The Things We Cannot Say(22)
“I’ll come now.”
“If you go to the store near your office, they might have stock of the Go-Gurt with the old labels.” I hesitate, then ask cautiously, “You know what that looked like, right? I’ll text you the image. Same for the soup. You have to get the right soup.”
“I’m not an idiot, Alice,” he says impatiently, and I hear the sounds of movement at his end. “I’m leaving right now.”
Wade is an excellent father, although if you viewed his behavior only through the lens of his interactions with Eddie, you’d suspect the opposite. He rarely engages with Eddie, he’s constantly resistant to the therapies that help our son to survive in the world, he’s dismissive and impatient and he’s unsupportive.
But with our daughter, Pascale—or Callie, as we usually call her, Wade is a model parent. He’s genuinely busy with his job, but he finds a way to be at all of the key events in her life—debate club meets, ballet recitals, parent-teacher interviews, doctor’s appointments. Callie and Wade usually do her homework together, though she rarely needs his help. They are twelve chapters into the last Harry Potter book because they have read alternate pages aloud to each other every night without fail over the past three years. She had her first crush last year, and she told Wade about little Tyler Wilson before she even told me.
I can’t even remember the last time Wade and Eddie were alone together.
Wade would say we had a perfectly normal son until Eddie was eighteen months old and I took him to a doctor, who put a label on our boy, and that label tainted everything. Wade would say I was so convinced that something was wrong with Eddie that it became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, then I spent so much time trying to “fix” him that I actually made him broken.
And he’s kind of right about the paranoia, because from the moment I realized I was pregnant, I knew that something was different. Even I don’t understand how I knew, so I can appreciate that to Wade it might seem that I made all of this happen somehow—at least at first. Maybe that theory could have been valid, right up until Eddie was two, and the developmental pediatrician said the words Autism Spectrum Disorder. We didn’t yet understand how bad it was going to be, but surely that diagnosis was a clear sign that this situation was way out of my control.
It is beyond me how my brilliant husband, a man with a PhD and an entire research program under his guidance, can fail to understand how utterly helpless I am when it comes to our son. I am a puppet controlled by medical professionals and therapists. They tell me all the things I need to do to engage with Eddie. Some of those things, like the AAC on the iPad, help me to reach him, but most of their therapies don’t reach him at all—they simply enable us to survive. None of those therapies made him different—Eddie just is different. That’s where my opinion and Wade’s diverge.
Wade would say all of my efforts enable a spoiled little boy who could be closer to typical if we just pushed him more instead of pandering to him. Wade speaks to Eddie, because he can’t accept that Eddie’s language is really as restricted as I know it is. Wade views Eddie’s echolalia as a game—a way to insult and taunt us—and of proof that Eddie could use verbal language to communicate if he wanted to. It doesn’t help that when Eddie sees Wade, he often echoes the words not now, Edison, although I’m not even sure why that one has even persisted because Eddie no longer makes much of an attempt to engage with his father at all.
What Wade loves to forget is that, initially, he was quite supportive of medical intervention. He seemed to have this idea that Eddie’s diagnosis automatically meant our son would be a savant, and Wade was kind of okay with the whole situation right up until the psychologist told us that Eddie’s IQ was a little under average, so he was unlikely to possess any quirky but genius abilities. My husband is a quirky genius himself—he could handle having a brilliant but odd child; in fact, we have one of those already in Callie, and he’s her best friend in the world. It was the “below average” designation that Wade couldn’t deal with, the autism itself was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.
That’s when the blame game started—but I don’t judge Wade for that, because I play it too. My husband and more importantly, his sperm, have spent an awful lot of time around intense industrial chemicals over the years, and he’s been exposed to radiation at work more than once. And heavens, left to his own devices? Wade’s diet is appalling. We blame each other for Eddie’s struggles—the only difference is Wade occasionally has the courage to voice his thoughts on the matter aloud. Maybe that makes him a better person, because at least he’s honest. I carry my resentment of Wade around like a millstone around my neck and some days I just know that sooner or later, something is going to snap.
He arrives twenty-two minutes after our call, and just as I expected, he’s frazzled. Wade wears a suit to work because he’s an executive manager these days. When he leaves home in the morning, his tie is always impressively straight. Right now, it’s at a somewhat-crazy angle, and his blond hair is sticking up all over the place. He looks sheepish as he enters the hospital room, his hands caught through the straining handles of two overloaded hessian bags.
“Hi, guys,” he says pointlessly to Babcia and Eddie on the bed, then he nods at me and raises the bag in his left hand. “I got a whole carton of soup—it’s in the car. Then they had plenty of stock of the old yogurt labels so I bought it all—here’s half of it.” He lifts the other bag a little higher and nods toward it. “And I got heaps with the new label too...” At my blank stare, he says hesitantly, “Well...you know, so he can get used to it.”