The Art of Adapting

by Cassandra Dunn

  “Sorry,” Lana said. “Of course you can do this yourself.”

  Lana had just made it into the kitchen when she heard a crash. She found Matt sprawled on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, a bin on top of him.

  “I’m fine,” he said before she could say anything. He waved her away. Matt was a strange mix of clumsy with lightning-quick reflexes. He was always knocking things off tables and desks, but catching them before they hit the floor. His gross motor skills were a trouble area. His fine motor skills highly developed.

  “Maybe I should be helping you,” Lana told him.

  “I’m younger than you,” he said. “I can fall down the stairs and not break anything. You go wait in the other room.”

  Lana sighed. What did she care if he dropped them all? They were Graham’s things, left behind for her to contend with. Her sister Becca had been telling her to clear out Graham’s belongings for months. Then she was supposed to light sage and spread the smoke throughout the house to cleanse it of the leftover bad energy of their troubled marriage. If only it could be that easy to clear away two decades of built-up memories, plans, arguments, wishes that never came true.

  When Graham arrived to drop the kids off, he stopped on the doormat like there was a force field before him. He rarely offered more than a brief wave through the open door as the kids passed from his world back to Lana’s. They usually exchanged a few words of small talk before he turned to head down the porch steps. He seemed to no longer feel welcome in his own house, and Lana wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. Tonight Lana needed to hit him up for money, so this time she waved him inside. He came in, just barely, his heels resting on the metal threshold strip.

  “A couple of things. For one, I wanted to warn you not to speed down the street here in your new car,” Lana said. It was such a loaded statement that it made her cringe, but then she patted her front jeans pocket, where Graham’s discarded wedding ring rested, and it seemed less petty. “I guess they’ve set up a speed trap.”

  “Here? Who are they hoping to catch?” Graham asked.

  “Well, sadly, me,” Lana said with a shrug.

  “A ticket? How much was it?” Graham asked.

  “Luckily, I got out of it. Turns out the officer was Nick Parker, if you can believe that.” She waited while Graham processed the name.

  The first time Lana saw Graham she was nestled in Nick’s arms at a party. Graham had done a double-take as he walked by and Lana had smiled at him. She and Nick were days from breaking up, in the tender tail end of their summer romance. Nick had just enlisted in the family business. He was shipping out soon and wanted no strings. It was a bittersweet ending. They were parting as friends. But Graham didn’t know that as he flirted with Lana at the drinks table while Nick was in the bathroom. Graham was competitive, confident, determined to steal Lana from chiseled, brawny Nick and his six-pack abs. He pursued her relentlessly. Lana had been loved before, but never like that. Never with such hunger. Graham had been so proud to call Lana his girlfriend, so jealous when other guys talked to her. When had that vanished?

  “Nick Parker,” Graham said. He shook his head. “Out of the Marines and into the force.”

  “Yeah, it was strange running into him. Funny thing is, I think he recognized Matt before he realized who I was.”

  “Well, good that you got out of the ticket,” Graham said. He backed up a step, nearly stumbling out the open front door.

  “So, the other thing. Byron’s swim team fees are due, and Abby’s soccer team is taking pictures, and for some reason the water bill is higher than usual this month. I was wondering—”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Graham said. He looked behind him, toward the darkening street. Was he looking for escape, or Nick Parker?

  “Oh, thanks. The car also needs an oil change. It’s actually overdue.” It wasn’t, but if Graham was feeling generous, Lana figured she should ask for something extra.

  “Yeah, okay. I don’t have my checkbook. I can bring it next time. Is three hundred dollars enough?” Lana hesitated, shrugged. He’d always insisted on managing the finances. How was she to know what everything would cost? “Let’s make it four hundred.”

  “Great. Thanks. That extra hundred is probably cheaper than a ticket would’ve been,” Lana said with a laugh. Graham smiled, a humorless pinch of his features, and headed out.

  Lana still felt the occasional swell of loss when she watched Graham leave the house. She was fine during the day, as the house had always been her domain during daylight hours. But watching him walk away during the same time frame he used to be arriving home reminded her how much her life had changed, without her permission.

  She found Byron settled at the kitchen table, his pen in his left hand, curled into a clublike fist that seemed incapable of creating the fine sketches and beautiful drawings that he left in the margins of every page, on the backs of junk mail envelopes, in the corners of her shopping lists. Matt was the only other left-hander in the family. And the only other one with any artistic skill.

  “This one,” Lana said, touching a thin line of a forehead, nose, chin. It was barely an outline of someone’s profile, but it was a beautiful suggestion of a young woman. “This is great. Who is that?”

  Byron slid his elbow forward until the picture was covered. “Nobody.”

  “Matt has some very nice artwork,” Lana said, tackling the dinner dishes, silently reprimanding herself for talking, for distracting Byron from his homework. English, which he hated, but which had been her favorite subject. She wished he’d ask for help, or share his assignment, or just connect a little more, like Abby did. Sometimes. The truth was, Abby had been growing a little more distant with each passing year since about age eleven. At fourteen she could go a full day without uttering a single word. And then other days she’d talk so much Lana couldn’t keep up with her.

  Matt drifted into the room, handed Lana his empty ice-cream bowl, vanilla with chocolate sauce, same as always. He hesitated, watching Byron.

  “Hemingway,” Byron said, without looking up. “He was kind of an ass, I guess.”

  Lana turned to scold him for his language, but stopped herself. He wasn’t talking to her. She didn’t want to interrupt one of his rare efforts to chat with Matt. Matt mumbled and slid his hands into his pockets, then back out. He smoothed his hair, tugged an ear, adjusted his collar, and tucked his restless hands back into his pockets.

  “Hemingway was unhappy. And sick. He had liver problems. Diabetes. High blood pressure,” Matt said. “He was an alcoholic. And depressed. He committed suicide in 1961.”

  “Really?” Byron looked interested for the first time.

  “His father, grandfather, brother, and sister all committed suicide. They had hemochromatosis. All of them. It’s hereditary. Too much iron in the blood. Toxic levels. The iron accumulates in joints and organs. Supposed to be very painful. Hemochromatosis leads to diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver, heart disease, and depression. The iron affects your brain and moods. A lot of suicide among people with hemochromatosis. It’s more common in people of Irish descent. He won the Pulitzer and the Nobel prizes. He had four wives.”

  “Hm.” Byron leaned back, taking in his half-written essay, and rubbed his lower lip.

  “Nice. Good shading,” Matt said. “The perspective is off a little. With the background. It’s morning? I see what you did with the shadow there. It’s too light. But definitely looks like morning light.”

  Byron looked at him questioningly and Matt nodded a few times, his head bobbing as he considered his own thoughts. Matt held his hand out, a curved index finger gesturing toward Byron’s paper as his eyes took in the spinning ceiling fan overhead.

  “Yeah,” Byron said. “It was this morning. The shadow of the tree’s pretty good, but something’s not right with the hill behind it, the building over here. The perspective is off.” He spun the paper around for Matt to get a better look. “You think it’s too light?”

  “
Hm,” Matt said. “The hill. Yes. The hill. It’s too . . .” His hand fluttered toward the page and Byron held out his pen. Shyly, Matt took the pen, made a few strokes that Lana couldn’t see, and they both nodded in unison.

  “Amazing,” Byron said.

  “Better,” Matt said. He laughed a hoarse huff and shook his head. “Not amazing, but better.”

  Byron spun the page back and lowered his head. Lana wondered if Matt had hurt his feelings, if she should explain again the bluntness that comes with Asperger’s.

  “Steinbeck’s next,” Byron said.

  “Ah, Steinbeck.” Matt nodded enthusiastically. “He also won the Pulitzer and the Nobel. But he only had three wives.”

  “Is his writing better?” Byron asked. “I just can’t get into all the bullfighting.”

  Matt nodded. “Not just better. Amazing.”

  Byron laughed, a loud bark, and Matt startled at the sound. Matt shook his head, clearing the effects of the unexpected noise, and chuckled himself, a rattle of mini-huffs, like the rumbling start of an ancient car. As he wandered back toward his room Lana raised her eyebrows at Byron. He shrugged, grinning.

  “He’s funny. Who knew?”

  Lana left him to his homework, headed upstairs to check on Abby, who was busy writing in a journal in her room. Abby ignored Lana in her doorway, so Lana left her alone. Lana pulled Graham’s wedding ring out of her pocket and set it in the jewelry box where her ring now lived. Maybe someday she’d sell them. Or give them to the kids. Just as she was sinking into a pool of self-pity, her cell phone rang somewhere in the house. She never had it on her, and never got to it before it went to voice mail.

  “Mom!” Byron yelled. “Phone!” It drove her kids crazy that Lana didn’t keep better track of her phone. They lived on theirs, but nobody really called Lana, aside from her sister Becca. The only people who ever sent texts from Lana’s phone were her kids, to keep under the texting limit Graham had set for them. She met Byron on the stairs, holding her phone out to her.

  “You missed the call.”

  “Of course I did. I always do.” She smiled.

  “Who’s Nick Parker?” Byron asked.

  Lana opened her mouth and closed it again, wondering if he’d overheard her talking to Graham. It took her a moment to realize the missed call had been from Nick Parker. The perfect, chiseled dreamboat of her past popping up in her present to pull her out of her own wallowing. Twice.

  “An old friend,” she said. An old friend who didn’t have her number. She smiled and hit the call-back button as Byron headed for the kitchen, back to Hemingway.

  “Are you a stalker?” she asked when Nick answered. “How’d you get my number?”

  “I’m a cop,” he said, laughing. “You never called for that coffee, so I thought I’d remind you. No pressure. If you aren’t interested . . .”

  “How’s Friday?”

  6

  * * *

  Matt

  Matt preferred forty-five-degree angles for most things. Ninety was too sharp. Thirty was too shallow. But forty-five felt just right. Each item just far enough apart to make it easy to grasp without knocking anything else over. Matt hated his clumsy nature, but it was what it was, so he just tried not to crowd things together, and never put anything at the edge of a table. Spacing was important. Spacing was soothing. Spacing was forgiving when Matt’s body didn’t cooperate with his brain.

  Matt arranged his food the same way, separate bowls and plates and utensils a few inches apart, spokes extending out from the wheel of his dinner plate at forty-five-degree angles. He admired the arrangement of objects the way he took in the beautiful alignment of a constellation. Not that constellations were aligned, not carefully placed or symmetric like he liked his food. In fact, it was the asymmetric nature that drew him to stars. So much chaos and chance, scattered all around. But then held in place for eternity. It was infinitely distracting and inexplicably soothing.

  But the food, that had to be at forty-five degrees. He started with the dinner plate, and set the blue cup and green bowl of carrots at the proper angles. He liked his blue cup best because it was the hardest to tip over, and he preferred a particular spoon and fork that felt most secure in his hand. He liked the carrots in a small green bowl just for carrots, and the corn on a very small salad plate with slightly raised edges. Lana was just finishing making dinner, and he didn’t have his napkin or silverware yet, and the special corn plate was missing, replaced by an extra salad bowl. He didn’t want to make a fuss, but he wanted the plate instead of another bowl. He tried to like having the bowl for a change. As he arranged them one by one, the overall effect of the dinner plate, carrot bowl, and corn bowl was very Mickey Mouse. Head and ears. He smiled and looked up, at no one in particular.

  “Mickey Mouse,” he said. Abby sat across from him and Byron was to Matt’s left. They were inches from the Mickey Mouse design, but instead of looking at his arrangement, they turned toward each other. They were always doing that, pulling in toward one another like magnets, instead of seeing what was all around them. He pointed toward the plate and two bowls, but just then his extra salad bowl was lifted away.

  “Sorry, Matt,” Lana said, replacing the bowl with the corn plate. “I forgot.”

  Mickey Mouse vanished, and the angles were thrown out of sync. He fixed it just as the napkin and silverware arrived, but they were the wrong fork and spoon. They were the narrow-handled smooth ones that he had a harder time holding on to. He needed the ones with the wide, flat handles, and the pretty flower design around the edges, for extra grip.

  “Oh,” Matt said, holding up the fork. “I can’t. Not these. I need the other ones. The ones with the scalloping around the edges.”

  “Right, sorry,” Lana said. She sighed, frustrated, and the feeling filled Matt’s chest as she took the fork and spoon and came back with the right ones. He wanted to keep things simple, to just have everything the same every day, but somehow that ended up making them harder. He didn’t understand why.

  Lana waited while the kids served themselves. Byron filled his plate in a messy heap, everything touching everything else, exactly the opposite of how Matt liked his food. Abby took a small scoop of corn, some salad, and a few slivers of halibut. Lana asked Abby if she wouldn’t like more food, and Abby said no, as always. Matt wondered why Abby came to dinner at all, since she rarely ate anything. Then Lana started eating, too fast to taste her food. Lana was sad again, or maybe mad, Matt wasn’t sure which, but her happiness was gone and her unhappy feelings filled Matt’s whole body until he could barely move. Then Abby asked for more water, and Byron told her to get it herself, and the tension in the room and in Matt’s body just got worse.

  Dinners, which had always been a quiet time for Matt, were quiet no more. The kids talked at the same time, tonight about swimming and driving and movies and money, and they got louder and louder, talking over one another until the noise hurt Matt’s ears and muscles and bones. He covered his ears to make it stop. It was better with his hands dampening the noise except that he couldn’t eat with his hands over his ears and he was hungry.

  He decided to try again, but when he removed his hands the talking was even louder, now about driver’s training and an expensive soccer camp and getting jobs and swim team fees, and there was a scraping sound, the horrible screech of metal against ceramic as Byron separated bites of fish with the side of his fork. Matt raised his hands to his ears again.

  An unexpected prod to Matt’s shoulder, not rough but a harsh jolt of unanticipated contact, nearly knocked him to the floor. It was Lana, smiling, holding an empty TV tray, nudging him with it. She gestured for him to put his food on it, but he still had no free hands, just the ones on his ears, which were busy keeping the noise out. She set the tray down, mouthed something he couldn’t hear, and loaded up the tray for him. She pointed from the tray down the hall toward his room, as if he had suddenly sprouted an extra set of arms and could now carry the tray of food away from the n
oise while covering his ears to block out the noise. Matt stared at it, wondering how it had all gotten so complicated so fast. He just wanted dinner. The weird ground-turkey meatloaf he didn’t care for, not on Mondays, but he refused to eat the halibut the rest of the family was eating, because Matt didn’t eat fish. So he got leftovers of other food he also didn’t care for. But he also got corn, which he loved. And it was getting cold.

  The tray rose before him and Lana led the way. Matt followed her out of the kitchen, into his room, where she set the tray down beside the bed. He would have to rearrange the food. Everything was in the wrong place again. Lana closed the door, shutting herself in the room as well. Matt removed his hands, grateful for the quiet. Well, it was considerably quieter, but he could still hear them: the higher pitch of Abby’s voice carrying above the lower tone of Byron’s. Byron’s voice was changing, getting deeper, getting easier to mute with doors and hands, it was more of a vibration than a sound these days. But Abby’s shrill pitch just couldn’t be stopped.

  “Sorry. They’re a little excited tonight,” Lana said.

  Matt nodded. Excited. Not the correct word. Agitated was closer. Argumentative.

  “They’re mad at you,” he said. Lana flinched, as if he had said something hurtful, and he wondered if he had. Wasn’t it true? Wasn’t it obvious? “Because you and Graham aren’t together anymore. And they think they could have all of these things if he was still here. You have less money without him. He makes a lot more money than you do. You aren’t a CPA like him. So they’re mad at you.”