Oma squares herself, bony shoulders rising as if she’s preparing for battle, as if she’s back in her old uniform giving marching orders to younger girls. “Then you’ll have to go with her,” she whispers, and she kisses me full on the lips, hard, like she did when I was small.
The horn blares again.
TWENTY
My grandmother has to be exaggerating, I think, as Malcolm winds us back the way we came. Has to be.
I know about the state schools from documents Malcolm has in his study, from still pictures that flash on the screen during Madeleine Sinclair’s weekly broadcasts. They aren’t home, but they look clean, and the kids in them smile their way through jump rope and hopscotch and team sports. Visiting parents lay out picnic blankets on thick patches of green and snap selfies to bring back home to grandmothers and aunts. The adults, the teachers, pause at each cluster of families, stopping to chat and answer questions.
Still, my own grandmother is comparing our yellow schools to work camps.
I don’t talk to Malcolm on the ride home because I don’t have anything to say. I also don’t expect he’ll break the silence, but that’s exactly what he does.
“You need to climb aboard the commonsense train, Elena.” His eyes are fixed ahead of him, on that double yellow line (yellow bus, I think), and his knuckles shine pale white as they clench the steering wheel. On his right cheek there’s a purplish bruise blooming. No blood, though. I kind of wish there were blood.
“I don’t think I like the commonsense train anymore, Malcolm,” I say between clenched teeth. In the side mirror to my right, I can see Freddie in the backseat. She’s counting telephone poles. Or mile marker signs. Counting something, anyway. It’s just as well. Anne has put her phone away and sits silent, listening.
Malcolm taps the wheel with his fingertips. If he were anyone else, I’d take it as a nervous twitch, but he isn’t anyone else. He’s Malcolm Fairchild, PH-fucking-D, and Dr. Fairchild never twitches nervously. He’s only tapping out the words he’s about to say before they escape his mouth.
About fifteen minutes from home, we turn off the main road, and the tapping stops.
“Your grandmother is old and prone to exaggerate.”
“Maybe. But I don’t want Freddie going to a state school.”
Now he slams his palm against the steering wheel. “Do you even stop to think how”—he jerks his head back slightly, toward Freddie—“breaking the rules for her would affect me? My career?”
My back’s up now. “I don’t know, Malcolm. Do you stop to think about your own daughter?”
“It’s for the best.”
“For the best,” Freddie echoes from the backseat. “All for the best. Best, best, best.” Then she goes silent again and returns to counting telephone poles.
“See what I mean?” says Malcolm.
When Freddie was five, I thought she was on the autism spectrum, maybe far off to one side of it but still on the spectrum. She simply wasn’t paying attention, wasn’t focusing. Several hours of testing and consulting, and several hundreds of dollars later, our pediatrician shook her head.
“Asperger’s?” I asked.
“That’s still on the spectrum, so I don’t think so,” she told me. “I’d be pushing the envelope with that diagnosis.”
“Then what’s wrong with her?” I asked. Even now, I want to bite my tongue when I hear myself saying it. Wrong. Like my daughter is some broken mechanism that needs to be fixed.
Dr. Nguyen laughed, not unkindly, and glanced toward the kids’ play area, where Freddie was building a tower of blocks. “Nothing’s wrong. Freddie’s a little anxious, that’s all. She’ll grow out of it.”
“Am I—are we—supposed to do anything? I mean, sometimes she curls up and blocks the world out,” I said. “Plus, she repeats things. Like an echo.”
Again, the doctor chuckled. “What do you want to do? Treat her like glass?” She put a hand on my arm. “Treat her like a little girl. That’s what she is. Maybe a bit nervous.” She scribbled an illegible prescription