Love Anthony (36 page)

She watched him like a nervous hawk for a long time after that, but Anthony didn’t have another episode. She relaxed and convinced herself that the seizing was gone for good, that it was a onetime fluke. Finally, they were lucky.

The experience of that first seizure when Anthony was four did nothing to prepare her for the sight of this one. This seizure was different. It kept going. One rolled into the next, each one gripping him tighter, shaking him harder. As if someone were adding kindling to a fire, the blaze kept growing bigger, hotter, brighter.

She tucked a towel under his head, unaware that he’d already
banged it against the porcelain tile floor with way too much force, and watched in helpless horror. Then it released him. The seizing stopped, and he just lay there. His eyes were still rolled back. His feet were splayed. His lips weren’t pink enough. His lips were purple. Purple turning blue.

Anthony!

As she wrapped her arms around him, she felt his limp wrists and his neck with her fingers. She couldn’t feel anything. She put her ear on his slippery, wet chest. She thinks that’s when she started screaming.

She called 911. She doesn’t remember what she told them. She doesn’t remember what they said to do.

She pinched his nose and began breathing into him.

Breathe!

She pressed on his small, naked chest with her hands the way she’d first been taught as a teenager on a lifeless doll named Annie.

Anthony, breathe!

Then there were two men. The firefighters. They took over. A bag on Anthony’s mouth, a large man repeatedly pushing the heels of his large hands down on Anthony’s chest. She remembers thinking,
Stop! You’re hurting him!

Then two more people. Anthony on a board. Anthony down the stairs. Anthony on a stretcher. Another man, bigger than David, straddled over Anthony, sitting on his knees, pumping Anthony’s chest over and over with his hands. Violent. Unrelenting. A bag squeezed over Anthony’s mouth. All while they were moving. Two men carrying Anthony and the big man on the stretcher out the front door to the ambulance in the driveway.

The images are surreal and all too vivid. Even as she’s remembering each moment now, reliving that morning and crying as she walks, it still feels unbelievable, as if it couldn’t have happened. She walks faster.

She sat in the front of the ambulance, facing backward, trying to see Anthony, to see what they were doing to him, trying to will him to breathe, to open his eyes.

Anthony, look at me.

She doesn’t remember calling David, but she must’ve. Or someone did. He was there, standing next to her in the ER hallway when a short, balding, bird-nosed man, replaced in her mind’s eye with the image of her grandfather who was similarly small and bald, approached them.

I’m sorry
is all she remembers before the sound of her own voice screaming. The sound of her own voice screaming is the last thing she remembers with any clarity for the rest of January tenth.

She’s on her third loop through her neighborhood, circling the same gray, empty houses and gray, barren fields, with no intention of altering her route or going home. She pauses only once each time around, in front of Beth Ellis’s house.

The black truck and blue minivan are both in the driveway, and the lights are on. Beth’s home. Olivia stands in the street in front of the house, desperate to ring the doorbell. She hasn’t seen or heard from Beth since that morning in her living room. But each time she passes by, she talks herself out of it. She’s in no condition to talk sensibly to anyone.

Not today.

She walks the loop three more times and stops. She’s freezing and exhausted. She checks her watch.

My God, it’s only noon.

Twelve more hours of January tenth. She can’t walk anymore. She has to go home.

On her way, she takes a quick detour over to her mailbox. She pulls out a couple of bills, a catalog, and a manila envelope with only her first name on it and no postage. She shoves the other mail back into the box, and with a scared and hopeful heart she opens the envelope.

In her hands, she holds a thin stack of printer paper, stapled together at the top left corner. The top piece of paper is blank, but a pink Post-it note is stuck to the middle of the page.

Olivia—

For you and for me.

Thank you,

Beth

She pulls the sticky note off the page, revealing a single word.

Epilogue
.

CHAPTER 39

T
oday is a Sunday-brunch book club at Jill’s house. It was Beth’s turn, but Jill insisted on hosting. Beth is early, the first to arrive. Jill walks her into the dining room.

“What do you think?” asks Jill, beaming, anticipating Beth’s reaction.

Beth surveys the room. Blue dinner plates on blue-and-white gingham place mats. A white bookmark lying on the center of each plate. A single, large, smooth, white rock placed on top of each folded blue linen napkin. A large glass-vase centerpiece packed with purple tulips sitting in the middle of a round metal tray covered with small, white stones. Skinny champagne flutes. A glass pitcher of orange juice and a pot of coffee. The food on the side table—a bowl of mixed berries, bagels and cream cheese, some kind of egg casserole, bacon, and French Toast sticks.

“It’s spectacular,” says Beth. “You’re amazing. Thank you for doing this.”

Jill waves off the compliment and excuses herself to tend to something still cooking in the kitchen. Beth chooses a seat and picks up the homemade bookmark on her plate.

Reading Group Guide
followed by ten questions created by Jill, printed in an elegant calligraphy font. Beth smiles.

They were here in Jill’s dining room for book club this time last year. This time last year, they talked about Jimmy’s affair and her separation instead of the book. She remembers that night as if it were yesterday and a million years ago. She remembers feeling terrified, humiliated, sick with worry, and drunk on vodka. She thought that night was the beginning of the end of everything.

What a difference a year makes.

The front door opens.

“Hello?” someone calls.

“Come in!” hollers Jill from the kitchen.

A few seconds later, Courtney and Georgia come into the dining room. They pause for the slightest moment, taking in the spread and Beth. They look ready to burst, like children absorbing the sight of presents beneath the tree on Christmas morning.

“Beth!” says Georgia. “I just finished it last night! This morning actually, you kept me up till two a.m. It was
so
good!”

“I finished it weeks ago. Read it in three sittings. I’ve been
dying
to talk about it,” says Courtney.

“Really?” asks Beth, grinning, her face flushed.

Jill made them all promise not to speak a word about the book until this morning, to save any discussion for book club, when they could all talk about it together. Even though Beth found this request to be more than a little controlling, even for Jill, Beth agreed. They all did. But she found sticking to her promise almost unbearable, as if she were stewing neck deep in a puddle of her own anxiety, every day for the past month battling the almost irresistible urge to ask each of her friends,
Have you read it yet? What did you think?
Every time she talked to Petra, she wanted to pepper her with at least a dozen questions, especially about the ending. But she held her tongue. It’s been an agonizingly long thirty days.

Petra walks in next, carrying a thick stack of white paper under her arm. Instead of paperbacks or library books or e-readers, they’ve all come to book club today with 186 pages of printer paper. Beth’s manuscript.

Petra plunks her stack of pages down on the table and smiles.

“It’s
beautiful
.”

“Who knew you had this in you? How did you come up with this? Do you know a boy with autism?” asks Georgia.

“No,” says Beth. “Not really.”

“I just heard a question,” says Jill, coming in from the kitchen with a bottle of champagne in each hand. “No questions until we’re all here.”

“Well, it’s inspired, it really is. To get inside his head the way you did. I really understood him. I loved him,” says Georgia.

Beth looks around the room. Jill, Petra, Courtney, and Georgia. It’s usually just the five of them, but today, there’s an extra place setting and one seat still empty.

As if on cue, the doorbell rings. Jill smiles at Beth and heads toward the front door.

“You look great,” says Georgia.

“Thanks.”

A book club held in her honor, discussing the book she wrote, her first novel, called for a new outfit. She made a special shopping trip to the Hyannis mall. Sophie came with her. Beth’s wearing a red-and-orange, floral wrap dress, a new pair of cream-colored, open-toed wedges, a pair of dangly earrings that Sophie picked out, and even a little makeup.

“And I love your necklace,” says Courtney. “Is it new?”

Beth places her hand just above her heart and rubs the shimmering bluish-white moonstone between her thumb and forefinger.

“It is,” says Beth, smiling.

Jill returns to the dining room followed by Olivia. She’s holding 186 pages in her hands. Beth gets up and walks over to her—her photographer, her neighbor, her editor, her friend—and hugs her.

“Thanks for coming.”

With a hand on Olivia’s shoulder, Jill guides her to the chair next to Beth’s and introduces her to everyone.

“Ready? Let’s raise our glasses,” Jill says, waiting for everyone to lift her flute. “To Beth and her beautiful book!”

“Cheers!”

They all clink glasses and drink champagne.

“That’s my only big problem with your book,” says Courtney.

Beth swallows and waits, her stomach clenched.

“It doesn’t have a title.”

“I know,” says Beth, relieved. “I can’t decide.”

“She was awful at naming her kids, too, remember?” says Jill.

She’s right. Poor Gracie was still Baby Girl Ellis when they left the hospital. She was almost a week old before she had a name.

“How did you pick the name Anthony?” asks Georgia.

Beth glances over at Petra and then Olivia and smiles, like she’s sharing a secret.

“I don’t know. I just liked the name.”

She doesn’t know why she never considered any other names for her main character. And she doesn’t know anyone named Anthony.

“I’m still crying over that ending,” says Georgia.

“I cried, too,” says Jill. “It gave me goose bumps.”

Beth looks over at Petra with raised eyebrows, waiting, holding her breath.

“It’s the perfect ending,” says Petra.

Beth exhales, and she swears she can feel her heart smile.

“Thank you so much. I love the ending, too,” she says, locking eyes with Olivia. “It’s my favorite part of the whole book.”

When Beth began writing this story, she remembers thinking how alien this character was to her, this boy with autism who didn’t speak, who didn’t like to be touched, who didn’t make eye contact, who loved Barney and the number three and lining up rocks. But as she kept writing, as his autism became more familiar to her, she began to see more and more the ways in which they are similar—she chews her fingernails as a form of self-soothing, she feels calm when her house is clean and all the picture frames are level and centered, she can’t stand the thought of someone else sitting in her seat at the library, she feels agitated when there’s too much noise around her, and sometimes, she just needs to be alone.

But their real similarities have nothing to do with autism. As she continued to write, she began to realize that this story was more about Anthony the boy than Anthony the boy with autism. Autism became almost irrelevant, and eventually she was simply writing about Anthony, a boy worthy of happiness and safety, of feeling wanted and loved. Just like her. The more she wrote about Anthony, the more she realized that she was actually writing about herself.

She loves the whole book, but the last chapter, the one she almost didn’t write, is without question her favorite. And the most essential. It was the lesson her heart needed, the advice her true self wanted to hear.

Now, her book is done. She rubs the smooth, cool moonstone on her necklace between her forefinger and thumb and presses it against her heart.

Thank you, Anthony.

“I think we should talk about the ending after we talk about
the beginning,” says Jill. “I’ve made a discussion guide for us on the bookmarks. Food is there. There’s plenty more champagne, and coffee and orange juice, but please don’t use the Moët for mimosas. Use the Korbel. Okay, let’s eat and discuss the book!”

CHAPTER 40