House Rules (20 page)

Instead, he closes his eyes. He sways forward and rests his cheek against the window, spreads his arms as wide as they can go.

I realize he is trying to embrace me.

I put the receiver down and step up to the window. I mimic his position, so that we are mirrors of each other, with a glass wall between us.

Maybe this is what it is always like for Jacob, who tries to connect with people and can‘t ever quite manage it. Maybe the membrane between someone with Asperger‘s and the rest of the world is not a shifting invisible seam of electrons but, instead, a see-through partition that allows only the illusion of feeling, instead of the actual thing.

Jacob steps away from the window and sits on the stool. I pick up the phone, hoping he will follow my lead, but he isn‘t making eye contact. Eventually, he reaches for his receiver, and for a moment, I see some of the joy that used to spread across his face when he discovered something startling and came to share it with me. He turns the receiver over in his hands and then holds it to his ear. I saw these on
CrimeBusters.
On the episode where the suspect turned out to be a cannibal.

Hey, baby, I say, and I force myself to smile.

He is rocking as he sits. His free hand, the one not holding the receiver, flutters, as if he is playing an invisible piano.

Who hurt you?

He touches his fingers gingerly to his forehead. Mommy? Can we go home now?

I know precisely the last time Jacob called me that. It was after his middle school graduation, when he was fourteen. He had received a diploma.
Mommy,
he had said, running up to show me. The other kids had heard him, and they burst out laughing.
Jacob,
they teased,
your mommy‘s here to take you home.
Too late, he had learned that, when you‘re fourteen, looking cool in front of your friends trumps unadulterated enthusiasm.

Soon, I say, but the word comes out like a question.

Jacob doesn‘t cry. He doesn‘t scream. He just lets the receiver drop from his hand, and then he puts his head down.

I automatically reach toward him, and my hand smacks into the Plexiglas.

Jacob‘s head lifts a few inches, and then falls. His forehead strikes the metal plate of the counter. Then he does it again.

Jacob! Don‘t! But of course, he can‘t hear me. His receiver dangles from its metal umbilicus, where it fell when he let go.

He keeps hitting his head, over and over. I throw open the door to the visitation booth. The officer who brought me there is standing outside, leaning against the wall.

Help me, I cry, and he glances over my shoulder to see what Jacob is doing, then runs down the hallway to intervene.

Through the window of the visitation booth, I watch him and a second officer grab Jacob by the arms and haul him away from the window. Jacob‘s mouth is twisted, but I cannot tell if he is screaming or sobbing. His arms are pinned behind his back so that he can be handcuffed, and then one of the officers shoves him in the small of the back to propel him forward.

This is my son, and they are treating him like a criminal.

The officer returns a moment later, to take me back to the jail lobby. He‘s going to be fine, I am told. The nurse gave him a sedative.

When Jacob was younger and more prone to tantrums, a doctor put him on olanzapine, an antipsychotic. It got rid of his tantrums. It also got rid of his personality, period. I would find him sitting on the bedroom floor with one shoe on, the other still on the floor beside him, staring unresponsively at the wall. When he began to have seizures, we took him off the drug and never experimented with any others.

I picture Jacob lying on his back on the floor of a cell, his pupils dilated and unfocused, as he slips in and out of consciousness.

As soon as I reach the lobby, Oliver approaches with a big smile on his face.

How‘d it go? he asks.

I open my mouth and burst into tears.

I fight for Jacob‘s IEPs, and I wrestle him to the ground when he goes ballistic in a public place. I have carved a life out of doing what needs to be done, because you can rail to the heavens, but in the end, when you‘re through, you will still be ankle-deep in the same situation. I am the one who‘s strong, so that Jacob doesn‘t have to be.

Emma, Oliver says, and I imagine he is as embarrassed as I am to find me sobbing in front of him. But to my surprise, he folds his arms around me and strokes my hair. Even more surprising … for a moment, I let him.

This is what you can‘t explain to a mother who doesn‘t have an autistic child: Of course I love my son. Of course I would never want a life without him. But that doesn‘t mean that I am not exhausted every minute of the day. That I don‘t worry about his future, and my lack of one. That sometimes, before I can catch myself, I imagine what my life would have been like if Jacob did not have Asperger‘s. That like Atlas I think just for once it would be nice to have someone else bear the weight of my family‘s world on his shoulders, instead of me.

For five seconds, Oliver Bond becomes that person.

I‘m sorry, I say, pushing away from him. I got your shirt all wet.

Yeah, Woolrich flannel is really delicate. I‘ll add the dry-cleaning bill to the retainer. He approaches the control booth and retrieves my license and keys, then leads me outside. Now. What happened in there? Oliver asks.

Jacob hurt himself. He must have been smacking his head against something his forehead is completely bruised, and there were bandages, and blood all over his scalp. He started to do it again just now in the visitation booth, and they gave him a tranquilizer. They won‘t give him his supplements, and I don‘t know what he‘s eating, or if he‘s eating at
all,
and I break off, meeting his gaze. You don‘t have children, do you?

He blushes. Me? Kids? I, um … no.

I watched my son slip away once, Oliver. I fought too hard to bring him back to let him go again. If Jacob
is
competent to stand trial, he won‘t be after two weeks of this.

Please, I beg. Can‘t you do anything to get him out?

Oliver looks at me. In the cold, his breath takes shape between us. No, he says.

But I think
you
can.

Jacob

1

1

2

3

5

8

13

And so on.

This is the Fibonacci sequence. It can be defined explicitly: It can be defined recursively, too:

This means that it is an equation based on its previous values.

I am forcing myself to think in numbers, because no one seems to understand what I say when I speak English. It is like a
Twilight Zone
episode where words suddenly have changed their meaning: I say
stop
and it keeps going; I ask to leave and they lock me up tighter. This leads me to two conclusions:

1. I am being
punk‘d
. However, I don‘t think my mother would have let the joke go on for quite this long, which leads me to:

2. No matter what I say, no matter how clearly I say it, no one understands me. Which means I must find a better method of communication.

Numbers are universal, a language that transcends countries and time. This is a test: if someone just one person can understand me, then there is hope that he‘ll understand what happened at Jess‘s house, too.

You can see Fibonacci numbers in the flowering of an artichoke or the scales of a pinecone. You can use their sequence to explain how rabbits reproduce. As
n
approaches infinity, the ratio of
a(n
) to
a(n
-1) approaches
phi
, the golden ratio 1.618033989 which was used to build the Parthenon and appears in compositions by Bartók and Debussy.

I am walking, and with every step I let another number in the Fibonacci sequence come into my head. I move in smaller and smaller circles to the middle of the room, and when I get there, I start over.

1

1

2

3

5

8

13

21

34

55

89

144

An officer comes in, carrying a tray. Behind him is a nurse. Hey, kid, he says, waving his hand in front of me. Say something.

One, I reply.

Huh?

One.

One what?

Two, I say.

It‘s dinnertime, the officer tells me.

Three.

You gonna eat this, or throw it again?

Five.

I think it‘s pudding tonight, the officer says, pulling the cover off the tray.

Eight.

He inhales deeply. Yum.

Thirteen.

Finally, he gives up. I told you. It‘s like he‘s on a different planet.

Twenty-one, I say.

The nurse shrugs and lifts up a needle. Blackjack, she says, and she plunges the syringe into my bottom while the officer holds me still.

After they are gone, I lie on the floor, and with my finger, I write the equation of the Fibonacci sequence in the air. I do this until it gets blurry, until my finger is as heavy as a brick.

The last thing I remember thinking before I disappear is that numbers make sense.

You cannot say the same about people.

Oliver

The Vermont public defender‘s office is not called the public defender‘s office but rather something that sounds like it was ripped from the pages of a Dickens novel: the Office of the Defender General. However, like in all public defender‘s offices, the staff is overworked and underpaid. Which is why, after I send Emma Hunt off with her own homework, I head to my apartment-office to complete my own.

Thor greets me by jumping up and nailing me right in the groin. Thanks, buddy, I wheeze, and I brush him off. He‘s hungry, though, so I feed him leftover pasta mixed with kibble while I look up the information I need on the Internet and make a phone call.

Although it‘s 7:00 P.M. long past office hours a woman picks up. Hi there, I say. My name‘s Oliver Bond. I‘m a new attorney in Townsend.

We‘re closed now

I know … but I‘m a friend of Janice Roth, and I‘m trying to track her down?

She doesn‘t work here anymore.

I know this. In fact, I also know that Janice Roth recently got married to a guy named Howard Wurtz and that they moved to Texas, where he had a job waiting with NASA. Public record searches are the best friend of the defense attorney.

Oh, shoot really? That‘s a bummer. I‘m a friend of hers from law school.

She got married, the woman says.

Yeah, to Howard, right?

Did you know him?

No, but I know she was crazy about him, I say. By any chance, are you a defender general, too?

Sadly, yes, she sighs. You‘re in private practice? Believe me, you‘re not missing out.

Nah, you‘ll get into heaven long before me. I laugh. Look, I have a really quick question. I‘m new to practicing criminal law in Vermont, and I‘m still learning the ropes.

I‘m new to practicing criminal law, period, but I don‘t tell her that.

Sure, what‘s up?

My client‘s a kid eighteen and he‘s autistic. He sort of flipped out in court during the arraignment and now he‘s locked up until his competency hearing. But he can‘t adapt to jail. He keeps trying to hurt himself. Is there any way to speed up the wheels of justice here?

Vermont‘s decidedly crappy when it comes to psychiatric care for inmates. They used to use the state hospital as a lockup for competency exams, but it lost its funding, so now Springfield gets most of the cases, since they‘ve got the best medical care, she says.

I once had a client being held pending competency who liked to slick himself head to toe he did it the first night with a one-pound block of butter at dinner, and with deodorant before a visit with me.

A contact visit?

Yeah, the officers didn‘t care. I guess they thought the worst he could do was rub me down with something. Anyway, with that guy, I filed a motion to set bail, the attorney says. That gets you back in front of the judge. Put his shrink or counselor on the stand to back up your story. But waive your client‘s appearance, because you don‘t want a repeat performance in the courtroom that will piss off the judge. Your main job is to convince the judge he‘s not a danger if he‘s not locked up, and if he‘s running around like a lunatic in court, that sort of messes up your case.