Following Ezra (11 page)

Shawn suggests we walk together, and I feel excited at the idea that Ezra can reach out to a schoolmate and bond over their mutual enthusiasm for wildlife. I imagine playdates at the zoo, hours to be spent musing over the boy’s photo albums and Ezra’s big book. But the two boys just trudge on, taking note of the dromedaries and gray wolves, but oblivious to each other. I am disappointed, but then I look at Ezra, who is unfazed, eager to get to the zebras.

Occasionally the zoo affords us sublime moments I couldn’t have experienced anywhere else or with anyone else. One chilly, misty afternoon when Ezra is eight, he notices that a new exhibit that has been under construction has finally opened. As we get close, Ezra leads me to a side of the enclosure where the floor of the cage is at about his eye level. We are the only visitors nearby, and Ezra quickly spots the animal inside: a young snow leopard—gorgeous, white with black spots—pacing back and forth inside the cage. Ezra squeezes his cheek up to the metal enclosure, tracing the leopard’s steps with his eyes.

“Listen,” I tell him.

We are so close, and the place is so quiet, that I can hear the leopard rhythmically inhaling and exhaling.

“He’s breathing!” Ezra says.

As the leopard paces, Ezra lines up his body with the animal’s, mimicking its steps, pacing back and forth, again and again. The air is cool and I see the vapor from the leopard’s breath.

“What’s that?” Ezra asks. “What’s coming out of him?”

“You can see his breath,” I tell him.

Ezra stops pacing and places his hands on the fence between himself and the creature. He takes a few deep breaths, and then I realize what he is doing: Watching the vapor emerging from the leopard, he is adjusting his own breath to be in sync with the cat’s. I take a few steps back and watch my son—who has gone through life seemingly so alone, who would never think of pacing the playground with another child—breathing in near silence with a leopard. I savor the moment, satisfied that I have brought Ezra to a place where he can be, at least for two minutes, content and calm, at peace.

And then he darts away, on to the next animal and the next and the next, until it is time to head to the parking lot. He senses the change, and even before we exit the gate, he starts in again on the usual chatter about Disney movies and junk food. As we walk hand in hand out toward the car, I wonder if the joy Ezra feels among his animals will ever permeate the rest of his life—and hope my little boy might someday feel as content and comfortable among his own species.

CHAPTER SIX

We’re at Brad and Elana’s house when Ezra is five years old. The four adults are chatting over what’s left of lunch. Meanwhile, most of the kids have scattered around the house, occupying themselves with a bucket of Legos and the chocolate-chip ice cream that has appeared on the kitchen counter. Ezra sits on the floor nearby doing what he spends much of his time lately doing: obsessively paging through a picture book, front to back, then back to front. It’s not idle page turning. He holds the book close to his face, examining the letters and images the way some kids stare at their Game Boys. This afternoon it’s his current book of choice: a simple, colorful storybook about Thomas the Tank Engine.

Elana glances toward him.

“Is he reading yet?” she asks.

I am not sure I’ve heard correctly.

“Reading?” I ask. She might as well have asked if he’s composing symphonies. But she’s serious. Ezra, thanks to
Sesame Street
, can recognize the letters, but he shows no sign of stringing them together into words. In school he is so challenged by the simple act of paying attention that it’s hard to imagine him achieving much more. Brad and Elana have an older son with a diagnosis similar to Ezra’s. Often, Elana has valuable advice and insights. But this time I can’t fathom what she’s thinking.

“Yeah,” she says. “I’ll bet he’s reading.”

Elana is smiling cryptically as she says it, and I wonder if she’s speaking in some sort of coded, ironic language, as if she’s putting quotation marks around the word
reading
. Is this her way of saying that maybe Ezra thinks he’s reading, but of course we all know better than that? Surely Elana can’t be implying that Ezra could be comprehending the words on the page.

He does spend countless hours—the majority of some days—scrutinizing the pages of books: Dr. Seuss,
The Story of Babar, Madeline
. He seems magnetically attracted to their pages, mesmerized by their images and practically hypnotized by the process of opening, staring, and flipping page after page after page. It may be a form of imitation. He’s growing up in a home lined with bookshelves, with a rabbi for a mom and a writer for a dad. The way other kids might put on an apron and pretend to cook or sit behind the wheel and play bus driver, Ezra flips through books, just like his parents. Yet with all of that, it has never occurred to me that at the age of five my son is actually reading those words.

“He does love books,” I say. “But I don’t think he’s . . .
reading
.”

“Here,” Elana says. “Let me see.” She rises from the table, taking a place next to Ezra on the floor. She sits cross-legged beside him, examining the book he’s holding.

“Let’s read this,” she says, and she squeezes next to him, pointing at one word at a time, pausing to listen to Ezra. I watch, waiting for a miraculous breakthrough, the moment my five-year-old boy suddenly emerges from his two-year-long trance to reveal his hidden ability.

It doesn’t happen.

Instead, he merely continues to page through, staring at the book. And as we continue our conversation with Brad, I let the momentary fantasy slip away.

Until a few minutes later, when Elana returns to the table.

“He’s reading,” she says evenly, still wearing her mysterious smile.

“What do you mean?” I ask. It just doesn’t make sense. I feel confused and skeptical—and it must show on my face.

“He’s
smart
,” she says. “Of
course
he can read.”

Later, on the way home, Shawn and I are both quiet for a while, and then I ask my wife: “Do you think he’s reading?”

She shakes her head. “Do I think he
will
read—someday? Yes,” she says. “Is he now?” She shakes her head again.

I don’t know what to think. Have we missed something? Have we been overlooking new developments all along? Has Ezra been reaching fresh milestones, higher levels of comprehension, unprecedented accomplishments that have escaped our notice? Has he been deciphering the words on the pages all this time, while we naively dismissed his page turning as mere habit? I’m perplexed. Did Ezra actually
read
the words on the page to Elana? Or is she just trying to send us a signal—that we ought to have faith in our son, ought to assume that he is a mindful, intelligent person?

That night at bedtime, I sit on the boys’ bedroom floor with Ezra, an Eric Carle picture book between the two of us. I point to a word and ask him to read it to me.

I read it, then point to the next.

No response.

“
Read
to me!” he demands.

“No,” I say. “You read to
me
.”

He squirms. “
Read
, Abba!”

“You,” I say.

It’s silent. In the hush between us I am aware of the tension within myself—the tug-of-war between acceptance and aspiration, between embracing what my son is and pushing him toward what he might become. As much as I aim to appreciate Ezra on his own terms, with all of his eccentricities and limitations, Elana’s comment has touched a part of me that dreams for—maybe even expects—my son to do what any other child could do: make friends, sit still, read books.

While I try to rein in those too-grand thoughts, he takes me by surprise. Soon after that evening Ezra magically starts spelling words.

At first it’s his own name: E-Z-R-A. And within a few weeks he has added to that the names of his brothers: A-M-I-E-L (Ami’s full name) and N-O-A-M. He spells what he calls me: A-B-B-A, and what he calls Shawn: I-M-A.

One night, I’m making dinner in the kitchen and notice Ezra running into the room and grabbing the brightly colored plastic magnetic letters from the refrigerator door. Again and again he appears in the doorway, hurries to the fridge, grabs a letter in each hand, then scampers back out. When he leaves and doesn’t return, I peek into the playroom next door to see what’s up, and spot Ezra arranging letters in the corner of the small table that holds his wooden trains and tracks. He has placed eight letters into a crooked line to spell a word: D-I-N-O-S-A-U-R.

A big word for a little boy who seems so lost in his own head.

“Did
you
do that?” I ask.

He beams: “I spelled
dinosaur
! That’s how you spell
dinosaur
!”

I smile and watch my son fiddle with the letters and the trains and wonder what else is going on behind his deep brown eyes. And for a moment I ponder another question: Was Elana right? Is Ezra teaching himself? And I wonder whether he has been doing that all along—and whether he just might continue.

Soon, spelling becomes yet another obsession. When Ezra is not mimicking phrases from
Winnie the Pooh
or disgorging minutiae about Thomas, he is asking how to spell words: names, characters, objects, animals. This is what he fills the silence with now as we drive around with Ezra strapped in his car seat in the back of my Toyota.

“How do you spell
tiger
? . . . How do you spell
house
? . . . How do you spell
Mickey
?”

Ezra’s newfound spelling prowess earns him a modest reputation among our children’s friends. Some neighbors install a backyard trampoline, which quickly gains popularity among the younger kids, who line up to bounce together within the circular netted enclosure. Ezra, in particular, finds the repetitive leaping motion so comforting that we begin making routine visits. Jumping within the twelve-foot circle provides exercise that calms Ezra, wears him out, and leaves him feeling more centered.

One afternoon I’m sitting on a patio chair near the trampoline when I notice that a couple of the younger kids have spontaneously developed a game: asking Ezra to spell as he jumps.

“Listen! Listen!” one girl of eight or nine is telling her sister. “Do it again!”

She bounces in sync with Ezra, shouting one word at a time. He repeats the word, then spells it, one letter per bounce. The children crowd around—as much as they can while springing up and down—to listen, fascinated and impressed by the little boy who cannot hold a conversation and won’t join in a basketball game but can magically jump and spell
dinosaur
.

He can spell. Does that mean he can read? Learning is such a mysterious process in any child—all the more so in a child who cannot—or will not—communicate about what he is learning. Ezra is building a remarkable mental catalog of spelling words, but can he make sense of words from seeing them? We simply don’t know.

That is, until an evening a few months later. It’s Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar—and the longest synagogue day of the year. We’re in Redlands, the small city east of Los Angeles where Shawn works as occasional visiting rabbi for a small, tight-knit community. At nightfall, after twenty-four hours of prayer and fasting, I’m eagerly anticipating the day’s end. As my wife and the cantor lead the congregation in chanting the climactic final Hebrew prayers, volunteers are busy laying out noodle kugels and fruit salads on tables in the rear of the hall for a potluck meal to break the fast. Finally, a long blast of a ram’s horn—the shofar—marks the holiday’s end, and the hundred or so famished congregants descend on the buffet tables, eagerly filling paper plates with food. Amid the crowd, I’m trying to assemble plates for the boys and Shawn, when suddenly a piercing sound rings out.

Looking up, I see a strobe light flashing near a large red cone-shaped speaker mounted on a high wall.

I look around for smoke or flames, thinking perhaps a careless kitchen volunteer set a burner too high and scorched a blintz casserole. But I see no smoke, no fire.

Moms and dads scurry to find their children and rush toward the doors while balancing plates and cups. Fire or no fire, after going hungry for a day, nobody wants to abandon the potato salad midbite.

Suddenly, a man’s booming voice rises above the din: “It was the rabbi’s son.”

I can tell from the tone which one he means.
That
son.

In the midst of the confusion, I spot Ezra. He’s in a corner, clasping his forearms against his ears and leaning forward, head almost to his knees. He uncoils now and then for just long enough to peer at the dessert table, with its trays of brownies and home-baked coffee cakes.

I notice a couple of congregants examining a red alarm box on the wall, its handle protruding at an odd angle. One man props himself up on a folding chair and holds a gray plastic trash bin over the blaring speaker to muffle the sound; he’s only partially successful.

“It’s all right!” the man shouts over the alarm. “There’s no fire.”

It’s too late. As the confused crowd debates whether to stay or go, I grab Ezra, who is still holding his ears, and nudge him outside, only to encounter
another
siren, this one on the red fire engine that’s arriving at the curb. A pair of firefighters in full gear descend and head inside. Ezra, practically shaking from the commotion, is also mesmerized by the red truck, with its pulsating light.

“Let’s go, sweetheart,” I say, placing an arm around him as we walk down the block, away from the people and the noise and the fading scent of kugel and toasted bagels. Around the corner and finally away from the blaring siren, I tell him he can take his hands off his ears. He still won’t. I pull his hands off of them myself, hold them in mine, and try to catch his eye.