The Home Front (11 page)

Todd and Sasha exchanged glances. A New Age extravagance had crept into Rose’s vocabulary, a new level of conviction the bad cop would eventually have to contend with. But for the moment Todd seemed content to let Sasha coax his wife down to earth.

“Sometimes kids just need to be loved for who they are, not who we want them to be.” Sasha had been on the brink of this declaration for months. At the risk of insulting Rose, she should have said it long ago. Part of her job was managing expectations, for the sake of parents as well as their children.

“Loving Max for who he is doesn’t preclude visualizing who he might become,” Rose said.

“I’m wary of visualizing anything with kids on the spectrum,” Sasha said. “It’s like fanning the fire.”

“What do you mean?”

“They visualize way too much as it is. Instead of seeing dust motes swirling in the sun, Max sees solar systems. An alternate universe light years away from ours.”

“Isn’t there something wonderfully imaginative about that?”

“He’s a little boy, not a science fiction writer. He needs to be grounded in the real.”

“The real is relative.”

“That’s a fairly accurate diagnosis of autistic cognition, you know. Believing with every fiber of your being that the real is relative.”

“That’s obviously not what I meant. I’m just saying we shouldn’t underestimate the power of positive thinking.”

“If anything, Max’s thoughts are too powerful. He can’t see beyond them.”

“Not just any old thoughts. Healthy thoughts. Thoughts of abundance rather than scarcity.”

They weren’t exactly in an argument. You can’t argue with cheery champions of the best of all possible worlds. Ordinarily Sasha would have let Rose’s blind optimism run its course. But something about her investment in perfection seemed to threaten the therapeutic process. It left very little room for Max. They all needed to be on the same page, or at least on the same planet, to facilitate his recovery.

“Trust me,” Sasha said. “His world is already way too abundant. He can’t take it all in. We need to teach him to focus on one thing at a time.”

“I’ll leave that to you,” Rose said. “You’re obviously very good at it.”

Rose ostensibly meant it as a compliment, but they both detected something dismissive in her tone. Sasha expected as much. Parents could be just as resistant as their children, sometimes even more so. Rose, on the other hand, was surprised at her own audacity. She had come a long way since accepting Dr. Dillard’s diagnosis at face value.
Your son may never advance beyond the mental age of five or six
. She remembered Tashi warning her against treatments that might rob Max of his gifts while curing his so-called deficiencies. She was less and less certain what, if anything, was wrong with him.

Todd felt curiously indifferent, watching them spar over Max’s prognosis. It was a familiar feeling, symptomatic of his desk job waging virtual war. Umpteen hours a day he surveilled the lives of others thousands of miles away. Feeling like a spectator in his own home was even worse. At least at work he could drag a mouse and a drone would do his bidding. He could push a button and activate a Hellfire missile. There was a two-second lag time as his directives bounced from satellite to satellite, leapfrogging across cyberspace before activating distant launchers. But the fundamental mechanism of cause and effect was still intact, the prerequisite of being the principal player in his own life. Even remote control pilots retained a modicum of control. At home, nothing he did produced the desired result. Everything was inconsequential. He loved his son, who shrank from him rather than loving him back. He loved his wife, and she retreated further and further into la-la land. His daughter’s primary emotional relationships were apparently online, given the amount of time she spent on Facebook. Everyone was missing in action, worlds away from here and now. Little wonder he was so detached.

“Sorry to break up the party,” Todd said. “Uncle Sam is beating the war drum.”

Every Monday Todd excused himself with a variation on the same joke. Pesky old Uncle Sam was always cutting their meetings short, summoning troops from the far corners of the Mojave Desert. Todd didn’t really sound sorry about leaving. Even indifference could be exhausting. He was tired of the prospect of treatment with no end in sight. Tired of Sasha’s relentless questions. Tired of his wife’s relentless optimism. Tired of feeling helpless. Going to work was a pain in the ass, but it provided a haven for husbands of all stripes, a refuge from all that was uncontrollable on the home front.

* * *

Sasha apparently decided that since Max had learned to hold a fork, he was ready to wield a paintbrush. Todd heard about their first session of art therapy after the fact. Otherwise he might have intervened. Quite frankly, Sasha’s unwonted leap of faith surprised him. Usually she was eminently pragmatic, a refuge from his wife’s delusions. It felt like his ally was betraying him, siding with Rose over how best to negotiate Max’s condition. The worst possible approach was expecting too much of him. Give the poor kid a break.

When he got home from work that night, Todd could hear Max screaming even before he pulled into the driveway. It was hot and the windows were open. God knows what the neighbors thought. He followed the screams into the bathroom. Max was in the tub. The water was an alarming shade of red. Rose was trying to wash what looked like gashes on his arms. Max kept slapping back her hands, as though it hurt even more than usual to be touched.

“What happened?” Todd asked, modulating his voice to avoid escalating the situation.

“Nothing much,” Rose said. “How was work?”

“What’s going on here?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Did he cut himself?”

Rose looked over her shoulder. Her mascara was running, like she’d been crying.

“It’s paint, not blood,” she said. “You’re projecting.”

“Don’t start with me.”

“Must have been a rough day at the office.”

She was right, as usual. Her sixth sense never failed her, even though he kept his oath never to divulge the logistics, let alone the consequences, of his drone missions. Blood everywhere. One of the rookie pilots had puked all over his keyboard, which Todd took to be a good sign. Evidence that the kid didn’t think he was just playing another video game. At the same time, none of the soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan had lost their cookies. Evidence that they were trained soldiers, not wimpy nerds playing at war in Nevada.

“Paint?”

“Art therapy.”

“What next?”

“The last thing we need tonight is your negativity. It’s been a long day.”

“Tell me about it. Do you want me to take over?”

“I’m already all wet.” Rose wiped the back of her hand across her eyes, smearing her mascara even more. “Remind me to wear goggles when I give him a bath.”

“Try it without the washcloth. It’s too scratchy.”

She dropped the cloth, and it disappeared into the red depths of the tub. Max struggled just as frantically when she scrubbed him with her fingers. They assumed he was just resisting human contact, as usual. The possibility that he might be cathected to the painted patterns on his arms escaped them. He was so rarely emotionally invested in anything new. Even Sasha had underestimated the success of their first art therapy session.

She had started by painting her own picture. ABA was big on what they called modeling. Todd called it Robotics 101. There was no denying that rewarding a child for aping mindless tasks produced tangible results. Max could now match squares with squares and stars with stars. Once in a while, he even managed to parrot a few words. Rose was ecstatic. But Todd hated the way his son’s voice droned when he repeated after Sasha.

“Say you love Daddy,” Sasha said.

“You love Daddy.”

Max extended his hand and Sasha placed two M&M’s in his palm, a red one and a brown one. He ate them both and Sasha made a mental note, which she later recorded in her logbook. Max was expanding his color palette.

“Not me, Max. You.”

“You.”

Max’s hand shot back out, but Sasha ignored it. He started banging his fist on the table.

“Say I love Daddy.”

“I love Daddy.”

“Good boy, Max.”

This time Sasha gave him four M&M’s, one red, two brown, and one green. He peered at them out of the corner of one eye and threw the green one across the room before eating the other three. There was a limit to his willingness to tolerate gratuitous novelties. He drew the line at green. Todd wasn’t entirely convinced that disembodied words prompted by the promise of sugar really qualified as language. If so, the meaning was clear. What Max really loved were M&M’s.

M&M’s were on the verge of being replaced by assorted dried fruits, sugarcoated in deference to Max’s sweet tooth. This was Rose’s innovation, the flavor of the week. She had devoured yet another pseudoscientific book, this one about pediatric nutrition. The author was making money hand over fist claiming that nutrition was the determining factor, both the cause and cure of autism. Fruit in particular could cure anything. Apples and oranges and peaches would transform Max into Rembrandt.

Since Max’s vocabulary was primarily visual, Sasha thought painting might unlock his ability to speak spontaneously rather than by rote. Shapes were like words. For the most part, they still existed in isolation, completely autonomous, which was the primary symptom of autism. Max liked lines because they were lines. He especially loved circles because they were circles. If he could see that lines and circles could be arranged into faces with actual human features, he could say
I love Daddy
with more conviction. It would be a multistep process, translating shapes into things, things into people, and people into something worth caring about.

First Sasha drew a picture of Max sitting at the table with a paintbrush in his hand. He was sitting upright in his favorite outfit—sweatpants and a tee shirt—with a big sheet of blank paper spread out in front of him. Sasha painted a big red smile on his face. She used color judiciously. Everything else was brown in deference to his comfort zone.

The real Max had thrown his paintbrush across the room. He was sprawled over the back of his chair, gawking at something, probably the window, which was infinitely more interesting than whatever Sasha had to offer. She got up and closed the blinds. She retrieved his paintbrush and slipped it back between his limp fingers. He didn’t cry out, as he usually did, when his window disappeared. He was too far away to even register a response.

“Look at this, Max. We’re drawing a picture.”

Sasha manipulated his limbs, trying to get him to sit at the table like the little boy in her picture. He kept collapsing like a puppet severed from its strings. Sasha moved her chair closer to his so he could see her picture even with his chin resting on his chest. In theory. He gave no indication of seeing anything.

“Look at all these circles and lines, Max. You can draw anything you want with circles and lines.”

Next Sasha drew a picture of Rose standing over Max’s left shoulder. She was pointing at his picture with apparent enthusiasm. Sasha’s little mother and son were nothing more than glorified stick figures. But they were remarkably animated. In college, she had taken a couple of cartooning classes. Her favorite comic strip was
B.C
. Its elemental sensibility made sense to her. Nothing was really very complicated. Just profound. This primal approach was the key to her success as a developmental therapist.

Max’s stare was no longer vacant. He had managed to find something infinitely fascinating either on his shirt or under the table. His body was still limp but he was popping his lips the way he did when he was lost in his own world. Sasha lifted his head so he could see her drawing. The popping stopped. When she let go, his chin dropped back onto his chest as though his neck couldn’t support the weight of his head. The popping resumed.

“That’s your mom, Max,” Sasha said. “You and your mom. Now let’s draw your dad.”

Todd’s distinguishing feature was his hair, which was cropped short and the same vivid red as Max’s mouth. He was smiling, too, equally enthralled by the little boy’s picture of nothing.

“What are you drawing, Max?”

She slid his paintbrush, which had fallen to the floor, back into his left hand. Then she loaded her brush with red and started painting circles on the little boy’s blank canvas, one after another until there were three rows of four, a perfect rectangle of circles.

Max didn’t look up, but his lips had stopped popping somewhere around row two.

She dipped her brush again and painted a stripe on Max’s arm. He didn’t lash out the way he usually did when someone tried to touch him. He didn’t move at all until she started painting the fourth stripe. Then his eyes alone shifted away from whatever it was they were or were not seeing so he could watch what Sasha was doing. The brush flattened the hairs on his arm. Then they inched back up, glistening with paint. Together they watched it dry. Sasha proceeded to the other arm. Max’s eyes shifted almost imperceptibly, tracing the pattern of the work in progress, one stripe after another, until there was another sequence of four.

“Four lines on each arm,” Sasha said. “Four circles in each row.”

Sasha pointed to each stripe, one after another, and then to each circle on the canvas. Max’s eyes followed her every move.

“Next time you’ll do it yourself. You’ll count to four with your paintbrush.”

* * *

The car goes too fast. He can count all the mailboxes. But he can’t add up all the house numbers going forty miles an hour. The speed limit is thirty. Mommy never slows down unless there’s a red octagon or a little red circle hanging so high he can barely see it from the backseat. Car seats are like straightjackets, which aren’t really straight. Even Daddy says so.

There’s a mall with seventeen stores, a theatre with sixteen screens, three drive-ins, and hundreds of cars parked between diagonal lines. Two with their lights left on. Some parked backward, which is upsetting, so he counts the ones with little balls on their antennas instead.