Language Arts (28 page)

•♦•

This person, my son,
Charles thought, for the thousandth time.
How do I describe him?

From where Charles was standing, in the foyer, a short hallway led to the spacious, well-lit combination kitchen/family room at the back of the house where the six residents (four boys, two girls, ranging in age from fourteen to twenty) took their meals and engaged in what passed for social interaction in a group home serving low-functioning autistic children. The house itself was clean but shabby-feeling, with its paucity of homey touches (one of the hallmarks of a state-funded facility); its sharp potpourri of chlorine, laundry softener, urine; its childproofed cupboards and cabinets; the waterproof pads laid out on every upholstered surface.

Even though Charles had been visiting Cody and his various housemates for years, he still felt as though every time he walked through the door, he was entering a new dimension, stepping foot on a planetary surface that was not quite solid but a swirling, liquefying mass through which he was eternally falling.

It was nearly dinnertime.

The senior member of the group—Cody—sat at his TV tray, immobile, eyes downcast. His arms were rigid, right-angled, and held aloft, his forearms framing his face, fists clenched. It looked as if he'd been frozen in the process of wrestling two flailing, disobedient antennae that had sprouted from his temples. Or, a more sedate description: his bent arms defined the parameters of an invisible box into which he'd inserted his head.

This was a signature posture for Cody, and one he took frequently, presumably in the interest of self-containment and/or segregation, although it was impossible to know for sure. What
was
certain was that he could hold this position for hours, whether waiting for food or not. Sometimes he even held a slightly relaxed version of it in his sleep. At least, Charles assumed he still did that; he used to, when he was little.

Alison emerged from the conference room. Their meeting with Cody's team had officially ended ten minutes ago, but she was still talking to the social worker assigned to the task of helping transition Cody out of state-supported care.

Charles tended to lose his civility when speaking with these people. He understood it wasn't their fault but found it beyond absurd that most of the state-funded programs and forms of assistance that were available to Cody as a child would disappear—
poof!
—the moment he turned twenty-one.

He lingered in the shadowed hall, waiting for Alison to finish her conversation. She'd reminded him that his presence in tandem with hers was unusual and thus potentially upsetting; she'd go in first and then gesture him in when she felt that Cody was ready to handle the unusual experience of seeing both Mom
and
Dad in the same room at the same time.

There were five staff members working tonight: Raisa, Benjamin, Malachi, Tami, and someone new: a small, compact, brown-skinned woman who could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty years old and whom Charles guessed to be Filipino. He'd overheard Raisa call her Bettina.

There had been a lot of turnover in the years since Cody had been here. This was understandable—none of these children were easy to care for, most had medical issues compounding their autism, all had very specific limits and conditions in terms of what they could tolerate, and state-employed caregivers in this kind of situation weren't exactly recompensed at a wage commensurate with the work—but it was also unfortunate. Personnel changes were hard on the kids, and every time a new caregiver came onboard there were almost always glitches. High turnover was one of many factors that Alison, the Youngs, and the Gurnees hoped to eradicate.

“Hi, Cody,” Alison said, acting and sounding like an ordinary mom entering a regular room greeting a developmentally normal teenager who was hanging out with five close friends. “How are you doing, sweetie? It's me, Cody. It's Mom.”

Cody showed no sign of registering either his mother's greeting or her physical presence; he continued to sit absolutely still, his dazed, unlit eyes directed at the empty surface of the TV tray. One of his upheld fists clutched a cloth napkin, the other, a spoon.

Dinner hadn't yet arrived—Raisa would dish it up at the counter and it would be served by the other staff members—but Cody's meal would consist of partially thawed frozen peas, mashed potatoes, room-temperature fried chicken, and a heavily vitamin-supplemented smoothie. Except for that final item—getting him to drink it was a fiercely fought, protracted battle begun when Cody entered adolescence—Cody's evening entree menu hadn't changed since he was thirteen. His food preferences were nonnegotiable.

“Smells great, Raisa,” Alison said. She introduced herself to the new caregiver, said hello to Cody's housemates, and then settled into one of the folding chairs that had been set up on either side of Cody. Charles realized with a flicker of anxiety that the second chair was for him.

“Looks like somebody's ready for dinner,” Alison said in a joking voice.

No reaction.

They sat side by side; patients in a waiting room, passengers on a train. Cody's posture, in this tableau, suggested an exhausted commuter headed back to the suburbs, escaping the stresses of his day and the proximity of his fellow passengers by hiding behind the pages of the
New York Times.

Alison looked up briefly and caught Charles's eye. Slightly shifting her body so that it blocked Cody's view of the gesture, she held up her hand:
No, not yet, stay.

Cody was tall, long-boned, almost plank-like in his slimness; big hands and feet; extremely strong and muscular. Ironically, he'd been gifted with a set of attributes that would have predisposed him to athletic success—tennis player, track star, point guard.

The new woman, Bettina, set Cody's plate on his tray.

A moment, and then, very slowly, he lowered his arms and began the process of feeding himself. The fact that some food did not end up on his bib, his face, the tray, or the floor was a mark of tremendous success.

“Those mashed potatoes look really good, Cody,” Alison said. “Be careful. I might have to steal some when you're not looking.”

Cody emitted the abrupt, voiceless
Hoo!
that was his version of a laugh; it briefly rocked him back and then forward in his seat. Charles was reminded of those odd, silent, featherless toy birds that balance and bob on the rim of a drinking glass.

Charles watched Alison watching Cody. When another spoonful of potatoes started making its unsteady way toward him, looking like its final destination this time might be Cody's eye, she rocked sideways, close to him, and opened her mouth. Cody straightened out his spoon's flight path and successfully deposited the potatoes in his own mouth.

“Darn!” Alison said.

Cody found this hysterically funny. Another
Hoo!
propelled him back and forth.

Another
Darn!
tilted Alison from side to side, and then a game began, a cross-species ornithological pantomime with role reversal: baby bird (species A) feeds self, mama bird (species B) feigns disappointment.

This reminded Charles of another favorite book from his children's library,
Are You My Mother?,
in which a baby bird determines who his mother
is
by determining who she is
not.

Darn! Hoo! Darn! Hoo! Darn! Hoo . . .

Charles loved that story, although he'd always hoped that Mr. P. D. Eastman would publish what would be the obvious companion to that book,
Are You My Father?

It had been clear for a long time that Charles didn't have the same permissions that Cody granted Alison—Charles's mere
presence
agitated his son in some profound, mysterious way; physical contact was out of the question. Because he and Alison were never here at the same time, Ali couldn't know that reminding Charles to keep his distance was unnecessary; Cody would let him know in no uncertain terms if he was too close. The saddest part of Charles's relationship with his son was this physical banishment. Yes, children need to be held and touched by their parents; it is also true that parents have a reciprocating need to hold and be touched by their children.

Wait. Look. Something is happening.

Cody's spoon was changing course, banking sharply toward Alison. Slowly, slowly, with a redirection of his lowered gaze so that he now seemed to be looking at Alison's shoes, he began tilting toward her—the oozing pace of tree sap on a subzero day—stopping before their bodies could actually touch but allowing his spoon-wielding arm to continue on until it came to the edge of the no-fly zone, the outer reaches of his rigidly maintained personal bubble.

Arm and spoon halted, hovered, and then a tremendous exertion of will allowed Cody to press on, sending his lone, cargo-carrying extremity beyond the limits of his heavily fortressed personal space and into the unknown space of another.

Arm and cargo arrived at their destination, coming to a full stop in front of Alison's gaping, astonished face.

Then Cody did a kind of thing they'd been told over and over again was impossible, beyond the range of his abilities:

He fed his mother a spoonful of mashed potatoes.

Ali chewed, swallowed.

“Yum.” The small vessel of that single word contained a sea of gratitude.

No giver-upper, my ex.

Dinner drew to a close. Alison gently wiped Cody's face as Bettina deftly exchanged his dinner plate for a pudding cup.

“Oh boy! Look, Cody. Here's dessert.”

As Alison carefully removed a long smear of mashed potatoes from Cody's jawline, she nodded to Charles to let him know he could come in.

“Cody,” she went on in a slightly lower, slower voice. “Guess what? I didn't come by myself.”

Charles started toward them, careful to strike an energetically neutral balance between stealth and exuberance.

“Cody,” Alison continued, “are you listening? I brought someone else along. Someone you'll be happy to see.”

His expression relapsed into its default glazed blandness, his isolation firmly reestablished. Anyone observing the scene now would find it difficult to believe what had happened between mother and son only a few minutes ago.

“Look who's here, Cody.” Alison signed the letter
D
at her forehead. “It's Dad.”

Charles arrived, on cue, and ventured a small smile. “Hi, Cody.”

A globule of pudding slid off Cody's spoon, hit his solar plexus—
splat!
—and started to migrate, sluglike, down the front of his bib. When Alison reached toward him with her napkin, he grunted and shrugged his chest into concavity, away from her hand. She immediately pulled back. Cody scooped up another spoonful and slammed it sideways against his mouth.

“Wow,” Charles said, trying to imitate the playful tone Alison had been using, “somebody really likes his dessert.”

“Your dad is talking to you, Cody,” Alison said. “Cody Larson Marlow.”

Cody moaned and bowed low to the surface of his tray, briefly submersing the tip of his nose in his pudding cup. Then, in a wide-ranging motion, he swept his head up and back: a startled horse carving an arc through space, mane tossing, whites of eyes exposed, assessing quickly and efficiently the possible presence of a predator.

At the end of this movement, Cody froze, body torqued, vacant eyes aimed toward the door leading to the backyard, as if he were longing to escape into the black, drenched night.

Bettina was making the rounds, moving among the diners, helping those who needed help.

Noticing that Cody had made a mess, she said cheerily, “Here, Cody, let's get you a new bib,” and before Charles or Alison could stop her, she had her hands on the bare skin of his neck, his shoulders, and Charles thought,
No,
no,
she hasn't been told, how can they not have told her, she doesn't know.

For one moment, there was a subtle undulation in Cody's face, the effect of an idly drifting cottonwood tuft landing on a perfectly unperturbed pool.

And then: thrashing, screaming, the sudden stench of loosed bowels, Cody reaching into the back of his pants, smearing face, hair, body with feces; Bettina backed away in horror and confusion as Charles and Alison tried to restrain him.

Among the other children, a cacophony arose: empathetic moans, giggles, gibbering incomprehensibilities; a wordless, savage wilderness expressing extremes of terror and jubilation.

“Didn't anyone
tell
her?” Alison was shouting, furious. “
Damn it,
I cannot
believe
that no one told her! He cannot, cannot,
cannot
be touched on his scars!”

•♦•

It is an odd but demonstrable truth that there are times in Earth's history when a shadow falls over the planet. (Charles always thought of the blackness enveloping Earth in
A Wrinkle in Time,
a book that is for many young girls—as it was for Emmy—an early favorite.)

The shadow manifests in large-scale devastation and suffering: environmental, cultural, political; earthquakes, fires, tsunamis; the rape and mutilation of innocents; acts of genocide; acts of terrorism. And although sometimes these catastrophes are glimpsed from a distance and our sympathies extend no further than writing a check, often the shadow falls on us in a personal way. The darkness finds us at home; personal suffering occurs in tandem with the larger tragedy and is forever after associated with it.

It was in the wake of 9/11. Alison especially had been devastated—she had enduring connections with many people in Manhattan and lost two dear friends in the Towers.

Charles didn't know how to reach her. His connection to the event was less direct than Alison's, and at times he felt that perhaps she resented him for that. But it was also that distance that allowed him to keep functioning when she could not.