by Leanne Davis
“Who are they?”
“Another psychologist that I saw for a while. One-on-one. He talked about it and described it to me from the eyes of others.”
“Like giving you a class in social skills or something?”
“No. That’s about the worst thing you could do to a kid like me. What? Put me in a group? Make me behave a certain way with others watching? No. It was one-on-one help when I was in high school.”
“What else?”
“It’s different for everyone. My psychologist told me they rate it on a spectrum. He considered me the highest of the high functioning. And almost typical.” He smiled at her quickly, then dropped his head back down. “But not totally. He gave me this example: think of it as being bipolar, which is rated on a spectrum too. On the mild end of the spectrum, the person might be having mood stability problems, while on the severe side, they might run down the street naked while yelling they are on fire. See the difference? Same underlying disorder, but extremely different symptoms. I know what you picture at hearing the word, autism, but that’s not me.”
“You have a sense of humor. I thought Asperger’s meant no sense of humor and monotone speaking.”
“I don’t check every box of what can be a symptom. I have narrow interests. I do have that problem. My focus can be a little too intense when I’m painting.”
“But just your painting? You don’t share it or seem to want to share it with others,” she said softly, and somehow, the term finally clicked as being true.
“That’s right. And some people with AS have and understand senses of humor. That was one reason my mom first argued against the diagnosis. I always managed to have friends, and I fit in pretty well and get the humor and sarcasm when I hear or read it. I told you before, it’s a fluid thing. And my version isn’t as extreme as the more obvious versions.”
“You also use inflection in your voice. I would have noticed if you spoke in a monotone.”
“I do, yeah, but I still frustrate you with how little I do speak. You’ve commented on that several times, so I try to talk more often with you. Look, this is how they finally explained it to me: I miss the most common verbal and nonverbal cues. I may appear normal when someone first meets me, and they might assume I’m maybe just quiet or don’t like to talk a lot; but after spending more time with me, some might find me a little odd.” A small smile touched his lips. “That’s how my sister used to describe me. She said I was just a little odd.”
Chloe ran both her hands through her hair as her anxiety overcame her. His sister. Back to that. There was so much here, so much shock and mystery and surprise, she didn’t even know where to start. “You were very close to her?”
“Yes.”
“There is so much I want to know, I don’t know what to ask first. How did she die?”
“Fell out of a window.”
Chloe didn’t expect that and her eyes penetrated his. “What?” she exclaimed louder than needed. “What did you just say?”
“She was at college, attending a party. She got drunk and sat on the ledge of a window several stories up. She fell out and the fall killed her.”
Chloe gasped. “Oh, my God. I—I don’t know what to say. That’s… that’s so horrible. Oh, God, your poor mother. Dok. That must have been… oh, my God…” She kept ranting on incoherently as she leaned over and gripped his hand but he didn’t respond to it. She slowly accepted the truth as she lifted her gaze up to his.
“You don’t like to touch much either, do you?”
“I’m not against it.”
“But it doesn’t comfort you, does it?”
“Not particularly.”
“Why do you touch me then?” she asked, and her expression turned crooked. There was so much to understand and she didn’t know how to process it.
“It helps you. I like to see you happy.”
“And after observing that, you want to do things that make me happy?”
He shrugged. “That’s probably the case, yes. I can’t say I ever thought it out though.”
“And sex?”
“I like sex,” he answered instantly. So eagerly, she almost smiled. But things were too serious and chaotic right now and she had too much information to process.
“But all the touching otherwise, that’s strictly for me?”
“That’s strictly for you.”
She nodded and pressed her lips together. “What was your sister’s name?”
“Hathai.”
“That’s pretty. Does it mean anything?”
“Heart.”
“How old was she? And how long ago did she die? Was she older than you?”
In an even tone, he answered her series of questions in the order she asked them, clinically and literally. “Twenty-one. She died six years ago, when she was twenty-one and I was eighteen.”
“I’m very sorry.”
He shrugged.
“So you approached me when my sister died because you recognized something? The pain, I mean. And you reacted to me the way you wished others had reacted to you?”
He leaned forward, pressing his hands to his temples. His face was pale and drawn. Whatever was going on inside him, this conversation wasn’t easy. “Yes.”
She nodded as so many different snippets from his past conversations collected in her head and settled together. Odd could describe him, and what she’d experienced so far with him. But then again, he was not unpleasantly odd. Not in a way she couldn’t stand him. “You really do understand about Ebony then.”
“I understand what losing a sister feels like.”
“Yes, I see that you do. Were you and your sister close?”
“Yes. My mom always said she was overly protective of me. She used to tell me I came across as being cold, neutral, stoic, reserved, and hard to read.”
“But you don’t necessarily see that about yourself? That is what you were told?”
He nodded. “Yes. I probably just don’t care. I only know the way I am often puzzles or bothers people. That’s what I’ve been told anyway.”
“Wow. And your sister?”
“She had the easiest time explaining my diagnosis to me. She probably helped me more than all the professional educators or doctors, combined. She was always pretty honest with me as well as others. She saw my condition as a difference in logic, but not a problem. I spent a lot of time with her, and my parents said a lot of the symptoms I had when I was younger improved as I got older.”
“What happened to your parents?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. They fought all the time after she died. They split up. Dad left and my mom needed a job. I was in school while she was floundering and feeling so sad without Hathai. She said she hated being all alone here.”
Chloe’s eyes shut. “So it made sense to you to come here to be with her.”
“Yes.”
“You got a job with me to keep an eye on her.”
“Yup.”
“What were you taking in school? Art?”
“No. That doesn’t make any money. That’s just something to do in my spare time. And I was always good at it. I went to school to study structural engineering. Well, that was the end goal. I only completed a year at community college.”
“Oh. Wow.” She bit her lip. He was kind of the opposite of what she pictured. One thinks of painters and artists in general as creative, impulsive, and emotional people. Not people who do it because they have natural talent, so hell, it makes sense to use it. And because it interested him. His interests were few and it gave him something to do by himself. Financially speaking, he was right, how many people could earn a career from it? He wasn’t prone to flights of fancy and had no illusions or daydreams of getting rich and famous or even appreciated for his art. He created it because he wanted to. End of story.
She blew out a breath. “I have about a thousand questions.”
“I’ll try and answer them.”
She clucked her tongue, restraining a smi
le. “Not actually a thousand.”
“Okay, then whatever you’ve got.”
“So by not telling me about your sister, you weren’t being callous or mean?”
His head shot up and he glanced at her. She assumed he was surprised, but again, his facial expression didn’t change. “No. Of course not. That’s what you think I was? For not saying it? I didn’t realize one had anything to do with the other.”
“It would seem natural to me. I believe most people would have told me about their dead sister after holding me on one of the dozens of occasions when I was crying over the death of my sister.”
He nodded. “Oh. Right. I see that now. I didn’t mean to keep it from you. Or hide it. I didn’t mean to do it anyway, actually. I just knew how much it hurt.”
“And you comforted me.”
“I don’t know. Yes. You like to be hugged.”
“I do. And you observed that over the three years that you’ve known me?”
“Yes.”
She closed her eyes and wilted forward. Holy shit. This was all so much. So unique. So not what she expected. She didn’t know how to process it.
“It makes me seem less. Or… or strange or something. I’m not, Chloe. At all. I’m just… I communicate a little differently. I can change if there’s something I do wrong. I don’t like to do it wrong. I’ll listen to you. I’ll learn. I will, if you need that from me.”
She sucked in a breath. It was a powerful plea. He wasn’t lying, playing games or being coy. She now fully understood what she sensed so strongly about him before. He was that honest. That literal. That concrete. While it drove her a little nuts, what with his incessant neutrality and the obvious things he didn’t say, other parts of his personality were overwhelmingly amazing. Like his focus on her. His ability to ignore what came natural to him, in order to make her happy.
None of this was anything like what she pictured. She knew about Asperger’s. It was stereotyped on TV and in the movies for years. It’s always used as a kind of cardboard place holder, portraying any monotone, odd, weird individual who doesn’t fit into normal society. People with AS are often portrayed to ramble on about long-winded, boring subjects, remaining oblivious to others or the reactions around them. They spit out awkwardly inappropriate statements in the middle of groups or conversations. In other words, people with AS have been typically portrayed as peculiar and woefully unable to fit into society. They weren’t portrayed as actual nuanced and valid people. People with as many characteristics and passions, faults and loves as anybody else. They were just people. And portraying them as so unlovable was not only false and unfair, but completely wrong. She now clearly understood that.
It never occurred to Chloe that someone could have Asperger’s and still interact and be a part of the social fabric without it being highly noticeable.
But she hadn’t known.
Knowing Chet, as she could well attest to now, that wasn’t the case at all. His sister—his dead sister—explained it correctly. You had to spend time with Chet to fully grasp he had his own, distinct personality. But it didn’t strike Chloe as being weird or indefinable, until he mentioned the actual term for it. She recalled the moments when she found him strange, but for the most part, he was helpful to her, and he appreciated her, and seemed wonderful and easy to be around. He wasn’t ever loud. And he didn’t prattle on and on about nothing. He was comfortable with prolonged silences and honest and trustworthy. He was funny too. He often added dry, sarcastic statements to conversations and his daily observations were both smart, savvy and often things she’d never have thought of or thought of in the ways that Chet did.
Chet was not at all the weird, awkward, or an uninteresting caricature of an Asperger’s sufferer that she’d seen in most of the media renditions. Perhaps no one was. It made her rethink everything she’d ever heard about being on the autism spectrum.
Chet was just Chet. And she not only respected, liked, cared for and relied on him. She could see herself falling in love with him.
This was a lot to take in, let alone begin to figure out how she felt about it. For this being a subject she never considered wondering about was kind of an understatement. She’d thought about different types of men she might like to date, from their professions, lifestyles and personalities to even considering if she cared whether she dated a man of her own skin color or not. Sure, she’d thought out all kinds of scenarios for the types of men she might date. But wondering how she’d feel or deal with a man who had—it was even hard for her to say it out loud, it felt so odd—autism… on the spectrum… whatever one wanted to label all this, she’d never in a moment’s pause wondered over it. She had never much paid attention to its characteristics to be honest, so she just didn’t know. For real. She didn’t really have an understanding of anything about it.
“I didn’t mean to keep my sister a secret from you. I see now that seems weird to you. But it wasn’t—” he kept shaking his head. “It wasn’t on purpose.”
She sucked in a breath. He was so earnest and real. So worried this could make her leave him and be gone. Like she was giving up on him and them.
But there was nothing about the words of what she knew about autism and what she knew about Chet that made it seem like there was any reason to leave him. None. She liked him, all of him, so much. So giving his traits a new label, though shocking and disconcerting didn’t change how she felt about him.
“Did you ever feel the need to talk about your sister?”
“No. It hurts to talk about her. So I don’t do it.”
She shuddered. “How can you forget your sister?”
He jerked upright as if she’d thumped him hard on the back. “I never, not for a day forget my sister. I told you, it hurts to talk about her, so I don’t, but it doesn’t mean I don’t care.”
She rubbed her hands together, confused about what to say. “I’m sorry, that was too far of me. But if your way to handle the same devastation is to not talk or cry or grieve out loud, how could you possibly want my way of dealing with this? Which is to do all that in excess, at least when compared to yours.”
He shrugged. “It’s not excessive. It’s what you do. It’s how you deal with things. You talk. You get emotional. You seek out comfort. That isn’t new, you have as long as I’ve known you. The only thing new here is it’s me you seek that from. I don’t compare my way to yours. I just understand that neither is wrong. They’re just different.”
Different. The simplicity of his argument made complete sense to her. It didn’t necessarily make him different however. Just in how he expressed things, communicated them, from her. Why was her way so “normal” and his so “different”? Who determined that?
“So you feel sympathy?”
“Yes. Of course I feel sympathy.” His shoulders jerked as if she’d pushed against him. His body language showed obvious anger at her question. She read that body language. What he was saying was he couldn’t always read hers, and especially couldn’t read a stranger’s? She tilted her head considering how frustrating that must be. He would struggle to interpret social situations and other people. She’d never considered how frustrating that must be. He was aware enough of himself to know he missed things, but for some reason, which was hard for her to comprehend, he could not easily read body language and facial expressions and assign feelings to them. So he didn’t have half the information she used to interpret and read social cues.
Then he shook his head, staring downwards. “Once I know or understand what someone else is feeling or expressing, I feel all that you do about them. The problem comes in that I don’t always “just know” where everyone else might “just know.” What might be obvious to you and most everyone else, might not be to me. If someone generically smiles at me, I note it. I see it. I don’t feel anything from it. I had to learn that most everyone else will automatically smile back, it’s considered polite, but I don’t just naturally do that. I make myself do that. I didn’t “just know” to do i
t. I note almost everything about everyone I meet, it just has no attached feelings inside me to know how to interpret it or react. So I miss things. Parts of the interactions that are subtle or nonverbal. I just don’t always express it or… or I don’t know to share how you might feel. But if I know, I feel as much sympathy as anyone, maybe even more.”
“And with this… when you heard me crying in the bathroom about Ebony, you knew. You were sure what I was feeling because it was obvious and you’d felt it yourself.”
“Yes.”
“Did you cry? Over your sister?”
“I cried. I… I felt a lot of things. It was hard.” The words were simple, beyond an understatement but the force of his words told her, it was far more devastating of an experience than he could communicate. His body language gave away a lot about him, which she was sure he might not fully grasp or understand.
“I’ve been kind of awful to you at times. I didn’t know… I didn’t understand somethings you said or did, but I should have been kinder about it. I couldn’t get out of myself enough to even try.”
“You didn’t mean most of it. I knew you were grieving.”
“How did you know? How did you not take my words at face value if you can’t fully read social cues?”
“I knew you before this happened. I knew how you were. I knew what losing a sister does, the feelings… they make it hard to be your normal.”
“Yes,” she said softly. His simple explanation more fully explained her mental state of late than all the ranting and raving she could have tried to use to explain what was inside of her.
“Chloe?”
She turned her head to him.
“There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m different. I get that. I can be hard for you to understand. But I’m no different than you’ve known me to be. And it doesn’t change that I love you.”
She stared at him, her eyes widening as she licked her lips. “And if you say it, I know you mean it.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Do you lie?”
“Sure. I’m not incapable of it. If something doesn’t make sense to me, I might fudge my reasoning. This doesn’t make me a robot.” She touched his hand again, forgetting that it didn’t help him. She tried to remove it but he clasped hers. “I know it’s the way you show caring. Touching me. So I… I’m used to doing it your way.”
