The Meridians (16 page)

Kevin nodded, but said, "No hurting, no pain, no owies, no discomfort." It was a typically repetitive speech pattern, but within it Lynette felt sure that there was something more hiding. Some meaning she would have to apprehend.

"So your hands don't hurt, then why are you sucking on them?"

Kevin said nothing. Rather, he licked his fingers like a lollipop.

"Are they tasty? Are you hungry?"

Still no answer, just continued sucking.

Lynette had a burst of inspiration. "Are your
fingers
thirsty?" Kevin still said nothing, but he paused in his strange actions, a sure signal that she was getting warmer. "Do they need something?" Another pause. Lynette looked at her computer and then, still moving intuitively, she saved her work, closed the application she had been using, and then opened a Microsoft Word document, a blank page, and moved away from the computer, leaving the chair where young Kevin could easily perch on it.

Sure enough, within only a few seconds, her son knelt on the chair, put his little fingers on the keyboard, and began to type. It was gibberish, of course, nonsense letters and numbers strung together without any kind of rational thought, but then she noticed that several of the numbers looked familiar.

She pointed over Kevin's shoulder. "Is that two plus two, Kevin?"

"Four," answered her son without ceasing his play typing.

Lynette was agog. Kevin was only five years old the first time he started typing, and she had never so much as hinted to him that such a thing as addition, subtraction, or mathematics in general existed.

She gently moved his hands away from the keyboard, waiting for Kevin to explode at the intrusion in what he was doing, but he allowed her to move him away and watched as she typed a string of characters into the computer:

3 + 2 4 + 6 5 + 8

7 - 4 10 - 8 14 - 1

2 x 2 4 x 7 8 x 12

Kevin started speaking before she was even done typing: "Five, ten, thirteen, three, two, thirteen." Then he was silent.

Lynette again felt her jaw drop open. The answers were the answers to the first two rows of problems. Apparently multiplication was beyond him, but somehow her son had picked up on - and absorbed - basic addition and subtraction.

Hurriedly, she entered another ten or so addition problems, with an equal number of subtraction questions. This time, however, rather than speaking the answers, Kevin typed them, his little hand guiding the mouse to insert the answers, at first slowly, then with greater confidence as he continued working. When he was done, she had a page of basic equations. And all of them had been answered correctly.

That had been the start of a wonderful thing for her. She discovered that, with the computer, Kevin was almost another person. Just as she imagined that Stephen Hawking used his chair and voice simulator to interact with others where his physical limitations did not otherwise allow, so the notebook computer she later purchased for her son became a special way for him to communicate with the outside world. He still spoke, but when he was stressed or upset in any way, he preferred to communicate via the computer. It was as though in the steady stream of ones and zeros floating through the quantum levels of the machine Kevin had finally found a place where he felt completely safe and so could act correspondingly at ease, even extroverted at times.

And so it was that every day Kevin spent at least a few hours typing on the computer. Most of the time he typed strange strings of synonyms, starting with one word that Lynette would provide and from thence proceeding through a daisy-chain of vocabulary that would have astounded any English professor.

"Drop" she would write. And within seconds Kevin would have followed the single word up with "spot, tear, bead, crumb, fall, cut, descent, percolate, splash, trickle, sag, slide, fall-off, lowering, rain." Then rain would apparently become the genesis of a new list of words: "downpour, cloudburst, mist, pour, barrage, profusion, torrent, shower, stream, mist..." and on and on and on. Occasionally he got stuck on a word, and would be unable to think of a new one. This frustrated him enormously - could disrupt his schedule for days on end as he tried to come up with a proper synonym to some tricky word. Luckily, early on Lynette had shown him - over the course of several hours, to be sure - the thesaurus.com website, and after that whenever Kevin got confused or stuck on a difficult word he could simply enter a word and get a long list of synonyms, each of which he apparently memorized at a glance.

Lynette had heard of this kind of thing happening with other autistic children: though unable to complete certain basic tasks such as having a normal conversation or conducting their own personal hygiene with regularity, some discovered themselves capable of amazing feats of intellect, such as being able to do long division in their heads, or being able to tell a person what day of the week a given date fell on in any time during the last thousand years. Still, when she discovered Kevin had such a prodigious skill at finding synonyms to words that most eight year olds would not have understood if you stood and explained them to the kids, and when she realized that his math skills were at least the equal of his English abilities, she was constantly amazed. It was as though Kevin was a blind man, and just as a blind man's other senses developed keenly to offset the loss of sight, so Kevin's skills in certain endeavors had sharpened to a razor's edge to counteract the dulling of his abilities in certain other arenas.

"Arena," he typed, and followed it up with "gridiron, battlefield, coliseum, field, stadium...."

"Kevin," she whispered, and touched his arm gently in the gesture that signaled she was going to interrupt his work. Kevin had become more and more capable of handling such interruptions over time, but he did require advance notice.

Without any apparent further thought, Kevin immediately withdrew his hands from the keyboard and sat motionless, clearly waiting for whatever his mother had in mind.

"Happy birthday to you," she sang.

Kevin, of course, did not sing along, but she thought she saw him glance quickly at the cake she held, and then appeared to smile ever so slightly. It wasn't much - just a tiny upturn of one corner of his mouth, the slightest unbunching of eyebrows that usually huddled together like opposing teams over his eyes - but it was a smile, and Lynette's heart soared. She lived for the small moments, the moments like this when she knew that her son, though different from other children, could still find what anyone in the world most hoped for: happiness.

She sang the rest of the song, then put the cake down in front of Kevin.

He typed something: "Happy birthday to me."

Lynette laughed, and held her son tightly for a second. Just the barest fraction of a moment, so quickly that a hummingbird would have missed it if it had blinked. She didn't want to make her son uncomfortable, but she also knew that if she didn't hug him - even for the smallest instant - she would explode with love for her wonderful, special, amazing, loving, beautiful boy.

"My Kevin Angel," she whispered in his ear.

"Angel," he typed. "Archangel, guardian, spirit, beauty, darling, dear...."

"Yes, my sweet," she answered. "You are all of those things."

"Guardian," he typed. "Attendant, defender, sentinel."

It took a moment for Lynette to realize what Kevin was saying. Her years with him had given her a greater ability to crack the Kevin Code, but it still took some time occasionally. She didn't hug him this time, but touched him on his shoulder, a "bug hug" as she had come to call the gesture.

"Yes, honey, you
are
my angel, my guardian. Because without you, I'd be totally lost. I'd be wandering without a hope of finding my way. You keep me safe, honey, more than anyone ever has except for your daddy."

"Robbie," Kevin typed.

Lynette felt tears begin to flow down her cheeks. "Yes, honey," she answered. "Just like Robbie."

"No," he typed.

This stopped her; puzzled her. No, he was not like Robbie? No, he did not accept that Robbie was his father? The sudden negative did not seem to make any sense in the context of their conversation.

"What do you mean, honey?" she asked.

"No," he wrote again. And suddenly Lynette smelled something: the pungent, ammoniac smell of urine. She looked down and saw that Kevin had wet himself, something he had not done in years.

"No," he typed once more. Then, "No no no nonononononononono." He began rocking back and forth as he typed, the motions rolling more and more exaggeratedly, until it seemed like he would end up unseating himself and falling to the floor.

"Nononononononono...."

Lynette's tears disappeared in an instant, the grief she had felt for her husband swallowed instantly up in concern for her son.

"Kevin, what's going on?"

"Nonononononononono...."

And then Lynette became aware of something. There was a sound, a rushing noise as of air blowing all around them, and she was transported back to the gale that she had felt on the day that Robbie died, on the day that her entire life changed.

Papers began flying all around the room as though ghostly hands were playing with them, whipping around in tiny cyclones of wood pulp and ink before finally tearing themselves to shreds in the ferocity of the storm that had found its way once more into their lives.

Lynette began looking around in as many directions at once as she could, trying to spot any danger or sources of distress before they could harm her or - more importantly - Kevin. But when it came, it came from behind.

There was a rancid smell, an odor so unpleasant that it was almost palpable; so thick that it literally carried a taste that made her mouth pucker in disgust. Then the hairs on the back of her neck stood up as the air around her electrified and became charged with static electricity.

She heard a voice, and froze. So did Kevin, stopping his rocking back and forth and becoming so still he might as well have been a graven image of her son. He was looking at something, looking right over her shoulder, and even though she could not see it, she knew what it was. For that voice was burnt into her mind and soul like a brand, a red-hot scar that forever burned her, that forever left her empty and alone because it signaled the loss of her husband.

"Hello, Kevin," said the old gray man. "Happy birthday."

***

17.

***

It was words. Just words. No blade materialized, no gun was wielded. Yet the mere sound of those words was enough to galvanize Lynette to action.

The instant the gray man said those words, the second that he wished Kevin a happy birthday, Lynette was already in motion. She leapt forward and swept her son off his chair, moving faster than she would have thought possible.

The movement seemed prescient, as the instant after she did so she felt a swish in the air and saw that the gray man had slammed something into the back of Kevin's chair, just about the height where the boy's neck would have been had he remained there.

It was a razor. Long and thin, its blade gleaming wickedly in the light of the living room, it had slammed into the back of the chair, embedding itself deeply.

The gray man cursed, his withered hands clearly jarred by the impact of his blade on the chair, and yanked the razor free.

His eyes sparked within the mask of scars that she had seen during the last visitation, years before at Robbie's death. Only now the scars were angrier, brighter. His face was still misshapen and broken, but again the wounds at the base of it seemed newer, as though somehow he was still recovering from them.

Kevin said nothing, but buried his head in her arms and hid from the world. It was his only defense from what was happening.

"I've waited sixty-two years for this moment, bitch," shouted the old gray man, words that made no sense to her and that she doubted would make sense to anyone other than the man saying them. "Sixty-two years! Do you understand how long a time that is when you're nothing but a ghost?"

Lynette did
not
understand what that would be like. Nor did she care to. All that she cared about in this moment was putting as much distance as possible between her and the fiend who had come into their life as he had five years before.

But no. He had not come into her life exactly the same as he had those years ago. Even in her panic, even as she turned and ran from the man while he was fumbling with the blade he had embedded in the chair, a part of her registered something odd: the old gray man no longer seemed quite so old. When he had appeared on the day of Robbie's death he had looked to be in his seventies or perhaps even eighties, but now the man looked younger, heartier. As though he had lost in age what the rest of the world had gained in the intervening time between his appearances.

But then observations ceased as she turned and ran from the man, rushing toward her front door as fast as she could.

The old man was faster. He grinned at her as he blocked the doorway, standing between her and Kevin and the freedom that they so desperately needed. He twirled his knife in his fingers, the silvery blade seeming to dance in his grasp as he flipped it around and around in a dizzying spectacle of expertise.