Mike Freeman's Blog, page 3

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Habit led me down to the rocks, habit and Shannon’s fervor, which would have dragged us to roiled water if custom hadn’t. The waves had drawn more of a crowd than mid-October normally sees, along with the tropic air whorled up from the Caribbean. Swells rolled one upon another, deep-sea black and molten blue, wracking and colliding, wrecking on the train car-sized bedrock fractures the glaciers had jumbled so long ago. Realizing I should have stayed on the grassy lip near the lighthouse with the onlookers, I clenched Shan tight as the Atlantic shoved into gullies and crevices that taste salt maybe once a year, likely less. Bermuda was taking this hurricane, but the fetch reached here, to Narragansett Bay, some seven-hundred miles off.

“Easy, Shan,” I said, cinching her hip against my ribs with a forearm. “Easy.”

Her bare feet ached for wave-worn stone, upon which she usually skipped a few strides before hopping in place a dozen times, then repeat. With cobweb foam blowing all around and sea water channeling within yards before re-flushing to chaos, I sensed the crowd above wasn’t judging me well and headed north, goating the pell-mell slabs as always, more mindful of the ocean than I ever had been. The rock sheets rose higher in this direction, and I was sure I could let Shan down a bit, just enough, anyway, to slake those pining feet.

* * * *

As with any condition, autism presents the afflicted with alien terminology, words passing quickly from foreign to familiar. If malignant and metastasize, in situ and invasive, foist their unwanted kinship upon the cancer-stricken, autism families speak their own tongue. Proprioceptive. Sensory Integration. In vivo. Self-Injurious. Rote. Circadian Rhythm, the light/dark gauge allowing most of us proper sleep patterns but one autism grossly fouls, or vestibular, the inner ear workings granting balance and rational stationing power in the typical but primitive imbalance in the atypical, making Shan and others seem as wormholes, portals between this time and that, one world and the next.

Unlike the gentler surf of most days, this seemed patternless. Normally the weaker sets simply nudge over the lower table rock, spreading like whisked sheets, interspersed by the stronger throbs that only shed a meek fountain or two on impact. Now, even in what passed for lulls, geysers soaked rocks thirty yards from breaking points, with foam motes cast well aloft, snowing cedar boughs and rose tangles. Water thumped water then rock then water then more rock, lashing out then in then out again, muting the day. With her jaw inches from my ear, I could hear Shan’s pinniped squeals, but doubted the assorted gulls – hunched below ragged turf chunks ten yards behind where past storms had chewed away earth – could.

Finally atop a steep scarp that led to a terraced second, I stepped to the plateau and stood. Even here water rushed to the base, but that was twenty feet below. Clenching the shirt fabric over her lumbar for the tightest grip, I let Shan down.

* * * *

All autism queries end the same, even from professionals: “Of course, we just don’t know.” Down at last, Shan hopped and skipped, ever on her toes, twisting soles into fine-grained rock where she paused to examine what her feet touched, fathoming.

“Their sensory intakes are off,” we’d been told. “At least to our understanding. They seek input in ways we either don’t or don’t realize that we do. Toe-walking and a preference for barefeet seem to be a frequent manifestation of that. Of course, we just don’t know.”

We only knew that our daughter hated shoes and adored commotion, any form of it – holiday malls or Newport’s summer streets to be sure, but nature-borne turmoil most of all. Wrenching the shirt tighter, my free hand hovered above one of her shoulders like a shrike as I strode along with her back-and-forths, listening to gales ingest those high-pitched eruptions. Her hand-flaps usually match mood to tempo, and upon arresting each skip/hop sequence she bent at the waist to work two hands and ten fingers in ebullient supplication, exhorting some unseen creature to share in the wonderment she’d stumbled upon.

Southward, toward the old lighthouse and bay mouth, the crowd swelled further. A few raincoat-laden arms pointed to mounting waves, but mostly people just stood, watching. In the brush thirty feet behind us and just above the motionless gulls, a yellow-rumped warbler hopped from soil to cedar then down again, re-joining the big birds’ immobility. Having skipped, flapped, and squealed in continuum for half an hour, Shan went through her paces, throttling from jubilation to restive contentment. A grand swell pushed ashore, soaking us both like a summer cloudburst, and lapping the salt from her upper lip, Shannon nudged against me, further deflating to contemplation.

Lord knows what we seek. Nestling Shan in my lap, I sat cross-legged atop the flat rock, facing seaward. A wrack line wouldn’t show until the storm abated, but we watched what it would contain tumble in and out to the diktat of each pulse. Ever shedding ribbons and flakes, offshore kelp beds always contribute, but here whole uprootings churned about like many-armed cephalopods. Shards of jetsam, too, normally seafloor-bound, vanished and appeared at the will of waves – the torqued wires of ruined lobster pots, a lead line from a lost gillnet, half an outboard cowling, most algae stripped clean by the current turbulence. Then the lighter fare:  Plastic bottles. Forks and spoons. A wrecked kite, string attached. Nests of monofilament.

Among it all swirled the faunal waste. Byssal threads severed by the storm, blue mussels flecked the inner life of each wave, rolling with gravel, awaiting the doom of tautog lips, while three cartilage-bound vertebrae segments – large, a seal maybe, or a turtle – snagged on an old limb before all washed back out. A gray lump floated in a just-deposited pool below us, its drenched feathers respiring up and down like branchials. It may have been a catbird, but the bigger storms will knock petrels in. I couldn’t tell and didn’t dare find out. Revolutions of wind banded around us, lifting even Shan’s wet, shorn locks. Rubbing her feet with my thumbs, the two of us simply sat as every onshore creature did – in silence. Occasionally we all do so, need to do so, every fish and fowl and living thing.  To creep inside the maelstrom, toe the wormhole, to bestill and be bestilled.  To blow out the vestibules and feel the voice of God.

Autism for the Tillerman

“Sure, Shannon,” I said, letting her guide my hand to the CD player. “We’ll change it.”

It wasn’t until the previous year, when Shan was four, that such guidance validated our hunch, that she had musical preferences and favored adult fare far more than children’s.

“That’s one nice thing about autism,” I’d told friends. “At least in our case. You can toss Barney and Raffi. The Allman Brothers and Van Morrison are all you need.”

Throughout her life she craved having me pace her back and forth across the bedroom while such music played, in the same position as I would walk her much of the day. For five years, from fifteen pounds through fifty, I’d crooked my left arm in a crude ‘C’, where she nestled to take in the world the way a skier rides a chairlift. Therapists urged us to break the habit, but it kept her close, kept her affectionate, and allowed us to talk in our own untranslatable way.

As with all days, this one had been long. Mostly pleasant, mostly quiet, but long, particularly with her younger sister Flannery so mentally agile now at three. Autism, too, doesn’t parallel sound sleep, and while Shan had improved over the years, on good days she was still up at 6:00 and down by 10:30, with the bedroom music walk marking a protracted lullaby.

Having grown up in the Seventies, I’ve remained fond of the era’s soloists, with their unobtrusive sounds backgrounding many childhood memories. ‘Older Sister Music’ my friends and I would come to call it, and do still – Joni Mitchell, Jim Croce, James Taylor, Carly Simon, and many others.

Cat Stevens had won this particular night. Shan’s tastes rotate, but over these past few nights Stevens had been her choice. Like most people, she prefers just a few songs per CD, lifting my hand for the change whenever a favored one ends.

“There, Shan. Let’s try that,” I said, resuming our to and fro room travels while the next song began. As it often does, a cat purr vibrated her chest, translating to my own, underscoring once again how thoroughly autism can challenge, even reconstitute, its caregivers’ private paradigms.

Whether it was family or zeitgeist I’m not sure, but I grew up knowing little of contemporary politics. Reared in the shadows of Vietnam, Sixties disquiet, and Watergate, it could be that my parents mirrored weary people of the time by simply not discussing such things, at least in front of their kids. For me, this carried into adulthood. Right through 9/11, in fact, despite a persistent voting record, I doubt I could have defined ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ in a political context.

History, though, along with other pursuits, was different. My parents infused me with their respective devotions to the past along with any artistic endeavor that delved human nature, endowments which collided with what amounted to a political awakening when the planes hit the towers.

Cat Stevens is Muslim. I had known that much. Forfeiting his commercial prowess when he converted, he vanished from the public eye at his peak. At the time, that was all I knew, and apart from occasionally hearing him on the radio, I didn’t think much about him before Shannon took to those several songs still soaked with my own childhood as I ambled her back and forth.

“There, Shan. Better?”

Karen brought his Greatest Hits into our marriage, where with Shannon I listened in earnest for the first time. If the lyrics don’t point to Islam, they ooze spiritual longing, soulful vagabondage in need of a home, and I imagined that if the conversion had shocked his fans, to people who knew him his settlement on a certain faith was just a matter of time. Shannon enjoys melody more than speech, and eased further into my torso as I hummed and sang along.

Like politics, in-depth knowledge of orthodox faiths evaded me when young. Other than broad-stroke Judeo-Christian knowledge imbibed through simply being American, I knew nothing of specifics. During the Troubles of 1980’s Ireland, for instance, I asked my parents after another bombing what caused all the fuss.

“It’s involved,” my mom said, “but in short the Catholics hate the Protestants and the Protestants hate the Catholics,” but I had no idea what she was talking about. Of Islam I knew even less.

As I aged, though, and read, such outlines gained focus, as did pattern. Liturgical creatures by blood, habit, and custom, people require routine, something as true in the aggregate as it is in the individual. If there was ever a time when humans didn’t splinter themselves along either biological variants or the confected ones of creed, culture, and worship, no memory recorded it. We’re divided, then, innumerably, and whether aware of it or not gain at least liminal comfort by the tidal amity and violence that such divisions orchestrate with nearly the same predictability as our moon-handled waters. Leo Tolstoy said as much, asserting that human life is little more than a flux of war and peace, and to date we stand without refutation.

As I played and re-played Shannon’ favorites, she moved in her accustomed revolutions, jumping stiff-legged on her little trampoline to maximize altitude before leaping again to my arms. Motion alone can slake any child, but it’s the exponential emollient of autism. Walking off the trampoline, she sat on the bed a moment, the sign that she’d jumped her last, then strode to my feet, hands high, issuing her lone word.

“Up-uh,” she said, as I lifted her to re-commence our travels.

So much is spoken of war, but so much hushed, that flux most of all, war’s bewitching, generational recrudescence. Few of us think we need either war or the faultlines that create it, but whether opposed or in support, such animus and intrigue, such partitioning and brutality, likely defines us, something we might never consider and may flee from the conclusions if we did.

In any endeavor it’s mostly story that we’re after, and the largest portion of human story derives from suffering along with our ability to withstand or succumb. If disease or heartbreak can produce individual suffering, on a cultural scale great story lies in war’s depths alone, furnishing identity. That such things matter is unlikely, but it’s the pattern we’ve set for ourselves and it’s that pattern that perversely comforts us. If not true in war’s midst, it’s certainly true in reflection as the stories compile to tapestry, to identity, across centuries.

If grateful for any one thing regarding my parents’ bestowal of history and literature it’s an awareness of my own ordinariness. As most of us are, then, I’m unexceptional, composed of the same properties that make up nearly everyone, the weaknesses most of all, and a thirst for story and pattern may top these. It takes ordinary people succumbing to such pattern, to such custom, for war’s airborne seeds to germinate across generations, and what’s customary in warfare’s overtures is discrimination, nourishing the requisite antipathies and loyalties within those distinctions.

I long ago gave up pretending that I’m impervious to such pettiness, and took to approaching it the way alcoholics do addiction, first by acknowledging a vulnerability followed by resisting it anew with each day. Over my lifetime, 9/11 was the first prolonged challenge to that, and for more than a decade I’ve struggled not to slip. In war, afterall, there are enemies and allies, a glorious simplicity, and after a life without imminent enemies I could now sense how easy it would be, soothing even, to fall into the ordinary debasement of Muslims, my kind’s latest foes. To align into one of two groups – us with our story, they with theirs, ours clearly superior – would be as simple, as liberating, as water finding its way. Us and them, with ‘them’ always whittled, reduced, downgraded to subhuman, the path of least resistance. Dark skin, dark eyes, dark beards, dark ways. Odd attire, odd creed, odd words, odd God. Filthy. Brutal. Sinful. Savage. So easy, so tempting, to elide the cumbersome occlusions of nuance and set yourself free.

“Easy, Shan. We’ll change it. There. Moonshadow.”

As far as I could tell, Cat Stevens was absent all menace. Acute spiritual ache aside, he seemed just another happy, hairy, healthy Hippie. In peace it’s easy to see that, the humanity, the fraternity, the kinship binding us all. In war it’s hardly possible, even dangerous. Threats, afterall, are real, most manufactured for those coveted plotlines, the stories we need, and like everyone, I grew up on such narratives.

As a child, maybe eight or nine, I mined my father for everything he knew of World War II, which was considerable. Dates and battles were one thing, the personalized another. He was four years old to eight during the war, with his father stationed in the Florida Panhandle after joining up near their Philadelphia home. After Pearl Harbor, when war was simultaneously declared on Germany, one guy kicked a Dachshund down a Main Line street while others tossed Frankfurters out windows. In Florida, near Panama City, my dad and his friends caused alarm on one of their many Gulf vigils, mistaking a porpoise school for a Kraut sub. Later he married Connie Mertz, my half-German mother, then took his first job in San Francisco.

“Our neighbor was Orf Logan, a living, breathing Joad.  A Dust Bowl Okie gone to Bakersfield. Orf lied about his age to join the Marines at sixteen. He was a big guy, even then, and they made him a flame-thrower. He fought at Tarawa, Saipan, and Iwo Jima. The Japanese hated flame-throwers, and for good reason, and those tanks made easy targets. He showed me and your mom a picture once, from Life Magazine, of his training squad. There were ninety-nine guys, all smiling, and Orf pointed to himself and one other. ‘We’re the only two that made it without a scratch,’ he said.

“He told me once that he’d done his best, but when he was walking around town he had to cross the street whenever he saw an Asian face, and as often as not went into a bar to settle down, as much to calm the hate still in him as to chase the screams of burning Japs from his head. It’s tough to walk half a block in San Francisco without passing a bar or seeing an Asian face.”

Such stories beguiled me, something already forming in Flannery. I’d taken her and Shan to Fort Wetherill in the afternoon, an old World War II gun battery on Conanicut Island in Narragansett Bay being re-ingested by coastal shrubland, where the dissipating artillery bunkers – root-cracked and weed-covered – are young mind wonderlands.

“It’s an old castle, Flan,” I’d said, carrying Shannon while Flannery poked about a crumbling turret, snatching at grasshoppers popping off goldenrod whips.

“A long time ago, across the ocean, a mean king stomped all over the nice people. He had mean knights who wore yucky hats and walked funny and everyone thought they’d come here too, so the nice people here built this big castle to look for their ships.”

“And then what happened?”

Such call and return went for some time, through grasshoppers and blacked-out ammo dumps, a woodchuck and a field mouse, with Shannon perched in her crook, smiling, laughing, staring wide-eyed at moving creatures. A chipmunk. An Eastern Towhee. A Brown Thrasher. A Red-Tailed Hawk overhead. A gray squirrel, then two more. A cottontail rabbit. Eventually we descended, finding a strip of beach among igneous outcrops, hundred-foot cliffs hemming a deep cove. Shan slipped from my arms. On par with motion, water soothes her wholly. She toed her way to the surf, letting the salt’s advance and retreat wash her ankles before she pistoned up and down, splashing. “A chainsaw on a pogo stick,” a therapist once described her, and it’s so.

Flan found the inner chambers of a broken moon snail, gull-dropped and shattered. After tracing the shell’s delicate curvatures, though, she lost interest.

“Did the mean king ever come here, Da-Da?”

“No, Flan. The nice people here and everywhere went and fought him and his knights, and he was really mean but they chased him into his castle and burned it down.”

“Will he come back?”

“No, Flan.”

“Will the knights with the yucky hats come back?”

“No. They’re all gone.”

“Were the hats really yucky?”

“Super yucky, like the knights inside.”

Shan heard none of it, or showed no indication that she did, simply reveling in the tide and the sand and the sun, in things that fly and things that crawl and things that swim and run. Water fountained out from each stomp and her hands shot down to her sides and up to the air then back and again in iterating elation. She broke off here and there only to chase the silver side schools occasionally daring sun-touched shallows, soaking up summer’s remains.

That night, recycling Shannon’s Stevens’ preferences for a fifth time, I knew that I’d lied to Flannery. There will always be nice people and mean kings and mean knights with yucky hats with everyone everywhere lined up on the right and proper side, and things are so because we only think we want them otherwise. The plot, afterall, never changes, only settings and characters, and suffering will always supply the stories we crave, along with the healing and compassion binding its wake.

Even at three I knew that Flan had already succumbed, and as I walked her now drowsing sister for a few final laps I equally knew that I could exchange the music for news at any time, to learn the coming casts and hear the Muses warm. Rebellion in the Ukraine, pinkos on the make. China tiffing with Japan, feigns to settle old scores. Iran, the Sudan, Nigeria. Headless bodies across Mexican deserts. Jihadi’s finally congealing, cutting off heads of their own, and always Jerusalem and Gaza, simmering, now and again boiling. Anger be now your song, immortal one.

Lowering the music, I could scarcely hear Stevens sing his own song – this of seeking, seeking God – as I laid Shannon down, pressing hair back from her forehead over and over, away from flickering eyes.

I once had dreams of her, many of them, day and night, talking, interacting, engaging. At the snap of a finger or the wave of a wand she’d become the word we’ve been told to never use, normal, but at some point the dreams just stopped, and I wondered if that didn’t have my unconscious sanction. Flannery, it’s true, is still a child, but the change is eminently foreseeable, when the knights and kings and yucky hats will become our common discrepancies, those of Gods and creeds and colors, of commerce and of countries. With luck we’ll raise her to beat them back, maybe for life, but they’ll never erase, any more than will her heart or spleen.

As it stands, Shan remains pure, and will stay so. She’ll never become the things we know her to be. She’ll never be white, never be female, never be Christian or American. She’ll only be, and I may have willed that magic wand away from an inability to bear it, to witness the conversion proceed. As our daughter crossed over into normalcy there would be a moment, some brief confusion before the surrender, when what causes all the fuss would seem as feeble and bizarre as I can only imagine it must be, and I’d wave that same stick in fury to send her back, back from where she came.

Having rolled onto my shoulder, Shan had fallen asleep. It would be some time before I could move without waking her, and I laid in the dark, straining to hear the music.

In the Gardens

            Shannon’s younger sister Flannery was two when I’d planted the asparagus in Jamestown, where we’d re-located that same week. Now, a year later, I fretted the same patch while remembering our youngest frolicking in the little trench when I filled it with water or pushed more dirt around the burgeoning stalks. If all went well, the packaging said, in three years we could begin harvesting. Now though, twelve months on and with local farms already selling their own asparagus, not a shoot had come up. Flan stared at the same ground that I did, while a now five-year old Shannon busied herself across the lawn.

When we moved I scarcely knew a thing about gardening. Shannon had a rough go in the Newport school system, and having heard that the next island over had a stouter special needs offering, Karen prompted the move, where for the first time in many years I’d live with a yard, a yard with soil. Twenty or so pines grow alongside the quarter acre, littering most of it with acidic needles that I’d soon learn don’t do much for fertility.

“Good for blueberries,” a neighbor said. “Not much else. You have to remediate.”

Having moved just in time, though, early May, I hacked out three beds from crab grass. The trees made finding steady sunlight a trick, but there was enough, and I placed twenty-eight potatoes on the little saltbox’s west side, a small lettuce-beet-carrot patch out front, and did the best I could with ten wads of asparagus roots on the eastern edge, where pines – white and pitch – reign.

The potatoes flourished, enlivening us all fall, while the island’s rife cottontail population mowed what paltry lettuce, carrot, and beet sprouts came up. Despite my not knowing anything about soil, however, by August two thin asparagus spears per root ball had bushed out, standing a couple of feet high and looking like tumbleweeds when November finally toppled them. I piled pine straw over the bed, thinking it might ward off deep freezes, but by mid-May was convinced all had failed. Now I stared at dirt, piquing Flan.

“What are you doing, Da-Da?”

With Shannon speechless at five and her sister forming complex syntax at three, Karen and I felt that we’d had two first children.

“Looking, Flan. Just looking.”

Squatted on the small bed’s edge, I scratched away some lingering pine needles before gently thumbing soil wherever there seemed to be a bulge.

“What for? What are you looking for?”

“Sprouts, Flan. Sprouts like you. You and Shannon.”

Flannery squatted alongside, already knowing not to step on the bed.

“What’s a sprout?”

“A baby plant, Flan. We’re hoping some will come up here.”

Ten yards away, where a rhododendron crowded the back deck, Shannon pulled the bush’s pink blossoms off in handfuls, flickering her fingers to watch petals flutter to grass. Her sounds varied, but for the last week she’d favored a loud, sheep-like bleat, ushered here between each flower haul.

“Shannon’s a lamb again, Da-Da.”

Jamestown, the lone township on Conanicut Island, has five active farms, two of which allow residents to wander freely, including right among their many sheep. Flannery and I often went when Shan was in therapy, thirty-plus hours of it a week now for the last three years.

“She certainly sounds like one, Flan,” I said, finally giving up on any new shoots for the day.

Shannon let forth another bleat, then yanked two fistfuls of petals, watching them drizzle down. Flan probed the soil as I had.

“When can we see the sprouts, Da-Da?”

I leaned forward, pushing dirt into three depressions where Shan had walked across the bed earlier that day. After smoothing the soil with a few back-and-forth swipes, I patted each reparation flat.

“I don’t know, Flan. I don’t know. We have to wait. We water, we weed, and we wait. After that, we just hope.”

 

 

 

Affinity

Middle-age compels re-assessing, parenthood too, along with any blunt-force diagnosis to either yourself or a loved one – cancer, schizophrenia, ALS, autism, anything. Karen delivered Shannon when we were forty-one, the ingress to middle-age, and twenty months later Shan was labeled autistic, making a profound confluence for re-calibration.

Faith often tops such reflective shufflings. Middle-aged atheists, for instance, even skeptics, often doubt their unbelief as mortality edges in. First newborns, too, are famous for eliciting the sense of a higher power, whereas the suffering induced by a fatal disease or a burdensome mental disorder can shock the faith of even the most devoted, or at least throw into question the character of a heretofore loving God. Rather than any such reversals, though, Shannon’s diagnosis invoked in both Karen and me stark affirmations, ones adumbrated nearly the moment we got together.

“Do you believe in God?,” I’d asked her a couple of days into our brief courtship. Having never asked anyone so directly, I had no idea what prompted the question.

We’d met a couple of years before when I’d come back from Alaska to visit family in Connecticut. Though we were both seeing people at the time, neither relationship materialized, and two years later Karen emailed from New York, where she had lived most of her adult life. Forty year olds have an urgency that the young don’t, and by chance I was scheduled to go to a conference in Maine not long after we started corresponding. We both wanted kids, and with two lifetimes of dating between us knew that at our age such tender-footing likely wouldn’t produce offspring. Having grown intimate by email, we sided with immediacy, and with that decision I probably guessed that all other barriers had collapsed as well.

“Do you believe in God?”

Seated on the ground just off a path, enough moonlight bled through broken cloud cover to glisten the Atlantic’s gentle washings of the dark stones below, while the approaching swells lilted a few moored sailboats.  Karen seemed as surprised by the directness of her answer as I had by that of the question’s.

“I do,” she said. “Yes. I do.”

Veiled in struggling moonlight, we sat silent for a while, with only the waves and an occasional halyard clank ruffling the quiet. Born in 1968, each of us grew up in the Northeast, ensconced in the long, braided shadows of Lyell, Darwin, Hubble, and decaying orthodoxy. If belief hadn’t fallen out of fashion within our demographic, admission of it certainly had, and among countless others Karen and I had learned to bury our respective faiths. Within that simple exchange, though, we’d exhumed them, flooding in oxygen, and if I’d been drawn to her before, in the silence following her confession I knew I was with somebody I could love.

“Me too,” I said, reciprocating her disclosure.

Neither of us could readily define what exactly we believed in, only that despite every evidence to the contrary we shared an intuition that a creative force of some kind existed, one that still – bucking even longer odds – laid hands on earthly affairs.  This shared hunch would serve as a great stabilizer in the storms to come, ones that unbeknownst to us were just then startling Karen’s womb.

Commencement

Through summer the bay lumped it up in patches some days, others not, but by now, Halloween, the red kelp carpeted the beach every morning, where the tides re-compiled it hour to hour. Having been out of New England for thirteen years, I’d nearly forgotten about Indian Summer, though 2010’s wasn’t so much a re-instated warmth as a continuation of it. While still fifty-some sunny degrees, then, scarcely a soul wended the Rhode Island sands that two months prior were awash in beach blankets, impediments Shannon and I navigated with effort just to gain the surf.

Now, with the expanse largely clear and the carousel and pavilion shuttered up, she picked her way through the seaweed mats, bending for detritus ranging from gull feathers to plastic spoons to candy wrappers to a ravel of striper skin tattered out from an eyeless skull. Gulls foraged the weeds’ fringes, and Shan occasionally broke off to give brief, passionate chase before the maroon plant mush drew her back. Having called her name many times only to receive the accustomed no reply, not even a glance, I mostly busied myself in the same mush, mid-shin in places, toeing crab claws and amphipod husks while finally feeling the onset of revelation, watching my nineteen-month old wordless daughter plunge herself in the world.

 *    *    *    *

Sometimes we’re shown the thresholds we cross, others we see for ourselves, while still more are sensed days or even months before life eventually shoves us through. My wife Karen and I were twelve weeks from Shannon’s official diagnosis, eight from first hearing a professional voice say ‘autism’, and two from calling the initial therapists to our apartment for an assessment. Having spent nearly every hour of every day with Shan since her birth, however, many of them here on Newport’s Easton’s Beach, I was finally receiving tinglings that no matter what lay ahead, as a family we were destined for unkempt, unanticipated corridors, even if such a warren remained nameless.

“Shannon,” I said, trying again, repeating once more to the air.  “Shannon.”

The light off-shore breeze still comforted this late in the year, and I watched it spin the towering wind turbine a half mile inland, beneath which Karen worked at a social services agency, having taken the job a year before to get us out of Queens. I’d been living in Alaska when we met, and with both of us forty we knew that a protracted settling in period would jeopardize the tremendous desire each of us had to have children. Subsequently, having corresponded by email for a couple of months while a continent apart, we met in Maine for a few days. Two weeks later, with me back in Alaska, she called, pregnant, a rapidity we hadn’t expected. Two and half weeks after that I moved to her Queens apartment, and eight months later became a full-time parent. If Queens was far more pleasant than I’d anticipated, particularly after ten years in small-town Alaska, Karen and I agreed that it was too cramped to raise a child, and we took the first outside job that offered. Soon enough places like this beach became familiar to Shan and me nearly sand grain to sand grain.

Earlier, in June, maybe July, blue crabs had come in, to breed I’d guessed, mostly stationing along the beach’s corners. At the southern face of Aquidneck Island, itself at the mouth of Narragansett Bay, Easton’s Beach backs a horseshoe cove, where rocky cover protects sea life as the sands end on each side. Bailey Brook feeds it, but what had once likely been quite a salt marsh has been converted to a reservoir across the busy road. The crabs, though, still seem to find enough nursery habitat along the cove’s rocky portions to migrate in every summer. With orange-tipped claws the only discoloration staining a metallic blue armory, they’re well-named. I’d caught Shan a few, but they’re far too aggressive to much more than show a toddler from distance. “Crab,” I said three or four times with her yards away, before dropping the claw-clacking creature to water. Words still drew her then, and she looked over each time, eyes lighting where the hard-shelled body had plopped. She’d stride over, pawing the shallows a while before resuming her own insular play.

At some point the crabs left as fast as they’d appeared, but here, squatting in the kelp at the end of October, fingering dead plants and the hordes of wild rice-like invertebrates they housed, I found one, or at least its remains. Twisting it from sucking weeds, I brushed it clean, with the limp, buff legs drooped off a blanched carapace. Holding a single claw, I spun the rind round like a mobile, then held the shell out. Sunlight breached it, with everything beyond shimmering in opaque blurs, including my daughter.

“Shannon,” I called, pitching my voice to cut both the wind and the thirty yards between us. “Shannon. Look. Crab. Crab. Crab.”

Rising, I stepped through the slush-like weeds until I could squat beside her. She’d been stomping the kelp to watch it spatter all around before dropping the next foot. Dangling the body near her face, I brushed one of many kelp nits off her cheek before speaking.

“Crab, Shannon. See? Crab. Crab. Crab.”

Tight-knit coercion still arrested her, particularly with such a plum offering. Her hand reached, the fingers feathering hollowed armor like squid arms. She squealed, grabbing the shell firm and tossing it far. Walking on, she reached the mat’s rear, where sunlight had crusted its surface. Every stride left a perfect hole behind, and several times I tried again to turn her.

“Shan. Shan. Shan.”

Five mergansers – fish ducks, winter ducks – flew overhead, traveling inland, framed in the big windmill above Karen. When I looked back to our daughter, walking away, she’d begun stomping again, puncturing kelp crust to geyser up the red ferment below like blood from a deep, sudden wound.

“Good Lord, Shannon,” I thought. “Where are we going?”