The Home Front

by Margaret Vandenburg

  That such a flimsy house of cards had stood for so long seemed no less incredible than the fact that it collapsed so quickly. Utterly bereft, Rose had no idea what to do next. She stared at the cell phone in her hand and the computer on her lap. For the better part of a year, they had connected her to a virtual utopia. Her lifelines had been cut by something as trivial as a transaction denied. What if her call had gone through? She would have clung to Tashi’s every word for another hour. The sound of the wizard’s voice would have drowned out her son’s voiceless anguish for another afternoon. Now there was nothing to listen to but Max.

  * * *

  Todd felt confident that he had performed well at his first redeployment audition in Arizona, and he was all jazzed up for the second. He did have one regret, though, which he hoped to rectify this time around. There was no excuse for the way he’d treated Rose the night before he flew out last time. Taking leave of your wife was a time-honored military ritual, an attribute of conduct becoming an air force officer. Everything was ready for takeoff again. His duffel bag, backpack, and boots were lined up next to the front door. All that remained was the fond farewell.

  Not that Rose had said anything. Everything was perfectly normal when he returned home, still flying high from the adrenaline rush of executing actual combat maneuvers in actual F-16 Fighting Falcons. Being back in the cockpit was like breathing fresh air after months imprisoned in a cave. He hesitated to talk about it with Rose. She used to love hearing him talk about flying. A sports car aficionado, she understood the allure of speed. But now the subject was fraught with abandonment issues. These were her words, not his, which she pretended pertained exclusively to the kids. The fact that she couldn’t share the excitement of his weekend drove another wedge between them, which was also perfectly normal at this point. Normal was flying robots all day and coming home to an autistic son and an estranged New Age wife. And she wondered why he wanted to redeploy.

  Rose was already upstairs, just sitting in bed. Something seemed strange. Out of place. An uncanny silence filled the room. He looked around, trying to locate the source, as though silence emanated from the presence rather than the absence of something. Then it dawned on him. Todd couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Rose idle this way, her hands at rest rather than typing maniacally on her laptop. He was embarrassed to admit that he was jealous of her love affair with prosperity and abundance, the virtual life she seemed to prefer to his actual company. Serendipity. He was contrite and she wasn’t preoccupied, for once. It would do them both good to have an amorous leave-taking.

  He crawled into bed and opened his arms. They lay there, nestled against one another, breathing in the silence. Todd started playing with her hair, which either he or she loved more than almost anything in the world. They had been married so long they couldn’t remember who enjoyed it more. Rose seemed to melt into him. But when he tried to kiss her, she turned away.

  “I can’t bear it anymore, Todd.”

  “Bear what?”

  “Anything. Everything. Certainly not this.”

  He assumed she was referring to his deployment. He had expected as much, the bereft wife lamenting her husband’s departure. It was part of the ritual, the prelude to a soldier’s passionate promise to return home safely.

  “We don’t even know if I’m going yet,” he said.

  “You’ll go. You always do.”

  “I’ll be back, baby,” he said.

  “I can’t cope. It’s too much.”

  Todd listened in disbelief. There was a sadness in her voice, a depth of feeling that revived an ancient memory of his wife before she had been abducted by her slaphappy soul sisters. A prehistoric time when she could still feel pain and disappointment. He should have been relieved by the promise of the return of the woman he had married. But she sounded so defeated.

  “What’s going on, Rose?”

  “Atlas shrugged.”

  She hadn’t used this expression since her mother died, and the weight of the world threatened to crush her.

  “Did something happen?”

  “Nothing new. I guess it all just caught up with me.”

  She tried to think of a way to explain without making a mockery of herself. For months on end, she had spent every waking minute clinging to the belief that the power of positive thinking could heal everything—her son’s illness, her failing marriage, the overwhelming guilt she felt as a wife and mother. Never, not for a single minute, had Todd entertained the possibility that what she believed in might be true. How could she express her devastation without proving him right? He wouldn’t have gloated or anything petty like that. But his way of seeing the world was unbearable. Seeing autism for what it was, a debilitating disease. Watching it infect their love.

  “I don’t know how you live this way,” she said finally.

  “What way?”

  “Without illusions. I can’t do it.”

  It turned out she was more of an escapist than he was, utterly incapable of accepting the facts on the ground, as he would put it. Utterly devastated by them. She understood completely why he wanted to redeploy.

  He felt an overwhelming desire to comfort her. She had finally shed the armor of euphoric insensitivity she had donned to protect herself. She seemed human again. Accessible. He gathered her in his arms, eager to be the husband he had failed to be these many months.

  “Just hold me, Todd.”

  There was a place for this, too, in the ritual of leave-taking. The bereft wife in need of comfort. Channeling the magnitude of his feeling into a gentle embrace did nothing to diminish its force. When he was sure she was asleep, he extricated his limbs from hers, lingering on every point of contact. The soft contours of her body left a hard imprint on his. He stood above her, gripping himself in both hands, watching the rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed. He was far too aroused to sleep without letting desire have its way with him. To avoid waking Rose, he carried himself downstairs to the couch, imagining that she was waiting for him there. She would have pushed him back on the cushions. She would have straddled him and made him work for it.

  Todd heard someone on the stairs. He eased up a little, hoping that his fantasies had conjured Rose in the flesh. It wouldn’t have been the first time. They used to be telepathic, thinking of each other the same way the same hours of the day, even oceans away. The tread was light. The third stair creaked, as usual, but not as loud as it would have if an adult were descending. Todd tried to find something to cover himself, but it was too late. A tousle-haired child shuffled into the living room. The little tan dinosaur on his pajamas was barely visible in the dim light. At least it was Max rather than Maureen. Todd pulled his tee shirt down as far as possible. Talk about coitus interruptus. He breathed deeply, as quietly as possible, trying to avoid detection and calm himself down.

  Fortunately, Max was focused on something else. No one could concentrate more intently on one thing to the exclusion of all others than good old Max. A bomb could explode without distracting him. With the air of a man with a mission, he made a beeline for the front door. Max’s back was to him, so Todd couldn’t figure out what he was doing at first. He bent over, braced himself, and pulled with all his might. Suddenly his grip slipped, and he fell flat on his ass. He picked himself up and tried another angle. This time Todd could see him grab a handle on the duffel bag, the one at the far end, which apparently provided better leverage than the middle one. The bag budged an inch or two. Max braced himself and pulled again, gaining almost a foot this time. He was getting the hang of it. Time after time he pitted the heft of his body against the weight of the bag until he had pulled it halfway across the room. Then he seemed to abandon it, walking back in the direction of the staircase. Todd assumed he had run out of steam.

  Max headed left instead of right, opening the door of the coat closet rather than retreating back upstairs. Todd had underestimated the unwavering intensity of his resolve, one of the best and worst attributes of his autism. Ma
x pulled up his pajama bottoms, which had slipped halfway off his little butt. Then he resumed his epic struggle with the duffel bag. He was panting by now. He started losing his grip more often, tipping over backward time and time again. Todd felt sorry for him and wanted to help. But this was Max’s feat of strength, not his.

  For months on end, Todd had been arguing with Rose and Sasha, insisting that they were reading into Max’s actions. The parking circle incident. The family portraits. His son’s motives seemed too inscrutable to bear the interpretive weight of their fairy tale scenarios. By the time Max had successfully stowed the duffel bag back in the closet, Todd had ruled out the possibility that this was just another random act. A narrative began to emerge, a series of meaningful gestures that transformed make-believe into reality. When he finally realized what his son was trying to accomplish, Todd was overwhelmed with conflicting emotions. Disbelief. Pride. Guilt. A father’s desire to honor his son’s quest.

  * * *

  Once a week, Sasha hauled out painting supplies hoping to entice Max back into art therapy. She tried everything, retracing the process that had yielded such promising results before. Tattooing his arms with lines produced no reaction whatsoever. Family portraits with or without Todd were met with blank stares, at best. Usually he didn’t even deign to look at them. She even drew a picture of Ralph and Harry, just to see if she could get a rise out of him. If Sasha said so herself, the likenesses were remarkable, Harry all scruffy and Ralph with that long skinny tail of his. They might as well have been Tom, Dick, and Harry for all Max cared. Looking out the window was apparently much more interesting.

  Then wham. One day he picked up his brush again. That’s the way it was with Max. He progressed in leaps and bounds or not at all, with nothing in between. He seemed to store things up, stockpiling them until he was good and ready to respond. The challenge was figuring out the catalyst, if there was one. Sometimes Sasha thought it just took time for him to filter out things nobody else even noticed, in which case the lag time reflected heightened rather than impaired faculties. His powers of perception were so acute, he catalogued a hundred precise details for every one or two random features observed by so-called normal people. Odors, sounds, and textures. Patterns within patterns. He wasn’t simple or slow. If anything, he was too observant to function at the same speed as everyone else.

  What was true of his perceptive faculties was even more true of his emotions. He felt too much rather than too little. Some of his most apparently regressive behaviors were actually strategies designed to help process overwhelming fears of being annihilated by the force of his feelings. He was like a hibernating animal protecting himself from perceived tempests raging beyond the confines of his den, a mental space small and spare enough to feel safe. Any step outside of this autistic haven was a step in the right direction. Sasha was learning to measure his progress in a less linear fashion. Even his recent bout of head-banging suggested he was experiencing more complex emotions, which he had not yet learned to express. Two steps forward and one step back. It was no accident that the banging stopped when he picked up his paintbrush.

  Sasha prided herself on devising innovative exercises. But there was no way of knowing whether her strategies actually contributed to Max’s decision to start painting again. It was equally possible he simply had something important to say that day, quite apart from her repeated attempts to find a common language. For two weeks running, Sasha drew a series of three portraits, each with three family members. Someone was conspicuously absent in each painting, first Maureen and then Rose and then Todd. She drew them in the same order each week, trying to appeal to Max’s predilection for patterns. When she finished, she lined them all up in front of him, six paintings that might have been called her missing persons series. Setting up the exercise took longer than expected, but they still had almost an hour before lunch. She sat back in her chair, prepared to wait until their session was over for him to respond.

  Max was staring out the window, as usual, but his eyes weren’t glazed over. Suddenly, he grabbed his brush and dipped it in red paint. Without seeming to look at any of the other portraits, he focused his attention on one of the two paintings with big blank spaces reserved for Todd. For some reason, he chose the one farther away from where he was sitting, even though he had to stand up to reach it. He drew a circle first, slowly and carefully, and then a series of short vertical lines around the top perimeter. When he finished he stared out the window again, still gripping his brush.

  Sasha waited a good ten minutes before making her next move. She needed to use a soft touch. Max hated to be pushed. She stacked up the other four portraits, the ones missing Maureen and Rose, and stashed them in a corner of the room, as if to agree they were of no interest whatsoever. Then she sat back down and pondered the remaining pair. She intended to stay there all afternoon, if necessary, using the focus of her attention as a visual prompt. Lunch be damned. She was banking on the assumption that Max wouldn’t be able to tolerate the discrepancy between the two—one already finished, with his father’s crew cut filling the void, and the other still blank where it mattered most. Max ultimately proved her both right and wrong.

  After only fifteen minutes, Max dipped his brush again, this time in brown. He stooped over the second portrait and painted two long lines and two short ones, what turned out to be a rectangle standing on end in the place where his father belonged. Then he drew two semicircles, one in the middle of the rectangle and one on the far end, what might have been a nose and a foot if the rectangle had been a person. When he finished he resumed staring out the window as though nothing had happened.

  Sasha couldn’t believe it. Max had never drawn a rectangle. More to the point, he had never deviated from a pattern. The majority of the energy he expended, both mentally and physically, was focused on maintaining consistency and order. Wearing the same tan clothes, eating the same round foods, lining up trucks or Legos or whatever else needed to be lined up, counting everything every step of the way to make sure nothing eluded his control. Sasha had no idea what the rectangle represented, if anything, but it wasn’t a circle or a line. Whether it was representational or purely abstract, the rectangle constituted a major step away from uniformity, toward something more recognizably human on the spectrum. If Max could embrace variation, there was a chance he could ultimately learn to tolerate unpredictability, the final frontier separating children with autism from living normal, chaotic lives.

  * * *

  Rose seemed uncharacteristically flat at their weekly meeting. Sasha had never seen her this way, bordering on depressed, if such a mood existed on her emotional palette. Rose was always so upbeat, all the more so when Todd was particularly bummed out. They were either a wonderful couple, balancing each other productively, or they were engaged in a destructive tug-of-war, in which case Max was the rope. Neither one of them would prevail. The fact that their son’s relative progress or regression had become the focal point of their marriage meant that autism had the upper hand. It was tearing the family apart.

  Sasha wondered what Todd thought he could gain by being so pessimistic about Max’s recovery. She knew he was unconsciously compensating for Rose’s blind optimism. This was common practice, a way for parents to protect themselves from disappointment. His impending redeployment put another spin on what was becoming an increasingly complex emotional matrix. It begged a chicken and egg question as to whether he wanted to redeploy to escape Max’s halting recovery or whether the halting recovery provided the excuse he needed to justify redeployment. If there was one thing her MA in psychology had taught Sasha, beyond the fact that the profession as a whole was alarmingly misguided, it was that emotional conflicts were always ambivalent, with chickens and eggs enough to fill an entire hen coop. Negotiating weekly meetings with Rose and Todd was like walking on eggshells.

  “Good news,” Sasha said.

  “I could use some,” Rose said.

  Todd just sat there. Rose had stolen his curmud
geonly line, and there was nothing left to say.

  Sasha shuffled through Max’s art therapy portfolio. She pulled out the two most recent family portraits and placed them side by side on the table. Rose stared blankly at the one with the circle and lines occupying the father’s position. She wasn’t entirely sure she still had the energy to believe the little vertical strokes of paint really represented Todd’s crew cut. They seemed more random than before, more like the lines Max had painted on his arms, which testified to improvements in manual dexterity but very little else. Meaning was in the eyes of the beholder. Sometimes a cigar was just a cigar.

  Todd focused his attention on the shape Max had drawn in the second portrait. It took him a minute to realize it wasn’t just a rectangle. The little semicircles in the middle and on the upper end spoke volumes, utilitarian flourishes that translated form into function. At first he thought Sasha was trying to trick them. But that was impossible. She couldn’t possibly understand the significance of these particular shapes. Todd alone was privy to their meaning, which was both literal and figurative.

  “Max drew this?” Todd asked.

  “Both of them,” Sasha said. “He’s painting again.”

  “He’s never drawn a rectangle before.”

  Rose perked up slightly. “Could this mean something?”

  “I’m not sure,” Sasha said. “But he’s expanding his vocabulary, even if they’re just shapes.”