She entered a large, open hall with shining floors that reflected the light from the windows and empty walls that echoed the sound of her footsteps. The odors—bleach, feces, and aerosol air freshener—didn’t bother Connie, as they also filled the nursing home where she worked.
The room number the doctor had given her was 210. Connie expected on her way to encounter a receptionist, or a nurse, or even an inmate, but there was no one. She found room 210, knocked, and a voice from within told her to enter.
The doctor who sat behind the desk was very old. Older, even, than Myra. He wore a crewneck cotton sweater with no undershirt. This was the way the old men at the nursing home dressed when they were in their last stage of unassisted living; they selected their clothes for the ease with which they could be put on and taken off. Connie suspected (though she couldn’t see, as the doctor remained seated behind his desk) that he wore no socks and his shoes were slip-ons.
“So,” said the doctor after they had introduced themselves and chatted for a minute about Myra, “you have some questions about your boy?”
Shyly, at first, Connie told the doctor how Gene never looked her in the eye, and never embraced her, and when he told her that he loved her, he said it as if it was something he had memorized. Although the doctor’s bottom eyelids sagged open like a Saint Bernard’s, revealing the red veins inside, his gaze was focused. She told him how he would take things apart and put them back together when she wasn’t around, and she would only know when the phone receiver felt different in her hand, or the answering machine’s buttons were a little crooked, or the toaster, the doorbell, the curling iron behaved a little differently. And how, recently, he had taken to tearing flowers apart. If she brought home a bouquet from work, she’d have to give him one rose, and put the rest by her bed where she could guard them. Connie didn’t mention the obscene details of how Gene would lay his flower under the desk lamp and slowly peel back its petals to expose the powder-tipped shag, dig for the inner parts with his thumbs, then turn away to sneeze.
“He checked out Bach records from the library and sat right in front of the speakers to listen to them. I asked him why, and he told me, ‘Bach is talking to me.’ ” Connie didn’t say what Gene had said next. She had asked him how Bach could be talking to him, and he had replied, “He asks questions and I answer.” Then he had shaken his head wildly, a gesture he used frequently, implying both a clearing of the head and exasperation at having to waste his time explaining when he certainly wouldn’t be understood. “I mean, Bach poses a question, and I predict the answer.”
Bach poses a question. A sixth-grader. Connie couldn’t string together all his habits for display, even to a doctor. She was embarrassed on Gene’s behalf for doing such things and on her own for putting up with it, for having been defeated by him. She had witnessed children defeat their parents before, but never using such roundabout tactics. It didn’t seem fair.
“His teacher called me just last week,” she said. “Gene is putting the date on his papers in the Hebrew or Chinese calendars. He refuses to use ours. These things frighten me a little, doctor. It seems wrong to refuse to date things from the Lord’s birth.” She stopped.
The doctor said, “Mrs. Anderson, sounds like you’ve got yourself a unique little feller.”
Connie nodded.
“Let me ask you, what was Gene’s first word?”
“Phone,” Connie said. “My husband used to call out ‘Phone,’ when the phone rang. Then one day Gene called it out, too.”
“How old was he?”
“Very young,” said Connie. “Ten months.” She knew the age because when Gene was eleven months old her husband had left.
“And at that time, did he know his name? Would he look up when you called him?”
“Yes.”
“About when did he begin speaking in sentences?”
“Around two, I suppose. He’s always been bright. That’s not the problem.”
“Interesting. Has Gene ever tried to hurt himself?”
“Oh, no,” said Connie.
“Does he throw fits where he hits you or hugs himself and rocks back and forth?”
“No, but he does throw things.”
The doctor nodded. “A unique little feller who throws things.”
Suddenly Connie saw what the doctor saw: a lonely woman, frustrated that her son didn’t love her enough. Because he suspected her of this, she suspected herself.
“Maybe I should bring him here to meet you,” she said meekly.
“There’s no need for that, Mrs. Anderson. I just asked you if your son displayed any of the three cardinal indications of autism. Does he have delayed or impaired speech development? No. Does he show evidence of delayed or impaired cognitive development? No. Does he show violent or self-destructive behavior? No. The patients who live here, Mrs. Anderson, are disabled—mentally disabled, profoundly. Your son is not.”
Again, something snapped into focus for Connie: it was this doctor’s job to ward off parents who came attempting to dump their children here merely because they were difficult. Connie bowed her head. “I don’t want to bring Gene to live here, doctor, I just want to find out what’s wrong with him, and help him.”
The doctor smiled kindly. “Perhaps you can help him by focusing on what’s right with him. That is my suggestion. Do you know why Bach wrote his music, Mrs. Anderson?”
“No.”
“He wrote every piece, and there are hundreds upon hundreds of them, for the glory of God. Be glad your boy listens to Bach, Mrs. Anderson. It’s better than the garbage my kids listened to.” He took a deep breath, apparently pleased with how the meeting had gone. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Anderson. You’ll forgive me if I don’t get up to see you out. The old knee’s been acting up.”
“Of course,” Connie said, rising. “All of this is just between the two of us, right, doctor?”
“Yes. Completely confidential. Always.”
Connie worried—not that people would learn the details of Gene’s strange behavior, which had been her worry before the meeting, but that they would say that Connie was trying to have him committed.
“Show me the way, Lord,” Connie whispered as she drove home. “Send someone to show me the way.”
And God had answered her prayer. She had had her spiritual awakening. That had been over a year ago.
GENE BEHAVED HIMSELF through the rest of the service, so in the car after church Connie allowed him to punch the button on the dashboard that realigned the mileage meter to a row of zeros (as he insisted he must before any trip), and they headed to Boise. Eula sat in a slight depression in the countryside, a basin in which, this time of year, the molasses-smelling smoke from the sugar factory pooled with worse odors from the stockyards along the railroad tracks. To drive out of town felt a little like elbowing yourself up out of a bed that was cozy, yes, but which smelled of a night’s worth of sweat and digestion. Connie mounted that first gentle ridge where twin wheat fields rose slightly, then lay flat on either side of the highway like the yellowed pages of an open book. The wildfires had been extinguished weeks ago. The haze had cleared, and now blue sky whitened where it met the earth in a crisp line that was interrupted by a ship-like butte, then again ran perfectly flat until turning jagged with the distant mountains ahead, beyond Boise. In the rearview mirror Connie could see beyond Eula’s jumble of trees and rooftops and billboards advertising cheap accommodations to the pale, treeless folds of the Owyhee Mountains.
Twenty minutes of driving north or south would have taken Connie through the irrigated belt that lined the Snake River, up to where the green ceased and the scrub took over. The earth seemed to lose its meat here and become dry, as if a vast rock—a skull—rose underground, leaving only the thinnest skin of soil. That was a lonely territory of jackrabbits and coyotes and dying ranch towns populated by leathery-skinned cowboys. Driving to Boise, however, she stayed parallel to the river, so the comforting patchwork landscape littered wi
th houses and silos continued for forty-five minutes, until it disappeared behind walls meant to shield the subdivisions from the highway’s noise. Then the city opened before her with its two tall buildings like sentries guarding the gleaming white egg of the capitol dome.
Connie drove downtown and parked in front of the magazine store, which was actually a smoke shop. It seemed as old as Boise itself; the same neon cigarette had glowed in the window on the Sundays thirty years earlier when Connie would come with her father to buy tobacco and papers. He quit on doctor’s orders years ago, but the fingertips of his right hand were still yellow. He now kept a toothpick at the corner of his mouth, as if holding the spot for his beloved cigarette, should it ever choose to return.
Connie and Gene entered the store, which smelled like her father. Connie read a gardening magazine while Gene, on his knees, rifled through pages of newsprint. After twenty minutes, he came and stood before her, holding a great pile: three big Sunday newspapers and two glossy science magazines. “Now, Gene, don’t get used to this,” Connie said as they walked to the front. “It’s even more than last week. We can’t afford it.” But Connie was secretly glad to do something so normal for her son. She would have preferred magazines about cars or airplanes—these science magazines, she imagined, might include propaganda like evolution and the “Big Bang”—but still.
Connie put the pile on the counter, caught a glimpse of pornography behind the register, and turned quickly away.
“Excuse me, sir,” Gene said. Even when he followed Connie’s rules about how to speak politely, his voice sounded abrupt.
“What kin I do for ya, little feller?” The old man peered over the counter. He had a face that bulged in parts, then pinched at the eyes like a lopsided potato. The tube of a hearing aide entered his head at the ear. Connie could imagine him looking at dirty pictures when there were no customers.
“Please set aside one New York Times every day this week for me. I will buy them next Sunday.”
“Gene!” said Connie with an airy laugh. She made a quarter-turn toward a man standing behind holding a box of cigars. “Don’t pester the nice man.”
“How ’bout this, little feller? We usually have extras that I toss at the end of the day. If you’re a good boy and mind your ma,” he winked at Connie, “I’ll save ’em and give ’em to ya fer free.”
“That’s very nice,” said Connie.
Gene appeared to be confused by the man’s offer, and said nothing.
Connie paid the man. “Come on, Gene,” she said. She loaded his arms with his purchases and guided him toward the door.
“THANK YOU!” said Gene, too loudly, as they left.
GENE GOBBLED HIS food at dinner, in a rush to get to his reading. “May I be excused?” he asked.
“You may.”
Gene raced to the sink, washed his plate by running water over it, squirting it with dishwashing liquid, and rubbing it quickly with his bare hand. Then he went down the hallway and closed the accordion door that shut his room off from the rest of the trailer. Only when he pressed the handle against its magnet did his movements become ginger and precise.
It was all right. Connie would give the plate a good cleaning later.
At bedtime, Connie came into Gene’s room, and told him his time was up. He got under the covers, and she knelt by his bed. “God in heaven,” Gene said, “thank You for this earth that we live on and the force of gravity that keeps us here. Thank You for the living things—people, flowers, and animals—and the nonliving things—oceans, houses, and computers. Forgive me for the sins I committed today and bless my mother. In Jesus’ name, amen.”
It was the prayer she had had him compose years ago, and he had repeated it monotonously every night since. She bent to kiss him. “I love you, Gene,” she said.
He touched her hair, then felt her earlobe, just as he had done when he was a baby. It made her smile. His eyes didn’t meet hers, but looked up, perhaps at the hairs that had escaped her bun and caught the hall light.
She closed the door and sat down on her bed. This was her room; her bed was divided from the rest of the trailer only by a dresser, and from it she could hear the refrigerator’s hum and click. Now she would read her Bible, then her devotionals, then spend her half-hour or so in prayer.
IN THE MIDDLE of the night, it rained.
Rain was unusual in Eula. All through the summer the lawns had been kept green by hose-connected sprinklers that created a fan-shaped plume that slowly waved back and forth, making a split-second rainbow with every pass, or by a man who sprayed back and forth as mechanically as a sprinkler until his thumb grew numb. It was simpler for those living among the fields outside town. They would shove a dike into the ditch on irrigation day, and the whole lawn (and, possibly, driveway and basement) would be flooded. Their kids and the neighbor kids and even some friends from town would race across the sun-speckled lawn kicking the water high into the trees, then bend to gather it in their cupped hands and toss it in each other’s faces. They’d run and slide until they made a mud slick, and their fathers would holler from the porch, “You kids stop that! You’re wreckin’ the dang grass!” while the quieter ones would gather into buckets the earthworms that had been flooded to the surface. Later, they would sell these worms to the Bait Shack on the boulevard for a dollar a pound. (The excitement of watching the big, mucusy mass roll into the metal tray on the scale—How much will I get?—would usually turn into disappointment: only enough for McDonald’s and a matinee.) Their mothers would always steal a handful of worms to toss over the fence into the vegetable garden almost superstitiously, as if they were charms.
Those who lived in the hills near Lake Overlook didn’t have to bother, as sprinkler systems that had been embedded in their lawns before they bought their houses would turn on automatically, controlled by a timer or by someone at the property-management company, no one knew.
The people in the trailer parks had no lawns.
So on this September night warm enough that Eulans had their windows open but not so warm as to make them turn on a fan, the rain drew everyone at least partway out of sleep.
Connie, who was a light sleeper, registered the tiny tic tic tic as the smallest sound there was, the aural equivalent to a pinprick at the tip of your finger. Then quickly it increased so there was nothing specific about it anymore: it was a wash, a huge sound like wind in a wheat field or (she imagined) the ocean. And then like a solo backed by a symphony, another individual sound rose—the splatter of a stream falling from the corner of the roof onto the asphalt. She thought of blind people. She had read something written by a blind man who said that the different sounds made by the rain against surfaces made it so he could see those surfaces, in a way. When it rained, he could see his garden. And this made Connie think of Marlene Bailey, the church organist whose parents were both deaf. At an ice cream social in the church gymnasium, Marlene had been telling a story and couldn’t remember the name of a family friend. “What was his name!” she said, looking around, until she spotted her mother. She gave the floor a quick, deft stomp with her heel, not loud but firm, and her mother immediately looked over. In sign, Marlene asked what the person’s name was, and her mother spelled it out using one hand. “Of course!” Marlene said and continued her story.
Connie was sleepy enough to admit that Marlene Bailey was a hero to her, someone who had achieved a degree of holiness in her daily life. And Gene had something missing, like a blind or deaf person, but harder. If only he were deaf, she thought, and before she could catch herself wishing such a thing, she fell back asleep.
Next door, Enrique and Lina were both such deep sleepers that the rain only lifted them from dreams they would never remember to ones closer to the quiet roar and lovely fragrance of the world. Lina dreamed that she was driving on a dark and rainy road, and Enrique dreamed, as he often did, of giant birds—storks and cranes with yellow leathery legs as tall as telephone poles, flamingoes with their backward-working knees—all
marching across the Earth. The strange undulations of bird-walking—the thrust forward of the beak, the dip of the curved neck, the slow heave and settle of the body—looked even stranger from down here, lying in the grass. Their huge feet tented as they lifted, then they sailed through the air to flatten on the ground many yards away. But in this dream, he was safe. They wouldn’t pluck him from the grass, as they had before, to fly him off to their huge roosts in the red wall of a canyon.
Coop was asleep, not in the house in Eula that he shared with his uncle, but in another out in the country, halfway to Homedale, where the rain arrived some minutes later. He was in the arms of Maria, the woman he had quietly loved for over ten years now. The beautiful sound was not rain, but her, and he pressed her to him, from face to hips to knees, and she kissed him without waking.
So it rained, and Eula rustled in its beds for a little while, enjoying something that was beautiful because it was rare.
Eulans were quietly perplexed by cousins in Northern California, where the fog crept in and out daily and August nights were cold, by uncles in Oklahoma towns outfitted with tornado sirens, and by grandchildren in the South, where the thunder rolled from one side of the sky to the other—“God moving His furniture.” Eula was very cold in winter and very hot in summer, but the air was so dry that neither extreme got inside one’s skin. Eula pumped water from Lake Overlook up into the water tower (a canary-yellow mushroom labeled “Eula” as if that were the name of water itself), then let it flow over the fields and lawns and into the Snake River. Weather-wise, there was no place simpler.
Chapter 3
Dress kind of old.” That’s what Winston had said to Wanda over the phone the day before. At the time, it had stirred her vanity a little, and she had smiled. What he had meant was that they would never believe that Wanda, at thirty-one, was the mother of Winston, a high school senior, unless she made herself look older. Now, as she flipped through the stained tops in her closet and rifled through the jeans in her bureau, all of them snug-fitting, she wished she would have listened to what Winston said and actually considered what she would wear, rather than collapsing onto the couch with a Newport Menthol, a glass of sun tea, and her last pain pill, settling into the happy truth that she’d have a hundred dollars to buy five more pills tomorrow, and, as part of the deal, get to spend the afternoon with Winston. She wished she would have listened to him, because now she realized that she had nothing at all motherly to wear.
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