Rules (2 page)

When David was three and started coming to the clinic for occupational therapy, I tagged along because I was too little to stay home alone. Now I’m twelve and can stay home if I want, but I still like to come. I like talking to Mom on the ride over and back and shopping in the stores across the street, and I love the road between our house and the clinic. It follows the ocean’s shoreline, and I look for snowy egrets standing stick-still in the salt marshes and osprey circling, hunting fish. At high tide, waves sparkle under the wooden bridges, and I can guess the tide before I even see the water, just by closing my eyes and breathing the air through the open car windows. Low tide smells mud-black and tangy, but high tide smells clean and salty.

The clinic is a few streets from the ocean, and in the summer sometimes Mom and I walk to the waterfront park while David has his appointment. It’s the only time in the week that I get Mom completely to myself and someone else is in charge of David. Mom likes to stay in the clinic waiting room so she can hear if David has a hard time, but I like when we leave because then she doesn’t look away from me every time she hears him shriek.

At the clinic there’s a waiting room and a long corridor of doors to little offices for hearing tests, speech therapy, and occupational therapy. David comes on Tuesdays and Thursdays to see Stephanie, a woman with kind eyes and an office full of games, swings, a trampoline, and more balls than I’ve ever seen outside a school playground. I think it’d be fun to go with Stephanie and do what she calls “playing,” but David thinks it’s work.

I wait while Mom says hello to the other waiting-room people, but as soon as Stephanie takes David’s hand, I ask, “Can we go to the park? We haven’t been since last fall.”

“It’s going to rain.” Mom sits down on the waiting room couch. “And it’ll be cold by the water. You didn’t even bring your jacket.”

“Can we go shopping, then?” I glance out the window to the line of stores across the street. My favorite is Elliot’s Antiques. From the sidewalk it seems only a door, tucked between two downtown shops, but behind the door and up a musty-smelling staircase is a sign:
ELLIOT’S ANTIQUES
. The whole store is like an attic, full of stuff someone’s grandparents once owned but had no more use for. Things not quite good enough to keep, but not quite bad enough to throw away.

“David had a hard time last week,” Mom says. “I need to make sure Stephanie can handle it. Why don’t we read?”

Mom crosses her legs, like she’s settled to stay. I slump on the couch beside her and check if anyone looks like they’ll mind Mom reading out loud. I haven’t been to the clinic since my last school vacation, but I recognize the waiting-room people because their appointments are nearly the same time as David’s every week. Mrs. Frost, a tiny old lady, reads a magazine in the big chair between the front windows (she brings her even-older brother for speech therapy because he had a stroke). The receptionist with her blond, beauty-parlor hair types fast on her computer. Carol, a young mother wearing a big skirt and hoop earrings, sits in the rocking chair near the bookshelf. She leans down, handing her baby with Down syndrome chunky plastic blocks from the toy basket. In the chair next to the exit, Mrs. Morehouse, Jason’s mother, checks her watch.

And there’s Jason. I’m not sure how old Jason is, maybe fourteen or fifteen, but even though he’s almost grown, his mother stays with him in the waiting room. Jason can’t go anywhere unless someone pushes his wheelchair.

I open my backpack, and Mom cleans her glasses on the bottom edge of her shirt. When I was seven, Mom began reading the Harry Potter series to me, and even though I can read easily to myself now, we still read each new book together. I never think of the characters without hearing her voices.

I pass her the book. “Read quiet.”

She turns to our chapter, and I arrange my colored pencils on the couch next to me.

Hunting out the window for something to draw, I consider the line of stores and restaurants across the street, but they look tired and “between.” In a week or two, the gift shop window will have splashy beach towels and plastic sand buckets, the hotel will show off the “No” lit up with the “vacancy,” and the parking lot will be full of seagulls strutting between the cars and perched on the streetlights, screeching for someone to drop a bite of sandwich or a French fry.

I wish time would hurry and there’d be sailboats tying up at the landing and tour buses passing through, and I’d already have the first hellos traded with Somebody Peterson, the girl next door.

I figure by five fifteen that first hi-trading could be over. Especially if I just happen to be outside at five o’clock when she arrives.

I sink back into the vinyl couch cushions, my sketchbook propped against my knees, listening to Mom’s voice changing, character to character.

There’s not much new to draw in the waiting room. The same yellowed awards cluster the walls, the same books spill off the bookshelf, and the same old toys are heaped in the toy basket. And there are only two people I haven’t already drawn: Jason and his mother.

I worry that glancing will turn into staring too easy with Jason, and I hate when people stare at David. But Jason’s mother fidgets — crossing her legs, picking up magazines, putting them down, smoothing her short, flipped-under, brown hair — so she’d be harder to draw.

Mom said Jason started coming to the clinic after Christmas, but the first time I saw him was February vacation. That day I didn’t know where to look, so I looked at his feet on his wheelchair footrests.

Maybe by drawing Jason, I could look at him easier.

Sometimes I can change how I feel about something by drawing it. Drawing makes me find the curves, the shadows, the ins and outs, and the beautiful parts. I solved my hating snakes by drawing their scales, tiny and silvery, overlapping and overlapping, until all I saw was how perfect they were. Can’t say I’d want a snake crawling across me, but I don’t have to run screaming to Dad every time I see a garden snake now.

“Should I go on?” Mom asks. “I could stop there.”

“No, keep reading.”

I turn to a clean page in my sketchbook and swoop a faint pencil line, beginning the outline of Jason’s head: over the top, down his temple and cheek, around the bumps of jaw and chin, and back to where my line began.

I don’t know what’s wrong with Jason, and it doesn’t seem polite to ask. Whatever it is, though, it’s something big. There’s a tray on Jason’s wheelchair, and on the tray is a communication book. At first Jason’s book seems like a big blue photograph album, but inside it’s full of word cards, not photographs. Jason can’t speak, but he turns the pages and touches the cards to tell his mother if he wants a drink, or has to use the bathroom, or is mad about something.

Today he’s mad — fighting mad. Jason slides his hand across his book, jabbing at cards. His fingers curl, clawlike, as his knuckle raps one word and another.

“Yes, I
know
they had a guitar,” Mrs. Morehouse says, fiddling with her earring. “But I told you, we didn’t have time to stop. If I had stopped, you’d have been late for speech!”

Jason stabs his book. I hope he has a “So what?” or a “Whatever!” card.

His hands twitch, and he makes rumbling-throat sounds, near to growling.

Mom shuts our book.

Jason’s jaw is a little crooked, not as perfect as I drew. But if I draw how it really is, it might look like I made a mistake.

Reddish brown waves of hair sweep over Jason’s brow. A few wayward strands dangle near his eyes. Hair’s my favorite thing to draw, but I only rough it in. Otherwise, I may not have time to finish before Jason’s speech therapist comes out to get him.

“What?” Jason’s mother asks.

I’ll draw his eyes downcast, looking at his book. That way they’ll be mostly lids, and it won’t matter that I don’t know what color they are.

“Girl don’t? What girl?”

Everything falls quiet. I glance up.

Mrs. Morehouse is staring at me. “Are you drawing my son?”

My pencil freezes, midstroke.

“Just because he can’t talk,” she says, “don’t assume he doesn’t mind!”

Everyone looks at me. My fingers move over my sketchbook, finding the corner. “I’m sorry,” I whisper, turning the page. It takes all my strength, every ounce, not to cry.

“A drink?” I hear Mrs. Morehouse say. “All right. Wait here.”

Mom reaches over, but I scoot down the couch, out of reach.

I pick up a lime-colored pencil and swish a tiny blade of grass on my page. One eyelash-curve of green, cutting all that white.

Footsteps pass me, but I don’t look up. I tick line after line, making grass.

“Oops,” Mrs. Morehouse says. “It’s only a little spill.”

I risk a peek. If that were David, he’d be wild to get those clothes off, but Jason sits there, a dark water spot spread on the front of his navy Red Sox shirt. Maybe he doesn’t mind. Or maybe he knows there isn’t another shirt. Or maybe he’s used to being wet. David wouldn’t care about any of those things. That shirt’d be off, faster than you could blink. And the pants, too — if any had spilled there and I didn’t remind him of the pants rule quick enough:

Mom opens our book again. “Let’s see, where were we?”

“Harry was about to use his cloak.”

“That’s right.”

As she reads, I think how useful a cloak that made me invisible would be right now. If I had one, I’d throw it over my head and run out the door and across the parking lot and the street, all the way through the waterfront park to the wharf, and board the first boat I saw going somewhere, anywhere else.

Mom reads, the receptionist types at her computer, Mrs. Frost looks at a magazine, and the baby sleeps on Carol’s lap, his little fingers still clutching a pink plastic block.

“HI, JASON!”

Jason’s smiling speech therapist finally comes out to get him. I’m relieved to see her, even though Mom stops reading when she comes.

“How’s his day been going?” the therapist asks his mother.

“He wanted to stop at a yard sale,” Mrs. Morehouse says. “So, he’s upset.”

“Oh?” The therapist turns to Jason. “YOU WANTED” (hands pointing, pulling) “TO STOP” (one hand karate-chopping the other) “AT A YARD SALE?” (fingers flying, eyebrows arched in a question).

Jason scowls.

His therapist pouts, her finger tapping his communication book. “Sad.”

I swallow a giggle. Sad? Is she kidding? If I were Jason, I’d want cards that said: “Get out of my face!” and “Go away!” and “This stinks a big one!”

The therapist pushes Jason’s wheelchair down the corridor, and Mrs. Morehouse picks up her purse. “I have a couple of errands,” she tells the receptionist. “I’ll be right back.”

The bell above the clinic door jangles as she leaves. Through the window, I watch her cross the parking lot to her van. “What do you think Jason would do with a guitar?” I ask Mom.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe just having one would be enough.”

Watching the van’s red taillights, I wonder, Enough for what? But as the van pulls away, I close my eyes and make a wish.
Please go back and buy that guitar.

In case Mom’s right.

“I didn’t mean to hurt Jason’s feelings. I was only sketching.”

“You could tell him that,” Mom says.

I cringe. “But he can’t answer me.”

“Maybe he’ll point to the answer in his book. Or maybe he’ll answer in his head.” Mom returns to reading, and I draw the front of a gray-shingled house, porch steps, and a front door with a doorbell. I reach for a blue-sky pencil, but pick up midnight black instead.

I hear a faraway David-shriek, and Mom stops reading to watch the corridor. But then it’s quiet, and I figure David gave in and did whatever Stephanie wanted.

My drawing takes shape under my hand: lemon for the stars, cream for the moon, pine for the trees along the fence, charcoal gray for the darkened windows, all but one.

When the clinic bell jangles again, I peek up long enough to see Jason’s mother isn’t holding a guitar.

“HERE WE ARE!”

The speech therapist pushes Jason’s wheelchair up beside me. “I saw you drive in,” she says to his mother. “He was so upset, we stopped early.”

Mom slides her elbow over in a “here’s your chance, Catherine” nudge. “Hi, Jason,” she says. “How are you today?”

His head stays bowed, his chin almost touching his chest.

Mom’s question hangs in the air. Maybe Jason is answering in his head? Maybe he’s think-saying, “I’m fine, thank you.”

Or maybe, “Well, I’ve been better.”

Or maybe, he’s think-screaming, “I’m in this wheelchair, you idiot! How do you
suppose
I am?”

Whatever he’s thinking, his silence stings me. I lay my sketchbook on my lap. “I’m sorry about that guitar,” I tell the reddish brown waves of hair on Jason’s head. “I like music, too.”

His head snaps up and Jason stares hard — right into my eyes. His eyes are stunning, ice blue.

Mrs. Morehouse spins his chair toward the door, and Mom stands up to help.