I didn’t say much on the way to Mary Fowler’s house, and if you don’t talk to Ethan under circumstances like that, he won’t start a conversation on his own. If you don’t want to talk about Yu-Gi-Oh! or Dracula, he’s pretty much exhausted his topics of conversation, anyway. For an AS kid, many times not interacting with people is just the easiest (and to be honest, most natural) thing to do.
I, meanwhile, was considering how expertly I’d screwed up my promise to Abby that I’d try to quell my dislike for her brother and his family. Virtually every time she’d seen me with them since their arrival, I’d been argumentative, sarcastic, or downright confrontational. In her eyes, I’d been the exact opposite of what she’d asked me to be.
On the other hand, I had to admit that Abby wasn’t totally blamefree. It was one thing to leave me to my own devices against her brother, since I’m a grownup (sort of) and can take care of myself (see previous parenthetical expression). But throwing Ethan to the wolves was another story. His mother should have defended him, or at least gotten his side of the story, before pulling the plug on the center of his life. Sure, I threaten to do that all the time, but I never actually shut him down, and when the punishment comes from Abby, there’s no appeals process. Ethan knows that.
He was in the seat next to me, muttering to himself (he doesn’t really talk to himself, but makes sounds in his mouth he thinks you can’t hear), no doubt going over what had happened on the stairs. He couldn’t make sense of it, either.
“I’ll talk to Mom later,” I said.
“Huh?” He hadn’t been listening to me. What’s going on in his head is more important than anything out on planet Earth.
“I said, ‘I’ll talk to Mom later.’ Maybe I can get your sentence lessened a little.”
“Yeah.” Ethan doesn’t come to “thanks” easily. But luckily, we were coming up on the Fowler house.
I had told Mary to expect us, but hadn’t told her the exact time we’d arrive. Still, she answered the door quickly and welcomed Ethan warmly. Justin, she told us, was in his room, and I walked over and knocked on the door.
“Yes?”
“Justin, it’s Aaron Tucker.” I hoped that wouldn’t cause him to barricade the door, and it seemed not to have any effect at all.
“Yes?”
As long as I had him saying “yes,” I might as well ask him for something. “I brought someone to meet you. May we come in?”
“Okay.” Hey, it wasn’t “yes,” but it had the same effect. Justin unlocked his door, and I crooked a finger to Ethan, who looked a little uncomfortable, but walked toward me. When the door opened, Ethan stood a little behind me, wanting me to shield him from a guy he’d never met.
To Ethan, Justin was a grownup. To me, he was barely older than Ethan. It’s all how you look at things.
“Justin,” I said, “this is my son Ethan. Ethan, that’s Justin.”
“Hi,” Ethan said. He’s learned he’s supposed to do that when he meets someone new.
“Uh-huh.” Justin might be a little farther down the continuum than Ethan. There are degrees of everything, and no two people are alike.
“So, did you kill that guy?” he asked, breaking the ice with a sledgehammer rather than a well-placed pick and a little melting action. Ethan’s social skills needed a little work.
We walked into Justin’s room. Mary had winced at the question, but it didn’t seem to bother Justin at all. I guess he’d been asked it so much lately, he had a conditioned response all set, and people with AS love nothing better than a conditioned response.
“Yeah.”
Ethan’s eyes widened a little, but he nodded. “Why?”
That seemed to take Justin by surprise. “I don’t know,” he answered. What did that mean? That he killed Michael Huston and didn’t know why, or that the people who had told him to confess to the crime hadn’t bothered giving him a motivation?
“That’s pretty weird,” Ethan said.
“Yeah,” Justin agreed.
Ethan looked around the room. “You don’t have any video games?” he said.
“No. I don’t like them. The guns don’t operate realistically.” Justin’s reasons for likes and dislikes centered around his special interest.
Since Ethan’s special interest is more vague—he’s into video games and TV shows—it’s easier for him to relate to other things, but not as much as people who don’t have AS.
“My dad says you really like guns. How come you like guns so much?” Ethan asked.
Mary and I stayed in the doorway, but Justin and Ethan were acting like we weren’t there, so it didn’t seem to matter much.
“I don’t know,” Justin said. “Guns are just so cool. They do exactly what they’re supposed to do.” This is key in the Asperger world—you can depend on something to be predictable, to be exactly what you expect it to be all the time. There’s great comfort in that. Little kids who have AS often don’t like toys that start out as one thing and transform into something else— they find that upsetting.
“How’d you get the old gun, the one that guy got shot with?” Nice question, Ethan. Something I’ve been wondering myself.
“I don’t know,” Justin said. For a guy who knew a lot, he didn’t seem to know much about the most crucial night of his life. “I just found it here in my room that day.”
I blinked a couple of times. “Wait a minute, Justin,” I said. “You mean the gun just showed up here in your room on the very day Michael Huston was shot?”
Justin looked startled, having forgotten the adults in the room. His mouth opened and closed a couple of times, and Ethan gave me a look that said, “Nice work, Dad.”
“I . . . I . . . I . . .
“Did it have, like, ammo and everything with it when you found it?” Ethan had made a remarkable leap of understanding, something he wasn’t supposed to be able to do, exhibiting something close to empathy. It was my turn to be startled, but would Ethan’s questioning work?
“The black powder and the ball were there,” Justin said. “I had to come up with my own fabric patch, but that was easy. I just cut a corner off my pillow case.”
Ethan closed the door to the room so they wouldn’t be further disturbed by the clumsy adults, and I marveled again at his read of the situation. This boy had potential I hadn’t recognized before.
Mary looked at me a moment, and gestured toward the living room. We headed in that direction.
“Your son is quite remarkable,” she said. “You said he has Asperger’s too?”
I nodded. “Yes, but he’s surprising me in there. Sometimes, you don’t know your own children as well as you think.”
I hadn’t intended that to sound the way it did, and Mary looked at the floor a moment. “I’m sorry.” I said. “That came out wrong.”
“It’s all right,” she answered. “You didn’t mean it like that. But it’s been very difficult.”
We sat on the sofa again, and I decided that if my son was making progress with Justin in the other room, he had damn well better have something to report when we got back into the car, or I’d never live it down. “Have you heard from Kevin?” I asked Mary.
She nodded. “Yes, he’s back in Indiana,” she said. “He has exams, so he rode the bike all night and he’s back there. He said he’d come home as soon as exams are over.”
“Did he say if he placed Justin’s bail?”
“All he said was that I shouldn’t worry about it,” she answered. “I don’t like the way that sounds.”
Exams? This close to Christmas? That didn’t seem very American. This country comes to such a grinding halt at Yuletide that if aliens arrived from space on or near December 25th, we’d probably ask them to come back after New Year’s. But I didn’t press the point with Mary.
“What does Justin’s lawyer say?” My first rule is: if the conversation gets uncomfortable, and that’s not what you’re going for, change the subject. Okay, maybe that’s not the first rule, but it’s a rule.<
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“That I should have Justin declared incompetent, and then contend he’s not able to stand trial.” Mary’s contempt for that idea was evident in her voice. “Justin’s different, but he’s not incompetent.”
“It’s never easy, is it?” I said, implicitly offering support as one Asperger parent to another.
“It never is,” she agreed. “Justin’s father left when he was six and Kevin was three. He couldn’t take the way Justin was. He didn’t want to accept the fact that it wasn’t anyone’s fault . . . because if there really was something wrong with Justin, he figured maybe it had come from him. And that wasn’t going to be the truth, no matter what.”
On first diagnosis of AS, a lot of parents go into denial, and most of them come out of it eventually. Some don’t. Most of the ones who go into denial, I’m afraid, are fathers. Sometimes, I’m not especially proud of my gender.
“I feel like apologizing for all fathers,” I told Mary.
“Don’t,” she said. “He wasn’t a nice guy before, either.” And then she didn’t say anything for a few moments.
“How do you think Justin got the gun?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” Mary said after a thought. “He’s been consistent in saying he found it in his room, but I know that’s not true. He’s covering something up, but that’s the confusing part. It’s not like him. He doesn’t have enough guile to be deceptive in any real way.”
“Does he have any friends—anybody who might be using him to cover up for themselves?” A kid with Asperger’s in the Midwest almost took the rap for counterfeiting because guys he thought were his friends told him he wouldn’t get into trouble. Another young man, in England, took “samples” home from his job at the jewelry store because “friends” thought it would be a good idea. But Mary shook her head, “no.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. Meanwhile, raucous laughter from Justin’s room convinced me the guys were getting along just fine.
“Sounds like they’ve found some common ground,” Mary said.
“Justin seems like a nice kid,” I told her, and she looked surprised.
“A lot of parents wouldn’t want their son to hang around with an accused murderer,” she said, reminding me of Abby’s comments the night before.
“If I thought he was a murderer, I wouldn’t be crazy about it, either,” I told her. “I just wish I could figure some of this out.”
The door to Justin’s room opened, and Ethan walked out, still doing that high-pitched braying he thinks sounds like a laugh. Asperger’s kids sometimes simulate the emotions they think they’re supposed to be having, and Ethan had gotten into the habit of pretending to laugh. By now, it was hard to tell these attempts from the real thing.
“See you, Justin,” he said over his shoulder.
“Uh-huh,” came the response.
Ethan walked to me and tapped me on the shoulder like he was Jimmy Cagney and I was Pat O’Brien or some other sidekick in this picture.
“We found out what we need to here,” he said. “Let’s go see the widow.”
Chapter Six
“Justin didn’t find the gun in his room,” Ethan told me in the car. “He didn’t?” I was reduced to straight lines like this because I was stunned by my son’s newfound ability to take command of a situation.
“No. He found it in the base of the grandfather’s clock in his living room, and he found it there after the guy was shot. He didn’t want to tell anybody because he figured whoever left it there would get into trouble.”
It certainly wasn’t Mary Fowler, and if Justin hadn’t put the gun there himself, that left only Kevin. But Kevin was in Indiana, right?
“What was he doing looking in the grandfather clock?” I asked.
“He and his brother used to hide things in there when they were little, and Justin hides some magazines from his mom in there.” I didn’t need to ask what kind of magazines. Hormones do not discriminate against people with AS.
“How did you get him to tell you this?” I asked Ethan, genuinely interested.
“It was easy,” he said. “I just got him talking about guns, because that’s what he likes.”
“When I got him talking about guns, he wouldn’t tell me anything,” I told Ethan.
“You’re a grownup,” my son informed me. Strangely, it was the first time I’d been accused of such a thing in quite some time.
“Why are we going to Karen Huston’s house?” I asked. Amazingly, I’d been recast. No longer in the role of Sam Spade, I was now playing Dr. Watson to my son’s Sherlock Holmes.
“We need to find out why she thinks her husband was in the Mafia.” Ethan hadn’t ever seen the Godfather movies or The Sopranos, so his view of organized crime came from Fat Tony on The Simpsons and Edward G. Robinson parodies in Bugs Bunny cartoons. Pop culture references guide our lives—and his, too.
“Why? I’ve talked to the gangsters, and I think her husband was involved with them. What difference does it make why she thinks so?”
He glossed over the idea that his father had been consorting with gangsters, since he wasn’t really listening to what I was saying.
“Because she’s hiding something,” my son said.
“And you think you can get her to tell you.”
“Justin told me.”
“Justin has Asperger’s. You know how to talk to him. What are you going to say to Mrs. Huston?”
But he had lapsed back into mumbling to himself. I caught the words “Spider-Man” and “evil plot.”
After about five minutes of self-immersion, he turned to me abruptly. “Why doesn’t Dylan like me?” he asked.
“What makes you think . . .
“Dad,” he said, exasperated.
“Okay,” I admitted. “Dylan doesn’t like you. Do you like Dylan?”
He thought about it. “I don’t know Dylan,” he concluded. “Dylan doesn’t like you because he doesn’t know you, either,” I said.
“I’m not always making fun of him,” he pointed out.
I sighed. “We’ve talked about this before, Ethan,” I said. “People make fun of what they don’t understand. Dylan thinks you’re weird, and he can’t figure out why, so he makes himself feel better by making fun of you. There’s not much we can do about it except point out when he’s being a jerk.”
“He’s always being a jerk.”
“Maybe you do know if you don’t like Dylan.” He laughed.
Ethan was silent the rest of the way to Karen Huston’s house. He didn’t mutter, either. I think he was digesting. I know I was.
Karen was, naturally, surprised to see us, since I hadn’t known we were coming, either. I was surprised, because Rezenbach was there, dressed in a way he must have considered casual—a blue blazer, gray slacks, and a light blue button-down shirt. He had clearly lightened up by not wearing a tie. It would be rude to say he looked as relaxed as Jackie Mason at a Hitler Youth rally. So I won’t say it.
I was too busy, anyway, wondering what Karen’s lawyer was doing in her house on a Saturday, dressed like he was about to go cruising with his wife Lovey, Gilligan, and the Skipper, too.
There wasn’t much time to think about that, because Dalma was advancing on me. This time, though, the dog wasn’t growling, wasn’t baring teeth, wasn’t even looking the least bit adversarial. In fact, bouncing toward Ethan and me, she looked downright friendly.
“Don’t worry about her,” Karen said. “She knows you now. It usually takes three or four visits, and then she’s your best friend.”
“She doesn’t know me,” my son helpfully pointed out. There is no one better than a twelve-year-old with Asperger’s at puncturing any sense you might have that you know anything.
“She loves kids,” Karen said. “She likes them the first time she meets them. And she can spot the mean ones, so I know she’s going to like you.”
Ethan got down on his knees and, sure enough, the dog came over and licked his face, which made my son la
ugh. Then, amazingly, the dog walked over to me and did everything but beg for a pat, so I provided one. Suddenly, she was such a close friend I expected Dalma to ask me out for a beer after work.
Rezenbach, however, was more likely to invite me in for an arsenic. “I have to protest, again, Mr. Tucker, your insistence on questioning my client when I’m not present, and when we haven’t had any advance notice.”
“The last time, Mr. Rezenbach, your client called me and asked me to question her. This time, I had to acquiesce to someone with considerably more influence over me than you have.”
“And who is that?”
“My son,” I told him. I was looking directly into his eyes and strangely, he didn’t seem outraged. His eyes actually softened a bit. Maybe a human being was actually in there trying to find a way out.
“I don’t understand,” was all the lawyer said.
“Ethan has a certain understanding of this case,” I said within my son’s earshot. “He has been helping me in the investigation of the story, and he has some questions for Karen that can help clear up Michael’s murder.”
Karen, to her credit, did not condescend. Ethan, still petting the dog, literally rose to his new status—he stood up. Karen nodded, and said to Ethan, “Sit down. Ask whatever you like.”
The dog, tail wagging shamelessly, followed us into the living room and sat at Ethan’s left hand, hoping to be stroked, but not realizing that the concentration of the Asperger’s boy would allow for only one area of interest at a time. Still, she sat hopefully, grinning and waiting.
Another major trait of people with AS: their total indifference toward small talk. “Why was your husband walking the dog that night?” Ethan asked. “Why not you?” He knew that in our house, Abigail usually walks the dog at night. Still, it hadn’t occurred to me to ask.
As Dog Is My Witness Page 15