A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself

by Peter Ho Davies

  “Yeah,” he sighs. “What about you?”

  She nods slowly, as if surprised herself.

  The marbles go into a Tupperware. Plink, plink, like prayers.

  “I just wanted to help,” he whispers.

  “I know.”

  He rolls the last marble, a blue cat’s-eye, back and forth between finger and thumb.

  “But what if you can’t?” she asks. “I know you want to protect women. Fine. But who do you think you’re protecting them from? Who do you picture? What if men are the problem? What if abortion at root is an undoing of the power of men? Can a man help with that?”

  He opens his mouth, closes it.

  Didn’t he say the selfsame thing about the US in the Middle East? Not that help wasn’t needed, just that America—so tarnished, so compromised by the invasion and all that followed—couldn’t offer it. Too much a part of the problem to be the solution.

  She takes his hand and squeezes.

  “What if you can’t help, but I told you it was okay? That I wouldn’t love you less? That I need your help? Here.”

  And he nods, swallows. “I’d still like to donate.”

  “Sure. Yes. Of course!”

  “It’s not like I don’t have regrets,” she says, taking his hand. “About a million of them. What do you think I talk about in therapy? But I wouldn’t have done anything differently.”

  He sighs. “I think I need a drink.”

  “I don’t,” she says, reading him. “But I’ll keep you company. And yes, we talk about that, too. You know what she reminded me? That the first drink I took, the first time we were pregnant, was after we got the final diagnosis, after we’d decided.”

  He pours two glasses of red, raises one.

  “Regrets.”

  They touch rims silently.

  “Except,” she whispers leaning close as if for a kiss, “it’s not really regret, you know. It’s grief.”

  III

  Heads, Twice

  They get the boy tested. At long last. They sit in another waiting room, waiting.

  A special doctor they tell the boy, assure him there will be no shots.

  “Promise?”

  The doctor takes his hand, leads him away.

  I’ve got a bad feeling about this, the father thinks.

  The judgment of the world. He feels it turning inexorably from himself to the boy, wishes he could shield him from it, fears he’s destined, like all parents, to only be the lens that focuses it.

  Another waiting room, but always the same lonely activity cube in the corner. He can’t recall a kid spinning its gears or flipping its alphabet tiles in anything but the most desultory way. On top there’s always a bead maze. Sometimes, its scribble looks like a model of his brain. Today the tangle of multicolored wires makes him think of a bomb he needs to defuse.

  Tick-tick-tick.

  He’s seized by the sudden need to get out of there.

  But by then the receptionist is calling them back. The tests are done, done, done.

  * * *

  The boy is what’s known as “twice exceptional,” the doctor says. They look at him blankly. “Gifted,” he says, “but also challenged.” They look at him blankly.

  “Autistic?” the mother whispers.

  The doctor smiles softly, and they start to exhale.

  “Somewhere on the spectrum, probably,” he says. “Spectrum-y, spectrum-ish—best not to get too hung up on labels. Atypical, yes, but very high functioning.”

  The father thinks of a prism, the light refracted into its constituent wavelengths. The boy has a rainbow night-light that works on the same principle. “It’s a very broad spectrum,” the doctor adds. “It’s hard to say for sure.”

  The father nods (some wavelengths are invisible, he recalls from his physics); the mother cries jaggedly; the doctor looks embarrassed.

  “All I want is an answer,” she sobs. “All I want is to know. Is that too much? Either/or. Heads or tails. But what you’re telling me is both. Both!” she spits. “It’s like some fucking good news/bad news joke.

  “No!” she snaps at the father when he puts a hand on hers. “I just want it to stop.”

  The doctor discreetly assures them of a full write-up to follow.

  The father feels dazed. His heart had lifted at that word, “exceptional.” Now he feels tricked, sucker-punched. The boy’s exceptional, except . . .

  He flashes on the line of Fitzgerald’s. “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time.” Another test. But not of intelligence (that just seems like so much flattery). To him it seems suddenly like a test of humanity.

  While they compose themselves for the boy to reappear, the father says quietly, “I’d probably be on that spectrum if they’d ever tested me as a kid.” She looks at him—he braces as if for a blow—takes his hand tightly in hers.

  And then the boy is there, beaming around a lollipop. He likes this doctor—zero shots!—enjoyed the games. They walk out hand in hand in hand, swinging the boy between them.

  “Can we come again?” he asks.

  “No!” the father tells him, and his face falls.

  Lately, when refused, the boy’s taken to sighing heavily, adding a dutiful “Well, please?” Not as if it really is a “magic” word, but as if they think it is. As if it’s some irksome game he’s outgrown like Simon Says.

  But this time he stays silent.

  * * *

  The mother reads up on it, but the father has never cared for the bogus debate about vaccines. To him it just seems a way of finding something or someone, anything and anyone, to blame. He understands the desire, but he already has people to blame. Himself. God. Not that they can ever be brought to account. Vaccines, drug companies, doctors, will just have to get in line.

  * * *

  Twice exceptional . . . half functional, the father catches himself thinking in the weeks that follow as he watches the boy put his clothes on backward, shrug on his backpack before his coat. It’s the impatience talking. He wills himself to breathe, to think of the boy—his capacity for joy, his gentleness—as a child half full.

  * * *

  He’ll still seethe, mostly inwardly he hopes, at the show-offs and prodigies, the gifted and the precocious. But he will also study the parents of more severely challenged kids as they wait together in waiting rooms, study them with admiration and sympathy and a shame-filled aversion indistinguishable from relief. They’re saints and martyrs, and he wants nothing to do with them.

  * * *

  They decide to change schools. The father lets the mother tell the teacher on the boy’s last day.

  There are other options, smaller schools, private schools. Not cheap—the father will have to teach summer session—but not required to administer standardized tests either. (“No tests!” They high-five the boy.)

  “Oh, yes, a lot of our kids are 2e,” one principal tells them. “We love them.”

  “Project based,” “child centered,” she says, but it’s the word “love” that they’ll gladly, gratefully pay for.

  2e being how the diagnosis is abbreviated. Almost as if it wasn’t exceptional at all.

  2e or not 2e, the father can’t help thinking. The next question.

  * * *

  That summer is their museum period: the era of natural history, the epoch of ancient civilizations, the eon of planetaria. It is the Age of Aquariums, the mother sings, the Age of Aquariums . . .

  Normal, normal, normal. They do all the normal things—hot dogs at the ballpark, cotton candy on the boardwalk, glow sticks on the Fourth. Look at us, he thinks, just like everyone else. Fake it till you make it.

  That August: a family vacation. San Fran, Monterey, LA. And for one shimmeringly hot day, Disneyland, mecca of childhood. His own parents never brought him; he never quite forgave them.

  They get there early to do everything (even if the most heart-pounding adrenaline rush turns out to be find
ing a bathroom after the boy drinks a Goofy Glacier). By the evening, his wife is crying with tiredness on Main Street, fireworks glittering in her tears. She’s been complaining about Disney’s California Adventure—the fake Fisherman’s Wharf, the faux Santa Monica Pier, the fiberglass redwoods and plywood Sierras. We’re in real California! Why’s everybody here? Happiest place on earth, he reminds her sternly, the boy slumped asleep on his shoulder. But what he means is: the normalest.

  * * *

  The report the doctor promised arrived before the trip. The envelope is still waiting when they return. The wife tears it open like a scab.

  He’s fine, she says afterward. The same, unchanged, himself. His normal.

  She is laughing and crying.

  We’re the ones who are fucked up. What were we so afraid of?

  The worst, he thinks. That’s all.

  Second grade is a second chance. Another flip of the coin. But for once, luck seems to be with them. The place they liked best is expanding, moving to a new building, taking new kids. The teacher loves the boy, the boy loves the teacher, the parents love the school.

  It won’t necessarily last, they know, but they cherish it all the more for that. You only know luck by its opposite.

  * * *

  Behind this new school, across a parking lot, behind a line of dwarf conifers, and beyond another parking lot is a low, blank building. Windowless, unmarked, facing away. It could be the back of a box store, some generic office building. It happens to be the clinic he volunteered at.

  They don’t share a street, which is why he didn’t realize before, but he confirms it on Google Maps.

  You couldn’t make that up, he thinks. You couldn’t put that in fiction. How could you? It’s so contrived. No one would accept it. But there it is. Life is a terrible fucking writer.

  He spots Barb at pickup one afternoon doing her rounds. After a moment she waves back. “Well, look who it is!” He walks over, holding the boy’s hand tight as if they were crossing a busy street. “Hello, cutie. What’s your name?”

  The boy tells her shyly, but soon grows bored with the adult pleasantries, asks if he can go play. The father is relieved to see him run off to join his friends (relieved and still momentarily dazzled: He has friends!).

  He asks Barb if it isn’t awkward, having the school nearby now, but she laughs. “They’re good neighbors, actually. Private school; crunchy, liberal parents.” She gives him a look. “Best of all, the antis don’t like the little ones to see them yelling or waving bloody signs. Plus, the one time they trespassed on school grounds, the principal told them off.”

  He can believe it. He’s seen her freeze a dozen kids with a frown.

  The only protester in evidence is standing vigil at the end of the drive beside an eight-foot-tall cross.

  “Impressive.”

  “Oh, Ross. I’ll tell you his secret. He has a little caster fixed to the foot of it, wheels it away at the end of the day like a golf bag. We call him ‘Holy Roller.’

  “How are you?” she asks.

  “Good. Better.”

  She beams.

  “And you?”

  “Outstanding!” She’s training to be a doula.

  He must look startled. As if Barb were looking for her own absolution.

  “Yeah. Doc got me into it. You know she splits her days between the clinic and the hospital?”

  (He hadn’t.) “Doing . . . deliveries?”

  “Sure. Don’t look so confused. It’s called ‘pro-choice’ for a reason, you know. Supporting women who choose to have kids and those who don’t.”

  “Of course,” he agrees hastily, but silently he exults, Both! Both! Both!

  Behind her a car pulls slowly into the lot, the anti stands a little straighter.

  “Gotta go.” Her smile crooks. “We all have our Ross to bear.”

  * * *

  It’s a small town, after all. Comes a moment when he recognizes a face, he doesn’t know where from. They’re at a store, he and the boy. Or maybe a café, the movies. A woman. They smile hesitantly, exchanges pleasantries, he waves her ahead in line—the kind of gesture he likes to make in front of the child to set a good example. She thanks him, beams at the boy, asks his name, and in that moment he recognizes her, recalls the context of their last encounter, even her Barb-bestowed nickname—“Scary Poppins,” on account of her black umbrella—and his face must change, betray him. She sees it, though her puzzlement tells him she hasn’t placed him yet. Instead, she reads his flinch as a rejection, as if he’s smelled something bad, spotted spinach in her teeth, guessed her age. And then slowly it comes to her too. They stare at each other over the boy’s head, and the father feels himself tense—to what? Cover her mouth? Cover his son’s ears? But she only gives the barest of nods, turns away. A small mercy, a narrow escape.

  What are the odds?

  “Who was that?” the boy asks.

  “Just someone.”

  It’s a small town after all. Eventually you’re bound to run into someone who thinks you’re a baby killer.

  * * *

  He never recognizes a client from the clinic, but those women he only saw once. Still, it makes him wonder how long he’d have volunteered before someone he knew came along. A friend, a neighbor. A student.

  Another reason he’s relieved he quit.

  He doesn’t like to know too much about his students, get too close. Not that he doesn’t like them, often he does, but something he insists on in class is that they must treat each other’s work as fiction, avoid the autobiographical assumption. Comments like “I’m so sorry that happened to you” are out of bounds, as inadmissible as the writer’s limp defense “It’s all true.” It doesn’t matter! he tells them. The truth isn’t always credible; sometimes it’s downright inconceivable. (“In-con-ceiv-able!” as he hears it from The Princess Bride, the boy’s old favorite.)

  Lately, though, a couple of his students have babysat the boy. He watches them read to him—now who’s in loco parentis?—feels bizarrely like a grandfather. The same feeling he gets when he meets the boy’s teachers, and they’re all younger than him.

  * * *

  There’s an equation they never talk about. Technically, an inequality.

  (The father is the one who does math with the boy—they used to do LEGO at the dinner table; now they do math—for which he earns the nickname “the Ruiner,” for ruining the boy’s fun. A supervillain’s name! The father is hurt, tries to make a joke of it, get the boy to give the mother one. “The Amomination?” he suggests hopefully, but it doesn’t stick.)

  Would they have had the boy if they had had the girl first? A question in two parts:

  1. Would they have had the boy if they had had a healthy girl?

  Probably not, the father thinks. He’s an only child himself. They started late. He’s not sure they could have afforded a second. Besides, as they tell each other, just about their only parenting “skill” is outnumbering the child.

  2. Would they have had the boy if they hadn’t had the abortion?

  Technically, the outcome of one coin flip doesn’t depend on another. But what if it determines whether you’ll even flip again?

  Does this make it more or less likely that they’ll ever tell the boy? the father wonders. The secret hangs over them, dark and massive as an asteroid. It makes them bow their heads.

  Amomination, he whispers in the darkness. Ruiner, she replies.

  They used to call each other “Baby,” “Babe.” He doesn’t remember when they stopped, who stopped first. We thought we were being ironic, she notes. Now it seems weirdly sincere. We were babies. Such babies!

  One nickname that does catch on. Among themselves, giggling and shushing, they call the hypo­chondriacal grandmother “the Gram Reaper.” They laugh like hyenas. They laugh like drains. Guilty, dirty laughter. The best kind. A bad laugh even better than a good cry.

  * * *

  Deep, dark parental secrets, as typically revealed in stor
ies (a partial list):

  We’re getting a divorce!

  We’re not your parents!

  I . . . am your father!

  We bought you/sold you/left you/found you.*

  You have a half-/twin/mad/evil brother/sister!*

  (*Delete as appropriate.)

  Never: We deleted your sister.

  The time comes when they can feel almost nostalgic for the boy’s childhood, the phases that pass so swiftly. He will never be four again, never be five again, never be six again. Another birthday, and another, and another. The longest day. The longest day. The longest day.

  The first time the boy sleeps over at a friend’s, they wander the house as if they’ve lost something. Not him, but their old selves.

  Later on his first over-night school trip—Chicago!—they’ll go to dinner and a movie, get drunk, dance, make noisy love. And still, in the spinning darkness afterward, the house will feel hollow and they, bereaved.

  “It’s not like it was before him,” she’ll whisper. “It’s what it’ll be like after.”

  In the garden, a steppingstone the boy made, a bird feeder.

  On the fridge, a collage. On the mantel, a card. On the sill, a crooked vase.

  The smudge of a sticker peeled off a door, the chip in a bowl, scratches on the wood floor. He’s everywhere and nowhere.

  An older friend warns: “It goes even faster when they get to ten, eleven, twelve. The worst is their teens. You’re missing their childhood, but really you’re mourning your own youth.”

  Every summer now: a clear-out of old clothes and toys and books the boy has outgrown. It has to be done, the mother and father tell each other. They wade into closets, sort through storage bins, linger over tiny T-shirts, past treasures. The boy who loved them so fiercely for an hour or a week, who slept with them, bathed with them, begged for them, named them, has no sentiment about these things. It’s the mother and father who find it hard to let them go. When the father finally takes a couple of boxes to a musty resale store—Buy Buy Baby—he’s offended at how little he gets, feels cheap for selling these memories. There are other secondhand stores—Klassic Kids, Boomerang!—but from then on they donate everything to Goodwill, Kiwanis, the Salvation Army. As if it all belonged to someone we’ve lost, he can’t help thinking, handing them over to a blowzy volunteer, and in a way he guesses they have. First the baby, then the toddler, the preschooler, the kindergartener, gone forever.