As Dog Is My Witness (3 page)

I put my daughter down. “You’ll see when I unpack my
bag,” I told her.

“That means yes.” She eyed my bag the way Warren eyes
a roast beef we’re having for dinner.

Ethan looked up from the couch. “Did I get something,
too?”

I turned to Abby. “This he hears,” I said. She smiled
widely and put her arms around me. A hug from Abby is worth
traveling 3,000 miles, too, but for different reasons.

“Welcome home,” she said. For a few moments, I felt
quite welcome indeed. Then, of course, I had to let go and resume
the non-hugging part of my life, which in my opinion is vastly
inferior to the hugging part. Then again, if you were hugging all
the time, it would be difficult to ride a bicycle.

“Have you eaten?” Abby asked.

“You’re such a Jewish lady.”

“Nonetheless.”

“They gave us something on the plane, but I’m not
sure what it was, or what time zone I was in at the time. I didn’t
eat it, anyway.”

“So you’ve had about 25 Diet Cokes and you’re loaded
with caffeine?” Abby stood marveling at how I managed to survive
four days without her dietary supervision. Luckily, God had
invented the cellphone.

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Come in the kitchen. I’ve got some chicken left over
from dinner.”

As I followed my wife toward the kitchen, Leah took
hold of my hand. “Daddy . . .  She looked up at me
with big expressive eyes, and I thought I saw a tear welling up in
one of them. I knelt.

“What’s the matter, baby girl?”

“Aren’t you going to give me my present?” Her lip
actually quivered.

I waved a hand at her as I stood up, ever so
creakily. “Go through the bag,” I told her. “Just don’t destroy any
of my stuff.”

“Yay!”

Ethan looked over and considered joining in the hunt
for gifts. Luckily for him, the leprechaun movie went to
commercial. He rushed around the couch to help his sister plunder
through my luggage. My underwear flew in various directions as I
walked to the kitchen.

Abby was taking a plate out of the oven with a
potholder. She set it down on a ceramic tile with an Al Hirshfeld
caricature of Groucho Marx on it—I had bought it when I was in
college, and it had somehow survived. I could see the plate held
oven-fried chicken and a baked potato with some broccoli hidden in
it. My wife looked after me well.

“You were ready for me,” I said.

“Watch out, the plate’s hot,” she said, turning
perfectly into the next set of embraces I’d planned for her.

“So are you,” I said.

“Eat. You’ll need your strength for later, unless the
jet lag’s gotten you.” She smiled and walked to the dishwasher.

“Remember, I
gained
three hours. My body
thinks it’s late in the afternoon right now. By eleven o’clock,
I’ll be at the height of my energy.” She pretended to look
horrified. At least, I
think
she was pretending.

She sat next to me at the table. “So you didn’t get
the option yet, huh?”

“Keep in mind that ‘yet’ is the operative word in
that sentence,” I told her.

“Still, you flew out there for four days
. . . 

“To get to the point where I understand what Glenn
wants, and once I give it to him, I’ll get the option. It’s a
question of weeks—a couple of weeks probably.” The chicken wasn’t
the least bit dry. It was crunchy and flavorful. If I had cooked
it, you could have used it for a game of shuffleboard.

“It’s not a sure thing, though, is it? I mean, we do
kind of need the money, Aaron.” Abby had a point. When a pipe had
burst, we’d had to tear out and replace all the plumbing in the
upstairs bathroom, and though our semi-resident contractor Preston
Burke had been sympathetic, he didn’t forget to give us a bill.
Owning a home is more fun than human beings should be allowed to
have.

“It’s close to a sure thing,” I said through potato.
I was hungry, and Abby is about as fine a chef as I’ve ever met.
It’s one of the many ways in which my wife is perfection
personified. “I’ll make some changes—not really big ones,
either—and send it to Glenn, and he’ll pony up the cash. Believe
me, I’ve been through this before. He wouldn’t have flown me out
there if he didn’t think he could sell it.”

Abby raised an eyebrow as she thought a moment. “I’d
feel better,” she said, “if I knew a check was in the mail.”

“So would I, but what could I do?” I asked. “Dazzle
him with my non-existent reputation and flash the Writer’s Guild
card I don’t yet have? I have no leverage.”

“Larry Gelbart doesn’t work on spec, you know.”

“Larry Gelbart is god.”

“True.”

The phone rang. “I’ve got it!” Leah screamed as she
ran from the living room into my office.

“Check and see who it is,” I reminded her. Before we
added Caller ID to the office phone, she would answer no matter
what, and then hand me the phone to fend off the inevitable
mortgage refinancer or siding salesman interrupting our dinner.

“I will!” She looked at the hard-to-read display.
“It’s somebody named Cherry.”

“Cherry?” Abby and I looked at each other. “You mean
Shery?”

“Oh. Yeah.” Leah is a fine reader, but she panics a
bit when the answering machine is about to pick up.

I stood and walked to the phone, looking at Abby.
“Lori’s calling again? It must be important.” Abby nodded, but
looked at my plate with some dismay. Great artists don’t like to
have their work interrupted, no matter how reasonable the
pretext.

“Lori?” I said.

“How’d you know? . . .  Oh, you have
that box, don’t you?” Lori Shery, the president and co-founder of
ASPEN (ASPerger Syndrome Education Network), doesn’t call often,
but her voice is always welcome on the other end of the phone. Even
now, through what sounded like stress, it had a friendly, warm tone
to it that is the perfect sound for a parent whose child has just
been diagnosed with AS, and who doesn’t know where to turn. I
know.

Lori started ASPEN out of her living room at
virtually the same moment Ethan was diagnosed, when he was in
kindergarten. Abby had stumbled across Lori’s web address while
doing some Internet research on this new condition we’d just heard
of, which our son will have all his life. And Lori was, indeed, a
godsend.

She had calmed our fears, which all AS parents have
in the beginning. No, she said, our son wouldn’t necessarily have
to live out his adulthood in a group home and work at Burger King
because he has Asperger’s. Yes, it’s going to be difficult, but not
so difficult you can’t handle it. Lori herself is an Asperger
parent, and she is nothing if not experienced, knowledgeable, and
confident.

Before I knew it, I was actually taking part in
ASPEN, despite my absolute refusal to attend any kind of meeting
involving any group since being initiated into the boys service
club—the Ciceronians—at Bloomfield High School in the 1970s. I’m
still not much of a joiner, but participating in ASPEN gave me the
background I needed to understand what Ethan would require from his
school and from us, his parents. Then, I started feeling
experienced enough to reassure new parents myself, and that is
another kind of blessing.

I also write a quirky column for Lori’s newsletter,
which she constantly has to remind me about. Non-paying work is
sometimes more difficult for a freelance writer to remember, I’m
ashamed to say. But it’s true, and I assumed she was calling
because I was in danger of missing the latest deadline, which I was
pretty sure fell sometime this month.

Now, however, the tension in her voice was telling me
this call wasn’t about 750 words on the lighter side of Asperger’s
Syndrome.

“What’s wrong, Lori?”

“You’ve known me a long time, haven’t you?” she
asked. “Well, I have a big favor to ask.”

“You know you can have whatever you want.”

“I need you to investigate a murder,” said Lori.

I’d been asked to do that just twice before, and in
both cases, resisted as hard as I could until there was no
alternative. For one thing, I think my track record would convince
anyone I’m ill-suited to that kind of work, and for another, I’m a
coward, and murders tend to be perpetrated by violent people. Other
people don’t do windows. I don’t do murders.

But this was Lori Shery doing the asking. Lori,
besides being an old friend and one whom I owe about 168 favors, is
also a force of nature. If something stands between her and what
she needs, she simply ignores it until it goes away—or she
bulldozes over it and teaches it a lesson. Lori is not to be
denied—ever.

“Sure,” I said.

“
R
eally?” Lori said. “I
thought you’d have to be convinced.” “Normally, I would,” I told
her. “But I can’t turn you down. I just hope you remember who your
friends are when inevitably you’re elected the first female Jewish
President of the United States.”

“Stop it,” Lori laughed. I wasn’t kidding.

“Why are you asking about a murder?” Well, somebody
had to bring it up.

Her voice became more serious. “Aaron, a man was shot
to death in North Brunswick Tuesday night, and one of our children
is suspected of killing him.” In the Asperger realm, a parent never
says “kids with AS.” They say “our children.” It’s a form of
shorthand. We insiders know what it means. The accused had
Asperger’s. “I know it’s not true,” Lori continued, “but nobody’s
trying to help this boy. They’re so set on tying it all up neatly
that they’re ignoring the facts.”

“What facts?”

“Well, if you knew Justin, I wouldn’t even have to
tell you. He’s so gentle, so sweet. You know how these kids can be,
Aaron . . . 

“Those aren’t facts, Lori,” I told her. “That’s you
being an Asperger’s mom. You know perfectly well that people with
AS are just as capable of anger as anyone else, and that impulse
control isn’t at the top of their abilities list.”

Abby, listening to my end of the conversation, looked
baffled and concerned. I covered the mouthpiece and whispered,
“Lori’s calling about an AS kid accused of murder.” Abby’s eyes
widened. “When?” she whispered back.

“Tuesday,” I whispered back, and she began to rummage
through the pile of newspapers we keep under the kitchen counter so
our disheveled house will look slightly more sheveled.

“If you’d just meet him, Aaron,” Lori said, “you’ll
see.”

“Why do the cops think he did it, Lori? I realize you
have the incontrovertible evidence that Justin is a nice kid, but
are they relying on that pesky evidence thing?”

Abby came up with a copy of the
Star-Ledger
and started leafing through it. “They have some evidence,” Lori
said, her voice suddenly smaller. “But it doesn’t mean
anything.”

“
What
doesn’t mean anything?” Abby found the
article she was looking for in the Middlesex County section of
Wednesday’s newspaper, and started reading.

“Like, they found . . .  the gun
. . .  in Justin’s room.”

“The murder weapon?”

“Yes.” Lori paused, waiting for me to make a
skeptical noise. I didn’t. “Justin’s special interest is guns,” she
said.

For an Asperger’s kid, a “special interest” is the
one subject in the world that’s so fascinating, so utterly
engrossing, that it takes them to the brink of obsession (and, to
be honest, sometimes beyond). By those with a taste for kitschy
nicknames, AS is sometimes called the “little professor” syndrome
because the person with Asperger’s can go on and on ad infinitum
about whatever the special interest subject happens to
be—doorknobs, train schedules, the migration patterns of Canadian
geese, whatever.

I groaned. A special interest in firearms wasn’t
going to help prove this kid’s innocence. Finding the murder weapon
in his bedroom was even worse. What was Lori getting me into?

Abby picked up the paper and walked toward me. “Does
this Justin have a lawyer, and while we’re at it, a last name?” I
was hoping Abby would at least know what the legal standards were
for getting the kid prosecuted as a juvenile rather than an
adult.

“Justin Fowler. And yes, he has an attorney, J.
Bernard Tyson.”

Abby held the paper up for me to see, then handed it
to me when it became obvious I wasn’t looking where she wanted me
to look. I held it in one hand and she pointed.

The second paragraph of the article (which was
written by a staff member whose name I knew) read: “Justin Fowler,
22, was arrested late last night and is expected to be charged with
the crime this morning in North Brunswick municipal court.”

Twenty-two
?

“Lori,” I said, as calmly as possible, “when you say,
‘one of our children . . . ’”

“I know,” she admitted. “Justin’s not a child. He’s
twenty-two years old.”

There went charging him as a juvenile.