by Cari Noga
“Amanda, go to your room.”
“Richard, she’s barely started her dinner.”
“This isn’t a conversation for a child to hear!”
“Then why did you start it?” Brett asked, as Amanda interrupted.
“I’m almost seventeen, Dad!”
“Start it? I haven’t started anything! It’s you.” He stood up, a condemning finger pointed at Brett. “You who have placed this family on the precipice.” Pushing his chair back so hard it toppled over, Richard stormed out.
Bleak silence draped the dining room. Wordlessly, Amanda stood and left, too. Brett sat alone, feeling a black hole open inside her. Even the sparrows outside had deserted her.
Friday afternoons the Lab was always sparsely used. On days like today, the first to flirt with seventy degrees since last September, it was deserted. So the knock interrupted Christopher’s concentration. He looked up from Donald Baxter’s website.
“Peter. Come in.” He turned away from the computer to greet the lab director.
“Thanks.” Peter Hawkins removed a pile of folders from the lone visitors’ chair and settled his lanky frame. “Came by to thank you for the nice job in Lansing.”
“How’s that?”
“Just got a call from Audubon magazine. They’re planning a major feature on bird camp.”
“Is that right?” He remembered talking at the Expo with a woman who identified herself as the Midwest editor for the nation’s most widely circulated ornithology periodical. At the most he’d expected a blurb. “A big piece, huh?”
The director nodded. “They’ll be on campus this summer to shoot the art. It’ll probably run in the November issue. So it won’t help enrollment this cycle, but it should really goose the numbers for next year.”
Christopher smiled dutifully at the feeble pun. “Great. Glad I could help.” He knew this was important to Peter. He was the Lab’s most budget-conscious director ever, and had vowed to turn the camp from a break-even enterprise into a revenue stream.
Enrollment was too highly concentrated in the northeast states, he said. That was why he approved the Lansing conference, though travel budgets in general were being chopped across campus. The upper Midwest states and Ontario were close enough to upstate New York that parents could drive their kids to camp, meaning they wouldn’t automatically rule out the program as “too far” or “too expensive” because of an airfare tacked onto tuition.
Distance and cost were all relative, Christopher thought, his mind jumping to Deborah. He remembered attending a birding conference in New Zealand several years ago—before the travel budget cuts—his first in the southern hemisphere. A presenter referred to the “fall migration north.” Though it was entirely logical, his northern hemisphere–trained brain couldn’t wrap itself around the fact. Now, living less than a mile from Deborah in the vacant fellow’s apartment, he felt as far away and befuddled by her as he’d been at that conference in Christchurch. Hawkins was talking again.
“What’s that you’ve got up there? Donald Baxter’s site?” Peter leaned forward, frowning, gazing at the monitor behind Christopher. “I heard he was in Lansing, too.”
“Uh, yeah.” Christopher felt irritated at the intrusion, and at his own instinct to justify what he was doing.
“Humph. Waste of your time, if you ask me.” He stood up. “I’ll keep you posted on the piece. The reporter will probably want to talk to you again.”
I didn’t ask you, Christopher thought. “Fine,” he said aloud, only wanting Peter Hawkins out of there. “Have a good weekend.”
“You, too.” The director finally left, his footsteps echoing.
Christopher leaned back, removing his glasses to massage his temples. Opening a drawer, he removed the thumb drive that kid gave him in Lansing. Dr. Felk’s protégé, Robby Palmer.
It was practically full and an organizational nightmare. Pdfs, Excel files, notepad files, JPEGs. Except for the file extensions, the names followed no protocols Christopher knew. He sighed, exasperated.
But though the research appeared haphazard, after what Dr. Felk told him over their drink in the hotel bar, Christopher knew the contents of the drive were organized to an almost military degree of meticulousness—just Robby’s own brand.
Felk was seated before a glass filled with ice when Christopher had entered at 6:05 p.m.
“What’s that?”
“Scotch on the rocks.”
“Make it two,” he told the bartender, settling onto the stool next to the older man. Wearily he rubbed his temples.
“Long day?”
Christopher nodded, then straightened up. He didn’t want to tell Felk the whole story about himself and Deborah. Steer the conversation away. Reaching into the pocket of his tweed jacket, he laid the thumb drive on the bar. “I need you to take this back to the boy.”
“Robby.”
“Yes. Robby. It would be a conflict of interest for me to look at his research before he applies. If he applies. You must know that. It would be unfair to the other—”
“Christopher.” Felk held up his hand. “Keep the drive.”
“Really, it’s not appropriate—” Christopher began to protest again, but Dr. Felk’s face stopped him. Almost translucent it was, the wrinkles and bifocals and thin lips belying his inner radiance. Christopher had seen that face before. In the crowd after his PhD commencement, a ceremony that his own father didn’t bother to attend. The card with the Phoenix postmark had arrived two weeks late, and he had let Deborah open it. He sipped the drink the bartender brought, remembering. So he’d hear him out.
“So. You’re convinced he’s exceptional.”
Felk nodded. “That morning we spent in the archives, he was a sponge. Anything to do with geese, with Anserinae, he just devoured. Pictures, specimens, charts—”
“If he’s spending hours on Baxter’s website and reading NTSB reports, he does seem to have the curiosity,” Christopher said slowly. “But there’s something about his manner, the way he presents himself. It’s—it’s off-putting,” he concluded lamely.
“That’s what I want to talk to you about.” Felk shifted in his seat. “Robby has autism.”
Christopher frowned. “I don’t know much about that. It’s neurological, right?”
“Right. Inhibits communication and social abilities, typically. People on the autism spectrum—and it is a huge range—also typically exhibit preoccupations with very narrow interests. Robby’s is the geese that struck the plane.”
“What about the hood? The wishy-washy handshake? The outburst at Baxter’s presentation?”
“Sensory issues, most likely. Kids on the spectrum have sensitive systems that get overloaded easily, and they shut down. The Baxter thing was because he felt wronged. He doesn’t know an appropriate way to handle it, so it came out like it did.”
Christopher rattled the ice in his glass. “You think a boy with all that going on can handle bird camp?”
“Absolutely.” Felk bored his gaze into Christopher’s eyes. “Cognitive deficits can accompany autism. But in high-functioning kids like Robby, more often it masks intelligence. Between you and me, I’m guessing that thumb drive will show he was a least a little justified about tearing into Baxter, too.”
“Why are you so interested in him, Arthur?”
Felk sat back. A long moment passed. “I had a brother who was autistic. Retarded, most people called him. No one had ever heard of ‘the spectrum’ back then—in the forties. He was pretty severe. Benjamin. He was four years older than me, and I talked before he did. Doctor advised my parents to put him in an institution. They agreed. With five other kids to take care of, they were overwhelmed.
“But it killed my mother. Literally.” Felk stared over Christopher’s head now, looking years and miles away from the bar. “The institution was probably a hundred miles from
our house. She visited every chance she got and when one visit was over, she was counting the days till the next. One December a blizzard was forecast when she was scheduled to visit. Dad tried to convince her not to go, but you’d have had to lock her up to keep her from Benjamin, especially right before Christmas.
“She made it for her visit.” Felk paused for a long swallow. “But she never made it home. Police never could say for sure why. The storm was over by the time she left the next day. Day was clear. Of course, they didn’t plow like they do now. Maybe she was going too fast. At any rate, her car skidded off the road, into a snow bank, which buried the car. If she wasn’t dead when she hit it, she was buried alive. The officer brought us her pocketbook. That was all.”
“I’m sorry,” Christopher said softly.
His words pulled Felk back to the present. He sighed deeply and looked at Christopher. “It broke my dad up. He started drinking. He was dead in less than ten years, his liver destroyed. So before I was out of high school, I lost both my parents, and my only brother, to the institution. And all because people were afraid of Benjamin. Afraid because he was different.”
“I’m sorry,” Christopher said again. He thought about Deborah, still in the early stages of her pregnancy, and the baby’s hidden, developing DNA strand. Was the Huntington’s gene there already? If so, would it remain dormant and benign? Or would it bide its time until the ominous threshold of thirty-five?
What about autism? The little he knew surmised a genetic role, too. His mother’s cancer, too. These were the kinds of risks having children posed. He shuddered involuntarily and drained his glass.
Felk nodded, accepting his inadequate rote sympathy. “There’s a happy ending, though. When we got old enough, my sisters and I transferred Benjamin to an adult group home in New Jersey. It became home for him. He lived there for more than thirty years. He got a job stocking grocery store shelves. He learned how to take the bus.
“He was a huge baseball fan. Baseball was to him what birds are to Robby. I took him to the Yankees play-offs a few years back—I think it was the highlight of his life. He died just last year.”
“That’s the happy ending?” Christopher looked at Felk curiously.
“Sure. Benjamin reached his potential. He was happy. He was living in the world, not locked away from it. You asked why I was interested in Robby. Benjamin is why.”
He swirled the ice in his glass. “But I’m a lot older now. Robby needs somebody younger.” He paused, then nodded again at the two-inch piece of plastic on the bar. “Take his drive back home, Christopher.”
Christopher had hesitated one more moment, then dropped the drive into his tweed pocket.
Now he stared at the cryptic list of files. He glanced at his watch. Three o’clock on a lovely spring Friday afternoon, but he didn’t have anything better to do. Randomly he opened a spreadsheet labeled “NTSBstrikes1985to2005.” It took a minute to load. The document had over one thousand lines of content. Christopher peered through his glasses, digesting. He sat up straighter and scrolled down farther.
Jesus. Dr. Felk was right about Robby.
TWENTY-ONE
Deborah stepped up to the nose-pierced cashier at Ivory Tower Coffee and Smoothies, looking longingly at the silver carafes lining the counter. Beside her, Julia poked a straw into a cup of dark-pink liquid and reproached her good-naturedly. “The Berry Blast is the best.”
Deborah sighed. “Make it two.”
She never thought it would be so hard to give up coffee. It was nice, though, Julia’s friendly needling. How long had it been since she went out with a girlfriend? Elizabeth had moved to North Carolina four years ago. There was Helen, but they only saw each other a few times a year. She’d missed friendship without realizing it, she thought, following Julia to a table.
“So, Megan’s going to celebrate Mother’s Day after all,” Julia said.
“Yeah. She was what, almost four weeks early?” The most pregnant at last week’s class, Megan, she of the arm and ankle tattoos, had not returned that week. Kate, of course, informed them that Megan had delivered early. Baby Carson was in the NICU at Cayuga Medical Center as a “precaution,” but he was expected to go home later that week. The news sobered everyone at the class.
“Mmm-hmmm. But the baby was almost six pounds. Doesn’t seem like he belongs in a NICU. I guess you never really know what can happen.”
“I guess not,” said Deborah, feeling uncomfortable. Helen had called the other night, again urging Deborah to get tested at Columbia so that she could “manage the pregnancy better,” whatever that meant. “So tell me about your nonprofit.”
“Oh, never mind.” Julia took a long sip. “You probably get sick of people picking your brain all the time.”
“No, it’s OK. I’d kind of like to talk about something I know, actually. And know I’m good at. All this baby stuff unnerves me. There’s so much to learn, and no way to practice before the real thing.”
Julia smiled. “Yeah, who decided that? All right. We need help with fundraising. What else is new, right?”
“What’s the name of the organization again? Interfaith something?”
“The Ithaca Interfaith Alliance. We run a food pantry and a community meal program. I got involved through my church.”
“A food pantry? In Ithaca?”
“That’s part of our problem.” Julia sighed. “Everyone thinks Ithaca’s a rich college town. But that’s not the whole story. There is real need here. I think we get a lot of Cornell people, in fact. The grad students and the adjuncts.”
Deborah stared out the window. The grass was greening up and students flowed by on bikes. She thought of the students she saw studying in the law library, buried behind piles of five-hundred-dollar books. Probably all purchased with student loan money. She’d never thought they could have a need as basic as hunger.
Julia continued. “So the churches who are Alliance members support it, collecting food from the congregations. We use their kitchen facilities for meals. But we’re starting to get more and more requests for meal delivery. Attendance really dropped this last winter. We heard it was because people couldn’t get out of the house.”
“Because of snow? Bad weather?”
“Maybe.” Julia looked pensive. “Or maybe they didn’t dare drive because they hadn’t paid their car insurance. Maybe they bought medicine that week, instead of gas. Or paid the heating bill.”
“Really?” Deborah thought about that. “People are that bad-off?”
“Well, think about it. You know all the stats about this economy. Record unemployment, especially long-term. How long could you last without a paycheck?”
Deborah shifted in her chair. She had been thinking about exactly that lately. She still hadn’t told Phillip. Under the best circumstances, he would have groused about a maternity leave, but the retrenchment from the law school donors made the timing even worse. Legally, he couldn’t deny her a leave. But he could—and would, no doubt—make her life miserable right up to and after it.
“Sorry.” Julia filled in for her silence. “I didn’t mean to sound so self-righteous.”
“Don’t apologize. You believe in your cause. That’s the most important thing in fundraising.” Deborah paused. “I was just thinking how I’m not sure what’s going to happen with my own job after the baby. And what I’d do without my paycheck.”
“Mmm.” Julia nodded. “One income makes it tight, that’s for sure.”
Deborah hesitated again. She didn’t know Julia Adams well yet. But if Deborah didn’t tell her she’d find out from the campus grapevine sooner or later. If her husband hadn’t told her already.
“Actually, I don’t know if there’s another one I can count on,” she said carefully, watching Julia’s reaction. “Christopher and I are separated.”
Devoid of judgment, Julia’s eyes relieved Deborah before he
r words. “I’m so sorry. Going through that while you’re pregnant must be very difficult.”
Deborah nodded, trying to will back her tears. The other day four large packages had arrived in Cayuga Heights. Inside was both the baggage they’d carried on and checked on Flight 1549, retrieved when the plane was salvaged from the river. Her purse, with her ID and credit cards and makeup bag and keys. Christopher’s red Cornell carry-on. Their matching navy rolling suitcases, a wedding gift from Helen and Matt. Inside Christopher’s, the green sweater she had given him for his last birthday. Their toothbrushes—his blue, hers red.
Sorting through the detritus of their lives lived together, Deborah felt mocked. The suitcases and purse were in bad shape, but the recovered contents, which someone had dried and folded, were in amazingly good condition, even smelling sweet from sheets of fabric softener placed in between the garments. Just the opposite of her personal aftermath. Still not visibly pregnant, she looked the same as ever outside. Professional, perfect Deborah. But her insides felt as battered as the waterlogged leather and canvas as she volleyed between resenting Christopher and missing him, blaming him, and feeling guilty, anticipating motherhood and fearing it.
But just like in the class last week, Julia was holding out a tissue. And even before she’d dried her eyes, Deborah felt the tears slow. A shared burden is half a burden. Shared joy is double joy. And she had that, too, she remembered, laying her palm on her belly. She took a long sip of the smoothie. It was pretty good, after all. She smiled as she dabbed her eyes.
“I’ve got an ultrasound scheduled.”
“What! Already?” Julia gasped.
As the spring sun streamed in through the windows, they feathered their nests together.
Chewing the end of his hooded sweatshirt string, Robby clicked “Play.” Two or three low notes followed by several higher ones. He clicked again, counting silently. Six was the most high notes in a row. He shut his eyes to block the distractions in his bedroom, concentrating as hard as he could. The low notes sounded almost like a duck’s quack, short and clipped. The high notes varied, some held twice as long as the others. He clicked “Play” again.