Language Arts (5 page)

All in all, her monologue served to do what all such monologues did: indict and baffle. It was their fault, always. That was what it all came down to. They'd doomed Cody from the beginning by dealing him a bad genetic deck, they'd wrought further damage by not recognizing and protecting him from hazards, and they'd compounded everything by not noticing sooner that something was amiss, not taking immediate action. (As if they didn't spend every waking moment with Cody
noticing
and
doing,
or at least
trying.
They loved him. They didn't leave him in a locked car on a ninety-five-degree day while they roamed the aisles of Walmart or smoked crack. And yet, for all the implied condemnation laid upon them at meetings like this, they might as well have.)

But they had a chance now to make things right, because here was yet another new prescriptive action to take, one that—like all the previous failed prescriptive actions—would not be covered by insurance.

The doctor paused. She looked down and shuffled some papers around—exactly, Charles thought, like a television news anchor filling that awkward interval before the camera cuts away to the commercial break.

When she finally spoke, Charles realized that she'd spent the entire office visit delaying the moment in which she'd have to ask one final question:

“Has anyone suggested that Cody might be . . . on the spectrum?”

“Excuse me?” Charles said.

“The
autism
spectrum.”

Charles heard Alison inhale sharply. Her writing hand opened, slack, as if it had gone numb; her pencil dropped to the floor.

“No,” Charles said.

Dr. Gayathri seemed, for once, to be bankrupt of speech.

“No,” Charles repeated. “No one has mentioned autism.”

“Well,” Dr. Gayathri said, “there is a great deal of evidence that mycotoxicity can be a significant triggering factor in the disease . . .”

Autism,
Charles was thinking, and it was as if he'd spoken the word into an electronic device that caused it to reverberate—not receding, like an echo, but exactly the opposite, gaining in volume and intensity, like the ringing of an unheeded alarum:
autism, Autism,
AUTISM,
AUTISM
!
He was vaguely aware of Alison reaching down to retrieve her fallen pencil.

“This company . . . ,” Ali began, her voice barely audible over the crescendo of the repeating word in Charles's head. “Emerald City.” Nodding toward the video screen, she wet her lips and swallowed with effort. “They could refer us to a house excavation contractor, couldn't they?”

Auto-,
from the Greek
autos,
“self,”
Charles thought.
How does that fit with
-ism
?

“Yes, absolutely!” the doctor answered. “There's a full list of resources related to mold mitigation right there in the informational materials I've provided.”

Alison snatched up the pamphlets and began studying them.

Dr. Gayathri went on. “I would like to schedule another appointment very soon. It's extremely important that we start finding ways to support and strengthen your child's immune system during this transition; that is, while you decide what to do about the environmental issue. Supplements, dietary changes . . . these can all have a very positive effect in the interim.”

“Oh God!” Alison cried out. “Is Cody safe, do you think? Do we need to move him somewhere else until the problem is fixed? Maybe we should send him to my parents . . .”

“Alison,” Charles said, but she didn't seem to hear him.

“I don't think that will be necessary if we take immediate precautions and implement a dietary program right away. But it would be appropriate for the two of you to have a discussion as soon as possible about how you'd like to proceed in terms of your house. In this case, I do believe we're dealing with SBS as caused by biological contaminants.”

Alison began to cry.

“SBS?” Charles asked.

“Sick building syndrome.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“I don't think we can move,” Alison managed to say. “It's the only home Cody has ever known; he loves the house, the garden . . . We live on a corner lot, you know, and there's this big stand of old trees. Cody calls it his forest . . .” She took off her eyeglasses, swiped at her nose, her eyes, her forehead. “And his room, he just loves it, all his things, the colors . . . We've tried so hard to make it . . .
his.
” She gripped her hands together in front of her face, a gesture of entreaty. “I think uprooting him would do more damage than good.”

“That is of course your decision,” the doctor said, and—to her credit—she looked at both of them.

Alison nodded sharply and put her glasses back on. “We'll need to replace the windows right away,” she said, “all of them, probably, but certainly those 1950s aluminum ones in the kitchen and bathroom. They're always sweating, I'm sure they're a factor in the mold . . .” She turned over a fresh page on her legal pad and resumed writing; it was a to-do list, Charles noted, beginning with
ASK DAD ABOUT CONTRACTOR RECOMMENDATIONS
and
GET CASH OUT OF 401(K)
. Her eyes were too big, too bright, her pupils too dilated, her breathing too rapid: a wild creature in flight mode.

“Alison,” Charles began again, reaching for her hand, but she gestured him away.

“We'll make this work,” she muttered, pressing down hard with her pencil, adding item after item to her list, all emphatically capitalized in block print. “We'll do whatever it takes. I know what you're thinking, Charles, I
know,
but we can't be proud about asking for help, not anymore. It's all for Cody. From now on. It all has to be for him.”

Charles pulled the crawlspace door closed behind him, turned on the overhead fluorescents, and surveyed the room. It looked far less like the father-daughter playhouse he'd remembered with such fondness and more like a hopelessly jumbled catchall: a scattering of tools, paint cans, odd bits of leftover construction supplies, Alison's abandoned sports equipment, and dozens of unlabeled cardboard boxes.

How could he have let this happen?

Charles despaired. Organizing clutter was not his strong suit.

If he and Alison were still married, she could have directed him instantly to the boxes he'd come down here to find. There were three.

One contained the earliest evidence of Emmy's existence, its inventory inscribed in painstaking detail in the ledger of his memory: an ultrasound photograph with the technician's crude drawing of a word bubble coming out of Emmy's already-formed mouth (
Hi, Daddy!
); a Post-it note the same technician handed him on the sly with the words
It's a girl!
(Charles had been eager to know the gender of their second child, but Alison preferred to be surprised); congratulatory cards scrawled with exuberant addenda:
We couldn't be happier for you! Wishing you and your little one every blessing! We can't wait to meet your perfect new baby!
(it was clear in retrospect that all the exclamatory excess was in direct proportion to Alison and Charles's fears—although they were in perfect, complicit, and unspoken denial about that at the time); a scrapbook of photos from the baby shower.

Another box contained Emmy's baby things: the layette (gender-neutral, in yellow, green, and white); the silver rattle; an assortment of soft cuddly things, wild creatures tamed by their plush exteriors and beribboned necks; the wind-up crib mobile playing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and setting a small flock of bluebirds in slow circular motion; the set of Beatrix Potter books, sized for a child's hands . . .

And there was at least one more treasure chest of sentimental savings down here as well, boxed relics documenting Emmy's journey from toddlerhood through high school: the handmade birthday/Valentine's Day/Father's Day/get-well cards; the letters from camp; the school projects . . . (Had Cody provided him with these kinds of treasures while he was growing up, Charles would have felt just as sentimental about them and saved every scrap.)

Where to begin? How would he be able to find Emmy's boxes in this mess?

Intending to pour a refill, Charles reached for the wine but discovered he'd left his juice glass upstairs. He considered drinking directly from the bottle, but that was just
too
scandalous,
too
dipsomaniacal. Besides, with the low ceiling, he wouldn't be able to tip up the bottle without risking spillage.

The problem solved itself as soon as he spotted Emmy's miniature china tea set—he'd forgotten about that!—stored in its original packaging, sitting in plain sight on top of a larger cardboard box in the farthest darkened corner, opposite where he was crouched. Charles crawled toward it, sliding the bottle along the floor with him, shoving aside the boxes in his way, creating a narrow but traversable path.

The tea set was packaged with a clear lid, so its components—teapot, creamer, sugar, saucers, and teacups—were in full view, nestled into molded plastic niches.
Who gave this to us?
Charles wondered. It was real china, from what he could tell, hand-painted with orange and yellow flowers, in pristine condition. He could picture Emmy sitting down here playing hostess to him and her favorite stuffed animals, serving up imaginary refreshments in the style of a Jane Austen heroine.

Would you care for a cucumber sandwich, Mr. Charles?

Yes, indeed, Miss Emerson. Thank you ever so much.

With care, Charles extracted one of the cups, filled it with wine—a little more than a thimbleful—and drank it down.

He might as well commence his archaeological dig here, by exploring the contents of the box nearest the one upon which Emmy's tea set was resting. The moment he began easing open the flaps, he knew exactly what he'd found.

There is no smell in the world like old magazines.

On the very top was the August 10, 1962, issue of
Life
magazine: a jaunty Janet Leigh on the cover, proudly buxom in a lemon-yellow sleeveless dress and wearing on her head a towering stack of red fezzes, eleven of them, their tassels swinging wildly, impossibly, illogically, so that one had to conclude that they were being animated not by the pedestrian mechanism of an out-of-frame wind machine but by Ms. Leigh's breezy insouciance. Next to Janet, a headline read
THE FULL STORY OF
THE DRUG THALIDOMIDE:
THE 5,000 DEFORMED BABIES, THE MORAL QUESTIONS OF ABORTION . . .

The box contained several other issues as well, their covers featuring photos of John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, JFK, John Glenn . . .

This smell, old
Life, Charles thought.
How does one describe it?

This was exactly the kind of exercise he gave his creative-writing students, so it was only fair that he attempt it himself.

He refilled the teacup, closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and spoke: “A dense, gluey, chemical musk that comes on strong but soon dissipates, growing elusive, trailing in its wake the faint aroma of a de-ivoried piano key in a Sunday-school classroom.”

That was terrible. Heavy-handed. Verbose. Self-consciously clever. Resoundingly average. He'd give himself a solid C.

Was
de-ivoried
even a word? And yet, how else would one describe it—
bald, scalped, denuded
? None of those quite got it somehow . . .

Charles lifted the magazine out of the box and set it on the floor.
Too late to stop now,
he thought, so he began to inventory the rest:

Fourth-grade report cards

A framed certificate of merit for Palmer penmanship bearing his name

Cursive-writing workbooks, most filled to capacity

Yellowed copies of a
Seattle Times
article from 1963 entitled “Fourth-Graders Predict the Future”

A stack of red-and-blue-lined newsprint, hole-punched and held together, just barely, by three still shiny butterfly brass brads. The front cover was a sheet of faded, dog-eared, orange construction paper bearing the block printing of his much younger self:

FLIPPER BOY by Charles Marlow

Room 104

Mrs. Braxton

Also in the box were several remaindered copies of this opus printed in grape-pop purple on slick white paper and emitting another distinctive smell, that high-inducing chemical blend known as mimeograph ink, the clearest evidence of a far-distant, toxic childhood. Astonishing. Someone had taken the time and trouble not only to transcribe Charles's words into typewritten form but to make mimeographed copies.

Who? The Nellie Goodhue secretary? Mrs. Braxton?

Why on earth had his mother saved this stuff? Did she think Charles would want it? To him, it was criminal evidence.

Fourth grade was a landmark year, the one in which Charles experienced his proverbial fifteen minutes of fame as well as the fall that inevitably follows such a sudden, unearned ascent.

It was the year he'd started wearing a crucifix, mastered the Palmer Method of penmanship, and become obsessed with doomsday scenarios—especially those resulting from pharmaceutical disasters.

It was the year he became a fan of sci-fi/horror movies and began collecting the names of film stars with the same fervency that his better-adjusted contemporaries collected baseball cards and merit badges.

It was the year his best friend moved to Minnesota. The year his parents' marriage went to hell.

Mainly, though, it was the year he met Dana McGucken.

Charles picked up the magazine and began thumbing through it.