Daniel Isn't Talking

by Marti Leimbach

  ‘So what is the story? You won’t come home unless I agree to put Daniel in special school?’

  ‘No, that’s not it,’ he begins.

  ‘Then why won’t you come home!’ I say this quite loudly. OK, maybe I’m yelling.

  But it doesn’t matter. He’s already off the line, having taken another call.

  ‘Where’s Daddy?’ Emily asks. She asks every day after school, like clockwork.

  ‘At the office, of course,’ I tell her, trying to sound cheerful. She holds a picture of a caterpillar and a butterfly. The caterpillar has been drawn by making a rectangle and then adding eyes. The butterfly is a number 8 that has been turned on its side, then coloured. If the school had let her do it in her own way they’d have been more successful, but even so the colouring is good. ‘Hey, that’s a really good picture!’ I tell Emily.

  Emily slaps the picture onto my stomach. Then she says, ‘When is Daddy coming home?’

  ‘He’s coming to take you to the park,’ I tell her. She doesn’t look satisfied with this answer, which isn’t really an answer at all, as she well knows. ‘Come on, let’s skip!’ I say. She holds my hand while I balance Daniel’s pushchair with the other. In this manner we manage to skip along the sidewalk – well, mostly skip. It’s a miracle we don’t all fall down.

  ‘Which day is he coming home?’ Emily says. She concentrates on skipping, her hand clasping mine. ‘Today?’

  ‘Soon,’ I tell her. ‘That’s good skipping.’

  ‘But when?’

  ‘Let’s hop!’ I say. ‘Ready now? One foot!’ I say, hopping. But Emily stops suddenly, nearly pulling Daniel and me over. She is not going to hop or skip. She is going to cry.

  ‘He’s coming on Saturday,’ I tell her, scooping her up in my arms. ‘And maybe even earlier if we’re lucky.’

  The book I have on this bizarre therapy for autistic children emphasises the need to get kids talking as soon as possible. So, Daniel must learn to talk. He has to learn the names of objects, which means he has to listen as I tell him the name of an object. The only way I can get him to pay any attention to me at all is by stealing his Thomas the Tank Engine and holding it above my head. When finally he stops screaming and lunging for Thomas, I put a car on the little plastic table in front of us, and say, ‘Car,’ and put his hand on it. Then I let his hand go and I give him the train as a reward.

  The first time I tried this he threw himself on the floor, banging his head against the cupboard door and flailing his arms and legs for about four minutes as I stood above him, waiting. I found it very difficult not to immediately scoop him into my arms and give him back the train. Every instinct said do something – anything – to make him stop crying like this. But I had to get his attention somehow, and confiscating his train – though difficult and painful – seemed to be the only thing that worked. He soon stopped whacking his head but was determined not to have anything to do with me, the table, the car – none of it. Eventually I managed to catch hold of his hand, placing it on the car. I said, ‘Car!’ and then handed over Thomas.

  The second time he did not throw himself on the ground but just screamed. I put his hand on the cat, said the word ‘car’ and then let him have his train.

  The third time he put his hand on the car himself.

  ‘Car!’ I said, and for a moment he let his hand linger.

  That was worth a dance around the kitchen, he and Thomas and I. It was Prince on the radio, a song I hadn’t heard in too long … I just want your extra time and your … kiss.

  Stephen has been living at Cath’s now for just over two weeks, seeing the children on weekends. This is totally insane, but I cannot convince him that it is totally insane. He visits his own house to play with his own children, takes them to the park, kicks a ball around with Emily. Everything just as he used to do, except then he leaves to sleep at his sister’s house. Two weeks of this and I’ve really had enough.

  ‘Right, fine, you’ve made your point, Stephen,’ I say. ‘But please –’

  For my benefit he always arrives at the house in horrible clothes, his grey tracksuit bottoms and an ugly sweatshirt, his hair dirty, needing a shave. He’s trying to look ugly, but he must know that men like him only look sexy when they do this. If he wanted to look ugly he’d have to slap on some black leather trousers three sizes too small, push his neck into one of those long, clinging turtlenecks that ride around the jawbone, grow a bushy beard that hangs like moss off his chin, and shave his head. If he did that, maybe I could relax. But not if he’s going to saunter into the house looking like he just crawled out of bed. That will not work.

  I miss him kissing me goodbye in the early morning, his face smelling of soap. I miss him sitting at the end of the couch with his laptop, stabbing at the keyboard replying to messages. I miss seeing his favourite beer in the fridge, the way he used to bring me tea in the mornings and we’d all climb under the covers to cuddle. And I miss him in bed.

  So I try to imagine him with the mossy beard and no hair and the turtleneck from hell and the matador trousers. Oh sure, it works for a few minutes. Until I see his real face smiling out of the photograph I keep on the mantel of the four of us at the primitive little cottage we have in Wales. Then I lose it.

  ‘I’m so sorry about this, Mel,’ says Cath, speaking to me from her surgery. ‘What do you want me to do, throw him out? Would he go back home if I did? I can tell you he’s miserable anyway. Just sits up at night watching TV and drinking beer.’

  ‘No, that’s normal for him,’ I say.

  ‘Is that what married people do?’ says Cath. ‘God, I’m glad I’m single. The only other thing he does is play with his sodding computer or his phone. All communication is strictly limited to machines.’

  ‘Hmm. Again, normal,’ I sigh.

  ‘Look, I know you’re going to ask me if he talks about you at all, but the answer is no. He doesn’t say a word. Nor does he tell me when he’s going to move out, which is too bad, because I’m rather looking forward to that day. He certainly isn’t happy, I can tell you. He just hangs about on a Saturday night turning channels on the TV with his thumb.’

  ‘That’s who he is,’ I say. ‘The man I married.’

  ‘Crikey, you can have him back, I tell you.’

  ‘Well, just keep me posted, OK?’ I say.

  ‘Yes of course. And let me know – about Daniel, I mean. I feel responsible.’

  Why would Cath feel responsible for my child?

  ‘I ought to have seen it. Being a GP,’ she says. ‘It’s just that we hardly get any training in developmental delays or autism. The only kids I ever saw who were autistic were much older and quite severe. Not at all like Daniel,’ she says.

  And this brightens my whole evening. Quite severe, not at all like Daniel! Not at all like Daniel!

  One thing I cannot live without is a VCR. This one is broken and so I go immediately to John Lewis and get a new one.

  ‘But your first one is still under warranty,’ says the salesman.

  ‘How long will you need to repair it?’ I ask.

  He shrugs his shoulders.

  ‘Right there is the problem,’ I say. ‘You’re telling me it could be days.’

  ‘Well, actually, it could be weeks,’ says the salesman.

  I shake my head. I hold out the money. ‘Just get a new one in a box,’ I tell him.

  In the evenings I am so lonely that I call my brother. My brother, older than me, is mostly on one army base or another. When he’s not on a base, he lives with a woman who regresses to past lives and thinks she used to be a Gregorian monk, a Roman soldier, a handmaiden to Queen Elizabeth, and also a victim of the sinking of the Titanic. She is roughly twenty years older than he is, nearly at the menopause, and has spent her present life being a kind of freak, rehabilitating traumatised parrots and living in a trailer in Maine, where often you will find my brother, if he’s not out on some useless evening course investigating aspects of his inner being or just getting wasted
on reefer.

  ‘You were so hot when you were young,’ says Larry now. ‘I mean, I’d show your picture to all the guys and they would just go Shiiiiit.’

  You have to be desperate to want to speak to my brother If you can hear him, that is. Those parrots make one hell of a racket, and he says he’s come close to cooking one of them, who sits in a corner pulling out its feathers and saying ‘Life is sweet’ over and over again.

  I am learning a useful trick with Daniel. What I do is use his obsessions to my advantage. For example, while he is sleeping I take his Thomas train, stick it high up on the curtains that Veena hates so much, and then wait for him to wake up and go searching for it. When he can’t find it, I point to it on the curtain pelmet. He eventually figures out that pointing means he has to look. He spies the train, and then – just as he sees it – I reach up and get it for him. I do this several times a day, putting Thomas on the tops of picture frames, or tied to the light-pull in the loo, or up on a high shelf in the cupboard. The minute Daniel actually looks to where I am pointing, he gets his train.

  And then, one day, I have an even better idea. I put the train up on the curtain rail and take Daniel’s hand, arrange it into a pointing shape and get him to point at the train himself. As soon as he points, I give him the train. It works every time. Soon he’s pointing for biscuits, milk, his disc-shaped objects, which I plant all over the house in high places.

  ‘Car,’ I say, and he touches the car.

  ‘Dumbo,’ Emily says, and he touches Dumbo. ‘Don’t break his ears,’ says Emily, snatching Dumbo away.

  Here is one that takes my breath away. Armed with a plastic jar of bubbles and a yellow wand, I swipe a bit of bubble fluid, hold the wand in front of my lips and say, ‘Ready, steady g-g-g-g –’

  ‘O,’ says Daniel.

  And I blow, and blow, and blow.

  We have a game in the pushchair. Emily and I run behind it, pushing it along the wide paths in Hyde Park, and then we suddenly stop.

  ‘Say GO, Daniel,’ says Emily.

  Daniel does his best, which is ‘Gah!’

  And we’re off again, another sprint. Then a sudden stop while we catch our breath. Daniel sits in the pushchair impatient for more.

  ‘Gah!’ he says, and on that cue we take off, beating the ground with our trainers, laughing as we glide past dozens of disapproving faces, who have perhaps forgotten the joy of hearing their child’s first words.

  ‘How exactly do parrots get traumatised?’ I ask Wanda, who is Larry’s ‘lady friend’, as she calls herself. I am stuck with her because Larry is not there and she has answered the phone and gets a kind of kick out of the fact I am calling from England.

  ‘People buy ’em, don’t want ’em, get rid of ’em. Then they don’t settle, so they come to me,’ she says. I can hear the parrots in the background, screeching. It’s so loud I have to hold the phone away from my ear. ‘So, you’re calling from England, huh? Why don’t you have no English accent, then, if you’re calling from England?’ says Wanda.

  ‘Because I’m Larry’s sister, Wanda,’ I say. Duh. ‘I grew up with him.’

  ‘But he’s not English!’ she says.

  It’s too much trouble to explain.

  I say, ‘Wanda, why don’t the parrots settle? Why do they come to you in the end?’

  ‘Because they’re psychologically abnormal. Can’t you hear them? They’re psycho loser parrots. Nobody wants them.’

  ‘But why not?’

  ‘Are you telling me you cannot hear this blaring noise over here?!’ she shouts.

  She puts the phone nearer the birds and it sounds as though there is a screaming mob taking over the nation. I wish she’d have warned me before doing this. Then Wanda comes back to the phone and says, ‘They destroy things, shriek, freak out and break their wings against the cage bars. They bond with one person. So if that one person lets them down, they go psycho. What about your kiddies, then? Do they have English accents?’

  ‘The talking one does,’ I say, thinking about Wanda’s ‘loser parrots’. What she describes sounds a little like Bettelheim’s theory of how children become autistic, or more precisely what is called ‘institutionalised autism’, which is when you take a child and refuse to give it any parenting, any love, toys, or stimulation that tells the child who he is. They withdraw and fail to develop.

  ‘So the parrots start out normal, then?’ I ask her.

  ‘Yessirree. It’s the hand of man’s done it to them,’ she says. ‘Hand of fucking man.’

  ‘But they get better?’

  ‘Well, it can take some time, I tell you.’

  ‘What if you never left them?’ I ask. ‘Would they become traumatised?’

  ‘Not if they stay with the first owner, no. Then they’re happy parrots. Parrots with a smile.’

  ‘If you loved them and cuddled them and played with them from the time they were born?’ I ask. I know this is what I did with Daniel. I cannot remember a day away from him. And then suddenly I realise I have sunk to a new low in my life. I am seeking reassurance from Wanda, who believes she was once an Iroquois squaw.

  ‘You looking for a parrot, honey?’ says Wanda. ‘Because if that’s what you’ll give him, that kind of love, he’ll be your buddy for life! But don’t take one of these psycho birds! My birds are a BIG disappointment.’

  When Stephen comes this morning we have a surprise for him. He looks a little impatient, wanting as he does to take the children to the Princess Diana Memorial Playground, which they love. He cooperates with me because I beg him, and because I am hoping things might turn around.

  ‘OΚ, stand here and watch this,’ I say. I then get the bubble jar, find Daniel and bring him by the hand over to where Stephen is. He’s interested at once, bubbles being round, and round being his favourite shape. He stands beside me as I kneel on the floor with my bubbles and all my hopes.

  ‘Ready, steady …’ I say.

  ‘Go!’ says Daniel.

  Stephen can’t believe it. He watches as Daniel swats at the bubbles, stamps them with his feet, turns around, his fists balled, putting his face into the ones that still float.

  ‘That is amazing!’ Stephen says, his face alight. ‘Do it again!’

  And so, once more, just for Daddy, I get the bubbles out and give Daniel his cue. ‘Ready, steady …’

  ‘Go!’ says Daniel.

  Stephen is so excited. He kisses Daniel all over his face, turns to me and hugs me hard. I cannot remember anything feeling so good as this hug. He wraps his arms around me and I cling to him, fold my arms over his shoulders and wish more than anything he’d kiss me, really kiss me. That he’d claim me as his all over again. He’s still wearing his ring, after all, we’re still married.

  ‘How did you do this?’ he asks. His eyes are full of love; he thinks I’m a genius. So I tell him about ABA, about how I read this book and then I got on the Internet and downloaded instructions and examples and all sorts of stories about kids who couldn’t talk but learned how through this method.

  ‘You motivate them by using whatever they like: chocolate, toys, whatever. And you break down every goal into tiny chunks.’

  ‘You’re remarkable,’ he says. ‘You’re brilliant.’

  I’m waiting for him to kiss me, as surely he will. Kiss me and come back and be here with us again. ‘We miss you so much,’ I whisper to him now.

  But he looks down, then away from me.

  ‘Stephen? Can’t we do something?’

  ‘Do what?’ he says. And there it is, his indifference, like an iron lid clamping down on top of me. It seems to me I even hear a thump.

  Emily is watching the Muppets on television and turning the dials on her Etch-A-Sketch at the same time. Daniel has returned to his train. I take Stephen’s hand and lead him out to the garden. There’s a bench there by the ornamental pond, which now looks like a fizzy green pool of slime beneath layers of chicken wire. Sitting on the bench I ask him, please, to come home.

/>   ‘I know I was a little crazy … and maybe I still am. I know I neglected you, but I’m getting much better at coping now that I know what I have to cope with. Stephen, I’d do anything for this family. I love us,’ I say. ‘Us. You and me and Emily and Daniel.’

  He doesn’t say anything. He looks pale and very tired. He’s put on some weight, I see, and from the way it hangs on him I think it’s probably all beer.

  ‘Well, yeah, I need to talk to you about us,’ he says.

  Us. I don’t like the way it sounds coming from his lips.

  ‘No, don’t,’ I tell him. In my mind I’ve floated up, away from Stephen, hovering in the air above like a departing soul of the newly dead. ‘No, don’t say what you’re going to say. Daniel is talking now – let’s just think about that.’

  ‘One word,’ says Stephen. ‘I still think he needs to go to some sort of school. Not that what you are doing isn’t important. Not that I’m ungrateful –’

  ‘But you are ungrateful,’ I say. I cannot believe this is happening. Not now, not after how many times I’ve played this scene over in my mind. In my imagined version of this moment, when Stephen saw that Daniel wasn’t so hopeless, he came back and we made a fresh start, and everything worked. I even imagined Daniel a couple of years older than he is now, speaking in sentences, playing with toys, being part of a group of laughing children. I should never have let myself dream like that, or at least I ought to have reminded myself it was only in my head, and that it would never really happen.

  Now I touch Stephen’s chin, turning his head so he’ll look at me. I’ve done the same thing with Daniel countless times. I’m not quite ready to give up, however grim things seem right now, so I say firmly, confidently, what I truly believe. I say, ‘If he can say “go”, he can say anything.’

  Stephen licks his lips nervously. ‘I understand what you are telling me,’ he says. ‘And I will support you through this … whatever it is … you are doing, to a degree –’