The Meridians(47)
No matter how much he complained, however, she was resolute. They were going to leave the apartment, and leave it quickly.
The drive to Meridian was the next hurdle that she feared. And she feared it for two reasons. First, she had never attempted to take Kevin on a road trip of any significant length before, let alone a fourteen hour marathon ride between L.A. and Meridian. She had no way of knowing how he was going to react, or if she was even going to be able to get him to ride with her in the moving truck. Almost as important, she had no way of knowing how she was going to get herself unpacked once she got to Meridian. Several friends had helped her move the larger items into her moving truck, but they would hardly be able to accompany her on her daylong trek through several states just so they could be there to help her unpack her armoire.
Luckily, at least one of the fears turned out to be fairly baseless: Kevin barely seemed to notice the trip. She made sure his laptop was fully charged the night before, and even purchased an AC/DC converter that would allow her to plug the computer into the lighter outlet in the truck, so Kevin would be able to stay on the computer all day long if he wished. The next morning, the morning of the move, she bribed him into the cab of the moving truck by promising him a Sausage McMuffin for breakfast and a Happy Meal for lunch and dinner if he came without pouting.
Kevin immediately - though without looking at her - came into the cab of the truck, and even went so far as to put on his seat belt without any fuss. There were a few moments on the trip that could have gone badly: moments when he had to go to the bathroom, which could have signaled the start of some very messy situations. But luckily there were rest stops close by at each occasion, and she was able to pull over and find a place for him to go to the bathroom within only a few minutes of his first complaints.
Other than that, Kevin spent the entirety of the day either typing on the computer, or watching DVDs on the portable DVD player she had purchased a few days before. He was instantly enamored of several of the Disney movies she had bought for him, though she noted that he preferred the softer, more mellow humor of such classics as The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh to the more melodramatic later Disney movies like Aladdin or The Little Mermaid. He cringed away from the DVD player whenever the villain arrived on scene, and she would have to pull over and comfort him, so she kept replaying the adventures of Pooh Bear and his other stuffed animal friends, over and over until she thought the next time she heard of a Blustery Day or a Smackerel of Honey she might have to scream.
Still, even though the trip went well, it ended up being longer than expected, due to the bathroom breaks and also just due to the fact that Kevin needed to get out and walk from time to time, as though he could not stand to be confined in the moving truck for too long without losing some important connection he had to the outside world.
That was wishful thinking, she knew: autistic children avoided connections; they didn't seek them out. Still, whenever they halted at a rest stop, Kevin was not happy until he had walked around the area, taking deep breaths as though inhaling energy from his surroundings.
The length of the trip, however, exacerbated her second problem. How was she going to get the beds or anything else unpacked if she was going to arrive at Meridian sometime around midnight? What was she going to do for sleep? She didn't know - it was never possible to predict - how Kevin would react to news that they were going to sleep in the moving truck. He might take the news as stolidly as a Spartan warrior, or he might throw a tantrum worthy of a sugar-crazed two year old.
So when she pulled up to her new home - a two bedroom house on a quarter acre - she was looking at the prospect of finishing the trip with more than a little trepidation. The sense of foreboding worsened as she realized that the street they lived off of was called Black Cat Lane. She wondered if that was an omen. Not that she believed in such things, particularly, any more than she followed the zodiac for her horoscopes. But there was no denying that she did have a bit of the superstitious about her.
Black Cat Lane, she thought, and sighed. Perfect. If a black cat runs in front of the truck, I'm turning around and going back.
No dark feline appeared, however, and so she was left without any excuse to turn back. Instead, she pulled into the driveway of the house, maneuvering the truck around so that it was facing backward, and then turned off the engine once she was in place.
She sat there for a long moment, listening to the sounds of Rabbit trying to get Pooh unwedged from the door of his burrow, then touched Kevin's shoulder gently. He didn't look at her, didn't look away from the brightly colored cartoon he was watching, but he did reach over with his own hand and touch her arm in response, so she knew he was listening.
"Kevin, honey," she said, "I have to get out and open up the house. You stay here, okay? You stay right here and don't move and I'll be right back."
Kevin barely moved, but she thought she saw his head go up and down the slightest fraction of an inch, which was as close as he ever got to a nod.
Lynette got out of the truck, and went to the front door of her new home, brandishing the key that Tom the realtor had sent her in the mail. She approached the door with no small sense of anxiety. She knew it was never a good idea to decide on a house without ever seeing it in person, but she also knew that she could hardly take Kevin back and forth multiple times with her to scout out a proper location and then make a purchase thereafter. So she was pleasantly surprised when she opened the front door and found a small but tidy front room, with track lights installed so that when she flicked the switch near the door the front room immediately lit up.