CHAPTER TEN
“Ugh.” Karina gave a shudder as she paused on the threshold of the indoor playground. “Is this where people come to die when they’ve entered the terminal phase of style-deficit disorder?” She gazed out at a sea of moms wearing spit-up-stained T-shirts and sweats.
“Because God forbid that raising a new life should be any reason to let one’s Vogue subscription lapse,” Rhys commented drily. He probably should have been angered by her wildly impolitic remark, but it was almost reassuring to see that Karina couldn’t fully suppress her true colors, even when it was critical that she make a good impression. She cut a striking figure in her high black boots, tailored black pants, and a silky-looking black blouse sure to harbor a dry-clean-only tag somewhere within its folds.
Will clung to Rhys like a limpet, not at all sure what to make of this exotic-looking stranger. Karina’s first few moments with her son weren’t the poignant, theatrical reunion she might have wished for. She’d met them at the entrance to Imagination Station, and when she’d leaned in too close to greet Will, he’d buried his head against Rhys’s shoulder, hugging his favorite wooden Thomas train to his chest and running a compulsive finger across the worn disk of the train’s animated face.
Tears were still drying on Will’s cheeks from a showdown that had erupted only minutes before, when Rhys tried to persuade him to leave the toy in the car. It was an unwritten rule at the venue that personal toys were best left at home, as sharing wasn’t exactly the forte of the playground’s young clientele. But Rhys had eventually backed down, figuring that the meeting with Karina was enough of a challenge that Will might need his precious comfort object.
Looking a little nonplussed that the playground’s policy required her to surrender her boots at the entrance, Karina tucked them into a bright-yellow cubby next to Rhys’s and Will’s shoes.
Imagination Station was a large warehouselike space, with areas marked out for different kinds of play. There were blocks, ride-on toys, a crafts-and-puzzles corner, a slide, a ball pit, a rose-covered cottage stocked with toy appliances and plastic food, and a replica fire truck for the toddlers to climb on. The scent of diapers, sweaty feet, disinfectant, and rubber was overlaid with eau de juice box and the faint aroma of stale Goldfish crackers.
“This place must be an incubator for some kind of super virus,” Karina said, her nose wrinkling as they stepped onto the bouncy flooring.
“When it’s twenty degrees outside and your toddler needs to blow off some steam, there aren’t a huge number of options.”
“Well, do they at least serve coffee?” Karina asked as she whisked out of the way of a grimy-faced little girl bearing down on her with a plastic lawn mower.
“It’s strictly bring your own,” Rhys said, gesturing to his stainless-steel commuter mug.
“Where do we sit?” Karina was surveying the area as if to locate a lounger from which to view the action. She craned her neck, perhaps hoping a drinks waiter might still emerge from behind the miniature country cottage at the end of the large room.
“We don’t.” Will was already toddling off toward a large, orange twisty slide, and Rhys lost no time in following him.
Making his determined way up the ladder to the apex of the slide, Will began to fuss when he got stuck behind a little boy who’d come to a dead stop three rungs from the top. Sure enough, the vertigo-afflicted toddler started backing down, stepping perilously close to Will’s fingers. Rhys ducked in and supported Will, moving him far enough to the side so that the other child could climb back to safe ground.
Karina, a game look on her face, positioned herself at the bottom of the slide to meet Will as he came down. But as soon as he saw her there, her gaze a little too avid, her arms outstretched to block any escape route, Will began to cry, furiously working his chubby little legs against the plastic chute as if to scrabble his way back up to the top.
“Maybe we should build something instead,” Rhys suggested quickly, moving to the front of the slide to scoop Will up. He lifted Will onto his shoulders to distract him and strode toward an enclosure filled with colored blocks, Karina trailing along behind.
“Will, would you like the blue block?” she asked once they were settled in the new space. Her voice was shrill, her manner too insistent, as she knelt on the floor and waved a plastic brick before Will’s eyes.
“Will?” she pressed, her aquamarine eyes so close that Will recoiled from their intrusion. A pit opened up in Rhys’s stomach. She reminded him of how he’d been in those agonizing months after Will’s first birthday, when speech should have started to blossom, and Rhys had dogged his small son—constantly pointing and naming, prowling over him with a strained smile in an attempt to elicit a response, performing a virtual cabaret of communication skills at every turn. But where Rhys knew his son through the everyday intimacy of being there, Karina had no way to read the nuances of his behavior or to know when she was overdoing it.
He had prepped her on the phone a few days before and sent her some of the parenting books and articles he’d found most helpful, but there was no substitute for face-to-face experience, and Will and Karina were still, for all intents and purposes, strangers to each other.
Will, brow furrowed, turned pointedly away, selecting his own blue block from the jumble on the floor.
Karina dipped her head, her silk-swathed chest rising and falling rapidly as she struggled to control her breathing. She brushed away what might have been a tear, and a pang of compassion tore through Rhys. She’s really feeling this.
“I’d hoped . . .” She trailed off. “I don’t know what I’d hoped.”
He reached out a hand and placed it tentatively on her shoulder but withdrew it quickly, disconcerted by the tense fragility of her form and her body heat warming the silk. Her frame felt small and slight, as if it were made of sparrow bones, and it was almost inconceivable to think they’d once been physically close.
“You can’t take it personally,” he said. “Will operates according to a logic all his own.”
“I know.” Karina swallowed hard and flashed a quick smile. “I’m fine, really. I’ll just keep trying.”
“Take it slow,” he suggested. “There’ll be other days.”
“Thanks. I appreciate that.”
She sniffed and hesitantly met his gaze. “I’m sure your girlfriend has no trouble bonding with him.”
Frustration welled up at Karina’s willful misunderstanding.
“Andie isn’t my girlfriend,” he said. “I already told you she’s Will’s occupational therapist, and she’s staying with us for three months.” He decided not to mention his hope that he could prevail upon Andie to stay longer.
“Rhys, I’m not an idiot. The woman answered the door in her pajamas—”
“For the last time, she is Will’s therapist, and I’d appreciate it if you would stop casting aspersions.”
“Oh . . .” Karina broke off, her demeanor already brightening as the message finally sank in.
In fact, by the time Will took off in the direction of the ball pit, her expression was so happily preoccupied that Rhys already regretted clarifying the situation. He could practically see the lavish schemes hatching under cover of Karina’s sweeping lashes. With a deep sigh, he tossed back the dregs of his coffee and took off after his son.
Will left his train on the wide ledge around the ball pit and maneuvered himself into the enclosure, where another toddler boy wallowed delightedly in a sea of red, blue, and yellow plastic orbs. The boy’s mother sat on the ledge, a harried expression knitting her brow. In addition to the toddler who played in the ball pit, she had an infant tucked against her chest in one of those stretchy fabric wraps. She looked exhausted, with dark shadows under her eyes and wisps of red hair escaping from a haphazard ponytail. Rhys gave her an awkward nod as he hovered nearby.
Will was more interested in the tactile novelty of plowing through the pit than he was in the other boy—until the boy reached for Will’s train. Rhys saw the conflagration looming as the plump little hand closed around Thomas’s familiar, weathered sides. He cursed himself for not persevering with Will in the battle to leave the toy in the car. Anyone who got between Will and Thomas was asking for trouble.
“Um.” Rhys hesitated, unsure of what to say to the mother, who whipped her head around to face him.
Rhys’s mind went blank. He’d seen these negotiations play out before, usually between parents who conducted a saccharine, singsong one-way dialogue that modeled dispute resolution for their offspring, sometimes with a decided edge. “We share our toys, don’t we, Beckham? But seeing as the other little boy doesn’t want to share, we’ll give the toy back.” But there was no way Will would be a compliant participant in such a ritual. Not when Thomas was in a rival’s hands.
Will uttered a throaty squawk and started thrashing his way through the slippery sea of balls to get to the other child.
“I think . . .” Rhys started again but was distracted by the way the mother’s eyebrows had rushed together, deepening the furrow between them.
“He thought it was a playground toy,” she said defensively. “Jack, the train belongs to the other little boy. Mommy needs to take it back now.”
“Thomas! Thomas!” Jack said passionately, clutching the train to his body.
Oh, no. Will was getting closer, and judging from the expression on his face, he was about to do something desperate.
Will has autism. He just doesn’t understand . . . The words quivered on the tip of Rhys’s tongue, but when the moment of truth came, he found that he simply couldn’t bring himself to say them. Why should he announce the achingly personal fact of his son’s diagnosis to a perfect stranger?
He was about to lean in and retrieve Will when a black shadow flitted by. Swooping in like a bird of prey, her sleeves a flutter of silk, Karina wrenched the train from the hands of the astonished Jack. Rhys was horrified to see that she pulled hard enough to create a recoil effect. As soon as the toy was torn from his hands, Jack flew backward and crashed down hard in the slippery mass of balls. He appeared unhurt, but if there was anything less becoming than a full-grown adult skirmishing with a diaper-clad child over a toy, Rhys had yet to see it.
“There,” Karina said with satisfaction, just as the boy’s shrill scream split the cavernous space. Dozens of alarmed faces turned their way to witness the sinister black-clad woman triumphantly brandishing the toy purloined from her pint-size victim.
With Thomas still in Karina’s grasp—out of the frying pan and into the fire, as far as Will was concerned—Will added his voice to the commotion.
Jack’s mother’s face looked bloodless, her stricken expression making Rhys want to fold in on himself in a penitential origami sculpture, growing smaller and smaller until he wasn’t there at all.
“That woman manhandled my son.” The aggrieved parent raised an accusing finger at Karina as the infant in the wrap began to stir and whimper, small fists balling against his mother’s shirt.
“I’m sorry,” Rhys said thickly as he stepped over the edge of the ball pit, bracing his weight on both sides of the barrier so he could haul Will into his arms. “I’m really sorry.”
Karina drew herself up indignantly. “I—”
“Not another word,” Rhys said through gritted teeth. Holding a still-shrieking Will against his chest, he stalked to the door, stepping into his shoes and stooping to grab the rest of their gear before they escaped into the frigid winter day, pandemonium erupting in their wake.
Karina hobbled out after them seconds later, her boots still unzipped. She passed the toy into Will’s hands, causing a minor reduction in the decibel level issuing from directly beside Rhys’s ear. Will was past the point of being immediately soothed by the return of the train.
“I don’t believe it,” Rhys fumed, storming across the parking lot to the Range Rover.
“What?” Karina demanded. “While you were standing there dithering, I did what had to be done.”
“You practically assaulted a child.” Rhys swung Will’s door open and began to buckle him into his car seat. “I wonder if this is the first time a family has been blackballed from the indoor playground.”
“That boy took Will’s toy. I got it back. Plain and simple.” Karina flounced around to the passenger-side door and took a seat instead of retreating to her own car. Clearly, she wasn’t going to let them escape to lick their wounds but, instead, wanted to stay for a while and push their aggravation to the limit.
“I know you haven’t spent much time in parenting circles,” Rhys said, unable to contain his exasperation, “but conflicts generally aren’t settled gladiator-style. The goal is to model self-control and diplomacy.”
He started the ignition and turned the heat way up, trying to take the edge off the chill.
“Well, maybe I haven’t spent much time in parenting circles,” Karina asserted, the tip of her nose going pink and her eyes starting to shimmer. “But just then I felt like a parent. I felt like a mama bear.”
To Rhys’s consternation, Karina was apparently so moved by the idea of reclaiming her maternal role that passionate tears were flowing down her cheeks. The only positive development was that Will’s cries were tapering off as he turned his attention to the familiar cluster of toys on the backseat.
“I failed him when he was little,” she sobbed. “He needed me, and I failed him. I was in no state to parent him, and who knows what effect my leaving had on him?”
Am I now supposed to comfort her for abandoning him? A desperate, suffocating frustration seethed in Rhys’s chest. And must she always turn the narrative to put herself in the center?
“Autism is a neurodevelopmental condition,” he said, his voice tight. “Will’s autism has nothing to do with your leaving.”
“Well, I’m here now to fight for him,” Karina continued. “He needs his mother.”
The implication being that I haven’t been fighting for him every day of his life? Rhys bristled. And that the mysterious void in his existence should now be filled by a fickle heroine whose superpower is vanquishing toddlers and stealing candy from babies?
Karina turned wide, wet eyes on him. “Rhys, I think I should move back into the house.”
“What?” Rhys sucked in a stinging mouthful of air, and all of a sudden he was coughing, his incredulity leaving no room for breath.
“I should be on Will’s team,” Karina said with almost religious fervor. “I want to be there for him every day.”
“Karina, you are not moving back into the house,” Rhys wheezed, once his speech returned.
“Why not?” she countered. “You have plenty of room, and you’ve already installed employees there to take care of Will. Shouldn’t helping him be more important than any hard feelings between us?” She readjusted the drape of her silk blouse, perhaps wanting to perfect the magnanimous picture she believed she presented.
“Let me be clear.” Rhys pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to restore his equanimity. “You will not now, and nor will you ever, occupy the position you once did in our lives or our house. You deserted us, and even if we don’t look too closely at the sordid details of that particular betrayal, there’s no going back.”
“I know it will take time—” Karina began.
“No,” Rhys intoned. “Time won’t fix it. Sad puppy eyes won’t fix it. Hell, the bloody Dalai Lama wouldn’t be able to fix it. I’m offering you the chance to get to know Will under my conditions. Take it or leave it.”
“Fine. Be that way.” Karina reached for the door handle. “We can talk more next time I see Will.” She swung the door open and angled herself to leave.
“Karina?”
“Yes?”
“Where are you staying?” He figured he should know, if they were going to persevere with her visits.
“With a friend,” she spat. “I’ve been reduced to sleeping on a couch and sharing a bathroom. Last night her boyfriend clogged the toilet. Are you happy?”
As she slammed the door, he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. But it did occur to him to wonder whether she’d already blown through the very generous settlement he’d given her. And, as she stalked away across the parking lot, he couldn’t help but observe that she hadn’t even bothered saying good-bye to Will.
It was closing in on dusk when Andie turned up the long driveway toward the house after her shopping escapade with Jess. As Will’s therapy session was off the day’s schedule, she’d had plenty of time to linger on the return trip. She stopped in the center of Concord to browse in a bookstore and pick up a few groceries—small, mindless activities that kept her mind only half-engaged, allowing her to thoroughly enjoy the mood of optimism that still buoyed her.
Her attention would stray for a moment, and then, returning to herself, she would be surprised anew by the astonishing circumstances that had shifted her outlook. Rhys trusts me. Rhys is my friend. Plus, I’m going to be an aunt—for real, this time. It was as if she had to become acquainted with these facts from different angles, to come upon them almost by surprise over and over again to reassure herself that they would hold firm. Firm enough to become the scaffolding for her dream of a different kind of life.
As she drove up to the house, she spotted a dark figure outlined against the pale stone of the front steps. Who is that? As she drew closer, the image resolved itself into Rhys’s lean shape, swathed in a well-cut black wool coat and jeans. He sat with his usual casual grace, leaning against the stone balustrade, his long legs crossed at the ankle. She slowed as she pulled into the turning circle, and he raised one hand in greeting. It’s almost as if he’s . . . waiting for me.
She pulled Ernie into the garage bay but decided to walk around the outside of the house rather than take the interior staircase.
“Aren’t you freezing?” she asked as she reached the front entrance, her shoes crunching on the gravel. To the west, behind the house, the sky was darkening from lilac to deep purple. The front of the house, with its jutting portico and overhanging Juliet balconies, was somewhat sheltered from the wind, but the air was still cold enough to make Andie’s nose and ears tingle.
“What, me?” Rhys smiled. “I don’t feel the cold. I have this.” He warmed his fingers around a large coffee mug. “Besides, I needed to clear my head.”
“Care for some company?”
“Actually, I would.”
“How did it go today?” She set down the shopping bags looped around her fingers.
“Before I open that can of worms, do you want to grab yourself a coffee to stay warm?” Rhys asked. “There’s a fresh pot.”
“No, thanks. I’m fine. Adding more coffee to my system would just give me palpitations.”
Instead of sitting on the step beside Rhys, she decided to hop up on the balustrade above him.
“I see you’re fond of the high perch,” Rhys commented wryly. He fixed her with a curious look that made her legs all quivery.
“Just like Yertle the Turtle,” Andie agreed, referencing the book she’d overheard Rhys reading to Will the night before.
“Dr. Seuss, teacher of life lessons,” Rhys sighed.
“So, what life lessons have you learned today?”
“Beware of Karina, for one,” he said. “But I knew that already.”
“How did Will do with her?”
“Not terribly well. She’s so impatient to connect with him that she’s sabotaging herself.”
“Poor Karina.” There was something ineffably sad about the fact that Will couldn’t understand the significance of the gorgeous, lonely, high-strung mother who’d come back to reconcile with him.
“And there was an incident at the playground. A hostage situation involving Thomas the Tank Engine.”
“Oh, dear. That sounds unpleasant.”
“It needn’t have been a big deal. Will left his train for a moment, and another boy picked it up, perfectly innocently. Of course, Will wanted to take the kid down—”
“But you stopped him?”
“Karina did it for him.” Rhys shook his head ruefully. “She tackled him. It was unbelievable. I don’t think we’ll be able to show our faces there again.”
“Oh, no. She put her hands on someone else’s child?”
“Yup. Left him sitting on the seat of his pants with a stunned look on his face. And then the screaming started.”
“Yikes.”
“It was quite a scene.” Rhys took a gulp from his cup. “But I blame myself.”
“How could you have known what she was going to do?”
“I couldn’t. But the problem is that I froze,” he said softly. “The other kid’s mom thought I was pissed off that he’d taken the toy. But I was just worried about Will having a meltdown.”
He took a deep breath. “That was the moment I should have come right out and said it: ‘Will has autism.’” Rhys shook his head, an expression of ineffable sadness settling in his eyes. “This woman had no idea why we were so stressed out about the train, and I could have helped her understand. But I couldn’t say it.”
Rhys’s hands clamped tighter around his mug, his knuckles forming pale peaks. “I physically couldn’t make the words come out of my mouth. It would have felt like this . . . this steamroller riding right over the top of Will’s life, his future.”
Rhys swept a hand through his hair, leaving ruffled strands pointing in all directions. “So, as I stood there brooding, Karina took it upon herself to save the day.”
“With dramatic consequences.”
“Quite.”
“You know,” Andie said gently, lowering herself down from the balustrade, “mentioning Will’s autism in public is perfectly okay.”
A field of energy seemed to engulf her as she squeezed in beside him on the step, almost shoulder to shoulder.
Rhys sighed. “I know—and it’s not like it’s any kind of secret. It’s just that I don’t want to attach some kind of label to him—some kind of disclaimer: ‘This is my son, Will. He has autism, so you’ll just have to excuse him, because he can’t do any better.’”
His voice cracked. “I don’t want him to hear me talking about him to some stranger. Reducing him to a label. Dismissing him. Dismissing all he will be—and all that he already is.”
“There’s no requirement for you to announce his autism to everyone you meet,” Andie said, nudging Rhys’s shoulder with her own. Every molecule in her body seemed to jangle and jump at the contact, and she had to fight to regain her focus. “But even if you did, so what? Will is still Will.”
She turned to look at him. “Remember, he’s not even three yet, Rhys. Anything could happen. By using the word ‘autism,’ you’re not making his outcome a self-fulfilling prophecy. You’re just helping people understand, in the moment—like you said, about the mom at the playground. It’s not a stigma. It’s a tool. It gives you explanatory power.”
“You’re right.” Rhys buried his head in his hands for a moment.
“Speaking of explanations,” he said, sighing again, “Karina has decided to cast herself as the heroine in Will’s story. She’s attributing his autism to her absence, and now she thinks miracles will accompany her triumphal return.”
“Seriously?”
“She even announced that she wants to move back into the house.”
“And what did you say?” Andie asked, skewered by a pang of anxiety.
“That it’s not going to happen.” A note of incredulity colored his response. “But, at the same time, I can’t deprive him of knowing his mother.”
“No.”
“I just want to do what’s right for him.”
“You’re not doing so badly.” Andie wondered whether she ought to hook a comforting arm around Rhys’s shoulders. Would a friend do that? But those shoulders looked so dauntingly high and wide from this angle. She’d have to stretch awkwardly to maneuver herself into the right position. And if merely sitting beside him caused this dangerous tug of attraction, she didn’t see how she could increase the contact and not jump right out of her skin.
“At the end of our café meeting the other day, Karina was going on about ‘Why us?’” Rhys said, lifting one hand and pressing his fingers to his temples. “I was so furious with her. I know she was talking about autism, but it was like she was wishing some quintessential part of Will away. And then I realized I’m not much better. All that self-pity.”
“It would be pretty unusual if you didn’t feel that way,” Andie pointed out. “In fact, it would be unnatural. You’re not expected to be a saint.”
“But there’s a certain amount of ego involved, you know? I assumed, just like Karina, that because we’re relatively fortunate people—healthy, reasonably intelligent, with all of our fingers and toes—that our child would get a free pass on the hard stuff. But, really, why the hell not us?”
“No reason at all, I suppose, statistically speaking,” Andie said. “And I can tell you one thing for sure.”
“What’s that?”
“If I were Will, I’d be thanking my lucky stars it is you and not someone else who gets to have him.”
Rhys looked away for a moment, and when he turned back, his expression was so raw that she felt her heart lurch.
“It takes one quirky mind to know another,” he said. “After all, if you’re looking for a reason for Will’s autism, I’m half of that puzzle.”
“Maybe so,” Andie said. “But it’s your love for Will I was talking about, your dedication. Just look at your connection with him and all you’ve already done for him.”
“I’m lucky I have the resources to give him what he needs,” Rhys reflected soberly. “Imagine what it must be like for a single parent on minimum wage. They sure as hell can’t hire their own personal Andie.”
“Well, no. Aside from the fact that there’s only one of me—”
“And you’re taken,” Rhys interjected. He turned back to her and smiled, and something in his expression sent a pulse of warmth all the way to her toes. There was an intimately proprietorial ring to his comment that only days before would have made her heart quail. But now she was able to let it vibrate pleasantly through her veins. Rhys was her friend, and right now she was where she was meant to be.
Rhys looked down at his hands still clasped around his coffee mug. When he looked up, his expression was slightly sheepish.
“Sorry, Andie,” he said. “I’m such a sad sack. I can’t help fretting about Will’s future. Who will he be? What will become of him? Will he be happy? Will he be loved?”
“He will be exactly who he is,” Andie said. “And you’ll just have to try to keep up.”
Rhys laughed ruefully while getting to his feet. “You’re probably right . . . wait, I just noticed my coffee is stone cold, and one hand may, in fact, be frozen to my cup.”
“Yeah, my teeth are chattering,” Andie agreed.
Rhys reached out and took her hand, tugging her to her feet. “Thanks for listening,” he said as they climbed the stairs to the front door.
“My pleasure,” she said as Rhys stooped to help her gather her shopping bags.
And it was, she reflected. In fact, this time with Rhys and Will was turning out to be one of the most fulfilling periods of her life. The question was no longer how she was going to settle in here without sacrificing her peace of mind. It was how she was ever going to leave.