“Some of it. Some of it I found in his room. Some of it was just lying around the house. I’d never really looked at more than one at a time before.”
She held the folder and she held his gaze, and neither said anything. She searched his eyes for something definitive—it’s really bad or we’re in real trouble or it’ll be okay—and finding none of the above, decided maybe it would be good news and took it. “Can I have dinner first?”
He handed the aluminum-foiled pumpkin over to her and went to heat leftovers. She tore apart an irritatingly small bag of M&M’s and opened the folder.
She smiled at what she found inside. Dozens of pictures. In crayon, in washable marker, a few all in green colored pencil. People with no noses but big eyes and big smiles. People whose hair was taller than the rest of them. Dogs with huge, toothy grins. Navy skies that took up no more than the top inch of the page. Penn came in with warmed-up pasta topped with butter and sliced hot dogs. She could think of nothing she’d rather eat.
She smiled at Penn. “I love them.”
“The pictures?”
“I’m so relieved. When you gave them to me, I thought … He’s no great artist maybe, but he has other talents. And he’s only five. I love his whimsy. I love the way he sees the world.”
“How about the way he sees himself?”
“What do you mean?”
Penn nodded at the pile of drawings. “Look.”
She looked through and found Claude in each one. He was wearing a dress. He was wearing a ball gown and four-inch heels. He had long brown hair or long blond hair or long purple hair or long rainbow hair. Sometimes he had a tail like a mermaid. Sometimes he had a silver necklace like his mother’s. That’s not what worried Penn, though, who’d ordered them carefully so Rosie could see the progression. In each picture, Claude seemed to be shrinking. He had a big family, yes, so it was hard to fit everyone on the page, and he was the littlest of them, true, but Claude got smaller and smaller. He was smaller than the smiling dog. He was smaller than the stemless flowers. In one, he had wings and was flying in the sky, and he was smaller than the clouds. In another, he was lying in the garden loomed over by a snail. In some, Rosie couldn’t even find him. She had to play Where’s Waldo until she located tiny Claude, half a centimeter high, behind the chimney of a house or in the corner of the chimp enclosure at the zoo. Or everyone in his giant family—including Jupiter, including the butterflies, including the house itself—had giant smiles, but Claude’s frown was so pronounced it dipped over the edges of his chin like a handlebar mustache. Or everyone else was in full color, and Claude had drawn himself in gray or once, worse, white on white. Or everyone was in clothes—hats, scarfs, sweaters, costumes, bathing suits, party dresses, and Claude was wearing nothing, not naked, just a stick figure, just an outline, just a sketch. And then, soon, Claude was nowhere. Rosie Where’s-Waldo-ed for fifteen minutes and failed to find him at all.
Maybe
“So, gender dysphoria,” Mr. Tongo began. “Congratulations to you both! Mazel tov! How exciting!” Mr. Tongo was the hospital handyman Rosie called late in a shift when she was otherwise out of options for a patient. He wasn’t really a handyman, of course, though he wasn’t a doctor either. Technically, he was some kind of multi-degreed social-working therapist-magician. It wasn’t that he made miracle diagnoses or magic cures. It wasn’t that he could pull secret strings or unglue red tape. It was that he had an entirely different way of looking at things.
And a different way of looking at things was what they needed. Rosie didn’t think there was anything wrong with Claude physically. She didn’t think there was anything wrong with Claude emotionally or psychologically either. He was already worried his teacher and his classmates thought he was weird. The third to last thing Rosie wanted to do was make him think his parents thought so too. The second to last thing she wanted to do was make him self-conscious about what he wanted to wear and who he was. But the last thing she wanted to do was ignore her baby as he slipped away from her and disappeared.
In Mr. Tongo’s office, they all three sat on giant colored balls like they were in some kind of exercise class, Mr. Tongo bouncing up and down on his and rubbing his hands together like a kid who’d been promised ice cream after a dinner of French fries. Penn was prepared to defend Claude against people who thought boys in dresses were sick. He was prepared to defend against people who thought his son was repulsive or deviant. He was prepared to defend Claude’s right to be Claude in any of his many wonderful manifestations. But he was not prepared for congratulations. “Uh … thanks?”
“Yes! Yes! You should both be very proud.”