Free Daniel Isn't Talking by Marti Leimbach Page B

whateverthefuck he does.
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    When I wake in the morning there are a few seconds’ reprieve before a sense of doom and anguish alerts me again to my son and my predicament. It would appear that he is to fail to attain any of the normal milestones of childhood growth, will likely become more remote and wilful, possibly even dangerous to himself and to others. To Emily? Yes, possibly. I have been told that for the sake of the siblings one must sometimes find alternative accommodation for the autistic one – but not to worry, that would be many years from now. Not to worry? Not to worry ? As for right now, I am to accept as fact that he will need special education in a school designed for children who cannot learn like other children. There is apparently nothing I can do but gently escort him through his childhood until one or another institution or, if we are lucky, sheltered community assumes his care as an adult. The unfortunate truth of autism is that it cannot be cured, or even effectively mitigated, and that the condition is a genetic mistake for which we will for ever pay the consequences.
    â€˜Stephen, please, don’t go to work today. Stay here with us. Please,’ I beg him now. What day is it? Tuesday, I think. All my concerns tumble around my mind like clothes in a dryer. I toss one up, then another, the next, and so on. I tell him this. I tell him that the day seems inordinately long and that I cannot see how to navigate it, that I am lost.
    Stephen understands, pats my arm, nods his head. But he does not stay.
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    Stephen’s uncle Raymond, that dear man, rings to tell me not to regret giving Daniel the MMR. His voice is loud in the receiver; he speaks as one who has endured early efforts at telephonic communication, who has shouted into tortoiseshell receivers fixed on wall phones, gone through operators in order to place calls. Now he tells me that in his time he has seen children die of measles; they died in droves when he was a boy. Temperatures of a hundred and six, their brains burned inside their skulls. I mustn’t regret a thing.
    â€˜Please come and see us,’ I say to him. Raymond lives on the other side of London. He owns the same house in which he grew up and that he shared with his mother until her death some thirty years ago. He has taken me round the upstairs to show me the scars in the ceiling where a bomb came through the roof during the war. He has stood me by the window and pointed to the areas, now dense with houses, where once there was nothing but craters and buildings in ruins. He’s seen things he will not tell me about, the experiences of being a soldier. ‘I would not wish my memories upon you,’ he once said, then asked me if I could find a use for the cake pan his mother used to bake birthday cakes for him and his brother when they were children. Whether, too, I might like some of his mother’s damask linen.
    â€˜I will come,’ he says now. ‘But meanwhile, you mustn’t blame yourself.’
    â€˜I don’t,’ I tell him, a lie. I am fast becoming a good liar, which I discover is a means of camouflage for the protection of others, those who have not been conscriptedinto this battle with autism, those who have normal children, for example. Or those like Raymond, whom I feel I am discovering now as one discovers an ancient and magical place. I would like to curl up on his mother’s window seat, admire the large oak tree he planted as a boy, talk to him about the way London has changed in his lifetime, consult the past, disregard the future. Where is that cake pan? I will bake a Victorian sponge, slather it with cream, talk about decoding machines and doodlebugs, battles fought on foreign beaches, places I have visited only in history books, anywhere far away.
    â€˜These things happen,’ says Raymond. ‘Nobody knows why.’
    Speculation abounds, however. I thought only hippies didn’t