Mom has turned Babcia’s retirement home unit upside down but she can’t find the box. Now she’s headed back to her house; she has some of Babcia and Pa’s things in storage. It’s been a few hours and she’ll be a while yet, but Eddie is pressing the lunch button on his iPad dozens of times a minute, and it’s driving me, Babcia and the nurses insane. I turned the sound down, but Eddie turned it straight back up—just like Babcia did earlier. One of the nurses quite gently asked if I could take the iPad off him, but it’s his voice and his ears, so I refused.
We’re actually lucky because now that it’s lunchtime, he’ll eat soup or yogurt—but also supremely unlucky, because given the fiasco in the store this morning, I have neither on hand. Eddie simply needs a can of soup, or better still, some tubes of Go-Gurt if we can find some with the right label. I have to call Wade. I have to convince him to come from work via a store, and to bring something Eddie can eat, or better still, to come and take Eddie home. The reason I don’t want to do it is that I already know how this conversation is going to go.
It’s an emergency, I’ll say. I wouldn’t have asked if I had an alternative, but I can’t leave Babcia alone—she’s distressed enough as it is. And I don’t know how much longer Mom is going to be, but Eddie desperately needs to eat.
Wade will make all the right noises, and then there’ll be some impressive reason why he can’t help. He did say he had meetings, so I imagine he’ll refer back to that premade excuse again.
I think about just putting up with the endless robotic demands for lunch, lunch, lunch and waiting, but Eddie looks so frustrated—like he’s about to explode, actually—and now that I think about it, it’s a bonafide miracle we’ve made it this far today with only one meltdown. I sigh and dial Wade.
“Honey,” he answers on the first ring. “I’ve been so worried. How are things going?”
“Things are terrible,” I admit. “Babcia can’t speak and I don’t think she can understand us. She’s been using Eddie’s iPad and she’s told us she needs a box of photos from home, but Mom can’t find it. And Eddie didn’t get his yogurt this morning because there’s new packaging on the Go-Gurt at the Publix and he had this meltdown and now he’s starving so another one is coming and I can’t do this by myself today. I need your help. I know you said you were busy...”
“I’m so sorry, honey. I have these meetings...”
“There is no one else I can call, Wade.”
I’ve raised my voice, and Eddie and Babcia both look at me in surprise. Even if they don’t understand the words, the volume apparently speaks for itself. I wince as I offer them an apologetic shrug, then take a deep breath to calm myself a little.
“I can’t take him home, Alice,” my husband says, a little stiffly. “I just have too much—”
“Don’t worry, Wade. I’m not asking for anything unrealistic like you spending an afternoon alone with your son,” I say, then I hear his sharp intake of breath, and I realize we’re about to argue. Again. Probably because he’s being an ass, and that comment I just made fell somewhere on the spectrum between “mean” and “bitchy” so it’s guaranteed to get a defensive rise out of him. I close my eyes and aim for a much more conciliatory tone as I say, “I’m only asking you to go pick up some tins of soup or some Go-Gurt if you can find the old packaging. Bring them to me here at the hospital. I’ll handle everything else.” My tone shifts, and now I’m begging him. “Please, Wade. Please.”
He sighs, and in my mind, I can see him in his office on the phone. He’ll be sitting stiffly because I’m irritating him, and he’ll have instantly mussed up his hair because he’s upset at how I just spoke to him. Even now, in the awful silence as I wait for him to speak, I know he’ll be repeatedly running his hand over his hair, and when the exasperation gets too much, he’ll rest his hand against the back of his neck and slump.
But just as I can picture this with perfect clarify after so many years with Wade, I also know he’s going to do what I asked, because if he wasn’t, he’d have snapped right back at me and we’d have wound up this call with one or both of us hanging up in anger.
“I’ll come now.”
“If you go to the store near your office, they might have stock of the Go-Gurt with the old labels.” I hesitate, then ask cautiously, “You know what that looked like, right? I’ll text you the image. Same for the soup. You have to get the right soup.”
“I’m not an idiot, Alice,” he says impatiently, and I hear the sounds of movement at his end. “I’m leaving right now.”
Wade is an excellent father, although if you viewed his behavior only through the lens of his interactions with Eddie, you’d suspect the opposite. He rarely engages with Eddie, he’s constantly resistant to the therapies that help our son to survive in the world, he’s dismissive and impatient and he’s unsupportive.
But with our daughter, Pascale—or Callie, as we usually call her, Wade is a model parent. He’s genuinely busy with his job, but he finds a way to be at all of the key events in her life—debate club meets, ballet recitals, parent-teacher interviews, doctor’s appointments. Callie and Wade usually do her homework together, though she rarely needs his help. They are twelve chapters into the last Harry Potter book because they have read alternate pages aloud to each other every night without fail over the past three years. She had her first crush last year, and she told Wade about little Tyler Wilson before she even told me.
I can’t even remember the last time Wade and Eddie were alone together.
Wade would say we had a perfectly normal son until Eddie was eighteen months old and I took him to a doctor, who put a label on our boy, and that label tainted everything. Wade would say I was so convinced that something was wrong with Eddie that it became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, then I spent so much time trying to “fix” him that I actually made him broken.
And he’s kind of right about the paranoia, because from the moment I realized I was pregnant, I knew that something was different. Even I don’t understand how I knew, so I can appreciate that to Wade it might seem that I made all of this happen somehow—at least at first. Maybe that theory could have been valid, right up until Eddie was two, and the developmental pediatrician said the words Autism Spectrum Disorder. We didn’t yet understand how bad it was going to be, but surely that diagnosis was a clear sign that this situation was way out of my control.
It is beyond me how my brilliant husband, a man with a PhD and an entire research program under his guidance, can fail to understand how utterly helpless I am when it comes to our son. I am a puppet controlled by medical professionals and therapists. They tell me all the things I need to do to engage with Eddie. Some of those things, like the AAC on the iPad, help me to reach him, but most of their therapies don’t reach him at all—they simply enable us to survive. None of those therapies made him different—Eddie just is different. That’s where my opinion and Wade’s diverge.
Wade would say all of my efforts enable a spoiled little boy who could be closer to typical if we just pushed him more instead of pandering to him. Wade speaks to Eddie, because he can’t accept that Eddie’s language is really as restricted as I know it is. Wade views Eddie’s echolalia as a game—a way to insult and taunt us—and of proof that Eddie could use verbal language to communicate if he wanted to. It doesn’t help that when Eddie sees Wade, he often echoes the words not now, Edison, although I’m not even sure why that one has even persisted because Eddie no longer makes much of an attempt to engage with his father at all.
What Wade loves to forget is that, initially, he was quite supportive of medical intervention. He seemed to have this idea that Eddie’s diagnosis automatically meant our son would be a savant, and Wade was kind of okay with the whole situation right up until the psychologist told us that Eddie’s IQ was a little under average, so he was unlikely to possess any quirky but genius abilities. My husband is a quirky genius himself—he could handle having a brilliant but odd child; in fact, we have one of those already in Callie, and he’s her best friend in the world. It was the “below average” designation that Wade couldn’t deal with, the autism itself was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.
That’s when the blame game started—but I don’t judge Wade for that, because I play it too. My husband and more importantly, his sperm, have spent an awful lot of time around intense industrial chemicals over the years, and he’s been exposed to radiation at work more than once. And heavens, left to his own devices? Wade’s diet is appalling. We blame each other for Eddie’s struggles—the only difference is Wade occasionally has the courage to voice his thoughts on the matter aloud. Maybe that makes him a better person, because at least he’s honest. I carry my resentment of Wade around like a millstone around my neck and some days I just know that sooner or later, something is going to snap.
He arrives twenty-two minutes after our call, and just as I expected, he’s frazzled. Wade wears a suit to work because he’s an executive manager these days. When he leaves home in the morning, his tie is always impressively straight. Right now, it’s at a somewhat-crazy angle, and his blond hair is sticking up all over the place. He looks sheepish as he enters the hospital room, his hands caught through the straining handles of two overloaded hessian bags.
“Hi, guys,” he says pointlessly to Babcia and Eddie on the bed, then he nods at me and raises the bag in his left hand. “I got a whole carton of soup—it’s in the car. Then they had plenty of stock of the old yogurt labels so I bought it all—here’s half of it.” He lifts the other bag a little higher and nods toward it. “And I got heaps with the new label too...” At my blank stare, he says hesitantly, “Well...you know, so he can get used to it.”
Eddie won’t get used to the label. I don’t know how we’re going to manage that yet, but the fact that Wade thinks it’s that easy is a blatant reminder of how little he understands.
“Thanks.”
I expect Wade to pass me the bags, kiss me politely and spin on his heel, but instead, he sets the bags on the floor and pulls me into an embrace. I’m surprised by this, and even more surprised when he places a gentle kiss on the side of my hair.
“Sorry, Ally. Honestly, I’m really sorry. I know you’re under a lot of pressure at the moment and I’m not much help.”
I sigh and lean into him, then wind my arms around his torso and accept comfort from the warmth of his embrace. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Rare glimpses of the man I know my husband to be have sustained our marriage. In these sporadic moments, I catch a hint of hope on the horizon. All I need to keep working and fighting and trying is a glimmer of that, just every now and again. This one comes right when I need it.
“I’m kind of on a short fuse emotionally,” I whisper. “I’m really sorry too...about before.”
“Would it help if I stay this afternoon?”
He doesn’t offer to take Eddie home, but this is as close as I’m going to get and I appreciate the offer.
“Actually,” I say, “Callie has ballet at four. If you could go pick her up from school, take her to ballet, then go home and cook some dinner...”
“Absolutely,” Wade says, with enthusiasm, or maybe it’s relief. “Absolutely, I can do that. Anything you need.” He brushes his lips against mine, then glances at the bed again. “How are you doing, Babcia?”
“She can’t understand you,” I remind him. “She’s been using the AAC—if you want to talk to her you’ll have to use that.”
Wade stiffens, then waves vaguely at the bed and glances at his watch.
“I might head back to the office and tell them I’m going to take off early. I’ll see you at home tonight. Let me know if you need anything else?”
“Okay,” I say.
Lunch, Eddie’s iPad says, then, Lunch lunch lunch lunch lunch lunch...
“Okay, okay,” I sigh, and I bend and fetch a pack of yogurt. He’s so excited that he sits up and his hands start flapping all over the place.
Six tubes of yogurt later, Eddie is settled on the bed watching YouTube videos of trains again. But then Mom flies back into the room with an archive box in her hand, and Babcia brightens until she’s the one impatiently flapping her hands.