For several years now Eve had been following the advice in Clara Park’s book almost to the letter. She had found a local school with the resources to take children like Billy, the classes small, the teachers and assistants well trained (though even there, she sometimes ran into resistance). The school had started Billy on pictures, a technique involving picture cards; the child learned to give a card to the adult to ask for or say the item shown. The images were bright, rudimentary, the word for each printed underneath. A stick man with a yellow book (‘read’), a beige biscuit with a glass of milk (‘snack’), a big red cross with downcast face (‘no’). Some of the pictures illustrated words taken from American Sign Language. Flattened hands touching fingertips (‘more’), a circular hand sweep around the chest (‘please’). Billy did not use any sign language yet though. For a long time he could not point a finger or imitate.

At the age of five he had his first speech-generating device, a Macaw, positively prehistoric in comparison to later models. It was serviceable but clunky, and not very much to look at.

‘He’ll get the hang of it,’ Eve had told Matt and Ben and herself, though she knew that was anything but certain. She had furnished the Macaw with pictures of her own making, Polaroids of the family and of household items, and colourful cut-outs from magazines. You had to slide the pictures carefully into place over the digital surface. When pressed, each image would set off an audio recording of the corresponding word: it would say ‘mom’ or ‘table’ or ‘car wash’. It was Ben’s voice you heard. He had been more than glad to lend his eight-year-old voice to his little brother.

But it had taken a lot of showing and persuading to get Billy even to touch his Macaw. You’d think the battery had died on him the way he only glanced at it before turning his head to the wall. This is more interesting than the wall, Eve felt like saying. And then, as if he had read her mind, he returned his eyes to the pictures on the device and then gave her a quizzical look.

‘Tell us what you want to do, Billy.’

No answer.

Eve asked and Matt asked and Ben asked. And got nowhere fast. Then they tried withholding something, some toy or candy, he’d usually make a hard throaty noise to request, and showed him – over and over – how to request it on his machine. Showed how easy, how much easier than relying on grunts and groans, it was to transmit his exact need or wish. Look, Billy, like this. Like this, see? But he didn’t, or maybe it seemed to him the device was harder than going without.

Then one day, no special day, they tried again and he looked at the device differently. It was the same Macaw, the same living room. They said the same things, made the same gestures of explanation. Didn’t he want to jump on the trampoline, or to read his books? Choices. Eve had always wanted him to see that the device gave him choices. Jump or read? Now that was a choice. He loved trampolining in the barn, loved his books too – at home as much as in school. He would sit in his chair or on the floor and turn the big, thick pages and look at all the words – he was beginning by now to make them out – and the fantastical illustrations. Their author was one doctor he need never fear – Dr. Seuss.

Billy’s face registered interest, understanding.

Eve said, ‘What do you want, Billy?’

Matt said, ‘What’s up, Billy?’

Billy leaned forward and hit a button. ‘Book,’ Billy said, in Ben’s voice.

‘Way to go, Billy!’

A tremendous thrill entered him then, and his chair became a rodeo bull. It bucked and rocked him back and forth as he threw out his arms and giggled.

‘Here,’ said Eve, and her firm hand tamed the chair. ‘Here are your books.’

And Billy sat still and turned the pages on his knees and smiled. It was as though he had needed all this time to grow into his big brother’s voice.

The technology had been maturing too. Soon he was using a touchscreen capable of expressing not only individual words but also short phrases.

‘Excuse me,’ the device would help a hungry Billy say. His finger would dart from icon to icon.

‘I  want.’  ‘Dictionary.’  ‘Food.’  ‘Meat,  fish,  poultry.’ ‘Hamburger.’

But none of this progress squared with the uncommunicative boy Billy could be in class. Prone to tantrums. No, not tantrums, Eve would remind his teachers. Not tantrums. A breakdown in communication. In any case, no one in the school had ever seen him use his device.

‘Show them,’ Eve would tell Billy. ‘Show the class what you can do.’ No one would believe her if he didn’t.

He showed them during one circle time, the children gathered round.

The teacher said, ‘What song shall we play today?’

Class favourites included ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ and ‘Old MacDonald’. One of the boys, by the name of Arthur, wanted ‘The Ants Go Marching’. This was the umpteenth time this month that the class would hear it. Perhaps Arthur was better at putting his hand up and requesting. Or perhaps the teachers just happened to know all the words to sing along.

Billy dropped his head at the thought of the music starting.

The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah.

Music wasn’t the problem. He liked music plenty and listened to all sorts of songs: he had an ever-expanding home collection of CDs, he listened to pop and gospel and to Louis Armstrong. Repetition wasn’t it, either. Sure, there were songs in his collection that were good for one listen, but plenty more repaid replaying. He’d simply had enough of this particular song. He’d been patient, he’d listened and listened and now he was all listened out. So he managed to point to his device, left his chair for it, navigated to the page he wanted and clicked a button.

‘I don’t like this,’ said Billy in the device’s voice, the nasally synthetic voice that had replaced his brother’s.

And with that he navigated back to the homepage and put down his touchscreen, not without a certain flourish, Eve imagined later when the teacher told her.

She knew then she had to keep his machine up to date. You could do that far more straightforwardly than with the Macaw. You could add new icons and the computer would do all the talking. She had to anticipate Billy’s appetites, his shifting moods and preferences; she had to adjust to circumstances as they changed. To her son as he changed, sometimes in ways she and her family could not predict.

✲

‘It’s us,’ shouted Eve as she and Matt came through her parents’ front door. She was a little out of breath from the evening jog – an expiation for the Yuletide calories – and the house’s fireside warmth flushed her cheeks. Returning the keys to her wallet and carrying the smell of chill a step or two towards the living room, she called out, ‘Where’s Billy?’

‘Upstairs with the boys,’ Eve heard her father say. The boys being Ben and their cousins.

‘He’s had his bath,’ she heard her mother say. ‘I helped him into his pyjamas.’

Eve took off her shoes and went up to see the boys.

Ben was there and the cousins, in the middle of some complicated-looking game, but not Billy. They had figured he was downstairs with nana and papa.

She headed to the bathroom and tried the door and turned on the light. No Billy. She went from room to room but there was no Billy behind the curtains or under the beds or in the closets.

Matt, who had been putting on some coffee, heard the sounds of pacing and fumbling – bedsheets, blankets? – and went up. ‘Eve?’

‘I can’t find Billy.’

He had to be somewhere. She looked unthinkingly in the laundry hamper. Billy’s clothes – discarded before his bath – were in there.

They returned to the rooms, hoping against hope that Eve had missed him the first time. Then they went and searched downstairs. The back door in the kitchen was unlocked.

‘He’s outside,’ she shouted.

Her mother called 911. ‘Missing child. My grandson. Yes. Nine years old. He’s autistic.’

His hand had managed to turn the lock, then pull the door shut behind him – and in his bare feet and pyjamas, his hair damp still from his bath, he had lit out into the dark.

And before she knew it, she was back in her shoes and out the door and running, running as hard as she could. He might be lying in a frozen ditch somewhere, catching hypothermia, and she could never get to him in all this darkness. Not that there were many ditches to fall in, not around these parts, sense and logic might have objected – but they did not object, for the good and simple reason that she had not summoned them. There was no time for that. And the thrust of the thought was valid. Her son was out on his own, God only knew where, in the cold and dark. ‘Billy!’ she shouted at the parked cars and the stray cats but they did not answer to that name.

There was silence, only silence, and she did not like the sound of it.

On and on she ran through the silent streets and the freezing gloom, glimpsing herself run, some madwoman beside herself with panic, frantic knees up, elbows pumping, going every which way and not a one of them the right. Not minding the risk of ice, or skidding on slushy snow, the nasty fall and the broken wrist or leg or worse she was courting. In her peripheral vision she saw Christmas lights coming on, limning gates and fences and hedges, green and silver and yellow, and just beyond these, on the outermost edges of her mind, she feared she saw something else: a black, frozen and crumpled heap lying somewhere she would never get to.

Then she saw more lights, different these ones, not small and twinkly, they were red and blue and flashing. They were travelling in the direction of her parents’ house and slowing as they neared it. Eve ran up to the police car and to the boy in pyjamas on its back seat. He was wet and cold and safe. Someone opened the car door and Billy leapt into her embrace.

He resembled her more than she had known, resembled the boy in The Snowman less than he had thought. This was what Billy’s aborted flight taught them.

✲