Authors: Margaret Vandenburg
“What’s your son’s name?”
“Max.”
“What did you mean when you said you’ve come to terms with his condition?”
“I won’t pretend his diagnosis wasn’t a shock. But we’ve set up a comprehensive treatment program. It’s part of our lives now. Part of our routine as a family.”
“He’s coming along?”
“As well as can be expected.”
Colonel Trumble let out one of his belly laughs. It sounded ridiculous, even cruel, given the context. Suddenly Todd felt protective of Max, as though his son were the butt of one of the colonel’s off-color jokes. He fought to maintain his neutral expression.
“The first time I asked you about your kids, you said they were great.”
“I didn’t realize at the time that you thought my family might be an issue.”
“I can’t say your candor recommends you.”
Todd felt cornered. If he acknowledged the exigencies of family life, he might jeopardize his chances for redeployment. If he didn’t acknowledge them, he would be censured for paying insufficient attention to his son’s special needs. Catch-22.
“It’s not fair to penalize me just because I have an autistic son.”
“It’s not about him. It’s about you. Guys are always trying to impress me during these little interviews. It’s my job to get to the bottom of things. To select men who are fit to serve their country most effectively, both physically and mentally.”
“I’ve proven myself time and again. I’ll let my record speak for itself.”
“Very well. We’ll get back to you by the end of the month.”
This time when Todd saluted, Colonel Trumble saluted back. The formality seemed out of place, given what had just transpired. If such a thing as a heart-to-heart was possible in the military, they’d just had one. The entire exercise seemed designed to break down the detachment characteristic of military interactions, with the sole purpose of disqualifying Todd’s petition for redeployment. He had been summoned to prove he was fit for active duty and then criticized for exhibiting the emotional resilience necessary to serve—faulted first for being a robot and then for being a man. It was all very confusing, especially when he was expected to fly drones one minute and sit down to dinner with his kids the next, with no buffer except his own heroic feats of compartmentalization. To simplify things, he blamed Colonel Trumble. He wasn’t very good at his job after all.
* * *
Sasha waited until the paint on Max’s forearms wore off before conducting their third art therapy session. Given the results of the previous two, she decided to take a slightly different tack. She learned from her weekly meetings with Rose and Todd that there had been some debate over Max’s body paint. Not that they told her outright. Todd made some crack about tattoos, which Rose pretended not to hear. When Sasha asked him what he meant, he rubbed his left forearm and said something vague about Max’s resistance to washing off the paint. She wasn’t trained as a marriage counselor, but it pretty much came with the territory. She could read between the lines even if they couldn’t.
Sasha tried to adjust Max’s treatment to address family dynamics. This approach was in keeping with their initial decision to meld ABA and Floortime techniques to combine behavioral and more emotional prompts. She liked to think that Max’s interactions were less robotic than those of other children on the spectrum. Her only real evidence was anecdotal, the notes she compared with fellow therapists in professional chat rooms. Nevada was still a kind of autism desert with very few resources available except on the Internet. You-Tube videos, which were usually staged to promote one therapeutic model over another, were notoriously unreliable. For the same reason, she took online advice with a grain of salt, even that of gurus like Dr. Stanley Greenspan whose websites were alternately informative and promotional. Like pioneers of old, Sasha had to rely on her wits and the pains-taking guidance of trial and error.
The fact that Rose and Todd had argued about Max’s body paint was potentially a good sign. Art therapy was providing a common language, one that resonated with parents and children alike. Even Maureen had apparently weighed in on the subject, using it as an excuse to start wearing toenail polish. If Max could apply body paint, why couldn’t she? Arguing wasn’t exactly an ideal form of communication. But if normalcy was the goal, they were certainly moving in the right direction, one well worth pursuing. Sasha’s family portraits were inspiring the Barrons to act more like a family, fights and all.
Too bad they never really argued about what they were arguing about. Their little spats were like proxy wars, one step removed from the real bone of contention. The threat was too terrible to meet head-on. Every time Todd mentioned the possibility of redeployment, Rose pooh-poohed it. Surely even the air force wasn’t desperate enough to send an old fart with an autistic kid on yet another tour overseas. She laughed and said she was kidding. In fact, they both laughed in a decidedly humorless way, especially when Sasha was around. They must have thought she was as prone to denial as they were. If Colonel Trumble granted Todd’s request for redeployment, all hell would break loose. Even Sasha doubted whether the family would survive the feud. Until then, they pretended that Todd’s physical presence precluded his virtual absence. The better part of him was already in Afghanistan.
Sasha didn’t want to overdetermine the importance of involving Max’s mother and father in his treatment. Plenty of families did just fine with one or the other, either because of divorce or because only one parent was emotionally equipped to endure the therapeutic roller coaster. But Max was equally cathected to both of them. Until recently, they had gone along for the ride in tandem. Just as recently, Max had begun to regress again, hardly a coincidence. At this critical juncture, having a parent missing in action could jeopardize, if not derail, his treatment. Max was like the canary in the coal mine. Far from being apathetic, he seemed to detect emotional disturbances long before anyone else did. Either his senses—including this sixth sense—were hyperaware or Sasha was kidding herself. She decided to conduct an experiment to find out.
Max was sitting at the table, as usual, pretending not to be there. Sasha spread out the family portraits from their first two sessions next to a blank sheet of paper. Then she started painting a picture of the little boy Max at his easel, with his mother standing behind him. A somewhat smaller stick figure, presumably Maureen, mirrored their mother’s attentive demeanor. All eyes were on the little boy’s blank canvas, with the notable exception of the father figure. There was a glaring hole where Todd usually stood in the family portrait. Max sat uncharacteristically quiet as Sasha painted. His eyes were fixed on some indeterminate point on the wall, but his peripheral vision included the table.
“What are you drawing, Max?” Sasha prompted.
When she wrapped his fingers around his paintbrush, they were limp and unresponsive. But he didn’t throw it across the room.
“Let’s draw some numbers, Max.”
His fists clenched slightly and then relaxed.
“I’ll go first.”
Sasha loaded her brush with red and painted two rows of four circles on the little boy’s blank canvas. Max continued to sit perfectly still. His eyes remained fixed on the wall.
“Now you try it.”
They sat there for almost fifteen minutes before Sasha reached over to cup Max’s left hand in hers. She managed to guide his brush halfway to the paint pot before he pulled away. He moved his hand as far away as possible but kept holding the brush.
“I’ll finish the numbers and you can finish the rest.”
Sasha filled in the canvas until there were three rows of four circles, the pattern established in the first art therapy session. She had already added a third row to the second painting, the one she hoped Max might finish on his own. Consistency couldn’t be overestimated, especially in the case of children with autism. They needed to feel safe, but not too safe to preclude adaptability. Painting the painting was a kind of play within a play, a way of dramatizing the distinction between literal and figurative representation. Once Max learned the difference between the two, he might move beyond imitation into the more abstract realm of actual expression. Language itself was an abstraction of the highest order.
Sasha toyed with the idea of repeating the body art segment of the exercise. But if she was reading Max’s body language correctly, he had already transferred his attention to the portrait itself. Painting his arms again would constitute a regression back to mere mimicry. The possibility that his remarkably docile demeanor might indicate indifference rather than receptivity crossed her mind. She decided to take a chance with the more positive diagnosis of his behavior. They could always backtrack next time if necessary.
“There now,” Sasha said, angling the pictures so that they lay side by side in front of him. “This little boy certainly likes to draw numbers. One two three four. I wonder if he likes to draw anything else.”
Max failed to respond. Either they had reached a stalemate, or they had reached nothing at all. An untrained observer might have described him as comatose. All of his usual stimming rituals were momentarily suspended. No flapping. No facial tics. He didn’t even seem to blink. Sasha had only witnessed this level of inertia once before, the first day they met. She had chattered away for a full two hours, telling him what fun they were going to have together. He had breathed and swallowed and stared at the wall. But there was no comparison, really. This time he was holding a paintbrush. His eyes, which were trained on the same spot on the same wall, weren’t glazed over. Another monumental milestone was within reach.
When their time was up, Sasha left the room without repeating her challenge.
I’ll finish the numbers and you can finish the rest.
She knew from experience that Max never forgot anything. Weeks might go by, and he’d finally respond to some previous prompt, expressing himself with gestures rather than with words. Sometimes she had to pore over the logbook to figure out what he was responding to. One day, seemingly out of the blue, he started pointing to everything red in the room, something she’d asked him to do two months prior. The act of pointing itself, the first step toward communication, had taken him a very long time to master. Or was he just watching and waiting to see if Sasha was trust-worthy? Overall, lag times were getting shorter and shorter. But there were still days at a time when he absolutely refused to respond at all, for no apparent reason.
The next morning when Sasha checked the outcome of her experiment, she found that Max had in fact been more engaged than indifferent. The results exceeded her wildest expectations. The three family portraits were still lined up in exactly the same configuration on the table, yet another testament to Max’s spatial meticulousness. The first two, featuring all four family members, remained the same. In the third portrait, a crude circle had been painted in red, filling the blank space where Todd belonged. A row of vertical lines extended across the top of the circle, unmistakable evidence that Max had learned to draw well enough to render his father’s crew cut.
* * *
Sasha was more upbeat than usual at their weekly meeting. Todd was surprised. If anything, Max was even more zoned out lately, off in his own little world. For some reason, the planet Mars came to mind. The red planet, veiled in mystery. All the hours and days and weeks and months of therapy seemed counterproductive, as though Max were determined to fend off their efforts to reach him by shutting down completely. Todd refrained from conveying his concern to Rose, who was in her own orbit around Mars. On her version of that fair planet, Max was a kind of prodigy, capable of all manner of communication Todd just hadn’t learned how to decipher yet, earthling that he was.
“He’s had a major breakthrough,” Sasha said.
Rose nodded knowingly.
Sasha spread out the three family portraits, labeled Art Therapy #1, #2, and #3, along with the dates of each session. Rose had already read all three log entries recording Sasha’s interpretation of the results. As usual, things were nuts at work, and Todd had fallen behind in his reading. Being out of the loop had its advantages. It meant he was less susceptible to the pipe dreams even Sasha sometimes indulged in, if only to bolster her morale in the face of Max’s intransigence. Everyone needed a reason to get up in the morning. Redeployment for Todd. Mystic crystal revelations for Rose. Behavioral breakthroughs for Sasha.
Last time they had been over the moon with excitement because Max had managed to smear paint on his forearms. Todd tried not to be dismissive. He even briefly entertained the idea that Max’s body paint resembled the tattoos on his own forearms. On further inspection, he had been forced to discount the comparison. Even if the lines constituted some kind of pattern, it was one that he alone understood. They were supposed to be discouraging rather than rewarding regressive behavior. Now even Sasha, who pretended to insist on scientific objectivity, was wildly overestimating the significance of the few random strokes of paint Max had apparently managed to daub onto one of the family portraits.
“Incredible,” Rose said.
“Just look at the level of detail,” Sasha said. She pointed to a red circle and a series of short vertical lines in the background of the third portrait. The fact that Max had always been enamored of circles and lines did nothing to undermine their amazement.
“Max drew that?” Todd asked.
“He did indeed.”
“Anything else?”
“I painted the rest,” Sasha said. “I tried to appeal to Max’s desire for consistency by drawing the same picture three times, hoping he’d feel compelled to fill in the blank.”
“To complete the pattern.”
“Right. We started with simple shapes painted on our arms and graduated to these family portraits. Patterns with human content. Max made the leap in only three sessions. I’ve never seen more remarkable progress in such a short span of time.”
“We’ve discovered Max’s native language,” Rose said. “It’s all there. Latent. Ready to explode into words.”