Love Anthony (17 page)

“Please.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“You’ve had
months
to talk to me. You only want to talk now because your girlfriend kicked you out.”

“She’s not my girlfriend, and she didn’t kick me out. I left. I ended it.”

“You have to leave,” Beth says as forcefully as she can without raising her voice. She doesn’t want to wake up the girls.

“Will you open the card before I go?”

“No.” She turns to walk out of the kitchen. If he won’t leave, she will. It’s the middle of the night. She’s going back to bed.

“Beth.” He grabs her free hand, stopping her. “Look at me.”

She does.

“I miss you.”

“Good.”

“I really do.”

“You only miss me now because you’re alone.”

“I’ve missed you the whole time.”

“You have to go.”

Still holding her hand, he pulls her into him and kisses her.

He tastes like sweat and beer and cigars. She should be repulsed and offended. She should kick him out on his sorry, drunk ass. She should whack him over the head with her racket-sword. But for some illogical reason, she drops her weapon and melts into his kiss.

Now he’s pulling her nightshirt off, and she’s letting him. He’s still kissing her, scratching her face with his beard, and
she’s kissing him back, and somewhere in her head, an outraged part of her is screaming,
WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!
But another part of her is quite calmly replying,
Shhh. We’ll talk about it later. Now be quiet and unzip his pants.

The next thing she knows, they’re on the kitchen floor. She’s naked, and his pants are down below his knees, his shoes and shirt still on. In the fifteen years that they’ve known each other, they’ve never done it on the kitchen floor. In fact, Beth’s never been naked anywhere in the house but in her bedroom and bathroom.

The whole shebang is urgent and hungry and straight to the point and, despite the pain of the hardwood floor against the bones of her spine and its being over in about a minute, surprisingly good. Completely foolish and probably regrettable, but surprisingly, undeniably good.

Her ears prickle. Did she just hear one of the girls upstairs? Oh my God, she and Jimmy made too much noise, and now one of the girls is probably on her way downstairs to see what’s going on. Beth pushes Jimmy off her and scrambles back into her underwear and nightshirt.

“Quick, I think the girls heard us,” she whispers. “Pull your pants up.”

He listens and doesn’t move. “I don’t hear anything.”

He’s right. Everything’s quiet.

“You have to go.”

“Okay, but can we talk?” His pants are still around his knees.

“Not now. Another time. When it’s daytime, and you’re not drunk, and you have your pants on.”

He smiles at her, that crazy smile that still undoes her. “Okay.”

“Now go.”

“Okay, okay. Where’s my hat?”

“There.” She points to the counter where she threw it.

He fixes it onto his head, forward and straight this time. “I missed you.”

“Go.”

“Okay.” He walks to the front door. “I’ll see you later, right?”

She nods, and he leaves. She hopes he’s sober enough to drive wherever he’s staying. She wonders where he’s staying. She wonders what he wants to talk about. She wonders what on earth just happened here.

The part of her that will have to face Petra and the rest of her friends, even Georgia, feels ashamed and stupid about what just happened. The part of her that has felt constantly threatened, like it had been thrown unasked into an unfair competition with that tramp Angela, feels victorious about what just happened. But the rest of her doesn’t know what the hell to make yet of what just happened.

She walks over to the kitchen table, picks up the card, and opens it.

Beth, I’m sorry. I love you. Please take me back.

Yours, Jimmy

CHAPTER 15

I
t’s ten thirty in the morning, and Beth is in the library. She’s writing. What she’s writing began as a short story, inspired by a dream, but it’s fast growing into something else, something more substantial, either a collection of related stories or a novella or maybe even a novel. She doesn’t know yet.

She’s writing about a boy with autism, but his story is different from those of
The Siege
or
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
or any of the other books that she’s now read about autism. The story she’s writing is about a boy with autism who doesn’t speak, and yet she’s telling it from his point of view, giving a voice to this voiceless child.

This morning, she is writing in her notebook instead of on Sophie’s laptop. She can write significantly faster than she can type, but even with a pen, she’s struggling to move her hand as fast as the words appear in her imagination, gripping her pen so hard her fingers cramp. She pauses to shake out her hand and look over what she’s written about how her character believes his mind works.

I’m always hearing about how my brain doesn’t work right. They say my brain is broken. My mother cries about my broken brain, and she and my father fight about my broken brain, and people come to my house every day to try to fix my broken brain. But it doesn’t feel broken to me. I think they’re wrong about my brain.

It doesn’t feel like my knee when I fall outside in the driveway and break the skin, and the broken skin bleeds and hurts and sometimes turns pink and white or blue and purple. When I fall and break my skin, it hurts and I cry, and my mother sticks a Barney Band-Aid on my broken skin. Sometimes the Barney Band-Aid loses its sticky in the tub and comes off, and the skin is still pink and broken, and I’ll get another Barney Band-Aid. But after a few tubs, the Barney Band-Aid will come off, and the broken skin will be fixed.

My brain doesn’t hurt, and my brain doesn’t bleed. My brain doesn’t need a Barney Band-Aid.

And it’s not broken like the white coffee mug I knocked off the table yesterday that split apart into three pieces when it hit the floor and that my father said he could glue back together but my mother said to
forget it, it’s ruined,
and she threw the three pieces that used to be one white coffee mug into the trash. Broken things are ruined and go into the trash.

My brain didn’t fall on the floor, it didn’t split into three pieces, and it doesn’t belong in the trash.

And it’s not broken like the ant I stepped on and cracked and flattened so it couldn’t move anymore, making it dead. Dead things are broken forever. That ant is broken, but my brain isn’t. My brain can still think about the ant and remember the sound of its body cracking under my shoe, so that is my brain still working.

My brain isn’t dead like the ant.

I wish I could tell them that my brain isn’t broken so they could stop crying and fighting and people could stop coming to my house to fix me. They make me tired.

My brain is made up of different rooms. Each room is for doing a different thing. For example, I have an Eyes Room for seeing things and an Ears Room for hearing things. I have a Hands Room, a Memory Room (it’s like my father’s office, full of drawers and folders and boxes with papers), a New Things Room, a Numbers Room (my favorite), and a Horror Room (I wish this room would be broken, but it works just fine).

The rooms don’t touch each other. There are long, looping hallways in between each room. If I’m thinking about something that happened yesterday (like when I knocked over the white coffee mug), I’m in my Memory Room. But if I want to watch a Barney video on the TV, I have to leave the Memory Room and go into Eyes and sometimes Ears.

Sometimes when I’m in the hallways traveling to a different room, I get lost and confused and caught In Between and feel like I’m nowhere. This is when my brain feels like maybe it’s a little bit broken, but I know I just have to find my way into one of the rooms and shut the door.

But if too much is happening at once, I can get into trouble. If I’m counting the square tiles on the kitchen floor (180), I’m in my Numbers Room, but if my mother starts talking to me, I have to go into my Ears Room to hear her. But I want to stay in Numbers because I’m counting, and I like to count, but my mother keeps talking, and her sound is getting louder, and I feel pressure to leave Numbers and go inside my Ears Room. So I go into the hallway, but then she grabs my hand, and this surprises me and forces me into Hands, which isn’t where I wanted to go,
and she’s talking to me but I can’t hear what she’s saying because I’m in my Hands Room and not in Ears.

If she lets go of my hand, I can go into Ears. She’s saying,
Look at me
. But if I look at her, I have to leave Ears and go into Eyes, and then I won’t be able to hear what she’s saying. So I don’t know what to do, and I’m wandering the halls, and I can’t make a decision on where to go, and I’m In Between, and that’s when I get into trouble.

If I hang around in the hallways too long and don’t get safe inside a room, I can get sucked into the Horror Room, and it’s not easy to get out of there. Sometimes I’m locked inside that scary room for a long time, and the only way out is to scream as loud as I can because sometimes my really loud scream can pop open the door and push me straight into Ears.

The sound of my own voice screaming is the only thing that can get rid of everything else.

My voice makes screams and sounds but not words. But this isn’t a broken room inside my brain. I talk to myself with words inside my brain just fine. I think I might have broken lips or a broken tongue or a broken throat. I wish I could tell my mother and father that my voice is broken but my brain is working, but I can’t tell them because my voice is broken. I wish they’d figure it out on their own.

CHAPTER 16

January 25, 2004

Yesterday was not a good day. I had a huge, ugly meltdown. That’s happening more and more. My therapist thinks I should go on an antidepressant. I think this is some kind of perverse joke. I’ve been searching and begging and praying for a medication that will fix everything, and this is the answer to my fucking prayers? Anthony has autism, so give ME an antidepressant—problem solved!

How about a medication for HIM?! How about that? And one that actually works, please. How about a prescription for him that will make him talk and stack blocks and stop flipping the light switches and moan-shrieking and grinding his teeth? And how about one that doesn’t turn him into either a doped-up zombie or a raging psychotic on crack? How about that? How about one that doesn’t make him puke all over his sheets and the rugs and me? How about that?

But, no, let’s medicate ME. There. Everything’s all better now.

Anthony has at least one meltdown a day, and now I’m having at least one meltdown a day, and we can’t manage his, so let’s manage mine. Let’s fix me, and then everyone can cope with Anthony’s autism.

My therapist wrote me a prescription for Celexa last month. I threw it out. I see her logic, and I hate it. I’m trying not to hate her. If I’m depressed, so be it. Feels like a pretty normal reaction to my life right now. If she had my life, she’d be depressed, too. Anyone would. She can keep her nice and tidy solution to all my problems. I’ll stick to wine, thank you.

So yesterday’s meltdown. I went to the grocery store alone, and David stayed home with Anthony, and I was in a good mood. I love going to the grocery store alone. Then I got home, and first thing I saw when I opened the front door was Anthony standing in the middle of the living room. He shot me a sideways glance and then started jumping up and down, elbows tucked at his ribs, flapping his hands, screeching. This is Anthony excited to see me. And the first thing I thought was Hi, Anthony. I’m happy to see you, too.