Read Life, Animated for Free Online Page B

him—to draw him out—and another fitful night.
    I told her I’d finished the story, written the last line, and was overcome, sitting there at the desk. “I think I’m losing my mind, bawling my eyes out in the bureau in the middle of the night.”
    “No,” she said, and, to my surprise, smiled.
    “What?”
    “It’s a good thing. You’re growing.”
    She lay down to catch a few hours’ sleep before sunrise and I slipped into the boys’ room.
    It was dark and, sitting on the rug, I listened to them breathing heavily. All was well on the top bunk, with Walt; not so below. I began to think about how when your life’s orderly and intact, it’s so easy to write about things, to step back as the dispassionate observer, full of knowingness, that crafted omniscience. But once you’ve felt how complicated the world can be, how little you can control, that surety is harder to manage. I was a mess. My heart had never been much engaged in my work—too dangerous, a journalist is supposed to be “objective,” whatever that means. Now my emotions were spilling out all over the place. But maybe that wasn’t such a terrible thing; maybe that was what Cornelia was saying. All I knew was that in a few hours she’d be up, rising like she did every day, thinking this is it, this is the day when Owen’s life is about to begin. Or begin again.
    Every day since that night in the bureau—a year ago now—I wake up feeling that too: that today Owen’s life will change. And at day’s end, I realize it hasn’t, that I know nothing worth anything.
    Owen is starting to talk in the spring of 1995. It isn’t much—a few words in succession. It’s oddly arrhythmic, not like his voice once was. It actually sounds a little like Helen Keller, like someone trying to speak who cannot hear. Blunt sounds, spoken out of need. Juice, never left.But Car. Mine. Hot. Cold. And the words don’t seem to be building into anything beyond a cluster of two or three.
    The best word—the one of greatest utility—is mine . The key is to be quick. When he points to something, anything—a book, a video, a toy—and says “Mine,” you move to grab it first. Hold it up and ask him what it’s called. Wait. He doesn’t get it unless he comes up with something. “A book. Owen, say ‘ book .’”
    Almost every evening, the teacher from Ivymount calls to go over, in detail, all they did during the day. Today, the trio—Owen; his nonspeaking peer, Julian; and the big-hearted Down syndrome boy, Eric—went to a concert in the gymnasium or outside to the soccer field, threw a ball or learned to hold a pencil.
    Any of these things might provide a handle for some connection, at least in theory. But in the descriptions of how she guides the children, get them to sit, to look at her, to walk with the group, she is teaching Cornelia and me how to be with our son. In her tutorials, we’re beginning to understand just how much has gone haywire. His auditory processing—the way we hear and understand speech—is barely functioning. Visual processing, too, is askew. He often turns his head and squints out of the corner of his eye, as though seeing you, straight on, is painful or overwhelming. These are all features of autism. As is getting up every night. His senses are untethered, floating each minute, hour after hour, on swift currents without a mooring or the anchor of sleep, when the body’s sensory equipment rests and replenishes itself. Not for Owen. His last nap was in Dedham. Hasn’t taken one since. He’s sleeping about three hours a night, and maybe another hour or two after Cornelia or I rock him back to sleep. We’ve heard a new term, “regressive autism,” for kids who appear normal, then experience a change—a regression—between eighteen and thirty-six months. Though we’re still using PDD-NOS, this regressive autism seems to fit.
    But when he’s tired, wanting to fall back to sleep in the predawn hours, we hear a golden