The Wave by Kristen Crusoe (ebook reader online txt) 📗

Sitting down carefully, tucking her feet under her, she kept her arms close to her body, afraid the two tubes would go crazy and begin flying around her. She had never had so much as a minor wound before. This double mastectomy was like traveling to the moon after never going further than the end of the road. She smelt of antiseptics, and disease. She wanted to get clean.

‘I can’t sit still now. I need to shower. Change clothes. Is that OK?’

‘Of course. Do you need my help?’

‘No, I’m fine.’

‘You know, you have all your clothes in the closet still.’

‘That’s good. Polyester has never been my thing. I’ll be out soon. And I’ll help with dinner, right?’

‘OK, sure.’

She heard something in his voice. Uncertainty?

‘I won’t poison you again, Adam. I promise,’ she said, an almost-smile on her face.

He couldn’t find a response. He nodded, a crooked grin on his face.

‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Call if you need anything.’

Clair eased herself off the couch, sharp stabs of pain shooting through her chest. She stood, holding her arms around her middle, moving slowly, as though underwater. Each step hesitant. The wide, open living room held ghosts. Devon on the floor, watching Paw Patrol on television. Curled in the armchair, staring out the window, daydreaming. Lying on the couch, his head in her lap, reading Peter Rabbit and Winnie-the-Pooh together. He had been a precocious reader, recognizing words and finding rhythm to sentences as early as two years old. They had at first thought he was gifted, and he was. Just not in a way society accepts as normal. Neurodivergent is what they call it now. Before his autism had been diagnosed, he had been set aside in his public pre-kindergarten class, left to play on his own, a distraction from the daily routines. The memory saddened her.

‘How long has this been going on?’ she had asked his teacher that day she had arrived early to pick him up, finding him in a corner, by himself, a line of toy metal cars surrounding him.

The early testing had been inconclusive, and she had willingly deluded herself that he was OK, or would be with the right school, the best environment. Now, they had to do more, extensive and definitive.

‘I don’t believe it,’ Adam had said. ‘I’m taking him to a different specialist. They’re wrong, he can’t have autism. He’s my son.’

She would find him watching Devon with tears in his eyes, but if she said anything, he would look away, walk away. And their distance had begun to grow. The closer she clung, the further he drifted until they had become shadows passing in these rooms, afraid to touch lest their carefully constructed realities shatter.

* * *

As she turned to walk down the hall, towards the bathroom at the end, her skin prickled. His room, Devon’s, was there on the left. She stood for a moment, holding her hand on the door, feeling the grainy wood, the raised lettering spelling out his name. She thought about opening the door, looking in, but didn’t, couldn’t. Unsure of what she would find. Adam had not said. She was afraid to ask. They’d had a big fight about Devon’s room, his things. Little boy treasures. Two weeks after they had returned home from the beach, without Devon, he had opened the door to his room. Calling her to come. Waving his arm inside, at the evidence of a boy gone. Dust had settled on the shelves, a cold stillness hung over every object.

‘It’s time, Clair. He’s gone, never coming back. You have to accept this so we can move on with our lives.’ he had said.

‘Not today,’ she had said, and walked away.

Clair had moved about the house like a robot, making coffee in the morning, putting away dishes from the dishwasher. There weren’t many. Mostly they ate takeout from the local food collaborative. Eating right from the boxes. Clair would sit in her window seat, looking out towards the river, watching the sun move across the grounds, first lighting the tops of the trees, then shining on the last of the rhododendrons and azaleas banked up along the garden borders. It sparkled when it caught the ripples in the white water, shooting up like crystals, catching on the flat rocks scattered across the areas where the river narrowed, creating small, wading pools. She would imagine Devon there, hopping across the rocks, using his water telescope to look deep into the pools.

That was what he had been doing the last time she had seen him, at the beach. Gazing into the tidal pools. Sometimes she was sure she saw him here, on the river. His red Superman T-shirt catching the glow, like a sun. When she looked in his room, when she would go in and dust, vacuum, straighten the already orderly toys, she felt like she could sense the elephant on the shelf, the bear, larger than Devon, huddled in the corner, look up expectantly as though their boy was coming home. Looking back, she thought maybe that was the beginning of her descent into madness. But then, she felt only rage.

Adam had kept at her, wanting to pack everything up, donate to charity, or throw away. It was that insistence that had led her to madness, to her attempt to kill him and herself. Now, standing here, she was afraid to open the door, of what she might find, or not find. Maybe he had done that while she was away, rid this house of their son, of every last vestige of his precious life, lived here, in this room? Later, she told herself. I’ll look later. One last caress to the door, then on down the hall. She looked into their bedroom, bed unmade, curtains closed, a musty, old shoe odor coming from its darkened space. Walking through to the bathroom, she noticed only one side of the bed had been slept in. It surprised her that she noticed and