Thanks to The
Battered Suitcase for first publishing this story on December 1, 2008. In 2005,
Pennwriters awarded this story second place in its short story contest.
All is Calm, All is
Bright
by
C.A. Masterson
The Talbots sat
around the Thanksgiving dinner table, hands clasped before their bowed heads,
faces aglow beneath the brass chandelier, looking for all the world like a
Norman Rockwell slice of life.
Albert Talbot Sr.
thanked God for blessing his family with a bounty of food, and – most
importantly, he stressed – good health. His eyes squeezed shut, he implored the
Almighty, “Send extra blessings to Jonah” like a preacher on a call-in
television show.
Margaret broke from
her silent prayer and gave her father-in-law a stern look. Her husband, Albert
Jr., looked up and shook his head. Jonah rocked gently in his chair beside her,
eyes heavenward. She tucked the napkin
into his shirt collar.
“I’m hungry,” Jonah
said in his usual monotone.
“Yes, I know. We’ll
eat soon,” she whispered.
“I’m hungry,” he
said louder. As if she were the one who didn’t understand, who needed
instructions repeated.
Margaret shot a
smile around the table. “I’ll just get him started with dinner, if that’s all
right.”
Mrs. Talbot said
that was perfectly fine and asked Albert Jr. to begin passing the food. Mr.
Talbot raised his eyebrows and fingered his silver knife and fork as Margaret
spooned mashed potatoes, turkey, and peas onto Jonah’s plate, careful not to
let one food touch another. Jonah’s eyes followed her hand as it moved from
bowl to plate, the tips of his fingers on the perfectly aligned Peter Rabbit
stainless steel fork and knife with blunted edges.
Margaret had
frowned upon seeing the baby utensils. Mrs. Talbot had blushed, and blustered
something about how much Jonah loved them.
“Loved” wasn’t quite accurate, they both knew – change was difficult,
even painful, for Jonah. Last Thanksgiving, while Mrs. Talbot looked on in
horror, Jonah had bent the tines of the silver fork, upset that his traditional
utensils had been changed.
Margaret ate,
thankful that the meal was uneventful.
“May I go play
video games?” Jonah looked her directly in the eye, startling her into a smile.
It always took Margaret aback when Jonah “surfaced,” as she called it, when his
autism seemed to lift its veil away from her son, however briefly.
“Of course, sweetie.
You were a very good boy at dinner. Thank you.”
She watched her son
jog to the television in the adjoining room, his hands flapping like fish fins.
He carefully opened the doors of the maple cabinet and lined them up exactly.
He took the game controls out, then with two flicks of the remote, set the
television to the proper station and turned on the video game. He sat down,
cross-legged, and waited for the screen to prompt “play.” He was at the third
level after only a day. Above the polite dinner conversation, Margaret heard
the game ping as he racked up points. Jonah imitated the game sounds perfectly
as he made his way through the maze of tunnels, fought off the evil attackers,
found the hidden clues and treasures to reach the highest level. It was more
than Albert Jr. had been able to achieve.
Albert Sr. leaned
back and rubbed his bloated belly. “The idiot savant beat you at the
idiot’s game.”
Her husband
continued to stir his coffee as if his father had said nothing, his back
straight, his jaw firm. Her father-in-law smacked her husband’s shoulder with a
wink and a guffaw as if to say, ‘no harm, no foul.’ This made her bristle more
– that Albert, at forty-seven, would not stand up to his father’s bullying.
Albert Jr. was too much like his mother, whose silence outwardly preserved
peace in the household, but under the surface, the conflict still roiled and
churned.
Later that night,
Margaret sat on the edge of the bed as Albert stepped into his pajamas. “You
should have defended Jonah. Your father has no right to call him such names.”
Her husband said,
“I learned a long time ago to be the bigger man, Margaret.”
Margaret brushed
her hair vigorously. “Bigger? How is not defending your son being bigger than
your father?”
Her husband’s voice
was quiet, his enunciation perfect. “I will never let my father know the damage
he is capable of. It will only encourage him.”
“And your silence
doesn’t?” She’d tired of silence.
Margaret had just
read Goodnight Moon to Jonah ten times; it had to be ten times without
interruption, just after he’d put on his pajamas and brushed his teeth, then
checked that the bathroom light was off. Events had to be in this exact order
or he’d thrash back and forth under the covers.
She brushed her
hair as Albert lined up his slippers by the bed so he could step into them
easily the next morning. He’d always been meticulous; it was the reason she
hadn’t been attracted to him initially. Until the day he’d helped her rescue a
dog struck by a van, and carried it, bleeding, to his car. His caring nature
surprised and touched her. They’d begun dating the next day, and married the
following year.
Jonah had been born
two years later. He’d been a happy, inquisitive baby until just before his
third birthday. Then, he turned away from them when they spoke, humming to
himself. He became obsessed with patterns and order, lining up light switch
rows, building intricate Lego constructions. The pediatrician diagnosed Jonah
as autistic, but said he was fairly high on the spectrum, and told them how lucky
they were. Margaret tried to view their lives through this perspective, but
never felt very lucky.
Except when Jonah
played the piano. She kept the stereo tuned to the classical music station; it
seemed to calm her son. Jonah would listen to a song, then pick out the notes
on the piano. After three or four practices, he would play the basic melody,
his timing so perfect it made her catch her breath, made her imagine a
multitude of Jonahs, as if she saw him through a prism, and each Jonah was at a
different level on the spectrum. Of all the Jonahs, the piano-playing one was
Margaret’s favorite – touching her with his music. She thought it was the only
way he knew how to touch her.
“We’re leaving
after the museum, right?” she asked Albert after slipping into bed beside him.
“Yes.” He said it
as if he were most grateful for this on Thanksgiving.
***
The bedroom was
dark even though she’d left the door open. Stilted breathing came from the
doorway. Margaret lifted her head from the pillow and saw her son in the
shadows.
“I’m wet.” He
sounded neither sorry nor upset. He never did. That would mean some interior
barrier had broken down, some nerve endings had connected that allowed her son
to feel even an isolated emotion, providing her a glimmer of hope.
“All right.” She
pulled on her robe and ushered him quietly back to his room next door. The maid
had been asked to leave an extra set of sheets in the room, and to make up the
bed with a plastic sheet underneath.
Jonah hummed one
note as Margaret changed the bed linens. He climbed under the fresh covers
mechanically. She hugged his stiff body and kissed his cheek.
“I love you,” she
told him.
“I love you,” he
echoed, looking at the bedpost. She wanted to cup his face in her hands, make
him say it again and again, until the warmth of the emotion melted the stony
façade that kept him prisoner. But she knew Jonah would cringe, pull away,
retreat. She lived for the days when Jonah looked her fully in the eye, hoping
each time that this time would be the day he’d smile and say, “I love you, Mom”
of his own volition, not parroting her. Jonah’s tenth birthday was next week,
and still she waited.
She went back to
bed, and her husband rolled his rigid back away from her. She felt as if she
were slipping back into the cold, silent depths between her husband and son.
Margaret waited for Albert to again show
any of the initial compassion that made her fall in love with him. Since
Jonah’s diagnosis, Albert had withdrawn from her; she felt as if he were
dragging her down and down, into the twilight where they all existed now. She
felt as isolated as Jonah, trapped far beneath the surface in a bubble where
feelings were alien.
***
The morning did not
so much dawn as slowly diffuse a dull grey pallor across the room. Margaret rose
and went to the window. Thick clouds hung low in the sky, moving as slowly as a
glacier, as if they were underwater looking up at the surface.
She let the curtain
fall into place. “Maybe we should go straight home, and skip the museum today.”
Albert buttoned his
shirt, leaving the last one at the collar undone. Always one, never two.
Inconsistencies made him jittery, he’d told her.
“We should go
today. We’d already planned it, and Father will be insulted if we cancel.
Besides, we’ve already prepared Jonah.”
She nodded; their
son needed repeated advance warnings of any change in schedule so the deviation
wouldn’t upset him. Jonah was comfortable with predictable patterns.
Albert paused to
look at her. “And he seemed better yesterday.”
Better. It was a word
Margaret hated. The implication that he was steadily improving. The false hope
it raised.
Jonah was sitting
in his bed, humming, when she went in to see if he was ready. Some mornings,
he’d completely dress himself, all his buttons in the correct holes except for
the top one, just like his father.
Jonah didn’t look
at her, didn’t look at anything. He did not respond when she asked him if he
wanted to go have some fun. He’d retreated again, so she couldn’t find him,
like in the nightmares she had.
Margaret dressed
her son with no struggle, and brought him downstairs for breakfast. She did not
look forward to spending another day with her in-laws.
***
In the museum,
Albert Sr. tried to engage Jonah, showing him how the mirror distorted their
reflections, how the electric charge made his hair stand up. Jonah turned away
quickly, humming loudly, slapping his arms against his chest in brutal hugs.
Margaret set her jaw and glared at her father-in-law, who could never
understand why Jonah didn’t like sudden changes in anything.
Albert Sr. frowned,
mouth set tight as he turned away. “Let’s try this room. He can touch the
displays.”
As they walked
through the doorway, Margaret tensed. The room was cavernous, some of the
exhibits huge. Open spaces sometimes made Jonah upset. He’d flail about, as if
lost at sea, as if drowning.
When she glanced at
him, Jonah was looking beyond the faces of people walking by. The room was
filled with children and their parents, all with the same idea for Black
Friday. They moved like cattle through a chute from exhibit to exhibit, Jonah
shuffling his feet.
“I wish it weren’t
so crowded.” Margaret felt invisible; neither Albert nor his parents responded.
“Hey, Talbot!” A
man waved, then herded his wife and three kids, aged about four through eight,
toward them. Margaret turned to her husband, one eyebrow raised in question.
Albert Jr. answered
in a hushed voice, his lips barely moving. “George Henderson. Salesman.”
She mouthed “ah”
and nodded, fixing a smile on her face.
The couples exchanged
introductions, the Henderson children all said hello, then looked to Jonah.
When he hummed tunelessly and turned away, Margaret steered the conversation to
trite pleasantries. Her determination to make them forget Jonah’s differences
made her forget him, to block him from her mind. Liberated, she talked of the
holiday, of her part-time job as a financial consultant, of the difficulties of
living hours away from family.
The metallic notes
of Silent Night, as if gonged from a church bell, swelled through the
room. Conversations ceased. As if on cue, every person in the room turned in
unison with surprised, delighted faces toward the music, so crude, yet so oddly
ethereal.
Then Margaret
remembered. “Jonah.”
He wasn’t in sight.
She turned to her husband and said more urgently, “Jonah.” His hand clasped her
shoulder, and he pointed, a foreign look of wonder on his face.
“Look,” he told
her.
She strained on
tip-toe to see what the entire room was attuned to: Jonah stood before an
exhibit, striking its long metal pipes of varying length in perfect pitch and
timing. He was sounding the final notes to the carol – sleep in heavenly
peace. Mr. and Mrs. Talbot watched in stunned silence.
“How?” was all
Albert Sr. could manage.
Albert Jr.
shrugged, but Margaret laughed, a bubble of joy escaping as Jonah turned to her
and smiled.
Of course he didn’t
know how. They would never know. But sometimes – like now – the feeling that
thick shafts of sunlight had penetrated the surface, suddenly illuminating the
shadows that permeated their lives with an astounding, blinding brilliance, was
enough to sustain her.