Love Anthony (14 page)

And then there’s me and David. We don’t know how to communicate either. We don’t look at each other anymore. I can’t stand to look into his eyes and see his despair, his exhaustion, sometimes the blame, and too often the wish that he’d stayed at the office another hour. Maybe I’d be in bed by then, and he wouldn’t have to deal with me and what’s in my eyes.

We don’t talk to each other anymore. Not really. We say plenty about what has to be done. Did you buy Anthony’s
JUICE? I’m going to the grocery store, do we need JUICE? Will you push Anthony on the SWING? He’s screaming because he wants to go outside and swing on the SWING. Will you take out the trash, go to the store, do the laundry, pay the bills? The bills, the bills, the bills.

We say all these words, but we don’t talk about anything. It’s all meaningless. Blah, blah, blah.

I don’t tell David what I’m thinking, that we’re the parents of a permanently disabled child and our marriage is crippled. I think this every day, but I never say the words. I don’t tell David.

We don’t have sex anymore, and I don’t want sex anymore, but I miss the part of me that used to feel connected to David, that felt horny and wanted sex. We don’t talk about this.

And who would want sex after the days I have? I’m exhausted from worry and the physical job of taking care of Anthony. I have bruises from his pinches and kicks, and bite marks all over me. I look abused. I feel abused, but I don’t tell David.

I don’t really feel abused by Anthony, I feel abused by this life. What happened to my life? My life is all about autism. If I’m not living it, I’m reading about it or talking about it, and I’m just so damn sick of it, I could puke. I’m scared that this is all it’s ever going to be. Anthony has autism, and he won’t say JUICE or SWING or why he is screaming, and David and I aren’t speaking, roommates in the same prison cell.

Or at best we’re colleagues, self-trained therapists working on the same patient, a beautiful boy named Anthony, trying to fix him. Only we’re failing. We’re not fixing him. His autism isn’t going anywhere, and it’s this huge pink elephant in our living room, and we’re not talking about what’s real, that we’re going to be living
with autism for the rest of our lives, and we need to accept this. As much as I want to scream and cry and break everything in this world, as much as I want to resist and fight and beg, we need to accept Anthony with autism.

Why can’t we talk about this? Why don’t we tell each other how we feel, what we want, what we’re afraid of, that we still love each other? Do we? Do we even still love each other?

What great role models we are for Anthony, huh? Hey, Anthony, TALK. See how Mommy and Daddy DON’T do it. We have Anthony in therapy for thirty-five hours a week to learn to communicate. I wonder how many hours a week David and I would need….

SHE AND DAVID
never went to couples counseling. Maybe they should have. But between all the occupational and behavioral and speech therapists for Anthony, the parent support groups, and then the grief counseling, none of it effective, they weren’t exactly jumping at the idea of inviting yet another counselor, and another expense, into their already therapy-saturated lives.

Olivia closes her journal and thinks with her eyes shut. She’s been going through her entries a little each day, reading her past, trying to come to terms with it all, looking for peace. She opens her eyes. Not today.

She sighs and returns to the kitchen for another glass of wine. As she opens the refrigerator door, she hears a shrill ding. She pauses, trying to decipher what it was. She’s always hearing things in this house, eerie, unexplained noises that used to spook her when she first moved here, but now she’s grown more curious than afraid.

The fog that often settles over the island usually insulates sound, muffling it. The silence of a thick fog on Nantucket can be palpable. But sometimes, and she has no idea why, the fog
amplifies, warps, and scatters sound, sending it miles away from its source. She swears she’s heard fishermen talking on their boats from her bedroom. And she sometimes hears a creepy, melodic moaning that she likes to think is the sound of seals barking offshore.

A fog is rolling in tonight, so the ding might’ve been a neighbor’s wind chime, a kid’s bicycle bell from around the block, an ice cream truck at the beach. But the ding sounded louder, more immediate. More
here
. She pulls the wine bottle from the refrigerator, and there it is again. Is it the doorbell?

She sets the bottle of wine down on the counter, wipes her wet hand on her shorts, walks to the front door, and opens it.

“Hi, Liv.”

She gasps. She didn’t actually expect to find anyone there. And she certainly didn’t expect it to be him.

“David.”

CHAPTER 11

I
t’s nine fifteen, and Beth has already dropped the girls off at the community center. Gracie and Jessica love it there, but Sophie hates it. She showed signs of outgrowing the games and crafts and activities toward the end of last summer when she was twelve, complaining that camp was “boring.” Well, if last year was boring, this year is pure agony. But it’s where all the other kids who are still too young for summer jobs go for camp, and Beth would rather she be in agony at the community center than skulking around the house all day, bored and in agony at home.

When Beth pulled into the community center parking lot, she said to all three, “Have fun!” Jessica and Gracie smiled and waved, but Sophie replied, “Don’t worry, I
won’t
!”—and slammed the car door. Ah, thirteen.

Camp runs until two. Jimmy has the night off and offered to pick them up, spend the afternoon with them, and then take them to dinner at the Brotherhood. He said he’d have them home by eight.

Beth has the next almost eleven hours stretched out in front of her to do whatever she pleases. A completely free day.
A week ago, she would’ve used that time to clean, a big project such as washing all the windows, or bleaching the mold and mildew off the deck furniture, or weeding. But she’s been rereading
Writing Down the Bones
and going through her notebooks, her old poems, her short stories, her many unfinished vignettes, enjoying them all. And she’s started dreaming again.

So she’s letting the mold and mildew and the pollen spots and pesky weeds be. Instead, she’s gone to the library for a quiet place to write, free of distraction. Today, she feels ready to dust off that creative part of her that she boxed up years ago and see if it still works. She’s finally giving herself the space and the time to explore that expressive voice inside her that became unconsciously stifled, lost first to the demands of young motherhood, then seduced into ennui by her daily routine.

She walks up to the second floor and sits in an armless Shaker-style wooden chair at a substantial wooden table, much larger than the one in her own dining room, facing a window that is also oversized, at least eight feet tall. The window is open, and a fresh-smelling morning breeze fills the air in the room. Nine other matching chairs surround the table, all unoccupied.

She pulls out her blank spiral notebook, the one she bought years ago, and opens it to the first blank page. It’s been a long time since she’s written anything other than checks to pay the bills. She feels excited, nervous. She pulls out her favorite pen and stares at the page, trying to think of how to begin. Beginnings have always been difficult for her. She taps her teeth with her pen, a habit she developed as a teenager whenever she was stuck on a homework problem, and she can hear her mother’s voice in her head saying,
Stop that, Elizabeth,
and so she does.

She looks up at the clock on the wall. It’s nine twenty-five. Like the window and the table, the clock is larger than most. It’s oak with Roman numerals on an ivory face. The wood has elaborate scrolls carved into it that look like curled ocean waves. The clock appears old and probably is, and it probably
has a story and historical significance, but Beth doesn’t know what. It’s quiet in the library today, so quiet that she can hear the clock ticking.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Why is the library so empty today? She looks out the window. Blue sky, no clouds, a gentle and steady breeze. It’s a perfect beach day. That’s what she could do with her free day. She could go to the beach! She slides her chair out, but before she caps her pen, she recognizes the real motivation behind this impetuous idea. Fear. Fear of this blank page in front of her. Plus, it’s a stupid impetuous idea, going to the beach in the middle of the day in July, fighting the summer people for a square of sand. That’s where everyone is. She knows better than to put herself through that madness.

She slides her chair back in, tucking her legs under the table, and tries to get comfortable. Okay. Begin. But begin what? Does she want to expand on one of her unfinished short stories? She should’ve brought those with her. Should it take place on Nantucket? Maybe New York? The questions keep coming, echoing in her head, paralyzing her hand.

She looks up at the clock. Nine forty-five.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Maybe she should do one of the exercises in
Writing Down the Bones,
get the pen moving, the ink flowing, grease the rusty wheels a bit. She remembers now that this is how she used to begin.

She unzips her purse, a big, bulky, worn, black nylon bag. Someone gave it to her. Was it Georgia? It’s so long ago now, she can’t remember. It was a baby-shower gift. Her purse is really a diaper bag. Jill thinks it’s really a disgrace.

Beth admits that it’s not the prettiest thing, and, yes, the girls have now been potty-trained for some time, but she likes the wide shoulder strap, that it’s water resistant and wipes clean of pretty much anything, that it has tons of useful pockets. The
pocket for the baby bottle is now where she keeps her water bottle. The wipes pocket now contains her wallet. The zipped compartment she used for pacifiers is now where she keeps her cell phone. The middle compartment is where she dumps everything else.

Everything else, it seems, but
Writing Down the Bones
. It’s not in there. She forgot to bring it. Damn. Maybe she should go home and get it. She looks down at her notebook.

Blank.

She has to go get it. But if she leaves, she knows she won’t come back. If she leaves, she’ll be wearing yellow latex gloves and carrying a bucket of bleach in twenty minutes. She plants her feet flat and heavy on the floor as if they were two anchors and breathes. She’s staying.

She thinks she wants to expand on the short story she wrote about a boy who found comfort and meaning inside an imagined world where colors had emotions, water could sing, and the boy could become invisible. But then she remembers the boy she once saw on the beach, the curious intensity and joy he showed, even for a child, as he created a line of white rocks, and the briefest moment they shared that felt like an exquisite secret between them. She feels compelled and captivated by both boys. Maybe she can combine them. But how?

She taps her teeth and thinks of the saying
Write what you know
. What does she know? She looks down at her blank page.

She looks up at the clock and sighs. Ten twenty-five. Maybe she should go to the The Bean, get a coffee and a snack. Maybe that’s what she needs, some caffeine, some food, and a change of scenery. Maybe the atmosphere here is all wrong. She looks around her—the many bookcases painted creamy white, packed with hardcovers; the Persian rugs; the oil paintings of famous writers like Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville on the walls; that damn clock. It’s all too serious, too scholarly, too intimidating. Too much pressure.

She has enough reasons to leave, excuses absurd to valid, and yet she stays. She wants to write. She looks around her, at the books on the shelves. Hundreds of books, each one written by somebody. She chooses to feel inspired instead of intimidated. Why not somebody like her?

Her eyes settle upon a book positioned face out on the bookcase closest to the window, second shelf from the top.
The Siege
. The cover is gray and white and has a black-and-white photograph of a young girl on it. The girl maybe looks a bit like Sophie when she was a toddler, but that slight resemblance isn’t what’s catching her attention. None of it—not the title, the cover, not even the picture of the girl—feels remarkable or particularly interesting to her, yet she feels drawn to it, oddly pulled by it.

She forces herself to look away, browsing the other bookcases from her seat. She finds no other books facing out on any of the shelves. Not one. She returns to
The Siege,
feeling again as if she can’t look away, not because it’s a distraction like the clock or her purse, not to avoid looking at her blank page, but because she feels strangely
compelled
to look at it.