The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora

Author:Lauren Acampora
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2015-03-17T15:31:45+00:00

FLOORTIME

SUZANNE IS supposed to be playing with Elliot. He sits on the rug with a stacking toy, donut-shaped rings on a rod. When finished, the tower should represent the colors of the rainbow in sequence, but Suzanne is happy if he can just fit a ring on the pole. When he fails, when a ring tumbles to the floor, she can’t resist the urge to pick it up and slide it on for him. She is not supposed to do this, she knows. It is important to observe and encourage without assisting. It is important to make frequent eye contact, to use an upbeat and affectionate tone of voice. If he will not look at her when she speaks, she is supposed to tilt his chin with her fingers, to insist that their eyes meet. She has never actually done this.

It is Saturday, the first true spring day. Carlota is off, and Brian is on the boat. She had not dissuaded him from going, had not played the guilt card. There is no need for both of them to stay home today. If she is bad at playing with their son, Brian is worse.

Elliot drops a red ring, and it rolls under the coffee table. Suzanne lets it go, places a larger yellow ring into his blunt little hands. She looks at the time: only 11:45. Her watch strikes her at this moment as ludicrously fine—an anniversary gift marking five years of marriage—the Ebel she’d been hinting for, with a gray satin dial ringed with diamonds. It is expertly engineered, exquisitely beautiful, splintering the overhead lights into a thousand blazing fragments.

It has been three weeks since Elliot’s diagnosis. For months, Suzanne had been lying at pediatrician appointments. When the doctor had asked about Elliot’s physical and verbal development, she forced a smile and said that, yes, he was running and jumping; yes, he had at least ten words. The truth was that she had never heard him speak. He had never muttered “Mama” or “Dada.” He was just a late bloomer, she’d assumed. He was an introverted, thoughtful child with quiet considerations of his own. It was true that she rarely spent time with other children Elliot’s age, and had little basis for comparison. Only once had she observed him alongside a boy of the same size, at a restaurant. That child had pointed at Suzanne’s hoop earrings and said a word that sounded like “bubble.” Suzanne had smiled in surprise and studied the boy’s face for a discreet moment—his eyes blue and keen, blinking with attention—before looking to his mother, a woman younger than herself and not remarkable in any way, and asking, “Did you hear that?”

“Oh, I know,” the woman had said, laughing and chewing. “He loves jewelry.”

Suzanne had looked back at the boy, who was now spooning clam chowder into his mouth. Slumped in the highchair beside her, Elliot gravely and repeatedly raked a fork over a paper napkin.

After that, Suzanne avoided taking her son into public.

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