Free The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son by Ian Brown Page B

deep that well felt, how far down they had to reach. I never asked them again. It was, as I always said to Johanna, too much to ask.
    “I wish people we know offered to take him more,” she said one night.
    We were talking in bed, one of the rare nights Walker fell straight to sleep. Lying next to each other in the darkness was so rare by then, it felt exciting again. I could feel her warm skin against mine, thrilled by the relative novelty of a grown-up at my side. The room was so dark we couldn’t even see one another, but we spoke into the black night anyway. A small act of faith, and someone to listen.
    “I mean, no one in my family or your family has ever offered to take him for a single night. My mom, once. That’s it.” I was shocked, not just by the truth of what she said, but by the very audacity of what she was suggesting. Asking someone to take Walker! Who the hell did she think she was! My parents were in their eighties, and they were afraid of Walker, afraid they wouldn’t know what to do. My sisters lived in distant cities. My brother, who lived in Boston, and his partner, Frank, offered, but I couldn’t bring myself to impose on them: they had no children, their house was too perfect to wreck. My wife’s sister was single and lived in Los Angeles; we had no family living nearby, and no extensive community in the city. It wasn’t just too much to ask, it was too much to imagine.
    “Our closest friends have taken Walker into their lives as if he were one of their own kids,” I said. “All those weeks at cottages, dinners at their homes. They didn’t have to do that.”
    “But one night? I would have done more than that for them.”
    “But you know what it’s like to do it. You have a kid like Walker. They don’t. Most people are terrified.”
    Speaking the words into the black night, our bodies touching, remembering luck and good fortune.
    It was too much to ask .
    At dinner parties, we ate in shifts, one of us eating, the other wandering hand in hand with Walker, to keep him calm. If he got carried away and stroppy, if he began to whack his head uncontrollably, I sat him on my shoulders or strapped him into his stroller and took him outside: we’d leave and come back twenty minutes later. If I caught a whiff of a diaper, I whisked him away. We insisted on maintaining ordinary routines and customs. “He’s fine,” friends said to me when they invited us over for dinner or drinks, but I knew his buzz-saw scream and I didn’t want to be responsible for other people hearing it; I didn’t want them not to invite us any more, because they were all we had. In those days I still thought Walker was a reflection of me, I didn’t think of him as a separate being. When he was calm Walker made his way from guest to guest, crawling into their laps, playing with their watches and their bangles, drooling onto their pants and shirts. He was a steady reminder not just of his presence, but of the existence of all children like him, the children we so often try to forget. For this reason we tended to select our dinner guests carefully. If he attached himself to someone, I intervened: “Here, I’ll take him.” Many objected and told me to go away; many did not. You could see the reserve in the eyes of the latter, in their posture: they kept talking, but they didn’t resist giving him up. Who could blame them?
    Johanna was better that way: she let other people look after him, wander with him, sit with him. She seemed to feel it was his, her, our due, whereas I literally leapt to take him off their hands. I didn’t want anyone to reject him, so I tried to take rejection out of the picture from the start. He felt like my boy that way. I was not going to let anyone hurt him, he had been hurt enough, and so I would wrap his guilelessness in my constant presence to protect him against everything, even rejection. We were in it together, he and I, it didn’t matter about the others. You could hammer away at me,