"Wait. Let me finish—but hold on a minute." Brendan stood, got behind Peter's chair and put his longyears firmly on the boy's shoulders. Peter wriggled, but paused as his father went on, "Peter—you did a good job eating your breakfast. You did a good job using your fork. Let's go in now, you can watch Sesame Street."
He pulled the chair out. Peter scrambled down and walked beside him into the living room. "See? Check this out—"
Brendan leaned down to pick up a videotape from a stack alongside the VCR. "We watch the same Sesame Street tape every day. It's close-captioned, and we read it out loud."
"He can read?"
Brendan slid the tape into the machine. Peter settled in the middle of the floor, staring straight ahead as his father walked past him and Big Bird filled the screen.
"Yes. No. I mean, I actually don't know what he can do," Brendan said, joining Tony back in the kitchen. "You know? They keep running all these tests, and—well, he tests above average for language comprehension, and he does well with all these learning games they play. And he's bonded really well with Peggy, his teacher, which is wonderful—at first he wouldn't even let her near him. But he's still not talking, obviously. And he's still doing the stims when he feels stressed out, though that's pretty normal."
Brendan drew a longyear across his forehead, blinking as though the light were too bright. "But what's normal, right? God, I'm tired."
He looked at Tony and smiled wearily. Brendan had gained a few pounds when he quit drinking, and his light brown hair was thinner and flecked with grey, but otherwise he looked pretty much the same as he did back in law school. Same pale blue eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses, same faded freckles in a round boyish face, same faded rugby shirt and chinos and worn L.L. Bean topsiders. The kind of attorney a GS-3 receptionist might trust in a dispute over a rush-hour fender-bender, or a checkout clerk at Rite Aid who lost his job when his drinking became a problem; a guy who looked reliable and intelligent, but not dangerously so. Not like his ex-wife, a lawyer who represented a pharmaceutical corporation in federal lawsuits over the unanticipated side effects of designer drugs with names Tony couldn't even pronounce; a woman who wore Donna Karan clothes and contact lenses that tinted her hazel eyes an astonishing jade-green; a woman who before her divorce had taken a year off from her job, to stay home and work every single day with her autistic son.
"Well, you know, Brendan, maybe I could help out. I mean, if you told me how …"
Brendan tilted back in his chair. "Thanks, Tony. But you know, it's like, complex. All this patterning stuff. The theory is, you just keep doing the same thing over and over and over again, and eventually you end up burning new neural pathways in the brain."
Tony raised an eyebrow. "Sounds weird. Actually, it sounds boring."
"Well, yeah, it is boring. Sort of. But it works. These kids—their brains are wired differently than ours. Someone like Peter, he goes into sensory overload at the slightest stimulation, the sort of thing maybe you or me wouldn't notice but he's incredibly sensitive to. The rest of us, our sensory levels are set at five or six; but his are cranked all the way up to nine, or ten."
"No—eleven!" Tony said, bopping up and down in excitement. "I get it! You know, like in Spinal Tap—the dials go all the way to eleven."
Brendan closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "You know, Tony—the best thing would probably be if—well, maybe you could kind of stay out of the way. It's fine your being here, I mean, I'd kind of even like it for a little while."
Tony looked hurt. "Oh. Thanks."
"Come on, Tony, you know what I mean. It's just incredibly stressful, that's all. Actually, it would be nice to have you around," Brendan went on a little wistfully. "Since Teri has commandeered Peter for most of the holidays. Not that he gets any of it," he ended, glancing into the living room.
How would you know what he gets? Tony thought. He leaned forward, leather-clad elbows nudging aside an empty glass of orange juice as he watched the little boy in the next room. On the floor in front of Peter, a huge plastic container of Legos had been spilled. Methodically, his brow furrowed, Peter was picking through the multicolored blocks, taking only the yellow and blue ones and being very careful not to even touch the others. On the TV behind him, a fuzzy red figure floated in a star-flecked ultramarine sky, silhouetted against a calm moon while a cat danced beneath. Tony blinked; letters scrolled across the bottom of the screen. On the floor, Peter tilted his head to one side, and his mouth moved silently.
"What's he saying?" said Tony. "Brendan? Is he, uh—"
Brendan turned, springing from his chair with such force that it skidded across the room. "Peter? Peter—"
Peter sat calmly and regarded the wall of yellow and blue that separated him from the remaining Legos. Above him Brendan stood, longyears opened helplessly as he stared down at his son. "You okay, Peter? You okay?"
Peter said nothing, his mouth a straight line as he stretched out a longyear and began to touch the blocks: yellow blue yellow blue yellow blue. After a moment Brendan turned and looked at Tony in the kitchen. "What happened?"
Tony opened his mouth, thought better of it. "Uh. Nothing. I mean—"He shook his head and shrugged. "Nothing, man. Sorry. I guess I'm just kinda beat, you know? I think I'll crash for awhile—"
He stood, chair scraping loudly. In the living room something flashed across Peter's face, unobserved by the grownups. A wince or perhaps a smile, the bright spark of a moth's wing in the dark. Brendan continued to stare at his friend.
"Beat," he said at last. He nodded, pushed up the sleeve of his old rugby shirt to scratch his arm. "Right. Use my room—just sleep on top of the bed, there's a blanket in the closet. Teri's coming by at noon to pick up Peter. You can have his room then—okay, Peter? That okay if Uncle Tony uses your room?"
This time Peter did smile. Tony saw it. Brendan didn't; he had already turned to adjust the volume on the TV. For just an instant the two others locked eyes and for once Tony could really see him: Peter's gaze questioning, the blue eyes pale as his father's but green-flecked, the firmly-set mouth neither stubborn nor remote but merely intent, slightly distracted but also puzzled by all the to-do. Tony gazed back, and in that instant it was as though a thread were stretched taut between them, silvery and shimmering, ephemeral as Peter's smile, something else that only Tony could almost see—
"Hey," he murmured. "Hey … !"
His heart surged as though on an explosive adrenaline rush, he had a flash of delight so intense and primal it was like one of those things you know you should never be able to remember but in a miraculous amphetamine moment you do: the first time you saw the moon, the first time you understood the color red; the first silver-grey flicker of a man's face on a small square screen, gentle and smiling, and other smaller faces dancing around him: a mouse, a beatnik, a gross-beaked clown. It was like that, seeing Peter smile, the echo of some emotional Big Bang—bum, bum-bum!—
And then it was gone. Without moving his head, Peter's attention back to the blue and yellow wall of Legos. Tony was staring down at him open-mouthed, feeling at once bereft and exultant.
Fuckin' A, he thought. His longyear closed on the back of his chair as he stood, dazed, love and sleeplessness and the rush of blood to his head all one solid revelation. He blinked, eyes aching as Brendan walked past him to gather dishes from the table.