Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [106]
But this?
They were, I still think, among the most frightening words a parent can hear. We both knew about autism—who hadn’t seen Rain Man? Or read about autism in news magazines or seen shows about it on television? I stared at Ryan. Was that our son? Our child? Our baby?
No, I immediately thought, the doctor was wrong. Ryan wasn’t autistic. He couldn’t be. He was fine. I’m not going to believe it. I can’t believe it. But . . .
Deep down, I knew there was something wrong with him. Both Cat and I had known he wasn’t right for months. But we had never imagined it could be this serious. It couldn’t be this. Oh, Please God, not this.
“What do you mean?” I stammered.
“It’s a disorder . . .”
“I know what it is. But why? . . . How . . . ?”
The doctor patiently explained what he’d seen in the office. The lack of eye contact. Lack of comprehension. Inability to talk. Intense focus on colorful items. Lack of motor skills.
We were in a daze as he went on. We already knew those things; we knew our son. We hadn’t known what they meant.
“Is he going to be okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“What should we do?”
“He needs to be tested. There’s a developmental center in town, and they can answer your questions better than I can.”
At home, Cat and I found ourselves staring at Ryan as he sat quietly in the living room, feeling a tidal wave of emotions.
Denial. Guilt. Anger. Fear. Hopelessness.
We spent the rest of the afternoon looking for reasons to believe what the doctor had said, and reasons to doubt him. We talked about Ryan and what we’d noticed over the years. We went back and forth for hours, talking and worrying and crying and sitting by Ryan, trying to convince ourselves that there was nothing wrong with him at all, but somehow knowing that there was. Hoping. Praying. Pleading.
That night, when I called Micah, I could barely tell him what had happened. My hands shook when I held the receiver. My throat was tight and I couldn’t get the words out without breaking down.
“Jesus,” Micah said. “Are you sure?”
“No,” I said. “We don’t know anything for sure. We’ve got to bring him in for tests.”
“What do you need me to do?”
I began to cry.
“Micah . . . I . . .”
“Do you want me to come out there? Help you guys through this? You want me to find out who you should talk to? I’ll do whatever you need.”
“No,” I said. “That’s okay. We don’t know anything yet.”
“I feel like I’ve got to do something.”
“Just pray for Ryan, okay? Can you do that for him?”
“I’ll pray for all of you,” he said. “I’ll start praying right now.”
The only thing I remember about the next two months was a sometimes nagging, sometimes overwhelming, sense of worry about our son. At times, it was all I could think about; other times, when doing something else, I’d suddenly get the strange feeling that something was . . . wrong and it would take a moment before I realized I’d been subconsciously thinking about my son.
Dread. It permeated our home, seeped into the nooks and crannies of our lives.
Over the coming weeks and months, Cat shuttled Ryan to and from various doctors in search of answers. There were long waiting lists—it took six weeks to have his initial evaluation completed—and I remember sitting in the office, waiting for the words I didn’t want to hear.
“Though he’s thirty months of age, currently he has the developmental skills of a fourteen-month-old. There are other problems, too. Lack of eye contact, for example.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I think there’s a good chance that he has autism.”
“Is he going to be okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is there anything we can do?”
“I don’t know.”
“What can we do at home?”
“I don’t know.”
There were never any answers.