by Angie Kim
When the biomedical treatments started and Henry improved and TJ didn’t, that was when Elizabeth and Kitt’s relationship warped into something that resembled friendship on the outside—still carpooling and having coffee every Thursday—but felt like something else on the inside. The funny thing was, it was Kitt who’d first told her about Defeat Autism Now!, a group of doctors (most with kids with autism) who advocated treatments for “recovery” from autism—something Elizabeth hadn’t known was possible. To be sure, the concept was a strange one, no less because the world at large didn’t believe autism was something you could “recover” from. Broken bones, yes. Pneumonia, sure. Maybe even cancer, if you were lucky. But autism? That was a lifelong thing. Besides, “recovery” implied a baseline of normalcy that had been lost, whereas autism was supposed to be an inborn trait, which meant, of course, there was nothing lost to recover. She’d been skeptical, but trying the treatments was the same as baptizing Henry despite her atheism: if she was right, they were just pouring water on Henry’s head (no harm), but if Victor was, they were saving him from eternal damnation in hell (big upside). Similarly, special diets and vitamins wouldn’t harm him, but if there was the slightest possibility of “recovery,” the potential upside was life-changing. Risk, nil. Reward, probably nil, but possibly huge. Simple math.
So she did it. Cut out dyes, additives, gluten, and casein from Henry’s diet, enduring teachers’ oh-you-crazy-neurotic-mother looks when she asked them to substitute her organic grapes for their rainbow Goldfish snacks. Cajoled Henry’s pediatrician to run tests despite his resistance (“I won’t inflict unnecessary blood draws on a little boy, not to mention the waste for the insurance company”) and, when they came back abnormal in the way predicted by the DAN! doctors (high copper, low zinc, high viral titers), got the ever so slightly humbled pediatrician to agree that yes, he supposed it wouldn’t be harmful, exactly, to give Henry B12, zinc, probiotics, and such.
None of this made her different; a dozen others in her autism moms’ group were on the “biomed track,” had been for years. The difference had been Henry. He was the Holy Grail of biomed treatments, the so-called Super Responder. One week (one!) after Elizabeth removed food dyes, Henry’s rocking went from an average of twenty-five to six episodes per day. Two weeks after starting zinc, he started making eye contact—fleeting and sporadic, but compared with none and never, a breakthrough. And the month after she added B12 shots, his MLU (mean length of utterance) doubled, from 1.6 to 3.3 words.
Talking with Kitt, Elizabeth was careful to avoid gloating, to be sensitive to the fact that TJ exhibited no changes. The problem was, they had opposite approaches to the therapies—Elizabeth anal, Kitt loosey-goosey—and it was hard not to think that her own type-A fastidiousness—buying a separate toaster and cookware for Henry’s food to ensure absolute compliance with the diet, for example—must’ve played some part in Henry’s dramatic response. Kitt, by contrast, let TJ “cheat” on his diet for special occasions, which, because he had four sisters, four grandparents, nine cousins, and thirty-two classmates, occurred once a week, and she regularly forgot his supplements. Elizabeth told herself that TJ wasn’t her child and everyone had their own way of doing things, but she ached for TJ, hated seeing him stagnate while Henry soared, and she yearned to take control and restore the parity between them, and with it—yes, she could admit it, she wanted this back most of all—her closeness with Kitt. Elizabeth offered to help—she volunteered to organize TJ’s supplements into weekly pill dispensers and bring diet-compliant cupcakes for classroom birthdays—but Kitt said, “And have the Autism Nazi take over my life? No, thanks.” She said it jokingly, with a wink and a laugh, but there was venom there, under the surface.
The day the principal announced Henry’s move from the autism class to one for “milder” issues such as articulation and ADHD—the oxymoronically named “general special education” class—Kitt hugged her and said, “It’s amazing news. I’m thrilled for you,” but she blinked a little too fast for a little too long, smiled a little too wide, and ten minutes later, passing by Kitt’s car in the lot, Elizabeth saw her slumped over the steering wheel, her whole body heaving in sobs.
Remembering this now, Elizabeth wished she could return to that moment and open the door and tell Kitt not to cry, that none of it mattered. For what difference did it make how much “higher functioning” Henry was, how many more words he could speak, when he was now in a coffin and TJ was not? When TJ would eat and run and laugh, while Henry could never do those things again? What would Kitt have said if she’d known that in a few years, Elizabeth would give anything to change places with her, to be the dead mother to the alive child rather than the alive mother to the dead child, to have died protecting her son, never to feel the torture of imagining her son’s pain and the guilt of knowing she’d caused it herself?
But neither of them knew what was to come, of course. Driving past Kitt that day in the parking lot, she thought of their first meeting, Kitt stopping and hugging her tight, and she wanted to stop the car, run over, and hug and cry with her. She wanted to say she was sorry for her judging and tacit criticisms disguised as “help,” that she’d quit and just listen and support her. But how would Kitt feel, having Elizabeth—the mom of the kid who’d caused her pain—comfort her and pretend to understand? Was she really thinking of Kitt, or was she being selfish, not wanting to feel like she was losing her only friend?
Elizabeth kept driving, all the way home. Later that day, Kitt e-mailed to say carpooling didn’t make sense anymore, since Henry’s new class was in a school five miles away, and oh, by the way, she couldn’t make coffee this Thursday, she had a field trip for one of the girls. Elizabeth said that was fine, she’d see her soon. There was no e-mail the next week, but Elizabeth went to their usual Starbucks on Thursday and waited. Kitt never came. Elizabeth didn’t call or e-mail. She just kept going to Starbucks every Thursday, sitting by the window, and waiting for her friend to walk in.
* * *
SITTING IN COURT, Elizabeth remembered back to the Thursday before the explosion, the day Detective Heights went to Henry’s camp and met Kitt. As usual, she’d been sitting at Starbucks, thinking about Kitt. She hadn’t seen her much after Henry moved schools, just monthly autism moms’ meetings, but she’d expected their closeness to return with HBOT. And, in a way, it did; they talked for hours every day in the sealed chamber and caught up on all they’d missed. But there was an awkwardness, a sense of them (or rather, her) trying too hard to revive an old intimacy gone stale. And then, of course, came the YoFun fight, after a particularly awkward dive when she tried telling Kitt about new therapies and camps, and Kitt kept nodding politely without engaging. Elizabeth’s frustration built and built, and at some point, it boiled over and she became—it hurt to admit it—an abrasive, overbearing, sanctimonious bitch. She knew it and wanted to stop, but it was as if all the balled-up hurt had erupted, spewing out in chunks she couldn’t contain.
She put down her coffee and decided: she needed to apologize to Kitt, properly, in person. Not at HBOT (they were never alone), and she couldn’t just show up at her house (too desperate, stalkerish), but she could call Kitt, say she was running late and ask her to get Henry from camp (one block from TJ’s camp). Then, when Elizabeth went to Kitt’s house for Henry, she could talk to her. She could say she was sorry, she missed her, and maybe with the bitterness poured out, a true closeness without rancor could emerge. So that’s what she did, which meant—God, the irony of this!—Elizabeth herself was responsible for Kitt meeting Detective Heights and verifying the child abuse complaint. And she’d never even gotten to apologize; when she went to get Henry, Kitt seemed upset and mentioned cat scratches, panicking Elizabeth into leaving and turning the soul-baring session she’d imagined into a one-minute doorway conversation.
And now, Kitt was dead and a psychologist-detective was on the stand, telling the world exactly what she’d thought and said about Elizabeth, her crazy ex-friend. Ab
e said, “When Kitt called the day of the explosion and said the defendant was, quote, ‘so mad, she’s ready to kill me,’ did she say anything else?”
Heights said, “Yes. She said she found out Henry was about to undergo IV chelation.” She looked to the jury. “Chelation is the intravenous administration of powerful drugs used to rid the body of toxic metals. It’s FDA-approved for heavy-metal poisoning.”
“Henry had poisoning?” Abe said, the familiar look of feigned surprise on his face.
“No, but some believe that metals and pesticides in our air and water cause autism, and that by cleansing the body, you can cure it.”
“That sounds unorthodox, certainly, but isn’t this a matter of medical judgment?”
“No. Children have died from it, which the defendant knew. She posted about it online, but didn’t tell Henry’s own pediatrician. She used an out-of-state naturopath, an alternative practice not recognized by Virginia, and ordered the drugs online. In my opinion, this is endangerment, subjecting your child to a potentially fatal and secret experimental treatment.”
“Did Kitt say which aspect of this treatment worried her?”
“Yes. She said Elizabeth was planning to combine this with an even more extreme treatment called MMS.”
Abe held up a ziplock bag containing a book and two plastic bottles. “Do you recognize this, Detective?”
“Yes, it’s what I found under the defendant’s kitchen sink. The book is MMS: The Miracle Mineral Solution, a how-to guide for the latest autism fad where you mix sodium chlorite and citric acid, these two bottles here, which forms chlorine dioxide.” She looked to the jury. “That’s bleach. You’re supposed to administer this solution orally—make him drink bleach, in other words—eight times a day.”
Abe put on an outraged expression. “The defendant did this to her son?”
“Yes, a week before his death. She recorded in a chart in the book that he cried, had stomach pain and a 103-degree fever, and vomited four times.”
“The defendant recorded these details, like she was conducting experiments on a rat?” Shannon objected, and the judge sustained, telling Abe to keep to the facts, but she saw it in the jurors’ faces: disgust and horror, the image of sadistic Nazi doctors torturing prisoners in their minds, nothing at all like her memory: holding Henry tight, telling him he’d be okay, how hard it was to read the thermometer with her hands shaking and eyes blurred with tears.
Heights said, “This dovetailed with Kitt’s account. Apparently, Elizabeth said she needed to stop MMS because it was making Henry too sick and she didn’t want him missing camp, but she’d resume it, combined with chelation, when camp was over. That way, he could get really sick, and it wouldn’t matter.”
“‘Really sick, and it wouldn’t matter,’” Abe repeated, his eyes glazed and fixed as if picturing Henry’s suffering, then shaking his head. Kitt had done the same thing—repeated Elizabeth’s phrase and shaken her head, except in a tone of outrage. “Really sick, and it won’t matter? Listen to yourself. He’s doing great. Why do you keep doing this shit?” Kitt said before making her usual bonbons comment—the words that made Elizabeth crazy and led to the huge fight ten hours before Kitt’s death.
The first time Kitt said it was at the autism moms’ meeting after Georgetown’s neurologist retested Henry and pronounced him as “no longer falling within the autism spectrum.” There was champagne in party cups with rainbow-lettered Wow!s, and the moms were toasting, some even crying—though not necessarily from happiness; based on her own uncontrollable crying whenever she read those “my kid miraculously recovered from autism” memoirs, she knew the tears came from an oscillation between despair (“Someone else’s kid got better, while mine didn’t”) and hope (“Someone else’s kid got better, so mine could, too”).
Someone said something about good-bye, how they’d miss her at meetings. When Elizabeth said no, she planned to continue everything—meetings, biomed treatments, speech therapy, et cetera—that’s when Kitt did it. Shook her head at Elizabeth like she was crazy and said with a chuckle, “If I had a kid like yours, I’d lie around on my couch and eat bonbons all day.”
Elizabeth felt a jolt, like a prick, but she tried to smile. Tried to overlook the forced lightness in Kitt’s voice and the contemptuousness in her chuckle, the tonal equivalent of a teenager’s eye-roll at an overbearing mother. She told herself that Kitt was brash and sarcastic, a no-filters type, and the bonbons comment was her way—trying to be funny, with no idea how acidic her words were—of congratulating Elizabeth for finishing the marathon they’d started together and telling her she’d earned the right to relax. To enjoy life.
The problem was, Elizabeth wasn’t convinced that she (or Henry, rather) actually had reached the finish line. Not being autistic was not the same as being normal. Even the words the doctor used—“speech is virtually indistinguishable from typical peers”—made that clear: Henry wasn’t typical, but had learned to mimic it, like a lab-trained monkey. If he was careful, he could pass for normal, but it was a precarious kind of normal, one that teetered on the edge.
In that way, having a child recovered from autism was like having one in remission from cancer or recovered from alcoholism. Constantly being on guard for signs of anything abnormal, anything that may mean he’s slipping back, while trying not to slip into paranoia. Forcing a smile when others congratulate you for beating the odds, while anxiety churns in your stomach as you wonder how long this reprieve will last.
But she couldn’t say this to Kitt, to any autism mom. It would be like someone in remission crying about the possibility of eventually dying from recurrence to someone actually dying of cancer right now—not sufficiently appreciative of how lucky you have it, how your own troubles pale in comparison. So when Kitt said the bonbons thing, she didn’t argue that Henry might regress. She didn’t say how worried she still was—that Henry had no friends in his new class, that whenever he was sick or nervous, he reverted to his old ways of looking up and perseverating on the same phrase in a robotic monotone. No, whenever Kitt said it (which she seemed to think got funnier each time), Elizabeth just laughed along.
Except that last day. The morning of the explosion, walking to their cars, she was talking about MMS when Kitt said, “Why do you keep doing this shit? I think the protesters might have a point with you. Like I always say”—and she said her usual bonbons thing. Except this time, without laughing.
Elizabeth didn’t say anything. She got Henry in the car, gave him apple slices, and waited for Kitt to settle TJ in. When Kitt closed TJ’s door, Elizabeth said, “No, you wouldn’t.”
“I wouldn’t what?”
“You wouldn’t lie around and eat bonbons all day if TJ were like Henry. That’s not how parenting works, and you know it. You think every mom with typical kids is going, My kid isn’t special-needs so I have nothing to do; I think I’ll mail-order some bonbons from Paris? Believe me, I’d love to lie around and eat bonbons all day instead of taking care of Henry—what mom wouldn’t?—but there’s always something to worry about, something they need you for. If it’s not health, it’s school or friends or something. It never ends. How do you not know that?”
Kitt rolled her eyes. “It’s just a joke, Elizabeth. A figure of speech. I’m telling you to relax a little with this ‘I can’t rest until my child is absolutely perfect’ bullshit.”
“You have no right telling me to stop. No more than Teresa would have telling you to stop everything for TJ because he can walk.”
“That’s ludicrous.” Kitt turned to get away.
Elizabeth stepped in front of her. “Think about it. If Rosa could wake up tomorrow and be like TJ, it’d be a miracle—that’s what Teresa’s doing all the therapies for. But does that mean she has the right to say you shouldn’t try your hardest to get him beyond where he is now?”
Kitt shook her head. “You’ve got to lighten up. It’s a frigging joke.”
“No, I don’t think it is. I think you’r
e pissed. You’re jealous that the boys started out the same, and Henry’s improved and TJ hasn’t, and you’re trying to pull me down and make me feel guilty for leaving you behind. Well, guess what? I do feel guilty.” At this admission, Elizabeth felt all the resentment gush out of her body, leaving a warm tingling, like a numb foot waking up. Here, finally, was the chance to say everything: how guilty she felt, how much she missed Kitt, how sorry she was for all her judging and nagging.
She opened her mouth to say all this, to ask for forgiveness, when Kitt slumped against the hood of her car with her hands over her face. She thought Kitt might be crying and started to go to her, when Kitt dropped her hands. No tears. Her face a mix of tired and amused, an I-can’t-believe-I’m-talking-to-this-crazy-person look.
