“They tell you it is your fault, se?ora.” Alma stands up. “They tell you he has a disease—autism—and they cannot cure it. And they say it is because he needs his mamá when he is small. But she is not here when he needs her.”
I can feel my face pucker into a frown. “Do you believe that, Alma? Do you believe it’s my fault?”
Alma clears my empty plate. “Se?ora, I say too much. There is work to do. I run the vacuum cleaner, now that you are up. ?Bueno?”
Okay, I tell myself. I want to close my eyes, go to sleep, and wake up at home, but I know that I won’t, not yet. Okay, this is only one person’s opinion. Granted, Alma is about as credible a witness as you could find. But still. That couldn’t be the whole story.
If it was, I reason as I rinse my coffee cup in the sink, why are Mitch and Missy just fine? If Michael is autistic because I am such a horrible mother—why, then, wouldn’t my other two children be autistic, too?
Immediately I scorn this easy response. It doesn’t work that neatly, my interior critic tells me. If it did, there would be a lot more autistic people in the world. Because there are plenty of horrible mothers.
The truth is—and I know this as I walk back to the master bedroom to dress—the truth is, there must be some element of hit-or-miss. And whatever hit Michael—Let’s be honest, Kitty, “whatever hit Michael” is your awful mothering—somehow it missed the other two. They dodged a bullet, and they will be fine.
But will they? Alma had stopped her story with the firing of Jenny, followed by Michael’s diagnosis. But I could pick up the pieces from there. I must have left Sisters’ Bookshop then. I must have left Frieda, probably quite abruptly. I’d settled in here, staying home with the children and doing my penance. And hoping, praying, that it wasn’t too late. That whatever damage I’d done to Michael could be undone. Hoping, as well, that it wouldn’t strike the other two.
In the bedroom, I glance at the bed. It’s still unmade, the sheets jumbled as if those sleeping there were restless. Perhaps we were, Lars and I. Crossing the room, I smooth the sheets and bedspread, fluff the pillows. I sense that making the bed is likely not my job, at least not on the days when Alma is here. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to do it.
Opening the closet door, I inspect the clothes in front of me, trying to select something to wear. But the clothes won’t come into focus. Instead I start seeing little snippets of my life from the past few years.
I remember some of those days. Not all days, but some of them.
My children were two and a half when I fired Jenny and determined to throw myself, body and soul, into the raising of my family. I was sure I could make amends. I could make Michael love me. I could make him be normal, be like the other two.
I decided that being outside in the yard, working with the earth, would be good for all of us. That spring we planted a vegetable garden: tiny lettuce and carrot seeds that we carefully placed in neat rows in the crumbly soil; leggy tomato plants that we bought from the garden store near my old duplex and transplanted into a plot along the back fence. I had to stop Mitch and Missy from having sword fights with the tomato stakes, but eventually we got the job done, and the tomato plants thrived. “Fresh food,” I told Lars with satisfaction when he came home from work. “Fresh food and fresh air. That will change everything.”
I remember how he smiled appreciatively, clearly enjoying this new version of his wife. “Farmer Katharyn,” he called me. “And her farmhands.”
The triplets and I put flowerbeds in the front yard. I let the children pick out the seed packets, and we waited with anticipation for the flowers to pop through the ground and bring patches of brightness to our yard. Mitch and Missy loved the muddy, colorful messes, the warm earth filtering through their fingers. Michael abhorred it; he would shriek when dirt got under his fingernails.
When the fall came, and we had to spend more time inside, I figured that imaginative play would help Michael find a way outside his own head—and besides, Missy wanted to grow up to be a princess. So we played dress-up. On Saturdays, when Lars relieved me of child-care duties for a few hours, I’d rummage through the Salvation Army store, bringing home treasures in satin and lace. These I’d transform into costume after costume, with a little magic on my sewing machine—another new acquisition, and one that was further converting me, I hoped, into the domestic whiz I was sure I could be.
Missy loved the costumes; she changed outfits twenty times a day, becoming Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and a princess she made up herself, a princess named Claire after my mother and Missy’s own middle name. Princess Claire wanted to marry Prince Jon—her name for Mitch—and she would force him, both of them giggling, into a tinfoil crown and a little velvet jacket. She tried the same with Michael. “A princess can marry as many princes as she wants,” Missy told us with authority. But Michael brutally ripped off his royal trappings and ran from the room, cowering in the corner of his bedroom, behind his bed.
I thought that being out in public might give Michael the opportunity to learn to interact with different types of people. So we went on outings: the zoo, the park, the library. Even though I had my station wagon, we sometimes rode the bus, because Mitch, as young as three, had already begun his love affair with transportation. But they were exhausting, those trips, because I never knew how Michael would behave, never knew what, if anything, would set him off. It was like the woman in Sisters’, the one who had come in with the autistic daughter. I know now how that woman must have felt, because my feelings when I took my child out of the house were the same. We’d be having a good day, and then suddenly, with no warning, something would happen—Michael would be hungry and I’d have packed a different snack than the one I’d promised him, or another child at the park would climb onto the swing that Michael had been heading toward, or the weather, which had promised to be sunny according to the television forecasters, would unexpectedly turn cold and cloudy. And then it would start. The screaming, the howling. The other two children would be in tears, and so would I. It was all I could do to get everyone back to Springfield Street in one piece.
By the time Lars came home in the evening, I was spent. The best I could manage by then would be to sit quietly on the couch and read stories to Mitch and Missy, who snuggled next to me.
Michael, as I recall, I was all too happy to hand off to Lars each night. I made it clear to Lars that the moment he walked in the door, Michael was his responsibility.