Fifteen

“I BROUGHT THIS TO show you,” Grace said.

They were sitting in Anna’s room. It was almost eight o’clock in the evening. Anna was still in surgery. Grace took a piece of paper from her bag, crumpled and creased; she placed it on the bedcover, and tried to smooth it flat.

“Do you see what it is?”

David leaned forward. It was a map. Drawn on a piece of school graph paper, about two feet square. “It’s a coastline,” he murmured.

“It’s where I live,” Grace said. “You see the road, the house? The lighthouse?”

“Yes.” He sat admiring it; it was rather beautiful, with Gothic lettering for the place-names, and pictures of the seabirds. He turned it around, seeing that there was a scale at the bottom.

“Rachel drew this when she was eight,” Grace said. “The cottage here is mine—it looks exactly like that. All the details are right. She did another one, after this. Of the city center, with the State House and Hancock Tower, and the Freedom Trail marked in bronze, like the plaques on the sidewalk. And the parks all drawn in green, with beautiful trees, and a frog sitting in the middle of Frog Pond…” She looked up at him, with shining eyes. “It was maps for a long time,” she told him. “All kinds of atlases. She could sit for hours, just looking. She drew a map of her own room first, and then the road, the town…She’s drawn maps of the state. And she loves place-names. She can tell you what place-names mean, and she knows every capital.…”

“You’re proud of her,” he said.

“Of course I am.” She sat back, and considered him. “Garrett told you about her.”

“Yes, he spoke to me.”

“That’s why you were late.”

“He insisted we stop at his house.”

She smiled thinly. “He does a lot of insisting,” she said. “Quiet, you know? Refined. Like sugar. Refined the hell out of himself. Took all the gritty bits away.”

He smiled back at her. “Well,” he said, “he’s told me about Rachel.”

She laughed softly. “Then you know all there is to know,” she said.

He heard the sarcasm.

She looked at the empty bed, at the equipment lying still. “Do you know anything at all about Asperger?”

“About what?” he asked.

She glanced back at him. “Asperger syndrome.”

“I don’t understand,” he said. “I thought Rachel was autistic.”

She nodded, slowly, assessing him. “Would you prefer her to be?”

“Prefer her…?”

“That’s Garrett’s theory. She’s autistic.”

“And she’s not?”

“Look,” Grace said, “she’s Asperger. Officially, as of nine months ago.” She spread her hands, indicating a fait accompli.

“I’m lost,” David said. He was beginning to feel the long day: pain drummed faintly behind his eyes.

Grace paused, then she pointed down at her bag. “It’s just like a map,” she said. “Do you remember those old ones? You’ve seen them, surely. Where the countries beyond the known world just said, Here be dragons?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“OK,” Grace said. She leaned forward, elbows on the bed. “So say we put autism with the dragons. We’re guessing at the country. We think it’s a long way off, so far on the edge of our own world, that it’s really another world. But it’s not. Aspergers are closer to us than that.” She nodded down again at her bag. “At least they can tell you where they are. Some Aspergers are incredibly vocal. They can talk about themselves. But autistic children might be so distant that they can’t distinguish just how deeply different they are. Whereas an Asperger, like Rachel, knows she’s different.”

“Rachel knows this?” he repeated. “She knows she’s different?”

Grace smiled at him sadly. “David,” she said, “Rachel is only too well aware. Other kids tell her all the time.”

“They do?” he asked. “They tell her?”

“Yes,” Grace said. “They tease her.”

He frowned. “You mean, they pick on her.”

“Sure.”

“They bully her?”

“Yes.”

He flushed.

“Look,” Grace said. “One of the things about Rachel—about any kid like Rachel—is that she’ll just speak up. Sometimes that earns her enemies.” She smiled, and then sighed. “It’s not that she’s trying to be aggressive,” she explained. “It’s just that she doesn’t have a set of social rules in her head. She doesn’t recognize subliminal stuff, messages that you or I pick up instinctively. You know—say, for instance, if someone rolls their eyes when we’re around. We know what that means, don’t we? We think, OK, so I’ve said something stupid. Or they don’t like me. And we store that information away. We’ll maybe be more circumspect around that person. We’ll watch them and ourselves. Or we might choose to avoid them.”

“And Rachel doesn’t store the information.”

“Oh, yes,” Grace said. “She stores information like a computer hard disc.”

“But not anything that helps her with relationships.”

“That’s right.”

“And she doesn’t want friends?”

“She wants friends,” Grace answered. “But making them, keeping them—that’s really hard for her. It’s as if it’s conducted in a foreign language to her. All the nuances are lost. All the little clues and lead-ins for a conversation. All the jokes. Plus,” she said, “Rachel can’t lie, and she won’t break a rule, and she won’t bend. Try having a friendship where you can’t tell that little white lie, the one that stops you hurting someone’s feelings.”

David got up, and walked to the window. The lights of the city were spread out in front of him. He was struck hard by the poignancy of this lost child, who could not grasp the way others behaved, drawing maps for herself. “I’m not surprised that Anna wants to take her out of school,” he murmured. He had his back to Anna’s mother. He didn’t see her face. “Garrett told me about the tutor.”

Grace got up. She came alongside him. “Rachel doesn’t need a tutor,” she said.

He looked at her. “But James…”

“Oh, let me guess. Rachel will be having a tutor at home.”

“You mean she won’t?”

“No,” Grace said. “She damn well won’t.” She put both hands on the windowsill, closed her eyes, drew in a breath. “He’s been brainwashing Anna with this stuff for weeks. Weeks! It’s just a way to control Anna, insisting on expensive schooling the child doesn’t need. Making Anna feel she’s mistaken. Fucking octopus.”

David stared at her. She opened her eyes. He shook his head, spread his hands. She started to laugh. “Well, that’s what he is,” she said. “Greasy tentacles everywhere, you know? Pulling you in. All in that nice soft voice of his. That very reasonable voice. Rachel would be so much better off with a private tutor, she would get along so much better in a calm atmosphere…You can see Anna waver. Is she doing the right thing? Is James right? He undermines her all the time.” She made a gesture, both hands to her head, as if she’d tear her hair out. “Oh, for two cents, I’d kill him,” she muttered. “I really would. I’d go down there right now and shoot him.” She glanced at David’s perplexed face. “I threw you to the lions,” she said, apologetically. “I called you here, to this mess.”

David frowned. He had no idea what was going on here. “So Rachel’s still in school?”

“Of course she’s in school, of course she is,” Grace retorted. “It’s what keeps her in the world. You want her to be out there with the dragons? You want her lost?” She put both hands on his arms. “Look,” she said. “Sometimes it hurts her to get face-to-face with people. She struggles to understand. She literally has to learn such-and-such an expression; she has to learn that that particular way a face looks means that the person is upset. And another expression means happy. She has to learn what silences mean in certain situations, and what they mean in others. It’s like she’s battling to stay afloat. But she has to stay afloat” Grace insisted, her fingers pressing into his flesh. “She has to stay in touch with us. What’s the alternative? The alternative is, she drifts away, she goes over that ocean, we lose her. And worse still, at some point in the future, she’s alone, when Anna and I aren’t here anymore, and she’s left without any clues, any strategies. That is the world that Garrett wants for her,” she said. “He wants to set her apart, and hothouse her, and turn her into a freak show. He wants her to have special math tutoring, and to take her college exams early.”

She sighed, running a hand through her hair. “And all the time she’d be shrink-wrapped against the world, and she’d be helpless. Helpless.”

David stared at her. An image sprang back at him: waiting for a bus in a winter landscape, with Anna at his side.

My father is dead and buried inside that face.

Grace dropped her hands. “Excuse me,” she said. “But I get so angry about this. We’ve had her for ten years, and he’s known her for five, and he knows everything. He knows best. He’ll talk and he’ll talk and he’ll talk. He’ll talk at you until you get so tired of listening to him. And it’s all the same tone, the same sound. Eventually you get like you’d agree to anything, just to get him to stop. He’s been like that with Anna. It’s a slow drip. You know? Like a slow-dripping tap.”

“But why would Anna let that happen?” he asked. “This is her daughter.”

Grace shook her head. “You haven’t seen,” she said. “You can’t imagine what he’s like.”

“You mean he just imposes what he wants?”

“He grinds her down.”

“Oh, come on! The Anna I knew wouldn’t let anyone grind her down,” David objected.

Grace looked at him for some time before replying. “Put yourself in her shoes,” she murmured, at last. “She’s a single mother. And an artist. She really struggles financially. She’s worn down with trying to work, and looking after Rachel, but she wants to be independent. She moves to Boston because she enrolls Rachel in a school here, one with a good record. It’s mainstream, but it understands. Unlike the other two schools that Rachel’s attended, this one is prepared to listen. And Rachel is five now.”

Grace interrupted her own story with a sudden, wide smile. “Oh, David, if you could see this school,” she said. “They have a parent support program; they’re flexible. They let Rachel go in before she started full-time, and they asked her to write down a description of herself.”

The smile became positively glowing now. “I’ve kept that description,” she said. “I’ll bring it. She wrote down what she liked best. The maps came into that, then. And playing an Autoharp. It’s just a little instrument we found in a store; you press down a band, and you make all sorts of chords…and she wrote about the tapping, and turning around.”

David frowned.

“Bouncing, tapping, whirling around,” she explained. “Of all the autistic traits, that’s the one that makes people think That child is crazy. It’s hard to look at sometimes. Or they bang their heads against the wall, or hit themselves.”

“My God,” David whispered.

“And you know why?” Grace said. “I read this only the other week. They believe that it’s because autistic children hear and see so much better than anyone else. Their senses are all tuned up. They’re wildly sensitive. Living in a superheated world. Have you seen that TV ad, the one where the person with the sore throat is sitting there, and he has—it’s a graphics effect—thorns wound around his throat?”

“I don’t know…maybe…”

“That always makes me think of Rachel,” Grace said. “Living in a world where a screech of car brakes sounds like a whirlwind, or the taste of orange marmalade on toast tastes just like eating an actual orange, pith and skin. And so many other things, so many others…the noise of waves, or of feet brushing against a carpet, or a cat’s fur under your fingers…”

Grace’s attention had drifted away from David and had settled on Anna’s empty bed. “They turn around, or move, or hit themselves, to concentrate on that vibration or pain, to temporarily tune out the overload.” She suddenly turned back to him. “Don’t you think that’s rather incredible?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. And the thought swept over him. The thought of himself walking in Lewesdon, repeating the names of trees. Hanging on to his private mantras and his solitude. The overriding feeling he had had since Anna’s departure—that he was not quite part of the rest of the world. Without her, he had slowly, slowly drifted away.

He thought of the last woman he had known—she was a teacher, near Bristol—telling him that he was so hard to know. It was New Year’s. They had been in a crowded pub. Someone else in their party was at the bar, shouting their order over the heads of other people. The music was deafening.

“What?” he’d said, cupping his hand to his ear, pretending to be both old and deaf. “What did you say, young lady?”

“Hard—to—know,” she’d answered, mouthing the words at him exaggeratedly.

“I’m not hard to know,” he had retorted, grinning. “Look at me. I’m Mr. Nice Guy.”

“Yes,” she’d said. “You are. You’re the life and soul of the party.”

“Yeah,” he’d retorted. “Mr. Cool!”

She had furrowed her brows. “It’s all the talking.”

“All the what?” he’d repeated.

She almost had to shout. “You talk so much.”

“And that’s what?” he’d asked, tipping his head down low to her now, to grasp the real meaning of what she was saying. “That’s a fault? All I ever hear from women is how they wish men would talk to them.”

She’d smiled. The drinks came back from the bar, together with much pushing and shoving. In the background, the radio was turned even higher as the countdown to New Year started. He had gripped her arm.

“All about your work,” she’d said.

And it was like it always was when his relationships finished. He would think of Anna. Not the woman he had lost. But Anna…

“David,” Grace said.

He jolted back to the present. “Sorry.”

“Do you want to hear about Rachel?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry. Go on.”

She paused just a fraction, then went on. “Well, Rachel starts this school, and it’s good. There are bad days—she is suspended twice—but, on the whole, it’s progress. We begin to relax a little. Just a little. But there is a downside. Living in Boston is expensive, and money is tight. Anna isn’t selling too well in Boston. We shuttle back and forth, and we talk about maybe me moving, or the two of them traveling back and forth every day, and there seems to be no right way to do it. No easy way. Anna gets tired, and Rachel gets tired.…”

She took a deep breath. “Then, out of the blue, here comes along a very wealthy man. A very quiet man who understands what she does. Who’s willing to look after this very challenging, different child she has. He doesn’t run away. Most men do, you know. They take one look at Rachel—”

“So there’s nothing wrong with him,” David interrupted. “Nothing wrong with Garrett.”

“No,” Grace responded sharply. “What could be wrong? He’s like manna from heaven. He gets Anna work. A showing, an exhibition. Money, a name. And everything suddenly starts to change. Everything’s easier, because he’s around. She doesn’t have to live in a one-room apartment anymore. She can afford a house. Not a great house, but a house. She feels less alone. He’s very understanding.”

“I don’t know why I’m here,” David observed.

Grace ignored him. Her voice was full of intensity. “And everything’s wonderful, and Anna paints, she paints like crazy, everything’s fine. And then he starts criticizing, just a little, he asks her to repeat work that sold, tells her the new routes she wants to take don’t work, he takes on commissions for her. And then the paintings change. Do you know what that means? Do you know the significance of that?” she asked. “They start looking dark, they lose their color, and she produces tone-on-tone. She produces single-color canvases; she produces modular stuff, that crappy mix-and-match stuff for banks and corporate dining rooms and airports; she sits in her studio and paints from photographs, predictable things, the same over and over.”

David still wasn’t looking up.

“He puts her on a production line,” she insisted. “Do you know what that means, David? To an artist? To be on a production line?”

David put his elbows on his knees, and held his head in his hands.

“Garrett looks and he sounds like an understanding man,” she said. “But he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand Anna. And he doesn’t understand Rachel. And they’re both crumbling away. And I have to watch.”

There was a long silence.

Grace got up. She pulled her chair around the side of the bed, next to his.

He sat back. “I’ve got no business here,” he said.

“What?” she gasped.

“I shouldn’t have come here,” he told her.

“David…”

He stood up. “How can I help Rachel?” he asked. “How can I help Anna? I can’t help them.”

“Of course you can!” she cried.

“How?” he demanded. “I don’t live here. I don’t have any money. And,” he added, “I don’t know them. Either of them.”

She stared at him.

“Even if you don’t like Garrett,” he said, “he’s a better bet than I am.”

“How can you say that!” Grace objected. “You’re Rachel’s father.”

“No,” he replied. “Her father is the one who looks after her.”

“You’re wrong,” she said. “Garrett will never be a father. He’s a manipulator. Haven’t you heard what I’ve been saying? For Christ’s sake!”

“Well, he’s all she’s got,” David replied. “Because Anna chose to leave the father she had.”

They stared at each other.

Then, down the corridor, they heard the heavy swinging doors open, and the sound of voices.