... A mentally or neurologically challenged child should be told he's special early on, the expert had said. By the age of six he probably has a vague idea that something's wrong, and with all the doctors, tests and frowns, he might think he's very sick or dying...
There had certainly been frowns, more frowns than Laura had ever intended to allow onto her face or into her family: nervous pink frowns in waiting rooms; tight-lipped purple frowns from over menus in the coffee shop near the hospital; steely gray thoughtful frowns that reflected off chrome instruments, just before doctors shook their heads in puzzlement. A palette of frowns.
Sam was seven. Seven chronologically. And he was a happy boy, except when blood was drawn and he screamed at the red hot firecracker being pressed to his forearm. Now Laura had moved beyond blood tests and rubber hammers to searching out advice in ladies' magazines. Why not? The doctors had asked her about things like prenatal care and bed-wetting, but which doctor had ever asked Sam if he was happy? Who had ever worried that he felt all those frowns? Laura dog-eared the article so that she could show it to Dave that evening.
"See here?" she said when Sam and his sister left the kitchen after dinner. She had circled the paragraph. "Maybe we need to talk about it with him, tell him that he's different. You know, explain to him why things are not easy for him, why they..." she paused for a reinforcing breath,"...why they never will be."
And with a quiet discussion over the supper dishes in which Laura did almost all the talking, talking fast, talking wobbly, talking both sides, the decision took shape. Laura would speak to Sam. Dave knew she'd find the right words, and he was never good at that kind of thing anyway. The rest of the evening she picked at her nails and just to be different, polished them over and over while she wondered about this discussion she would have. She knew the why of it, but had no idea about the when or how.
The next morning with a thickly polished nail she singled out one yellow tablet from the tiny pills polka-dotting her palm.
Sam gulped it, then asked, "Mommy, why do I have to take these pills?"
It was not a new question, he asked it every morning. This time Laura paused, mixed Sam and Jessica each some orange drink, and stirred their glasses to froth before she answered. "They help you learn better," she said after weighing the choices. It was the standard reply and true enough. There wasn't time for big discussion now, not before school.
"Then why doesn't Jessica have to take one too? Don't you want her to learn?"
It was one of those questions, one of many in any given week, that allowed Laura a small and earnest oasis of hope, just for a minute.
See? she thought. He does reason. The candle burns in that brain and sometimes it burns so brightly. It flickers to be sure, but on those lucid mornings--on those sun-filled mornings when things are going right--when finches flock to the backyard bird feeder and the clouds hold their foreboding darkness back along the horizons--on those mornings, a cool breeze flutters back the curtain from Sam's eyes and Laura sees the light burning within. It is there, she insists to those whom she can trust to agree. He's in there.
Hadn't Sam come home just yesterday from his class for the delayed and volunteered that Africans wear white because it's hot? Didn't that prove something? He'd gone to an assembly, a milestone in itself, and from his place under the folding chair between two teachers, amid hundreds of other kids whom he said were angry monsters that chewed his ears, he'd heard the program and remembered something. And he'd held it behind frantic eyelids until he got home. And then he'd taken it out for her like a badge they could take turns wearing.
Of course today he would not remember. Or maybe he would but he would claim he didn't. And of course today he might scream between earmuffs made of his own two fists and tear the colored paper alphabet from the classroom wall and give his teachers a first-rate lesson in patience and confetti. But yesterday the window was open. Would another pill keep the window open a little longer? A double dose? Two or three bottles? Maybe if we took him off completely?
"Better run up and get dressed. The bus will be here in fourteen minutes. Here, gimme a hug first." Laura bent down and wrapped her arms about the soda straw body. Sam rested his arms in the vicinity of her neck and after a moment wiggled away. "Your hugs are too tight," he complained.
All the better to make up for yours, Laura thought, releasing him. She'd often likened his body to a rag doll, but it was more of a cloth and wire doll, somehow soft and tense at the same time.
Laura ate Sam's untouched toast and worried that hunger might bring on another spell like last week and maybe she should try to force more breakfast on him when he came back down. But now there were only nine minutes before the bus and what if he decided to watch his trains do their incessant errands around his room instead of dressing?
"Eat up, Jessica. I've got to check on Sam."
Sam was carefully dressing when Laura gained the top of the stairs. He hadn't derailed after all. Even so, watching him do the assigned task distressed her as he went through the motions of dressing with the deliberation of a Japanese tea ritual. She tried to nonchalantly proceed past his doorway and into her own bedroom so as not to break his rhythm, but Sam had seen her and now sat on the bed bare-chested, his pullover shirt ringed around his neck like a clown's ruffled collar.
"Wasn't that lady nice?"
Laura felt herself being pulled into the recesses of Sam's mind. "What lady?" she asked, then added, "Keep dressing, the bus will be here in six minutes."
But forward progress was stalled. "The lady who pushed us from behind, when our car broke on that busy street."
Laura was used to these trips. "Yes, she was nice. Here are your shoes."
That happened over two years ago, nearly one third of Sam's lifetime, and he had offered it for conversation with the same abandon of a bird flapping overhead and dropping a piece of string at her feet. She was glad he was in the mood to talk, but it wasn't the kind of talk she wanted to have and anyway, there was no more time.
"Come on down, I'll brush your hair by the window," Laura said when Sam had finished dressing and she was fearing the bus might be early.
He sat still except for barking monosyllables at Jessica. Jessica, with yellow ooze sliding down one nostril, was carrying a bowl of cereal around the living room to spill on an unchristened patch of carpet should she happen to find one. Dave and Laura regularly debated on how to discipline two-year-olds, and if Jessica suddenly shrieked at the wrong pitch and volume they would exchange glances over her head and wonder telepathically if their second seed had also fallen on rocky ground.
Sam's hair grew at unlikely tufted angles. The prospect of putting him through the sensory panic of applying a damp cloth to his hair daunted Laura. She gave his hair a final pat and pretended to be satisfied. "Good looking boy," she murmured and kissed his fine hair.
The "nice lady" incident made her think once again that Sam's mind was a parking lot like the one she'd used once at O'Hare Airport. Every snippet of knowledge he absorbed was parked there, each in an individual space, neat and in rows, floors and floors of bits of knowledge. But Sam had no indexing, no road map. If he happened to find the appropriate piece of data for any given moment it seemed only a happy coincidence. Or maybe he did have a vague idea of what floor it was parked on and managed to stroll the aisles quickly enough to find it before the subject changed. On this day she felt he'd told his parking lot attendant to come up with some sparkling conversation and the attendant had discovered the nice lady from two years ago just hanging around the exit ramp and had said, "Here. How about her?" Laura didn't know what the term "Random Access Memory" meant in computers but she knew what it meant in Sam.
Laura handed Sam his book bag and sighed deeply just as the nearly empty "special" bus groaned to the curb. "Be a good boy, honey. Don't forget to wave."
In the four months since she'd started saying this he'd remembered to wave to her from his bus seat exactly once, and his eyelids were beating his eyes out of focus again. He only echoed, "Be a good boy, honey. Don't forget to wave," and escaped her grasp out the door.
She thought of calling to warn his teacher that he was in "that mood" but it was just as likely he would pull himself together and come home this afternoon with a reasonably good report.
She turned away with the fleeting wish to go back to bed, a full day's work accomplished in the space of an hour. But Jessica was dribbling rubber cement into her cereal and there was housework to do.
The orange bus that blurred in the corner of Laura's eye still hadn't moved as it waited the customary minute for Sam to find his seat belt. She pulled the lace window panel back with one finger and stared out.
Amazingly, Sam was waving--waving and smiling with those two front teeth missing, looking like every other happy grade- schooler up and down the block. The clouds had lifted, the sun was shining, and Sam was bobbing on the surface again, like a shiny fishing bob, buoyant and bright.
Laura grinned and waved furiously back, grabbing at the moment. After all, how long would it last?
As the bus sighed away, Sam still waving, Laura considered the conversation she had planned, and she knew that she would not have it. After all, if she tried to talk to him when he was in his mood, her words would not be absorbed but would echo back at her, bounced off a funhouse mirror. And if she waited for that one shining moment when Sam's eyes met hers and the sun peeked through the clouds, she knew he already knew.
NOTE: Discussing Asperger Syndrome or other disabilities with one's child is a sensitive decision. The story mother did not discuss it with her child, but the actual mother (author) did, when her child was older and the time was right. Each parent must evaluate his or her own situation and determine the best time and circumstances to share information with their children.
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