When My Heart Joins the Thousand(36)

“Alvie, please. Not now.”

When we get back home, she starts brewing a pot of coffee, then seems to forget about it. She wanders around in the kitchen, grabs a rag, and starts to wipe off the table, even though it’s already clean. She gets down on her knees, opens a drawer, and takes out a small piece of paper. I’m not close enough to see it, but I know what she keeps there. It’s a picture of my father—the only one she has. He’s standing in the sunlight, holding the handles of a bicycle, smiling. He’s tall and lanky, with very short hair and thick, black-framed glasses. There’s a date scratched onto the back in pencil; it’s from a few months before I was born.

I grab an oversized, floppy plush rabbit from the couch and sit on the living room floor, the rabbit in my lap. After a few minutes, she puts the picture away, comes in, sits on the couch, and looks at me with tense lines around her eyes and mouth.

I wait for her to ask me questions about what happened, but she doesn’t.

“You were so close, Alvie. You almost made it to the end of the school year.” She rests her elbows on her knees, and her head falls into her hands. “Why now?”

I curl into a tighter ball and hide my face against the rabbit.

“Just tell me, please.” Her voice breaks. “What is it you want? I’m trying, but I don’t know how to help you. Tell me what you need. Tell me how I can make this stop. Should I send you to more doctors?”

“I don’t want to go to doctors anymore,” I say, my voice muffled against the rabbit’s fur.

“What, then? Am I supposed to do what that man says and send you to a special school? To one of those places where half the children can’t even talk?”

“I could just stay at home. You could teach me.”

She pushes her fingers through her hair. “Honey, that’s not . . . You need to learn social interaction. Keeping you isolated would be the worst thing. I want you to have a life. I want you to have friends. I want you to have the chance to go to college someday, and have children of your own. That will never happen if we don’t fix this.”

She puts her hands over her face. “I keep having this dream,” she whispers through her hands, “where you’re forty years old and everything is still the same. You’re in your room all day, drawing those mazes over and over. I’m trying to do what’s best for you, but it’s so hard. It’s so hard to know what’s right.”

My arms tighten around the plush rabbit. I curl into a tiny ball, the rabbit’s head tucked under my chin, and begin to rock back and forth. I can’t look directly at her, but I’m very aware of Mama’s soft sniffling, her hitching breaths. Each one hurts.

“Sometimes,” she whispers, “you seem so far away.”

I don’t know what she means. I’m sitting right in front of her.

“It’s like this thing is getting worse,” she says. “Like you’re drifting away, and I can’t save you.”

Her words don’t make any sense to me. But I know that she’s sad right now, and I know it’s my fault. My fingers dig into the rabbit’s plush fur. I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing, of making her hurt even more, so I don’t say anything.

She draws in a shaky breath. “I’m sorry.” She wipes her eyes and gives me a wobbly smile. “Let’s go out. We’ll go to the lake. How does that sound?”

The tension eases out of me. I like the lake. “Okay.”

As we drive, Mama says, “We’ll get through this. You’ll see. Things will change. I don’t know how, yet, but I really believe they will. Do you want to listen to music?”

“Yes.”

We play a cassette tape. I rest my cheek against the window. My breath fogs the glass as fields and houses roll past outside. There’s a tightness around the base of my throat, like an invisible wire. “I’m sorry I’m so much trouble, Mama.”

At first she doesn’t say anything. “It’s not your fault, honey. If anything, it’s mine.”

I shift in my seat. Outside, fields and strip malls roll past.

“You were such a happy baby.” Her voice is very soft, like she’s talking in her sleep. “You were perfectly normal. And then you started school, and suddenly there were all these . . . problems, and you couldn’t seem to play with the other children. Sometimes you would come home and just sit on your bed rocking back and forth . . .” Her voice breaks. “The doctors all say that it’s just something that happens, that the parents have nothing to do with it. But I keep thinking, what if they’re wrong? What if it is something I did? Or what if I could have changed it, if I’d recognized it sooner and gotten you help before all the trouble started or . . . I don’t know.” She rubs at the corners of her eyes. “I feel like I—I failed you.”

It’s not like that. I know it’s not. But I don’t know how to make her understand. I don’t have the words.

When she speaks again, her voice is barely audible: “I miss the real you.”

A chill runs through me. I am real, Mama, I want to say, but suddenly my throat is locked.

“I know you’re still in there, though,” she adds quickly, as if realizing she’s made a mistake. “Just . . . underneath . . . everything.”