperger’s.
And it never ends well.
I am allowed to work at home on my column, but every Tuesday afternoon I have to trot downtown to meet with my editor. Mostly it’s a therapy session-she tells me what’s wrong with her life and expects me to dole her out advice, the way I do for the masses in the paper.
I don’t mind, because I think that one hour a week of counseling is a pretty fair trade for a paycheck and health insurance. But it also means that on Tuesdays, when Jacob meets with Jess, she is responsible for getting him back to our house.
Tonight, as soon as I walk through the door, I find Theo in the kitchen. “How do you feel?” I ask, pressing my palm against his forehead. “Do you have a fever?”
I’d called home from Burlington, like I usually do before I leave the office, only to find out that Theo was sick and frantic because he’d left school without remembering that today is the day he walks Jacob to his appointment with Jess. A second call to the guidance department kept me from panicking: Mrs. Grenville had talked to Jacob about taking a bus to Jess’s new house and said he felt confident about doing it on his own.
“It’s just a cold,” Theo says, ducking away. “But Jacob’s not home yet and it’s past four-thirty.”
He doesn’t really need to say any more: Jacob would rather saw off his arm with a butter knife than miss an episode of CrimeBusters. But Jacob’s only fifteen minutes later than normal. “Well, he was meeting Jess somewhere new today. Maybe it’s a little farther away than her dorm was.”
“But what if he never got there?” Theo says, visibly upset. “I should have just stayed in school and walked him there like usual-”
“Honey, you were sick. Besides, Mrs. Grenville thought this might be a good opportunity for Jacob to be independent. And I think I’ve got Jess’s new phone number on my email; I can call if it makes you feel better.” I wrap my arms around Theo. It’s been too long since I hugged him; at fifteen, he ducks away from physical affection. But it’s sweet to see him worried about Jacob. There might be friction between them, but at heart, Theo loves his brother. “I’m sure Jacob’s fine, but I’m glad he’s got you looking out for him,” I say, and in that instant, I make a snap decision to capitalize on the goodwill Theo’s feeling for Jacob. “Let’s go out for Chinese tonight,” I suggest, even though eating out is a luxury we can’t afford; plus, it’s harder to find food Jacob can eat if I don’t make it myself.
An unreadable expression crosses Theo’s face, but then he nods. “That would be cool,” he says gruffly, and he slides away from my grasp.
The door to the mudroom opens. “Jacob?” I call, and I go to meet him.
For a moment, I can’t speak. His eyes are wild and his nose is running. His hands flap at his sides as he shoves me into the wall and runs up to his room. “Jacob!”
He has no lock on his bedroom door; I removed it years ago. Now, I push the door open and find Jacob inside his closet, underneath the tendrils of shirt cuffs and sweatpants, rocking back and forth and emitting a high, reedy note from his throat.
“What’s the matter, baby?” I say, getting down on my hands and knees and crawling into the closet, too. I wrap my arms tight around him and start singing:
“I shot the sheriff… but I didn’t shoot the deputy.”
Jacob’s hands are flapping so hard that he is bruising me. “Talk to me,” I say. “Did something happen with Jess?”
At the sound of her name, he arches backward, as if he’s been pierced by a bullet. He starts smacking his head against the wall so hard that it dents the plaster.
“Don’t,” I beg, using every bit of strength I have to drag him forward, so that he cannot hurt himself.
Dealing with an autistic meltdown is like dealing with a tornado. Once you are close enough to see it coming, there’s nothing to do but weather the storm. Unlike a child having a temper tantrum, Jacob doesn’t care if his behavior is making me react. He doesn’t make sure he’s not hurting himself. He isn’t doing it in order to get something. In fact, he’s not in control of himself at all. And unlike when he was four or five, I am not big enough to control him anymore.
I get up and turn off all the lights in the room and pull down the blackout shades so that it is dark. I put on his Marley CD. Then I start pulling clothes off the hangers in his closet and pile them on his body-which at first makes him scream harder and then, as the weight builds, calms him down. By the time he falls asleep in my arms, I have ripped my blouse and my stockings. The CD has repeated four times in its entirety. The LED display on his alarm clock reads 8:35 P.M.
“What set you off?” I whisper. It could have been anything-an argument with Jess, or the fact that he didn’t like the layout of the kitchen in her new accommodations, or the realization too late that he was missing his favorite TV show. I kiss Jacob on the forehead. Then, gently, I disengage myself from the knot of his arms and leave him curled on the floor with a pillow under his head. I cover him with the rainbow postage-stamp summertime quilt that’s been folded up for the season in his closet.
Muscles stiff, I walk downstairs again. The lights have all been turned off, except for one in the kitchen.
Let’s go out for Chinese tonight.
But that was before I knew that I would be sucked into the black hole that Jacob can become at any given moment.
There is a cereal bowl on the counter, with a puddle of soy milk still in the bottom. The Rice Chex box stands beside it like an accusation.
Motherhood is a Sisyphean task. You finish sewing one seam shut, and another rips open. I have come to believe that this life I’m wearing will never really fit.
I carry the bowl to the sink and swallow the tears that spring to the back of my throat. Oh, Theo. I’m so sorry.
Again.