The Prodigy's Cousin

by Joanne Ruthsatz

  He was absorbing far more than Lucie and Mike realized. When William was eighteen months old, Lucie took him and Alex shopping. It was an activity both boys hated. After an hour or two, Lucie took them to the play area in the mall and let them loose.

  A set of letters—randomly distributed—decorated the play area carpet. William was immediately drawn to them. He ignored all the kids and all the toys and stared at them. Lucie watched as William began moving from one letter to the next. He found the A and stood on top of it. Then the B and the C and the D. He kept progressing all the way to Z.

  Lucie was a bit surprised. She hadn’t been working on the alphabet with William. She hadn’t been working on much of anything with him. He was almost always happy, almost always content, and at the time Lucie was in the thick of battling autism with Alex, who was then in his first year at Portia.

  William started moving through the letters again, this time in a different—but still deliberate—progression. The hair on Lucie’s arms stood up. William, her eighteen-month-old child, was going through the alphabet backward. Lucie didn’t think she could recite the alphabet backward.

  But knowing that William had memorized the alphabet only exacerbated the sense of unease that had taken hold in the pit of Lucie’s stomach. Over the previous few months, Lucie had noticed changes in her second son.

  William’s interest in letters and numbers had darkened into an obsession. He took his books to the corner of the room and spent hours staring at them. His social interests began to fade. William grew increasingly upset when things were not just how he wanted them, and changes in schedule became difficult. Lucie waited for months for William to utter his first words, but her baby hit the one-year mark, then the fourteen-month mark, then the sixteen-month mark, and those words still didn’t come.

  Lucie knew that autism had different faces. Sometimes autistic tendencies were evident almost immediately, as they had been with Alex. Sometimes a child might appear to be developing normally but then seem to slowly slide backward into autism’s grasp. That was what she feared was happening with William.

  Lucie took William for an assessment when he was just over two years old. The doctor thought she might be right. During his visit, William made some eye contact, certainly more than Alex had, but he was inconsistent about it. He occasionally responded to his name, but at least as often he seemed oblivious to it. He walked on his toes as Alex had done, and he had a ritualistic dance he performed when he was excited. Just like Alex, William never engaged in pretend play. His use of gestures was delayed, and even at two he rarely pointed. He produced some words, but he primarily used them to label things, not to communicate. The doctor diagnosed William with autism.

  For Lucie, the disappointment flooded back in. The bitterness returned. In some ways, this diagnosis was even harder than the first; for months, she had been sure that William was going to be fine.

  She broke down during a car ride with a friend. The appointments. The therapy. The workshops. Lucie didn’t think she had the energy to start over.

  But at least this time the course was charted. She had a formula at her fingertips. She had already enrolled William at Portia. She added him to the speech therapy waiting list; she added him to the occupational therapy waiting list. She closed her eyes, held her breath, and hoped for another miracle.

  At Portia, William’s speech improved, but his progress was not as dramatic as Alex’s had been. It was tough to offer incentives because his interests shifted unexpectedly.

  After seven months of therapy, he still didn’t respond to his name; eye contact was still fleeting. During an assessment, he yelled when the examiner tried to join him in completing a puzzle and nearly cried when his alphabet letters were not perfectly arranged. When frustrated, he bit his hand or tapped his head. He echoed the words of the examiner and his mother, a phenomenon known as echolalia, and chanted phrases—“Today is Friday” or “Go press the O”—out of context.

  Despite William’s struggles, Lucie began getting—more and more frequently—the distinct, sometimes chilling sense that his intelligence was “out there.”

  The December after William enrolled at Portia, he became engrossed with a set of magnetic letters that Lucie and Mike had bought for Alex. In the midst of the holidays, William took the letters off their magnetic board and placed them on a brown leather ottoman. Lucie went to get her camera to snap a couple of pictures. When she returned, she found William where she had left him, still playing with the letters.

  She took a closer look. At two years and three months, William had spelled out two words across the ottoman, “Mommy” and “Daddy.” He was midway through his third word, “William.”

  Lucie watched, stunned, as William continued to work, his head of tousled brown hair weaving back and forth between the ottoman and a stockpile of letters. He announced each new addition. He drew out its pronunciation for several seconds, as if he didn’t want to let it go, as if merely saying the name of the letter was a delight. Eventually, his childish voice lilted upward, warbled, and broke, and William moved on to the next magnet. When he ran out of letters, he flipped a W over to use as an M; he rotated a 7 to create an L.

  Over the next few weeks, William used the letters to spell increasingly difficult words. A few days after watching his aunt write out “algorithm,” William re-created the word with the magnet letters; he spelled the same word out loud at dinner, squirming in his high chair, sporting a bib with a lion on it. Lucie discovered him spelling out the months of the year—correctly and in sequence—with the magnet letters. There was no calendar anywhere in the house. “There was a constant stream of stuff that he would always do that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. It gave me goose bumps,” Lucie said. “It was almost creepy.”

  By two and a half, William could battle his way through early readers, carefully keeping his place with his finger and sounding out each new word. After that, he read all the time. He read books, he read newspaper ads, he read labels; he read at home, and he read on the beach. Whenever he received a gift, he carefully read every word of the card before opening the present.

  About a month before his third birthday, William began writing out words on Alex’s chalkboard. At first, it was an exercise in frustration. When a letter wasn’t perfect, William screamed and frantically erased it. But when he printed one to his specifications—magic. “I did it!” he would cry out, the curls above his forehead bouncing as he ran to Lucie. Within days, he was spelling out “Mommy” and “Amanda” (the name of one of his behavioral therapists). His writing wasn’t restricted to the chalkboard; he used Lego bricks to craft words, piecing them together to spell out “Nana,” and he wrote out the alphabet on graph paper.

  William discovered the computer before he turned three and became mesmerized by fonts. He spent hours typing words in different fonts and developed opinions about which fonts looked best in which colors. By three and a half, he was using the computer to type out train schedules. Before he turned four, he was writing out paragraphs.

  He looked for any opportunity to calculate. At first, he zeroed in on dates. William began asking people their age and month of birth, information he used to compute birth year. Around the time he turned four, he got his hands on a perpetual calendar and began calculating the day of the week on which different events occurred. When the family’s Apple TV displayed the year in which a particular song came out, William would report how old his mom had been that year and how old he had been, a calculation that often drove him into negative digits.

  By the time he was four, William could multiply two-digit numbers together. He could complete multiple-step problems in his head. At four years and three months, his parents videoed him swapping math problems with his uncle, beaming between bites of applesauce as he answered “5” when his uncle asked him to solve 9 squared minus 76. “I guess everybody’s smart,” William said afterward as he ran from th
e table. “Oh, not quite as smart as you, my goodness,” Lucie said to herself, taking a deep breath as she wiped off the table and picked up an empty applesauce cup. On a standardized test he took a few months later, at four and a half, William scored better than 99.9 percent of five-year-olds who took the test.

  For all of his impressive—more than impressive, sometimes shocking—intellectual abilities, William struggled to integrate in a classroom setting. He enrolled in nursery school with a therapist, just as Alex had done. He had mostly overcome his language delays by then: he had more typical back-and-forth exchanges with others; he initiated conversations and asked questions. But following a schedule was a feat beyond William’s abilities. He resisted leaving behind any project he hadn’t finished. If a teacher tried to help him put things back in place to move on to the next activity, he would swat her hand away.

  In junior kindergarten, he hardly ever interacted with the other children. He rarely participated in group activities without prompting; he preferred to let his own interests dictate his pursuits. He had trouble remaining seated, struggled with a short attention span, and frequently disrupted other children’s play.

  He still couldn’t take care of himself. He couldn’t get himself dressed or undressed. While he had the dexterity to button his shirt and tie his shoes, he struggled to stay focused on the task long enough to complete it. When dressing to go outside for recess during senior kindergarten, he was frequently distracted; recess often ended before William had a chance to go outside. Even when his parents broke down what he was supposed to do at home—walk to your drawer, open it, get a T-shirt, and pull it over your head—William would wander off before he finished the task. “He’s off in his brain,” Lucie said. “It’s such an amusing place that it’s really, really hard to keep him in the here and now sometimes.”

  But over the next couple of years, things got easier. He began taking an ADHD medication, and his ability to stay on task improved. His doctor tinkered with his dosage and added an anti-anxiety medication to the mix. More improvement still. Eventually, William could make it through the school day without his therapist. He still needed more prompting from the teacher than most other kids to complete tasks, but it was progress.

  Along the way, Lucie and Mike realized that William had an epic ability—and desire—to process novel information. He craved new topics. The richer in detail, the better. Lucie and Mike fought to keep a constant stream of dense reference books at the ready for William’s birthday and Christmas gifts. Upon receiving a new one, he grew giddy. He got a glint in his eye and threw himself at the material.

  Lucie and Mike saw that glee when William pored over the atlas he received for his fifth birthday. He was soon inhaling geography. He studied maps—maps of the world, maps of Canada, maps of Ontario. Then he discovered Street View on Google Maps and began spending long periods of time traveling around the world, street by street. When Lucie asked whether he’d like to visit those places in person one day, William told her no, he liked traveling from his living room.

  William wasn’t much of a showman—other people’s approval meant relatively little to him—so he was generally content to sock information away in his brain for his own enjoyment. But every now and then Lucie and Mike caught a glimpse of what was bubbling beneath the surface. It happened one day when Lucie drove the boys out into the countryside to pick out a pumpkin, a month after William got his atlas.

  “Why don’t we just go to the grocery store?” Alex whined. “There’s a box of pumpkins right by the door.” Lucie pressed on. As they drove onto a rural road, far out of their usual circuit and into an unfamiliar part of Canada, Lucie jokingly asked the boys if they knew where they were. “Yes,” William piped up. “We’re on page 34.” Lucie sat for a moment in silence. “Oh, wait, we just drove onto page 35.” Lucie realized that William had done more than just study the atlas—he had memorized it. And not just their own neighborhood or their familiar haunts. He had memorized the entire thing.

  Lucie couldn’t probe too deeply; if she tried to pry open the doors to William’s mind, he was quick to change the subject or shift the conversation back to something that interested him. But William’s knowledge wasn’t something he could conceal, either. His command of geography popped up again when Lucie once referred to a street in a place they were visiting. William supplied two cities that had a street of that name (in one of which the street was so short, few cabbies would have known of it) and asked which one she meant.

  William had the same fascination with vocabulary. The fall after he turned five, he saw Lucie pick a dictionary up off the shelf. William asked what it was. Lucie explained that it was a book that listed every word in the English language. “He looked at me like, ‘How could you keep this from me all these years?’” Lucie recalled. When he received a dictionary of his own for Christmas, he abandoned all his other gifts and paged through it, soaking in all of the information. He discovered sections previously unknown to Lucie: lists of the most common words, lists of the most commonly used letters. “I would just go in and look up a word,” Lucie said. “I never read it like a book.”

  It made him an ace at Scrabble—he knew every two-, three-, four-, and five-letter word that contained the letter q and delighted in slamming them down on triple-word-score spaces. He enjoyed creating words so much that sometimes he played both players in a two-player Scrabble game.

  When William was five, Mike gave him a printout of the periodic table of elements. By the end of the day, he had memorized it. Lucie tried to coax William into playing outside, and she eventually persuaded him by giving him a piece of chalk he could use to draw on the ground. He took it and re-created the periodic table on their backyard patio. Over the next few months, he taught himself everything he could about each element: its symbol, molecular weight, electron shell structure, diameter in picometers, density, state of matter, year and country of discovery, what it is used in, percent on Earth’s surface, and percent in our bodies.

  His memory—at least for things that interested him—seemed to know no bounds. At five, he discovered pi. Over two days, he memorized it to the seventy-fifth decimal place. He memorized every country in the world, including information about its location, capital, population, population density, and area in square kilometers. He devoured a book on the flags of the world, memorizing the flag of each country, its year of creation, color scheme, historical changes to that color scheme, and the flag’s size ratio.

  His memory wasn’t just photographic; it was episodic. It was as if he had a video recorder running all the time, capturing everything he saw, time-stamping his every activity. When a first-grade teacher asked William to write down a time he had gotten hurt, William recalled the precise date two years before when he had scraped his knee. One day, in the family’s Lego room, William pointed to a Lego replica Alex had built of a character in one of William’s books and said that Alex had built it a year ago that day.

  He could slice and dice the information in almost any configuration. He knew how many elements were discovered in France. He could rattle off a list of fonts that began with any given letter. If you gave him a year, he would re-create the then-current version of the periodic table. He could tell you which of the world’s flags featured any particular color.

  William had always enjoyed music; he was a constant hummer, which irritated his brother. Around the time he turned six, he requested piano lessons, and his parents signed him up. His teacher, Kathy, reported to Lucie that William had perfect pitch. Over a thirty-eight-year career, she had seen a handful of students who supposedly had this same ability. These students could, perhaps, identify a note played in isolation without any benchmark. But she had never seen anyone like William. “We played this game all the time where he shut his eyes and I would play notes and chords and he would name them immediately,” Kathy said. “I would try to trick him, but I never could.”

  Though he almost never practi
ced, he picked up new pieces quickly and could swap the right-hand part with the left-hand part, something Kathy had never seen anyone do. William constantly composed music, and he told Lucie that he had more than a hundred original songs on the CD in his head. He wouldn’t perform the pieces on command, but he knew the precise length and title of each one. “There’s no child like him, that’s for sure,” Kathy said.

  He was still a kid. When he wasn’t reading reference books, he loved stories about mischievous cats and neurotic squirrels. He laughed with his brother, stuck his tongue out at the table, got his face covered in chocolate, and delighted in potty humor; nothing cracked him up like Calvin and Hobbes. He dressed up like an alien for Halloween and donned a Santa hat around the holidays. When he worked in his “office” at home, a stuffed animal often tagged along. But anyone who knew William, anyone who’d gotten a glimpse at his mind, realized that the kid chasing bubbles in the elephant T-shirt wasn’t your typical six-year-old.

  Things were better. Things were oh-so-much better than they had been when Lucie was staying up at night wondering whether her boys would ever talk, laugh, or make a friend.

  But she still had so many questions.

  What yanked Alex out of the depths of autism? Maybe it was the jump start they had gotten on intervention. Maybe Portia housed the secrets to autism recovery. Maybe it was something internal to Alex, some part of his wiring that destined him to speak, to laugh, to connect, and nothing she or Portia did made any difference. Maybe it was only a matter of time.

  William was no less a mystery. Was he actually autistic? Lucie—and some of his doctors—were uncertain. Maybe he was. There were plenty of symptoms you could point to. But maybe he was just extraordinarily bright and had a severe case of ADHD coupled with anxiety. There was really no way to be sure.