Alison had made a point of inviting him this year; she’d be bringing Mike/Dick/Harry—Don’t you think it’s time you met him, Charles?—but Charles demurred; he was fairly sure that sitting down to cranberry sauce with his ex-wife’s gentleman friend would not put him in a count-your-blessings mindset.
Then, back here by three o’clock Seattle time (six o’clock in New York, when Emmy would be sitting down to dinner in Brooklyn with her roommate’s family), he’d open the wine, warm up a single-serving Traditional Thanksgiving Meal from Whole Foods, and settle in front of the television to watch his DVD of The Accidental Tourist; all in all, a perfectly acceptable way to spend the holiday.
But for the next few hours, his focus would be exclusively on the Box Project.
Charles donned his 3M 8293 respirator; he’d discovered a stash that Alison had purchased in quantity for Cody when they were mitigating mold. Although the crawlspace was now mycotoxin-free, the dense, gluey, chemical musk of old magazines lingered, and after developing a slight cough, Charles became worried about the potential side effects associated with long-term exposure to Life. Respirator secured, he headed purposefully down the stairs.
The agenda was simple and straightforward: move one box at a time upstairs, open it, assess its contents as quickly as possible, distribute those contents into one of three large plastic tubs labeled DISCARD, DONATE, SAVE, and repeat.
He would not allow himself to loiter. He needed to be efficient. He needed to focus. No wallowing. He would not spend time wondering which box to explore; he would simply lay hold of the first one that caught his eye (That one, right there) and get on with it.
It was small, not terribly heavy. Using the top of his head, Charles nudged it across the crawlspace floor as he made his way on hands and knees: a one-trick pony nosing a bale of hay across the least exciting ring of a three-ring circus.
Outside the crawlspace, non-equine, bipedal, he toted the box up the stairs and into the living room.
When he scissored it open, he discovered a haphazard jumble of newspaper clippings and magazine articles; mixed in with these were the persimmon-colored napkins that had served as Alison’s notepaper during their epistolary courtship.
Charles reached into the box, gradually submerging his hand as if testing the temperature of a bath, feeling the clothlike suppleness of the napkins, the brittleness of the newsprint.
It saddened him to find these two types of archival material mixed together and in such disarray. But he had to admit, from a curatorial point of view, it made a certain sense: Alison’s letters (chronicles of buoyancy and hope) mixed in with the articles (uniformly bleak stories related to persons with autism)—these relics bookended their life together.
What was odd was that Charles had never gone looking for these articles; they had found him: in the teachers’ lounge, at the dentist’s office, in the grocery store. Some were in the nature of profiles: informational calls to action, full of sobering statistics. Others were exposés: shocking, reform-inciting, the kind of major, serialized stories that are frequently collaborations between two or three investigative reporters whose efforts end up winning them a Pulitzer.
Charles wasn’t cynical about such things; the commendations were well deserved, the work these journalists did was vitally important.
Whenever these stories appeared in his field of view, Charles felt he had no choice but to filch or purchase the publications in which they appeared, clip them out with his blunt-nosed scissors, and preserve them. He had cast aside his crucifix decades ago, but God wasn’t about to let him forget that he was still under surveillance.
In a way, journalists were to be envied; objectivity gave them an ability Charles lacked. He was always trying to come up with ways of describing Cody.
He didn’t think of his son as backward or flawed or withdrawn or challenged … The word pale sometimes seemed right—before, Cody had been an oil painting, dense, textural, color-saturated, layered. He was still the same person, but his portrait had thinned and flattened, changing to a watercolor, one in which the absence of paint—the white space—was as defining as the colors.
Did Charles love him?
Yes.
Was it the love he’d imagined?
No, because there was always this overlay of bewilderment, disconnectedness.
A haze, an impediment, what was it?
Charles couldn’t help himself, he couldn’t stop trying to describe his love for Cody through language. Words were what he had, what he sought—what he’d reached for since childhood in times of fear, sorrow, confusion.
It was the Catholic in him, he supposed, the habit of prayer forever outliving the loss of faith.
He’d stopped collecting the articles after Alison moved out; with her departure, there was no one in the house who needed reminding that happy endings weren’t always possible.
So why had he kept all this?
In a way, this material provided the ephemera that Cody could not; in lieu of school reports, report cards, certificates of merit, tournament trophies, and Father’s Day cards, there were these articles.
DISCARD? DONATE? SAVE? Charles had no idea.
So once again, he found himself sitting on the floor, full stop, rubbing up against inky, tattered old newsprint, acquiring the smudgy fingertips of a disreputable archivist.
Ah, this one, he thought, lifting out one of the largest articles in his collection—and the only one that had found its way into his possession by way of Alison:
Three full pages from the Seattle Times dating back to 1998.
•♦•
On their tenth anniversary that year, Alison presented Charles with a gift certificate for a ten-week Introduction to Aikido series.
“Ha!” he said. “Clever you. Very nice.”
“I signed up for it too,” she answered. “We can go together.”
“Aikido,” Charles mused. “That’s a martial art, right?”
“Yes, but not like karate or tae kwon do or jujitsu.”
“I see,” Charles said, even though he didn’t. Obviously and as always, Alison had done a good deal of research in advance of this conversation so that her knowledge already far outpaced his.
“It means ‘the way of harmony,’” she continued. “It’s essentially nonviolent, based on the idea that it’s possible to practice self-defense in a way that doesn’t inflict harm on the attacker.”
Cody was only six, but he was tall for his age and getting stronger every day. What would happen once he reached adolescence, Charles wondered with apprehension, when that surging hormonal stew makes lunatics of us all? Words like violence, self-defense, and attacker had taken on a whole new meaning in their family. But Alison seemed to be using them in a completely guileless way.
She read Charles’s silence as reluctance. “Of course,” she joked, squinting through her spectacles in a familiar send-up of her lawyer persona, a character they referred to affectionately as the Honorable Judge Ball Buster, “if the plaintiff would rather have an anniversary gift that lines up with tradition, I could sentence you to a pair of tin cufflinks or a ten-piece set of anodized cookware …”
At the ten-year mark, it was presumed that a marriage had revealed itself as durable and flexible; the traditional tin or aluminum gift was supposed to remind the couple that a marriage can perhaps be bent, but never broken.
Charles laughed. “No, this sounds great.”
He’d avoided tradition entirely that year, finding the metallurgical metaphor lovely in theory but completely uninspiring. Instead, he’d presented Alison with ten yellow long-stemmed roses, a gift certificate from her hair salon, and a current bestselling novel about a man trying to find his way back to his wife after the Civil War. It sounded good. Alison was hard to buy for.
“This will be fun,” Ali said, reaching out and giving his upper arm a light squeeze. “Something for just the two of us. The sitter will be here at five thirty.”
“What, wait, it starts toni
ght?”
“And she can stay until nine. That gives us time for dinner.”
“Dinner. You mean, out?”
“We’ve got a seven-fifteen reservation at a little hole-in-the-wall sushi place across the street afterward. It’s supposed to be excellent.”
Viewed objectively, the gesture was sweet.
And yet, it was so obviously underpinned by Alison’s preeminent love for Cody. Ten weeks of dates, yes, but these arrangements, they weren’t for the two of them, not really; not dinner and a movie, not a hand-holding stroll on the beach, not sweaty sex at a nice hotel in Pike Place Market, but a martial-arts class.
It was for Cody, as always.
After being welcomed to the dojo—an open, airy place with picture windows looking out toward Lake City Way—they sat side by side on the white, expansive, canvas-covered mat as the instructor, Sensei Richard (a ginger-haired, bearded fellow with a scant ponytail and pale beefy feet), informed the class that there are two components of aikido, nage and ukemi.
“How many of you have done some form of martial-arts training before?” he asked genially.
A couple of hands went up.
“How many of you have an impression of martial arts based on what you’ve seen in the movies?”
More hands went up, including Charles’s.
The instructor grinned and nodded. “Well, it’s a common misconception that the person who throws is the one with all the power—”
Throws? Charles thought. Throws what?
“—when in fact it is the uke, the person being thrown, who is in control. That’s why we’ll start by learning ukemi, the art of falling.”
“He’s kidding, right?” Charles muttered to Alison.
The philosophy behind aikido, Charles soon learned, is a worthy one; unlike other martial-art forms, which stop the flow of energy, aikido is about redirection, about acknowledging that an aggressive force is in play but shifting that force slightly so that it is aimed elsewhere. Its movements are largely circular and flowing, as opposed to angular and sharp; the sounds of an aikido class are predominantly rustlings, swishings, like the gentle abrading of a broom being swept across a slightly roughened surface.
Alison took to it right away—to such an impassioned extent that any outward signs that she and Charles were there together soon disappeared. There was Charles, sitting back on his heels, wary but polite, and there was Alison, leaning forward as if tethered to the sensei by an invisible wire fastened firmly to a spot between her furrowed brows.
Ali’s zealotry for aikido sparked with a suddenness that was startling but, in retrospect, hardly surprising. Not that she liked falling; she hated it. It was so antithetical to anything she had ever done before: giving in, giving over to another’s manipulations, even if the fall itself—an orchestrated roll on a padded floor—was highly controlled and concluded by the uke with a firm thump against the floor, for it was the uke who in that way announced that the fight was over; one of many aspects of the philosophy behind aikido is that uke and nage are equal partners.
But the idea the instructor put forth time after time, that falling does not equal failing, was one that intrigued her even as she was frustrated by it. Learning to embrace the art of ukemi became the latest in a long line of battles she was determined to win.
She would fall, but she would not by God fail.
Charles quit after the first three sessions. He hated to fall too but, unlike Alison, had no desire to learn.
“Can’t you try, Charles?” Alison said repeatedly, pursuing what had become their regular date-night conversational topic. At least they weren’t talking about Cody; although, of course, they were. “I could help you, if you want,” she offered. “We’ve got a perfect place to practice at home …”
By this time, the room that was formerly Charles’s office had been re-appropriated; Ali had installed a thick, soft, wall-to-wall wrestling mat that allowed her and Cody to work comfortably on the floor. It also minimized injury.
“It’s just not for me, sweetheart,” Charles said. “But I’m glad you like it. Really. I hope you’ll keep going after the series is over.”
Each week, Charles accompanied Ali to the dojo. He remained in the waiting room, out of view of the class, perusing the dojo’s lending library of books on Japanese culture, philosophy, language, history while Alison learned to fall.
It was there that he first came across the word koan.
A fundamental part of Buddhist lore, a koan is a story, dialogue, question, or statement, the meaning of which cannot be understood by rational thinking.
Everyone knows the famous ones—What is the sound of one hand clapping? and If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?—but these don’t do justice to the tradition. A koan is not simply an unanswerable or even absurd question; it is a question that requires deep thought. It is only when the student has truly committed to the thought—detaching from any outcome, any desire to please the teacher or be correct, any expectations—that he or she solves the koan. The answers are often ridiculous-sounding, producing laughter in the teacher.
Charles and Alison continued to go out for dinner afterward, but to one of the fast-food places that dotted Lake City Way, not to the sushi restaurant. It had been a disappointment: too slow, and they had to be home no later than eight thirty, not so much for the sitter but for Cody, who had lately taken to lashing out at anyone who tried to get him to go to bed. This included Alison, but his attacks on her were less intense and didn’t last as long.
Charles’s real reason for quitting aikido was one he couldn’t share: soon after their first session, he’d dreamed of Dana McGucken.
They were at the dojo. Dana was kneeling across the room from Charles wearing not a white gi and belt like the other students but his signature three-piece suit. When Mrs. Braxton ordered them to stand and choose a partner, Dana began running toward him, calling Char-Lee! Char-Lee Mar-Low!
In his wake, staining the expanse of the white dojo mat, was a wide swath of gleaming, viscous blood.
•♦•
Charles initiated the conversation. He had to; Ali would never do it.
“What is it going to take, Alison? A broken nose? Fractured eye socket? Knocked-out teeth?”
She was sitting on their bed, holding a bag of frozen peas to her cheekbone.
“I’ve got it under control.”
“Are you listening to yourself? Have you looked in the mirror? When I come home, I don’t know whether I’m going to find the police waving a domestic-abuse warrant with my name on it or you comatose on an ambulance gurney.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You think that’s ridiculous? What do you tell your friends, the people at work, about the bruises, the scratches, the bite marks, the bald spots? What are you telling your parents? Do you really think no one but me is paying attention?”
When she didn’t respond, Charles sat down on the bed. “It just isn’t working,” he said. “You’ve done everything possible. No one could have done more. We have to start facing the fact that—”
“No,” she said. “No. I will not accept that. I will not hand him off to strangers. Nothing bad is going to happen.”
“And you know this how? Do you want him to kill you, Alison? Because something bad is going to happen, there is no other way this is going to play out, and if you can’t see that, maybe you need proof. I have plenty …”
Charles crossed the room and yanked open the top drawer of his bureau; it fell on the floor, scattering several years’ worth of clippings. He grabbed a stack at random and began reading: “‘Ballard Resident Attacked by Disabled Son Suffers Miscarriage, in Serious Condition.’ ‘Fierce Protection of Mentally Challenged Son Costs University Professor Her Life.’ ‘Autistic Child Who Started Fire Survives; Mother, Sibling Die’—”
“Stop it, Charles,” Alison said. “Please. I understand that you’re worried about us, but I have to keep trying. I
can’t give up.”
“I’m not suggesting that you give up, Alison. I’m just suggesting that there might be another setting where he could be better cared for, and our family could be safe.”
“But he’s our son, Charles,” she appealed, “he is our family, and he’s only six years old.”
Not long after, Charles arrived home late from school and found her in Cody’s room, sitting on his bed, watching him sleep.
It was the fact that one of her hands was resting lightly on their son’s head that made Charles know something was seriously wrong; touching Cody, awake or asleep, was a calculated risk. Her other hand was clutching a section of newspaper.
“Alison,” Charles whispered. When she turned around, Charles saw that she’d been crying. “What’s the matter?”
She got up, careful to shift her weight in a gradual manner. Her weeping continued, noiselessly, and she didn’t speak until they’d passed out of Cody’s room, closed the door, and made their way down the hall and to the first floor, where they stood next to the efficient, under-the-stairs office she had so meticulously crafted.
“We can’t … ,” she said, turning to face him and then starting to cry again.
“Ali. Honey. What is it? What?”
“No matter what happens, we can’t let something like this happen. We can’t ever see his picture in an article like this.”
Her body went limp and she leaned into him, dropping the newspaper to the floor at their feet.
•♦•
It occurred to Charles that he was sitting in almost exactly the same spot where he’d held Alison that night, where he’d seen this article for the first time.
LAWSUIT ALLEGES THREE DISABLED MEN WERE ABUSED; THEY WERE LEFT AT GROUP HOME AFTER STATE HAD BEEN WARNED.
The accompanying photograph—yellowed now, but still just as striking and memorable as it was the first time Charles saw it—was a close-up of the oldest victim. He looked much younger than he actually was.
The faces of some disabled adults can be like that, Charles thought. Cody’s is; smooth, ageless, unmarked, the sinless portrait of Dorian Gray.
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