The Center of Everything - By Laura Moriarty Page 0,113

just pointing.

“I can’t believe it,” my mother says. Her eyes are wide, her hands pushed up under the glitter hat. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

I stay silent, watching his doll eyes. My mother is never this happy anymore, and I don’t want to ruin it for her. She thinks she’s found a key, a way in, and proof that something is going on behind the blank blue sky of Samuel’s eyes. I don’t want to steal this from her. But I think she’s tricking herself, seeing something because she wants to see it, not because it’s there.

But Verranna Hinckle is impressed with the pointing, even more excited about it than my mother. She comes over and takes pictures with a Polaroid camera, watching Samuel’s arm move this way and that, writing down notes on her clipboard. This pointing is a very good sign, she says, an important step. She likes what my mother is doing with the radio.

“You just don’t know,” she says, pushing up the sleeves of her turtleneck. “There was a girl in Pennsylvania who never talked and never looked back. Severe autism. But then, finally, somebody thought to give her a pen, and the first thing she wrote was a sonnet.” She nods at my mother proudly, as if she herself had something to do with this miracle. “It rhymed and everything. Fourteen lines.”

I am standing in the doorway eating an apple, watching Verranna Hinckle carefully. I am suspicious of her now, with her little snub nose and her clipboard and her notes for her dissertation. I don’t like her getting my mother’s hopes up. I take a pen and slide it into Samuel’s hand.

Nothing. He doesn’t even look at it. He bangs his fist though, and we have to take the pen away from him so he won’t stab himself. I look at Verranna Hinckle, and she looks back at me. She wears glasses too.

“Well, it’s not always that drastic, of course,” she says. “Sometimes it’s just a blinking of the eyes, but at least then you’re communicating. At least then you know he’s in there.” She keeps talking, looking only at my mother. “Right now we should concentrate on the basics, meaning self-care. I want you to keep his hand under yours when you feed him. Let him get the feel of it. We won’t know what he can do unless we give him a chance.” She squints down at Samuel, tapping her fingers on the counter. She tells my mother there are people just as disabled as Samuel who have learned to feed themselves, to use sign language, to use the telephone in an emergency. My mother nods, holding Samuel’s twisted hand. She is believing this. She believes that Samuel might be able to use the telephone.

If I weren’t so mad I would laugh. As if, when someone answered, there would be something for him to say.

I think Travis actually wants to be Mr. Goldman now. I am only waiting for him to show up on the bus one day with his hair long in the front but short in the back, wearing an ironed shirt and a tie, a U.S. News & World Report tucked under one of his arms. All of a sudden, Travis wants to travel. He says Mr. Goldman has been to Italy and Japan. He’s gone looking for kangaroos in Australia.

“You’re not going to believe this story,” Travis says, leaning over the back of his seat on the bus. “This is great.”

The story is that when Mr. Goldman was just out of college, he and two of his friends went to Australia together, and they drove into the outback to try to find kangaroos. They spent a whole day, looking and looking, but the only kangaroo they saw was the one they hit with the jeep they were driving home. Thunk, and that was it. They felt bad, but then finally decided they should at least take a picture of the dead kangaroo, since that’s what they had come out there to see.

“Gross,” I say.

“Just wait,” Travis says, pinching my shoulder. “Listen.”

Mr. Goldman and his friends thought it might make a funny picture if they picked the kangaroo up and held it in between them with his sunglasses on its face, so it would look like the kangaroo was having a good time instead of being dead. They ended up putting his sunglasses and his friend’s jacket on the kangaroo. But when the flash of the camera went