The Bookseller (31 page)

“Did we . . .” I say softly. “Did Mr. Andersson and I . . . did we have any idea?”

“Well,
el niño
was
loco
, not right in the head.
Lo siento decir
. And everybody knows. Señor Andersson knows before you. He begs you to take Michael to doctor. But you say Michael is fine, just a little shy and
lento
, cannot do things fast like
los otros niños
. You say he comes around, in time.”

“But we didn't know . . . that he was being . . . that she was . . .”

Alma shakes her head. “No. You do not know about that. I should tell you. I should tell you long before I did.” She lowers her eyes. “Like I say, Jenny came here before me. Me, I am the new girl. In those days, I am afraid to speak up. Afraid to lose my job.”

“But you did . . . eventually.”

“
Sí
. More than a year pass. Then I speak up.” Her look is grim. “And when I speak up, you fire that Jenny
como un rayo
, like . . .” She waves her arm, making a zigzag pattern like lightning in the sky. “Me, I am glad of it.
¡Adiós!
” She sets down her cup. “And then you take Michael to the doctors. See what they think.”

“What did they tell me?”

“They tell you it is your fault, señora.” Alma stands up. “They tell you he has a disease—autism—and they cannot cure it. And they say it is because he needs his
mamá
when he is small. But she is not here when he needs her.”

I can feel my face pucker into a frown. “Do you believe that, Alma? Do you believe it's my fault?”

Alma clears my empty plate. “Señora, I say too much. There
is work to do. I run the vacuum cleaner, now that you are up.
¿Bueno?
”

O
kay, I tell myself. I want to close my eyes, go to sleep, and wake up at home, but I know that I won't, not yet. Okay, this is only one person's opinion. Granted, Alma is about as credible a witness as you could find. But still. That couldn't be the whole story.

If it was, I reason as I rinse my coffee cup in the sink, why are Mitch and Missy just fine? If Michael is autistic because I am such a horrible mother—why, then, wouldn't my other two children be autistic, too?

Immediately I scorn this easy response. It doesn't work that neatly, my interior critic tells me. If it did, there would be a lot more autistic people in the world. Because there are plenty of horrible mothers.

The truth is—and I know this as I walk back to the master bedroom to dress—the truth is, there must be some element of hit-or-miss. And whatever hit Michael—
Let's be honest, Kitty, “whatever hit Michael” is your awful mothering
—somehow it missed the other two. They dodged a bullet, and they will be fine.

But will they? Alma had stopped her story with the firing of Jenny, followed by Michael's diagnosis. But I could pick up the pieces from there. I must have left Sisters' Bookshop then. I must have left Frieda, probably quite abruptly. I'd settled in here, staying home with the children and doing my penance. And hoping, praying, that it wasn't too late. That whatever damage I'd done to Michael could be undone. Hoping, as well, that it wouldn't strike the other two.

In the bedroom, I glance at the bed. It's still unmade, the
sheets jumbled as if those sleeping there were restless. Perhaps we were, Lars and I. Crossing the room, I smooth the sheets and bedspread, fluff the pillows. I sense that making the bed is likely not my job, at least not on the days when Alma is here. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to do it.

Opening the closet door, I inspect the clothes in front of me, trying to select something to wear. But the clothes won't come into focus. Instead I start seeing little snippets of my life from the past few years.

I remember some of those days. Not all days, but some of them.

M
y children were two and a half when I fired Jenny and determined to throw myself, body and soul, into the raising of my family. I was sure I could make amends. I could make Michael love me. I could make him be normal, be like the other two.

I decided that being outside in the yard, working with the earth, would be good for all of us. That spring we planted a vegetable garden: tiny lettuce and carrot seeds that we carefully placed in neat rows in the crumbly soil; leggy tomato plants that we bought from the garden store near my old duplex and transplanted into a plot along the back fence. I had to stop Mitch and Missy from having sword fights with the tomato stakes, but eventually we got the job done, and the tomato plants thrived. “Fresh food,” I told Lars with satisfaction when he came home from work. “Fresh food and fresh air. That will change everything.”

I remember how he smiled appreciatively, clearly enjoying this new version of his wife. “Farmer Katharyn,” he called me. “And her farmhands.”

The triplets and I put flowerbeds in the front yard. I let the
children pick out the seed packets, and we waited with anticipation for the flowers to pop through the ground and bring patches of brightness to our yard. Mitch and Missy loved the muddy, colorful messes, the warm earth filtering through their fingers. Michael abhorred it; he would shriek when dirt got under his fingernails.

When the fall came, and we had to spend more time inside, I figured that imaginative play would help Michael find a way outside his own head—and besides, Missy wanted to grow up to be a princess. So we played dress-up. On Saturdays, when Lars relieved me of child-care duties for a few hours, I'd rummage through the Salvation Army store, bringing home treasures in satin and lace. These I'd transform into costume after costume, with a little magic on my sewing machine—another new acquisition, and one that was further converting me, I hoped, into the domestic whiz I was sure I could be.

Missy loved the costumes; she changed outfits twenty times a day, becoming Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and a princess she made up herself, a princess named Claire after my mother and Missy's own middle name. Princess Claire wanted to marry Prince Jon—her name for Mitch—and she would force him, both of them giggling, into a tinfoil crown and a little velvet jacket. She tried the same with Michael. “A princess can marry as many princes as she wants,” Missy told us with authority. But Michael brutally ripped off his royal trappings and ran from the room, cowering in the corner of his bedroom, behind his bed.

I thought that being out in public might give Michael the opportunity to learn to interact with different types of people. So we went on outings: the zoo, the park, the library. Even though I had my station wagon, we sometimes rode the bus, because Mitch, as young as three, had already begun his love affair with transportation. But they were exhausting, those trips, because
I never knew how Michael would behave, never knew what, if anything, would set him off. It was like the woman in Sisters', the one who had come in with the autistic daughter. I know now how that woman must have felt, because my feelings when I took my child out of the house were the same. We'd be having a good day, and then suddenly, with no warning, something would happen—Michael would be hungry and I'd have packed a different snack than the one I'd promised him, or another child at the park would climb onto the swing that Michael had been heading toward, or the weather, which had promised to be sunny according to the television forecasters, would unexpectedly turn cold and cloudy. And then it would start. The screaming, the howling. The other two children would be in tears, and so would I. It was all I could do to get everyone back to Springfield Street in one piece.

By the time Lars came home in the evening, I was spent. The best I could manage by then would be to sit quietly on the couch and read stories to Mitch and Missy, who snuggled next to me.

Michael, as I recall, I was all too happy to hand off to Lars each night. I made it clear to Lars that the moment he walked in the door, Michael was his responsibility.

Despite my desire to make it up to Michael—to change him, to cure him—by the end of the day, I couldn't stand to spend another second with him.

The September before they turned four, Mitch and Missy began attending nursery school three mornings a week. Logically, that ought to have made things better. Caring for one child, albeit one child like Michael, ought to have been much easier than caring for three, right? To my surprise, I found that things were more difficult on the days that Mitch and Missy were in school. Michael and I both missed them, and the time that we spent one-on-one did not satisfy either of us. Although he did not have the words to
say so—he spoke very little, and what he did say, we usually had to work to decipher—Michael did not understand why he could not join his brother and sister at school. Barring that, he could not understand why Mitch and Missy ought not to be prevented from going. “Michael go,” he'd insist when I dropped them off each morning. He shook his head violently, clawing at my arm as I held him at the doorway, as I tried to steal a moment to kiss my other two children good-bye, rarely getting the opportunity to do so. “Michael go, too! Or no go. No, no, no go!” He'd break into a fit and pummel me with his little fists as I dragged him to the car, the other mothers staring and whispering as I made my hasty retreat.

On the short drive home, I would be silent as he whimpered and fussed beside me. I knew it was my job to help him, to comfort him. But nothing I said or did—no touch, no word, no gesture of any sort—seemed to matter to him. So I learned to keep my eyes on the road, choking back the guilty tears. There was nothing, I told myself, that I could do for my child. The damage had been done; it was too late. And it was my fault.

Eventually I started having Lars drop the other two off at the nursery school. That helped, but I still dreaded pickup time; I was never sure how Michael would act in that gathering of children and mothers and end-of-schoolday confusion. But there was no way to avoid it; Lars was at his office at that hour.

The hours between Lars leaving to take the other two to nursery school and my driving to the school for pickup felt like an eternity. I did my best to entertain Michael, trying to engage his interest as I read him stories on the couch, walking around the block at his slow, methodical pace, and taking him to the playground on nice days, where I'd swing him for hours—something he loved, and that gave me respite in a way, a chance to clear my head, the orderly, reliable pace of the swing on its chains a small comfort to both Michael and me.

Mitch and Missy were aglow with all they learned at nursery school. They adored music hour, and they would insist I turn on the car's radio on the way home, so they could sing along with the catchy tunes. They learned in full detail the name and sound of each letter in the alphabet, and they quickly became skilled at counting to twenty. These accomplishments made me smile, thinking that even at their tender age, they already displayed an extraordinary ease with and love of learning, much like my own.

Still, my joy was bittersweet. While they flourished in this introduction to school life, Michael and I both withered.

Kindergarten the next year only made things worse. I was thankful Mitch and Missy had had the nursery-school experience; they were a few months shy of age five when they started kindergarten, and thus younger than many of their peers. But having each other, and having a little bit of schooling under their belts, they did splendidly. They learned to write their own names, and they could recognize a number of words in their picture books. Their drawings transformed from scribbles to stick figures and recognizable houses and suns and stars. They remembered to hang up their jackets and carefully line up their boots in the coat closet when they got home, as they did at school. Lars and I marveled at these wonders, at how smart and accomplished Mitch and Missy were.

And then we would both be silent, thinking about Michael.

There was never a question of sending him to school. Not regular public school, at any rate. The public school was not required by law to educate him, and we did not feel it would be fair to anyone—the teacher, the other children in the class, or Michael himself—to force him into a typical classroom situation. He would be disruptive, we knew, and he would learn little; a teacher with a room full of other young children to manage
would not be able to give Michael the type of one-on-one attention he so clearly would require.

Of course we researched other options. We looked at a few special schools, private schools designed for children who could not function in a regular school. But the children at those schools were either high achievers who were completely out of Michael's league, or else children with much more severe disabilities, for whom the schools seemed little more than babysitting services, somewhere such children could be during the day, giving their mothers a break.

“I can teach him at home,” I told Lars. “I have the credentials; I have the experience.”

He gave me a skeptical look.

“I can do it,” I insisted. “I had the occasional difficult child in my classes, you know.”

“But none like Michael, right? And none that were your own.”

“True,” I conceded. “But really, Lars, what other choice do we have?”

I didn't bother giving Michael formal lessons during the kindergarten year, but we began working on some basic skills. Knowing that forming accurate circles, squares, and triangles is the foundation for writing letters, I encouraged him to draw. This he appeared to enjoy on occasion, although his drawings were generally indecipherable as any particular objects. Quite often I read to him, hoping that he would eventually fall in love with stories, as most children do when frequently read to. Michael did not relish these sessions, the way most children would, but he tolerated them for short periods.

Not until Mitch and Missy started first grade did I decide it was time for Michael's lessons to start in earnest. His learning might be delayed, but, I reasoned, I had as long as it would take to teach him.