I pulled into my driveway, hungry and tired, at 8:15. Luckily, I travel light, so the canvas bag holding my screenwriter equipment and my one carry-on case were the only items I had to maneuver into the house. But after only four days, I had already gotten out of the habit of wearing a heavy coat, and was already trying to remember why I didn’t live in a warmer climatic zone.
Entering the house was no small feat, since four small feet were waiting for me just inside the door. Mr. Warren T. Dog (the “T” is for “The”), the beagle/basset mix we’d liberated from a shelter not long before, can hear a fly walking on the outside wall of a building two blocks away, and so he heard me coming up the steps to the front door. When I opened it, he was squealing and pacing in front of the door, making it difficult to get by without petting him, so I patted his head. He looked disappointed, as if I should have immediately taken him for a walk, or at least fed him some hamburger meat.
Ethan, as twelve years old as a kid with Asperger’s Syndrome can get (which means he was often twelve going on nine), was sprawled about the sofa in the living room, one foot, with shoe, on the cushion, and one off, in a T-shirt and shorts. He didn’t know it was in the twenties outside, because twelve-year-old boys don’t have nerve endings. He was staring blankly at a Disney Channel movie called “The Luck of the Irish,” which they run about every 20 minutes. I was hoping some day to make as much from screenwriting in a year as the guy who wrote this TV movie gets in a month of reruns.
“Hi, Dad.” For all he noticed, I could have just come home from getting a gallon of milk at the convenience store. Depending on to whom one speaks, Asperger’s Syndrome (AS, for those of us in the know) is either a form of, or similar to, high-functioning autism. Kids like Ethan, who are on the higher-functioning end of the autism spectrum, are not severely hampered in their lives, but need help understanding the world’s finer points—like the fact that when their fathers leave home for four days, it’s not the same as a trip to the neighborhood video store.
“Hi, kiddo. Come here.” I held out my arms to embrace him, and he looked at me like I had to be insane. “Come on.”
He glanced at the TV screen again, but he knew I was serious. He stood, walked to me, and put his arms around me awkwardly, making sure he was positioned to keep his eyes turned toward the kid on TV who was turning into a leprechaun right before the big basketball game. No, I’m not kidding.
“I’m glad to see you,” I told my son.
“Uh-huh,” he answered lovingly. I let him go because two better huggers were headed my way from the kitchen.
Leah, newly nine years old, was, unsurprisingly, faster than her mother, but I had to bend to receive the flying hug she offered. It was worth it, since Leah hugs whole-armedly, essentially wrapping herself around the huggee in an outpouring of affection. A Leah hug is worth flying 3,000 miles.
“Hello, pussycat,” I said. Despite my general indifference to cats, I used it as a term of affection. “I missed you.”
“I missed you, too, Daddy,” came the chirpy voice a quarter inch away from my left ear. “Did you bring me something?”
I put my daughter down. “You’ll see when I unpack my bag,” I told her.
“That means yes.” She eyed my bag the way Warren eyes a roast beef we’re having for dinner.
Ethan looked up from the couch. “Did I get something, too?”
I turned to Abby. “This he hears,” I said. She smiled widely and put her arms around me. A hug from Abby is worth traveling 3,000 miles, too, but for different reasons.
“Welcome home,” she said. For a few moments, I felt quite welcome indeed. Then, of course, I had to let go and resume the non-hugging part of my life, which in my opinion is vastly inferior to the hugging part. Then again, if you were hugging all the time, it would be difficult to ride a bicycle.
“Have you eaten?” Abby asked.
“You’re such a Jewish lady.”
“Nonetheless.”
“They gave us something on the plane, but I’m not sure what it was, or what time zone I was in at the time. I didn’t eat it, anyway.”
“So you’ve had about 25 Diet Cokes and you’re loaded with caffeine?” Abby stood marveling at how I managed to survive four days without her dietary supervision. Luckily, God had invented the cellphone.
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Come in the kitchen. I’ve got some chicken left over from dinner.”
As I followed my wife toward the kitchen, Leah took hold of my hand. “Daddy . . . She looked up at me with big expressive eyes, and I thought I saw a tear welling up in one of them. I knelt.
“What’s the matter, baby girl?”
“Aren’t you going to give me my present?” Her lip actually quivered.
I waved a hand at her as I stood up, ever so creakily. “Go through the bag,” I told her. “Just don’t destroy any of my stuff.”
“Yay!”
Ethan looked over and considered joining in the hunt for gifts. Luckily for him, the leprechaun movie went to commercial. He rushed around the couch to help his sister plunder through my luggage. My underwear flew in various directions as I walked to the kitchen.
Abby was taking a plate out of the oven with a potholder. She set it down on a ceramic tile with an Al Hirshfeld caricature of Groucho Marx on it—I had bought it when I was in college, and it had somehow survived. I could see the plate held oven-fried chicken and a baked potato with some broccoli hidden in it. My wife looked after me well.
“You were ready for me,” I said.
“Watch out, the plate’s hot,” she said, turning perfectly into the next set of embraces I’d planned for her.
“So are you,” I said.
“Eat. You’ll need your strength for later, unless the jet lag’s gotten you.” She smiled and walked to the dishwasher.
“Remember, I gained three hours. My body thinks it’s late in the afternoon right now. By eleven o’clock, I’ll be at the height of my energy.” She pretended to look horrified. At least, I think she was pretending.
She sat next to me at the table. “So you didn’t get the option yet, huh?”
“Keep in mind that ‘yet’ is the operative word in that sentence,” I told her.
“Still, you flew out there for four days . . .
“To get to the point where I understand what Glenn wants, and once I give it to him, I’ll get the option. It’s a question of weeks—a couple of weeks probably.” The chicken wasn’t the least bit dry. It was crunchy and flavorful. If I had cooked it, you could have used it for a game of shuffleboard.
“It’s not a sure thing, though, is it? I mean, we do kind of need the money, Aaron.” Abby had a point. When a pipe had burst, we’d had to tear out and replace all the plumbing in the upstairs bathroom, and though our semi-resident contractor Preston Burke had been sympathetic, he didn’t forget to give us a bill. Owning a home is more fun than human beings should be allowed to have.
“It’s close to a sure thing,” I said through potato. I was hungry, and Abby is about as fine a chef as I’ve ever met. It’s one of the many ways in which my wife is perfection personified. “I’ll make some changes—not really big ones, either—and send it to Glenn, and he’ll pony up the cash. Believe me, I’ve been through this before. He wouldn’t have flown me out there if he didn’t think he could sell it.”
Abby raised an eyebrow as she thought a moment. “I’d feel better,” she said, “if I knew a check was in the mail.”
“So would I, but what could I do?” I asked. “Dazzle him with my non-existent reputation and flash the Writer’s Guild card I don’t yet have? I have no leverage.”
“Larry Gelbart doesn’t work on spec, you know.”
“Larry Gelbart is god.”
“True.”
The phone rang. “I’ve got it!” Leah screamed as she ran from the living room into my office.
“Check and see who it is,” I reminded her. Before we added Caller ID to the office phon
e, she would answer no matter what, and then hand me the phone to fend off the inevitable mortgage refinancer or siding salesman interrupting our dinner.
“I will!” She looked at the hard-to-read display. “It’s somebody named Cherry.”
“Cherry?” Abby and I looked at each other. “You mean Shery?”
“Oh. Yeah.” Leah is a fine reader, but she panics a bit when the answering machine is about to pick up.
I stood and walked to the phone, looking at Abby. “Lori’s calling again? It must be important.” Abby nodded, but looked at my plate with some dismay. Great artists don’t like to have their work interrupted, no matter how reasonable the pretext.
“Lori?” I said.
“How’d you know? . . . Oh, you have that box, don’t you?” Lori Shery, the president and co-founder of ASPEN (ASPerger Syndrome Education Network), doesn’t call often, but her voice is always welcome on the other end of the phone. Even now, through what sounded like stress, it had a friendly, warm tone to it that is the perfect sound for a parent whose child has just been diagnosed with AS, and who doesn’t know where to turn. I know.
Lori started ASPEN out of her living room at virtually the same moment Ethan was diagnosed, when he was in kindergarten. Abby had stumbled across Lori’s web address while doing some Internet research on this new condition we’d just heard of, which our son will have all his life. And Lori was, indeed, a godsend.
She had calmed our fears, which all AS parents have in the beginning. No, she said, our son wouldn’t necessarily have to live out his adulthood in a group home and work at Burger King because he has Asperger’s. Yes, it’s going to be difficult, but not so difficult you can’t handle it. Lori herself is an Asperger parent, and she is nothing if not experienced, knowledgeable, and confident.
Before I knew it, I was actually taking part in ASPEN, despite my absolute refusal to attend any kind of meeting involving any group since being initiated into the boys service club—the Ciceronians—at Bloomfield High School in the 1970s. I’m still not much of a joiner, but participating in ASPEN gave me the background I needed to understand what Ethan would require from his school and from us, his parents. Then, I started feeling experienced enough to reassure new parents myself, and that is another kind of blessing.
I also write a quirky column for Lori’s newsletter, which she constantly has to remind me about. Non-paying work is sometimes more difficult for a freelance writer to remember, I’m ashamed to say. But it’s true, and I assumed she was calling because I was in danger of missing the latest deadline, which I was pretty sure fell sometime this month.
Now, however, the tension in her voice was telling me this call wasn’t about 750 words on the lighter side of Asperger’s Syndrome.
“What’s wrong, Lori?”
“You’ve known me a long time, haven’t you?” she asked. “Well, I have a big favor to ask.”
“You know you can have whatever you want.”
“I need you to investigate a murder,” said Lori.
I’d been asked to do that just twice before, and in both cases, resisted as hard as I could until there was no alternative. For one thing, I think my track record would convince anyone I’m ill-suited to that kind of work, and for another, I’m a coward, and murders tend to be perpetrated by violent people. Other people don’t do windows. I don’t do murders.
But this was Lori Shery doing the asking. Lori, besides being an old friend and one whom I owe about 168 favors, is also a force of nature. If something stands between her and what she needs, she simply ignores it until it goes away—or she bulldozes over it and teaches it a lesson. Lori is not to be denied—ever.
“Sure,” I said.
Chapter Three
“Really?” Lori said. “I thought you’d have to be convinced.” “Normally, I would,” I told her. “But I can’t turn you down. I just hope you remember who your friends are when inevitably you’re elected the first female Jewish President of the United States.”
“Stop it,” Lori laughed. I wasn’t kidding.
“Why are you asking about a murder?” Well, somebody had to bring it up.
Her voice became more serious. “Aaron, a man was shot to death in North Brunswick Tuesday night, and one of our children is suspected of killing him.” In the Asperger realm, a parent never says “kids with AS.” They say “our children.” It’s a form of shorthand. We insiders know what it means. The accused had Asperger’s. “I know it’s not true,” Lori continued, “but nobody’s trying to help this boy. They’re so set on tying it all up neatly that they’re ignoring the facts.”
“What facts?”
“Well, if you knew Justin, I wouldn’t even have to tell you. He’s so gentle, so sweet. You know how these kids can be, Aaron . . .
“Those aren’t facts, Lori,” I told her. “That’s you being an Asperger’s mom. You know perfectly well that people with AS are just as capable of anger as anyone else, and that impulse control isn’t at the top of their abilities list.”
Abby, listening to my end of the conversation, looked baffled and concerned. I covered the mouthpiece and whispered, “Lori’s calling about an AS kid accused of murder.” Abby’s eyes widened. “When?” she whispered back.
“Tuesday,” I whispered back, and she began to rummage through the pile of newspapers we keep under the kitchen counter so our disheveled house will look slightly more sheveled.
“If you’d just meet him, Aaron,” Lori said, “you’ll see.”
“Why do the cops think he did it, Lori? I realize you have the incontrovertible evidence that Justin is a nice kid, but are they relying on that pesky evidence thing?”
Abby came up with a copy of the Star-Ledger and started leafing through it. “They have some evidence,” Lori said, her voice suddenly smaller. “But it doesn’t mean anything.”
“What doesn’t mean anything?” Abby found the article she was looking for in the Middlesex County section of Wednesday’s newspaper, and started reading.
“Like, they found . . . the gun . . . in Justin’s room.”
“The murder weapon?”
“Yes.” Lori paused, waiting for me to make a skeptical noise. I didn’t. “Justin’s special interest is guns,” she said.
For an Asperger’s kid, a “special interest” is the one subject in the world that’s so fascinating, so utterly engrossing, that it takes them to the brink of obsession (and, to be honest, sometimes beyond). By those with a taste for kitschy nicknames, AS is sometimes called the “little professor” syndrome because the person with Asperger’s can go on and on ad infinitum about whatever the special interest subject happens to be—doorknobs, train schedules, the migration patterns of Canadian geese, whatever.
I groaned. A special interest in firearms wasn’t going to help prove this kid’s innocence. Finding the murder weapon in his bedroom was even worse. What was Lori getting me into?
Abby picked up the paper and walked toward me. “Does this Justin have a lawyer, and while we’re at it, a last name?” I was hoping Abby would at least know what the legal standards were for getting the kid prosecuted as a juvenile rather than an adult.
“Justin Fowler. And yes, he has an attorney, J. Bernard Tyson.”
Abby held the paper up for me to see, then handed it to me when it became obvious I wasn’t looking where she wanted me to look. I held it in one hand and she pointed.
The second paragraph of the article (which was written by a staff member whose name I knew) read: “Justin Fowler, 22, was arrested late last night and is expected to be charged with the crime this morning in North Brunswick municipal court.”
Twenty-two?
“Lori,” I said, as calmly as possible, “when you say, ‘one of our children . . . ’”
“I know,” she admitted. “Justin’s not a child. He’s twenty-two years old.”
There went charging him as a juvenile.
“Is there anything else you need to tell me—like they found him hovering over the
body with blood on his hands? Some other little detail you might have overlooked?”
“Well,” Lori said, “did I mention he’s confessed?”
“No,” I told her. “I think that might have slipped your mind.”
Chapter Four
“There’s something I haven’t told you,” Abby said.
I was in the bedroom, unpacking my bag, and she was almost through putting the bed back together. We almost never make the bed in the morning, and since I hadn’t been there today, only Abby’s side was mussed. I took a pile of clothes out of my travel bag and dumped them into the hamper.
“You’re not going to tell me you’re really a man, are you?” I asked. “Because I was present at the births of our children, and would be completely surprised.”
“I talked to my brother a couple of days ago,” she said, ignoring my attempt at wit.
“How is Howard?” I asked, trying to keep my voice neutral.
Abby’s older brother Howard is everything I’m not—tall, successful, serious—did I mention successful?—so naturally he wonders what the heck his baby sister ever saw in me. He began expressing these doubts sometime during the second Reagan Administration, and he hasn’t stopped since. I, of course, have responded with the level of maturity and logic you’d expect—in private, I moan piteously to my wife. Maturity means different things to different people.
“He’s fine. He and Andrea are bringing Dylan for a visit in a couple of days.” Abby looked at me, daring me to react, and I did my best not to move a facial muscle. It took effort, and made me greater appreciate the Keanu Reeves School of Acting.
A visit from Abby’s brother and his family—especially his fifteen-year-old son Dylan, the sports star, honor student, class president, and all-around pain in the rear—meant constant reminders of what a screw-up I am, and pressure to keep Ethan, the anti-Dylan, from having a melt-down when the families actually have to be together. I was not, let’s say, enthusiastic about the forthcoming visit.
“Where are they going to be staying?” I asked, knowing that the three of them probably wouldn’t be commuting back and forth to St. Paul, Minnesota every night—although a man can dream.
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