by Jael McHenry
“I’m not trying to be cute,” I tell her.
A little trilling pattern of footsteps, muffled by the carpet, follows Midnight down the stairs. I see Shannon crouched on the bottom step, stretching her hand toward the white, soft-looking tail, just beyond her reach.
Amanda says, “Ginny, did you hear me?”
“Sorry,” I apologize absently. All my attention is eaten up watching the cat and the girl and concentrating on not telling my sister to put a figurative sock in it.
“I said … I think … Ginny, I think you need more help.”
“I have Gert.”
“Not that kind of help.”
I know that. Midnight lowers herself off the steps onto the floor and sits down to lick a paw like it’s the most urgent thing in the world that her paw be licked. Shannon leans a touch too far and tips over, and she falls off the bottom step, falling too fast to catch herself, striking her head on the hardwood floor. Her howl immediately fills the house.
Amanda is on her feet. “Shannon, honey, it’s all right, it’s all right.” She sweeps her up. “C’mere, baby. It’s all right.”
Shannon is sobbing as Amanda strokes the back of her hair. Amanda twists to face me and says, “You’re not getting off the hook. Listen. This can be easy. All I want is for you to see a doctor. Get you diagnosed. Treated. It could make things easier.”
Shannon’s cry drops and rises through the octaves. I can’t tell, it might be getting louder. Amanda stops stroking and just holds her head with a flat palm, pressing gently. Midnight scurries away.
“No,” I tell Amanda. “No doctor.”
“One of these days you’re going to get hurt. That’s why I worry. You nearly set the place on fire the day of the funeral. And you let strange men in the kitchen. And you vanish for hours with the cleaning lady. I mean, Ginny, it’s just not normal.”
“Just one.”
“One hour?”
“One man.”
“You’re going to get hurt,” she says.
I stare her in the throat.
“Those are the facts. Shannon, hush, sweetie, it’s okay, all right?”
Shannon is crying some words but I can’t make them out. She cries them into her mother’s ear.
“Here, Ginny, you try,” says Amanda. “She wants you.”
I hold my hands out and Shannon comes over. She’s heavy. Immediately her head drops onto my shoulder as if drawn there by a magnet. My hand goes up to cradle her without any help from my brain. I look at Amanda. She’s staring at me, arms folded. I know what that means. The shoulder of her shirt is a different color than the rest, wet with Shannon’s tears.
She says, “Please. I know you don’t think you need it. But do it for me, Ginny. To make me happy. Just go to the doctor and get screened.”
“Screened” makes me think of food getting rubbed through a screen. It’s a French technique. Soups get screened, and sauces. Forced through a tamis or a chinois. Everything that comes out is smooth and all the rough parts get left behind, thrown away. I don’t want to be screened.
Amanda steps toward me. She speaks in a low voice. “There’s a word for it. For your condition.”
“Shyness?”
“No.”
“Social awkwardness?”
“No.”
“Iconoclasm?”
Shannon is much quieter now, not howling, only whimpering. Amanda steps even closer and puts her hands over her daughter’s tiny ears.
“God damn it, Ginny. It’s called Asperger’s syndrome.”
I say, “I’ll stick with iconoclasm.”
“Hear me out.” She leaves her hands on Shannon’s ears. We’re all standing very, very close together. “This one, at preschool, they told us she was unusually quiet. Plays alone, doesn’t talk as much as the others. I’m sure she’s fine. But I started doing some research on the Internet, and when I saw this list of symptoms for this syndrome, Asperger’s, I was like, oh my God! That’s Ginny.”
I snap, “I don’t have a syndrome, Amanda.”
“Just think about it. Just consider it.”
“No.” If I weren’t holding Shannon I would bolt for the closet right now.
Amanda won’t stop. “And I talked to Angelica about it and she said she had a cousin who has it, or something like it, and all he had to do was take some pills and now he’s fine.”
“I don’t want to take pills.”
“Don’t be mad. I’m trying to help.”
Parker comes thundering down the stairs, and Amanda runs to the bottom of the staircase in a flash. The little girl is unsteady on her feet. My arms are getting tired, so I move in the direction of the chair by the fireplace, thinking I’ll set Shannon down.
Amanda yells back at me, “We’re not finished!”
Shannon puts her hands over her ears.
“Are you okay?” I ask her.
“Mommy’s loud,” she says, speaking into my shoulder.
“Everything’s all right,” I tell her. She says nothing, but my arms have gone from tired to tingling. “Do you want to get down?”
“Okay.”
I set Shannon down. She immediately heads toward the couch and lies down on the floor in front of it, her head on a throw rug.
“Why is she doing that?” asks Amanda.
“It’s where the cat went,” I say. Parker walks over to her sister and mimics her, lying down with her head against the floor.
Amanda speaks softly to me. “Just go to the doctor. It’s one little thing. For me.”
“No.”
“Come on. After all I’m prepared to do for you.”
“What is that?”
“Open my home to you. Let you stay with us.”
I think about it, and I say, “But I don’t even want to stay with you.”
“This is how I know something’s wrong with you,” says Amanda. “Because I can’t make you see reason.”
Parker says, “What’s wrong with Aunt Ginny?”
I say, “Nothing at all.” But that’s not what Amanda thinks. Amanda wants to label me. Like a piece of fruit. A cut of meat.
Shannon says, “The cat won’t come out.”
“Just let her be!” shouts Amanda, too loud again.
My sister wants to put a word on me. It’s very important that you not let Amanda … “put a word on you”? Is that what Ma was saying? It makes sense.
Amanda says, “God, are you even listening to me?”
I tell her the truth. “No.”
“This is your future we’re talking about!”
“You’re talking about it. I’m not.”
“This is the bottom line,” she says. “Will you go to the doctor to make me happy?”
“No.”
“That makes me unhappy.”
“Then be unhappy,” I say. We’re all unhappy sometimes. I don’t see why Amanda should get to be exempt.
She says, “Oh, I’m unhappy, believe me. Believe me.”
Parker says, “Mommy, why are you unhappy? You should be happy instead!”
“I know I should, sweetie,” she says, “but sometimes people just won’t listen. Hey, tell you what. Do you and your sister want to go out for breakfast?”
“Yeah!” says Parker.
“Shannon, do you want pancakes?”
“Pancakes!” says Shannon, getting up off the carpet.
“That’s silly, I can make pancakes here,” I say, but Amanda’s already walking out the door, taking her daughters’ winter coats off the coatrack as she goes, and they scurry out behind her.
Okay. She’s upset. She needs space. That’s fine, if that’s what she needs. But I’m not going to do what she wants me to do, and not just to be contrary. Because I think I’ve finally figured out what the ghosts are warning me about.
If Amanda puts a word on me, I won’t be equal anymore. She can run the show. She can take the house, and kick me out, and sell it if she wants. If I have a disorder, she’s in charge.
It doesn’t matter what the disorder is—I don’t have it—but I should probably educate myself anyway. That way I can prove it. I’ve heard the word, I don’t remember where—maybe at school? But I only know how to spell it. I don’t actually know what it is. In that way Asperger’s is like fregola, or kohlrabi.
I go to look up Asperger’s in the dictionary, but it’s not there. The page it would be on is a good one, with lots of food words. Asparagus. Aspartame. Aspic.
Then the words turn bad.
Asocial.
Asphyxiate.
I close the book and walk into my parents’ room and kneel down on the floor of the closet and put my hands inside Dad’s shoes. I stay there for a long while. I break one of Ma’s cardinal rules. (Cardinal is on a page with cardiology and cardoons.) I let the one-hour battery recharging turn into two hours, even three. She would be aghast at the indulgence. She would say, Ginny, my word! But she isn’t here to say it.
When I come back out again, Amanda and the girls are still gone. I go upstairs to my room and sit down with my laptop in the alcove facing the back of the house, and I pull up Kitcherati. I read a thread about kitchen injuries. I have countless little cuts and burns and bruises, but nothing serious other than the cut across the pad of my thumb that Dad was too late to fix. Even that one isn’t as bad as what a lot of people on Kitcherati are writing about. People talk about burning themselves on spun sugar, which is extremely hot and dangerous. Or they cut off parts of their fingers in meat slicers. They swallow pure wasabi, sit down on griddles, step somehow into boiling stock-pots. The kitchen is a place of sharp and hot and deadly things. Ma never would have taught me to cook if I hadn’t kept going in there, over and over. But either she taught me right or I learned right, because I never hurt myself that badly again. Amanda thinks I’m not capable, but I am.
After Kitcherati I pull up one of my favorite advice columns and read the day’s quandary. The writer complains about something hurtful her mother-in-law said, something she let pass at the time but has never forgiven or forgotten. The columnist counsels her to either address it head-on or let it go, because the pent-up resentment is harmful. Channel negative energy into something positive, says the advice.
I decide to give it a try.
I’m on the Internet anyway, so I look up Asperger’s, for Amanda. Maybe I can tell if Shannon has it. That’s how Amanda said she starting thinking about it, wondering what syndrome might make a girl unusually quiet in preschool, enough that her teachers would remark on it.
Lots of sites come up. Blogs, discussion groups, the whole smorgasbord. I go for something that looks clinical and not homemade. That way it’s likely to be more precise. I’ve learned this over time. You can learn from the Internet but you can’t be sure what you’re learning is true. Same as life. Be careful.
I pick a white-and-blue site with a consistent font, not too large, not too small. The definition comes in bullets. Difficulty with eye contact. Inability to read emotions. Lack of empathy. Inappropriate social reactions. Doesn’t sound like Shannon so far. I read on.
Tendency to obsess on particular topics that may not be of interest to others. This symptom has the opposite problem. In short, it reminds me of everyone I’ve ever met. Everyone has something they like to talk about. I remember a boy in kindergarten who only ever talked about caterpillars, and a girl in the fourth grade who was the same way about butterflies. The girls who sat behind me in college classes only ever seemed to be talking about beer and sex. Even Dad talked nonstop about surgery. And Amanda—unicorns. When we were kids Amanda obsessed about unicorns for more than a full year. She bought unicorn stickers and unicorn shoes and begged Ma to sew unicorn appliqués inside every item of her clothing. Does that mean Amanda has Asperger’s? I know she doesn’t. She wouldn’t have made a big deal out of telling me she thinks I have it, then. But do I? I don’t want it, so I push that idea away, and keep reading.
As part of the autism spectrum, can be more or less severe. May also include facial tics, repetitive behaviors, aggression, poor gross motor coordination. Key distinguishing characteristic from autism is lack of speech delay. Like autism, more common in males.
More common doesn’t mean only. And the more I think about this list, the more I think it fits Shannon more than it fits me. And Amanda did say she didn’t know for sure if Shannon had it.
I copy the list of symptoms into an e-mail and send it to Amanda’s address, with just a one-word comment, Shannon?
Maybe she has the syndrome, maybe she doesn’t. Of course she is normal. We are all normal. I wonder if Shannon would like her own version of the Normal Book. Maybe when she’s older.
I can’t think about it anymore. I need to think about something else. I look over at the closet and remember what’s hiding under the carpet there.
I turn up the corner of the carpet in the closet and pull out the pictures of Evangeline. I put the one I showed Amanda back with the others. I haven’t really looked at the whole series since I saw Evangeline’s ghost. I was too shocked, but as time passes, I think I can control my feelings now. I think I can look at them in the right way. Analytically, instead of fearfully.
The woman in the photographs looks nothing like the ghost I saw. Maybe it wasn’t even the same Evangeline. I consider the differences. The ghost’s bald head and huge sunken eyes. The wrinkled skin of her neck. Those gaunt toothpick arms. The woman in the picture is round and soft and young. But when I look at her face—it isn’t pleasant but I can do it—I begin to see the similarities. The eye shape, the ear shape. A faint discoloration on her left temple. There’s more here than I’ve already seen, I know it. I just need to figure out what it is.
Could Dad have loved this woman? Run his fingertips along that neck and kissed those lips? Why would he, how could he, when he had Ma?
I line up all twenty-nine pictures in a long row on the floor of my room. The gray sky stretches above her head and the white collar marks the spot under her chin. It is all the same, the same, the same.
A nurse at the hospital, Ma said. The white collar is part of her uniform. I can’t tell if they were taken at the hospital or not, but it was definitely outdoors. Maybe in the courtyard out back.
I remember thinking maybe she was looking at something, something she was holding in her hand. She is looking down and to the right.
Not always.
Her eyes are looking down in some pictures, but in others, she is looking directly into the camera.
I change the order of the pictures. Getting up and moving from one end of the line to the other gets tiring, so I kneel in the middle of the room and spread the pictures out in a circle around me. I start with all the ones where she’s looking down, then all the ones where she’s looking up. There’s some kind of pattern there but it’s not quite right. I try a different approach.
I stack all the pictures and straighten their edges to make them match, straight up and down. I hold them at the bottom with a one-handed grip and put my thumb at the top, then flip through. Evangeline’s eyes flick back and forth. I scatter the photos around me again and put them back in a different order, checking the tiny variations between each to make sure each one follows from the next, then stack them neatly again, then flip through again, fast.
The effect is this: her eyes slowly look toward me, then slowly look away.
It’s uncomfortable at first. I hate it when real people look toward me, and because of the motion, it’s like she’s looking at me that way. But I remind myself. This is not a person. This is a series of photos. I flip through it again. She looks toward me and away again.
Did he keep these as a reminder of her? Does this mean they had a relationship? That Evangeline, as terrifying as her ghost was to me, was once a tender young woman my father loved?
“Are you feeling more reasonable now?” comes Amanda’s voice from the doorway. My back is to the door. I’ve been so absorbed in the photos, I didn’t even hear her. I hunch over to protect them. I do
n’t think she can see.
I make myself be calm. I couldn’t do it earlier.
As I turn around and look up at her, I make sure my eyes connect with hers, and I say, “I don’t know how to answer that question.”
Her eyes are on mine. With a flick of the wrist I toss the stack of photos under the bed. I finish turning, standing up, to face her.
She says, “I’m sorry if I came on too strong, but I’m really frustrated. It could really help you, to deal with this. Knowing what you are.”
“I know who I am.”
“Let’s not fight,” she says, and holds her hands out for me to take. I can’t tell if it’s a genuine gesture or a test. I offer her my hands and she gives them a quick squeeze, a friendly action.
“Okay.”
Amanda drops my hands and says, “Sorry I didn’t call. Brennan got back early, so everything was a madhouse. I drove the girls home, and now they’re with him. I thought you and I could get a little more done in the peace and quiet.”
“Sure.”
“The library is next on the list.”
We pack another wall of books in the library. As I put them away, I shake each, just to see if there’s anything in it. If she notices what I’m doing, she doesn’t say. But there’s nothing. No letter, no recipe, no hint about the past. The most interesting thing I find is another book of Dad’s with a strange title, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. I show it to Amanda.
“Haven’t read that one,” she says. “I haven’t had much time to read lately.”
“You love to read.”
“I used to. These days, I can’t find the time.”
“You can always find the time,” I tell her.
“No, Ginny,” she says, shaking her head. “You can. I can’t. Actually, that—You know what, let me show you something.”
We walk down the hall to her old room, the one painted buttery yellow, and she walks to the stack of labeled boxes along the wall. She opens the AMANDA KIDHOOD box.
“Unicorns,” she says, flipping through a notebook, pointing. “All over the place. Here I’m copying a recipe for chocolate peanut butter balls from the Mini Page. Here I’m in love with Trent Dillinger.” She picks out another notebook, “Here, this one’s high school, this is only ten years ago. Here’s backward writing that Angelica and I used to write notes to each other during study hall. This one says, lemme see, ‘JW has great big zit on nose.’” She flips a few pages forward. “Here I was writing SO BORED in the margins and practicing to see how tiny I could write ‘Mrs. Amanda Davis’ because I wanted to go to prom with Greg Davis so bad I thought I’d die. And he didn’t ask me and I didn’t die. But at the time that was the most important thing in the world to me. That feeling. Now I can’t even picture him.”