Daniel Isn't Talking

by Marti Leimbach

  ‘Be sure of that, Melanie,’ he says. ‘Because I can’t do it. If what you are asking for is to see a typically developing boy, you won’t find it in your son. I hope that is not so terrible for you, because I see something in Daniel that is wonderful, unique. It’s him, with or without the autism, that I see. And though I will try my hardest for you, for you both, for us all, I cannot produce for you a normal child. You know that, right?’

  I nod, taking this in.

  ‘And anyway, you know everything you need already to do it yourself. You play with him for hours every day and you do as good a job as I do.’

  ‘You’re better at it,’ I say.

  He bends around me so that I can see his eyes. ‘No, I am not,’ he says. Then he says, ‘You don’t need me. Not for that.’

  ‘I do need you.’

  ‘For you? Or for Daniel? I want to know that you see a difference.’

  I remember how Andy stood outside the gate of the pre-school with all those wretched parents and promised that Emily and Daniel would one day play together. It was true, for now they do. Even tonight they were playing in the bath, splashing water at one another, giggling. I remember how Andy taught Daniel to call me ‘Mummy’ because he knew that would delight me, and it did. How to pretend that his trains were having conversations, how to play-act with a puppet.

  But these are memories not about Andy, but about Daniel.

  ‘Have you ever been married?’ I ask him. It seems an absurd question. In any normal relationship I would have found this out months ago.

  ‘No.’

  ‘A long-term girlfriend of many years?’

  ‘Two,’ Andy says. ‘Serious girlfriends, I mean. I don’t know how many years.’

  ‘OΚ, then you know that love gets bound up with many other things. With other people, with events, the history of our lives unfolding. It is not isolated, like a seed, but plugged into a world with many branches. It is a sprawling, messy business, or becomes so eventually. I should know.’

  He considers this.

  I say, ‘So, how can you ask me to separate you from everything you’ve touched and changed? I can’t do it.’

  He nods. Then he says, ‘OΚ.’

  He sleeps for a few hours with me, then rises, goes downstairs, waits for me to join him, for the children who bounce against him as though they think he’s rubber, for the day to begin. He has to go to Wandsworth, to a family there with a boy of eight who has just started saying his first words. I will drive the rental car to pick him up and then we are off, together, the four of us. We are heading to Wales.

  ‘Dung,’ he said when I suggested this plan to him. ‘Who knew I’d get a holiday with you because of dung?’

  The rental car is a beautiful Volvo with leather seats and a radio, and also a CD player. It glides as though on air, obedient to the mildest expression of your fingers on the steering wheel, your foot on the brake pedal. So silent, I have tried to start the engine when it is already on. And the seats are like velvet, the way they hug you, the way they smell.

  What happened was the rental place gave me the wrong car. But by the time they found out it was too late, I was away. So I get the ‘luxury’ category for the economy price. It couldn’t be better, and the children think it is great fun. Daniel likes all things mechanical. I took him on a test drive last night and he spent the whole ride mesmerised by the purring engine, the movement of the gear shift, the steady clicking of the turn signal. Back home, he ran his hands over the dashboard, eyeing the dials, reading the numbers. He said, ‘Mummy has a green car.’ It is green, metallic, shiny, like a new American dollar.

  For the occasion of our trip I have scrubbed their car seats, which I fix into place now, loading the boot with the luggage, the swimsuits and towels, the sunscreen and plastic buckets, the water wings and beach balls. All of Daniel’s special flour and the ingredients for the gluten-free cakes I make, all the vitamin pills and the fresh oranges I will squeeze for their breakfasts.

  ‘I want my talking books,’ says Emily. ‘The ones Andy gave me.’

  The talking books are her newest craze. She has begun to read the highlighted words inside them: us, it, dog, cat, man, child. The code of language reveals itself to her and now she finds, as I once did, that all around her are messages.

  ‘I won’t forget them. But please, Emily, you’d be better off in the house with Veena right now.’ Emily refuses to leave the car. She will wait as I load it, she says. She will keep me company.

  ‘Darling, it is many hours to Wales. You’ll get bored sitting in the car. Why not go play?’

  ‘I’m not bored,’ she says.

  I explain to her that it will grow very boring there very quickly, but she will not listen. Finally I say, ‘Go find all your ponies to bring along! You wouldn’t want to leave them, would you?’

  She considers this, her finger to her mouth, then traipses back into the house, holding her Mickey Mouse by the neck as usual. I turn to her and say, ‘You get chocolate for being cute!’ This makes her smile.

  I am leaning over the trunk, rearranging the bed quilts which I’ve rolled lengthwise, strapping them in shape with a belt. I am considering a thousand details. Do I have enough of Daniel’s gluten-free flour? Do I have enough sunscreen? Do I have enough goat’s milk? Have I remembered craft paper for Emily, trains and track for Daniel? All these details fly through my mind, so that I don’t notice there is someone watching me until he has been there some time.

  It is Stephen.

  ‘You don’t return my calls any more,’ he says. It’s a beautiful late summer’s morning, the breeze rustling the trees, laden with leaves, opulently green. The sun is low in the sky yet at ten o’clock, so we stand in the shade of buildings. He is wearing his beige suit, a loose tie, brown shoes. He’s shaved his face clean, gotten his hair cut. I am wearing Andy’s jeans, the ones with no knees, a ripped pocket, the colour of clouds. They are loose on me, but not much. They are long on me, but only by a couple of inches. In them I feel I could hike a mountain, reach the summit and spring cartwheels across the sky.

  ‘I hope you get good weather in Wales,’ says Stephen. ‘Here the forecast is for rain.’

  ‘Rain is fine,’ I say. ‘I expect rain.’

  ‘I got a very strange call from an estate agent,’ he says.

  I nod.

  ‘Hey, it’s your house,’ he says, opening his hands as though offering me a gift. ‘But if you needed help selling it you could have told me so. I’m happy to arrange for the collection of that pile of …’

  ‘Shit,’ I say.

  ‘To have it removed,’ he continues.

  I finish sorting the luggage, close the boot of the car, wait for what is next. For surely there is something. Stephen stands there, looking at me. His hands look empty, his face unsure.

  ‘I’ll sign some papers, if that is what you want,’ I say now. ‘But I need a lawyer. I guess you already have one. Maybe you could do me a favour and not tell Emily anything just yet. I really don’t know how much she should be expected to understand.’

  He says nothing.

  ‘If we remain reasonable, it might not be so bad,’ I tell him. ‘So let’s try that, OK?’

  ‘I want to be very reasonable,’ says Stephen. Then he comes closer to me, folds his arms across his chest, sighs. ‘But I don’t want a divorce.’

  I look at him. His mouth is soft; his eyes search my face. He is being a man more tender than he is used to. It suits him and it moves me. I cannot think too much about it.

  ‘Please,’ he says. ‘Five minutes. Please talk to me.’

  I can remember just after he left to live with Cath, before he went to Penelope, how I hung on the phone begging him to speak to me, to come home. I remember how I made deals with him. ‘I won’t call you again for three days if you just talk to me now.’ And how his silence on the phone felt almost like a weapon. I’d try to make a joke, but he wouldn’t laugh. I’d lavish long, verbose arguments for why he needed t
o stay, why we needed him home, and he’d grow even more curt. If I cried, he stopped talking. If I got cross, he hung up. Now he wants five minutes on a summer’s day. And what reason might I have not to give it?

  I don’t want Daniel and Emily to see their dad – not right now, just as we are leaving – so I tell Stephen to wait a minute. Then I go inside and ask Veena if she will watch them for me. Daniel is on the floor with Play-Doh, making trains and cars. He looks like any other little boy, except that occasionally he swipes the air in front of his eyes with the figures he makes, much in the manner of swiping a credit card through a machine.

  ‘I’ll be right back,’ I promise.

  ‘Can I bring all my ponies?’ asks Emily.

  Stephen and I walk down the street, passing the Italian pastry shop, which features cheesecakes and loaves of bread studded with herbs, pizza in thin dials, coffee that fills the air with a scent that makes me think of dark wood and ochre, the accents of strange men.

  ‘You look great,’ he says, seated with me on a bench in a public park, not far from lovers and drunks, kids on Rollerblades, old ladies with bread for the pigeons.

  I cannot believe he has picked this time, this day, this hour. I want to shout at him, Why now?

  ‘I’ve thought about some of the things you’ve said,’ he tells me. ‘Maybe you are right that I belong home.’

  He says this as though ‘the things’ I said were said last week. That he’s had a good night’s sleep and now, in the clear light of day, it seems that I might have been right after all.

  I look at him, astonished, amazed. He carries on affably, says the whole thing just seemed to get away from him, that he thought there might be something wrong with Daniel – perhaps his hearing, or maybe he had a problem with speech – but he also thought there was a lot more wrong with me. He didn’t make the connection between the two. And once the diagnosis came, he just ran scared.

  ‘I was a coward,’ he says, shrugging his shoulders. ‘That’s what I feel I’ve been.’

  I cannot disagree. But neither can I condemn him for it. Watching him now, I wonder how much he’s acting, and why he’s doing it. There’s a shadow of deceit here, like the dark spot on an ocean’s surface that tells you below are sharks.

  I say, ‘I didn’t make it easy. And I didn’t really know. I just felt upset all the time, like something terrible was going to happen.’ As I say these words, I realise all at once that this is exactly the feeling that has been missing since I let Andy into my life, the dread and dismay, the heaviness that accompanied me everywhere. I am light again, free and young. I am happy once more. I think of Daniel and I see progress, not disability. I look at Emily and I see a girl with a brother who plays with her. I try not to look at Stephen.

  ‘You are a lot smarter than I am,’ he says now. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Because something terrible always does happen.’

  Now, all of a sudden, I am crying a little, wiping my nose with the back of my hand, turning my face down and bringing the hem of my T-shirt up to my eyes. I am crying because I feel that Stephen’s sudden return will take away that feeling of well-being I have, that lightness that I have worked hard for, that I have won. Now that he is here he has automatically cancelled out the days and weeks, the months I’ve had around Andy. All of Daniel’s progress seems wrapped up in those months. And it seems that, for some reason, I am crying for Daniel

  In front of me, all at once, is Stephen’s handkerchief. I take it, willing myself to stop crying, but finding it harder than it ought to be. Wasn’t I lying in Andy’s arms just hours ago? Didn’t I laugh when he held up the ‘ingenious’ sign? Wasn’t he there in the morning, isn’t he waiting now for me to pick him up in our fancy rental car? Can’t I hold on to what is good in my life now? Must I relinquish it as stolen booty to which I have no right?

  I am entitled. I am a good mother Perhaps one day I will have the chance again to be a good wife. I tell myself these things. But Stephen always gets what he wants. He is shrewd and utterly unstoppable. If you think you are leaving without me, you’re kidding. He knows how to work things in his favour and he has a sense of entitlement that is a force of its own. He takes my hand and I feel powerless to resist his touch. I am thinking now of someone else anyway, not of Stephen or Andy, or even of Daniel and Emily. I am thinking of a young man I knew in what feels a lifetime ago, who I realise all at once was very much like Andy in the way he saw the world through glad eyes and very much like Daniel, who loves mechanical things, trains and motorbikes, racing cars and helicopters. And he loved me. When my mother died, he rode his motorcycle from New York to Boston after getting off the phone with me in the middle of the night. ‘I’ll be there in three hours,’ he said, and he was, too, marching into my flat smelling of exhaust fumes and snow. Something terrible always happens. Will it happen now? And why is it terrible? Listen to him speak, my husband, with his lovely voice and that smouldering look, a look that will win your heart if the words do not.

  ‘It is all my fault, Melanie, I didn’t want to heat, didn’t want to know. I underestimated you, I’d forgotten who you are. You once asked me if I remembered what I loved about you. Can I tell you now? Will you let me?’

  I shake my head. Across my skull my protest echoes, no no no.

  He is going to tell me anyway. I have no choice. He says, ‘I loved that you were never worked over and shaped and made to be a thing, as I have been. That you were never groomed and polished, never stylised. It was different for me. I was readied to be a particular type of man. And I learned to want to be that man. Am I making any sense? While I was being made into this monstrous gargoyle like the sort you might find on a listed building, you sprang up as though in a meadow, like a wondrous, delightful tree. If you want to know what I loved about you, it was that. Who you were. Who you are now.’

  Oh fuck, it’s over. I feel Andy receding from my life like vapour. I feel a coldness in my heart where once there was a thrill of possibility. I am with my husband again and he’s taken it all away.

  ‘What about Penelope?’ I say. Perhaps he has forgotten about her? Shall I remind him now? She is so much more suited to him. I have come from nowhere; I am no one. It always bothered him, this. Rita without the sexiness, Eliza Doolittle without the charm.

  ‘Penelope is thirty-five and she wants to have children. There is nothing wrong with that. But when we started to talk about it I realised something,’ Stephen says.

  ‘That you don’t want any more kids? That you are afraid the next one might be autistic as well?’ I want him to say that. I want him to say it because I think it is the truth and I am terrified of believing any lies.

  Stephen shakes his head. ‘No. What I realised is that when I think about having kids, there is only one woman who I can imagine being their mother. And that isn’t Penelope. It’s you. It always was.’

  I shake my head. I don’t believe him and I wish he’d stop. How will I live with myself, pushing away my children’s father? I’d do anything for them and – certainly, definitely, unquestionably – if I didn’t have Andy in my life I would take Stephen back like a shot, if only for the children’s sake. For Daniel, who looks just like him with his sandy hair, his brown eyes. For Emily, who hangs on his neck when he leaves, calling Daddy.

  Emily. If I am going to pitch for her, this is the time.

  ‘Do we have to send Emily to that pre-prep?’ I ask. ‘Can’t we find a school with shorter hours?’

  ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘If that’s what you’d like. And I am willing to let go of the idea of special school as well.’

  No hesitation, no sigh of disapproval. Just a straight answer.

  ‘Daniel will not need special school,’ I tell him.

  He says, ‘I trust you.’ And I wonder what exactly he means. With the children, I suppose. He trusts me with the children.

  I say, ‘If something had happened to you, Stephen, if something had happened to you instead of Daniel, I want you to know that I w
ould have fought just as hard. And for as long as it took.’

  ‘I know that,’ he says.

  And then another thought occurs to me. It appears in my mind like a lit candle, illuminating everything. ‘But I don’t think you’d fight for me,’ I say. ‘If something happened, I mean.’ And something always does, I think to myself. Haven’t I learned that much? Haven’t I seen this before with my own eyes?

  ‘Oh, but I would, Mel, I would.’ He means it; he believes it himself. His voice is sugar, his words line up like soldiers. But somehow I feel like Eve, being whispered to in the garden.

  He sits with me here in a park full of crowded trees and borders of colour saying all the things I once longed to hear. I am sad for him, and for me, remembering how much I missed him. But I feel there are other forces at work here, things that are not being said, circumstances not fully disclosed. He is so shrewd, and so tempting, awesome in his own way. But he is not telling me the truth – it is the only thing of which I am certain. I think of Penelope, who wishes for a family just as I have done. She is older than me by five years. Five years is not much until you are planning pregnancies. Hit your mid-thirties and you’ll find five years counts as a lot. She has pinned her hopes on Stephen, who feels she isn’t quite right for him. She was all right to look after him when his marriage fell apart, but not all right to bear his children. Oh dear, what a price he has put on his affections. And I am feeling awfully tired, looking at his pretty face,

  I cannot trust him. Perhaps if I tried hard enough I could make myself, I think about what Andy once told me. He’ll come back. Then he will go again. I can see now that this is true. And when he goes next time, what will he take with him?

  I put my lips against Stephen’s cheek, my hand across his heart. I kiss him tenderly, as though my lips may bruise him. I realise that I am about to hurt him and that never, in all the years we were together, did I ever before deliberately do him harm. I find it impossible to speak. To say what I must say. I am thinking about what Penelope might feel if she were here with us. I’m thinking about Andy, waiting confidently in Wandsworth for a woman who cannot scare him away even with two young children, one autistic. If I consider them for a moment then I feel better about what I want to do, which is to tell Stephen goodbye. I will say this and everything that was us will recede even further; trickle away until eventually it is nothing. It is not nothing now. Not yet. Stephen is looking at me, hoping it isn’t too late. But I know what I will do and he knows, too, because he can see it in my face as I stand up, still touching his shoulders. He knows that I will go now. Already, he is looking away.