Because I Said So (18 page)

yes, my crime—all converged in my pounding head. Where were my children? Who was with them? Were they safe? Would I ever see them again?

How could I have done it? How could I have left them like
that? In the care of a person I had never even laid eyes on?

“You know,” I heard myself say, “I think we’re really just going to order a main course. We have to get back to our hotel.”

My husband looked at me, incredulous.

The waitress seemed puzzled. Perhaps it was only her very good training that prevented her from saying what she was actually thinking. “I’m not sure you understand,” she told me. “This
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is a prix fixe menu. Here,” she said helpfully. “If you’re short of time, I recommend the five-course dinner, rather than the nine-course dinner.”

Five courses? I thought, my heart thrumming wildly.
Nine
courses?
I calculated frantically. We wouldn’t be out of there till 11:30 at the earliest, then another forty-five minutes to get home—

if, that is, we didn’t get lost again. And we had left the kids . . .

when? 7:45? And I had no idea whom they were with.

“Okay,” I said numbly. I started naming dishes. I have no idea how I chose them. I had absolutely no appetite.

After my husband had placed his order, I got up from the table.

“I’m just going to phone the inn,” I said.

“Why?” my husband asked.

“Well, you know,” I said carefully, “I haven’t actually talked to that babysitter.”

I took my phone downstairs and stepped outside. My call, incredibly, went through. It rang at the front desk of Madrona Manor. After six rings, an answering machine picked up. I checked my watch. It was almost ten o’clock. Of course the woman at the desk would have retired for the night. Our little cottage had no direct line. Whoever was in there with my children, I couldn’t reach them. I went back inside.

Our first course arrived. I stared at it. I couldn’t remember what it was supposed to be. It was very green. It sat on an elegant white plate like a little green sculpture. It tasted like the glue on the flap of an envelope.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I told my husband. He nodded, glumly. I went to the bathroom, locked the door behind me, and took out my phone to call the inn again. It rang and rang, then the same friendly recorded voice invited me to leave a message. I didn’t want to leave a message. I wanted to talk to whoever was with my kids. I wanted to say:
Who are you
? and
Have
you ever abducted, raped, or murdered a child?
and
How do I
know I can trust you?

But what right had I to ask? What kind of mother would just
Why I Can Never Go Back to the French Laundry 113

run off and leave her children like that, with a stranger whose name she didn’t even know? I wanted to weep, not return to my five-course dinner.

I went back to the table.

“Are you all right?” my husband asked.

“Sure!” I told him.

That was virtually our only dinner conversation.

The next course arrived. It was brown. I took a bite. It, too, tasted like the glue on the flap of an envelope.

The waitress came over. “Are you not enjoying the food?” she asked worriedly.

“I have a babysitter problem,” I told her. “It’s nothing.”

She asked if she could get me something else. The check, I wanted to say, but I just shook my head.

“I’ll be right back,” I told my husband.

“Don’t call the inn again,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Oh, no, no,” I said gaily. “Just have to pee.”

I went to the bathroom, sat on the toilet, and phoned the inn.

No one answered. My stomach was in knots. I mashed the phone to my ear with a clammy hand, hating the innkeeper, hating Miss Medea of Medea Nanny Services, mostly hating myself. I would have given anything at all to fly up out of the beautifully appointed toilet on the second floor of the French Laundry and over the nighttime hills dividing the Napa and Sonoma Valleys and down into the little sitting room of our cottage at Madrona Manor.

Failing that, I wanted to rend my garments and howl.

I returned to the table, trying to smile.

“I told you not to phone,” my husband said.

The waitress materialized at our table. “I wanted to let you know,” she said sweetly, “that our chef is aware of your situation.”

This statement had the effect of a bucket of cold water thrown on the already sober evening.
Thomas Keller, the greatest
chef in America, was aware of our situation?

She brought the third course. I didn’t even attempt my customary bite. I knew it would taste like the glue on the flap of an
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envelope. Everything would taste like the glue on the flap of an envelope until I could see my children again and know they were safe. We sat there in total silence as the gourmands all around us ate and drank and murmured appreciatively about what they were eating and drinking. Every table was happy, celebratory, except for ours. A rain cloud hung over ours. A rain cloud of acid rain. My husband, as if sensing the game was over, stopped trying to eat his dinner, too. My hands were shaking. I thought:
So this
is what a panic attack feels like.
I had often taken the term in vain.
I’m having a panic attack!
I would joke. But about what? A missed deadline? A missed train? Now I knew what I had been joking about, and it was nothing to joke about. Every ounce of my remaining strength was required to keep myself from bursting into tears.

Suddenly, the maître d’ was standing beside us. “Do you need to leave?” he asked us quietly.

“Yes!” I said. I nearly hugged him. I leapt to my feet. My husband followed me downstairs. I paid the bill, only vaguely noticing that they had charged us a fraction of what our complete meal would have cost. Then we were outside.

We drove back in bleak silence, north and west through the valley of vineyards to Healdsburg, and finally up the rustic drive to the inn. Door to door, the journey took us precisely forty-five minutes. When we pulled up at our cottage, the light was on in the sitting room. I flung open the door. A grandmotherly woman was sitting on the couch. She wore a gold crucifix and was reading a Danielle Steel novel.

“My,” she said, surprised to see us. “You’re home early!” The children were both asleep in the bedroom.

We can never leave them again, I told my husband after the babysitter had gone. I was sitting in an armchair, exhausted and incidentally famished.
Never, never, never.
I might have dodged a bullet this time, but that was utterly undeserved. What had I done, after all? I had consigned my children to the unknown. I had not shown care. I had failed to take that necessary moment when you look into the eyes of the person who proposes to be
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responsible for them and ask yourself:
Is this an axe murderer?

And for what? A dinner reservation?

I had no trouble gleaning the pertinent lesson, and my guilt drove it mightily home: no appointment, no reservation, no curtain is important enough for me to leave my children before I feel, if not
safe
, then safe
enough
. Though I have indeed left my children in the care of other babysitters many, many times since that horrible night, I have never repeated the mistake I made when I flew out the door of Madrona Manor, bound, however indirectly, for Yountville.

You may come to my door, and I will greet you warmly. I will shake your hand and introduce you to the kids, and show you around and give you my contact numbers. I will tell you what time they go to bed and what they should eat for dinner. I will ask you about yourself, your family, your Social Studies paper due on Thursday. But the truth is, I don’t care much what time they go to bed or what they eat for dinner, and I don’t care at all about your Social Studies paper. What I care about is looking at you and listening for anything that gives me pause, sizing you up in the starkest possible terms:
Are you sane? Are you evil? Are the children afraid of you? Am I afraid of you?
This will take only a moment. This won’t hurt a bit. Just look me in the eye and then—

and only then—I’ll know if it’s all right for me to go.

There’s No Being Sad Here

D e n i s e M i n o r

Max places the box on my head,
and his laughter is muffled by the cardboard as it slides down to my shoulders. All is darkness except for the narrow rectangle of light coming through the hole on the bottom. I turn the box slightly so that I can look out of the opening at him.

“I see you,” I say.

Max moves closer to peer in, and our faces are only inches apart. I suddenly feel like my insides are liquid—my boy is looking straight into my eyes for the first time since he was a baby. But he can’t see me through the dark hole. I am certain. If he could, he would turn away because the eye contact would be unbearable for him.

These warm, brown eyes, I am convinced at the moment, must be the most beautiful eyes that have ever graced a child’s face. They turn down softly at the ends, like the eyes of those huge-headed children in paintings that were popular in the 1970s.

I hear my breath echoing lightly off the insides of the box. My heart is pounding. I want this to last for a long time. I want to sit here through the dinner hour, through bath time, and well into the night. I want to make up for all the moments of looking-ineyes that we should have had during his seven years on this earth, but that we never had because Max is autistic.

Max pulls the box off of my head and puts it on his own. “I see you,” he says.

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I should keep playing this game with him, should respond with words that make him laugh. But all I can do is sit on my living room floor with my chest rising up and down to accompany my quick breathing. This—this full minute of looking into Max’s eyes—is the best moment I have ever stolen from autism.

Stand up. Have someone you know stand facing you with her
toes almost touching yours. Now look into her eyes. That is what
it feels like for my son to make what the rest of the world considers normal eye contact.

Autism is my enemy,
and I am a cunning warrior. By day, I am a respectable general with ribbons on my chest and a cell phone on my belt. I use my sword to draw battle plans in the dirt for my deal-ings with the school district’s special education administrators. I wage the good fight of a mother who attends meetings, reads the latest reports on autism treatments, and drives to three different towns for Max’s speech therapy, social skills therapy, and Relationship Development Intervention. Through my bullhorn, I marshal and cajole the efforts of friends, therapists, and teachers. Also by day, I teach Spanish at the University of California at Davis, and am completing a Ph.D. in Spanish linguistics.

But by night, I am a guerilla fighter. I am a thief in fatigues with a face painted green. It is my secret battle whose only benefi-ciary is me. I silently steal from autism what I believe is rightfully mine—the moments, the feelings, the experiences that would have been part of my life if this neurological disorder had not taken hold of my son’s brain. The beauty of my strategy is that I relinquish nothing of the satisfaction that comes from raising both of my children exactly as they are.

It began more than four years ago, not long after experts told me that my youngest son was not, as I had believed, a quirky and introverted daydreamer, but rather a child with “high functioning” autism. The depression that engulfed me was swift and deep.

But through the pain, I researched and wrote letters, read and vis-118

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ited experts. At night sometimes I would lie down on the bed next to Max as he was sleeping. I would kiss him lightly, pull him close, and feel comforted, for some reason, by telling myself,
This
moment is the same. This moment of kissing my sleeping son is
exactly the way it would have been if he had never gotten autism.

My stealth expanded from there. After a year in an intensive behavioral program that included rehearsing proper behavior in various scenarios, Max became an expert at, among other things, going to the doctor. When his regular Kaiser doctor was not available for illness visits, we would take an appointment with the first available practitioner.

“Take off your shirt. Now, this is going to feel a little cold,”

the doctor would say more often than not as he or she placed the stethoscope on Max’s chest.

“Good job. Breathe deeply. Again. Okay. Now open your mouth and say, ‘ahhhh.’”

Max’s compliance was perfect. I would watch the doctor carefully for any signs of recognition that something was different about my boy.

“Now I’m going to look in your ears.” Max would turn his head to allow the otoscope to be stuck inside. Sometimes he would mumble something like “. . . potatoes in there,” and the doctor would laugh.

Then the doctor would turn to me and explain what appeared to be the problem and send us off. Four or five times the doctor didn’t expect a word from Max and didn’t appear to notice that something was unique about this child.

In the waiting room, I would always get down on one knee and place my cheek against Max’s cheek. He seemed to understand best when I said things softly right next to his ear.

“Good job going to the doctor, little buddy,” I’d say.

Max, staring blankly ahead, would say, “Good job, Max.”

Another moment stolen from autism.

Language sounds and looks
to me like a dance. Or, I should say, numerous dances. I blame my years of studying linguistics for
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