House Rules (34 page)

Actually it does, he told me. There have been all kinds of studies done. People are more attracted to people with symmetrical features, for example. And symmetrical men smell better to women. Also, people who have similar genetic traits are attracted to each other. It probably has something to do with evolution.

I burst out laughing. That is
awful,
I said. That is the most unromantic thing I‘ve ever heard.

I don‘t think so …

Oh, really. Say something that will sweep me off my feet, I demanded.

Henry looked at me for a long moment, until I could feel my head growing lighter and dizzier. I think you might be perfectly symmetrical, he said.

On our second date, Henry took me to Boston. We had dinner at the Parker House, and then he hired a hansom cab to take us around the Boston Common. It was late November, and frost crouched in the

bare branches of the trees; when we settled into the back of the carriage, the driver handed us a heavy wool blanket to put over our laps. The horse was spirited, stamping its feet and snorting.

Henry was telling me riddles. The ratio of an igloo‘s circumference to its diameter?

I give up.

Eskimo
pi,
he said. How about half of a large intestine?

I don‘t know …

A semicolon.

That‘s not a math or science joke, I said.

I‘m a Renaissance Guy. Henry laughed. Eight nickels?

I shook my head.

Two paradigms, he said.

The puns weren‘t, by definition, funny. But on Henry‘s lips, they were. Lips that were curved at the ends and that always seemed a little embarrassed to smile, lips that had kissed me good night on our first date with a surprising amount of force and intensity.

I was staring at his lips when the horse dropped dead.

Technically, it wasn‘t dead. It had slipped on a patch of black ice, and its front legs had buckled. I had heard one snap.

We rolled in slow motion out of the hansom cab, Henry twisting so that he would cushion my fall. You all right? he asked, and he helped me to my feet. He held the rough blanket around me while the police came, and then animal control. Don‘t watch, Henry whispered, and he turned my face away when the officer pulled out a pistol.

I tried to focus on the words on Henry‘s T-shirt, where his coat was gaping open: DOES THIS PROTON MAKE MY MASS LOOK FAT? But the sound was like the world cracking in half, and the last thing I remember was wondering who wore a T-shirt in the winter, and if that meant his skin was always warm, and if I would ever get to lie against it.

I woke up in an unfamiliar bed. The walls were cream-colored, and there was a dresser made of dark wood with a television on it. It was very clean and … corporate.
You fainted,
I told myself. The horse, I said out loud.

Um, a voice said quietly. He‘s in that big carousel in the sky?

I rolled over to find Henry pressed against the far wall, still wearing his coat. You don‘t believe in heaven, I murmured.

No, but I figured you would. Are you … are you okay?

I nodded gingerly, testing. What‘s wrong? Don‘t women swoon around you all the time?

He grinned. It
was
a little Victorian of you.

Where are we?

I got a room at the Parker House. I thought you might need to lie down for a while. His cheeks bloomed a bright red. I, um, don‘t want you to get the wrong idea, though.

I came up on an elbow. You don‘t?

Well … n-not unless you want me to, he stammered.

Well,
that‘s
a little Gothic, I said. Henry, can I ask you something?

Okay.

What are you doing all the way over there?

I held out my hand and felt the mattress give under his weight as Henry crawled onto it. I felt his mouth come down against mine, and I realized that this relationship would not be what I‘d imagined it to be: me, playing teacher to the shy young computer science geek. I should have known from watching Henry work at the office: programmers moved slowly and deliberately, and then waited to see the reaction. And if they did not succeed the first time, they would try over and over again, until they broke through that fifth dimension and got it right.

Later, when I was wearing Henry‘s T-shirt and his arms were wrapped around me, when we had turned on the television and were watching a show on primates in the Congo with the volume muted, when he had fed me chicken nuggets from the kids‘ room service menu, I thought how clever I‘d been to see past what other people saw in Henry. The silly T-shirts, the Star Wars canteen in which he stored his coffee, the way he could barely look a woman in the eye beneath that exterior was a man who touched me as if I were made of glass, who focused with such intensity on me that sometimes I had to remind him to breathe when we were making love. I never imagined at the time that Henry wouldn‘t be able to love anything other than me not even a baby he‘d made. I never imagined that all that passion between us would pool beneath the tangled threads of Jacob‘s genetic code, waiting for just the perfect storm to dig in its roots, to burst and blossom into autism.

Henry is waiting for me when I get off my plane. I walk toward him, stopping an awkward foot away. I lean forward to embrace him just as he turns away toward the arrivals monitor, which means I close my arms around nothing but air. He should be landing in twenty minutes, Henry says.

Good, I reply. That‘s good. I look at him. I‘m really sorry about this.

Henry stares down the empty corridor past the security barrier. You going to tell me what‘s going on, Emma?

For five minutes, I tell him about Jess Ogilvy, about the murder charge. I tell him I‘m sure Theo‘s escape had something to do with all of this. When I‘m finished, I listen to the call for a passenger about to miss his plane and then muster the courage to meet Henry‘s gaze. Jacob‘s on trial for
murder
? he says, his voice shaky. And you didn‘t
mention
it?

What would you have done? I challenge. Fly back to Vermont to be our white knight? Somehow I doubt that, Henry.

And when this hits the papers out here? How am I supposed to explain to my seven- and four-year-old that their half brother is a murderer?

I reel back as if he‘s slapped me. I‘m going to pretend you didn‘t just say that, I murmur. And if you knew your son at all, if you had ever actually spent time with Jacob instead of just sending a check every month to ease your conscience, you‘d know that he‘s innocent.

A muscle tics in Henry‘s jaw. Do you remember what happened on our fifth anniversary?

That time of my life, when we were trying every intervention and therapy possible to get Jacob to connect with the world again, is a dark blur.

We were out at a movie the first time we‘d been alone in months. And suddenly this strange man walks down the aisle and crouches down and starts talking to you, and a minute later you

walk out with him. I sat there thinking,
Who the hell is this guy and where is my wife going
with him?
And I followed you into the lobby. Turned out that he was the father of our babysitter and an EMT. Livvie had called him in a panic because Theo was bleeding like crazy. He went to the house, put a butterfly bandage on Theo, and came and got us.

I stare at Henry. I don‘t remember any of this.

Theo wound up getting ten stitches in his eyebrow, Henry says. Because Jacob had gotten angry and knocked over his high chair when Livvie had her back turned.

Now it is coming back to me the panic we came home to with Jacob in total meltdown mode and Theo hysterically crying, a knot the size of his tiny fist rising over his left eye. Henry making the hospital run while I was left behind to calm Jacob. I wonder how it is possible to put something so far out of one‘s mind, to rewrite history. I can‘t believe I forgot that, I say softly.

Henry glances away from me. You were always good at seeing what you wanted to see, he answers.

And then suddenly, we both notice our son.

What the hell? Theo says.

I fold my arms. My thoughts exactly, I reply.

* * *

It is a strange thing to be in an airport and to not be celebrating a reunion or a departure. It is even stranger to sit in the backseat of Henry‘s car and listen to him making small talk with Theo as if Theo isn‘t smart enough to know that, at some point, a colossal bomb is going to drop.

When Theo went into the restroom at the airport, Henry came up with a plan. Let me talk to him, Henry said.

He won‘t listen to you.

Well, he ran away from
you,
Henry pointed out.

The freeways here are white as bone and clean. There‘s no cracking from frost heaves, like in Vermont. Shiny and happy and new. No wonder Henry likes it. Theo, I say, what were you
thinking
?

He twists in his seat. I wanted to talk to Dad.

In the rearview mirror, Henry meets my gaze.
I told you so.

Haven‘t you ever heard of a phone?

But before he can answer, Henry pulls into a driveway. His house has Spanish tiles on its roof and a plastic, child-size princess castle on the front lawn. That makes my chest tighten.

Meg, Henry‘s new wife, bursts out the front door. Oh, thank goodness, she says, clasping her hands together when she sees Theo in the front seat. She is a tiny blonde with überwhite teeth and a shiny ponytail. Henry approaches her, leaving me to wrestle my own bag out of the trunk. Standing beside each other, with their blue eyes and golden hair, they look like a poster for the quintessential Aryan family. Theo, Henry says, all fatherly, too little too late, let‘s go into the library and talk a little.

I want to hate Meg, but I can‘t. She immediately surprises me by linking her arm through mine and leading me into the house. You must have been worried sick, she says.

I know I would have been.

She offers me coffee and a slice of lemon–poppy seed cake while Theo and Henry vanish deeper into the house. I wonder if the cake was just lying around, if she is the sort of mother who makes sure there is a homemade baked good at all times on the kitchen counter, or if she‘d popped it in the oven after Henry told her I was coming. I‘m not quite sure which image upsets me more.

Her daughters (well, Henry‘s, too) dart across the living room threshold to get a peek at me. They are sprites, little towheaded fairies. One of them wears a pink sequined tutu. Girls, Meg says. Come on in here and meet Ms. Hunt.

Emma, I say automatically. I wonder what these little girls make of a stranger who has the same last name they do. I wonder if Henry has ever explained me to them.

This is Isabella, Meg says, lightly touching the taller girl on the crown of her head. And this is Grace.

Hello, they chime, and Grace pops her thumb in her mouth.

Hi, I answer, and then I don‘t know what to say.

Did Henry feel there was some balance to his second life, having two girls instead of two boys? Grace tugs on her mother‘s shirt and whispers in her ear. She wants to show you what she does in ballet, Meg says apologetically.

Oh, I love ballet, I say.

Grace puts her arms in the air and touches her fingertips together. She begins to turn in a circle, wobbling only a little. I clap for her.

Jacob used to spin. It was one of his stims, when he was little. He‘d go faster and faster until he crashed into something, usually a vase or another breakable item.

I already know it‘s not true by looking at her, but if little Grace turned out to be autistic, would Henry run away again?

As if I‘ve conjured him, Henry ducks into the room. You were right, he says to me. He won‘t talk without you there. Whatever small satisfaction this gives me vanishes as Grace sees her father. She stops spinning and hurls herself at him with the force of a tropical storm. He lifts her into his arms and then tousles Isabella‘s hair. There is an ease to Henry that I have not seen in him before, a quiet confidence that this is where he belongs. I can see it etched on his face, in the tiny lines that now fan out from his eyes, lines that were not there when I loved him.

Meg takes Grace on her hip and grasps Isabella‘s hand. Let‘s give Daddy a chance to talk to his friends, she says.

Friends. I loved him; I created children with him, and this is what we have been demoted to.

I follow Henry down a corridor to the room where Theo is waiting. Your family, I say. They‘re perfect. But what I‘m really saying is,
Why didn‘t I deserve this with you?

Oliver

Well, Mr. Bond, the judge says. Here you are again.

Like a bad penny, I reply, smiling.

Jacob and I are in court again, this time without Emma. She had called late last night and left a message saying that she and Theo would be flying home today. I hoped to have good news for her when she arrived; God knows she would need some by then.

The judge glances over the half-moons of his glasses. We‘ve got a motion before the court for accommodations during the trial of Jacob Hunt. What are you looking for, Counselor?

Sympathy for a client who is incapable of showing any himself … but I can‘t admit that. After Jacob‘s last outburst in court, I thought about asking the judge to let him watch the proceedings from a separate room, but I need him in full view of the jury in order to make my defense work. If I‘m playing the disability card, they have to be able to see Asperger‘s manifesting itself in its full glory. First, Your Honor, I say, Jacob needs sensory breaks. You‘ve seen how he can get agitated by courtroom procedure he has to be able to get up and leave the courtroom when he feels the need to do so. Second, he would like to have his mother sitting at the defense table beside him. Third, due to Jacob‘s sensitivity to stimuli, we ask that Your Honor not use his gavel during the proceedings, and that the lights be turned down in the courtroom. Fourth, the prosecution needs to ask questions in a very direct and literal manner

For God‘s sake, Helen Sharp sighs.

I glance at her but keep talking. Fifth, we request that the length of the day in court be abbreviated.