We traveled back through the front room, with me swooping him down over the couch and the armchair. He squealed and giggled. This was what two years away had robbed me of; this was what my mistake had cost me.
My arms were beginning to quiver and I brought the Kid down and landed him gently on the couch. He lay there for a moment, gasping and giggling. I collapsed beside him, shaking a cramp out of my arm. For an instant, I was happier than I had been in years.
And in that instant he looked into my eyes. They were his mother’s eyes—the same ice-blue, pale and startling. I felt my throat choking up.
He looked away, leaped to his feet, and began dancing in front of me, arms uplifted as though demonstrating exactly what he wanted.
“No way, Kid. You almost did me in. I’m going to need a good long rest after that.”
He danced faster and the look of happy expectation began to morph into a mask of anxiety. He began the keening “Eeee” of the jet.
“Nope. Not now. No, Kid. I’d love to, but if I tried right now I’d drop you.” I stood up and reached for one of his flapping hands.
His distress increased exponentially. The noise from his throat was an ugly, angry growl. The color of his face went from pink to red to purple. His eyes lost their focus and began wandering erratically, seemingly disconnected from each other and the rest of his face.
I bent down and reached out to hold him. “Come on, Kid. It’s okay. We can do this again later.”
He turned and raced for the stairs. I raced after him. He was fast and had moves that Curtis Martin would have envied. We passed Mamma in the hallway—her arms were folded across her chest and her face glowered with suppressed anger. She didn’t even try to stop him.
I got to the bottom of the stairs just as he reached the top. He turned and began the dance again.
“No! Kid, no!” I advanced up two steps. He was weeping and drooling, but there was still some crazed, desperate hope in his eyes. “No! Not now! Later!”
“Wanna get away!” he cried, and threw himself off a second time.
I got my hands up in time, but I wasn’t centered to take the sudden weight. My arms still felt shaky. We both went down. I fell to the landing, the Kid cushioned by me, but still shaken. I was hurt. Nothing broken, I could tell, but I wasn’t going to be out running for the next day or two.
The Kid sat up, wrapped his arms around my neck, and began pulling at me. “Jason, up! Jason, up!”
Mamma intervened before he pulled my head off.
“No! Stop that, boy! Jason is hurt. Now you leave him be.”
“Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.” He couldn’t stop. The word kept coming in a mechanical singsong, guaranteed to make any injured party want to wallop him.
“Enough.” I pulled myself up. “Listen, Kid. I will take you flying again tomorrow. No more until tomorrow. Now, let me go.”
He listened.
“Promise buttery spread?”
The question was clear. “Yes. I promise.”
He stared at me as though trying to read the depth of my commitment. I let him. He came to a decision and nodded once. Then he jumped up and ran back up the stairs to his room.
I stood slowly, checking for cracks and bruises. Mamma glared at me.
“Are you going to be there to catch him every time?”
I thought about it. “I’m going to try.”
She turned and walked back to the kitchen.
—
ANGIE FAILED TO SHOW
that day or the next. I spent the time sitting on the front porch, watching my son place his collection of cars in perfect rows along the floor planks. The only breaks in the line were where a plank ended—no car was allowed to bridge the space between boards. I let him fly off the front steps a few times, until I realized that each successive repetition only increased his need for the next. More tantrums. More promises.
It wasn’t until late Monday morning that she showed.
Angie’s brother was cutting my hair. Tino had a high-end salon in Lafayette, which is not the same as a high-end salon in New York, but he managed to do well enough to vacation twice a year in San Francisco, Provincetown, London, or Berlin. He was called a “bachelor” by his family and clientele. We had always got on well despite our different backgrounds and proclivities.
“Do you have a plan yet for what you’re going to do up here?” He gently tapped the top of my head with the scissors.
“No comb-overs, okay? I’m not going bald, I’m just letting a little more light in.”
“You could wear it all a bit longer. With your height, it would be years before anyone would notice.”
“I like to keep it simple.”
He gave an exaggerated sigh and kept clipping.
The Kid had his cars. From inside, Mamma’s kitchen radio was giving off the baritone sounds of one of her preachers—her Cajun Catholicism was ecumenical when it came to listening to the radio. The sermon was broken intermittently by commercials for local businesses and brands of products I had never seen offered at Zabar’s: Zatarain’s Wonderful Fish-Fri; Mello Joy brand coffee; and Boudreaux’s Butt Paste.
It had rained briefly that morning, taking the humidity out of the air for a bit, and there was a slight breeze rattling the canebrake hedge. For the moment, the peaceful, slow pace of southern Louisiana wasn’t making me nuts.
A brand-new metallic-silver Chevy Silverado Platinum pickup pulled into the driveway and rolled to a stop. It was tricked out with fog lamps, spotlights, roll bars, custom wheels, Yosemite Sam mud flaps, and a Confederate battle flag decal. Tino stopped cutting.
“Well, there goes the neighborhood,” he said.
The sun was reflecting off the windshield and I couldn’t see more than two vague shapes in the cab.
“That’s Angie?”
“And her friend. You won’t like him much.”
“No?”
“No one does.”
The passenger door opened and my heart stopped. I tried a brave smile and dismissed it. I couldn’t carry it off. I let my face relax in my normal scowl.
She was wearing jeans, cowboy boots—Lucchese, if I knew my Angie—and a lavender tank top. I was draped in an old sheet and covered with hair clippings.
I was primordial putty. She was perfect. Wild and unpredictable, childish, willful, irresponsible. Perfect. She strode across the yard like it was the main runway at Fashion Week. She was a leopard—graceful, powerful, and very dangerous. She was a fawn—delicate, insecure, and exquisite. She was the devil’s daughter for whom I would have sold my soul a thousand times over.
She stopped at the foot of the porch steps and looked up at me.
“Hey,
cher
. I heard you were here.”
I had a hundred well-rehearsed opening lines. They all flew out of my head.
“You look great, Angie.”
She shrugged. Looking good came a lot easier to her than anything else. She noticed the Kid for the first time.
“Antoine! Why’d you let my boy out of his room? He gets hurt real easy. You know that.”
Tino didn’t answer.
“I brought him down, Angie,” I said. “I thought he needed some air. I’ve been enjoying his company.”
She gave me a hard stare. When it didn’t cause me to cringe in fear, she gave it up and shrugged.
“Thanks for the CDs. My music. That was kind of you.”
For a moment she went completely blank. She had no idea what I was talking about. Then she shook her head. “I didn’t know what else to do with them. The auction man said they weren’t worth much.” She took a long pull from her Evian bottle.
I had a co-dependent’s flash—it wasn’t water in that bottle.
Maybe this was going to be harder than I’d imagined.
She flashed one of her well-practiced smiles at her brother. “Tino? Be a dear, will you? Take my boy inside, so I can talk with Jason?”
Tino put the scissors and comb down on the table next to me and walked over to the Kid. He got down on his haunches and looked out into the yard.
“I was thinking of having some ice cream. You want some with me?”
“Mouthwatering French vanilla?” The Kid sounded exactly like the ad reader on Mamma’s radio. He gave Tino a suspicious look from beneath furrowed brows. Vanilla was the only flavor he would eat.
“It’s what we got.”
The Kid got up and walked into the house. Tino followed.
Angie ignored the exchange, though she made it quite clear with attitude alone that she was just waiting for it to finish. The door had barely closed when she began her attack.
“You have no goddamn idea, Jason, what in hell I have been through while you’ve been gone.”
“I wasn’t ‘gone,’ Angie. I was ‘away.’ There’s a difference.”
“That boy is strange, Jason. You don’t know. I can’t hug him. He won’t look at me. He cries or screams or throws a goddamn fit if I look at him.”
“He’s sick, Angie. We knew that.”
“Well, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know what it meant. You weren’t there, you sonofabitch.” She leaned in to me and I could feel flecks of her saliva hit my cheeks as she spoke. I wanted more.
“Angie. I couldn’t be there. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I’m sorry. We talked about this. We talked about how it was going to be. What happened?”
“That boy, Jason. That’s what happened. You have no idea, no goddamn idea, what it is like to live with that boy day after goddamn day.”
I leaned forward. I wanted her to know that I knew. That I cared.
“Angie, listen to me. I read every book I could find on autism while I was up there. I had Pop send me books, magazines, anything that would help me understand what you were going through. You’re right, I don’t know what it means every day, day after day, but I tried, Angie. I have tried to understand.”
She slumped into the other chair. She looked soft. I wanted to stroke her hair and tell her I could fix everything. I had read the books. I could do this. All she had to do was come along with me.
But Angie was rarely soft when she looked it. Vulnerable was just another pose.
“You think you know because you read a book?” She made the last words sound particularly vile. “So you know what HFA means, or maybe you think your boy is some genius savant with Asperger’s? Well, what’s your opinion on chelation therapy? Did we do this to our baby by getting him inoculated against measles? Are you going to tell him he can’t have his ice cream because he has to cut back on caseins? Have you ever tasted gluten-free bread? How many times have you sat in some doctor’s office, waiting and praying, while they did their tests and then they come when it’s all over and the boy is all quiet and frozen and shrunk down and you wonder just what the fuck they were doing to your child in there? And you listen to another Harvard graduate tell you he doesn’t know what it is. He doesn’t know! Could be Asperger’s. Autism. Pidnose. That’s my favorite. Do you know what Pidnose is, Jason?”
I shook my head, as much in answer as in response to the whole assault.
“PDD. It means Pervasive Developmental Disorder. That right there tells me nothing. Zip! And the ‘nose’ part? NOS. It stands for Not Otherwise Specified. In plain English that even a currency trader or a model could understand, it means DUH! As in ‘Duh, I don’t know’!”
I tried to take her hand as I spoke.
“Angie, I just want the chance to try to understand. I can do this.”
She pulled away and folded her arms. She spoke to the floor. “And you weren’t there the night I found him gushing blood from banging his head on the coffee table—again—because, despite the fact that he was almost three years old, he hadn’t quite learned how to walk yet. And I rushed him up to Saint Vincent’s—the boy humming away like there was nothing the matter at all, like he didn’t even feel it—and while they’re stitching him, the nurse calls me into another room. And you know what happened then?”
I could imagine, but I didn’t think I was supposed to answer.
“There’s two detectives. NYPD. Goddamn Briscoe and Green have nothing better to do than grill me about hitting my boy. And there’s this fatass bitch from Social Services in the corner smiling like she can’t wait to pounce. They made me take a breathalyzer!” She took another swig from the Evian bottle.
At another time, it might have been funny.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It must have been embarrassing.”
Angie burst out laughing, but there was still nothing funny.
“Embarrassed? No. Maybe I was embarrassed when I had to call the pediatrician in the middle of the night and ask him to explain to the police that my boy falls down a lot. That’s a tough one to explain to the answering service. Police and pediatrician aren’t supposed to go together. No, Jason, I wasn’t embarrassed. I was pissed. I was really, really mad because you weren’t there to help me. You weren’t there to help our son.”
I wasn’t there because I was in prison. That fact was going to stick in my craw for quite some time.
“I’m here, Angie. And I’m ready to do my part. We can do this. We can’t just dump the Kid on your mother. It’s not right.”
“Oh, please, Jason.” She looked at me as though I was trying to sell her a bridge. “There’s nothing right. It is all wrong, and the rest is just us tryin’ to make our way.”
I tried again. My castle on the cliff was sliding down into the ocean. “Angie. Come with me. We can make it right. There’s money enough for the three of us to be just fine. We’ll get help for the Kid.”
“What in hell is the matter with you, Jason? Did prison make you stupid? You left me, you sonofabitch. You left me with that boy and he goddamn well hates his mother. Do you know that? What little boy hates his mamma? Like I’m some kind of monster. The boy doesn’t care whether I am alive or dead.”
“So you leave him locked in a closet?”
“That’s his bedroom. And Mamma takes care of him.”
“Screw that, Angie! I’ll take him. I’ll take care of him.” The words came flying out of their own volition. I would swear I had never had that thought before in my life.
She gave me the look again. “Bullshit, mister. I’m not buying that. The boy will stay with Mamma.”
“No chance. I’ll fight you, Angie.” I wasn’t thinking, but something in my gut drove me on.
We were both standing, glaring at each other.
“Fine. Take the boy. Let’s see how long it takes you to dump him on your father.”