The Art of Adapting

by Cassandra Dunn

  “Oh, I’d love that!” Lana said, too loudly. She laughed, embarrassed for herself. “So how long were you in the Marines for? And are you married? Kids?”

  “If I tell you everything now, we’ll have nothing to catch up on,” Nick said, giving her that sly grin of his, the one that had lured her in so long ago. “Happy Valentine’s Day.” He gave her shoulder a squeeze, gave Matt a salute, and slid his sunglasses back on. As he did so, Lana noticed that he had no ring on his left hand. Lana watched him walk back to his car in her rearview mirror. It was a very nice view.

  “The kids are waiting,” Matt reminded her.

  “Right,” she said. She started the car, but waited for Nick to drive off first. He slowed next to her and waved, and she waved back, her fearless, long-forgotten twenty-four-year-old self reemerging temporarily. The bright-eyed girl of hope and promise, the one who didn’t take life so seriously, who loved sex and kissing and hand-holding but didn’t need a man in her life full-time. It was time to dust off that version of herself.

  “There are three more stop signs on this road,” Matt said. “You should do a five-second stop. That way there’s no mistaking that you stopped. I always stop for five seconds. I can count if you don’t know how long that is. Most people don’t know how long a second is. Not really. Not exactly.”

  Lana drove toward her children, Nick Parker’s information in her hand, and Valentine’s Day laid out before her, ripe for the picking. “You do that,” she said. “You count for me.”

  She was on such a high that even the sight of Graham, freshly showered and well dressed, smiling, relaxed, and happy to be free of her, did nothing to rattle her. She embraced her children as if they’d been gone more than just sixteen hours. She wondered briefly if she should be concerned that her mood that day had swung so quickly from insomnia and tears to ecstatic, effusive joy.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day, my loves!” she sang, kissing both kids, knowing how her gushing affection embarrassed them. Abby rolled her eyes and Byron shrugged her off.

  “Oh, right. Happy Valentine’s Day,” Graham said. Lana gave him a smirk and turned away. As if there were any chance she’d been talking to him. She floated down the steps toward her car, still holding Nick’s note.

  2

  * * *

  Matt

  Matt waited in the car when Lana went up Graham’s steps to get the kids. His heart was beating too fast and his ears were still buzzing. He didn’t feel like rocking anymore, but he didn’t feel like walking up two flights of stairs, either. He’d thought it would be a nice change, getting out of the house, going for a ride, but it had been a mistake. The police officer, even though he turned out to be Nick Parker, just Lana’s ex-boyfriend and not the bullish police officer who’d yelled at Matt for drinking, had still managed to upset Matt. And Matt’s breakfast was ruined, dropped on the floor of the car. And he was hungry.

  The kids came toward the car, backpacks on and carrying armloads of clothes and books as if they weren’t wearing backpacks that the clothes and books could go into. They were talking too much, too fast. Lana held up her hands as she smiled at Matt, made a show of covering her ears. He nodded, covered his ears, and waited. He closed his eyes while he was at it. He felt the car doors open by the suction then barrier-breaking feeling, pressure building then snapping, followed by a gust of fresh air. Then he felt the kids’ voices more than heard them. Abby chirping like an excited bird, the high-pitched energy raising the hair on Matt’s arms. Byron’s voice was a deep grumble, the vibration carrying through Matt’s seat and into his spine. Matt kept his ears covered until they got home. Waited until Lana and the kids were inside the house before he uncovered his ears and rubbed them. They were itchy and sweaty. He sat for a moment in the silence of the car, shut safely in the garage. It was a perfect bubble of calm and quiet. But only for a moment, before Lana remembered Matt’s spilled breakfast and came back to clean it up. She was always cleaning something up. But she was smiling, happy now, and didn’t even scold Matt for the butter on the floor mat. At least his milk cup had been in the cup holder so he hadn’t spilled that.

  Matt headed for the comfort of his room, the only place in the whole house that was just his. He was learning to like his new room. His bed was firm and the cornflower-blue sheets were soft stretchy cotton. T-shirt sheets, they were called. But they were even softer than Matt’s T-shirts. The room was fine. It was the window that posed a problem. The window faced east, letting in early morning light, which woke Matt up before he wanted to be awake. The sun refused to be stopped. Like Buddha had said, “Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” Matt’s sister Becca liked to quote Buddha, and he liked that one the best.

  Matt’s old room at Spike’s had faced north, so no sunrises or sunsets had glared their way into his space there. Every change brought new problems, which was one reason Matt tried to avoid change. But moving to Lana’s house was a change Matt just had to live with. Like the window, and the sun. Matt had tried closing the blinds, but the light still found a way in. He added a sheet over them for reinforcement, but the effect was all wrong: rumpled sheet, slats of light visible through it, dust motes escaping out the bottom. Eventually Lana had brought home blackout curtains for him. They were much better at muffling the morning light, but they were a deep maroon color. Matt preferred blue curtains. He preferred blue everything. But it was Lana’s house, even if it was Matt’s room. So he tried to like the maroon curtains. Lana seemed to prefer shades of red to any other color. Lana was sad sometimes, and Matt didn’t want to make her more sad by telling her he didn’t like the curtains.

  Matt was not good at sleeping. Even without the sunlight interfering. His mind kept him awake at night. He liked to take walks or work on his computer at night when he couldn’t sleep. He also used to drink and use Spike’s pills to sleep. The pills and the drinking weren’t allowed anymore, doctor’s orders, and mostly Matt was good about that. He missed the drinking all day long, but it was the worst whenever he wasn’t busy thinking about something else. He’d found some bottles of alcohol in Lana’s garage, in an empty red toolbox. Drinking them a little at a time helped at first, but they were empty now. The pills he only missed at night, and he missed them most nights. One night it got so bad he used Google to map the route from Lana’s house in the suburbs to Spike’s apartment near campus. He figured out how to walk there, and how long it’d take, but hadn’t gone. But he saved the route. Just in case.

  Aside from the pills to help him sleep, Matt didn’t miss Spike. For one thing, Spike didn’t seem to like Matt much, except when Matt was giving him money. The good thing about Lana was that she liked Matt no matter what. When she bought the weighted blanket for him, he felt how much she cared about him. That blanket was Matt’s favorite new possession. It was thick and soft and so blue and so heavy that it sometimes could make Matt’s body stay asleep even when his mind wanted to be awake.

  Lana had also bought Matt a noise machine. He was trying to choose the right sound for each night. He wasn’t sure how much it helped, but it gave him interesting things to listen to as he lay awake in the night. He liked the birds on Monday, a bustling forest waking at dawn. He liked the rushing stream sound on Tuesday, little trickles and drips across small pebbles beneath the roar of white water. Wednesday he used the raucous traffic noises. He’d never lived in a big city, and he wasn’t sure he’d like it, all those people, but he liked the car noises, trying to figure out what kind of car each one was from the sound it made. Thursdays he always listened to Bach. He was still figuring out the right sounds for sleeping on the weekends, because the routine in the house was different then—the kids were up later and Byron was usually in the kitchen eating around two a.m., just as Matt was trying to figure out what to do with himself.

  Those were the times when Matt most missed his nighttime walks. He and Spike had lived in a neighborhood where college kids were out late, and there were always a few of them on the str
eet while Matt walked. Lana was worried that if Matt walked around her quiet neighborhood, even just doing a few laps around the block at three a.m., the neighbors might think Matt was suspicious and call the police. Matt never wanted to talk to the police again. Except maybe Nick Parker. To learn to hit a baseball.

  Matt was also still adjusting to Byron and Abby, Matt’s only nephew and only niece, fifteen and five-sixths and fourteen years old, sophomore and freshman in high school, Taurus and Libra. They were loud. That was the main problem. They yelled across the house to each other even when they had nothing to say. They sang and whistled and banged cupboards and slammed drawers and argued a lot. And they were messy. Not that Matt was never messy, but he never left dirty dishes all over the place with half-eaten food on them. Matt tried not to waste, and he definitely tried not to leave food out that might attract ants or, even worse, roaches. Not anymore, not after what happened at Spike’s. Plus there were the germs. Food left out for even a short period of time was a perfect breeding ground for microorganisms. Matt wanted to explain this to Byron and Abby, but even when his words came easily, they didn’t seem to understand him.

  Lana’s house was big and full of echoes, while Matt and Spike’s apartment had been rather small and full of quiet. He missed the quiet. But Lana’s house also had a front room, a formal sitting room that no one ever used, with a huge picture window that looked out across the green lawn, the tiny hedges, and into the world beyond. Matt’s apartment had windows, but Spike never wanted the curtains open. Sitting and looking out Lana’s front window was one of Matt’s favorite things to do now, once the kids were off at school and Lana was either at work or out doing whatever she did when she wasn’t working.

  Matt couldn’t drive anymore, so the window was all he had. Or he could drive just fine, but they wouldn’t let him. One night he’d had the same number of beers he always had, but while he was driving to the library a cyclist had distracted him and made him swerve. A police car had pulled him over and he’d gotten into trouble for it, for driving after the beers. The police officer was a huge hostile man with a bushy mustache who wanted to scare Matt, and did, but Matt didn’t understand why. He’d only swerved a little, not even across the yellow line, and hadn’t hit anything. He’d never had a car accident or even a ticket before, because he knew every traffic rule there was. But the big angry mustached police officer didn’t care, and Matt’s license was revoked.

  After that Matt stayed home more, with Spike and the beers and the whiskey and the pot, and Matt slept a little better, but then there were Spike’s good pills, which really helped Matt sleep, until one time Matt slept too much, too hard, and too long, and Spike couldn’t wake him.

  Matt had woken up in a white hospital room under starched itchy white sheets. He was strapped to the bed and in terrible pain. His body was full of tubes and wires and nose-burning antiseptic smells. His throat ached so much that he couldn’t talk, and when the nurse came in and asked how he was feeling, Matt could only tip his head back to show her his raw throat. It felt like it had been scraped with metal on the inside.

  “We had to pump your stomach. Your throat will be sore for a little while,” she said.

  The nurse undid Matt’s restraints, rubbing Matt’s arm where they had been, and it felt like being slammed by a hammer, the sudden and unexpected graze of her cold fingers just above the inside of his left wrist. The jolt of pain spread throughout Matt’s body in one hard fast shock wave and he’d jumped away from her. Matt didn’t like to be touched. He could feel the touch of people’s breath, the prickly sensation of their eyes on him. Actual physical contact could hurt his skin in a way that nobody else seemed to understand. He could tell by the nurse’s wide eyes that she didn’t understand. And with his throat on fire he couldn’t speak to explain. He hated hospitals and doctors and nurses in general. They were always saying they wanted to help you before they caused you some sort of pain.

  The nurse left and a doctor came in. Matt knew he was a doctor because his name badge said so. Aside from that, he could have been anyone. He was middle-aged, graying and fat, with ill-fitting glasses that carved deep impressions on either side of his nose. And he smelled like cigarette smoke. Matt didn’t like him. The doctor breathed through his nose and it made a whistling sound so distracting that Matt could barely hear him over it. How could Matt trust the advice of an obese doctor who smoked?

  The doctor told Matt that his liver was compromised, like that made sense, like there was a negotiation going on inside his body, but there wasn’t any negotiating—Matt’s liver was broken somehow and he was to blame even though he’d known nothing about it. He felt like he should apologize, like he’d violated some rule, when he was always so careful to follow every law and rule. He didn’t like troubling people. He could feel the doctor’s disappointment. It filled Matt up from his chest to his head, made the buzzing start inside his ears, and he didn’t know what to do with the feeling or the sound. Sometimes he hit his ears to stop the sound, but he knew the doctor wouldn’t like to see that. Most people didn’t like to see it, although Matt didn’t understand why they cared what he did to his own body.

  The doctor told Matt that he had to stop the alcohol and drugs and take Wellbutrin to stay calm instead. He told Matt that he had Asperger’s syndrome and that’s why he wasn’t like other people, but Matt didn’t know what other people were like so it didn’t mean anything to him, except that he couldn’t drive or drink or smoke pot anymore, and could only take the pills the doctor told him to, and never sleeping pills in case he took too many again. The doctor’s nose whistled and whistled and Matt agreed so that the doctor would go away and take his noises and disappointment with him.

  But being alone in the hospital room wasn’t better. The room was too bright and the antiseptic smells made Matt feel sick. Then he’d had to go to the bathroom, but the rolling IV stand wouldn’t fit in the small bathroom with him. He really had to go, though, so he pulled out the tube in his arm so he could shut the door and before he’d even finished peeing the nurse was back and yelling at him and there was saline and blood all over the dirty white linoleum floor and then the doctor came in whistling, whistling, shaking his head, even more disappointed.

  “Asperger’s,” the doctor said to the nurse, and they both nodded like it was code for something Matt couldn’t see or feel. He tried to be good after that, holding very still while they put the IV back in his arm, but it hurt too much to bear, and he flinched and they yelled at him like he was a bad child. Matt kicked the IV stand away and it hit the nurse in the chest and then they left him alone. Moments later two huge orderlies came in and restrained Matt again, and they gave him a shot of something that made the room go all fuzzy.

  When Matt woke up he was still restrained, and the IV was back in his arm, and the scratchy sheets still hurt and his throat burned even more because he’d screamed when the orderlies had pinned him down. But Lana was there, the warm rose-petal smell of her competing with the antiseptic to soothe Matt’s nerves. She stood next to Matt’s bed, her back to Matt, her arms crossed and legs locked and strong like when they’d been little and she’d told other kids to leave Matt alone. And then he felt safer. Not completely safe, because he was still in the hospital, but better, calmer. Or maybe it was the doctor’s new pills that made him feel calmer. But only until a social worker came to visit and said she was worried about Matt going back to live with Spike. She had short blond hair, messy and wet-looking even though it was dry. It was full of some product that smelled like men’s cologne. She had lots of earrings on one side and only half as many on the other, and red-framed glasses. She didn’t seem like she wanted to help Matt, even though she said she did. She spent more time looking at her phone and clipboard than she did at Matt or Lana.

  The social worker tried talking to Matt but he couldn’t stop counting her earrings: nine on the left and four on the right. Why nine and four? He needed to count again and again, trying to find the significance, and she
became very irritated with him because he couldn’t stop counting to answer her questions. Then she talked to Lana instead of Matt, which was fine with him. She cleaned her red-framed glasses on the hem of her shirt and told Lana that Matt needed more care, maybe some help from the state, maybe a facility that would better fit his needs, as if Matt had any needs, aside from the need to get out of the hospital and away from all the sick people there with germs they couldn’t contain, not really, even with all of the antiseptic. Matt could feel the germs in the air, getting into his lungs with each breath, and even with the calming pills he couldn’t sit still and had to rock against his restraints to stop thinking about the germs on every surface around him.

  Then suddenly Lana was angry. She used her loud voice to tell the social worker to leave and never come back. And then it was decided, before Matt even knew they were deciding. He was going to live with Lana.

  And so he’d moved into a house of red accents: burgundy curtains and cranberry-colored throw pillows and a huge Persian rug with golds and greens dancing on a sea of maroon, and he’d fit in his soothing blues wherever he could.

  3

  * * *

  Abby

  Abby passed her time at the dinner table flexing and relaxing her abs, glutes, and thighs over and over, counting reps until she could escape back up to her room. She was on twenty, headed for a hundred. She hated meals. Especially listening to other people eat: the click of a fork against someone’s teeth, the chomp of their teeth coming together as they mashed food, even the gulp of swallowing—they all revolted her. If she’d been allowed to listen to her iPod at the table to drown it out that might’ve helped, but it was against her mom’s rules. Abby thought maybe when her dad moved out there would be fewer rules, since Graham was the one who always needed everything just so to relax after work each day, but the rules stayed even without Graham there to care.