Which of course they did, in a sense. They happened to her, to Abbie, and like all her most personal memories left little trace on social media for Tim’s algorithms to reconstruct.
Even so, the terror of that time is embedded deep in your brain.
You realized quite quickly something was wrong, of course. You just didn’t know what.
“Danny?” you called one day. “Lunchtime.”
Normally that would have been enough to bring him running to the table. But not that day. You knew he was in the playroom, playing with a dinosaur he’d been given for his birthday. When he still didn’t come after you called a second time, you put your head around the door.
“Danny!”
He didn’t look up. The dinosaur was on the floor, and he was staring at it. Just staring.
“Lunch,” you repeated. Still he didn’t look up.
You took a step forward, concerned. Then suddenly he turned to look at you, and his familiar toothy smile lit up his face.
* * *
—
“I think Danny might have glue ear,” you told Tim that evening. “He seems to find it hard to hear me sometimes.”
Tim frowned. “Danny?” he called.
At the sound of his father’s voice, Danny looked up. “Yef?”
“Seems all right to me.” Tim turned back to his BlackBerry.
“It varies,” you said defensively. “Anyway, I booked an appointment with the audiologist.”
“My grandpa used to have a saying,” Tim said mildly. “There’s none so deaf as them who don’t want to hear.”
“I’m so sad I never met Grandpa Scott. He always sounds so much fun.”
“He was a miserable old bastard,” Tim agreed.
You pointed silently at Danny.
“Sorry—miserable old person,” Tim said. “My point is, what was the consequence of Danny not paying attention to you? Did his lunch go in the trash?”
“Of course not.”
“Hmm.” Which was shorthand for a whole debate you and Tim had on a regular basis. For him, parenting was a subdivision of engineering, a collection of design processes that merely had to be applied with total consistency in order to produce a well-mannered, efficient outcome. For you, it was a relationship, and half the fun was seeing what happened when you threw the rule book out the window.
You’d never have admitted it to Tim, but you secretly encouraged Danny to climb into bed with you at first light every morning. Feeling your son’s warm, perfect body wriggling alongside yours was the best part of the day. Even his rare outbreaks of naughtiness seemed like cause for celebration, proof he was going to be an independent thinker, his own man, a creative not a suit. Sometimes, when he got angry or defiant with you, it was all you could do not to cheer him on.
When, later that week, the very expensive audiologist diagnosed glue ear and told you it would most likely clear up over time, you felt quietly vindicated.
* * *
—
You’d managed to place Danny in the local Montessori. It was a compromise between Tim and you: You’d rather Danny stayed home, Tim wanted a “proper” preschool.
“Research shows that children who start school earlier do better,” he told you more than once.
“Better at what, exactly?”
“Better at school.”
“But do we really care if he’s academic?” you wondered aloud. “I can teach him to paint better than any classroom assistant.”
“Better socially and academically,” Tim said patiently.
In the end it was the fact that the preschool was just a few blocks away that persuaded you. Plus, if you were honest, you were seduced by the sheer beauty of the Montessori teaching materials—handcrafted from pale Scandinavian oak, not a plastic toy among them.
As you picked Danny up one afternoon, the teacher came over. “I’m a little concerned about Danny’s language, Mrs. Cullen-Scott. He seems to use a lot of nouns. Very few verbs.”
You looked at her, surprised. You hadn’t known the ratio of nouns to verbs was even a thing. “Do you want us to work on it?”
“Oh no,” she said breezily. “I’m sure it’ll sort itself out.”
Needless to say, you spent the rest of the day randomly tossing verbs at him—“Look, Danny, dancing! Look, Danny, jumping! Danny, waving!” He seemed puzzled, but bore it with his customary good humor.
A few days later the same teacher said, “I’m a little concerned about Danny’s hearing. He doesn’t always seem very…present.”
“Well, it’s not glue ear,” you said. “He had that, but the audiologist says it’s cleared up.”
“Have you had him tested for a language processing disorder?”
“For a what?” you said, instantly concerned. You never knew parenthood was going to be such a minefield of