The summer Owen turned a confident nine and Jenny remained a childish twelve, he had assembled a Popsicle stand from cardboard, painted it carefully to resemble a storefront, and made his first sale minutes after opening. Edith, watching from the window, had called to Jenny in the living room behind her. “Why don’t you go join your brother,” she’d said, painting cheer onto her voice. “I bet if you offered help refilling the cooler with ice, or making change, he’d cut you a bit of the profit.” Instead, Edith had observed as Jenny slumped out, barefoot, squinting, and crumpled on the concrete some ten feet from Owen. From the pocket of her cutoffs she had removed a number of stones—treasures, Edith knew, from a creek they’d walked along on a rare trip upstate—and set them in a ragged line, occasionally pushed at one with a big toe. When a neighbor, Popsicle in hand, drifted with pity to Jenny’s odd station and asked how much, Edith had strained to hear her daughter’s faint reply. “Free,” she had said, barely moving her head from its place between her raised knees. “Came from water.” The man nodded and moved on empty-handed, and Owen had laughed like he did at the stupidity of half-wit cartoon characters, the ragged coyote who looked down his fate only after passing the end of the cliff.
Jenny spent the next six years growing more inscrutable, drawing vast spirals in her school notebooks and keeping odd pets, toads and then millipedes that Edith and Declan had paid for as though they were lottery tickets, chances to make their daughter’s life rich. She left for San Francisco the day she turned eighteen. Declan, who liked to believe himself wild, the kind of person who could appreciate the untamed in others, told Edith not to worry, but she already knew: she had already spent more time losing her daughter than she had having her. Jenny bought a rose suitcase and painted it with words from a song she liked; Jenny brushed out her always-tangled just-brown hair in their bathroom one last time; Jenny put on teal eye shadow that looked to Edith like the color of an empty hospital room; Jenny took the bag of fruit Edith had prepared; Jenny hugged each of them, and then Jenny was gone. She sent three progressively more disturbing postcards that said things like Really letting my body return to the earth and I speak a new language every day, and then one day they saw her on television. The news special about Haight Street and all the young people and all the sex and all the drugs, and then, for an excruciating twenty seconds, Jenny, writhing. She wasn’t wearing enough, a paisley handkerchief stretched taut across her chest, jeans mutilated and discolored. Sitting in the lap of a bearded man in a crocheted vest who held her by the waist, she chewed on a piece of her own hair as though hoping to extract something vital, and her eyes with their enormous pupils lolled. She kept moving her hands up and out, rhythmically, as if trying to keep some wall from caving in. “Aren’t you concerned about her?” asked the reporter. And the man shrugged: “She’s not mine, man.”
Owen had earned good grades and befriended beady-eyed little boys who turned into greedy, scheming young men. Edith made them after-school sandwiches and listened through the door: they afforded no one mercy, not the shy bucktoothed girl with long braids or the young teacher with the stammer. Once he got to high school, Owen, already tall and fine-fingered, developed a reputation as a salesman. He sold pencils and toffees at half the store cost at first, then expanded his enterprise through the hire and development of a ring of bookish types who wrote term papers feverishly in the library. Edith learned about it only when a concerned mother did Owen the favor of calling his parents rather than the principal. Afterward, he made atonal apologies and pursued his studies with new conviction, often tacking up and checking off neat to-do lists in capital letters, and ultimately landed at Duke on a full scholarship. Following one sixteen-hour return for Thanksgiving, during which he spoke only to ask after salt and pepper, he expressed implicitly that his need for family—had it ever been there—was no longer extant. Edith and Declan were to him like a house he had once rented.
Declan took pains to keep up with Owen’s professional pursuits, but Edith stopped sending birthday cards after five years without a thank-you note or a call, and often recalled breastfeeding her son, how much less urgently he had sucked than his sister, how infrequently he’d cried.
DIAGNOSES OF WILLIAMS SYNDROME were rare then—one in twenty thousand births, sources would note much later—and Lydia quickly lost the energy required to say, “There is something different about my son, yes, but he does not belong here.” “Here” being among these other children labeled as impaired, sedate and taciturn compared with Paulie. He is six years old and understands and uses words like magnetic and illuminate, she always felt like asserting. He remembers whole songs after hearing them just once.
She began homeschooling him after the third failed experiment in an institution for “children like him,” undertaking the mission as if it were as natural as breathing, forever designing lessons and searching for signs that he’d absorbed them. She tried and tried with numbers, with zippers and shoelaces, and later rewarded him (and herself, she admitted) with narrative and music, the environments in which he thrived. When Seymour returned home, she smiled up at him wearily as Paulie yelped and covered his father in kisses. Love grew a bigger mystery by the day.