The Prodigy's Cousin (3 page)

When Alex was two, the family caught a break. The Portia Learning Centre, an organization that provides services for autistic children and children with developmental delays, opened a nearby location. Lucie and Mike sprinted through the door.

The therapists at the center began with an intensive assessment of Alex. They emphasized the importance of getting to know him, of studying his particular case. In a moment that Lucie will never
forget, the therapist remarked on Alex's potential: I really see something in him, she said. Though other experts had told Lucie that Alex would never speak meaningfully, his new therapist said the first thing they were going to do was get him to talk.

Lucie told the therapist they had been working on speech for months. She told her how when she handed Alex milk, she would look directly at him and enunciate, as clearly as she could, “milk.” Maybe that's too intense for him, the therapist suggested. Let's try something he might find a bit less overwhelming.

They started working with Alex in his home. During the first session, Alex stood in the living room in front of his model train set, slowly, quietly, moving the trains back and forth across the tracks. The therapist positioned herself behind him and watched him play. Slowly, quietly, she began making the same consonant sound over and over again:
mm mm mm mm mm mm
.

Back and forth, Alex moved the trains.
Mm mm mm mm mm mm
.

Back and forth.
Mm mm mm mm mm mm
.

The ninetieth time the woman repeated the sound, Alex chimed in.
Mm mm mm mm mm mm
.

The therapist switched to a new consonant sound:
bb bb bb bb bb bb
.

Back and forth, Alex moved the trains.
Bb bb bb bb bb bb
.

Back and forth.
Bb bb bb bb bb bb
.

The sixtieth time, Alex chimed in.

The therapist switched to a third consonant sound. This time, Alex chimed in on the fortieth repetition. “It was like, oh, is this all we needed to do?” Lucie remembered. “How hard have I been working on this at home? Why didn't anyone tell me to do this?”

But it was two steps forward, one step back. Once Alex seemed comfortable with his therapist, they tried switching his sessions to the learning center. Alex made it no farther than the entranceway, where he planted his feet and screamed. He reached for the light switch and
began flicking it up and down, turning the lights on and off. The therapist interacted with him for a few sessions in the entranceway. Then she began putting toys and activities that interested him in front of the treatment room door. Eventually, she coaxed him inside.

Two months later, Lucie was feeding Alex lunch in his high chair while William napped. When Alex finished what she had given him, he stared at the bowl of fruit sitting on the counter.

At two and a half years old, Alex said his first word: “pear.”

Lucie's heart thumped. She stopped breathing. She sat completely, perfectly still.

“Pear,” Alex repeated.

Lucie sobbed. “Pear! Pear!” she cried out. She rushed to the counter and began slicing her son's favorite fruit. She sliced so quickly she nearly chopped her finger off.

Two and a half years of silence. Thousands of dollars in therapy. Periods of despair. And now, finally, “pear.”

A wall had crumbled. Word followed word, and over the following weeks Alex built them into sentences. A few months later, he began using his words to ask for things.

Breaking the communication barrier seemed to poke holes in Alex's social isolation as well. He responded more. Over the next few months, he began playing and laughing with his brother. He no longer gazed off into the distance but looked right at other people. He smiled; he laughed. He let his therapist tickle him.

In February, just three months after Alex had said his first word, he played chase with his father. It was an interactive game, the kind autistic children weren't supposed to be able to play. Lucie watched, amazed, as Mike ran around the house, doing a loop through the kitchen and the living room, while Alex ran after him. Lucie grabbed her camera. Mike switched directions unexpectedly, and Alex laughed. He switched directions again, and Alex laughed. Mike stopped and turned, letting Alex catch up. Alex looked straight at his dad, ran into his arms, and
hugged him. The two high-fived. Tears filled Lucie's bright blue eyes, and she had trouble focusing the camera.

At Portia, Alex began initiating social interactions with the other children. The therapists urged Lucie and Mike to get Alex into a different environment. The children at the center were predominantly autistic; few of them would engage with Alex socially. The therapists recommended a nearby nursery school they thought would be open to enrolling Alex and allowing him to have a therapist accompany him during the school day. “I was surprised when they suggested it, and really scared,” Lucie recalled. “But I trusted her, the woman who runs Portia; I trusted her infinitely with anything because she was the one who was responsible for his progress. Whatever she would have said, I would have done.”

There was improvement; there were bumps. Alex could communicate with his teachers, but he had no idea how to make friends. Lucie and Mike plotted with the teachers, searching for ways to help Alex integrate with his class.

Things got better. After a year, Alex enrolled in a small but mainstream, private junior kindergarten (the Ontario equivalent of prekindergarten). His therapist tagged along. She accompanied him in the classroom, helping him to integrate in group settings, and offered one-on-one teaching. There were still challenges. There were days when Alex ran around the classroom screaming and days when he threw toys. But eventually those behaviors began to fade. They lessened in intensity. They disappeared. Lucie and Mike began cutting back on the number of hours that Alex's therapist accompanied him at school. Eventually, Alex's teachers said she was no longer needed at all.

When Alex was four and a half years old, his eligibility for public services was reassessed. It was a mere two and a half years after his diagnosis, but the experience was completely different. During his first visit, Alex had made infrequent eye contact and never spoke or gestured. This time, he made direct eye contact, introduced himself to
the examiner, and initiated conversation. During his first visit, he had paced the room, opened and closed cabinet doors, stared at the lights, and lined up toys. This time, he complied with the examiner's requests and played with the toys in a more typical manner. During his first visit, the examiner had placed his adaptive skills at the second percentile; this time, he was at the forty-fifth percentile—comfortably within the average range.

There were still a few remnants of Alex's autism. He had trouble using the restroom in unfamiliar places. He had a comfort toy he spoke to in a repetitive manner several times a day, and he occasionally walked on his toes. But bottom line: Alex no longer qualified as autistic.
His diagnosis was stripped away. He could transition out of behavioral therapy and was ready for full integration into the school system.

Although Lucie and Mike had watched Alex's progress, it was still something of a shock.
Could a kid really grow out of autism?

Those at Portia were thrilled; Alex's development was breathtaking. But for Lucie and Mike, it was hard to fully rejoice. Just over a year earlier, William, Lucie and Mike's second son, had received an autism diagnosis of his own.

Lucie had been in a hurry to have a second child.

“Basically, I'm up in stirrups, I push Alex out, and I ask how many weeks do I have to wait until I have another kid?” Lucie remembered.

Because she was hell-bent on making up time after putting off starting a family during her medical training, she was pregnant with William before she knew about Alex's autism. If she had known ahead of time, William would probably never have been born: “I would have been too scared to get pregnant again.”

After Alex was diagnosed, Lucie had watched William like a hawk. She knew that if a boy had an autistic older sibling, the likelihood that he, too, would have autism shot through the roof.

At first, Lucie thought they had gotten lucky.
William wasn't as serious as Alex had been. After a colicky first few months, he was a quiet but happy baby. He was much more interactive than Alex had been. His face lit up when he saw his parents; he was enthralled with his older brother. William's play was typical in a way that Alex's had never been. If you gave him toy cars, he didn't line them up; he pushed them back and forth. The boys are like night and day, Lucie thought. William is going to be fine.

In fact, Lucie began to suspect that William was more than fine. He might actually be quite bright. He had an almost intuitive knowledge of shapes. At twelve months old, he zipped through peg puzzles without any trial and error. He plunked the shapes—even the relatively complex ones—right into place.

He adored letters. At four months old, his face lit up when he looked at books, and at eight or nine months, he began pointing to the words. Whenever he could get his hands on Alex's PECS binder, he lay on the floor and traced the letters of words like “cookie,” “milk,” and “Magna Doodle” with his pudgy fingers. Once he started crawling, he ignored the assorted toys around the living room and motored himself toward the books. He picked them up, turned the pages, and spent long periods of time staring at them.

He was absorbing far more than Lucie and Mike realized. When William was eighteen months old, Lucie took him and Alex shopping. It was an activity both boys hated. After an hour or two, Lucie took them to the play area in the mall and let them loose.

A set of letters—randomly distributed—decorated the play area carpet. William was immediately drawn to them. He ignored all the kids and all the toys and stared at them. Lucie watched as William began moving from one letter to the next. He found the
A
and stood on top of it. Then the
B
and the
C
and the
D
. He kept progressing all the way to
Z
.

Lucie was a bit surprised. She hadn't been working on the alphabet with William. She hadn't been working on much of anything with
him. He was almost always happy, almost always content, and at the time Lucie was in the thick of battling autism with Alex, who was then in his first year at Portia.

William started moving through the letters again, this time in a different—but still deliberate—progression. The hair on Lucie's arms stood up. William, her eighteen-month-old child, was going through the alphabet
backward
. Lucie didn't think
she
could recite the alphabet backward.

But knowing that William had memorized the alphabet only exacerbated the sense of unease that had taken hold in the pit of Lucie's stomach. Over the previous few months, Lucie had noticed changes in her second son.

William's interest in letters and numbers had darkened into an obsession. He took his books to the corner of the room and spent hours staring at them. His social interests began to fade. William grew increasingly upset when things were not just how he wanted them, and changes in schedule became difficult. Lucie waited for months for William to utter his first words, but her baby hit the one-year mark, then the fourteen-month mark, then the sixteen-month mark, and those words still didn't come.

Lucie knew that autism had different faces. Sometimes autistic tendencies were evident almost immediately, as they had been with Alex. Sometimes a child might appear to be developing normally but then seem to slowly slide backward into autism's grasp. That was what she feared was happening with William.

Lucie took William for an assessment when he was just over two years old. The doctor thought she might be right. During his visit, William made some eye contact, certainly more than Alex had, but he was inconsistent about it. He occasionally responded to his name, but at least as often he seemed oblivious to it. He walked on his toes as Alex had done, and he had a ritualistic dance he performed when he was excited. Just like Alex, William never engaged in pretend play. His use of gestures was delayed, and even at two he rarely pointed.
He produced some words, but he primarily used them to label things, not to communicate.
The doctor diagnosed William with autism.

For Lucie, the disappointment flooded back in. The bitterness returned. In some ways, this diagnosis was even harder than the first; for months, she had been sure that William was going to be fine.

She broke down during a car ride with a friend. The appointments. The therapy. The workshops. Lucie didn't think she had the energy to start over.

But at least this time the course was charted. She had a formula at her fingertips. She had already enrolled William at Portia. She added him to the speech therapy waiting list; she added him to the occupational therapy waiting list. She closed her eyes, held her breath, and hoped for another miracle.