Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [30]
Harriet, who had been sitting, she realized, in a rather unladylike position—knees apart, back slumped, pocketbook in her lap, wearing the same sack of a dress she wore yesterday—now sat up straight. She removed her glasses, let them bob on their chain. A trivial amount of alcohol had been found in Jude’s system, but it was the freon that had caused him to pass out. And he was okay now: scheduled to go home that afternoon. She said, “Jude’s sixteen.”
“Yes, I know. Most children are diagnosed at a younger age, but not always. And I see that he’s adopted. Was he tested for birth defects as an infant?”
“I’m—I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Is anything known about the pregnancy?”
Harriet shook her head. The doctor scribbled. She knew almost nothing about Jude’s biological parents. That was the way most New York State adoptions had worked then.
“And he’s on methylphenidate. Kids with FAE or FAS are often diagnosed with ADHD, often have trouble in school, even trouble with the law, which is why it’s so important to take precautionary measures. Now, the hyperactivity and dyslexia, combined with the adoption and the telling facial features, lead me to suspect—”
“Hold on, facial features? What—you have to spell things out. FAE?”
“Fetal alcohol effects, which includes fetal alcohol syndrome.” The doctor, who appeared to be all of twenty-one years old, went on to describe Jude’s cranial symptoms with a precision—as though she, not Harriet, had kissed the boy good night every day for sixteen years—that pierced Harriet’s very brittle sense of reality. She felt dazed, dizzy, listening to the list that reduced her son’s face to a series of tribal malformations. Short, upturned nose; flat space between nose and mouth; thin upper lip; small chin; short eye openings—
“His eye openings—are just fine. Are perfect. I—”
“Perhaps it’s a mild case,” the doctor said, not unkindly.
Harriet said nothing. She was suddenly exhausted. She had slept about ten minutes in two days.
“Think about it awhile. When Jude has had time to recuperate, bring him in.” He would just need to undergo a few tests—motor functions, language skills. The doctor recommended a birth defects specialist whose name Harriet promptly forgot. “A firm diagnosis could be helpful to you. You could consider other medications. It could help answer questions about the source of your son’s behavior.”
“The source,” said Harriet dreamily. She looked down into the gaping pocketbook on her lap. In it was the detritus of her slipshod motherhood—keys, Kleenex, aspirin, cigarettes, checks decorated with the Grateful Dead dancing bears, a Snickers wrapper, an old shopping list, and a dime bag inside an Altoids tin inside a glove, which she decided then and there to flush the next time she had the chance. She closed her eyes. She could fall asleep right here, disappear. How wonderful it would be to find the source of all this, to blame it on some other mother.
At home, she was a shadow, a voice. She flitted in and out of his dreams, in and out of his room, opening the curtains, picking up the clothes from the floor, leaving a mug of warm milk on the nightstand. Sometimes she sat at the edge of his bunk bed, humming his song but not singing the words, running a hand over his arm or ankle, still trying to return heat to his body. Most of the day and most of the night he lay curled on his side with his back to the room, his Walkman turned up, his nose pressed to the cold wall.
Delph and Kram visited every day after school, always together. One sat in the bean bag chair, one in the wooden school chair with the butt cheeks scooped out. Again and again they apologized for not showing up on New Year’s Eve—their girlfriends had dragged them to another party. If only they’d gone to Tory’s instead! Maybe things would be different.
But mostly they didn’t talk about Teddy. They talked about school, what new albums were coming