Try as he might to keep the sweet remembrance of Kate at a safe remove, John Neal was fighting a losing battle. It was pointless to close his eyes again, he realized. He’d only fall asleep and see her in his dreams, dreams that had no bearing on the reality that she was two thousand miles away and, in all likelihood, in a committed relationship with someone who wore Armani suits, drove an expensive car and sported a tan direct from St. Tropez. The two of them probably turned heads wherever they went, he imagined, though a cynical part of him also wondered whether Kate’s escort was the type who liked to repeatedly check his reflection in elevator mirrors and silverware.
On the other hand, he mused, the perfection of a GQ jet-setter image didn’t seem entirely consistent with the companionship of a child who probably liked to leave grape jelly handprint smears on every surface he touched. He caught himself smiling in the dark at how Jimmy had pointed at his shoes and said “parade”. Funny word to stick in a five-year old’s head, he thought, trying to fathom how much he’d understood about the floats and the marching bands that Cassy had camped out overnight on a sidewalk to share with him.
That he couldn’t articulate those memories to anyone was an irony John could personally relate to, especially in light of the daily struggles he saw his father go through to regain his ability to walk and talk. Certainly, there’d been no shortage of outbursts of seemingly unrelated words from Sean when he first came home from the hospital, a situation that often left Abby baffled.
“What do you suppose he means by ‘Joof cat’?” she’d ask John, relating that this was something his father had been angrily repeating to her all afternoon. The next day, it would be completely forgotten and either replaced by a different string of strange words or complete silence. “Do you want some Joof cat?” Abby would ask him, hoping that her mimicking might lead them to invent a special interim language through which they could more easily communicate with one another. Sean, in response, would look at her as if she were some kind of an idiot who was trying to drive him crazy.
The doctors had explained to them in layman’s terms that everything was still in Sean’s head but that it would take time for his brain to learn how to retrieve it. They had also been honest in their assessment that some of the older man’s memories were probably lost forever. John remembered his mother saying, “As long as they’re only the unhappy ones, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”
A black veil was now moving painfully at the back of John’s mind, triggered by his father’s mention the previous afternoon of the money that was available for him to go back to school. If he remembered the money, it was only a matter of time that he might also start remembering where it had come from.
Shelby was now stirring at the foot of the bed, her canine sixth sense perhaps telling her that her master was awake, restless, and in need of a wet nose in his ear.
“Bed hog,” John said to her as she maneuvered herself into a comfy spot closer to the pillows. He glanced over at the alarm, dismayed to see that the time displayed was a tweener, too early to get up and start the day but too late to roll over and try to catch a few more zzz’s. For a moment he was tempted to go downstairs and retrieve the college brochures just to give himself something to do until daybreak. “It wouldn’t hurt to just look at them,” Abby had tried to coax him.
To John’s way of thinking, of course, even a casual perusal might suggest that he was admitting his parents were right, that his life could stand for a little improvement. Even worse – and unspoken – was the reminder of why he and Kate had gone their separate ways after high school. Seeing the trappings of success that her Amherst education had brought her, he reflected, only widened what was already an impossibly wide chasm between them.
“Well, aren’t you the early bird?” Abby declared in surprise.
John, with his back to the entryway, was making a Cajun omelet for himself when his mother entered the room. Had he turned at that precise moment to acknowledge her presence, he might have dropped the frying pan at the alarming sight of her sporting a facial mask.
“Not a look for everyone,” he remarked, mindful of the silly fact that his mother’s penchant for trying out radical new beauty remedies had been a family joke for at least a decade. “What’s this one supposed to do?”
“Anna swears that it takes twenty years off.”
The image of Anna Loftig, wizened and not unlike an apple doll with clove eyes, made John chuckle. “Anna’s older than dirt,” he said. “You mean she’d look a lot worse if she didn’t use it?”
His mother quickly rose to the retired librarian’s defense. “She happens to be very well preserved for her age.”
“Yeah, that’s what they say about mummies, too. So, where did she get it?”
Abby poured herself a generous cup of coffee as she explained that the youth-rejuvenating mineral masque originally came from the Dead Sea and that her friend had recently purchased a jar from two lovely girls at a kiosk down in Cape May. “Anna had quite the chat with them and found out that they’re from Israel. Isn’t that interesting?”
“And they’re selling the beauty products here in Jersey?” John replied with an arched brow of suspicion. “They’re probably with the Mossad.”
“Oh don’t be silly! Why would spies be selling facials and body butter off a cart at a mall?”
“Sounds like a good enough cover to me,” he opined.
Abby took an appreciative whiff of the spicy omelet he was now getting ready to transfer to a plate. “I’ll have one of the same as long as you’re up,” she announced. “Smells good.”
“Take this one and I’ll make myself another,” he offered, thankful for having learned when he was still in high school how to put a meal together without killing anyone. His interest in the culinary arts, of course, went back to Mitch’s juvenile taunts that he’d starve if the Neal household was ever torn asunder. To everyone’s surprise, he’d gotten quite good at finding his way around a kitchen, an asset that Abby frequently liked to remind him would be an attractive draw to any young lady he chose to woo. Mitch, on the other hand, subsisted wholly on take-out and corporate expense accounts. If anyone did the cooking at his Georgetown digs, it was obviously Mindy.
As he handed her the plate, he couldn’t help but stare again at the coal-black concoction that camouflaged everything except her eyes. “So, has Dad seen you yet?” he asked.
“Heavens, no. He’d probably freak out, wouldn’t he?”
“To say the least.”
Sean, she explained, was sleeping soundly like a baby while she’d been in the bathroom applying her latest modern miracle. “Isn’t it funny,” she said, “how he can drive us to distraction all day long from worrying about him and yet every night he goes to bed like he doesn’t have a care in the whole world?”
John gently reminded her that neither of them knew that for certain.
“I suppose,” she agreed, wondering aloud that if he ever regained full control he might proceed to talk non-stop just to catch up on all of the time he’d been forced into silence. “Getting a word in edgewise with him could be like trying to thread a sewing machine while it’s still running.”
“I’d been wondering the same thing about Jimmy,” he said.
“Jimmy?”
John refreshed her memory concerning Kate’s nephew. “It’s gotta be hard,” he commented, “taking on a responsibility like that for a little kid who’s not even your own.”
Before his mother could contribute her two cents on the subject, the doorbell rang. Shelby was already barking to alert her household to an unexpected morning caller.
“I probably should get that,” John offered, “seeing as how—“
Abby finished the sentence for him. “I wouldn’t want to scare anyone off.”
“Y’know, if we got ourselves a video phone,” he mused. “Maybe you could scare off the telemarketers, too.”
Shelby was impatiently pacing back and forth in front of the front door when he reached the living room. John snapped his fingers to command her to move out of the way so he could at least open it without 70 pounds of canine curiosity wedged in-between.
A petite young woman with long black hair swept into a high ponytail and wearing a rose pink jogging suit was standing on the porch and holding a pair of half-frame reading glasses.
“Oh hi,” she said, enthusiastically extending her free hand in greeting. “You must be John?”
“Guilty,” he replied. “And you’re?”
“Gabrielle Davis—uh, I mean Delvaggio,” she replied with a movie star smile. She indicated the glasses in her left hand. “I think that your mom left these at the bridge game last night.”
“The challenge in dealing with autism,” Muriel Moran reiterated, “is that there’s no one-size-fits-all presentation or treatment.”
She had been sitting on Kate’s sofa and taking notes for nearly an hour and a half but so far the school caseworker had yet to divulge anything about Jimmy’s condition that Kate didn’t already know from her research on the Internet and experience with the boy. Despite the increase in and diversity of clinical therapies available to help autistic children and adults learn communication, social and life skills, the complexity of neurological factors that interfered made individual results a total crapshoot.
Nor, Muriel emphasized, was the expense of special education classes, speech, and occupational therapy as well as the ongoing tests easily affordable for most families. That she had commented several times on the condo’s furnishings and fabulous view since her arrival underscored the woman’s awareness that her potential client was not looking to effect change on the cheap.
The only flicker of a bright spot, or so Kate reassured herself, was that Jimmy’s symptoms weren’t as severe as they might be on the spectrum of developmental disorders. She had often wondered if his being seen by so many different pediatricians in such a short stretch of time might have contributed to some mistakes in his record. Certainly, from her viewpoint as an adult, the stress of having to recount her health history to someone new was never a task she looked forward to whenever an employer’s health plan changed.
A short distance away, Jimmy had taken off both of his socks and was attempting to stuff Mr. Ollie’s head into one of them.
“The important thing,” she told Muriel, “is that I’d like to get my nephew enrolled in the right level program and be around kids his own age.” Playing with other children, she explained, hadn’t been part of his upbringing with Cassy since the latter was always worried about him being picked on for being different. Not to mention that Jimmy preferred being alone. There was an indefinable feeling of rightness, Kate thought, to be able to move him into an environment that would allow him to just be himself and explore his surroundings. “How soon do you think we could get him started?”
“Wanting to make up for lost time is certainly understandable, Ms. Toscano, but I have to be honest and tell you that—”
“I know what you’re going to say,” Kate apologetically cut in. “Patience.” She looked over at Jimmy and smiled. “It’s just that he’s lost so much and I want to do whatever I can for him.”
Muriel nodded thoughtfully. “He’s very lucky to have you.” She was now withdrawing some forms from her portfolio. “Just a few more things I’ll need you to look over and sign for us as the boy’s legal guardian.”
It was almost a throwaway line and yet it jumped out at Kate as suddenly as if someone had thrown a neon switch on it. “Excuse me,” she spoke up to correct her, “but I’m just Jimmy’s aunt.” That her sister’s death was so recent hadn’t allowed enough time for her to plan much beyond the flight back to Las Vegas.
Behind her tortoise shell glasses, there was a significant lifting of Muriel’s eyebrows. “But you do have some sort of legal authority granted by the courts to make decisions on his behalf?”
On the surface, Kate depicted ease she didn’t necessarily feel. “It’s what Cassy would have wanted for him,” she said. “The two of us were always close and certainly she knew if anything ever happened to her that our mother—”
“Did she put those specifics in writing?” Muriel sharply interrupted.
Kate couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “No one that young ever…” She lowered her voice and measured her words lest Jimmy overhear. “She couldn’t have known that something like this would change everything.”
Without looking at her, Muriel started to reach for the papers she had taken out only a moment before.
“Listen,” Kate said, “this is all new to me but I’m doing the best I can. Just tell me what exactly it is I need to do and what I have to file with the courts and I’ll get everything back to you by tomorrow.”
“I appreciate your sincerity, Ms. Toscano, but the petition process for guardianship doesn’t move quite that fast.” The capacity and disposition of the petitioning party, the stability of the home, and the best interests of the child, she explained, all had to be taken into consideration before a decision, even a temporary one, could be rendered.
“At least let me get the ball rolling,” Kate insisted, suddenly anxious that if Jimmy had a medical emergency between now and when the ink dried she might not be able to authorize any treatment. “I’m all he has left now.”
Muriel was writing down a phone number and handing it to her. “They’ll be able to walk you through the hoops. As far as enrolling him in our program at this particular time, however…” Her sentence went unfinished as she glanced over at the subject of their conversation who was now amusing himself by rolling back and forth over Mr. Ollie the speed bump. “By the way,” she delicately queried, “I’m assuming that his father not in the picture?”
“Totally lost cause,” Kate candidly volunteered. “Wannabe rocker.”
Muriel frowned. “He’s still alive then?”
Kate shrugged. “I assume so.”
Muriel pursed her thin lips.
“Something wrong?” Kate asked.
“Very much so, Ms. Toscano. I’m afraid this changes everything.”