‘What wonderful things? He’s already got a home,’ I say. It is a favourable condition for her that she reports this to me by telephone. If I’d been in her presence and actually watched her say such a thing to me with her bright smile and stinging eyes, I cannot tell what might have happened.
‘Well, I know he does, of course he does …’ says Daphne. But it is no good, I see where she sits on the subject of Daniel. Tricia says they are grieving people, but I don’t see grieving people. What I see is an old man more concerned about his own son than he is about mine. Well, OK, I won’t blame him for that, but grieving? And what about Daphne, who thinks Daniel should be in a home, if such things still exist? She’s imagining a stout white building with pleasant gardens and a name like ‘Little Springs Centre’ or ‘Magnolia House’. In her mind she is travelling by car down the smooth, soundless drive shaded by oak trees, surrounded by discreet tall fences. ‘Isn’t it marvellous how beautiful it all is!’ she is saying, as though the residents in this opulent prison are luckier than the rest of us.
‘Your mother rang,’ I whisper to Stephen. We are all sitting on the floor watching Sesame Street and eating pizza. Emily giggles at the Cookie Monster and watches the letter Q do a ballad about how great it is to be the letter Q. Daniel seems to like the letter Q as well. He’s looking at the television anyway, I say to Stephen, ‘She wants to put Daniel in a home.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. She never said that,’ he says.
‘I heard her.’
‘She’s just worried about how we’ll cope –’
‘How you will cope.’
‘She didn’t mean anything by it,’ he says.
‘So she told you, too, right? She said the same thing to you?’
‘I’m not talking about this,’ Stephen says. And he means it.
But things get better because Daniel likes Elmo. He looks at Elmo and laughs. He bounces up and down, his fingers in his mouth, his eyes shining. I take his hand and make it so that he is pointing and then hold it, pointing, at the screen until he is almost doing it on his own.
‘That is what is missing,’ says Stephen, rising to his knees, and staring open-mouthed at Daniel. ‘What you are doing there. That.’
Daniel’s chubby hand is just about able to point at Elmo, and his face is bright. He looks like any other child and so, for the time being, we are all laughing. Emily loves the pizza, making long strings of the cheese. Stephen is delighted with his boy. Right now, this second, I’d say we are the happiest we’ve been in a long time. Because Daniel is pointing. Or trying to.
We’ve been asked by Emily’s new school to enrol her in a pre-school before she arrives in the autumn at their pre-prep. This is to ‘prepare’ her. So, if I understand correctly, we are meant to prepare her for the school that is meant to prepare her for the school that prepares her for the school from which she will eventually go to university. It seems a bit much to me, but when I protested to Stephen that I felt this was overkill for a child not yet five years old, he looked at me impatiently and said, ‘Don’t stand in her way.’
‘Don’t stand in her way?’ I said. I followed him out of the house, still in my pyjamas, my hair flying every direction. ‘In her way?’
But Stephen isn’t the sort of man who will engage in an argument on a city street. ‘I’ll see you tonight,’ he said in a perfectly even tone, as though there was nothing wrong at all.
So now, at everyone’s request except Emily’s, I get her ready in the mornings for eight thirty. I strap Daniel in the pushchair, take Emily by the hand, and we walk half a mile to the pre-school, where Emily gets to use glue and glitter to make us cards, sing songs during circle time, and argue about who gets what toy at playtime.
‘What do you like best about it?’ I ask enthusiastically.
‘Going home,’ she says.
‘That’s a good one. You have good jokes,’ I say.
‘I am not joking,’ Emily says.
I say, ‘OΚ, but there must be something else you like.’
She thinks about this. ‘During milk time you get a biscuit.’
‘Not bad,’ I say. ‘I don’t get any such thing during milk time. Your school sounds great!’
‘The biscuits are yucky,’ she complains. ‘And I only ever get one.’
She doesn’t want to go. I don’t want her to go. But the pre-prep says this is good for her and so she goes.
‘I miss Daniel,’ she says, dropping her school bag on the pavement, bending over the pushchair, her lips pursed, kissing the top of his head.
‘You do? You miss him?’ We are standing outside the pre-school gates surrounded by mothers and nannies and dozens of tiny, beautifully clad children holding their sugar paper stiffened by wooden sticks and pasted-on seeds. The theme for this week is spring and they’ve done a study of the germination of beans. ‘Oh, Emily, he misses you, too!’ I say, fairly singing my exclamations. ‘He loves you! He loves you so much! He needs you! We all need you so much!’
The mothers and nannies around me have noticed this moment I am having with my daughter, who loves her baby brother, who misses him and lays claim to his affection with a kiss on the head. They are not impressed by my mushy response. Eyes roll. Some of the nannies look as though they might gag.
Around five in the morning or so, when Daniel can’t sleep, I take Emily from her bed and tuck her in next to Stephen. If she should wake, I want her to feel at once the comfort of him next to her. Then I put a sweatshirt over Daniel’s pyjamas, find his thickest socks, his canvas shoes, and go directly to the Italian pastry shop and sit on their shining stools. Round and round I go with Daniel in my lap. He laughs, holding his hands out, squinting his eyes. Round and round until I am so dizzy I might fall off.
The guys there remind me of wild cats, so young and sleek, looking exactly alike with their dark hair, their dark eyes. They are lean and full of themselves, treating the kitchen like a kind of gym, hurling pans to each other, pivoting on their heels with trays of hot bread. They sing in English to the radio, stomp around in workmen’s boots, their aprons tied loosely, batted by their thighs. They throw bits of uncooked pastry at me to get my attention. Their father or uncle or whatever he is – Max is his name – wipes the sweat from his face with his meaty hands, barking orders to them in Italian to please not throw food at the lady. But they make me laugh, trying to pretend it was all an accident, that the dough just flew from their hands, landing down my blouse. One of them – he couldn’t be more than sixteen – gets down on one knee and proposes to me, his apron wadded in his hands as though he is holding a bouquet.
‘I’m already married,’ I tell him.
‘But are you loved?’ he says.
‘This one is especially stupid,’ says Max, swatting his son on the head.
A dark January night, rain thumping the window pane. There’s been some sort of problem with the boiler and the whole house is steaming hot. On one side of the bed, in a messy heap, is every book I could find on autism, on language in children, on play therapy, on child development. Many of them are from Iris, my lady from the supermarket, who told me that she didn’t really recommend the older books. So much has changed, she told me. The books occupy the whole of one side of the bed. On the other side there’s myself and Stephen.
‘Don’t make me pregnant, please,’ I whisper to him. His head is above me, I speak into his chest. ‘Not that you are planning to … I didn’t mean that … only just be careful.’
He stops, and there is an awful silence between us. Then he rolls off me and stares up at the ceiling.
‘Is there no place we can go now, nothing we can do?’ he says, his voice getting louder with each word.
‘Please, don’t be angry –’ I begin, but it is too late.
‘I’m not angry!’ he shouts. And now the whole room seems to echo, and I brace myself for whatever he’s going to say next, which is that we cannot even make love without me thinking of children – existing or potential – and be
ing worried about them in one way or the other. I am troubled, too, that he will link all this anxiety back to Daniel, to autism, to the mess we find ourselves in, and that he will tell me Daniel has ruined his life, just as his father has declared. But he doesn’t say anything. He stares up, glassy-eyed, occupying a place far away and un-reachable. I pull on a nightshirt, run my fingers through my hair. I am all at once embarrassed by everything about me. I want to cover myself up. I want to run.
‘Stephen, don’t do this,’ I say.
‘Don’t do what!’ he says.
I have no answer. What shouldn’t he do? Be angry? Of course he should be angry. Anyway, in this new world we’ve entered since Daniel’s diagnosis there is no emotion that is out of bounds. But there is something more going on here, and I don’t want to say it and he doesn’t want to say it.
Stephen begins to shake and I see now that he is crying. I realise all at once that I’ve never actually seen him cry. I’ve seen him shout, hit a wall or two, and I saw him when Daniel was diagnosed, how floored he was. But this is different. It is as though he has been completely brought down. I can do nothing to soothe him, although I try. On my knees, beside our bed, I speak to the back of his neck, but he will not turn to me, or look at me, or answer.
‘Don’t blame me,’ I say. ‘Don’t blame yourself.’
* * *
Dear Dr Bettelheim,
Were you there when I rocked my baby to sleep, or held his rattle for him before he could hold it himself? I didn’t know I could love so much as I have loved my son, my daughter. Why do you insist this isn’t the case? Why do you openly despise me, despise all mothers of children with autism? I am twenty-nine years old. I would give my life publicly if I thought I could lift from my baby this appalling diagnosis. If it were that he could be normal – just ordinary like other children – I would climb the scaffold and tie the noose myself, smiling as I waved away the pain of watching him unable to speak or play or look at people. You would not hear me complain. I would run for the chance. You’d have to beat me away from those steps.
I write this letter and fold it carefully, putting it in an envelope, and pressing it into my jewellery box, an ornamental wooden box lined with crimson velvet that Stephen gave me on our first anniversary along with a pearl necklace. It is hard to remember that he loved me that much, but I’m trying to.
Bettelheim has been dead for many years now, of course, A case of suicide.
I want to be a good wife. A good mother The glue that keeps a family together, a sign of permanence and peace in our lives. Isn’t that what a woman is? What else are we anyway? Lots of professions, lots of titles you can read in the want ads. I lost my first family early and ever since then I’ve been scrambling to get a new one. Marcus and I were trying to start a family before he died. We weren’t married because both his parents and my own mother thought we were too young. So our plan, if you can call it that, was to fake an accidental pregnancy. What kind of idiots fake an accidental pregnancy? But that is what we were doing. And I’m sure we would have succeeded, given our commitment – which went far beyond simple bedroom lovemaking, and included the seasonal shelter of willow trees, cornfields and beach dunes, not to mention several modes of mass transport. But that didn’t work, although it might have done if we’d had more time. I try not to think too much about him because if he were still here then certainly Emily and Daniel would not be. It’s an awful thing to admit, but if it meant losing Marcus to have my children, then that is a deal I would make.
‘This is a completely twisted sort of logic,’ says Jacob, wagging his chin back and forth slowly as though to punctuate the sentence. ‘Nobody had to be killed in order that you would have your children. I don’t understand your meaning.’
‘Yes you do,’ I tell him. I’m glad I didn’t tell him about the letter to Bettelheim. God knows what he’d have made of that.
He looks up at the ceiling, then down to his clipboard where he writes furiously, his lips pressed grimly together.
‘I’m a mother. And mothers are like bears,’ I say. ‘OΚ, you don’t have bears in this country.’
‘But you wouldn’t actually kill Marcus?’ Jacob says, his pen angled toward me like a microphone.
‘Jacob, stop it. Of course not. No.’
‘Then what are we talking about?’ he says, his hands outstretched.
‘I’m just saying that if he hadn’t died I wouldn’t have my children. And that I don’t allow myself to think of him or miss him or anything because to do so would be like a betrayal of Daniel and Emily.’
‘And Stephen?’ says Jacob.
‘OΚ, add him in,’ I say, rolling my eyes.
Today, as part of being a good mother and wife, I do a survey of all the local dry-cleaners as I can’t remember where Stephen’s clothes are. He is sure it was me who deposited clothes at the dry-cleaner and did not retain the ticket. OK, so maybe it was me, I say. I have to admit it sounds like something I would do. I will find the two suits and three ties he needs right away, yes, I will do that before his business trip to Vienna. No problem. It was a real oversight on my part not to keep that ticket taped up on a cupboard door or strapped onto my person or someplace anyway. A mistake, though if I may say, it would help if the dry-cleaner put the name of their enterprise on their tickets instead of just a number, which one can easily mistake for a raffle ticket or any number of other things, like Lucky Dips or racing stubs.
So I’m going from dry-cleaner to dry-cleaner all morning with Daniel in the pushchair dragging his toes along the pavement so we can’t go quickly, that’s for sure. Emily is in pre-school so I can focus all my attention on him, but he does not want to include me in whatever fun he finds in his disc-shaped objects. He keeps these objects in his lap, and is particularly attached to the top from a Snapple bottle. Nobody is any help at all finding Stephen’s suits. And aren’t they an unfriendly bunch, these dry-cleaning people? They want all sorts of very specific information like when did I bring them in. Isn’t it enough that I brought them in? At least, may have brought them in because I have brought other items here before. Of that I am certain.
Another thing – and I’d just like to say this now – is that I think parents with autistic children should have disabled parking badges. No, they should have their own badges that let them park even closer than those with regular disabled parking badges. I think the other disabled people would agree. Certainly this lady in a wheelchair, who my son is now trying to push off the chair so he can sit in it, would see the logic in my idea. She is screaming for help, and the race is on now between me and a security guard.
‘Just tell me if you found the suits,’ says Stephen. I am breastfeeding Daniel, which is annoying Stephen, who feels all babies should be off the breast by nine months. Emily was off the breast by nine months, he often reminds me. But Daniel is different – if one can make such an understatement without begging laughter – and he has a cold coming on. The glands in his neck are up. His nose is running and I can see it is hard for him to turn his head. The only thing I can get him to take is breast milk, so Stephen will just have to live with that.
About finding his suits, I say, ‘Not yet.’
‘Mel, I need those suits. They cost hundreds and hundreds of pounds. I don’t even have time to replace them right now and I need them for this trip.’
‘Don’t they sell suits in Vienna?’
‘Who the hell knows? Yes,’ he says impatiently. ‘But I want my suits.’
I promise I will find them and I set off the next day, doing the rounds once more to all the dry-cleaners, not having a clue when I dropped the suits off but begging them to look anyway. According to the one sensible book I read about teaching autistic children, you are meant to spend the whole of the day distracting the autistic child away from their autism, their odd obsessions with objects, for example. But today is a total loss. Feeling ill, stuck in his pushchair, forced to charge around with me looking for Stephen’s suits, Daniel is ge
tting no help out of this crisis at all. Not today anyway.
‘Did you find them?’ asks Stephen, calling me from the train platform around dinner time.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘And where were they?’
‘In the closet,’ I state flatly.
‘In the wardrobe?’ he says, immediately translating my American ‘closet’ to his British ‘wardrobe’, a mild correction I choose to ignore. Then he starts to laugh. He says, ‘They were in the wardrobe the whole time? Oh, Melanie! You banana!’
But I’m not laughing. I’m actually very upset. Daniel has his face pressed up against the front of the television and Emily is sulking because her Febo Dumbo has broken. Earlier in the day Daniel turned off the washing machine mid-cycle, which I didn’t notice, so when I went to open it gallons of water poured on to our kitchen floor. I haven’t had more than two hours’ sleep in a row since Daniel caught this new virus and, generally speaking, I am not in a good mood. But I have to make myself laugh along with Stephen – I know I do – because the man hasn’t touched me in three weeks and because I am beginning to think he’s never going to again.
And I’m feeling scared. Sleepless, tearful. I can’t concentrate or think straight. I race through the house adjusting curtains, organising toys, scrubbing a stainless-steel pan until it is surgically clean. Veena asked if I wanted her to babysit the children so that Stephen and I could go out to dinner tonight before he leaves for his business trip, but I said no. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t sit that long in a chair.
‘Whatever you are taking, stop taking it,’ said Veena.
‘I’m not taking anything,’ I said. ‘I do it all on Nescafé.’
But I guess I ought to have gone out with him. Once again, I’m the idiot. Because the next morning, after he leaves for the airport, I find a Hamleys bag with a present for Daniel’s third birthday – a shaggy Elmo glove puppet which you might call ‘life-size’ if Elmo were an actual living thing, which I am sure he is not despite how lifelike he seems, certainly more lifelike than my husband, who for the past few weeks is always on the telephone, in the office, or typing emails on his laptop. There is a card with Thomas the Tank Engine on the cover, a button saying ‘I am 3’ and a roll of bills inside a rubber band. A thousand pounds. A thousand pounds is way too much if he is planning to return in a few days, as he told me he would. And it’s pitifully little if he’s never coming back. Which is my new, and not unfounded, fear.
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