The Home Front (21 page)

“He’s processing sensory information on a higher plane,” Tashi said.

“Then why drag him down?”

“An excellent question, Rose. Try, instead, to ascend to his level.”

“How?”

“By speaking his language.”

Rose remembered, vaguely, similar advice during one of their previous sessions. This time she wrote it down.
Try to speak his language
.

“I will,” Rose said. “I do.”

“Being gifted can be lonely. Only you can relieve his isolation.”

It made perfect sense at the time. But she couldn’t help traveling into the future, imagining what Todd would say.
Autism is a sixth sense
. Rose underlined it twice, as if to ward off his sneering cynicism, which affected her far more than she was willing to admit. His voice vied with Tashi’s, engaging in an ongoing heated debate, the real source of her burning desire.

“I realize now why I called,” Rose said. “The problem isn’t Max.”

“Of course not.”

“It’s my husband.”

“Listen to yourself, Rose.”

“I’m trying.”

“You’re inviting problems by trying to solve them.”

“I can’t help it. Todd gets angry if I don’t.”

“If you don’t what?”

“Acknowledge the problem.”

“Live in the solution. Let Todd have his problems, if he’s invested in them. Everyone is entitled to their own way. You can choose to live in the solution, no matter what he chooses to do.”

“It’s like we’re living in different worlds.”

“You’ve got to find common ground.”

“I have no idea what that might be anymore.”

“Little wonder,” Tashi said.

It sounded more like criticism than commiseration. The possibility that Tashi might be getting impatient with her was inconceivable. The only plausible explanation was that she was administering some of the tough love reserved for her inner circle, something Rose’s soul mates discussed wistfully during conference calls.

“If you have no idea what you want, how can you manifest it?” Tashi said. “You are learning to desire no less than perfect health, happiness, and prosperity. Offer this gift to your husband, who is no less deserving. What does Todd want?”

“He wants us to be like we used to be.”

“Translate that into the Now.”

“I don’t know how.”

“What was the happiest moment in your marriage?”

The question caught Rose off guard. It was the first time they had ever broached the subject of the past. In spite of the fact that Tashi knew virtually nothing about their marriage, Rose was convinced that she alone could help them save it.

“Speeding across the desert in our Jaguar.”

“Find your way back to that desert, Rose. It’s still here. Right here. Right now.”

“We had to sell it to pay for Max’s therapy.”

“Your happiness?”

“The Jaguar.”

“One less distraction. The less you desire, the happier you’ll be.”

Rose could just imagine what Todd would say to that. She doubted whether his conception of happiness would ever coincide with her own, the way it did when they were first married. She knew better than to raise these reservations with Tashi, who would dismiss them as incidental, mere window dressing in the larger scheme of things. Even she had always thought the Jaguar was about desire. All those afternoons and evenings making love. She saw now that it had been about the journey, not the destination, the eternal vanishing point, not the motels dotting the side of the road.
It is better to travel than to arrive
. They were still on that never-ending highway, stalled and bickering over who was at fault, now that the proverbial feeling was gone. All that wasted energy, embracing loss instead of each other.

“I’m going to leave you with one last paradox, Rose.” As the voice faded out, meditation music began to fade in. “You know you’ve come a long way when you’re back where you started. Full circle.”

“Is that why Max loves circles so much?”

“Didn’t I tell you he’s a prophet?”

* * *

The old fart with the autistic kid had apparently made the first cut. Todd and an undisclosed number of other officers were summoned to Glendale, Arizona, for the first of three training exercises. Officially, they were there for routine requalification and medical exams. Even drone pilots had to prove their eyesight was still good enough to read an altimeter or spot an al Qaeda operative with his pants down, as the saying went. But everyone knew it was more like an audition for redeployment. A squadron of lucky contestants would win a trip to Afghanistan.

Todd clocked out at 1900 on the nose on Friday, leaving the trailer park in the capable hands of Captain Frick. A flight out of Creech early Saturday morning would get him to Luke Air Force Base just in time for roll call. He would have gone straight to the base, to catch some shut-eye in the barracks, if he hadn’t promised Rose he would put Max to bed. After making auspicious progress with Sasha, Max was apparently shutting down again. He was stimming almost nonstop. He hadn’t picked up a paintbrush in weeks. Todd still didn’t buy the idea that Max had miraculously rendered a minimalist portrait of his father. But even if the circles and lines he had drawn were just circles and lines, they were better than nothing at all. The most alarming measure of his regression was his refusal to eat anything but round tan foods again. Things were going from bad to worse, back even further than square one.

Rose blamed too many disruptions in their routine. Todd in particular was dropping the ball, working late a lot and skipping bedtime rituals even when he was home. The truth was he had ceased to believe in the efficacy of some of the more far-out aspects of Max’s regime. It seemed to him that Rose’s New Age mumbo jumbo had seeped into what had originally been a more pragmatic, behavioral approach to his recovery. If Rose believed that ushering in the Age of Aquarius could heal Max, she was on her own. At the same time, Todd was perfectly capable of keeping his skepticism under wraps when it served his purposes. Sometimes it was easier to just go with the flow.

The minute he got home, Todd climbed into bed and held Max in the crescent moon position. If he wanted to get any sleep at all before flying out, he couldn’t afford to waste time fighting with his wife. Thankfully, the process took less time than usual. Max only wrestled with him for a few minutes before relaxing into the embryonic shape that allegedly helped his brain to develop more normally. Then he lay very still and they breathed together until it sounded like he was asleep. When Todd extricated himself from the warm bed, Max either didn’t wake up or failed to notice altogether, depending on whether the session had achieved the desired outcome or pushed Max further into the nether regions he frequented to escape human contact.

Todd grabbed his duffel bag out of the coat closet and headed back upstairs. Rose was already in bed, her laptop propped on her knees. She had that beatific look on her face, the smirky little all-knowing smile. No doubt she was chatting with her soul mates. Or with her Facebook friends. It was entirely possible that she was multitasking, communing with both groups in adjacent windows. Todd didn’t want to know, and she knew better than to tell him. One thing was certain. Way too much visualization was going on.

“How’d it go?” she asked.

“Not too bad.”

“He’s going to miss you this weekend.”

Todd resisted the impulse to question her statement. If she wanted to believe that Max was capable of missing his father, why not allow her that comfort, even if it was an illusion? Sometimes he wished he could believe it, too, instead of clinging so doggedly to so-called objective reality. As though such a thing existed in the world of children with autism, where the subjective reigned supreme.

Todd brushed off the top of his duffel bag. It had been ages since the last time he used it. When he unzipped the top flap, a few grains of sand sprinkled onto the carpet. They were more crystalline than the local desert soil. He took a whiff of the open compartment, to see if any vestiges of Iraq might still be lingering there. But it smelled like the coat closet, stale and musty, without a trace of the high desert wind he missed so much.

He always packed in chronological order, beginning with what he needed first thing in the morning to avoid forgetting anything. He went into the bathroom and started lining up his toiletries. Without thinking he put his shaving cream can on the left and a little bottle of Tylenol all the way to the right so that the line graduated from large to small in an orderly fashion. He ticked off the items on a mental checklist and then put them in the side pocket of his duffel bag.

“I’m going to miss you, too,” Rose said.

It sounded like an accusation. Either that or Todd was always on the defensive these days, unable to embrace love because he could no longer negotiate his family’s emotional matrix. One way or the other, it had all become too complicated. He longed for the simplicity of living in the combat zone, utterly intent on winning the contest between life and death. With the stakes so high, nothing else mattered. He thought of Max, who shrank from human contact for his own nameless reasons. Sometimes he felt responsible for his son’s willed isolation, as though they shared some genetic predisposition to retreat.

“Me too, honey,” Todd said, hauling his duffel bag back into the bedroom.

Rose looked up expectantly, her hands still poised over the keyboard. Todd pecked her on the cheek by way of eluding detection. Getting away with going through the motions of marriage used to be impossible in the Barron household. Rose’s bullshit radar was capable of registering infinitesimal levels of insincerity. But that was the old Rose. The new Rose was too busy friending people. Or liking their smiley-face postings. Whatever. She abandoned the keyboard long enough to cup his face in her hands. Mission accomplished. They had avoided another emotional booby trap.

Todd rolled up three pairs of boxers and lined them up next to three undershirts and three pairs of regulation socks. They made a little bed on the bottom of his duffel. Then he folded two flight suits flat, one after the other. He laid his service hat on top and zipped up the bag. His backpack was already loaded and ready for action by the front door, next to his boots. His dress uniform, which he intended to wear on the plane, was downstairs in the coat closet. That way he could get ready in the morning without waking Rose. He picked up the duffel and started carrying it downstairs. It was pathetically light, a measure of how lightweight this training exercise was compared to the real deal. With any luck, he’d be toting a fully outfitted duffel on the next flight out.

“I’m going to have to hit the hay soon,” Todd said as he left the room.

When he returned, Rose was in the bathroom brushing her teeth. He was surprised to see that her laptop was turned off. When he went to bed early, she usually moved downstairs to continue chatting online until midnight or so, her usual bedtime. The bathroom door popped open. There she stood, stark naked, with a teddy in each hand.

“This one or this one?” she asked, holding out one and then the other.

Todd was torn, not so much between the red one and the purple one but between wanting to make love to his wife and wanting to go right to sleep. Even sex was too complicated these days.

“You choose,” he said.

He was too embarrassed to say no. It would have been an admission of something, he didn’t quite know what. His failure as a husband, for starters. Or as a man. He felt cornered, caught somewhere in-between, as though these two parts of himself had become mutually exclusive. He resented Rose for making him feel this way, simultaneously alienated and aroused. At war with himself, if not his wife. His fight or flight instincts kicked in again. She seemed to be plotting to trap him, using her body as bait. He wanted more than anything to fly off to Arizona, better yet Afghanistan, with no emotional strings attached to drag him down. But he would have to fight his way out first.

When Rose climbed into bed, he rallied his defenses. It wasn’t the first time they had waged the battle of the sexes in the bedroom. The fires of some of their most passionate encounters had been fanned by conflict, even anger. But there was something almost malicious about it this time. Todd dispensed with preliminaries, to get it over with. Rose was ready for him, instantaneously hot and bothered and spoiling for a fight. Her eagerness to engage his hostility was incredibly seductive. He redoubled his efforts to fend her off. To fend off his feelings for her. To finish it off without falling into the trap.

She didn’t say a word when they were finished. None of the usual endearments and professions of love. They didn’t so much fall asleep as retreat into their respective corners.

He woke up on his own thirty seconds early and shut off the alarm before it sounded. 4:59 a.m. The good old internal clock was still in excellent working order, in spite of the laxities of civilian life. He crept out of bed without waking Rose. Her red teddy reminded him that she was trying to be a good wife. But he no longer knew what that meant any more than he knew how to be a good husband. He was convinced that redeployment was the only thing that could save their marriage.

He padded downstairs and grabbed his dress uniform out of the coat closet. It fit him exactly the way it had fit him ten years ago. There was life in the old man yet. He was dressed and ready to go in seven minutes. There was a mirror on the back of the door, but he didn’t need it. Everything was already spit shined and creased to within an inch of its life. He closed the door and checked his watch. If he left now, he could pick up coffee and a roll on the way to the base. His backpack was next to the front door where he’d left it, but his duffel bag was nowhere to be found. If it wasn’t one thing it was another in this goddamned house. Some of the rage he’d felt the night before began to resurface. There was nowhere to direct it, no one to blame for the missing bag. All he knew was that it was exactly where it was supposed to be last night, and now it was gone.

He started retracing his steps, which seemed ridiculous. It wasn’t like he’d misplaced the bag. He could have sworn he’d left it by the front door last night, next to his pack. When he opened the closet back up, he saw his duffel shoved all the way in the corner where they stashed it between deployments. For the sake of the kids, supposedly. Out of sight out of mind, so they wouldn’t have to face the daily reminder that their father might suddenly disappear overseas again. He unzipped the bag to make sure nothing had been tampered with. Everything was in order. He strapped his pack on his back and shouldered the duffel. The heft of it all made him feel strong. When he got back from Arizona, he meant to ask Rose if she had any idea how on earth his bag ended up back in the closet. Good thing he hadn’t wasted any time looking for it. His wristwatch ran a minute faster than the clock in his pickup. 5:14. If he drove eight miles over the speed limit, he’d still have time to pick up breakfast.