The Shortest Way Home (27 page)

Yes. Yes, he certainly did.

But Chrissy answered, and though he’d only had a fuzzy idea of maybe getting coffee or taking a walk, their plan soon grew like fast-multiplying cells into dinner and a movie and possibly a nightcap at her house afterward. The girls were staying with their father.

Sean’s visceral reaction to this last little firecracker of a revelation was a combination of
Yippee!
and
Yikes!
But he’d worry about that later.

The night seemed to buzz by, except during the movie,
The Bouquet Catcher,
a romantic comedy so cloyingly sweet that Sean thought he might need insulin injections by the time the credits rolled. He focused on consuming his extra large popcorn fast enough to qualify for the free refill before the movie was over. After this personal success, he fell into a drooling, head-bobbing doze. He woke up as the violins were cued, feeling like he’d eaten a bag of rock salt.

“I need water,” he told her.

“Great! Let’s have a drink at my house.”

As they exited the theater, her hand slid once again into his, and pleasant as the physical sensation was, alarm bells began to ring in his mind as he imagined the
WE ARE TOGETHER
sign flashing garishly over their heads.

Are we together?

Together with
Chrissy Stillman
, he tried to tell himself.
Way to go!
But somehow it didn’t feel the way he’d fantasized it would. Actually, it felt a little like handcuffs. He’d been handcuffed once in India, mistakenly identified as having run out on his bill at a teahouse. It was sorted out fairly quickly. He suspected this situation would definitely take more sorting than that.

At her house, they were soon snuggled on the enormous burgundy leather couch with the beaten metal tacks, glasses of Cabernet cradled between their fingers. He liked the smell of the leather and the wine and her perfume, the feel of her closeness, and the way her perfectly symmetrical eyes sparkled at him.

Symmetrical?

He realized that at the back of his brain was the image of Rebecca’s eyes, perfectly
un
symmetrical, as if God’s level had been a bit off plumb as he’d made her. She was out with “a friend” tonight, he reminded himself.

Well
,
so am
I.

He kissed Chrissy, and the kissing soon turned passionate, hands passing over backs and then over fronts, Chrissy’s lovely half-cantaloupe-shaped breasts rising to the occasion, her nipples erect through her shirt. They went on like this for a bit, and he definitely wanted to have sex with her. But something kept stopping him from pressing forward. It was the hand-holding. He just wasn’t sure if he was ready for that.

She didn’t ask him to stay, but he got the feeling she would have liked him to. He could always stay another time, he figured. He wasn’t burning any bridges. He was just . . .
balking
was the first word that came to mind, but that wasn’t right. He was being considerate, waiting until he’d sorted out that hand-holding/handcuff thing. It seemed like the right thing to do.

* * *

W
hen he got home that night, there was a glow coming from the den. Since Dee’s computer had been left on, he decided to check his e-mail account. There was one e-mail waiting for him from Rebecca Feingold. She had forwarded the links to the sensory integration sites she’d found. Then she’d written a couple of lines.

I’m glad you crumbled so quickly to my e-mail ultimatum. I’ll miss you when you’re gone, and it’s nice to know that now I’ll be able to find you from time to time. You never know when another interior decorating emergency might pop up out of nowhere. :)

R

He smiled at this, thinking of receiving news of her ongoing furniture crises at an Internet café in some decrepit third world city. He wouldn’t be around to do the actual moving, of course, but he could badger her until she found someone else to help. Someone with a strong back . . . maybe whoever she was with tonight . . .

Don’t be an idiot,
he told himself, and responded:

Doran Furniture Removal, always at your service, ma’am.

S

CHAPTER 32

A
fter breakfast the next morning, Aunt Vivvy went out to the backyard and slowly snipped at an overgrown bush of some kind, while George patrolled the perimeter of the property as if she were on duty at a maximum security prison. Sean had second thoughts about his aunt’s using the pruning shears, but he knew George would get his attention if things went awry.

He went into the den, powered up Deirdre’s laptop, and opened up Rebecca’s e-mail again. He clicked through to the Web sites on sensory integration, sometimes called sensory processing disorder. It was described as a neurological dysfunction in processing information from the five senses: taste, touch, smell, sound, and sight. Though doctors had been noting and theorizing about the symptoms for approximately forty years, it had only recently coalesced into a definitive condition—one which the medical community was still coming to terms with.

In the “Sensory Modulation” section, Sean found Kevin.

This group over- or underresponded to sensory input, meaning that they might experience a normal sound as too loud or not loud enough, a neutral food to be terrible-tasting or tasteless. The input was the same, but the person’s neurons weren’t making sense of it at the appropriate level. There was a checklist with symptoms that included:

“Uncomfortable being touched, especially if unexpected . . . avoids certain materials or fabrics . . . distressed by sock seams or clothing tags . . . needs heavy blankets to sleep . . . repeatedly touches objects that are soothing . . .”

Sean thought of Kevin’s stubborn refusal to wear the latex gloves at Cormac’s Confectionary, and how he now always seemed to have his hand in George’s fur.

“Excessively bothered by normal sounds like loud laughter or lawn-mowing . . .”

Lawn-mowing,
thought Sean, slumping in shame.
Jesus Christ.

“Overreacts to bad smells, such as bathrooms, but also to an overabundance of pleasant smells such as perfume or food . . .

“May seem intensely stubborn or easily upset about small things . . .”

“Tends to prefer being alone rather than risking the discomfort of sensory overload . . .”

It was Kevin to a T.

Sean had a thought and went upstairs to Kevin’s bedroom. There were no fewer than seven blankets on the kid’s bed. Sean opened the dresser drawers—there were pairs of underwear, shorts, pants, T-shirts . . . but no socks. There was not one pair of socks anywhere in the room. Evidently Kevin did not wear socks, a fact that Sean had completely overlooked. He pulled out shirts and underwear. Each and every one had had its tag carefully snipped out. In fact, there was a pair of scissors sitting on the dresser, apparently kept there for just that purpose.

Sean sat down on the heavily blanketed bed. He wondered what it was like to feel as if you were under assault by things that everyone else thought were normal. And to have no one to talk to about it.

Sadness hit Sean like a body slam. But it quickly turned to anger. Why had no one been there for Kevin? Had his teacher, Ms. Lindquist, seen this and done nothing? What about Deirdre or his aunt? There were things that would have helped—Hugh’s soothing music, for one. But there were many other suggestions for helping an overly sensitized child learn to manage the perceived mayhem around him. Why had no one helped Kevin?

Sean glanced out the bedroom window and saw Aunt Vivvy sitting on the wrought-iron gardening bench in the backyard. He went down to the kitchen, filled two glasses with water and brought them out, sat down next to her, and handed her a glass.

She took a sip. “It’s summer,” she said with a hint of disgust.

“Is that a problem?”

“Only with regard to pruning,” she responded drily, “properly conducted in the early spring or late fall.”

“At least you only did one bush.”

“Which has now been carelessly thrown into biological confusion.”

Sean wondered how she could find such compassion for plants when she evidenced so little for other living things that had actual feelings.

“It’s happening more and more, isn’t it?” he said.

“You tell me. I’m hardly aware of it.”

“What does it feel like when you are?”

She stared fiercely at the newly shorn bush. “It’s much like when you’re falling asleep and a dream begins. You know you’re lying in bed, but then you sense that you’re being pulled toward some greater reality. And you go.”

A trickle of sympathy hydrated his parched anger toward her, and he reached over and took her hand. She quickly disengaged it. “The only unpleasantness is when you return and see that everyone is staring at you and behaving as if you were a hallucinating child.”

He put his hand back in his lap. “I need to ask you about Kevin.”

She sighed. “Proceed.”

He summarized the information he’d learned about sensory processing, and what he’d noticed about Kevin’s difficulties. “How long has he been avoiding socks?”

“Since he was old enough to pull them off.”

“That young? Did Hugh know about it?”

“Know about it? How could anyone within a quarter mile miss the crying and screaming? ‘No sock! No sock!’ Practically his first words.” Aunt Vivvy rested her glass on the arm of the bench. “I told Hugh he needed to take control, but that was about as effective as telling a street sweeper to run for president.”

“How did he handle it?”

“In warm weather, the child wore no socks. In cold weather, Hugh bought every different kind of sock he could find. He must have spent a small fortune trying to find a pair that wouldn’t send the boy into paroxysms, all to no avail.”

“So he just doesn’t wear them. Ever.”

“Correct.”

Sean considered this—not the sock aversion; that was completely consistent with everything he’d just learned about the disorder. What fascinated him was Hugh’s response: a Holy Grail–like quest for the perfect sock. It was another example of Hugh’s fatherly dedication.

“And he tossed the boy constantly,” Aunt Vivvy interjected suddenly. “It was very irritating.”

“Tossed him how?”

“Into the air. Onto the couch. Over his shoulder. The man was a human trampoline. It’s a wonder the child hasn’t joined the circus.”

A trampoline . . .
thought Sean.
Hanging upside down . . .
These were on the list of suggestions for parents with oversensitized children. Somehow Hugh had figured out activities that would help Kevin and had used his own body to provide them.

“He must have gotten very strong,” said Sean.

Aunt Vivvy’s eyes cut toward him. “He was always complaining of back pain.”

* * *

S
ean left his aunt to contemplate what further gardening blunders she might commit, worried that he might start saying things he’d later regret.
Cold-hearted witch,
he thought, returning to the den.
Uncaring, miserable tyrant . . .

He’d seen the postings of parents who’d been told by relatives and professionals alike that their child was simply manipulating them, and that the correct course of action was to be firm, to punish them if need be. Tragically, Aunt Vivvy’s take on it was quite commonplace.

And yet what made Sean’s own back ache all the more, like some sort of delayed sympathy pain, was the fact that he hadn’t known. Or more specifically, hadn’t lifted a finger to find out. Hugh had been a single father whose child had an unknown, untreated condition, muddling through as best he could, tossing the kid into the air by the hour and buying socks by the dozen . . . and his own brother hadn’t picked up on it during the one brief visit while all three of them were alive. Had never written a letter to say, “How’s it going with you and the kid?”

Something Deirdre had said when he’d first gotten home came back to him.
You’ve been all about you,
she’d said.
You haven’t given a shit about anyone else your whole life.

It wasn’t true.

He had cared deeply about many people—the embattled indigenous Indians of Guatemala, the de facto slaves in the Dominican Republic, the unthinkably poor of India, the wounded and abused of Africa. He thought of conversations with people like Yasmin Chaudhry, the few who understood what it meant to live as they did, to sacrifice so much, to see things no one else wanted to see—and to try and be that drop of water in the desert.

Bullshit,
said the Deirdre in his head.
You did what you wanted to
do.

And that
was
true.

More than anything he had wanted to leave Belham. And he had wanted to believe that his screwed-up life had a purpose. He had wanted something to feel good about, instead of feeling shitty all the time. He had saved lives and healed people and brought babies safely into the world—he had made the difference he’d wanted to make.

But in doing so he’d neglected his own sister and brother, his aunt (though God knows she never wanted any help, and a case could be made that she hardly deserved any), and his nephew. And knowing that he’d missed his chance to be there for Hugh, through what were likely his toughest times, Sean felt more committed than ever to helping Kevin now. He would get things on track, and he wouldn’t leave until he knew Kevin was okay.

In the spirit of his newfound commitment to Kevin’s health and happiness, Sean turned to Deirdre’s laptop, his fingers hunting and pecking across the keyboard like a kind of therapy. He entered the Belham Middle School Web site and got himself on the parent e-mail list; he clicked over to Juniper Hill School and sent an e-mail to Ms. Lindquist. And then he made a few purchases.

CHAPTER 33

S
ean couldn’t have been happier to spend the day at the Confectionary if it had been a swimming pool and he’d been on fire. It was a relief to attend only to people’s baked-good needs, spar with the ever-sardonic Tree, and help out his old friend. Besides, the money would come in handy.