House Rules

by Jodi Picoult

Jacob remembers the dialogue from every movie he’s ever seen. I’ve met so many parents of kids who are on the low end of the autism spectrum, kids who are diametrically opposed to Jacob, with his Asperger’s. They tell me I’m lucky to have a son who’s so verbal, who is blisteringly intelligent, who can take apart the broken microwave and have it working again an hour later. They think there is no greater hell than having a son who is locked in his own world, unaware that there’s a wider one to explore. But try having a son who is locked in his own world and still wants to make a connection. A son who tries to be like everyone else but truly doesn’t know how.

One day I looked at him, lying on the floor beside a Tonka truck. He was spinning its wheels, his face only inches away, and I thought, Where have you gone?

By then, I’d completely devoted myself to Jacob’s early intervention therapists – a parade of people who would come to our house intent on dragging him out of his own little world. I want my house back, Henry told me. I want you back. But I had already noticed how, with the behavioral therapy and speech therapy, Jacob had begun to communicate again. I could see the improvement. Given that, there wasn’t even a choice to make.

There’s a lot of fuss about whether or not Asperger’s is on the autism spectrum, but to be honest, it doesn’t matter. It’s a term we use to get Jacob the accommodations he needs in school, not a label to explain who he is.

‘He’s autistic,’ I snap. ‘Do you have any questions?’ I’ve found that anger works best. It’s the electric shock they need to tear their gaze away from the train wreck.

But I’m not allowed to say my life would be easier without Jacob around. I’m not even allowed to think it. It’s another one of those unwritten house rules.

I live with my mother and my brother, Theo. The fact that we emerged from the same gene pool is mind-boggling to me, because we could not be more different from each other if we actively attempted it.

Theo is always caught up in what other people think of him, while I already know what people think of me – that I’m the weird kid who stands too close and doesn’t shut up.

It’s times like this I am glad I don’t look people in the eye. If I did, surely they would die on the spot from the contempt shooting out of mine. Of course I survived. But at what cost?

I’d like a friend with benefits, although I’d never admit that to my mother. I’d like a friend, period.

Contrary to popular belief, the ink is not still drying on my bar certificate. That’s pizza sauce. But it was an honest accident.

I decided to go to law school, for the same reason everyone else goes to law school: because I had no idea what else to do. I’ll be a good lawyer. Maybe even a great one. But here I am, at twenty-eight, and my secret fear is that I’m going to be just another guy who spends his whole life making money by doing something he’s never really loved to do.

Owen is in my Advanced Placement physics class. He is really quiet and very smart, and if you ask me, he has a little bit of Asperger’s in him. It’s like gaydar; I can tell.

‘Are you looking forward to anything this week in school, Jacob?’ Sure. Rampant dismissal and abject humiliation. In other words, the usual.

But whenever he’s around, the conversation always has to be about him, and I don’t know why that’s okay if it’s Mark talking but not if it’s me.

I had assumed that I’d go back to work when Jacob was in school full-time – but that was before I learned that being an advocate for your autistic child’s education is a forty-hour-a-week profession in and of itself.

And here’s the really remarkable thing: all these people who trust me to sort out their own sorry lives assume that I have a clue when it comes to sorting out my own.

There are some teachers who see the greater good in Jacob, in spite of all his quirks – and there are others who just don’t get him and don’t bother to try. Jack Thornton expected Jacob to be a math savant when that’s not always part of Asperger’s – in spite of what Hollywood seems to think. Instead, he’s been frustrated by a student whose handwriting is messy, who transposes numbers when doing calculations, and who is far too literal to understand some of the theoretical concepts of math, like imaginary numbers and matrices.

Well, that explains why I didn’t see a deterioration in Jacob’s behavior. When the class started laughing, he would have assumed he’d done something good.

‘Did something happen in math class today?’ I ask. Jacob’s eyes widen. ‘You can’t handle the truth,’ he says, in a dead-on imitation of Jack Nicholson, as sure a sign as any that he’s squirming.

The world, for Jacob, is truly black and white. Once, when he was younger, his gym teacher called because Jacob had a meltdown during kickball when a kid threw the big red ball at him to tag him out. You don’t throw things at people, Jacob tearfully explained. It’s a rule! Why should a rule that works in one situation not work in another? If a bully taunts him and I tell him it’s all right to reciprocate – because sometimes that’s the only way to get these kids to leave him alone – why shouldn’t he do the same with a teacher who humiliates him in public?

‘Teachers deserve respect,’ I explain. ‘Why do they get it for free, when everyone else has to earn it?’ I blink at him, speechless. Because the world isn’t fair, I think, but Jacob already knows that better than most of us.

‘But it would be nice,’ I said, ‘to wake up on Mother’s Day and, like every other mother in this country, to get a card from her son.’ Jacob thought about this. ‘What day is Mother’s Day?’ he asked. I told him, and then I forgot about the conversation, until May 10. When I went downstairs and started my Sunday morning coffee-making routine, I found an envelope propped up against the glass carafe. In it was a Mother’s Day card. It didn’t say Dear Mom. It wasn’t signed. In fact, it wasn’t written on at all – because Jacob had only done what I’d told him to do, and nothing more. That day, I sat down at the kitchen table and laughed. I laughed until I started to cry.

I’ve often thought, since then, about what would happen if Jacob was stopped by the police while he was on his own – like on Sundays, when he bikes into town to meet Jess. Like the parents of many autistic kids, I’ve done what the message boards suggest: In Jacob’s wallet is a card that says he’s autistic, and that explains to the officer that all the behaviors Jacob is exhibiting – flat affect, an inability to look him in the eye, even a flight response – are the hallmarks of Asperger’s syndrome. And yet, I’ve wondered what would happen if the police came in contact with a six-foot, 185-pound, out-of-control boy who reached into his back pocket. Would they wait for him to show his ID card, or would they shoot first?

Jacob’s room has the nuclear precision of an Architectural Digest feature: everything has its place; the bed is made neatly; the pencils on the desk sit at perfect right angles to the wood grain. Jacob’s room is the place entropy goes to die.

Sometimes I think the human heart is just a simple shelf. There’s only so much you can pile onto it before something falls off an edge and you are left to pick up the pieces.

I could probably get to Jess’s dorm while comatose, but today – when I really do need Theo’s help to find my way to a new location – he leaves school because he’s sick. He searches me out after sixth period and tells me he feels like crap and is going home to die. Don’t, I tell him. That would really upset Mom

When Theo ruined one of my forensic experiments-in-progress, I went into his bedroom with a pair of scissors and systematically hacked his comic book collection to bits.

Dealing with an autistic meltdown is like dealing with a tornado. Once you are close enough to see it coming, there’s nothing to do but weather the storm. Unlike a child having a temper tantrum, Jacob doesn’t care if his behavior is making me react. He doesn’t make sure he’s not hurting himself. He isn’t doing it in order to get something. In fact, he’s not in control of himself at all. And unlike when he was four or five, I am not big enough to control him anymore.

Motherhood is a Sisyphean task. You finish sewing one seam shut, and another rips open.

‘Do you always get the bad guys?’ she asks. There’s no way to explain to a child that the line between good and evil isn’t nearly as black and white as a fairy tale would lead you to believe. That an ordinary person can turn into a villain, under the right circumstances. That sometimes we dragon slayers do things we aren’t proud of.

‘That’s all right, Daddy.’ Sasha shrugs. ‘I’m used to it.’ The hell with a bullet. What kills me is disappointing my kid.

‘Look, Emma,’ the doctor says, ‘I’m an hour away from where you are. I think you need to take him to the ER.’ I know what will happen then. If Jacob is unable to snap out of this, he’ll be a candidate for a 302 involuntary commitment in the hospital psych ward.

Frankly, I don’t understand why she’s so upset, when I am the one who went missing. Frankly, I wonder who Frank was, and why he has an adverb all to himself.

It gets me out of English, which is a blessing in disguise, since we are reading Flowers for Algernon and just last week a girl asked (not in a mean way but truly curious) whether there were any experiments under way that might cure people like me.

In fact, I haven’t seen this stuffed animal in ages; she’s been buried in his closet. It is hard to see your eighteen-year-old son clutching a stuffed toy. But that’s what autism is, a slippery slope. One minute, you convince yourself that you are so far up that hill you can’t see the bottom anymore, and the next, it’s covered with black ice, and you are falling fast.

I feel a little like Alice in Wonderland, in the Disney video that Sasha likes to watch on her weekends with me, and everyone is in on the Unbirthday routine but me. Last time we’d watched it, I realized that being a parent wasn’t all that different. We’re always bluffing, pretending we know best, when most of the time we’re just praying we won’t screw up too badly.

I don’t know how anyone could look at Jacob and think he’d be a viable witness. Sure, his mind is a steel trap. But half the time, there’s no lock to get inside it.

When I corrected Mr Hubbard’s mistakes in class, he smiled with the left side of his mouth. I assumed that meant he was grateful. But that weird half smile apparently meant he was annoyed with me, even though if someone’s smiling it is supposed to signify that they’re cheerful. So I got sent to the principal’s office for my bad attitude when, really, it was just because the expressions on people’s faces are not always reflections of how they feel inside.

Here is what I learned: Dead isn’t angels or ghosts. It’s a physical state of breakdown, a change in all those carbon atoms that create the temporary house of a body so that they can return to their most elemental stage. I don’t really see why that freaks people out, since it’s the most natural cycle in the world.

I may not understand emotion, but I can feel guilt about not understanding it.

By the time I was five, I knew that there were differences between Jacob and me. I had to eat everything on my plate, but Jacob was allowed to leave behind things like peas and tomatoes because he didn’t like the way they felt inside his mouth. Whatever kids’ tape I was listening to in the car while we drove took a backseat to anything by Bob Marley. I had to pick up all my toys after I was done playing, but the six-foot line of Matchbox cars that Jacob had spent the day arranging perfectly straight was allowed to snake down the hallway for a month until he got tired of it.

Because the minute Jacob had any kind of crisis – and that happened constantly – my mom would drop everything and run to him. And usually the thing she dropped was me.

Rest easy, real mothers. The very fact that you worry about being a good mom means that you already are one.

If you were dropped into the UK and you happened to be Korean or Portuguese, your confusion would be expected. After all, you don’t speak the language. But if you’re American, technically, you do. So you’re stuck in conversations that make no sense to you, in which you ask people to repeat themselves over and over, in the hope that eventually the unfamiliar words will fall into place. This is what Asperger’s feels like. I have to work so hard at the things that come naturally to others, because I’m just a tourist here.

On the other hand, I think cats have Asperger’s. Like me, they’re very smart. And like me, sometimes they simply need to be left alone.

Emma Hunt is crying now, and I know less about what to do with a crying woman than I would with a greased piglet on a New York City subway.

A tantrum is like a magnet: eyes cannot help but lock onto you and your child when it happens.

I realize he is trying to embrace me. I put the receiver down and step up to the window. I mimic his position, so that we are mirrors of each other, with a glass wall between us. Maybe this is what it is always like for Jacob, who tries to connect with people and can’t ever quite manage it. Maybe the membrane between someone with Asperger’s and the rest of the world is not a shifting invisible seam of electrons but, instead, a see-through partition that allows only the illusion of feeling, instead of the actual thing.

After they are gone, I lie on the floor, and with my finger, I write the equation of the Fibonacci sequence in the air. I do this until it gets blurry, until my finger is as heavy as a brick. The last thing I remember thinking before I disappear is that numbers make sense. You cannot say the same about people.