Midnight. Whispery bells as he tiptoes downstairs to find the snowman come to life. A warm welcome indoors to admire the Christmas tree (how round the snowy face in the bauble) and try on different noses at the fruit bowl: pug (a cherry), big (a banana), laughable (a pineapple). The snowman basking in the fridge’s yellow rays. His trombone sneeze after smelling the mother’s perfume.
Throbbing violins as the two uncover the father’s motorbike in the yard; an acceleration of horns as they zoom behind the golden cone of beam through woodland. The yellow-red of fox, brown of horse. Return to the garage. Then boy and snowman run into the air, to piano thunder and high-pitched song. Gliding fields of white, houses like those of dolls, roving cliffs and hills and peaks of ice, fuzz of pine forest, fireworks of Northern Lights. After the soft landing, the red round Santa, festive flutes and rattles as boy and snowman dance. Muted music for the flight home. The snowman in his garden, the boy in his bed. Then, in the bright sun of morning, the snowman is gone.
When he wasn’t watching its celluloid twin, Billy was out in the real snow. The snow could just as agreeably be sleet or plain cold rain as far as he was concerned. He’d slow his pace in any downpour, not speed up as others do to find shelter. He’d slow to a crawl and instead of bowing his head he’d face the sky, feeling the drops pummel his temples, hearing them tambourine in his ears.
It was a similar story with the wind, which, for many Americans, exists as star-spangled banners flapping on poles. Or as tornados on TV. But for Billy the wind was alive. He would take it in his arms, dance with it, swaying and laughing. He never shunned it, never turned his back, when it blew hard.
✲
During most of the first two years, Billy’s infancy resembled Ben’s.
As a baby he returned his mother’s smile – he’d submit to her cooing and break out that grin of his, the one that made Eve think of her father when he played hearts at the kitchen table. He had the Edwards men’s energy about him too: exuberant, a robust character, Eve liked to say, rambunctious.
Eve said to Matt, ‘He’s got your hair and eyes.’
Mommy and Daddy. Juice. Sword. These were some of the only fifty or so words that Billy ever learned to say. Sword, because, at eighteen months, he played with a long plastic sword. Eve would remember that morning he’d held his toy aloft and said its name. Said it clearly. Not the easiest word for a boy his age to say, she had thought.
Many days during Billy’s second spring Eve took him in the stroller along the woodland trails near their home.
‘Look, Billy, moss!’
‘Look,’ said Billy.
And after he had sunk his baby fingers into it, Eve said, ‘Soft, huh? Just like your cushion.’
That smell, she might say, was skunk cabbages flowering in the damp ground. And that whistling sound in the maple was a robin singing. The bird sang, cheerily, cheer up, cheer up, cheerily, cheer up.
He listened attentively. He smiled and giggled and responded to everything around him.
But within weeks, at home or outside, Billy altered. The change announced itself by a gradual silencing. Billy was losing words.
Perhaps it was all in her head. She’d misheard. But no, it wasn’t, she hadn’t. Well then, he was losing them momentarily, to a bad mood or a head cold. So he’d swallowed ‘cookie’ and dropped his ‘cup’ and mislaid his ‘car’. Any day now he would utter them again, and others besides.
Only, once lost, the words never returned. ‘Milk’ and ‘hi’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘all gone’.
He was assessed twice.
The doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital, all starch and stethoscope, couldn’t find anything wrong. Billy’s ears were fine, his coordination was fine. He knew as well as any two-year-old how to get a cookie out of his mother.
‘He’s not what you think,’ the doctor said, when Eve raised the possibility of autism. He sounded very sure of himself.
Eve didn’t know what to think.
A slow developer, people said, boys sometimes are. Give him a bit more time to straighten out. More time didn’t help. What bothered Eve as much as the missing words, or more, was that Billy wasn’t his grinning, charming self. He didn’t react when she cooed; and, sometimes, as she went to touch him he made an angry sound, shrilling. Then she sat beside him and felt the rawness of his senses, the absence of language’s second skin as he retreated from her, as if he had been stung.
Dr Margaret Bauman was different from her colleague. The first doctor had spoken too quickly, she said. Billy’s symptoms were consistent with autism. Eve tried her best to listen as Dr Bauman explained. A developmental disorder of brain function, not a disease. Certain features become apparent over time, notably delayed use or absence of language. Intelligence on nonverbal tests may be in the normal or above-normal range. A condition of constant ups and downs, setbacks are common. Until that instant, Eve believed she had prepared herself to hear what the doctor was telling her.
Afterwards, while Billy slept in the car, she drove the long way back to the house. She could cry with abandon here, her crying swallowed up by the noises of the road. She could feel a strange gratitude for the orange cones, the construction work, that delayed her.
She was afraid. There had been some talk of an institution. A chill passed through her as she pictured her son imprisoned within himself, left to his own panic and confusion in the dark corner of a room.
Autism. Neurodevelopmental. A child quiet and withdrawn described as being ‘on the spectrum’. Words later widely heard and spoken, but which sounded obscure in 1992, muffled within the heavy covers of manuals bearing forbidding titles, in closeddoor conferences for specialists only, in reams of journal paper in German or jargon equally impenetrable.
She did not know the first thing about autism (or only the first, not the second or third). She remembered a movie she had seen, not the recent Rainman starring Dustin Hoffman, but an old French film in black and white. L’Enfant sauvage by François Truffaut. When had that been? During her college days at Chapel Hill. She would sometimes go to the little arts cinema there which showed pictures from Europe. Fellini. Bergman. The French new wave.
It was the boy in the film, the ‘wild child’, that Eve remembered, an infant abandoned to the woods of revolutionary France and whom a doctor, several years later, takes in. Her eyes would not leave the boy as the doctor tried teaching him to dress, sit in a chair, hold a spoon. No subtitles came up when the boy’s sensitive face filled the screen, because he never would learn to speak. Too late. Too late for language.
The child’s awful silence was the true star of these scenes, it seemed to Eve, a character in its own right, a baddie upstaging the youngster and drowning out all his lines. ‘All ears on me,’ the Silence cried. ‘Fear me and shudder for the boy.’
Reading the newspapers – articles Eve would have previously skipped or skimmed – was enough to endorse a mother’s worst fears. Two autistic pupils in Japan had died of heat prostration after their principal locked them in a windowless storage shed for two days. ‘Strange and disquieting’ was how a report in the Washington Post described a group of autistic children.
And then a fierce determination succeeded her initial shock, a craving for facts, knowledge, understanding. Hardly an hour now passed, half an hour, a quarter, without her thinking about Billy, and every spare minute not spent on calls from her siblings, or parents – how are you all holding up, Evie? – went into driving to and from, and combing through, bookstores, then returning home with the wares to read. None of the refrigerator mothers rubbish that you could still find then on certain shelves. Instead, Temple Grandin and Oliver Sacks. (How well, how thoughtfully, he could write about his subjects, and then, in the pages that interested Eve, how cruelly. One passage compared two autistic men, twins, to pantomime puppets.)
But there is hope, she thought, when she read about Clara Park and her daughter Elly. This was an old book, an expanded, updated reprint of Clara’s memoir of Elly’s early years, The Siege, which had first been published in the sixties. Eve had been drawn to the cover, the black-and-white photo showing a small child with fair hair and eloquent eyes, the mother looking through thick glasses at her offspring, protective and professorial. Elly’s parents were both academics in Williamstown. Eve recognised the name – Williamstown is on the western side of Massachusetts (her own family lives on the eastern side). Like Billy, Elly had grown more or less silent by the age of two, devoting herself to her senses to the exclusion of people, playing by herself in ways that quickly became repetitive. But the Parks had not despaired. They had taken Elly to England, London, to 21 Maresfield Gardens and the Hampstead Clinic where they had received no end of reviving encouragement. Their efforts during their year in England, and then back in the US, to play and play and play with their daughter, in competition with her inwardness, to school and to stimulate her with pictures and gestures, signs and words, had been enormous. They would be compensated. Elly would grow more responsive, to the point of finally recovering her speech (though never speaking with much fluency). By the end of the book, Elly was a young woman who painted houses (that is, she painted beautiful, multicoloured pictures of houses she saw), and was holding down a job as a part-time mail clerk. She still lived with her parents, requiring constant care and supervision, and always would.
The last word in the book, in Elly’s story, was ‘love’.
Eve read its pages several times, though she knew it would not be sensible to get her hopes up too much. Billy wasn’t Elly. His name wasn’t in a book.
Outside the family circle she shared next to nothing about Billy, her thoughts and cares turned towards her son and home, her hope hugged tight.
Word would get out, though. It was only a matter of time. Soon neighbours would stop her in the street, or turn away, embarrassed, as she passed. The nosiest might sneak looks of commiseration at her son. How could she show her face in church? They would all crowd around, get in her way and on her nerves, the well-intentioned pity in their voices, saying, ‘So sorry for you and Matt,’ ‘anything we can possibly do,’ ‘he’s still your son,’ and the furrows across their brows, aiming for solemn. She didn’t want to be asked again and again how Billy was doing, or what the doctors had said or which treatments might be undertaken.
She put on her best face and let no one see a thing. She continued favouring clothes that flattered, making the most of her thick curls, wearing earrings that caught and dispersed the light as they dangled. Creams and powder masked the angry red blotches that invaded her cheeks and nose and forehead – the months of stress and anguish catching up with her.
Therapists. Special educators. After Dr Bauman, she consulted widely. She canvassed their views, opinions, advice. She asked them to help her help Billy learn to tie his shoes, recognise words and, why not, use a computer one day – it being the nineties and everything. The specialists listened. They leaned back in their chairs then forward and said she should lower her expectations. They said this as if she had suggested something outlandish. Tie his shoes? Velcro would do the job.
Eve persevered. She asked what she might do to support her son more generally. What did she mean? She meant help him learn to communicate so as to be a full member of the family and society. And grow into a thoughtful, attentive young man. The specialists shook their heads. Hadn’t her doctor explained what Billy’s condition entailed? He would probably never learn to speak. Not speak, she said. She hadn’t said learn to speak. Communicate. Surely Billy could be taught in some other way to communicate his needs, wishes, thoughts.