Love Anthony (11 page)

Max is the middle boy, Olivia’s guessing around five, and he’s now chasing a seagull down the beach. He’s fast, ignoring his mother. The father goes after him.

The oldest boy, around eight, wanders over to his mother, no longer interested in the cold water without a brother to race. He stands by her side and holds her free hand.

All three of these boys are familiar and foreign to Olivia, two sides of the same sword, each equally capable of carving her in two. They are the size and shape of Anthony—his feet when he was two, his legs when he was five, his eight-year-old hands.

Max, the boy running down the beach not heeding his parents’ calls to stop, is just like Anthony. And yet, he’s nothing like Anthony. This boy leaps up and takes off with a glint in his eye and the devil in his smile. He’s playing, and he’s involving his parents in the game.
Chase me!
And he’ll delight in being caught.

When Anthony ran on the beach, he ran to feel the impact of the solid ground compressing his joints, to feel the cool wind on his skin, to feel the hot, granular sand between his toes, to get to the water he loved more than anything else. He ran and didn’t listen to her or David’s calls to stop, but it was never a game that included them in his world.

The photographer arrives, the father returns with the middle boy, carrying him tucked under his arm like a football, and the mother gathers them all together, encouraging the boys to smile.

“Look at me,” says the photographer, and unexpected chills tremble through Olivia’s center.

Look at me
.

How many hundreds of thousands of times did she hear those three words, spoken by her, by David, by doctors, by a series of applied-behavioral-analysis and speech therapists.

Anthony, look at me,
while she held a Pringle to her nose.

Anthony, look at me,
while she held her breath.

Anthony, look at me,
while he did not.

The toddler is throwing his head back and stiffening his limbs, crying, his face puffed and red, his eyes squeezed shut. The mother hands him over to the father. She pulls a toy still inside its packaging from her beach bag and hands it to the photographer. It’s a truck. A bribe. She’s smart.

“Look at the truck.”

It works. The toddler’s attention is drawn to the truck, which the photographer has strategically placed on the top of her head. The toddler stops crying and points. The toddler points and says, “Mine.”

Until that moment, Olivia wondered if he were on the spectrum. She’d already decided that the other two were neurotypical, but she wasn’t sure about the toddler on his mother’s hip. After Anthony’s diagnosis, every boy she saw—preschoolers and teenagers, sons of women she knew and sons of strangers, boys sitting in front of her in church and boys playing on the playground—she observed for signs of autism. Even now she can’t look at a boy and simply see a boy. She has to see or not see autism, too. Like looking at the letters of a word and reading the word, she has to do both. They are inextricably linked.

And where she feels an unspoken bond, a compassionate kinship, with mothers of children on the spectrum, she often feels all sorts of unflattering emotions toward the parents of typical boys and girls. Jealousy, irritation, hatred, rage, grief.
Their normal, blessed, easy, unappreciated lives flaunted right there in front of her.

Look at them,
she’d usually think, jealousy, irritation, hatred, rage, and grief consuming her, poisoning her.

But today, quite unexpectedly, she feels none of this. Instead she feels relieved and hopeful that this mother will get at least one decent picture with her whole family smiling and looking at the camera. The toddler continues to point at the truck while sitting on his mother’s hip, his older brothers are yelling,
“Cheeeeeese,”
and the father has his arm around his wife, his other hand on the shoulder of the oldest boy while the photographer clicks away, still saying, “Look at me.”

Olivia pulls her Nikon up to her eye and looks at this family through the viewfinder. It’s almost sunset now. The light on their faces is warm and flattering. Click. Click. Click. She looks down at her LCD, at the last image she captured. She sees the saturation, the brightness and contrast, the composition, and approves. It’s a good picture. Then something shifts, maybe some of the gray surrounding her lifts, and she forgets the technical aspects of the photograph. She looks at the image on her LCD, and she sees joy, intimacy, family, love. Magic captured.

I could do this
.

CHAPTER 9

B
eth and Petra meet up with Jill, who is waiting for them, always early, in front of Salt. Courtney’s not coming because she’s teaching two yoga classes tonight, and Georgia can’t come because she’s overseeing a wedding down the street at the Blue Oyster. But with Petra and Jill by her side, Beth has more than enough girl power in her corner, and she’s feeling confident and ready in her Goldie Hawn dress. But as Petra walks up the steps, leading the way, Beth realizes that her heart is beating way too fast, urging her body to spring into some kind of large physical action to match her racing pulse.
Run!
She focuses on the back of Petra’s neck, on the clasp of her turquoise necklace, the one Beth asked to borrow but didn’t wear, as she forces each forward step, walking behind her friend, slowly, deliberately, against her heart’s instinct, into the lion’s den.

“Hi, welcome to Salt.”

Before Beth can notice anything else, there she is, smiling at Petra. Salt’s Saturday-night hostess. Angela.

She’s younger than Beth, possibly in her late twenties. Her hair is long, curly, and dark brown. She’s wearing a plain, boring
black top, but on her it’s tight and has a plunging V neckline. That and a small gold cross at the end of a long gold chain draw Beth’s eyes, and probably everyone else’s, to her big, exciting boobs. Of course. Twentysomething and big boobs.

Beth rounds her shoulders and folds her arms over her own chest, already neatly covered by the thick polyester blend of her Goldie Hawn dress. Even pushed up and in to the best of her Victoria’s Secret bra’s ability, even before pregnancy stretched them and breast-feeding sucked the bounce out of them, her boobs never looked like
that
. Angela’s eyes, big and black and unnervingly beautiful, are still smiling as they move to include Jill, but then they stumble when they see Beth.

She already knows who I am.

Angela clears her throat and pulls her fake, professional welcome smile back on. “Table for three?”

“No, thanks,” says Petra. “We’re going to sit at the bar.”

We are?
Beth wants to correct Petra, to say that they’d prefer a table, please, one facing the street and not the bar actually, but a sour-tasting panic has risen at the back of Beth’s throat, and she can only manage to swallow. Like a lamb being led to slaughter, she follows Petra and Jill to the bar and takes the empty seat between them. And there’s Jimmy.

He at first greets them with a neutral cheerfulness, the way he might acknowledge any three women who sit down at his bar, clearly without really seeing them. But then it registers. His smile softens on Beth, becoming genuine, but only for the slightest moment before it’s replaced by a tensed grin, holding surprise and uncertainty between his teeth, and then finally his jaw clenches tight to keep him from saying what he’s probably thinking.
Oh, shit.

“Ladies.”

“Jimmy,” says Petra.

“Beth,” says Jimmy.

“Hi,” says Beth.

“So what are you ladies up to tonight?”

“This,” says Petra. “We’re here to spy on you.”

Jimmy laughs and shakes the martini he’s making with noticeably extra vigor. Beth wipes her hands on the lap of her dress. She didn’t know her hands could sweat.

“Not exactly subtle, are you, Petra?” he asks.

“Never,” says Petra.

Direct and fearless, Petra would never tap a nail gently a hundred times with a rubber mallet when she could whack it once with a sledgehammer and get the job done. While Beth admires this quality in Petra, Beth has never been comfortable with the trait herself. She’s too afraid of missing the nail head altogether, of creating a huge and ugly hole in the wall next to her intention.

“What can I get for you?” he asks.

“What do you recommend?” asks Petra.

“What are you in the mood for, beer, wine?”

“Something stronger. Something you make,” says Petra.

He pours off some of the drink he’s just mixed into a small glass and places it down in front of Petra, who takes a sip.

“That’s good. Espresso martini?”

He nods.

“I’ll have that,” says Petra.

“Me, too,” says Jill.

“Try some?” asks Petra, offering what’s left in her glass to Beth.

“No, no, I—” says Beth.

“Can’t have caffeine after four,” says Jimmy, knowing her answer. “She’ll be up all night.”

Beth shifts in her seat.

“How about something sweeter?” he says, already pulling bottles.

It’s strange to see him mixing all these fancy drinks. Jimmy’s a beer-in-the-bottle kind of guy. And not the new kinds
of beers infused with nutmeg or pumpkin or blueberries. He likes “real” beer. Budweiser and Coors. He reluctantly admits to liking Cisco’s Whale’s Tale, but only because the brewery is down the road from their house.

And this isn’t Jimmy’s kind of bar. He likes a guys’ place, not necessarily a sports pub, although the Red Sox, Patriots, Bruins, or Celtics had better be playing on the flatscreen. He likes a bar that’s dark and dirty, a glass jar of hard-boiled eggs and bowls of peanuts on the counter, wooden floors warped from years of soaking in spilled beer, Def Leppard playing on the jukebox. The menu might have mozzarella sticks and buffalo wings but certainly not anything with foie gras or truffle oil. There’s a pool table and a dartboard and a bouncer because at least one sloppy drunk is going to throw a punch at somebody before closing.

Salt is the opposite of Jimmy’s kind of bar. The coppery-orange globe pendants glow against the tin ceiling, giving off a romantic light. The mixed crowd here—some locals, most not—is more women than men, and everyone is dressed well, refined looking, out for a civilized evening. Beth reads the list of cocktails on the drinks menu and gasps at the prices. At $20 a pop, everyone here is out for a civilized and
expensive
evening. She looks down the length of the bar, at the men and women seated next to them, trying to get a sense for who comes here. She notices nothing worth mentioning until she sees the large Nantucket basket purse perched on the bar, owned by the blond woman next to the bald man in the seersucker suit jacket. Too expensive for anyone actually from Nantucket to own; Beth has seen Nantucket baskets much smaller than that sell for over $1,000.

The bar itself is a honed, rugged stone slab embedded with amber-colored pieces of sea glass. Beth slides her hand over the cool surface. It’s beautiful, a piece of art. The music is techno and loud. No one will be singing “Pour Some Sugar on Me” here.

“Here you go,” says Jimmy, presenting Beth with a martini glass brimming with pink liquid. “The best drink on the menu.”

Beth takes a sip. It’s sweet and spicy with a strong but not unpleasant kick, the kind of drink she could easily get drunk on.

“It’s good. What is it?” asks Beth.

“Vodka, rum, chili, lime, and ginger. It’s called a Hot Passion martini.”

Hot Passion? What is he doing?
Beth feels embarrassed, indignant, and then strangely flattered.

“What’s with the beard?” asks Petra.

“Just trying it out,” says Jimmy, scratching the hollows of his newly hairy cheeks with his fingers. “You like it?”

“No,” says Petra.

He’s been growing the beard for about a month now, and Beth thinks it looks good on him, rugged, masculine. It makes up for his weak chin. And she knows him, that he’s not just trying it out. Jimmy stops shaving whenever he’s going through a hard time—when his dad died, when scalloping dried up and they couldn’t pay the bills, when Jessica had surgery on her ears in Boston. And now. Beth smiles to herself, pleased to realize that at least their separation ranks up there with the death of his father, that she still matters to him. And he stops shaving not simply because he’s too distracted and overwhelmed with the stress in his life to bother, but mainly because his beard makes him feel protected, hidden. Jimmy wearing a beard is like Beth wearing one of her big, black, shapeless sweaters that covers her butt.

But she’s not wearing one of those sweaters tonight. She’s wearing her Goldie Hawn dress, and Jimmy’s wearing a beard. Interesting. It hadn’t occurred to her that he might be having a hard time without her. Maybe this isn’t what he wants. Maybe he’s suffering, too.

Angela wiggles her way behind the bar and says something to Jimmy that Beth can’t hear. Angela laughs, and he smiles, flashing those crooked, charming teeth. It’s quick and then guarded, but there it was. She made him smile.