As Dog Is My Witness (12 page)

You get this a lot from people who have no idea what
Asperger’s is, nor who my son has become. They think of the poor
afflicted child and wonder if he can actually get himself dressed
in the morning. They try to show their pity by disguising it as
concern.

“He’s doing fine,” I said with a touch more purpose.
“
Really.
”

Andrea looked disappointed. Clearly, I wasn’t sharing
my pain sufficiently, but since I didn’t have all that much pain, I
felt it was necessary to horde what I had. Call me greedy.

Abby, who was placing a ridiculously rich chocolate
cake on the table, saved my butt (as usual). “We’ve seen a lot of
progress with Ethan the past few years,” she said. “He’s doing very
well at school, and he’s made some friends.” Okay, he
is
doing very well at school, and he has one friend—kind of.

Asperger kids are not what you’d call social
butterflies—their entire mental makeup is geared away from doing
what everyone else does. If you had a “weird kid” in your class
growing up, there’s a decent chance he or she had AS, and didn’t
know it. I now realize I had one in my class, and sometimes I feel
like Ethan is my penance for the way we treated that kid. But my
son is teaching me more about acceptance and diversity than a
twenty-year stint in sensitivity training ever could.

“That’s so wonderful,” Andrea cooed. “It’s what we’ve
prayed for.”

Oh, please. First of all, I’m an agnostic. That means
I don’t believe in God, but I’m afraid to say so out loud in case
He’s listening. Although people praying for me or my son is a nice
gesture, it’s not necessarily an example of time well spent. And
the only thing Andrea and Howard ever prayed for, in my humble
opinion, was phenomenal growth in their 401(k) plan. On a good day,
they might be able to remember Ethan’s name.

Still, I held my tongue (and if you’re expecting the
inevitable “gross and slippery” joke, I must refer you elsewhere).
I tried to picture myself somewhere more sedate and calming, like
the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 42nd Street. It was little
comfort.

“Thank you,” my diplomatic wife said. “It’s been a
lot of hard work for Ethan, but he really is doing much—”

At that exact moment (I swear), a rather
bloodcurdling scream came from upstairs. It wasn’t from either of
my children, I could tell, so it didn’t really worry me, but I did
rifle through my memory banks to recall if I had, in fact, paid up
that month’s homeowner’s insurance premium.

Howard and Andrea, however, reacted more violently.
They stood up as one, and waited but a single fateful moment before
racing upstairs. By then, there was no reason to move.

Dylan was already running down the stairs, clutching
his left hand in his right. Something approximating a real
emotion—anger— was stamped across his face. From Ethan’s room, I
could hear a fullblown Asperger meltdown rattling the house’s
foundation.

“What is
wrong
with that kid?” Dylan yelled at
his parents. “The little bastard
bit
me!”

“
I
’ll bet he had it
coming,” I said.

Abby stared at me. After the standard brouhaha over
Dylan’s hand, which was not, so far as I could tell, damaged, Ethan
was brought down for recriminations, public scenes, extremely
forced apologies, and threats of punishment to be carried out at a
later date (and, in all likelihood, forgotten).

Three hours later, Abby and I were getting ready for
bed. Normally, we start by making the bed, but Abby had been so
edgy about “anyone seeing the way we live,” she had actually made
the bed within an inch of its life that morning. I was having
trouble freeing the sheet from its tight corner—the woman has some
muscle on her.

I had shed my forty-six layers of clothing, since the
upstairs in our house is almost literally the polar opposite of the
downstairs. If any heating device is used anywhere in the house,
the temperature on our second floor goes up to 106 degrees
Fahrenheit and stays that way until May, when it goes down to 98,
where it stays all summer.

Personally, I was taking comfort in the fact that
Howard and Andrea were sleeping in our basement, where no matter
how hard the furnace pumps, you can see your breath during the
winter.

“‘He had it coming?’” Abby said, incredulous. “Our
son bites another child on the hand because he felt his cousin
wasn’t playing a video game correctly, and you say he had it
coming
? Please tell me you were joking, Aaron.”

“All right, so maybe I was exaggerating.” I wasn’t in
a charitable mood. I was contemplating a week’s worth of Howard in
the flesh, we’d barely gotten Ethan under control before Dylan had
rolled out his sleeping bag a foot from Ethan’s bed, and I hadn’t
gotten anywhere with Justin Fowler. Being nice to my brother-in-law
was like sucking in my gut to look more appealing: it had little
effect, and felt so good when I stopped.

Abby, resplendent in flannel pajamas despite the
tropical climate in our bedroom, wasn’t letting go easily. “That
was no way to get off on the right foot, and you weren’t helping,
Aaron.”

“Sure I was helping. I stopped Ethan from biting him
again, didn’t I?”

She started brushing her hair in a way that made it
look so luxuri-ous, I was thinking of moving in and living there
for a while. My wife can soften my mood by diverting my attention,
which isn’t all that hard to do.

I walked over to her and put my hands on her
shoulders. She stopped brushing, and her hair cascaded onto the
backs of my hands in a very pleasing manner.

“I don’t want to fight,” I told her, and put my arms
around her back. I kissed Abby and felt her respond. She pulled me
a little closer and kissed back most satisfactorily. So I moved my
hands a little.

“Aaron,” she said softly, “we have
company
in
the house.” She moved my hands back. I exhaled and dropped them
entirely.

“Please tell me you’re kidding,” I said. “Is this the
way it’s going to be for a week—because your brother and his wife
are two floors below us? I hold no illusions about my prowess,
honey. I couldn’t make you scream
that
loud.”

We separated and I walked back to my side of the bed,
shaking my head. Another man—one with an ounce of sense—would have
left it at that, but no one has ever accused me of being so
sensible.

“You know,” I told Abigail, “you’re overreacting to
this whole thing.”

She sat down on the bed, clearly upset. “I’m
overreacting because we’re not having sex tonight? You’re getting
all testosterone on me, Aaron.”

I turned to face her. “That’s not what I’m talking
about at all. I barely recognize your behavior today. You’re
putting on a show for your brother about how orderly and organized
a family we are. If it were anyone else, you’d have at least
entertained the possibility that Ethan was provoked, but you
wouldn’t hear it about Dylan, because if you did, you’d be risking
having to tell your brother that he’s not the essence of perfection
he thinks he is.”

“You think it’s okay for Ethan to bite his cousin
because he didn’t play a video game right? Whose behavior are we
talking about here, Aaron?”

“Yours,” I said. “I agree that Ethan did something
really, really wrong tonight, but we never even got to
discussing
what set him off. You know as well as I do that
Dylan baits him, and Ethan’s hardly well equipped to deal with it.
We’re supposed to help him. But instead, you were so busy kowtowing
to your brother that you weren’t willing to stand up for your
son.”

Her voice dropped an octave and her eyes narrowed.
“Aren’t you the one who told him his punishment would be no
PlayStation for three days? Aren’t you the one who got red in the
face yelling at him? You can’t blame all this on me because you
don’t like my brother, Aaron.”

“So you’re being reasonable and I’m the one with a
chip on my shoulder?” I said. “You haven’t changed the way you’re
acting at all? You’re not distracted?”

“No.”

“Then why did you forget to walk the dog tonight?”
Abby walks the dog after dinner practically every night. It’s a
daily ritual that she actually enjoys doing. Forgetting to walk
Warren is tantamount to for-getting her husband’s name, something
Abby probably wished she could do right then.

She stared at me for a long moment, then stood up and
walked to the closet. “You might have said something before,” she
said.

I stood up and put on my pants. “I forgot myself
until this moment,” I told her. “Abby . . . 

She looked at me. “What?”

“I’ll go. I’m faster than you, and it’s late.”

I had most of my clothes on, and she hadn’t taken
anything out of the closet yet. “No,” she said. “I wouldn’t want
you to feel like I’ve forced you to do something you didn’t
want
to do.”

“
Neither would I.
” I put on my shoes and
walked out. But first, I reached into my top dresser drawer and
pulled out a small plastic bag.

Passing by Leah’s room, I looked in and saw the
little feet, sticking out from under her blanket and still moving
around.

“Little girl?”

She sat up. She hadn’t been crying, but no matter how
much Leah and Ethan battle each other, she hates it when he gets
into trouble. Leah loves her brother, and feels that any punishment
of him should come from her.

I reached into the bag and pulled out the small
stuffed horse I had bought the day before. “This is for you,” I
said, handing it to my daughter.

“Horsey!” she said in what she calls her “Baby Leah”
voice. It is deliberate exaggeration for effect. “What’s it for,
Daddy?”

“It’s because you deserve it,” I said. “You’re a good
girl, a good daughter, a good sister, and a good
niece.
” She
nodded, understanding what I was saying.

“Thank you, Daddy,” she said. Leah held out her arms,
and gave me one of her therapeutic hugs. But this was a rare
occasion where it didn’t take.

Outside in four sweatshirts, a coat, gloves, and a
hood (I look stupid in hats), I walked Warren to the corner, and
turned left toward the park.

Edison Park, named after the guy who made it possible
to see Edison Park this late at night, closes after dark. The irony
makes it foolish to walk around down there at this hour. So I stuck
to the streets, waiting for Warren to remember the purpose of the
walk.

I’m not often angry with Abby, and I don’t enjoy it.
Worse, she was angry with me, and I
hate
that. But she was
being unreasonable, I thought, and I hadn’t stepped out of line
pointing that out. Isn’t a good marriage supposed to be based on
honest communication? Don’t they tell you that in all the
sitcoms?

I wasn’t going to apologize. I hadn’t done anything
wrong. Okay, so maybe she was just trying to reach out to her
brother, realizing that their relationship hadn’t always been all
that warm, and she wanted to improve that. But I felt she was
reaching out at the expense of her family, and it was okay to raise
that possibility. Wasn’t it?

On the other hand, was this actually about her not
wanting to make love while they were in the house? Was I really
that petty? Okay, sure, so I was that petty. And maybe some of it
had to do with the fact that I can’t stand her brother, who acts as
if I’m a mistake his sister should have corrected years ago. So
maybe I was reacting to that.

But I wasn’t going to apologize for it.

At that moment, a hand, palm flat, hit me smack on
the shoulder. I was so lost in my Talmudic musings I hadn’t even
noticed the three men standing on the sidewalk under a bare tree—a
very unusual sight in this neighborhood at this time of night. They
were wearing matching parkas, with fur-lined hoods, like Elliot
Gould wore in M*A*S*H.

“Tucker,” the one with the palm said. He was the
smallest, only about five inches taller than me.

I blinked. In this cold, without my contact lenses
in, it was hard to see their faces in the hoods. There were three
of them—big, bigger, and biggest—and based on the gravelly voice,
this one had been gargling less with the Listerine and more with
the glass bottle it came in.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know you,” I said. “I don’t have
my glasses on, and . . . 

“It’s okay,” said Bigger. “We know
you
.” I
didn’t like the way that sounded.

“Really? Who’s
we
?” No sense acting scared. Of
course, in this case, I wouldn’t have been acting, but still.

“We want you to stop asking questions about the guy
in North Brunswick,” Big said. “It’s none of your business.”

“I’m a reporter,” I said. “Whatever they tell me to
ask about is my business.”

Big looked at Bigger in disbelief and laughed. “You
don’t understand,” he said. “You’re not being asked—you’re being
told. Stop asking about the guy in North Brunswick.”