This is Just Exactly Like You (2 page)

He finds Hendrick downstairs right where he left him, sitting in the kitchen on the half-finished tile floor, fully into his morning routine. He’s in front of the one cabinet they’ve left the guards off of, opening and closing it, rocking back and forth, humming the tune to the WXII NewsChannel 12 evening news. He knocks his forehead against the cabinet door every second time he gets it open. He’s got a good rhythm going. Jack watches him do that a while, stands there and looks at their kitchen, tries to see what Beth sees. This is something she asks him to do. So he looks. He ran out of tile at the hole where the dishwasher is supposed to go eventually, and when he went back to the flooring place the next week, they were out. Evening Mist had been discontinued, they said.
But why wouldn’t you have bought it all the first time?
Beth wanted to know. No good answer, like most other things. He goes ahead with projects without planning them all the way through first. It makes her crazy. He knows this, does it anyway. Gets excited. Which is why there’s plywood running one entire wall of the kitchen: Jack knocked a hole through the back of the house in February, planning a little 8x8 breakfast nook with a bay window. Something Beth might enjoy. She was out of town, at a conference in Chicago. He had dreams of getting it roughed in over the course of the weekend—ambitious, he thought, but possible—except he hit the water line trying to dig out trenches for the footings and foundation. When the city came out to turn it off, a good-sized geyser Hendrick got a kick out of watching, they shut him down. No building permit, nothing to code. Now he’s supposed to get actual licensed plumbers and electricians. Plus an architect. He’s got to get drawings approved downtown. He’s done none of that.
How was Chicago?
he asked her at the airport.
How’s the house?
she said, knowing already, somehow. Expecting. She took it well at first, or pretty well, but it was what he’d have to call a mitigating factor in her leaving. Last week, during her meltdown:
And I’ve had a goddamned plywood kitchen for six months!
Jack wanted to point out that really it was just the one wall, and that it had only been four months, but she’d already moved well past that and on to his most recent sin, his most grievous, the one they’ll surely send him up the river for: That he’d
bought, Jack, for chrissakes, the house across the street.

Which was an accident. He’d never have done that on purpose. Nobody would have. They woke up one morning at the end of April to an auctioneer working his way through a series of end tables and sofas and riding lawn mowers all set up in the yard over there. The old man, somebody they’d known well enough to wave to, had died, and his kids, in from out of town, were auctioning everything they weren’t keeping. The auctioneer had a microphone and a podium. Jack took Hen over to watch, to stand in the crowd of old men wearing camouflage ball caps and listen to the guy work his way through
ten, ten, gimme ten, can I get ten? Ten! How ’bout fifteen? Gimme fifteen, gimme fifteen.
He had a high, thin voice that rode out over the top of the crowd. Up for sale: Boxes of old
Field and Stream
magazines. Shovel handles. Mini-blinds. Light fixtures. Shot-guns. Trash cans full of shotgun shells, bags and bags of shot. The old man must have been preparing for an invasion. When the auctioneer got around to the house itself, the bidding stopped thirty thousand dollars below what Jack had bought his own house for last year, and there it was: The exact same house, same floor plan, same everything, one more house in a neighborhood full of postwar ranch houses built all the same by the same builder, and it was too simple. He could not help it. Didn’t even really think about trying to. He raised his hand.

Beth couldn’t believe it, kept saying that over and over.
I cannot believe you did this to us.
It was easy money, he tried to tell her: Open up a couple of walls like they’d done, pull up the carpets and redo the hardwoods like they’d done, replace the stove and fridge like they’d done. Coat of white paint top to bottom. Sell the place in two months. Easy money. Beth wanted to know how in hell he thought he could do all that across the street
when you can’t even finish a tile floor in your own kitchen
. Wanted to know
what on earth, Jack, could have gotten jammed inside your skull that would make you do a thing like this.
Last week, after they’d railed through their own house at each other for a while, Jack went across the street while she stuffed her toothbrush and whatever else she could find into a plastic grocery sack. He sat on the steps, identical to his own steps. Concrete. Iron railing. He watched her come out their front door, watched her get into the car and back down the driveway, watched her drive down the road. To Terry fucking Canavan’s house, of all places. If he’d known that—if he’d known where she was going—he might have thrown himself under the back bumper while she was leaving. Or stood in the street and lit himself on fire. Or something else that might have gotten her attention, or his.

Open, closed, open, forehead, closed—Hendrick bangs his head on the cabinet, hums a little louder. Jack refills his coffee and runs his toe along the place where the tile ends. At least Hen’s dressed today. This is a minor triumph. He hates textures right now, hates his sheets and clothes, likes to be naked a lot. Two weeks ago at the post office Jack looked up from checking whichever square it is that allows delivery without signatures, and there was Hen, walking the row of PO boxes, naked but for his socks and shoes. He had one hand out to the side, for balance, and he was hanging onto his little pink dick with the other. He kissed each keyhole as he passed. What Jack couldn’t figure out was how he’d managed to get his pants off over his sneakers, how he’d done it so fast. A logistical miracle, hugely impressive. People in line whispered to each other, staring, not sure what the protocol was for a situation like this, not sure if this was the sort of thing allowed in government buildings post-9/11. Nakedness, shouting, repetitions, astonishments: These are the things Jack’s all but used to, finds a little funny sometimes, even. They are the sorts of things that freak Beth right the hell out. Sign after sign after sign that Hen’s not getting any better. The difference is that Jack doesn’t really expect him to—not any time soon, anyway. At the post office, he picked him up and put him over his shoulder and headed for the door, Hen going fully limp in his arms. Jack stared right back at the people in line. Made eye contact. He left the pile of clothes and the mail and everything there on the counter, drove back home.

What do you mean you left his clothes there?
Beth wanted to know, Hen standing naked in the hallway, spinning in circles, making his noises.
Bup-bup-bup-bup-bup.
She asked him again:
How could you just leave them there?
He wanted to tell her that it had all been pretty simple, actually, but instead he went and sat at the kitchen table, flipped through the stack of credit card offers and bills: Reward miles and bonus points, the first mortgage payment due across the street. Beth made a big show of piling into the car and then came back in half an hour, mouth set in a thin line that meant victory, holding the clothes, and holding Jack’s overnight envelope, too.

Hen switches into the Patio Enclosures song. It’s his favorite TV commercial right now.
Someone you know knows something great: It’s Patio Enclosures.
He does it falsetto to match the voice of the woman in the ad. The people in the ad are deeply moved by their new glass sunrooms. Glass sunrooms are the cure for cancer, for erectile dysfunction, for our dependence on foreign oil. All that is missing from your life is a new glass sunroom from Patio Enclosures. Hen sings it again and again. It’s the background music of Jack’s life—jingles, the full texts of radio commercials, state capitals, state birds, state flowers, the entire sides of cereal boxes. All from memory, everything in perfect recitation.
Montpelier Montgomery Albany Sacramento Carson City. This is Budweiser, This is Beer. The cardinal, the dog-wood. We’ve gone C-R-A-Z-Y here at American Furniture Warehouse,
and then, word-for-word, the monologue that the guy, decked out in his flag tie or his gorilla suit, delivers as he sprints the rows of recliners and daybeds. Hen’s a genius, if a broken one. He could read at two and a half. Getting him to talk
to
them, though, instead of at them, or at the television—that’s something else altogether. There have been so many doctors that Jack’s long since quit counting, and anyway, they all say the same thing: Hendrick is autistic. Some of them say he’s
high-functioning
, and some of them don’t. They stand or sit behind their desks in their candy-colored pediatric doctor coats and generally want to talk about
where he falls on the spectrum
.
Autism is what we like to call a spectrum disorder
. Jack always finds himself picturing something actual, Hen splayed out on a big blue mat, having fallen
onto the spectrum
from some significant height. The doctors have cartoon animals on their coats. Baboons. Gazelles. Hendrick sits over by the box of toys and lines up the blocks in identical, regimented rows, probably pointing to true north.

There are good days. There are days when they go to the post office and nothing happens, or not much happens, days where Jack does, in fact, go back to trying to believe in what one of the first doctors told them, a guy with a biggish mole over his lip.
Could still be nothing
, he’d said, fingering the mole.
No need for alarm.
He soothed them. Jack sat in the highback chair on the other side of the desk, and Beth sat on a sofa with Hendrick, straightening his hair with a wet finger. They felt soothed. The doctor’s degrees hung on the wall behind him.
Boys develop more slowly,
he told them.
He could still grow right out of it.
They nodded along, eager.
Language acquisition comes at different times, and in different ways. We’ll see where we are in a couple of months. We can run some tests then, maybe do a little blood work.

A little blood work. It was like they were in a movie about going to the moon, or tunneling to the center of the earth. Any amount of blood work seemed like too much. They waited the couple of months, then another couple. And now he’s six. He’s not growing out of it. This morning, like any morning, Beth gone and impossibly moved in with Canavan or not, Hen is disappeared deep into his secret set of notes, his rhythms and maps, marking time with his forehead on the kitchen cabinets. He could as easily be watching the ceiling fan spin, or reading—he’ll read anything they put in front of him—and touching the same sentence on the same page of the same book again and again for hours at a time. At the grocery store Wednesday night, he started pulling soup cans off the shelves one by one and throwing them down, yelling
Alexander Haig! Alexander Haig!
as each one hit the floor. He’d been all week in the H encyclopedia.
He actually hates Secretaries of State
, Jack said to the mothers standing there, watching. He picked cans of Cream of Mushroom up off the floor, put them back on the shelf.

Nobody at home to tell that story to. He and Hen came home to their plywooded, half-tiled kitchen, and made dinner, two men in the house. Macaroni and cheese for Hen, a little thin steak in the pan for Jack. Can of beer. Beth had already been gone three days. What spooks him is that it’s starting to feel familiar. He’s getting to the point where he’s not looking for her in the bed when he wakes up. At work, Butner and Ernesto can’t believe she left Hen with him. It doesn’t make any sense, they say. She’d at least have taken him with her. Jack tries to explain that actually it does make a kind of sense. That it’s fucked up, but it makes sense. That yes, she’s always been the paranoid one, and yes, she’s the one who’s got the
CPR for Kids
and
The Pediatric Heimlich
placards stuck up on the fridge. She’s plugged the primary and backup numbers for emergency rooms and urgent care centers and the Ear, Nose & Throat guy into their speed dial. She’s put poison control magnets on every metal surface in the house, she’s covered over all the sharp edges on everything, she’s filled every outlet with the little plastic protective tables—but the thing is that Hendrick, for all of that, for all her readiness, has never really been hers. If he’s ever been anyone’s, he’s been Jack’s. It’s Beth who finds and drags them to special parenting classes, and it’s Beth who records the afternoon talk shows any time there’s going to be anyone on there with a special-needs child, but Hen chose Jack, or he chooses him—smiles, when he smiles, at Jack, aims his few brief cogent moments generally in Jack’s direction. It rubs at her every, every time. She doesn’t understand it, doesn’t know why she can’t be the one to unlock him, or why he can’t be unlocked—and then she hangs another choking hazard list on the pantry door, sticks another awareness bumper sticker on the back of the car.

For his part, Jack wants none of the peripheral bullshit that arrives with
the autistic child,
has never wanted it: He hates the passing sympathies he gets in the stores, the caring looks, the whispering. He doesn’t want anybody else feeling like they get to weigh in on the subject. No ribbon magnets. No Differently-Abled. No special summer camps with psychopathic overstimulated teenagers running on about how
Y’all, I’ve just always felt so called to help the less fortunate, you know? We are so blessed for this opportunity. We are going to have a super-fun time.
None of it. No more magazines, no more pamphlets, no more instructional videos. He just wants Hendrick, wants to be with his son without being told by sloganeers how to feel about it. He does not want to have to hear any more human interest stories on NPR. He doesn’t want to listen to somebody’s soft, caring voice asking somebody if it’s hard.
How hard is it? Is it so hard?
It cannot possibly get any harder.

He’s never wanted anyone, under any circumstance, to
reach out to him,
or to
be there for him
, and the way he’s got it working in his head is that Beth must have finally started to feel that way, too. That it maybe got to the point where even she couldn’t, in all her freaked-out glory, record one more show about kids in helmets. That what this has to be for her is a vacation, a sabbatical. She’s checked out of it for a day, a week, for however long this is going to take. Just checked out of her marriage, of her son. Because she can’t be over there at Canavan’s going through her same routine, watching Oprah walk somebody through the stations of the cross one more time.
And when did you know for sure that your son was different from all the other children?
He can’t picture her over there surfing the web obsessively, trying one more time to find the right diet combination to sync Hen’s mouth back up with his brain. He can easily enough, though, picture her over there fucking his best friend, which makes him want to drive nails through his own shins. That’s another thing they can’t believe at work: That of all people she’d have gone to Canavan instead of somebody from the college, or somebody from another part of her life, or anyone else from anywhere else. And he tries to explain that, too, to them, to himself. That even that part might make its own sick sense. Because of course she’d end up with a friend. Even an old boyfriend would have been too strange for her, too unfamiliar, someone too much from another time. There would have been too many things to explain. How much easier to land with someone, even if it is Canavan, who already understands about Hen, about her, about everything. Right?