His mother needed to get back to work as soon as Sam returned home. He was taking a couple of weeks off school to recuperate, but after the past year of tests and doctors’ appointments and procedures she had no leave left, so Dettie offered to drop over each day from her apartment and watch him. Sam was meant to use the time to relearn his daily routine. How to bathe without getting water in his stoma. How to clean and strap his vent in place. He would dab the incision point with antiseptic, as the nurse had shown him, and clear it out with the suction squeezer. He’d rub ointment on the skin that was inflamed and blotchy red, and before re-wrapping it all, he would stare into his reflection, at his exposed neck. Into the hole. Without the vent in place. The hole open to the world. Dark and open and quiet. He would put his hand up to his neck and feel the warm air on his palm as he exhaled.
Mostly he stayed in bed. Dettie had given up trying to coax him out. He read comic books, listened to the radio. Katie brought him packages of homework from his teachers that he would skim through and leave unfinished on his bedside table. The few times he did sneak out of his room it was to use the bathroom or get a spoonful of ice cream from the freezer. Ice cream had become his primary pleasure. It was slick and cool on his tongue, dissolving against his teeth, all the sweeter for having been pilfered from behind Dettie’s back while she sat on the couch humming whispery old tunes to herself, smoking and stitching colourful new scenes into ever more squares of cloth.
One afternoon, hunting through the laundry cupboard for batteries, Sam found a yellow cassette that looked strangely familiar. Back in his room he found that it was a recording of him and his father singing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’. Sam must have been about two years old at the time. He was slurring a lot of the words and was wildly off-key. Between the drop-outs of the sound, and Sam continuously thumping on the microphone (his father kept breaking the melody to ask him to stop), it was difficult to listen to, even huddled close to the speaker so that Dettie couldn’t hear. The voices seemed to belong to other people. Strangers, from another time and place. Sam’s was garbled and alien, oddly nasal and squeaky, but even his father’s seemed strange. Higher-pitched than he remembered. Somehow thinner and metallic. At one point he coughed and it sounded more like a small sneeze.
Sam stopped the tape, slipped it back in its case, and stuffed it under his bed.
‘You had the sweetest little voice,’ Dettie said that evening as they sat watching television.
Sam was balled on the couch under a blanket. She peered over at him with a gentle smile. He tried not to look up at her, feeling himself tense, pretending he was transfixed by the commercials. Was she talking about the tape? Had she heard? He’d hidden himself away. He’d only played it once. Barely above a whisper. How could she know?
‘Like a little bird,’ she said. ‘Chattering all over the place. Gabbing away all day. But heavens, you’d shout the house down if you couldn’t find your toys.’ Dettie hummed happily. ‘Oh, the noise. Remember that, Joanne?’ she called out towards the kitchen.
There was no reply.
‘Joanne?’
Sam’s mother called out, ‘What?’
‘Remember when Sam was little? All that running about? The noise?’
Sam stayed transfixed by the flickering television screen. A pizza was twirling in a haze of steaming cheese. Katie, lying on the floor with colouring books, was rolling her head on the carpet, sighing.
‘What, Dettie?’ His mother appeared in the doorway. She was clutching a fan of papers and brochures. ‘Pardon?’
Dettie chuckled. ‘Just reminiscing about when Sammy was a toddler. Remember? All that shouting about—oh, what was it? Robot Boy?
His mother shook her head, blinking. ‘Um, I don’t—Astro Boy? Is that the one?’
‘That’s right! Yes! The funny little robot. Flying around everywhere. Remember that Christmas—you and Donald trying to find a toy with the robot on it?’
Sam’s mother exhaled. Loudly.
‘Sorry, Dettie,’ she said, firmly. ‘I’m just,’ she waved the papers in her hand, ‘I’m just a little busy trying to deal with some things in here.’ She turned, digging her shoulder into the doorframe as she pivoted, and left the room.
Sam knew what she was busy doing. He’d seen the letters from his school, noticed the business cards for advisors and private tutors splayed on the table. Sam’s school was arguing with his mother about whether they had the facilities to take him back. None of their teachers were trained to teach children with disabilities.
‘He’s not disabled!’ he’d heard his mother shout into the phone at his principal. This was the day after he’d come home from hospital. His mother had called to give the school an update on his progress. ‘He’s not deaf! He can hear and see perfectly well.’
The principal had said something in reply, but whatever it was, Sam’s mother was unimpressed.
‘Well, that’s not really our problem, is it? He can write and play and participate. He’s smart. He can take care of himself. The only one who seems incapable of anything here is you.’
Somewhere more suitable seemed to be the common refrain, but eventually she had convinced them that it wouldn’t be a problem. Sam would be allowed back to his same class in the same year, and she would arrange for a private tutor, at her expense, to help him regain some sort of speech.
Dettie seemed unfazed. ‘Your father never did find that toy, did he, Sammy?’
Sam kept staring at the television, through the screen. He shrugged. He remembered the show, but not any toys. Not running about pretending to be flying.
Besides, he thought, Astro Boy was a robot. He could be rebuilt. Good as new.