Following Ezra (16 page)

“I . . . w-i-l-l . . .”

He looks at the monitor to make sure the words are appearing. Reassured, he looks back to the keyboard and keeps typing:

“I . . . will . . . go . . . to . . . the . . . Disney . . . Store . . . with . . . Abba.”

When he finishes, he looks up at me, eyes serious, then pleading. He nods vigorously, first his head, then practically his whole upper body. I can’t help but smile. They are the same nine words that he has been repeating for the previous eight hours. But now they feel different. Ezra has communicated in an entirely new way. To me it feels like the famous scene in
The Miracle Worker,
when Annie Sullivan pumps water into Helen Keller’s hands while spelling the word, and Helen makes the connection: “W-a-t-e-r . . . Water! Water!”

I will go to the Disney Store with Abba.
The moment feels pregnant with possibility.

I grab the keyboard and quickly tap out my response:

“What will you do there?”

Ezra, still silent, leans forward again and reads my message. Without hesitating, he punches the keys with his index finger, typing his response:

I call to mind an afternoon some years earlier, when Ezra was four. At that age, most children are nonstop squawk boxes, bursting with questions and opinions, exploring the world, learning right from wrong. Ezra at four was so detached that he often seemed not to register when someone spoke to him. His hearing was fine, and he was not being defiant; it simply didn’t occur to Ezra to respond. We would call to him—at mealtime, or to get in the car for school, or when we simply couldn’t find him—and hear only silence.

Then on that one afternoon I called to him:
“Ezzzraaaaaa!”

After a second, emanating from the backyard, I heard his high-pitched reply:
“Whaaaaaat?”

Shocked, I ran to get Shawn from another room.

“Did you hear that?” I asked.

“What?” she asked.

“I called Ezra and he answered.”

I tried again. Again, he answered from the backyard. We savored the moment the way other parents celebrate a baby’s first steps. Our son was responding.

That was what passed for a breakthrough when Ezra was four.

And now this. Our prosaic, typed exchange about the Disney Store is, in fact, the longest continuous conversation I have ever had with my eight-year-old son. I have the instinct to hold his arm and keep him in the chair, because I keep worrying that Ezra is about to bolt, fleeing my presence as he has so many times over the years.

Remarkably, he does not flee. Ezra calmly and carefully reads each sentence and phrase I type, giving it a moment’s thought, and then pecking out his response with deliberation and silent confidence. He scarcely wavers from his agenda: We’re going to the Disney Store. Now, though, instead of repeating the same phrase over and over, he tries every angle into the issue.

 

 

“How will you feel if I tell you that you cannot buy anything today?”

 

 

“What will you do?”

 

 

“I like to be with you all the time but when you are in stores and you ask to buy LOTS OF THINGS I get upset. It makes me sad.”

 

 

“No. You will not! We can look, but we cannot buy toys today.”

 

 

“Do you have money?”

 

 

“Then how can you buy toys?”

 

 

“No. The bank is closed on Sunday.”

 

Ezra is not stuck repeating the same words. He also isn’t a pushover. My furtive dream has been that if I could ever get Ezra to type he might, like Tito, reveal some deep, hidden side of himself. Instead, the remarkable breakthrough in this conversation is that he is participating at all. And the written version of Ezra is strikingly similar to the spoken version. He is himself, only more so. He uses the same quirky syntax.
I want witch snow white and the seven dwarfs thing there is.
That is the way Ezra talks at age eight, creating his own unique grammar, probably because that is the way his brain processes the words he hears others speak.

While I have his attention, I decide to probe a bit:

 

 

“Ezra, can I ask you a question? What makes you feel happy?”

 

 

“But what else makes you happy?”

 

 

“When I say ‘Yes’ to what?”

 

 

He isn’t trying to be funny or clever. It is the only way Ezra knows how to be when he wants something—persistent, single-minded, inflexible, intent. Perhaps it is his determination that is keeping him in this dialogue. That’s fine with me. I try a few other questions to see if Ezra will open up a bit.

 

 

“Who’s your favorite person to be with?”

 

“Why?”

 

 

“Are you different from Ami?”

 

 

“What makes you different?”

 

 

“Why?”

 

 

By then, Ezra is squirming again in his chair, taking a bit longer to grab the keyboard, and assuming the more familiar flight mode. I look at my watch. We have been passing the keyboard back and forth for nearly an hour, with barely a spoken word between us, except for my occasional prompts—“keep going,” “just a little more”—to keep his attention on the screen. Ezra isn’t writing soul-searching poetry or revealing a deep understanding of life he has previously concealed. (But he has convinced me to take him to the Disney Store—where, alas, he is disappointed to find no dwarf toys.)

Ezra in type is just Ezra.

If some part of me feels disappointed, the greater part finds it comforting, even exciting. I have spent nearly an hour in conversation with the same boy who has eluded me for years. And maybe he wasn’t hiding anything after all.

CHAPTER NINE

At first I think we’re experiencing an earthquake. I’m lying in bed when I feel the house shake—
thud
,
thud
,
thud
—and then I hear a voice shouting something I can’t quite make out. It’s coming from just outside our bedroom. I sit up and listen more carefully. Somebody’s jumping up and down. It’s Ezra.

“It’s February first!” he is saying with the kind of enthusiasm most people reserve for overtime soccer goals and airport greetings. “It’s February
fiiiirrrrst!
” I’m not sure what the significance of that is. I scramble out of bed and into the hallway, where eight-year-old Ezra, still in pajamas, is pacing in small circles on the carpet, looking at nothing in particular. As he does most days, he has risen at full speed. Early morning grogginess is a foreign concept.

“It’s
February first
, Abba!” he says to me with so much gusto that the words roll out like a cheer.

“What’s happening on February first?” I ask, still not quite awake.

“It’s the first day of the new month!” he says, and he keeps running and shouting.

That’s it. My son has sprung out of bed at dawn to celebrate a new page on the calendar. His joy isn’t about what he expects to
happen
. It’s about the day.

This becomes a monthly ritual in our home. February 1, March 1, April 1: Ezra greets each arriving month with equal glee and fervor, his celebration echoing through the day. When he notices the month and day at the top of the newspapaper’s front page; when he overhears the radio announcer say, “Good morning. It’s Tuesday, July first”; when he spots the date on a bank’s digital display board or writes it at the top of his homework sheet, he cannot help but whoop it up all over again: “It’s February first!

“It’s March first!”

“It’s the first day of November!”

The turning of the seasons inspires the same kind of merriment: spring, summer, winter, fall. Ezra wakes up the family on the twenty-first of March or December with that same unrestrained joy:

Other children count down the days to Christmas or a birthday, to baseball spring training or to summer vacation. Ezra celebrates the simple passage of time.

His enthusiasm is easy to share, and we revel along with him. No matter what my mood when I awaken, it is difficult not to join him. As I wipe the sleep from my eyes, before I have the chance to bring to mind the worries of the day—mounting bills, pressures at work, a disagreement with Shawn—I do what Ezra does: I rejoice in the arrival of a new month.

In fact, long before he knew how to read a calendar, Ezra displayed an unusual attraction to the annual cycle, eagerly welcoming his favorite Jewish holidays—Passover, Purim, Hanukkah—and, before that, showing an extraordinary fascination with people’s birthdays. Even at four or five, Ezra had one question he regularly asked almost everyone he met: “When is your birthday?”

He demonstrates a remarkable ability to memorize and recall the months (sometimes the days) in which birthdays fall. Driving him to preschool one day, I hear him reciting a combination of months and names. Then, listening more closely, I realize what he is doing: Ezra is enumerating the months of the year in order, and listing the birthdays he knows in each month.

Walking in the neighborhood, he encounters entire families we know and—without bothering with formalities like “hello”—rattles off the birth month of the mother, the father, the children—even the dog. Without any apparent effort, he commits to memory the birthdays of our immediate family, his four grandparents, his aunts and uncles and first cousins. Ezra isn’t using flash cards or consulting a date book. He just knows.

One evening Shawn and I are in our bedroom talking when she mentions the name of one of our nieces. Abruptly, Ezra appears at the door, apparently having overheard.

“Shana is June,” Ezra says, accurately. “Shana and Dalya are the only relatives that aren’t in a thirty-one-day month.”

As quickly as he appeared, he walks away.

The words tumble out so quickly that at first I’m not sure what he said, so I call after him and ask him to repeat it. He does.

“Shana is in June. Dalya is in November,” he says. “Thirty days! Everybody else has thirty-one days.” And then he rattles off the names of the rest of our extended family, sorting them on the spot by month: “October is Uncle Mark and Abba and Papa; March is Aunt Marcia and Grandpa . . .” and on and on. Shawn and I look at each other. He’s right. Everyone else in our family was born in a month with thirty-one days. Not only has he memorized the birthdays of at least seventeen relatives, he has taken the effort to perform a rudimentary statistical analysis, sorting the dates into categories another person might not have even considered or noticed.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that nearly all of our relatives were born in months with thirty-one days. But it requires a certain kind of mind to notice. Hearing his observation about his cousins’ birthdays gives me insight into the kind of thinking Ezra is doing in the long hours he spends on his own, avoiding social situations. It makes me pause to consider the mental processing that occupies him while the rest of us are talking. If he can mull over a list of ordinary dates and emerge with such a precise and magnificent insight, I wonder, what other astounding discoveries might be in his future?

I come to relish my periodic, precious glimpses into the extraordinary ways Ezra’s mind makes sense of the world—particularly when he shows flashes of his powerful and unusual memory. When he is five years old and we are focused on early intervention—that is, finding him as much help as possible while his brain is still developing—he has a packed weekly schedule. It includes time at two different preschools (Temple Isaiah, with Dawn, and a therapeutic school called Smart Start) and various sessions with specialists. One morning I am shuttling him to his gymnastics class (taught by a man named Dave) when I think to remind him what’s on his agenda.

“Ezzy,” I say, “you know what you’re doing today?”

He answers with a litany: “Dave’s gym is one, Temple Isaiah is two, Smart Start is three, home is four, playing with water is five, dinner is six, dessert is seven, bath time is eight, reading books is nine, time to go to bed is ten, getting in Abba and Ima’s bed is eleven.” He has calibrated his routine down to the part where he regularly wakes up in the middle of the night and, unable to get back to sleep, sneaks under our covers.

“What’s the number after eleven?” he asks.

“Twelve comes after eleven,” I answer.

“Waking up is twelve, making pancakes is . . . what’s after twelve?”

“Thirteen,” I say.

“Making pancakes is thirteen. Sarah’s gym is . . . What’s after thirteen?”

“Fourteen.”