by Delaney, JP
We had to find ways of bringing the costs down. And that, frankly, was a task Tim wasn’t very good at. He was a visionary, not a bean counter. So the problem never really got solved, and the funding slowly drifted away. We were stagnating.
It was Mike who eventually called Tim on it, a couple of months before the wedding. He walked into Tim’s office, shut the door, leaned his back against it and folded his arms. His whole posture shouted, We have to talk.
Someone reported that, through the glass, you could see his knees shaking.
The discussion was amicable at first. Tim got up from behind his desk and paced. Mike stayed with his back to the door, talking.
Then things started to get heated. There was shouting, although we couldn’t make out the words. At one point Tim picked up the framed picture of Abbie on his desk and waved it at Mike.
“Tim force four?” someone suggested, watching.
“Five,” someone else decided.
There were a couple of newbies around who had never seen a full Tim eruption before. “Watch and learn,” we told them. “This is what it used to be like all the time.”
But actually, this was like nothing we’d ever seen before. It escalated beyond a five to a six, a seven, and even beyond. Eventually the door of Tim’s office crashed open. He was gesticulating at Mike. “Get out,” he was shouting, amid a stream of profanities. “You’re fucking fired!”
“Fine,” Mike yelled back. “But when you realize I was right, don’t ask me back.”
From which we deduced that Mike’s pep talk hadn’t gone so well.
“Listen, you fucking creep,” Tim spat. “She’s worth a dozen of you. And that sexless stick insect you married.”
It was only then we realized they hadn’t only been arguing about the company. They’d been arguing about whether Tim was doing the right thing marrying Abbie.
59
After Tim drops you back at the house, you use the burner phone to do an online search for graduated electronic decelerator. The links take you to a news story about a mother who sued Meadowbank for assaulting her eighteen-year-old son. There’s footage of him strapped to a board, being shocked thirty-one times. It’s disturbing to watch him scream “No!” over and over, jerking in pain as the electricity hits his body.
That film was made five and a half years ago, you notice. Only a short time before Abbie’s disappearance.
Did the footage spark a disagreement between her and Tim? Had she only then realized exactly what sending Danny to Meadowbank would entail? Could that have been another factor in what happened?
* * *
—
You find yourself thinking about the period of Danny’s diagnosis. Your memories of that time are hazy—almost as if they happened to someone else. Which of course they did, in a sense. They happened to her, to Abbie, and like all her most personal memories left little trace on social media for Tim’s algorithms to reconstruct.
Even so, the terror of that time is embedded deep in your brain.
You realized quite quickly something was wrong, of course. You just didn’t know what.
“Danny?” you called one day. “Lunchtime.”
Normally that would have been enough to bring him running to the table. But not that day. You knew he was in the playroom, playing with a dinosaur he’d been given for his birthday. When he still didn’t come after you called a second time, you put your head around the door.
“Danny!”
He didn’t look up. The dinosaur was on the floor, and he was staring at it. Just staring.
“Lunch,” you repeated. Still he didn’t look up.
You took a step forward, concerned. Then suddenly he turned to look at you, and his familiar toothy smile lit up his face.
* * *
—
“I think Danny might have glue ear,” you told Tim that evening. “He seems to find it hard to hear me sometimes.”
Tim frowned. “Danny?” he called.
At the sound of his father’s voice, Danny looked up. “Yef?”
“Seems all right to me.” Tim turned back to his BlackBerry.
“It varies,” you said defensively. “Anyway, I booked an appointment with the audiologist.”
“My grandpa used to have a saying,” Tim said mildly. “There’s none so deaf as them who don’t want to hear.”
“I’m so sad I never met Grandpa Scott. He always sounds so much fun.”
“He was a miserable old bastard,” Tim agreed.
You pointed silently at Danny.
“Sorry—miserable old person,” Tim said. “My point is, what was the consequence of Danny not paying attention to you? Did his lunch go in the trash?”
“Of course not.”
“Hmm.” Which was shorthand for a whole debate you and Tim had on a regular basis. For him, parenting was a subdivision of engineering, a collection of design processes that merely had to be applied with total consistency in order to produce a well-mannered, efficient outcome. For you, it was a relationship, and half the fun was seeing what happened when you threw the rule book out the window.
You’d never have admitted it to Tim, but you secretly encouraged Danny to climb into bed with you at first light every morning. Feeling your son’s warm, perfect body wriggling alongside yours was the best part of the day. Even his rare outbreaks of naughtiness seemed like cause for celebration, proof he was going to be an independent thinker, his own man, a creative not a suit. Sometimes, when he got angry or defiant with you, it was all you could do not to cheer him on.
When, later that week, the very expensive audiologist diagnosed glue ear and told you it would most likely clear up over time, you felt quietly vindicated.
* * *
—
You’d managed to place Danny in the local Montessori. It was a compromise between Tim and you: You’d rather Danny stayed home, Tim wanted a “proper” preschool.
“Research shows that children who start school earlier do better,” he told you more than once.
“Better at what, exactly?”
“Better at school.”
“But do we really care if he’s academic?” you wondered aloud. “I can teach him to paint better than any classroom assistant.”
“Better socially and academically,” Tim said patiently.
In the end it was the fact that the preschool was just a few blocks away that persuaded you. Plus, if you were honest, you were seduced by the sheer beauty of the Montessori teaching materials—handcrafted from pale Scandinavian oak, not a plastic toy among them.
As you picked Danny up one afternoon, the teacher came over. “I’m a little concerned about Danny’s language, Mrs. Cullen-Scott. He seems to use a lot of nouns. Very few verbs.”
You looked at her, surprised. You hadn’t known the ratio of nouns to verbs was even a thing. “Do you want us to work on it?”
“Oh no,” she said breezily. “I’m sure it’ll sort itself out.”
Needless to say, you spent the rest of the day randomly tossing verbs at him—“Look, Danny, dancing! Look, Danny, jumping! Danny, waving!” He seemed puzzled, but bore it with his customary good humor.
A few days later the same teacher said, “I’m a little concerned about Danny’s hearing. He doesn’t always seem very…present.”
“Well, it’s not glue ear,” you said. “He had that, but the audiologist says it’s cleared up.”
“Have you had him tested for a language processing disorder?”
“For a what?” you said, instantly concerned. You never knew parenthood was going to be such a minefield of disorders. It felt like every day there was a new one you should be worrying about.
“Sometimes it’s like he’s…tuned out for a few moments. I mean, it’s probably nothing, but…”
“No,” you said. “No,
I’ve seen the exact same thing.” Because there had been four or five instances of this at home now, this switching-off as you’d come to think of it. You hadn’t wanted to mention it to Tim. You knew he’d ask what the consequences were, and raise his eyebrows when you told him the only consequence was that you got completely terrified.
You made an appointment with a pediatric neurologist. His assistant told you that, for elective scans, there was a waiting time of about seven weeks. Her tone made it clear that elective meant unnecessary.
You went ahead and booked a full set anyway.
* * *
—
Having made the appointment, you felt better—you’d done something, after all. It was probably nothing, but it was going to be checked out.
The next day was a Saturday. Tim went to the office, as usual—he liked it when there were fewer people around, he claimed, though from what you knew of Tim’s employees, they mostly spent weekends at the office, too.
In the night you’d been woken by laughter coming from Danny’s bedroom; a strange, eerie cackling. Not wanting to wake Tim, you’d crept to take a look. Danny’s eyes were open, and he was staring at the ceiling. His eyelids were fluttering.
According to a site you found on the internet, twitching eyelids could be a sign of abnormal brain activity.
Or, admittedly, it could just be a sign he was dreaming with his eyes open.
Tim, of course, was scathing about people who used the Web to make diagnoses. But this looked like a proper site, run by doctors.
You had to get groceries, so you and Danny went to Whole Foods. In the car he was unusually quiet. You kept twisting around to look at him, until you nearly caused an accident.
“They’re bad animals,” he said in a quiet, slurred voice. You pulled over then.
“They’re bad animals,” he repeated. He was looking at the other cars. “Bad animals! Bad animals! Kill them!” He was agitated now, wriggling in his booster seat, trying to bend his tiny body out of it. “Take it off,” he screamed at you. “Take it off! It hurts!”
He was pointing at his own head.
“What is it, Danny? What’s wrong?”
Then, as fast as it had come, the agitation stopped. He slumped back in his seat.
“Danny, what happened?”
“I saw a red one,” he said faintly. “Red ones are the baddest.”
* * *
—
At the store he trotted around next to you as usual, one hand on the shopping cart. When you got to the checkout, there was a line. An old lady was paying with coins, very slowly, counting them out and chatting to the cashier.
You always tried not to mind things like that—if the lady needed to take more time, she should. It was just unfortunate she was there today, when you really wanted to get Danny home.
That’s when you heard a low growling sound coming from his throat. He was staring at the people in front of you.
“It always takes longer at weekends,” you said, to distract him.
And then he started screaming.
It was so high-pitched, so strained, it was hard to make out any words. But it sounded something like “They’re doing it wrong!” His face was—there was no other word for it—crazy. Like he was hallucinating.
Then, abruptly, he turned and ran away. As he ran he stuck his arms out, flailing as if at invisible bees, cannoning into the displays of fruit, the proud pyramids of organic grapefruit and oranges that collapsed in bouncing cascades of tumbling colors. Then he ran down the canned-foods aisle, headbanging the tins. Next it was the turn of the breakfast cereals. Then the soda bottles. And all the while, he screamed.
People stared. And then, even worse, they looked away and pretended nothing was happening. Honey, there was a really badly behaved kid in the store today.
When you caught up with him he was lying on the floor, his body arcing in pain, bouncing off the ground like a landed fish. Was it a fit? It looked like a fit. But then he stuck his fingers in his mouth and bit them, hard enough to draw blood.
You managed to get his hands away from his mouth, then get your own hands between his fragile skull and the floor.
When Danny finally stopped crying, he babbled gibberish. You carried him back to the car and drove straight to the ER.
* * *
—
“It sounds like you have a child with a behavioral problem,” the doctor said.
They’d done some basic tests, checked his pulse. Meanwhile, Danny slowly came back to normal. No: not normal. He still wasn’t himself. But convincing the doctors of that seemed impossible.
“Will you at least order an EEG?” you asked desperately.
The doctor shook his head. “That really isn’t indicated.”
“Please.” The thought of having to go home and tell Tim that Danny had been diagnosed with—essentially—extreme naughtiness terrified you. Because you knew that, however much he loved Danny and you, he would side with the doctors. In Tim’s world, doctors were scientists, and therefore on the side of Truth. Mothers were emotional, irrational, and therefore on the side of False Intuition. He would smile that smile at you, the one that said, Your lack of logic is so cute. But now it’s time for the grown-ups to make a decision.
“You could think about seeing a child psychologist,” the doctor suggested. “For some tips on parenting.”
Then Danny started growling, deep in his throat.
“It’s moving again,” your son said to you, looking at the ceiling. “Make it stop. Please, make it stop.”
Those were the last coherent sentences he spoke. Two minutes later, he was on the floor, screaming.
* * *
—
The medical process did at least snap into action after that. X-rays, EEGs, MRIs, and an ultrasound were ordered. Nightmare scenario after nightmare scenario was raised, rat-a-tat-tat, as possibilities to be investigated and eliminated. Schizophrenia. Brain abnormalities. Epilepsy. Tumor.
By the time Tim got to the ER, they were hypothesizing Danny might have taken something—found a pill on the floor, say, or down the back of a seat. Over and over you furiously denied such a thing could have happened. But you could see them sneaking glances at you, at your ear studs and tattoo, putting two and two together and making seven.
They did a blood test. You made them do one on you as well, just to prove to them that you weren’t a junkie.
To them, but also to Tim.
For forty-eight hours they ran more tests. Finally, you and Tim were called into a room to speak to a very senior doctor.
“Well, overall the test results are good,” he said, running his finger down a list. He was in his sixties, charming and white-haired. “The EEG is normal, which pretty much rules out epilepsy. All the scans are fine, ditto the blood work. There’s no infection or any sign of toxins. And no tumor that we can detect.”
You heard that word good and fastened on it. Good was positive. Good was great news. Wasn’t it?
It took you a while to work out that good actually meant the opposite. Good results didn’t mean Danny was going to be fine. It just meant their previous theories about what was wrong hadn’t stacked up.
“That really only leaves two possibilities,” the doctor added. “Juvenile psychosis, or Heller’s syndrome.”
At the time, psychosis sounded the scarier of the two. It was only later—after more researching on the internet—that you discovered how wrong you were. Psychosis is temporary, while Heller’s syndrome—otherwise known as childhood disintegrative disorder, or late-onset autism—is a friend for life.
“If, as I suspect, it turns out to be Heller’s,” the doctor said, “please remember, he’s still the same kid now that he was before the diagnosis. Having a label like autism can be hard for parents. But that’s all it is—a label.”
&nbs
p; And with that, he sent you away. It was kind of him to try to sweeten the pill. But for all his well-meaning words, he was wrong. Danny wasn’t the same person anymore. The Danny you knew and loved, your little boy, was gone. Autism had stolen him.
TWENTY-ONE
None of us took Mike’s firing very seriously. Tim was always firing people. Often his rage lasted no longer than it took them to clear their desk, by which time he would have gone over and said, “Forget it. I didn’t mean it.”
Mike, though, walked out and didn’t come back. We waited for Tim to call him up and apologize, but it never happened.
It was because they had insulted each other’s wives, we decided. They’d crossed a line. That was what made this argument different.
It was made even more awkward by the fact that Jenny had been sitting right there on the mathematicians’ desk when it happened. We’d all heard what Tim had called her. The chances were, she had, too. But she still showed up for work every day, just as if nothing had happened.
But then, we had all of us become adept at turning a deaf ear, working in that environment.
The standoff went on for weeks. The weeks became months. Still there was no sign of Mike. Someone heard from a friend of a friend at another tech company that he was on his fourth round of interviews there.
It was Abbie who decided enough was enough. She booked a table at Fuki Sushi for lunch. When Tim got there, he saw the table was set for three. Then Mike turned up. He looked just as surprised to see Tim as Tim was to see him.
According to legend, Abbie stood up and said, “I’m leaving you guys to it. Bottom line is, it’s my wedding in three weeks. And right now Tim doesn’t have a best man.”
To Mike she added, “You don’t have to like me or think I’m the right partner for Tim. But we both care about him. So let’s try to make this work, shall we?”