by Jodi Picoult
“Our medical staff can administer prescription meds,” the officer says. “I can get you a form to fill out for that.”
“There are dietary supplements, too. And he can’t eat glutens, or caseins—”
“Have his doctor contact the warden’s office.”
Jacob’s diet and supplements, however, weren’t mandated by a doctor—they were just tips, like a hundred others, that mothers of autistic kids had learned over the years and had passed down to others in the same boat, as something that might work. “When Jacob breaks the diet, his behavior gets much worse . . .”
“Maybe we should put all our inmates on it, then,” the officer says. “Look, I’m sorry, but if we don’t get a doctor’s note, we don’t pass it along to the inmate.”
Was it my fault that the medical community couldn’t endorse treatments that autistic parents swore by? That money for autism research was spread so thin that even though many physicians would agree these supplements helped Jacob to focus or to take the edge off his hypersensitivity, they couldn’t scientifically tell you why? If I’d waited for doctors and scientists to tell me conclusively how to help my son, he would still be locked in his own little world like he was when he was three, unresponsive and isolated.
Not unlike, I realize, a jail cell.
Tears fill my eyes. “I don’t know what to do.”
I must look like I’m about to fall apart, because the officer’s voice gets softer. “Your son have a lawyer?” he asks.
I nod.
“Might be a good place to start,” he suggests.
From Auntie Em’s column:
What I Know Now That I Wish I’d Known Before I Had Kids
1. If you stick a piece of bread in a VCR, it will not come out intact.
2. Garbage bags don’t work as parachutes.
3. Childproofing is a relative term.
4. A tantrum is like a magnet: eyes cannot help but lock onto you and your child when it happens.
5. Legos are not absorbed by the digestive tract.
6. Snow is a food group.
7. Kids know when you are not listening to them.
8. A Brussels sprout covered in cheese is still a Brussels sprout.
9. The best place to cry is in a mother’s arms.
10. You’ll never be as good a mother as you want to be.
From my car, I call Oliver Bond. “They won’t let me in to see Jacob,” I say.
In the background I can hear a dog bark. “Okay.”
“Okay? I can’t see my son, and you think that’s okay?”
“I meant okay, as in tell me more. Not okay as in . . . Just tell me what they said.”
“I’m not on some approved visitors list,” I shout. “Do you think Jacob has any idea that he needs to tell the jail who can and cannot visit him?”
“Emma,” the lawyer says. “Take a deep breath.”
“I can’t take a deep breath. Jacob does not belong in jail.”
“I know. I’m sorry about that—”
“Don’t be sorry,” I snap. “Be effective. Get me in to visit my son.”
He is quiet for a moment. “All right,” Oliver says finally. “Let me see what I can do.”
* * *
I can’t say it’s a surprise to find Theo at home, but I am so mentally drained that I don’t have the fortitude to ask him why he is here, instead of at school. “They wouldn’t let me in to see Jacob,” I say.
“How come?”
Instead of answering, I just shake my head. In the buttery light of late morning, I can see the softest down on Theo’s cheek and jaw. It reminds me of the first time I noticed that Jacob was growing hair underneath his armpits, and I was unnerved. It was one thing to be needed so fiercely by a child; it was another thing to have to take care of a grown man.
“Mom?” Theo says, hesitant. “Do you think he did it?”
Without thinking, I slap him hard across the face.
He falls back, reeling, his hand pressed to his cheek. Then he runs out the front door.
“Theo!” I call after him. “Theo!” But he is already halfway down the block.
I should follow him; I should apologize. I should confess that the reason I hit him wasn’t what he said but because he gave voice to all the unutterable thoughts I’ve been thinking.
Do I believe Jacob is capable of murder?
No.
The easy answer, the knee-jerk reaction. This is my son we are talking about. The one who still asks me to tuck him in at night.
But I also remember Jacob knocking over Theo’s high chair when I told him he could not have another glass of chocolate soy milk. I remember the time he hugged a hamster to death.
Mothers are supposed to be their children’s biggest cheerleaders. Mothers are supposed to believe in their children, no matter what. Mothers will lie to themselves, if necessary, to do this.
I step outside and walk down the driveway, in the direction Theo ran. “Theo,” I call. My voice does not sound like my own.
* * *
I have clocked 193 miles today on my car, driving to Springfield and then back home and returning again. At five-thirty I am again in the lobby of the jail visitors’ entrance, with Oliver Bond standing beside me. He left a message on my cell phone instructing me to meet him here, explaining that he’d arranged a special visit for me while he sorted out long-term visiting plans.
I was so happy to hear this that I didn’t even dwell on the phrase long-term.
At first, I hardly recognize Oliver. He isn’t wearing a suit, like he was yesterday; instead, he’s in jeans and a flannel shirt. This makes him seem even younger. I glance down at my own clothes—which look like something I’d wear to a staff meeting at the newspaper. What made me think I had to dress up for jail?
Oliver leads me to the booth. “Name?” the officer asks.
“Emma Hunt,” I say.
He looks up. “No, the name of the person you’re here to visit.”
“Jacob Hunt,” Oliver interjects. “We’ve arranged a special visit through the superintendent’s office.”
The officer nods and hands me a clipboard to sign. He asks for my ID.
“Give him your keys,” Oliver says. “He’ll hold them while you’re inside.”
I pass them to the officer and then step toward the metal detector. “Aren’t you coming?”
Oliver shakes his head. “I’ll be waiting out here.”
A second officer arrives to lead me down the hall. Instead of turning in to a room where there are tables and chairs set up, though, he leads me around the corner to a small cubicle. At first, I think it is a closet, but then I realize it’s a visiting booth. A stool is pushed beneath a window that looks into a mirror image of this room. A handset is stuck to the wall. “I think there’s been a mistake,” I say.
“No mistake,” the officer tells me. “Noncontact visits only for inmates in protective custody.”
He leaves me in the tiny chamber. Had Oliver known I wouldn’t be able to see Jacob face-to-face? Had he not told me because he knew it would upset me, or had he not been given this information? And what is protective custody?
The door on the other side of the glass opens, and suddenly Jacob is there. The officer who’s brought him points to the telephone on the wall, but Jacob has seen me through the glass. He presses his palms flat against it.
He has blood on his shirt and in his hair. His forehead is covered with a line of purple bruises. His knuckles are scraped raw, and he is stimming like crazy—his hand twitching at his side like a small animal, his entire body bouncing on his toes. “Oh, baby,” I murmur. I point to the phone in my hand and then to the spot where he should have a receiver, too.
He doesn’t pick it up. He smacks his palms against the Plexiglas that separates us.
“Pick up the phone,” I cry, even though he cannot hear me. “Pick it up, Jacob!”
Instead, he closes his eyes. He sways forward and rests his cheek against the window, spreads
his arms as wide as they can go.
I realize he is trying to embrace me.
I put the receiver down and step up to the window. I mimic his position, so that we are mirrors of each other, with a glass wall between us.
Maybe this is what it is always like for Jacob, who tries to connect with people and can’t ever quite manage it. Maybe the membrane between someone with Asperger’s and the rest of the world is not a shifting invisible seam of electrons but, instead, a see-through partition that allows only the illusion of feeling, instead of the actual thing.
Jacob steps away from the window and sits on the stool. I pick up the phone, hoping he will follow my lead, but he isn’t making eye contact. Eventually, he reaches for his receiver, and for a moment, I see some of the joy that used to spread across his face when he discovered something startling and came to share it with me. He turns the receiver over in his hands and then holds it to his ear. “I saw these on CrimeBusters. On the episode where the suspect turned out to be a cannibal.”
“Hey, baby,” I say, and I force myself to smile.
He is rocking as he sits. His free hand, the one not holding the receiver, flutters, as if he is playing an invisible piano.
“Who hurt you?”
He touches his fingers gingerly to his forehead. “Mommy? Can we go home now?”
I know precisely the last time Jacob called me that. It was after his middle school graduation, when he was fourteen. He had received a diploma. Mommy, he had said, running up to show me. The other kids had heard him, and they burst out laughing. Jacob, they teased, your mommy’s here to take you home. Too late, he had learned that, when you’re fourteen, looking cool in front of your friends trumps unadulterated enthusiasm.
“Soon,” I say, but the word comes out like a question.
Jacob doesn’t cry. He doesn’t scream. He just lets the receiver drop from his hand, and then he puts his head down.
I automatically reach toward him, and my hand smacks into the Plexiglas.
Jacob’s head lifts a few inches, and then falls. His forehead strikes the metal plate of the counter. Then he does it again.
“Jacob! Don’t!” But of course, he can’t hear me. His receiver dangles from its metal umbilicus, where it fell when he let go.
He keeps hitting his head, over and over. I throw open the door to the visitation booth. The officer who brought me there is standing outside, leaning against the wall. “Help me,” I cry, and he glances over my shoulder to see what Jacob is doing, then runs down the hallway to intervene.
Through the window of the visitation booth, I watch him and a second officer grab Jacob by the arms and haul him away from the window. Jacob’s mouth is twisted, but I cannot tell if he is screaming or sobbing. His arms are pinned behind his back so that he can be handcuffed, and then one of the officers shoves him in the small of the back to propel him forward.
This is my son, and they are treating him like a criminal.
The officer returns a moment later, to take me back to the jail lobby. “He’s going to be fine,” I am told. “The nurse gave him a sedative.”
When Jacob was younger and more prone to tantrums, a doctor put him on olanzapine, an antipsychotic. It got rid of his tantrums. It also got rid of his personality, period. I would find him sitting on the bedroom floor with one shoe on, the other still on the floor beside him, staring unresponsively at the wall. When he began to have seizures, we took him off the drug and never experimented with any others.
I picture Jacob lying on his back on the floor of a cell, his pupils dilated and unfocused, as he slips in and out of consciousness.
As soon as I reach the lobby, Oliver approaches with a big smile on his face. “How’d it go?” he asks.
I open my mouth and burst into tears.
I fight for Jacob’s IEPs, and I wrestle him to the ground when he goes ballistic in a public place. I have carved a life out of doing what needs to be done, because you can rail to the heavens, but in the end, when you’re through, you will still be ankle-deep in the same situation. I am the one who’s strong, so that Jacob doesn’t have to be.
“Emma,” Oliver says, and I imagine he is as embarrassed as I am to find me sobbing in front of him. But to my surprise, he folds his arms around me and strokes my hair. Even more surprising . . . for a moment, I let him.
This is what you can’t explain to a mother who doesn’t have an autistic child: Of course I love my son. Of course I would never want a life without him. But that doesn’t mean that I am not exhausted every minute of the day. That I don’t worry about his future, and my lack of one. That sometimes, before I can catch myself, I imagine what my life would have been like if Jacob did not have Asperger’s. That—like Atlas—I think just for once it would be nice to have someone else bear the weight of my family’s world on his shoulders, instead of me.
For five seconds, Oliver Bond becomes that person.
“I’m sorry,” I say, pushing away from him. “I got your shirt all wet.”
“Yeah, Woolrich flannel is really delicate. I’ll add the dry-cleaning bill to the retainer.” He approaches the control booth and retrieves my license and keys, then leads me outside. “Now. What happened in there?” Oliver asks.
“Jacob hurt himself. He must have been smacking his head against something—his forehead is completely bruised, and there were bandages, and blood all over his scalp. He started to do it again just now in the visitation booth, and they gave him a tranquilizer. They won’t give him his supplements, and I don’t know what he’s eating, or if he’s eating at all, and—” I break off, meeting his gaze. “You don’t have children, do you?”
He blushes. “Me? Kids? I, um . . . no.”
“I watched my son slip away once, Oliver. I fought too hard to bring him back to let him go again. If Jacob is competent to stand trial, he won’t be after two weeks of this. Please,” I beg. “Can’t you do anything to get him out?”
Oliver looks at me. In the cold, his breath takes shape between us. “No,” he says. “But I think you can.”
Jacob
1
1
2
3
5
8
13
And so on.
This is the Fibonacci sequence. It can be defined explicitly:
It can be defined recursively, too:
a0 = 1
a1 = 1
an = an-2 + an-1
This means that it is an equation based on its previous values.
I am forcing myself to think in numbers, because no one seems to understand what I say when I speak English. It is like a Twilight Zone episode where words suddenly have changed their meaning: I say stop and it keeps going; I ask to leave and they lock me up tighter. This leads me to two conclusions:
1. I am being punk’d. However, I don’t think my mother would have let the joke go on for quite this long, which leads me to:
2. No matter what I say, no matter how clearly I say it, no one understands me. Which means I must find a better method of communication.
Numbers are universal, a language that transcends countries and time. This is a test: if someone—just one person—can understand me, then there is hope that he’ll understand what happened at Jess’s house, too.
You can see Fibonacci numbers in the flowering of an artichoke or the scales of a pinecone. You can use their sequence to explain how rabbits reproduce. As n approaches infinity, the ratio of a(n) to a(n −1) approaches phi, the golden ratio—1.618033989—which was used to build the Parthenon and appears in compositions by Bartók and Debussy.
I am walking, and with every step I let another number in the Fibonacci sequence come into my head. I move in smaller and smaller circles to the middle of the room, and when I get there, I start over.
1
1
2
3
5
8
13
21
34
55
; 89
144
An officer comes in, carrying a tray. Behind him is a nurse. “Hey, kid,” he says, waving his hand in front of me. “Say something.”
“One,” I reply.
“Huh?”
“One.”
“One what?”
“Two,” I say.
“It’s dinnertime,” the officer tells me.
“Three.”
“You gonna eat this, or throw it again?”
“Five.”
“I think it’s pudding tonight,” the officer says, pulling the cover off the tray.
“Eight.”
He inhales deeply. “Yum.”
“Thirteen.”
Finally, he gives up. “I told you. It’s like he’s on a different planet.”
“Twenty-one,” I say.
The nurse shrugs and lifts up a needle. “Blackjack,” she says, and she plunges the syringe into my bottom while the officer holds me still.
After they are gone, I lie on the floor, and with my finger, I write the equation of the Fibonacci sequence in the air. I do this until it gets blurry, until my finger is as heavy as a brick.
The last thing I remember thinking before I disappear is that numbers make sense. You cannot say the same about people.
Oliver
The Vermont public defender’s office is not called the public defender’s office but rather something that sounds like it was ripped from the pages of a Dickens novel: the Office of the Defender General. However, like in all public defender’s offices, the staff is overworked and underpaid. Which is why, after I send Emma Hunt off with her own homework, I head to my apartment-office to complete my own.
Thor greets me by jumping up and nailing me right in the groin. “Thanks, buddy,” I wheeze, and I brush him off. He’s hungry, though, so I feed him leftover pasta mixed with kibble while I look up the information I need on the Internet and make a phone call.
Although it’s 7:00 P.M.—long past office hours—a woman picks up. “Hi there,” I say. “My name’s Oliver Bond. I’m a new attorney in Townsend.”
“We’re closed now—”
“I know . . . but I’m a friend of Janice Roth, and I’m trying to track her down?”
