The Measures Between Us (12 page)

DR. WHEELING:     Do you have his address?

E. PHILLIPS:     His address?

DR. WHEELING:     So we can interview him.

E. PHILLIPS:     Oh, I know it by turns. Gordon could probably
tell you better. I go by my nose.

Every week Sam took his son, Brandon, to the cemetery. Early on, when Brandon was five or so, he didn't understand what the graveyard was. The headstones were mere shapes, colors, textures. He seemed to think of these trips as if they were outings to the park, only without swing sets, no seesaws or basketball court “where the big kids play.” At the local schoolyard, where they often idled away a sunny Saturday, Brandon was rapt by the pickup games. He ran right up against the fence, his mouth parted slightly, his head moving left to right, mirroring the motion of the players. When someone dunked, he stomped his foot, almost unconsciously. His fingers curled around the chain link, and Sam tried not to stare at him but could not resist.

Why aren't there more people here, Daddy? Brandon always asked at Mt. Auburn, kicking the leaves that littered the asphalt. They sailed up from the toe of his sneaker, then drifted back down. In the fall he handed the brightest ones to his father to keep, though once they were home he forgot about them. A small pile grew on the top of Sam's dresser, next to loose change and ATM receipts.

Fresh cut flowers crowned some of the headstones. Most were
bare. Soon Brandon would notice the difference and ask about it, one more confounding question that emerges from a child's mouth. Kids can make you stammer without even intending to.

At home, as they buttoned their coats and tied their shoes, Brandon often announced, “My shovel and pail are already in the car. In the way back.” Sam nodded. Every time they prepared to leave, he was tempted to cancel the trip. Untie Brandon's boots, rehang their jackets on the pegs. Park their boots by the door. Face this another day. Yet the change in plans would force another question, one he definitely couldn't answer. Better to soldier through.

“I'm bringing my airplane too. There are good runways there.” He was impatient, his little body flitting around the tight confines of the mudroom.

“I'm bringing the new F-16 you got me last week,” Brandon said. “I put the flag stickers on it but one's crooked. Will you help me straighten it?”

“It's okay.”

“But it's not. Will you help me? It's crooked and it should be straight.”

Again his father nodded. Dinosaurs, school buses, cheetahs and jaguars—it's hard to keep pace with a boy's obsessions. Once you master one, he has a new fixation. There were plastic bins in his bedroom brimming with what he had moved on from. For a week he would cling to a plaything as if it were a critical part of his life, essential as air or water.

Sam used to find himself in Toys “R” Us, lost amid towering shelves of gleaming plastic, suddenly unsure of just what it was Brandon treasured at the moment. The aisles turned into a labyrinth. He saw parents being led by children, prophetic and thirsty
as divining rods. He fingered solar systems, battleships, Nerf footballs. Decades ago he and his brother used to see who could throw the farthest, the tightest spiral. They mimicked their favorite quarterback, Steve Grogan, wore shiny jerseys with his number and name on the back. They muddied the fronts of their shirts with handfuls of dirt as if they'd been in an actual game.

He had called Alice on his cell phone. “Help,” he'd said. “What should I buy?” “I don't know,” she'd said. “A map?” Now, with the distance of memory, he thought he'd called her as much to confirm their son's wants as to hear her soothing voice, something to take him away from the circus of the store.

You don't have to go there, she always said. There are smaller places.

I know, he said. It's like some sort of penance.

You've done something wrong? she asked.

Nothing more than usual, he said.

The smaller stores have nicer toys, she said. Handmade things, wood instead of crap.

Yes, he agreed. But are we buying toys for our son or for us? Besides, I think of it as patriotism: Sometimes you have to eat at McDonald's, drink a Coke, and shop at a superstore. It's the American way.

Or else we're no better than the Commies, she said.

Right: Or else we're Commies.

It had been nearly two years since Alice had killed herself. Sam always preferred those two words over the more clinical “committed suicide,” which sounded to him like avoiding the truth, fleeing something—the same way people say “passed away” instead of “died.” Those words, like
kill
and
die
, are hard to say, he
supposed, especially when they're attached to people close to you. But the other words, they're just putting off the truth for a moment or two longer as your brain translates what they mean. In a way, it prolonged the pain.

Several months after it happened, he was reading a magazine and saw an advertisement for a language school aimed at recent immigrants who couldn't speak English. The ad listed the languages the instructors were fluent in. All the major ones were there, like French, Spanish, German, and Chinese, along with more obscure tongues like Urdu, Farsi, Tagalog. He decided to find out how to write “suicide” in every entry on the list. He pinned the magazine page over his desk, crossing out each language as he progressed. He did it only when Brandon was asleep, because he didn't want to have to lie to him if he asked what the writing was:
learning how to tell everyone in the world what your mother did.
But the thing was, some of the languages didn't have an equivalent word or expression. You could hinge the word
kill
to
self,
but it wouldn't make sense to a native speaker. It would require further explanation, sentences, paragraphs, and still there was a good chance at miscommunication. There are some cultures in which people never learn how to kill themselves.

A year before she died, Brandon was diagnosed with autism. It's a disorder that reveals itself without warning, like a slap. One day your child is motoring his popcorn-popper toy through the living room, the next he's babbling maniacally and flapping his hands and running into a doorjamb. When you have a baby, you spend hours childproofing the house—taping foam corners onto the coffee table, stoppering outlets with plastic plugs, locking
cabinets with clips. (All of which annoyed Sam, having to break into the area under the sink just to throw something into the trash.) And none of those safeguards mattered when you had a son like Brandon. He could transform nearly any object or surface into a weapon, things you'd never imagine could wound. Short of living where there are no walls and no floor and no furniture, there is little you can do.

Before the autism fully bloomed, Brandon was learning at a pace that often left Sam and his wife speechless. At dinner he would assemble sentences with words they had no idea he knew, and later as they relaxed in front of the TV he would finish a puzzle in minutes rather than hours. They bought him toys pegged for an age bracket he hadn't reached yet, proudly bragging to the cashier about how precocious he was. Then one night he turned a patch of white wall red with blood. Sam stayed up late scrubbing the stain, attacking it with it so much vengeance that he scraped off all the paint and exposed raw Sheetrock. For weeks he inspected it like a forensics detective, looking for bits of red he had missed, specks buried deep in the guts of the house. His eyes played tricks on him. He'd be on the couch, talking to his wife, and something would catch his gaze. He would rush over, certain he'd discover more dried blood, proof of an additional outburst, some taunt about the uselessness of trying to contain this wreck.

They went to six doctors before getting an answer. They sat in eerily similar offices across from thick, overlacquered mahogany desks. The framed diplomas and their gothic typefaces were supposed to reassure; here was someone who could supply answers and untangle mysteries. They looked at CT scans and they were chilling, even though they had no idea how to read them.
X-rayed, the human body looks diseased even if it is not. They nodded at what the doctor said, even if it differed from what the previous one had reported.

Sam often wondered if the doctors understood what was going on and if all of them were just too cowardly to tell them. Did they look also into Alice's eyes and sense something that he himself should have but did not? About her inability to cope with the future the doctors were soon to define, about the choking off of so much happiness and what that can do to a person? The doctor who finally gave the diagnosis said, “It's autism. There's a lot of debate around what causes it.” He absently fingered the stethoscope ringed around his shoulders.

Soon the pediatrician was splayed out on the floor in his office, showing Brandon the contents of a toy medicine bag while he continued talking about what was chewing up their son's brain. Brandon was most interested in his tie, dotted with colorful hot-air balloons. He kept touching them, ascending toward the man's neck, and Sam was worried that he would inappropriately paw the doctor's skin. They had seen him throw himself onto children at the park, and they would apologize endlessly to the parents who scooped up their boys and girls. The doctor interspersed his explanation of autism with questions for Brandon—“Do you want to float up in the clouds?” “What's your favorite color?” Blue, Sam nearly answered, because Brandon could be shy. It was striking, the canyon between how sweet and gentle the doctor was and the brutal coldness of his words.

They were silent on the drive home. Brandon was strapped into the backseat, and occasionally Sam caught his face in the rearview. Mirrors were one of those things he had always anticipated teaching him about, along with geography, the Beatles and
the Stones, baseball. He had old oil-softened mitts stuffed in the closet, just waiting, and he had held on to his records, too, alphabetized and stored in the attic. You try not to be one of those fathers who projects his own desires onto his son, but then it just happens and it's too much work to veer elsewhere. Was any of that a possibility now?

The motion of the car usually made Brandon sleepy and soon his eyes were shut, his right hand still gripping his sippy cup. Alice was staring unwaveringly out the windshield. No tears pooled in her eyes, she didn't rub her palms on her jeans to dry the nervous sweat. When he asked whether she minded if he listened to the Sox game, she didn't say anything. He let his hand linger on the tuning knob longer than necessary, hoping she would slap it away, give him some signal that she was present. Now, years later, he thinks he should have sensed something from her extreme detachment, the island she was considering. He thought about asking her a question, but there was only one: What the fuck do we do?

The route home took them along the Charles River, where lone rowers locked in rhythm cut straight lines with their sculls. Sam wanted to think he contemplated swerving into a neighboring lane, into the unerring path of a semi, yet that would be a lie, history rewritten, to be nearer to her—nearer even to Brandon and his outbursts. Or maybe he pictured drowning the three of them, finding a watery home on the murky riverbed. They would have made the newspapers, their tragedy loud across the front pages. Reporters could have pieced together the final hours, interrogated the doctor with the hot-air-balloon tie, mapped something that defies mapping. People they never knew could have pitied them.

No, he didn't think of that either, though in some ways he wished he had. It would have made him feel closer to Alice, to the visions of a crisp ending shooting through her head. An ending she understood not as an ending but as relief. He had known early on in their relationship how extreme she could be, he had even admired it, but he had never thought it would have approached this, no matter what they might have had to face.

When they got home, Alice poured herself a glass of whiskey and curled up on the couch. She pulled a blanket over her legs and lap. Sam joined her there with his own glass. They drank often enough to know that little else could soothe as quickly, and alcohol always made them close. So much of their courtship had played out in dim bars filled with familiar strangers, with jukeboxes that played songs you never knew you missed. At some point the quarters and dollars run out and the songs muddle into a warm, hopeful mess.

They spent the rest of the afternoon getting drunk and being quiet, Brandon arranging and rearranging his Matchbox cars on the floor in front of them. He held races and contests, occasionally steering a car up their legs. He asked them to root for certain numbers and colors, and they complied and cheered, raising their glasses when their drivers won.

Sam remembered that his wife did this thing when they were first dating. He would be late to the bar, and when he'd come in and apologize and ask how long she had been waiting, she'd point to how much of her drink was gone and say, “This long.” He liked that she measured the time with liquid, and sometimes he thought he made himself late just to hear her say that and watch her hands pinch the air.

He put a Bob Dylan CD in the stereo that day, and pushed the
repeat button so neither of them would have to get up when it ended. The Jameson bottle stood on a side table, within reach. They tracked the sun and whiskey going down by a green patch of light descending the wall. He thought Brandon might see it and obsess over it, have to be talked out of yet another preoccupation, but his cars were demanding all his attention. Sam couldn't remember how many times they let the album start over.

Hungry for information, Sam spent hours at the computer, reading about cases far worse than Brandon's. Kids who smeared walls with their own feces. Kids who burned themselves. Kids who tried to murder their siblings. He found other, rare illnesses, like one that caused kids to age prematurely so that they had heads and bodies the size of dolls, along with the features of a seventy-year-old. “Actually I don't blame people in the supermarket for staring,” one mother wrote. “Sometimes I do it myself.” The websites were filled with empty platitudes: “Take it one day at a time,” “Look for joy in the little things.” Yes, Sam thought, they'll always be little.