by Cara Wall
Lily was constantly amazed at how normal Annelise considered her odd, difficult child.
“You’re so matter-of-fact,” she said, “so unembarrassed.”
“I’ve never understood embarrassment,” Annelise said. “Why are we bothered by what is difficult? Why are we unsettled by what is strange? I’ve always just been curious. I always just want to find out as much as I can.”
“But you’re not just learning.” Charles said. “You’re trying to change him.”
Annelise cocked her head to one side and squinted. “I’m going to see if he wants to be changed. I want to give him the chance to live as full a life as possible. If he doesn’t want to, if it seems impossible, then we’ll leave him alone. But he deserves the chance, doesn’t he? Doesn’t everyone?”
Lily looked at Charles, hoping to see on his face the same enthusiasm she felt. This woman was saying everything they had ever wanted to be true. Charles had been quiet for so long, but he had to at least hear. He was looking at Annelise with need and fear, as if she might take off her clothes at any moment, as if he were terrified he might find her beautiful.
“Will doesn’t like to be touched,” Annelise said. “But I don’t think he minds being held.”
“What’s the difference?” Lily asked.
“Touch involves movement,” Annelise said, taking Charles’s hand and rubbing her fingers on the back of it. “Being held involves stillness.” She came around the table, wrapped her arms around Charles and he let her stand there for a moment, embracing him. Lily had never seen another woman hold her husband. Jealousy flared inside her.
Annelise let go. “You can’t squeeze him, of course. Kids like Will tend to hate that. But if you’re very still, he might sit in your lap.”
Lily had never thought of letting Will sit in her lap without holding on to him, but Annelise was right. When she tried it the next day he sat on her knees without complaint. Lily decided that if Annelise wanted to have an affair with Charles, it would be worth it.
“What else should I do?” she asked.
Annelise thought for a moment. “Try to live like him,” she said. “Try to get behind his eyes.”
So Lily made time to sit with him every day, to watch him, to not avert her eyes, to become fascinated. And she began to see a pattern to his moods. She began to see changes in his breathing, the way he changed position, the times he twirled his hair, the times he lined up the dominoes. She began to see a rhythm, and saw a personality in there, saw that he found comfort in these activities, and it helped her. She made time to sit in the garden and contemplate what his life might be like. She felt how hot the sun was, how bright. She sat in the kitchen while Bip ate and heard how loud he was, how unpredictable. She jumped each time he dropped a fork on the floor. She went into Will’s room, where it was dark and cool, and she took out the dominoes, lined them up in front of her. She twirled her own hair. She twirled it hard, until she felt strands tearing themselves from her scalp, and she was calm. She felt it: All these things brought order, gave her a deep sense of control.
And so she let Will do them. If he wanted to take toys apart and not put them back in the box, line the parts up in rows instead of putting them back together, what was wrong with that? If he wanted to sit for hours alone, in the quiet, in the dark, what was wrong with that? He needed the ocean around him to be glassy and motionless. He needed to sit in the middle of it. Why did the world find that so disturbing? It was not disturbing to her.
There were many things that Will liked, and many he did not, and slowly themes emerged. He began to have, by process of elimination, a personality. Their lives assumed more structure. They woke Will at the same time each day. They ate at the same time, exactly. They bought him seven sets of the same clothes. If they went to the park at the same time each day, Will would come out from under the bench.
“It’s all about routine.” Lily said to Charles. She did not let herself think about the future, about how hard it would be to keep a routine once Bip was bigger and went to school and had friends over. She did not let herself think about the fact that Will would not go to school.
Charles watched Lily come back to herself. He watched her stand straighter, breathe deeper, reinhabit her skin. Will was improving. He no longer howled. He could sit at the dining room table for ten minutes at a time. He went to sleep at night without banging his head against the headboard. Sometimes, if he wanted something, he would take Lily’s hand, or Annelise’s, and point to it with their fingers. When he did this, Lily’s astonishment lit up the room.
Will never took Charles’s hand, though. Charles had not practiced, had not gone in the little workroom to make Will point to bits of cookie, to withhold them when Will would not use a gesture or move his eyes. Charles interacted with Will the way he always had: He took care of him. He fed him, buttoned his shirts, forced his mouth open to brush his teeth, held his head to brush his hair. When he found Will sitting in the front hall, he brought him a box of dominoes. He sat by Will’s bed until he was asleep. He could not do more.
But Charles knew Annelise was helping. He read her exhaustive daily logs. He read that Will pointed eight times, then fifteen times, that Will followed orders, waited to pick up a domino until Annelise told him it was time. Charles read that Will let his hands be washed without crying, then his feet, then his hair. He knew that Lily felt she could leave Will in the house alone with Annelise, that Annelise could handle him, that Will accepted her. He knew Lily got to go out with Bip now, just the two of them, that they went to the park and ate ice cream cones. He knew this made her happy. She slept now without crying out, had stopped waking at four a.m. Their life was getting easier, and Charles did not know what to do.
It seemed a miracle. It seemed he had asked God for more than comfort and God had given it. It seemed he had asked God to cure his son, and God was trying. It seemed that, despite Charles’s abandonment, God was present in his life, and Charles was unbearably ashamed.
TWENTY-ONE
Nan walked slowly down Fifth Avenue, headed for Washington Square Park. As she made her way past the graceful apartment buildings on either side of her, the arch beckoned her, friendly, like a big white dog.
It was just about to be summer. The park was green. The huge sunken fountain sprayed the children splashing in its basin. Everywhere there were kids playing, old women and old men gossiping with each other on benches on which they had sat for forty years.
She was finally, securely pregnant.
She and James had both had small surgeries, outpatient, which had not resembled her miscarriages as much as she thought they would. Still, they had made her feel inorganic, like a tree felled, planed, reduced to a box. When the surgeries worked, when her doctor smiled at her and shook James’s hand, she felt engulfed by dread. She did not know what to do with an accomplishment that had not been earned. It felt mechanical to her, absolutely mundane.
But today, Nan was afloat with hope. Today was the first day of her third trimester and she had not had one cramp, not one spot of blood. Now she was round and firm as a pumpkin, and the baby was due on Halloween, so James was calling it Spook.
“What if it’s a girl?” she asked.
“Spookette,” he said. Nan had an image of a girl in an orange dress, shaking her hips behind a microphone on a lit-up stage.
She was assiduously trying not to worry.
For months, she had been ashamed of her good fortune, ashamed that she had the resources to fix such a secret, transcendental problem. She was ashamed that she could not help Lily in the same way. That there was no small surgery for autism, no scalpel, no stitch, no specific tool. She was ashamed that only some problems could be fixed, and that those problems were hers. It was not fair. She had suffered little, and Lily had suffered much.
Nan received baby booties, silver rattles, and advice, but they were given surreptitiously, almost with a sense of shame. The women of the congregation were still troubled by Will; it felt wrong to c
elebrate with her. When they saw Nan, they said, “Would you tell Lily that my cousin knows a doctor in Ohio (or California, or Switzerland) who keeps up with all this autism, if she wants to call him.”
Nan did not want to feel ashamed of her luck. She did not let herself think that her baby might be born with the same issues as Will, or worse. She did not let herself believe she might deserve that. She was determined to enjoy herself, to let her pregnancy unfold like a brand-new book. She went to the park. The sun was warm, the breeze soft, and as the baby did a backflip in her belly, Nan freed herself of all her anchors and just floated happily away.
She and James made a nursery in the small bedroom next to theirs, with a white wood crib, yellow walls, and an oversized rocking chair they’d found in the church basement. Her parents had sent some extra money, which they’d put in a separate bank account, with its own little red bankbook.
James’s favorite baby accouterment was a Moses basket.
“They really call them that?” he asked incredulously as Nan unwrapped it and set it by her side of the bed.
“Of course.”
“Can they do that? I mean, what about all the mothers who don’t believe in Moses?”
“Who doesn’t believe in Moses? It’s a story—like Br’er Rabbit or The Three Little Pigs.”
In fact, James had always thought the story of Moses’s birth the most miraculous of all. It was a mother’s desperate, selfless act of protection, another woman’s softening heart.
And it seemed even more of a miracle to him now, as he contemplated his wife’s pregnancy. He thought of his own soon-to-be child, tucked in a woven basket on the river of their life. He wondered if this feeling was what some people called being reborn. He thought of Charles and Lily and knew their life was what most people would call hell.
He redoubled his campaign of usefulness, adding childcare, health care, education. Parenthood, his and Charles’s, drove him toward these labors, exposed him to new nightmares that woke him in the middle of the night: his baby left in a home, or Nan forced to give up music in order to care for him, compelled to renounce everything that made her smile. He thought of Marcus’s friend, a woman on her own with a son to care for. When the feminist group approached him about starting a day care in the church building, he immediately agreed.
“That was a mistake,” Marcus told him.
“You’re against childcare?” he asked.
“No, but this feels like just one more of your impulsive, arbitrary projects.”
James narrowed his eyes.
“Sorry,” Marcus said. “But I’ve watched you for a while now, and you don’t always put two and two together.” James shifted on his feet, wanting Marcus to get to the point. For all of his new empathy, he was still horribly impatient.
“The boy at my church can’t go to school,” Marcus said abruptly. “His mother tried to start him in kindergarten, but he bit the teacher, so they asked her to keep him home.”
“They can’t do that,” James said fiercely. “It’s against the law. They have to find him a place somewhere.”
Marcus raised his eyebrows. “And you want to start a day care?”
After a long moment James said, “Oh. I need to think bigger.” One part of him was embarrassed, one part was rising like a lion from a nap. “I need to start a school for boys like Will.”
Marcus shrugged. “It seems like the kind of thing you like to do.”
“In fact,” James said, clapping his hands together, “I think we can do both. I think we can start two schools.”
Nan had not seen Lily since the day she had passed on Dr. Foster’s number. Lily had not thanked her or asked Charles to thank her. But one morning, Nan walked out of the church and Lily was there, leaning against the brown bricks of the outside wall.
“Oh,” Lily said, running her eyes over Nan’s huge belly.
Nan was coming from rehearsal and was full of song, which made her obviously serene.
“You look wonderful,” she said to Lily. It was almost true. Lily looked better. She had showered and brushed her hair, and she was out of the house alone. Nan hadn’t seen Lily without Will since the boys were born.
“Thank you,” Lily said, stepping back. She did not know how to respond to a Nan this cheerful. She realized she had never seen Nan truly happy, blond and rosy and smiling without regret.
“How are you?” Nan forged ahead, determined not to be embarrassed. “I’ve just been preparing for rehearsal on Sunday. Dr. Rose lets me use the organ from ten to noon. He’s playing now, if you want to listen. He won’t mind. It’s so wonderful to sit in the church and listen to him, to be the only one there.”
“No, thank you,” Lily said. “I’m just waiting for Charles.” She and Charles were going to eat lunch together for the first time in as long as she could remember. They were going to sit in a restaurant and not think about doctors or diagnoses. They were going to talk about books or the weather, or nothing at all.
“I don’t think they’ll be out for a little while yet,” Nan said. “They’re passing the budget.”
“Oh,” Lily said for the second time. She did not like Nan’s smugness. She did not like that Nan knew Charles’s schedule better than she did. She did not like that Nan was part of Charles’s life at all.
“Everyone is so pleased Charles is back,” Nan continued. Lily thought about what that meant. For the church, it meant a return to stability and, of course, that made Nan happy. But at home, Charles still retreated to his study—not as much as he once had, but enough that Bip noticed when he was gone. So the church had its minister, but Lily did not quite have her husband. Something in Charles was still missing, some weight he needed to be secure.
Nan smiled at her again, brightly, and Lily realized what it was. Charles was still missing God.
Annelise looked at Lily inquisitively when she returned home. Lily had dropped her bag on a chair, was pacing up and down the front hall.
“What’s up?” Annelise asked. “I thought you were going to lunch.”
“I’m understanding,” Lily said, without stopping her steps. “It isn’t fun.”
“Is this about Will?” Annelise asked, standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the hall.
“No,” Lily said. “It’s about everyone else. I’m suddenly seeing that everyone else cares about Will, too.”
“Is this about Nan?” Annelise asked curiously, casually. As if Lily paced in the front hall, wild-eyed, every day. “Because she seems perfectly nice. Why don’t you like her?”
Lily forced herself to focus on Annelise’s normalcy, to let it steady her, set her to rights. She shook her head. “It’s about Charles . . . I don’t know where to begin.” She sat down on the black-and-white-tile floor, leaned her back against the wall, imagined Nan in her mind. “I hate that Nan is a part of his life. She’s too cheerful. She likes chintz. She doesn’t stand up for herself, she waits for others to speak, she always seems frightened. She wants everything to be pretty and soft.”
Annelise smiled a rueful smile. “And that’s just the opposite of you.”
“What?” Lily gaped at Annelise.
“It’s not an insult,” Annelise corrected herself. “It’s just a fact. She’s a woman in your husband’s life. You’re jealous. She’s jealous too.”
“I’m not jealous,” Lily protested. “I just remembered that Charles has a whole life he lives without me. And I haven’t tried to understand it at all.”
“And Nan does,” Annelise said. “What’s the point in hating her for that? She doesn’t hate you. She wants to be your friend. She’s lonely.”
“You can’t fix loneliness by finding friends.”
“You can’t?”
Lily stretched her legs out. “No. That’s ridiculous. Loneliness never goes away.”
Annelise sat on the floor across from Lily. “I don’t think Nan believes that,” she said. “I think she would feel almost completely better if you and she could be friends.
Wouldn’t that be nice for you, too? Your husbands are friends—the four of you could have a cozy life together.” She looked directly at Lily, waited for her to meet her gaze. “You can’t forgive her?”
Lily paused before answering, assessing Annelise. “I can’t lie to you, can I?”
Annelise shook her head. “Well, you can, but I spend all day looking at a child who can’t communicate with words, trying to figure out what he’s really thinking.”
Lily looked past Annelise, through the kitchen doors to the garden. The tulips were up, and she saw tiny green tips in the far planter box that meant the irises would be blooming soon.
“I used to believe everything was random,” Lily said. “I used to think that what you did with your life didn’t matter—look at me: I believed I could marry a minister and not ever come into contact with God. I thought that, at the root of it all, things were unconnected. And now I know I won’t ever be alone. If I’d had two regular children, I don’t know if I could say that to you so clearly. I think, maybe, I would have raised them to be independent, to not need me, to be able to walk away. But Will will always need me, so I know, now, what it means to be connected. I’m connected to Charles and to you and to the boys. And I suppose I’m going to have to admit that I’m connected to James and Nan, too, whether I want to be or not. I suppose I’m going to have to allow that being connected is better than being alone.”
“I’ve always believed that,” Annelise said. “Have you not? Oh my goodness! How can you live without believing in people or God? Haven’t you been terribly sad?”
Lily smiled. “Yes,” she said, “I have been terribly, terribly sad.”
Annelise crawled across the floor and hugged her.
Lily called Charles and told him to meet her at home. She sent the boys to the park with Annelise, made beef bourguignon, and poured herself a glass of wine. When Charles arrived, the kitchen was full of olive oil and rosemary.