The Home Front (24 page)

After only fifteen minutes, Max dipped his brush again, this time in brown. He stooped over the second portrait and painted two long lines and two short ones, what turned out to be a rectangle standing on end in the place where his father belonged. Then he drew two semicircles, one in the middle of the rectangle and one on the far end, what might have been a nose and a foot if the rectangle had been a person. When he finished he resumed staring out the window as though nothing had happened.

Sasha couldn’t believe it. Max had never drawn a rectangle. More to the point, he had never deviated from a pattern. The majority of the energy he expended, both mentally and physically, was focused on maintaining consistency and order. Wearing the same tan clothes, eating the same round foods, lining up trucks or Legos or whatever else needed to be lined up, counting everything every step of the way to make sure nothing eluded his control. Sasha had no idea what the rectangle represented, if anything, but it wasn’t a circle or a line. Whether it was representational or purely abstract, the rectangle constituted a major step away from uniformity, toward something more recognizably human on the spectrum. If Max could embrace variation, there was a chance he could ultimately learn to tolerate unpredictability, the final frontier separating children with autism from living normal, chaotic lives.

* * *

Rose seemed uncharacteristically flat at their weekly meeting. Sasha had never seen her this way, bordering on depressed, if such a mood existed on her emotional palette. Rose was always so upbeat, all the more so when Todd was particularly bummed out. They were either a wonderful couple, balancing each other productively, or they were engaged in a destructive tug-of-war, in which case Max was the rope. Neither one of them would prevail. The fact that their son’s relative progress or regression had become the focal point of their marriage meant that autism had the upper hand. It was tearing the family apart.

Sasha wondered what Todd thought he could gain by being so pessimistic about Max’s recovery. She knew he was unconsciously compensating for Rose’s blind optimism. This was common practice, a way for parents to protect themselves from disappointment. His impending redeployment put another spin on what was becoming an increasingly complex emotional matrix. It begged a chicken and egg question as to whether he wanted to redeploy to escape Max’s halting recovery or whether the halting recovery provided the excuse he needed to justify redeployment. If there was one thing her MA in psychology had taught Sasha, beyond the fact that the profession as a whole was alarmingly misguided, it was that emotional conflicts were always ambivalent, with chickens and eggs enough to fill an entire hen coop. Negotiating weekly meetings with Rose and Todd was like walking on eggshells.

“Good news,” Sasha said.

“I could use some,” Rose said.

Todd just sat there. Rose had stolen his curmudgeonly line, and there was nothing left to say.

Sasha shuffled through Max’s art therapy portfolio. She pulled out the two most recent family portraits and placed them side by side on the table. Rose stared blankly at the one with the circle and lines occupying the father’s position. She wasn’t entirely sure she still had the energy to believe the little vertical strokes of paint really represented Todd’s crew cut. They seemed more random than before, more like the lines Max had painted on his arms, which testified to improvements in manual dexterity but very little else. Meaning was in the eyes of the beholder. Sometimes a cigar was just a cigar.

Todd focused his attention on the shape Max had drawn in the second portrait. It took him a minute to realize it wasn’t just a rectangle. The little semicircles in the middle and on the upper end spoke volumes, utilitarian flourishes that translated form into function. At first he thought Sasha was trying to trick them. But that was impossible. She couldn’t possibly understand the significance of these particular shapes. Todd alone was privy to their meaning, which was both literal and figurative.

“Max drew this?” Todd asked.

“Both of them,” Sasha said. “He’s painting again.”

“He’s never drawn a rectangle before.”

Rose perked up slightly. “Could this mean something?”

“I’m not sure,” Sasha said. “But he’s expanding his vocabulary, even if they’re just shapes.”

“Has he painted arcs before?” Todd pointed at the semicircles.

“Never. Just circles and lines.”

“Which one did he draw first? The circle or the rectangle?”

“The circle.”

“What difference does it make?” Rose said.

Todd picked up the first portrait. Half a dozen art therapy sessions had yielded the same circle with vertical lines sprouting out of the top. It was either evidence of yet another obsessive-compulsive pattern, an autistic barrier erected to prevent communication with his family. Or it was Max’s way of acknowledging that he was actually part of the family, something that Todd himself found increasingly difficult to feel, let alone express. The rectangle cracked the code, confirming the latter interpretation. It was no longer possible to see the circles and lines as anything but a father figure.

“You’ve been right all along,” Todd said.

“What do you mean?”

“They’re not just shapes.” Todd traced the image in the second portrait with his index finger. He tried to feel what Max must have felt when he painted the rectangle. He wondered whether the little loops were part of the original design or an afterthought. One way or another, they were unmistakably meaningful. An entire history, once lost in translation, came into focus.

Rose and Sasha looked incredulously at one another. Todd had prided himself on his pragmatic approach to Max’s illness, accusing them of grasping at straws. He had habitually refused to acknowledge that the circles and lines represented his presence in the portraits. Now the tables were turned. He alone understood that the rectangle with handles represented his impending absence. The second portrait lamented the loss of what was so hard-won in the first, a story line culminating in what would amount to abandonment, if he went through with it. In this light, redeployment was an act of cowardice based on the assumption that winning the war on terror abroad was more likely than defeating autism on the home front. The fact that such a complicated emotional matrix could be reduced to such simple terms left little room for evasion. All along, without know it, Todd had been choosing between Afghanistan and his son. Max was calling his bluff, forcing him to make a conscious rather than unconscious decision.

“He’s telling a story,” Todd said.

It was Rose and Sasha’s turn to be skeptical. Moving from literal to figurative representation was one thing, a remarkable developmental feat. But stringing signs and symbols together into a linear narrative was quite another. They had no idea what Todd was talking about until he pointed out the loops. Even then, it took time to piece the story together, let alone understand its myriad implications.

“How do you know they’re handles?” Sasha asked.

Todd left the table to fetch his duffel bag from the coat closet. He dragged it across the floor the way Max did, grasping the loop on the end rather than the one in the middle. He hesitated to tell them about Max’s epic struggle with the bag. This was between him and Max, the time-honored story of fathers and sons lost and found again. He hesitated to tell them anything at all for fear of colonizing Max’s message. The simplicity of his vocabulary in no way precluded multiple meanings. If anything, it inspired a wider spectrum of interpretation. The shapes spoke for themselves. Let Rose and Sasha draw their own conclusions.

* * *

Rose found herself wandering around the house a lot. She tried to remember what she used to do with her time before discovering the Source. Virtually nothing came to mind. It was as though her brain had been washed clean, leaving no memory of her former self. Todd was decent enough not to talk about it much. But Rose knew full well he had thought she’d been abducted by Tashi and her cronies. She almost wished it were true. Abduction assumed there was someone to abduct, an authentic identity she might recover now that she wasn’t living her life online. Who had she been when she and Todd were first married, before Max’s diagnosis? All she knew for sure was that she was still a wife and mother, a set of facts that did very little to help solve the riddle of who she might have been, once upon a time.

Judging from the weeks that had transpired since she last logged on to the Source, she was a devoted housewife who loved, above all, to clean closets and shelves. She wandered around opening doors and cupboards, searching for something. Far from finding anything of value, she felt compelled to throw everything away. The impulse to purge seemed counterproductive, given her need to fill the void left by bogus New Age promises. But her compulsion overwhelmed every other consideration, rational or otherwise. She made short work of the kitchen, jettisoning stale herbs, consolidating stray packages of flax seed and wheat germ, and tossing out unopened staples with lapsed expiration dates, some of which actually predated her abduction. She took this as a sign of how egregiously she had neglected her responsibilities, which fueled her determination to make a clean sweep of the entire house.

Rose knew better than to touch, let alone discard, anything belonging to Max. Todd’s stuff was so well-organized, there was nothing expendable, except maybe an odd sock here and a broken gadget there. Maureen was another story entirely. She came home from school to find a pile of clothes next to the recycling bin. Given the general state of their daughter’s bedroom, which Todd called a disaster area, Rose assumed she wouldn’t miss ratty old clothes that had been balled up in the backs of drawers and closets for years. No exaggeration. But Maureen had her own system, apparently. Underneath her disregard for superficial tidiness, she shared the Barron family’s genetic predisposition for order.

“What are all my clothes doing in the garage?” Maureen demanded.

“Not all of them,” Rose said. “Just the ones you never wear.”

“What are you doing with them?”

“I’m taking them to the Salvation Army.”

“They’re my favorite.”

“You haven’t worn them in years, Maureen.”

“I’m saving them.”

“Saving them for what?”

“So they won’t wear out.”

“You’ll outgrow them before you’ll ever wear them out.”

“I don’t care. They’re my favorite and I’m keeping them.”

Rose was reminded of Max’s outrage when she made the mistake of trying to dispose of Ralph and Harry. She conceded that she had crossed a boundary, which effectively ended the quest to find herself amidst the domestic flotsam and jetsam that is the purview of wives and mothers. But expanding the parameters of her search was easier said than done. At a loss as to where to turn next, she nearly suffered a relapse. She actually logged on to the Source and was one number away from renewing her membership before she hurled her MasterCard across the room. Living life online was no longer an option. At the same time, she couldn’t conceive of an alternative without surfing the web. She limited herself to half an hour a day, thirty precious minutes of feverishly looking up listings of local events. She confined her searches to a thirty-mile radius, trying to resist the magnetic pull of the universe, whose abundance masked the black hole that had engulfed her.

Las Vegas and its environs had plenty to offer tourists and rattlesnakes, but not much of interest to Rose. She blamed herself. Without knowing who she was, how could she expect to find anything worthwhile to do? Other people had hobbies. She had an autistic son and an Internet addiction, which had pretty much monopolized her time since his diagnosis. The important thing was to get out. To try new things. First she enrolled in Bikram Yoga classes at the Om on the Range Yoga Center. The clientele reminded her too much of her soul mates, especially Nirvana and Libra, who had been avid Hatha practitioners. Rose was obviously still in the grip of an addiction to New Age fads. Next she tried Pilates, which attracted an entirely different, tonier crowd. She quite liked them until she joined the group for lunch, where all they discussed was getting work done. She thought they were talking about their jobs, not their plastic surgeons, a misunderstanding that inspired her to check out the want ads online. Almost any gainful employment seemed more worthwhile than hobnobbing with ladies with nothing better to do than obsess over crow’s feet. But she was really only free from nine to one, the hours Sasha spent with Max. The rest of the day, Rose was still his Floortime facilitator. Even waitressing jobs demanded more flexibility than her commitment to his recovery would allow.

She started to doubt whether she’d ever work again. Not that it bothered her too much one way or the other, as long as she felt fulfilled. Most parents relied on their kids for fulfillment, of course, especially mothers. This had been the source of Rose’s biggest mistake. She could no longer afford the luxury of pretending Max would attend a regular grade school in a year or two, counting on New Age fairy tales to alleviate her disappointment in his recovery. Wishful thinking had almost destroyed her marriage. It had placed a terrible burden on her son, as though his progress, or lack thereof, defined her worth. Her need to be absolved of the guilt she felt as his mother stemmed more from intolerance than from love. She kept reminding herself that nothing terrible had happened to Max, nothing she as a parent might have prevented. He didn’t have a problem. She did.

Once she let go of her expectations, she noticed a change, one she didn’t know whether to attribute to Max or to herself. Either she was simply more accepting of his behavior, or he was actually less distracted lately, not quite so distant. Even when he was in his own little world, that world appeared to intersect with the one she inhabited. He seemed less alien. The idea that he had ever seemed alien at all was something she hadn’t dared admit to herself until now. This admission relieved them of the need to pretend otherwise. Once in a while, rather than whipping Max into Floortime frenzies of activity, she would just let him be. They would hang out together, he doing his own thing, she trying to figure out what her own thing might be. He would spend the afternoon straightening the rug fringe while she straightened up the rest of the house. He seemed calmer, somehow. Or she was calmer, especially once she finally found an outlet, something she liked to do as much as he liked twisting each little string until it lay perfectly straight where it belonged.