Stella McCartney, Marc Jacobs, Céline. You had good taste, you think. And a good budget, thanks to Tim.
You pick out a loose Indian-styled dress, something easy to wear. “I’ll leave you to it,” he says tactfully, stepping out.
Remembering that hideous plastic skull, you avert your eyes from the mirror as you pull the gown off, but then you can’t help looking. Your body hasn’t been this toned for years, you catch yourself thinking: not since you gave birth to Danny—
But this isn’t a body. Those limbs were put together in an engineering bay, your skin color sprayed on in a paint booth. And below the waist you simply fade into smoothness, as blank and sexless as a doll. With a shudder, you pull the dress over your head.
There’s a sudden crash from downstairs, the front door slamming open. Feet pound the stairs.
“Danny, don’t run,” a female voice says.
“Don’t wrun!” a small voice mumbles. “Wrunning!” The running feet don’t slow down.
Danny. Spinning around, you catch a glimpse of dark hair, deep-set eyes, a taut elfin face, as he hurtles down the landing. Maternal love sluices through you. You can’t believe how big he is! But of course, he must be almost ten. You’ve missed half his life.
You follow him to his room. He’s already pulled an armful of toy trains from under his bed. “Line them up. Line them uuuuup,” he mutters feverishly as he sorts them, biggest to smallest, placing them precisely against the baseboard.
“Danny?” you say. He doesn’t respond.
“Danny, looking,” the woman’s voice prompts firmly behind you. Danny does look up then, his gaze passing blankly over yours. There’s nothing in it, no hint of recognition that you’re even a person, let alone his mother.
“Great looking. Good job.” The woman steps past you and crouches next to Danny. She’s in her twenties, blond and cheerful, her hair tied back in a ponytail. “High five, Danny!”
“Sian, this is—” Tim begins.
“I know what it is,” Sian says, giving you a look even blanker than the one Danny just did. “High five, Danny!” she repeats.
Without lifting his eyes from his trains, Danny flaps his hand in her direction. She moves her own hand so he makes contact with it. “Good looking, good high-fiving,” she says encouragingly, “but now we’re going to go back and walk upstairs properly. Then you’ll get extra time with Thomas.” She holds out her hand. When he doesn’t respond, she says clearly, “Stand up and hold my hand, Danny.”
Reluctantly, he gets up and takes it. “Well done! Good standing,” she says as she leads him away.
“She’s a very good therapist,” Tim says when they’re out of earshot. “When she joined us, Danny wasn’t engaging with anything except food and his trains. Now we’re getting about a dozen exchanges a day.”
“That’s great,” you say, although that it still stings. “I’m so proud of you both.”
You say it, but you remember your excitement when the two of you first discovered applied behavior analysis, this way of teaching children with autism that, according to some studies, was even capable of curing them, or at least making them indistinguishable from other kids. If you’d known then that five years later, Danny would still be working on eye contact, would you have had the energy to keep going?
You push the thought aside. Of course you would. Any gains, however hard-won, are better than none.
Danny stamps up the stairs again, more slowly this time, with Sian at his heels. When he reaches his bedroom she produces a blue train. “Good walking, Danny. Here’s Thomas.”
“Here’s Thomas,” Danny echoes as he flops down and aligns the train with the others. Then, without warning, his troubled eyes flick up to yours.
“Moh,” he says. “Moh-moh.” He laughs.
“Did he just call me Mommy?” you say, amazed.
Tim’s already weeping with joy. You would be, too, if you could cry.
TWO
It was a couple of weeks after Tim’s announcement before Abbie Cullen actually showed up. Finishing a commission, we speculated, or maybe having second thoughts about working with us at all. We didn’t get many visitors—our backers were paranoid about security, and our location had been chosen for its low cost per foot rather than its potential for social activities. So to say that Abbie made quite an entrance probably says less about her than it does about the smallness and focus of our lives.
Even before Tim’s cry of “Listen up, people!” most of us had spotted her in reception—and if we hadn’t, we’d certainly seen the way Tim