The Things We Cannot Say Read online

  Wade would say all of my efforts enable a spoiled little boy who could be closer to typical if we just pushed him more instead of pandering to him. Wade speaks to Eddie, because he can’t accept that Eddie’s language is really as restricted as I know it is. Wade views Eddie’s echolalia as a game—a way to insult and taunt us—and of proof that Eddie could use verbal language to communicate if he wanted to. It doesn’t help that when Eddie sees Wade, he often echoes the words not now, Edison, although I’m not even sure why that one has even persisted because Eddie no longer makes much of an attempt to engage with his father at all.

  What Wade loves to forget is that, initially, he was quite supportive of medical intervention. He seemed to have this idea that Eddie’s diagnosis automatically meant our son would be a savant, and Wade was kind of okay with the whole situation right up until the psychologist told us that Eddie’s IQ was a little under average, so he was unlikely to possess any quirky but genius abilities. My husband is a quirky genius himself—he could handle having a brilliant but odd child; in fact, we have one of those already in Callie, and he’s her best friend in the world. It was the “below average” designation that Wade couldn’t deal with, the autism itself was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.

  That’s when the blame game started—but I don’t judge Wade for that, because I play it too. My husband and more importantly, his sperm, have spent an awful lot of time around intense industrial chemicals over the years, and he’s been exposed to radiation at work more than once. And heavens, left to his own devices? Wade’s diet is appalling. We blame each other for Eddie’s struggles—the only difference is Wade occasionally has the courage to voice his thoughts on the matter aloud. Maybe that makes him a better person, because at least he’s honest. I carry my resentment of Wade around like a millstone around my neck and some days I just know that sooner or later, something is going to snap.

  He arrives twenty-two minutes after our call, and just as I expected, he’s frazzled. Wade wears a suit to work because he’s an executive manager these days. When he leaves home in the morning, his tie is always impressively straight. Right now, it’s at a somewhat-crazy angle, and his blond hair is sticking up all over the place. He looks sheepish as he enters the hospital room, his hands caught through the straining handles of two overloaded hessian bags.

  “Hi, guys,” he says pointlessly to Babcia and Eddie on the bed, then he nods at me and raises the bag in his left hand. “I got a whole carton of soup—it’s in the car. Then they had plenty of stock of the old yogurt labels so I bought it all—here’s half of it.” He lifts the other bag a little higher and nods toward it. “And I got heaps with the new label too...” At my blank stare, he says hesitantly, “Well...you know, so he can get used to it.”

  Eddie won’t get used to the label. I don’t know how we’re going to manage that yet, but the fact that Wade thinks it’s that easy is a blatant reminder of how little he understands.

  “Thanks.”

  I expect Wade to pass me the bags, kiss me politely and spin on his heel, but instead, he sets the bags on the floor and pulls me into an embrace. I’m surprised by this, and even more surprised when he places a gentle kiss on the side of my hair.

  “Sorry, Ally. Honestly, I’m really sorry. I know you’re under a lot of pressure at the moment and I’m not much help.”

  I sigh and lean into him, then wind my arms around his torso and accept comfort from the warmth of his embrace. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Rare glimpses of the man I know my husband to be have sustained our marriage. In these sporadic moments, I catch a hint of hope on the horizon. All I need to keep working and fighting and trying is a glimmer of that, just every now and again. This one comes right when I need it.

  “I’m kind of on a short fuse emotionally,” I whisper. “I’m really sorry too...about before.”

  “Would it help if I stay this afternoon?”

  He doesn’t offer to take Eddie home, but this is as close as I’m going to get and I appreciate the offer.

  “Actually,” I say, “Callie has ballet at four. If you could go pick her up from school, take her to ballet, then go home and cook some dinner...”

  “Absolutely,” Wade says, with enthusiasm, or maybe it’s relief. “Absolutely, I can do that. Anything you need.” He brushes his lips against mine, then glances at the bed again. “How are you doing, Babcia?”

  “She can’t understand you,” I remind him. “She’s been using the AAC—if you want to talk to her you’ll have to use that.”

  Wade stiffens, then waves vaguely at the bed and glances at his watch.

  “I might head back to the office and tell them I’m going to take off early. I’ll see you at home tonight. Let me know if you need anything else?”

  “Okay,” I say.

  Lunch, Eddie’s iPad says, then, Lunch lunch lunch lunch lunch lunch...

  “Okay, okay,” I sigh, and I bend and fetch a pack of yogurt. He’s so excited that he sits up and his hands start flapping all over the place.

  Six tubes of yogurt later, Eddie is settled on the bed watching YouTube videos of trains again. But then Mom flies back into the room with an archive box in her hand, and Babcia brightens until she’s the one impatiently flapping her hands.

  CHAPTER 7

  Alice

  Mom slides the box onto the tray table while I shift Eddie to the chair beside the bed. Babcia grows impatient and she pushes herself into a sitting position without our assistance, so then we have to hasten to adjust the angle of her bed and fix her pillows. She waves us away and reaches for the box, her hands trembling. There’s reverence in her gaze, and every now and then she flicks a glance toward Mom that’s brimming with gratitude and relief. I have to help Babcia to lift the lid off the box when it becomes apparent she can’t coordinate her right hand to do so, but once I do, she pulls the lid against herself and hugs it awkwardly with her forearms.

  “Where was it?” I ask Mom quietly.

  “Under her bed at the retirement unit, I missed it the first time I went there,” Mom mutters as she shakes her head. “I didn’t realize how close she keeps it, but I probably should have. She’s always been so sentimental.” She makes that last statement as though this is an utterly bewildering character trait—which momentarily amuses me.

  “So are you, Mom,” I laugh softly, and she frowns at me. “You forget I helped you and Dad move last time. I know your attic is basically the Museum of The Slaski-Davis Family.” She’s kept artworks and school reports for me right from preschool, and ticket stubs from her early dates with Dad, and, because she is a stickler for the letter of the law, she’s kept sentimental paperwork from her journey to the bench but she’s self-redacted identifying details where that might be problematic from a confidentiality point of view. I tried to thin the boxes of mementos out a little when they were moving, but Mom stubbornly held on to every last piece of our history, and when I pointed out how pointless those redacted files seem to be—she told me that each and every page triggers a memory of a case that meant something to her. I suspect that my Mom is scared that one day she’ll get dementia like Pa did. Maybe those bits and pieces from our past are important in case they one day need to act as a map to guide her back to the memories she cherishes.

  In the meantime, it’s kind of hilarious that above my mother’s industrial minimalist-styled house is an attic brimming with boxes of macaroni art, letters and unsorted photographs. Mom sighs now, but she gives me a rueful smile.

  “I suppose she taught me that some things just can’t be replaced,” Mom murmurs, and we both look back to Babcia, who’s awkwardly wiping tears from her face as she stares into the box. “She never said so,” Mom adds, “but I always assumed these little things came to mean so much more to her because she had to uproot herself from her whole life back there in Poland.”

  Babcia motions impatiently toward Eddie’s iPad, and h
e’s partway through a train video so I fully expect him to resist and maybe even grunt like a toddler as he pulls the device against himself. Instead, he looks up at her, blinks, then swipes to the AAC and hands it to her. Babcia smiles at him, then she taps the thank you icon and shows it to Mom, who nods as she sinks into the chair on the opposite side of the bed. As soon as Babcia’s attention shifts, Mom rubs her forehead and for the briefest of moments, closes her eyes. She looks exhausted—maybe more tired than I’ve ever seen her, and I was waiting at the finish line for every one of her eight marathons.

  “Mom,” I say softly. “Are you okay?”

  “I need this hospital to get it together and figure out what’s going on with her. I can’t keep taking time off—I have a decision pending and it’s just...” She stops speaking abruptly, then raises her gaze to me and frowns. “It’s just all too much, Alice. You just couldn’t possibly understand.”

  Any rare glimpse of vulnerability from Mom is always followed up by a reminder of how vitally important she is, and often, a little jab like that one—a reminder of how unimportant my role is by comparison. I do speak with my mom almost every day and by the standards of most of my friends, we’re particularly close—but it’s a difficult closeness, because “close” to Julita Slaski-Davis is a difficult place to stay. Almost every day, we end up raising our voices at one another. It’s just the dynamic of our family—she doesn’t understand this life of mine that revolves around my kids; I don’t understand her life that revolves around the law, but we love each other fiercely anyway. Mom was determined that I’d follow in her footsteps and at the very least become a lawyer, and until my late teens, I never even questioned that was to be my path. It was only the year before college that it occurred to me I didn’t have to go into law, but when I instead decided to “waste my life” and study journalism, my relationship with Mom changed forever.

  It changed again the day I told her I was pregnant, two weeks before I was due to graduate, and then the final nail in the coffin was when I didn’t even bother looking for a graduate job. There didn’t seem any point, since I had no intention of working for several years after my baby’s birth, but to Mom—this was unforgivable. Didn’t I understand how hard my foremothers fought in the first and second waves of feminism for my right to a career? How could I betray them by accepting a life where I was dependent on a man?

  Even ten years later, I still don’t have the guts to tell Mom that Callie’s conception wasn’t an accident, but rather the result of a carefully considered decision that Wade and I took that I would not follow in my mother’s footsteps, even in my approach to motherhood. Mom studied, built a career, and then at forty-three went into a panic and thought she’d probably better have a child after all. I do so love and admire my mother, but I’ve spent a lifetime coming second to her work, and I was determined that I would never let my children feel like an afterthought. Wade and I had our kids first, because we were both absolutely sure that I’d find my way into some kind of career once they were at preschool.

  Then Eddie came along.

  Life has a way of reminding you that you are at the mercy of chance, and that even well-thought-out plans can turn to chaos in an instant. That’s why now, when I might be tempted to condemn my mother for her desperation to return to her job during Babcia’s medical crisis, I instead force myself to be patient with her. Mom has been here for two days straight, on her own except for the limited time I’ve spent with her. She has no siblings; I’m her only kid. Dad is retired, but he’s on a golfing trip in Hawaii with his old academia buddies and she is far too proud to ask him to come home. My mom has the weight of the world on her shoulders right now. If she needs to retreat for a little while into her work for some emotional respite, so be it.

  “Okay, Mom,” I say softly. “Eddie has school tomorrow... I can come straight to the hospital after I drop him off and sit with her if you want to go to chambers and catch up a little.”

  “Good,” she says, snapping her chin upward. “Thank you, Alice. Yes, please.”

  Babcia reaches for my hand and leads it to the box. I lift out a stack of photos and papers and then push the tray table away so I can rest it all on her lap. Her hands move slowly and clumsily as she sorts through this first stack of photos. They are a tumbled confusion of printing technology and eras—photos of Pa and Mom and me and my kids and Babcia herself over the decades, and a few scant photos of beloved dogs from the days when Babcia and Pa lived in their big house in Oviedo. But just a few layers into the stack, Babcia freezes on a single photo that I’ve never seen before—it’s a sepia print on thick, aged paper. The gloss over the photo is cracked, but the image is still clear.

  It’s a young man, sitting casually on a boulder against the background of a forest. He’s wearing damaged boots, so well-worn that a tattered sock is visible at the toe of the left one. His clothes are equally tired, but he’s smiling broadly at the camera. He’s incredibly thin—but, despite the gaunt cheeks beneath his sparse beard, still handsome. There’s something striking about his eyes—he looks like he’s holding back a chuckle.

  Babcia’s hands shake as she lifts the photo, and she sighs as she brings it to her cheek, cradling it against her skin. She closes her eyes for a moment and rests her head toward the image, then she turns to offer it to me.

  I can tell this is precious to my grandmother, and so I try to take it from her with appropriate reverence. I stare down at the photo in my hands, and it strikes me that this young man is both a stranger and, somehow, familiar.

  After a moment, Babcia reaches up toward the photo and turns it over. On the back, I see a scrawled message in faded ink—the tiny handwriting is tightly compressed.

  Photograph by Henry Adamcwiz, Trzebinia Hill, 1 July 1941

  I read it aloud to Mom, and then I pass the photo back to Babcia.

  “Poor Babcia. She’s really missing Pa,” I say, and Mom frowns and stares at the photo again.

  “I’m sure she is,” Mom says. “But that is not Pa.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Pa’s hair was dark before he went gray. That man has lighter hair, unless the shades on the print are deceptive,” Mom says, then she shrugs. “Plus... I don’t know. That guy just doesn’t look like Pa. His eyes are all wrong...the shape of his lips. Although, there is definitely something familiar about some of his features. He looks a lot like you, actually. Mama had twin brothers. This must be one of them.”

  “I wonder who Henry Adamcwiz was?” I frown. “And 1941—was that after the war?”

  “No, the war didn’t end until 1945,” Mom murmurs, and then we all stare at the photo, as if it can explain itself. Babcia wipes a tear from her cheek, then reaches for the iPad again.

  Tomasz, it says. Find Tomasz. Please find Tomasz.

  “Are you sure this isn’t Pa?” I ask Mom, and she takes the photo from me and stares at it hard, then she shakes her head.

  “I’m quite sure.”

  Babcia looks so frustrated now that if she could speak, I’m pretty sure she’d be yelling at us both. I frown and look at Mom, who frowns right back at me. Helplessness and frustration leave my mother looking much more vulnerable than I’m used to—much more human. I feel another alien pang of sympathy for her.

  “She’s so confused,” Mom mutters, then she looks to the door and the frustration gives rise to anger. “Why won’t the staff listen to me? They should be reassessing her cognitive state. Clearly there’s more than language damaged here.”

  Babcia hits the replay button on the iPad.

  Please find Tomasz. Your turn.

  I swallow and take the iPad. Mom is staring at the ceiling now, blinking rapidly—so I guess it’s up to me to remind my Babcia that her husband is gone. Rising dread swamps me, and I am shaking a little as I swipe through the screens, then I groan in frustration and try making my own icon.

  Pa is d-e-a-d
, I type, but Babcia grabs my wrist, shakes her head fiercely and snatches the iPad from me with surprising strength. She flicks back to the AAC and finds an icon we haven’t needed to use in twelve months—Pa. The sight of his image makes the ache in my chest intensify.

  No Pa. Find Tomasz.

  Then, she flicks to the “new icon” screen and with painstaking effort, starts to type. She makes a new icon of her own now. It’s a picture of houses, a suburban street. She painstakingly adds a label: Trzebinia. The AAC makes an attempt at reading the word aloud, but I’m pretty sure it’s not accurate.

  “That word is on the photo too. Is it a mountain in Poland?” I ask Mom. She stands, then frowns as she reads the icon.

  “That’s where she grew up. See? She is confused. I told you.”

  I take the iPad and give another fruitless search for a “dead” symbol—but the best I can do is: No Pa. I am sorry.

  Again, Babcia shakes her head, her expression twisting now with frustration, and she takes the iPad and she jabs her finger at the screen. She points at me, then at the photo.

  Not Pa. Trzebinia.

  She glances up, sees my confusion, then scrolls through all of the screens until she finds a page of national flags. She selects a red and white one, then adds it to her sentence.

  Not Pa. Trzebinia. Poland. Tomasz.

  Eddie is watching all of this with an almost-wondrous focus, and he reaches eagerly for the iPad, which Babcia automatically hands to him. He swipes out of the AAC program and loads Google maps, then quickly types in Poland. The map zooms in on Europe, then centers on Poland, and Babcia points to the lower half of the screen and looks at me as if this should explain everything.

  It’s my turn to take the iPad. I swipe back to the AAC, copy the town name, and then paste it into Google maps. Eddie squeals with delight as the screen refocuses on the town, then he claps his hands. I didn’t know he knew how to use Google maps. I make a mental note to mention it to his teacher, because he sure does seem excited about it.