He could not sleep. In the dead of night, Tim opened his eyes and realized he was alone in the bed. His wife was gone, sleepless too, no doubt. Lately Holly had been uneasy and agitated, seeing and hearing things, strange things that were not there, but then who was he to judge? Not with that pale wild man running naked over hill and dale, or was it just a chimera, a conflation of a white dog and his own frazzled nerves? Turning over in the bed, he flipped his pillow to the cool side, trying to go back to sleep. Useless.
Huffing, he threw off the covers and swung his legs over the edge to sit up in the bed. The room was gloomier without her in it. As a boy he could not bear to stay alone in a darkened space. Where had she gone, what was she chasing now? He walked across the creaky floorboards and threw on his robe. Just past midnight, the alarm clock said. Another Christmas come and gone. That Weller boy would be over in the morning, just hours away, their houseguest for the next week. He envied Fred and Nell, ditching the kid and heading for warmer climes, a week at sea away from the wintery murk of Maine. He imagined them promenading on the deck, Fred in a tuxedo and Nell in an evening dress, and then at once he laughed at the absurdity of his vision, the notion that people today traveled like they were Astaire and Rogers in some black-and-white 1930s film, when in reality it was probably polo shirts and khaki shorts, or maybe a charming little sundress, her peach one that gives the impression that she is wearing nothing at all. He banished her from his thoughts.
As soon as he stepped into the hall, Tim could tell where Holly had been. The door to their son’s room was ajar, so he traced her steps and pushed it open with his toes just enough so that he, too, could spy on Jip asleep. A crack of light zigzagged across the boy’s face, giving it a gentle and peaceful aspect, a marked contrast to the sullen child hours ago who could not be contained. Why did he push his son so hard? Why did Jip have to go so far away sometimes? Love from a distance was so much more difficult when it is your own child. And Tim loved Jip with a depth that amazed him in such quiet moments. Still, he cursed the doctors and the therapists, wishing for a thousandth time to have a different boy.
Perhaps Holly was right, perhaps their son wasn’t ever going to be normal. Surely they had more difficulty recently in forcing him to comply with their wishes. Jip had deliberately torn apart that drawing long after he had been told to stop, and he persisted despite their warnings. They would have to work harder with Jip, Tim thought, at listening and obeying. Go easy, Holly had said, but that was just the problem. They had been too easy on the boy, coddling him, when he’s smart enough to understand the moral consequences of his actions, right from wrong. He’d talk with Dr. Wilson next time. He’d find a way to get Jip to obey more readily once it becomes clear that he has no choice. They would work harder on achieving some equilibrium.
How much easier it had been in the beginning, before they knew the facts about Jip. He came into the dream house as an answer to their long-held prayers for a child. After years of trial and failure, the miracle pregnancy, and nine months later the baby was born, pure and simple, a baby who did baby things. Who would know, without any experience in raising a child, what to expect at each stage of development? They took his affect as normal, his long naps were a blessing. Aren’t you lucky, Fred Weller had said, to have one that sleeps through the night? The baby’s sudden disinterest in play or food was chalked up to boredom. Only when periods of withdrawal grew more frequent and alarming did they begin to suspect. They made countless trips to the doctor, but they resisted nearly every diagnosis. On the spectrum, one had said. Asperger’s, said the next one. But he refused to believe it for the longest time, and even now, he pressed against the cold hard language every chance he could. Words, words, but no real explanation, no cure. An abnormality—one quack had actually used that word. As if that was a reasonable way to talk about a human being or to discuss the future of a child with his parents. Tim looked at his son, sleeping like a baby, and wished he could buy back those days and hold him in his arms again, unaware of the darkness ahead. Bring me back my baby, my little boy.
When he closed the door, the knob clicked softly. He listened to whether he had awakened his son by accident, but heard instead his wife moving through the rooms downstairs, furtive as a mouse. Sneaking around lately, holding secrets, off to church for the first time in years, a signal of her deeper unrest.
“I just miss it,” she said, when the prospect of midnight Mass had been broached. “Not so much for the religion but for the ceremony, the ritual, the order, and certainty of it.”
“Go then,” he had said. “I’ll stay here with Jip. But I hope this doesn’t mean you’ve gone soft in the head and are interested in all that superstition—”
She kissed him, now that he thought about it, to shut him up.