Woman No. 17

by Edan Lepucki

  I was startled, but I didn’t move. It’s calming to wake to a bunny. Spas should offer them to guests. I smiled—it was a tweet waiting to happen.

  I sat up and held the bunny aloft and gave him a little squeeze like he was a watermelon I was checking for ripeness.

  “What are you doing here, Peter Rabbit?”

  For a moment I missed Karl, who surely would’ve cracked a joke. Something about an awkward moment after a one-night stand. Or no—maybe he’d make an allusion to Watership Down. The next time we talked I would tell him about waking to Peter Rabbit, just to hear what he’d say.

  I put Peter down and he snuggled into the comforter.

  “Just don’t shit the bed,” I said, picking up my phone. Before I opened Twitter, rehearsing my phrasing—Woke next to a white bunny. Promise I’m not on drugs. #BunniesAreTheBestTherapy—I checked my email.

  I’d forgotten all about sending the photo to Seth’s friend until I saw the reply in the muffinbuffin account, sandwiched between emails from J.Crew and an assortment of enraged environmentalists.

  Thanks but what’s your phone number? I have some questions.

  I wasn’t going to write back. No need to engage any further.

  I’d seen Seth’s tweet a few days ago and last night before bed I’d finally dug out the picture of me and Marco. I snapped a photo of it with my phone and sent it off. I would call it a whim if I hadn’t deliberated for days. I needed to do it. Seth finally had a friend who didn’t seem off, someone from the Internet or college. Okay, an artist, but at least that meant someone normal, with a hobby if not ambition. That seemed good. And what was the danger? I barely recognized myself in the photo; I doubted anyone else would.

  But if someone did recognize me and Marco—I wanted that. Seth’s father hadn’t responded to my tweet and I was tired of being ignored. I knew Marco, I had known him, he was real. Twenty years ago, we were real. This photo was proof.

  Seth was looking for his dad. Well, there he was. Marco Green.

  If Seth saw this photo, eventually, from his friend, it would force me to answer the questions he’d wanted answers to for so long.

  This would be my first attempt to tell him, however indirectly.

  I woke with a bunny on my chest. Must stop fucking magicians. Funny, but too racy for six a.m.

  I had one new email in my regular account.

  “Oh boy, here we go,” I said, petting Peter Rabbit. “Cunt Daniels at Gmail dot com.”

  To: LadyDanielsWrites@gmail.com

  From: Kit@kitdaniels.com

  Subject: Seth

  Dear Lady,

  I hope you don’t mind me Writing. I am worried about Seth. Do you think he’s Depressed? I feel certain Reconciliation is possible between you and my brother, mostly because he is ready to move back in at your say so and I know you Love him. But even if you two resolve your Issues and he moves back in, I still think you need to talk to Seth. I’ve spent a lot of time with him recently and he is more morose than usual. He’s gotten quite moody. I assume, as Mommy, you’ve noticed. Last week I offered him a plantain chip and he just shook his head at me, not even a thanks. (He knows I know the thank you sign, as well as hello. Not a wave, the sign. He taught it to me years ago and I always use it when we see each other. He is also such a Polite kid so his Rudeness was a shock to me.) Anyway, I urge you to talk to him. Or send him to someone. I know the language barrier is an issue, but perhaps someone who knows ASL would be a good fit? It’s worth looking into.

  Twin told me not to write, but you’re Seth’s Mommy. I had to. This comes from a place of Love and Concern, I hope you see that. I know we haven’t always seen Eye to Eye on things, but we can agree that we both love Seth!

  Let’s get lunch soon. I met the babysitter the other week. Ess? She seems great. While she’s there why don’t you and I meet at Crudo? We can eat at the bar, no reservation required. Or maybe shabu-shabu in Little Tokyo?

  All my Love,

  Kit

  PS I’m working a lot. I want another show—the one in Berlin seems like it happened Centuries ago. I’m sorry you weren’t able to make it. But you must come to the next Los Angeles show, which will probably be scheduled for next year. I’ll tell you more about the project when we meet for Lunch. Twin doesn’t even know the details, which feels Different but it’s kind of Great to have a Secret from him for once.

  PPS Kisses to Nephew!

  The language barrier? I kicked off the duvet. A plantain chip? The random capitalization wasn’t even the half of it. Kit was pretentious: she had only started calling Karl “Twin” a year or so ago, and she didn’t dare do it to his face. Seth’s depressed. No, he wasn’t. How could she know anything about my son? He was fine—Photographer needed to stop Meddling in Mommy’s Business.

  I closed my email and opened Twitter. Bunny joke, come on, bunny joke. But my mind had deleted all quips. Before I could stop myself, I typed I’m afraid I’m a bad mother and sent it into the world. It was unfunny and true and utterly scrollable.

  With Peter Rabbit under my arm like I was preparing to nurse him football-style, I headed downstairs. I couldn’t return the animal to S, it was her day off and it was so early that Devin wasn’t even up yet. But what would I do with the bunny until then?

  The dog’s bed at the foot of the stairs was empty. “Milky?” I called.

  No answer.

  “Milkshake?” I repeated, louder, but still nothing.

  Was the dog sleeping somewhere else? I wondered if he’d gone into a coat closet to die in private, like a cat might. Doubtful. He was twelve years old with cysts that could turn malignant any day now, but the ferocity of his farts suggested he didn’t possess the modesty required to die alone.

  “Please be alive, Milky,” I said.

  I went to the sliding glass door. It was open a couple of inches, certainly not wide enough for a Maltese to wiggle through—or was it? I imagined Milkshake in the clutches of a coyote.

  “Please God.”

  I ran outside with Peter Rabbit still in my arms and banged on the Cottage door.

  “Hello? S? I’m sorry to wake you, but do you have Milkshake?” I knocked again. “S! I have your bunny!”

  I heard a groan and something like a space heater—in the summer?—clatter to the floor.

  “You okay?”

  “Just a sec,” she croaked. Maybe she was throwing on clothes and stowing her bong under the bed. The one I’d discovered in the Cottage during Seth’s tenure was bright blue and as tall as Devin. Karl was more upset by the genre of his stepson’s drug paraphernalia than by the paraphernalia itself. “A bong is just so unattractive,” he’d said, shaking his head.

  S finally unlocked the door and opened it just wide enough to stick her head out. She looked like hell, which is rare for a woman so young, what with all that metastasizing collagen.

  “You look like hell,” I said.

  “Why do you have my bunny?” she asked, squinting in the sun.

  “He was in my bed,” I explained, handing her the animal. “Milkshake’s missing.”

  She widened her eyes and shut the door without a word.

  “S?”

  A minute later, she opened the door with the dog in her arms. The relief felt like a bear hug. “Milky!” I cried.

  “Switched at birth?” she said. “Sorry.”

  “What the fuck, S? How did this happen?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Were you in the house?”

  “God, I don’t think so. How can I not remember?”

  The door was open wider now. It was dark inside the Cottage, but I could make out the empty bottle on the desk, and a paintbrush next to it.

  “You’re still drunk,” I said.

  “It’s my day off.”

  She held out Milkshake, and I took him from her. I balanced an animal on each arm.

  “Are you sure you can handle the bunny right now?”

  She looked thrilled by the question. “
She can! Or she thinks she can!”

  “Are you speaking of yourself in the third person?”

  “Sorry. Yeah, I have a pen, he’ll be fine.”

  “Are you painting something?” I asked and gestured with my chin. “That paintbrush.”

  She took Peter Rabbit from me. “Too many questions.”

  “Are you?”

  “I do landscapes sometimes. To relax.”

  “I’d love to see one sometime.”

  “Maybe.”

  We stood facing each other: woman to woman, animal to animal.

  “Do you think Seth’s depressed?” I asked.

  The question surprised her. “Lady—come on.” This was a plea. Probably to let her go back to bed. After a second she said, “All teenagers hate their moms.”

  “Seth doesn’t hate me.”

  “You still hate your mom, and you’re forty.”

  “I’m forty-one, actually, so thank you. Do you think Seth hates me, though? Because I asked Karl to move out?”

  “Because you’re his mom.” She gave me a kind, if condescending, smile. “Good night, Lady,” she said, and shut the door.

  I didn’t move. It was as if I’d traveled backward through time to those few months when Seth was living in the Cottage, when it felt like he’d crossed a border into a country I didn’t have the proper papers to follow him into. My same face and that same door. Either he’d closed it on me or I was too afraid to knock. There was something sinister about that dank little guesthouse, or it was simply that the privacy it offered goaded its tenant to secrecy. Bad. Seth had been getting naked with girls, and high, and S was painting landscapes and drinking. Possibly snooping in my house in the middle of the night.

  I turned and faced the pool, scratching behind Milkshake’s ears to keep myself calm. The water was blue and still. A dead bird floated in the shallow end and I wondered if the Eavesdroppers above could see it.

  31.

  Seth and I used to be close. That’s true of many mothers and their young children, but our bond was stronger than most, intensified as it was by Marco’s abandonment and my mother’s betrayal, and by Seth’s silence. We were best friends because we had no one else. According to my editor, the love between me and Seth, the maternal bond, et cetera, et cetera, would be my book’s central theme and the narrative’s unifying principle.

  By the time Seth turned four, I had taken him to countless specialists. His hearing was perfect, the blood tests revealed nothing amiss. The first doctor recommended a second one, who recommended a speech therapist who recommended a speech pathologist, who recommended an occupational therapist, who recommended a behavioral therapist, who wanted to get Seth an expert to shadow him at day care. Alma, whose permits expired half a decade earlier, refused to allow it. Despite Seth’s age, I hadn’t moved him to preschool. Fuck circle time, he couldn’t even say hello.

  None of the appointments started when they were supposed to. The waiting rooms were dingy, and their only reading material, if it existed at all, was in Spanish or Russian. At least my insurance paid for almost everything. Key word: almost. A couple of doctors had suggested Seth’s silence might be a problem of physiology, and I wanted Seth to get an MRI to check his throat and diaphragm, and have a doctor examine his tongue. None of that was covered. I broke down and borrowed a thousand bucks from the Actress, with whom I spoke every month or so. She felt for my predicament (her word), and gave me the money.

  Turns out, aside from a few weak muscles in his tongue, Seth’s body worked perfectly. Something else was broken—but what?

  “The longer he doesn’t speak, the harder it will be for him to do so,” the doctor who reviewed the MRI told me.

  I’d started writing about these visits for my book, but I couldn’t get past this one. I remember thinking, Time is running out, time is running out, like I would die if I didn’t cure Seth in time. I was hardly eating back then, I was too busy ferrying Seth from doctor to doctor before and after work, eating the dregs of his Rice Krispies and mac and cheese whenever I had a spare moment. Sleep was also hard to come by, sharing as I did a bed with a growing kid who thrashed and blanket-hogged all night long. Sometimes I put off going to sleep until four or five in the morning; night was the only time to myself, and I took it.

  “Your son’s window of opportunity is closing,” the doctor said on that visit. “If he doesn’t start to verbalize in the next two years, he most likely won’t approach competence.”

  “You mean like those kids chained in basements?” I asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “You know, those neglected children who are tied up—like, in sheds—by themselves. And the ones raised by wolves? They never learn to speak.”

  He squinted at me like I was a mirage. “It’s…sort of…like that,” he said carefully. “Though feral children usually use some language, even if it’s nonsense to our ears. Your son doesn’t say anything at all, is that correct?”

  I nodded. I left his office as soon as I could, tears burning the back of my throat.

  My editor would probably like that detail, but what would she say if I admitted that when I left the doctor’s office all I could think about was Marco? Two, three, even four years after he left, I expected him to seek us out. Eventually. He had to. And when he finally did, he would learn that Seth was nonverbal, that his son was special needs—it was the phrase teetering on every doctor’s tongue, I knew it—and he wouldn’t stay. Marco would leave us for the second and final time.

  A few hours after that appointment, I called the Actress and told her the issue was Seth’s diaphragm, that I had already scheduled the surgery, which would be minor. Her joy and relief at my lie angered me more than I expected and I never spoke to her again, let alone paid her back.

  —

  The doctor had recommended a behavioral specialist who was miraculously covered by my insurance. Dr. Zaire Bowen-Shultz. She decorated her office in rich jewel tones and her patience for Seth made me feel small and inadequate. Unlike me, she never got frustrated, never raised her voice. Seth liked her stash of puzzles and the thick braids that fell down her back. I would have been embarrassed when he grabbed one, wide-eyed, except Dr. Zaire Bowen-Shultz was used to kids of every race grabbing at her hair, or yelping if anyone touched their skin, or shitting in their pants, or screaming as if possessed, and so on and so on. She simply smiled and gently released her hair from his fist.

  Dr. Zaire Bowen-Shultz explained Seth’s mutism better than any of the previous doctors. Language is receptive and expressive, she said. “He can receive language. He understands everything that we say to him, but he can’t express himself vocally. He can’t take all that syntax and content in his head and turn it into sound.” She passed me a tissue. “It’s promising that he can gesture, though. Since that’s also expressive.”

  “So if he can express through gestures,” I asked, “why can’t he talk?”

  She wasn’t the first to bring up an autism diagnosis, but she was the most practical about it.

  I must have been making a face. “It’s a spectrum,” she explained. “Seth doesn’t display any other characteristics of the syndrome—or not strongly. But his mutism is severe and I’m not sensing intense social anxiety.” When I didn’t say anything, she added, “We should definitely dialogue about it further.”

  She suggested a support group in addition to our meetings. She lent me two books on the subject.

  “Doesn’t this seem overzealous?” I asked.

  “It’s never a bad idea to educate yourself, right? And find community.”

  I tried to keep a straight face whenever she talked about community.

  “Think of it like this,” she said, sensing my unease. “If Seth does receive the diagnosis, the services he is eligible for will expand.”

  Seth looked up and smiled when he heard his name. He had dumped out all the puzzles and was raking the pieces with his fingers.

  We kept going to Dr. Zaire Bowen-Shultz, but I told
her I didn’t want her to submit any such diagnosis. I didn’t read the books. I eschewed the support group. Instead I signed us up for ASL at the Learning Annex in Carson. My son couldn’t speak, okay, fine, but he could communicate.

  He was four. We already had a dozen special signs like Stop Drop Dead, Stop Honking, Ninja Mama, Afraid Afraid Afraid. I knew when he was hungry and when he had to use the bathroom, and when he wasn’t feeling well. Alma could deduce that much too, but at her house Seth preferred to sit with the babies or draw pictures or build elaborate towers with cardboard bricks—by himself. I was his only playmate and our conversations consisted of pantomime, special signs, facial expressions, nodding, head shaking, pointing. I had perfected the running monologue of a mother with an infant, except Seth hadn’t been a baby in years. Other times we were silent together. Often I didn’t even notice until I finally spoke and my voice cracked from lack of use.

  Seth picked up ASL easily. I didn’t, which I’d been told was expected for a hearing adult. But when Seth made deaf friends and entire conversations occurred between them that I couldn’t follow, I started teaching him to read so that he and I could communicate via writing. Every night I wrote words on index cards and made him tape them to their corresponding objects. Then I made him pick up raisins with a pair of tweezers so that his fine motor skills would improve enough to write legibly. As soon as he could do sign language and write, I explained to Dr. Zaire Bowen-Shultz, the universe would be his.

  “But it’s his universe now, Lady,” she said gently.