Miracle Creek(63)

Elizabeth never expected to see her again, didn’t exchange numbers, e-mails or even last names. A week later, though, they ran into each other, first at the county autism preschool orientation, then at a speech therapist’s, and again at an applied behavior analysis info session—not surprising given that Georgetown had recommended them all, but still, it had a kismet feel, a little too coincidental to be coincidence. They started doing everything together when Henry and TJ ended up in the same class at the same school. “Autism boot camp,” they’d called it. They carpooled to school and therapies, attended lectures on coping with the grief of an autism diagnosis, and joined the local autism moms’ group. In that way, they fell into closeness, as if by accident. Not because they particularly enjoyed each other’s company, but out of habit, because they were thrust together daily, like it or not. The repeated proximity grew into intimacy; once, after Victor dropped the bombshell about his newfound love in California, they even went on a drunken girls’ night out.

Elizabeth was an only child, so she’d never experienced this, but the thing about being together and sharing so much—everything from their sons’ quarterly autism-severity scores to their teachers’ daily counts of “perseverative behaviors” (rocking for Henry, head banging for TJ)—was that it bred an intense rivalry. It infected everything they did, crept into the nooks and crannies of their relationship and turned it slightly sour. Elizabeth knew competition was rampant in the “typical” kids’ moms’ world, had heard women comparing their kids’ all-star and gifted-program-admission statuses in line at Trader Joe’s. But like everything else, the jealousy shot into overdrive in the world of autism moms, which was at once the most cooperative and the most competitive she’d seen, with stakes that mattered—not which college your kids got into, but their very survival in society: whether they’d learn to talk, if they’d ever move out of your house, and how they’d live when you died. Unlike in the “typical” world, when someone else’s child’s success meant your own was falling short, the sharing, helping, and celebrating of others’ successes was far more intense and complex because another child improving meant hope for your own, but also put more pressure on you to come through for your own. In the case of Henry and TJ, all these factors were magnified because they were the same age, in the same class, impossible not to compare and contrast.

When the biomedical treatments started and Henry improved and TJ didn’t, that was when Elizabeth and Kitt’s relationship warped into something that resembled friendship on the outside—still carpooling and having coffee every Thursday—but felt like something else on the inside. The funny thing was, it was Kitt who’d first told her about Defeat Autism Now!, a group of doctors (most with kids with autism) who advocated treatments for “recovery” from autism—something Elizabeth hadn’t known was possible. To be sure, the concept was a strange one, no less because the world at large didn’t believe autism was something you could “recover” from. Broken bones, yes. Pneumonia, sure. Maybe even cancer, if you were lucky. But autism? That was a lifelong thing. Besides, “recovery” implied a baseline of normalcy that had been lost, whereas autism was supposed to be an inborn trait, which meant, of course, there was nothing lost to recover. She’d been skeptical, but trying the treatments was the same as baptizing Henry despite her atheism: if she was right, they were just pouring water on Henry’s head (no harm), but if Victor was, they were saving him from eternal damnation in hell (big upside). Similarly, special diets and vitamins wouldn’t harm him, but if there was the slightest possibility of “recovery,” the potential upside was life-changing. Risk, nil. Reward, probably nil, but possibly huge. Simple math.

So she did it. Cut out dyes, additives, gluten, and casein from Henry’s diet, enduring teachers’ oh-you-crazy-neurotic-mother looks when she asked them to substitute her organic grapes for their rainbow Goldfish snacks. Cajoled Henry’s pediatrician to run tests despite his resistance (“I won’t inflict unnecessary blood draws on a little boy, not to mention the waste for the insurance company”) and, when they came back abnormal in the way predicted by the DAN! doctors (high copper, low zinc, high viral titers), got the ever so slightly humbled pediatrician to agree that yes, he supposed it wouldn’t be harmful, exactly, to give Henry B12, zinc, probiotics, and such.

None of this made her different; a dozen others in her autism moms’ group were on the “biomed track,” had been for years. The difference had been Henry. He was the Holy Grail of biomed treatments, the so-called Super Responder. One week (one!) after Elizabeth removed food dyes, Henry’s rocking went from an average of twenty-five to six episodes per day. Two weeks after starting zinc, he started making eye contact—fleeting and sporadic, but compared with none and never, a breakthrough. And the month after she added B12 shots, his MLU (mean length of utterance) doubled, from 1.6 to 3.3 words.

Talking with Kitt, Elizabeth was careful to avoid gloating, to be sensitive to the fact that TJ exhibited no changes. The problem was, they had opposite approaches to the therapies—Elizabeth anal, Kitt loosey-goosey—and it was hard not to think that her own type-A fastidiousness—buying a separate toaster and cookware for Henry’s food to ensure absolute compliance with the diet, for example—must’ve played some part in Henry’s dramatic response. Kitt, by contrast, let TJ “cheat” on his diet for special occasions, which, because he had four sisters, four grandparents, nine cousins, and thirty-two classmates, occurred once a week, and she regularly forgot his supplements. Elizabeth told herself that TJ wasn’t her child and everyone had their own way of doing things, but she ached for TJ, hated seeing him stagnate while Henry soared, and she yearned to take control and restore the parity between them, and with it—yes, she could admit it, she wanted this back most of all—her closeness with Kitt. Elizabeth offered to help—she volunteered to organize TJ’s supplements into weekly pill dispensers and bring diet-compliant cupcakes for classroom birthdays—but Kitt said, “And have the Autism Nazi take over my life? No, thanks.” She said it jokingly, with a wink and a laugh, but there was venom there, under the surface.