Language Arts (25 page)

They arrived in the stable, the tangy smells of manure, cedar, horse sweat, and hay made denser by the damp. The rain was falling so hard on the tin roof that the executive director had to shout:

“The stable and outlying farm buildings constitute the heart of our program; every resident has tasks related to our agricultural and animal-husbandry programs.”

Husbandry,
Charles thought. It struck him as a lovely, old-fashioned word, one that wasn't heard nearly enough.

The director—who had the broad, strong physique of a rancher's wife and squarish, unmanicured hands—relaxed visibly in this environment; it was as though they'd started the tour at a country-club gala and had now arrived at the block-party barbecue.

After calling out a greeting to a group of four people at the back of the stable—two residents, each paired with a caregiver—she said, “As you can see, residents groom and feed the horses. Those who are able take riding lessons.” She snatched up some hay and offered it to a large brown-and-white horse that was nosing its head insistently over the top of its stall gate toward her.

“Cody would love this,” Charles murmured to Alison.

“Hmmm,” she replied.

The director started herding them back to the stable entrance. “We give our residents every opportunity to participate in the routines of farm life to whatever extent they are capable.”

“Great philosophy,” Charles said. “She hasn't said the word
autism
even once.”

“Hmmm,” Alison repeated.

“Okay, we'll walk over to the organic garden and the chicken house, and then we'll head inside. I'm sure you're all ready to dry off and warm up.”

They were still slogging through the open field, maybe two hundred feet from the shelter of their destination, when Alison spoke up.

“It's very isolated.”

“Sorry?” the director said, turning around. “Did someone say something?”

Alison raised her hand and shouted,
“It's very isolated.”

Charles was irritated with her. Hadn't the director made it clear that questions would be taken once they got back inside?

“I'm just wondering how often residents get off campus.”

Why couldn't she wait? Why was she inconveniencing everyone like this? She knew there was a Q&A scheduled after the tour. It seemed to Charles that Alison wasn't really asking a question but showing off, asserting some kind of alpha-female bullshit.

“I'd be happy to answer that,”
the director shouted in reply, her voice amicable, her expression pokerfaced,
“once we get inside
. . .
”

They trudged on.

“Jesus, Alison,” Charles muttered.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

They arrived in the chicken house and shook off their parkas and raincoats and umbrellas—a pack of Labrador retrievers who'd just emerged from Lake Washington.

“So,” the director began, now competing vocally with both the rainfall and the brood hens. “In answer to that question from . . . ?”

Alison raised her hand and announced her name with a prim reserve; she seemed to be channeling the spirit of Astrida Pukis.

“We occasionally schedule trips into Snohomish,” the director said, “even into Seattle, but mostly our residents stay on campus. We have art, music, and woodworking classes. We have ice cream socials and dances, game and movie nights. The craft program supplies residents with not only the satisfaction of making things but the knowledge that the things they produce—the rugs, brooms, hats, and so on—are valued, and visible. We don't, for example, have our residents doing things like wiping down tables in church basements. Does that answer your question?”

“Yes,” Alison replied. “Thank you.”

They looked in on resident bedrooms, recreational and community spaces; Charles was struck by words like
campus, pods, dorms.
Language you'd hear on a college tour. Language they
would
have heard on a college tour, had things gone differently.

“Okay,” the director said as they returned to the entrance. “That wraps up the facilities tour. Please help yourself to refreshments and then meet me in the conference room.”

They didn't stay. Charles wasn't surprised. “You've made up your mind already, haven't you?” he said once they were in the car.

“No,” Alison answered defensively. “I have not. It's just so far from everything. Can you imagine yourself coming all the way out here to visit him?”

“Yes.”

“On a regular basis?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that's not the point. It's as if they want to separate them from the rest of the world. Cody already does a lot of the things they offer here—and he gets to do them while he's out in the world instead of hidden away . . .”

Charles stared at the highway. The rain pounded against the windshield. A semi pulled past, sending up a blinding spray.

“Why are we even doing this, Alison?”

“Don't be like that, Charles, or this is going to be a long day.”

“It's already been a long day. If we're just going through the motions, if you've already made a choice, then please take me home. I've got work to do. Let's not waste time pretending that there's some kind of collaboration going on here.”

“A waste of time? You consider looking for places for our son to spend the rest of his life a
waste of time?
”

It was hopeless. Charles shut up.

He thought about the young woman he'd noticed in the stable, one of the residents, probably close to Cody's age: pale skin, long dark hair, dazzling smile, nonverbal. She'd been grooming one of the horses, stopping now and then to press her forehead against his whiskered muzzle.

Charles was reminded of Eulalie, the special relationship she had had with Cody, their shared love of horses. Maybe it was that more than anything that seemed to so instantly sour Alison on Foxglove Farm; God forbid she should make a choice that would have pleased her Kentucky-born-and-bred equestrian mother.

Eulalie had died nine years ago, suddenly, of a hemorrhagic stroke. There was no suffering, but neither was there time to say goodbye.

Cody still missed her, Charles knew; whenever Eulalie was spoken of, whenever Cody saw a photograph of her, he signed her name by gently touching his nose, forehead, and eyelashes.

Eskimo. Horse. Butterfly.

•♦•

The next visit was to a typical adult group home about eight miles north of Seattle, in Bothell. It was a neat-looking structure on a big wooded lot.

At the door, they were greeted by an enormously tall, lantern-jawed man who bore an astonishing resemblance to the actor who'd played Lurch in
The Addams Family.
He smiled at them with expansive, genuine warmth and then urinated on the floor.

The final visit was to one of Seattle's oldest and largest facilities, a place that occupied several acres up in Shoreline. It was a state-run institution that had had a horrible reputation in the past but, according to Alison, had recently undergone major reform.

It certainly wasn't as bad as Charles had expected, but he couldn't believe that she was honestly considering putting Cody in a place like this.

Eventually, he figured out her strategy: she was showing him the worst possible scenario so he'd offer no resistance to the
other possible option
she'd outlined on their date night, which basically involved co-purchasing a house and establishing a privately funded facility.

It wasn't that Charles didn't want the very best for Cody. Of course he did. He should feel grateful that money was no object when it came to their son.

But instead, he felt angry.

Maybe because it was Alison's pretense that the playing field was level. Maybe it was because he'd let himself be suckered into this whole day, this prolonged charade, this emasculation.

They arrived at the house around four. It was already dark. It felt like midnight.

“Let me know what you decide,” Charles sniped as he exited the car.

“You are such a baby,” Ali shot back.

•♦•

They used to refer jokingly to that claim check—the one she'd handed him the night they met—as their prenuptial agreement.

As it turned out, the final article of that document,
I'll want to have children right away,
wasn't entirely true, but in contrast to what was expected in the arena of legal counsel (where, as Charles understood it, withholding certain key demands was essential in ensuring a successful outcome for one's clients), Alison believed that when it came to matters of the heart, it was important to state the deal-breaker from the outset.

Their courtship might have been unorthodox, but after they married, their lives conformed to a traditional template: they didn't start trying to have kids until Alison's law practice was established and Charles was hired full-time at City Prana; and then, it was so easy, it took no time at all. Alison always said that it was like Cody was right there, watching, ready to jump into their lives the very moment they made room for him. He chose them, he wanted them; they were the parents he was meant to have.

There were some problems early on: Cody did not nurse well; his growth was somewhat behind the curve; his movements were slow, but purposeful—something Charles attributed to a patient temperament.

At each office visit, they ran through the list of social, emotional, linguistic, cognitive, and physical expectations and were always reassured:
He's hitting all the major developmental milestones. See you in three months.

But Charles was not reassured. He pretended to be, but he knew something was amiss; he even knew
why
—although for a long time, he couldn't admit it to himself, much less to anyone else:

Dana McGucken had returned. Dana, who had waited and waited and waited and waited. He had come for Cody, whisking him away, bit by bit, replacing him with the inscrutable changeling child who would from that time forward be Charles's son.

“Sorry I'm late,” Charles said. “Lost track of time.” He sneezed, his habitual reaction to arriving in Pam's classroom, where the atmosphere was filled with pottery dust and paint fumes.

“Bless you,” Pam said. “No worries, we just got started.”

“Hi, Mr. Marlow.”

Charles sneezed again.

“Bless you,” Pam repeated. “Romy and I were talking about the incident.”

They were gathered for a senior-project update meeting, meant to assure all concerned parties that Bertleson, Romy Andrea, was on track.

“What incident?” Charles asked, reaching into his satchel for his pen and notepad.

“Romy had some trouble with one of the participants at Art Without Boundaries.”

“A participant?”
Oh God,
he thought,
please let it not be Cody.

“One of the dementia patients.”

Romy jumped in. “Really, the whole thing got blown way out of proportion. I mean, yes, it was upsetting, but it was just a little slap. She got frustrated, the way little kids do when they can't find their words.”

“Someone
slapped
you?” Charles interjected.

Romy continued. “I just don't want to give up on her. I mean, that's the whole point of the program, right? To help people
connect
through art?”

“Some people don't want to connect,” Charles said.

Pam and Romy turned in unison to look at him. Charles doodled a row of loops across his notepad.

“Let's look at your photos,” Pam said brightly. “You have prints for us, right?”

Romy laid out the twenty or so portraits that she was considering for inclusion in the May exhibit: black-and-white, mostly close-ups of individuals. The subjects were sharply polarized by age.

At first, Charles didn't see any pictures of Cody; he wasn't sure whether he felt relieved or offended. Was Cody so unremarkable that he didn't warrant photographic notice? It was hard for Charles to imagine Cody as anything other than the center of attention, but maybe for once, at least in this setting, his son was
blending in.

But then Charles spotted him in the background of one photo, one of many featuring the same elderly woman. He recognized her from an earlier batch of photos Romy had taken.

“That's her,” Romy said, pointing. “That's Mrs. D'Amati.”

The angle of the photograph suggested the viewpoint of a small child; Romy must have crouched below the tabletop on which Mrs. D'Amati was writing—for that was what the woman's downward-focused gaze and posture suggested she was doing, although she didn't appear to be holding a writing implement. Cody was standing in the background. His face was out of focus, and anyone who didn't know him as Charles did wouldn't have been able to read his expression and stance: whatever Mrs. D'Amati was doing, Cody was riveted.

“How did you get this one?” Pam asked. “I thought the groups take classes separately.”

“They eat lunch together.”

Pam ran the rest of the meeting. Charles nodded and made occasional nonverbal interjections, but in truth he was barely in the room; his eyes kept wandering to the photo, to the blurred but rapt expression on his son's face.

•♦•

Charles and Donnie used to conduct experiments that might have been published under the title “Factors Affecting the Speed of Elementary-School Lunch Consumption.”

What kind of meat sandwich went down quicker, bologna or olive loaf? (Bologna. Donnie almost choked to death testing this one day.)

Which combination could you eat faster, peanut butter and jelly or peanut butter and marshmallow fluff? (Surprisingly, PB&J; they discovered that fluff expands rapidly in the belly, giving it appetite-suppressant qualities.)