House Rules: A Novel Read online

  He falls back, reeling, his hand pressed to his cheek. Then he runs out the front door.

  “Theo!” I call after him. “Theo!” But he is already halfway down the block.

  I should follow him; I should apologize. I should confess that the reason I hit him wasn’t what he said but because he gave voice to all the unutterable thoughts I’ve been thinking.

  Do I believe Jacob is capable of murder?

  No.

  The easy answer, the knee-jerk reaction. This is my son we are talking about. The one who still asks me to tuck him in at night.

  But I also remember Jacob knocking over Theo’s high chair when I told him he could not have another glass of chocolate soy milk. I remember the time he hugged a hamster to death.

  Mothers are supposed to be their children’s biggest cheerleaders. Mothers are supposed to believe in their children, no matter what. Mothers will lie to themselves, if necessary, to do this.

  I step outside and walk down the driveway, in the direction Theo ran. “Theo,” I call. My voice does not sound like my own.

  I have clocked 193 miles today on my car, driving to Springfield and then back home and returning again. At five-thirty I am again in the lobby of the jail visitors’ entrance, with Oliver Bond standing beside me. He left a message on my cell phone instructing me to meet him here, explaining that he’d arranged a special visit for me while he sorted out long-term visiting plans.

  I was so happy to hear this that I didn’t even dwell on the phrase long-term.

  At first, I hardly recognize Oliver. He isn’t wearing a suit, like he was yesterday; instead, he’s in jeans and a flannel shirt. This makes him seem even younger. I glance down at my own clothes—which look like something I’d wear to a staff meeting at the newspaper. What made me think I had to dress up for jail?

  Oliver leads me to the booth. “Name?” the officer asks.

  “Emma Hunt,” I say.

  He looks up. “No, the name of the person you’re here to visit.”

  “Jacob Hunt,” Oliver interjects. “We’ve arranged a special visit through the superintendent’s office.”

  The officer nods and hands me a clipboard to sign. He asks for

  my ID.

  “Give him your keys,” Oliver says. “He’ll hold them while you’re inside.”

  I pass them to the officer and then step toward the metal detector. “Aren’t you coming?”

  Oliver shakes his head. “I’ll be waiting out here.”

  A second officer arrives to lead me down the hall. Instead of turning in to a room where there are tables and chairs set up, though, he leads me around the corner to a small cubicle. At first, I think it is a closet, but then I realize it’s a visiting booth. A stool is pushed beneath a window that looks into a mirror image of this room. A handset is stuck to the wall. “I think there’s been a mistake,” I say.

  “No mistake,” the officer tells me. “Noncontact visits only for inmates in protective custody.”

  He leaves me in the tiny chamber. Had Oliver known I wouldn’t be able to see Jacob face-to-face? Had he not told me because he knew it would upset me, or had he not been given this information? And what is protective custody?

  The door on the other side of the glass opens, and suddenly Jacob is there. The officer who’s brought him points to the telephone on the wall, but Jacob has seen me through the glass. He presses his palms flat against it.

  He has blood on his shirt and in his hair. His forehead is covered with a line of purple bruises. His knuckles are scraped raw, and he is stimming like crazy—his hand twitching at his side like a small animal, his entire body bouncing on his toes. “Oh, baby,” I murmur. I point to the phone in my hand and then to the spot where he should have a receiver, too.

  He doesn’t pick it up. He smacks his palms against the Plexiglas that separates us.

  “Pick up the phone,” I cry, even though he cannot hear me. “Pick it up, Jacob!”

  Instead, he closes his eyes. He sways forward and rests his cheek against the window, spreads his arms as wide as they can go.

  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.

  Jacob steps away from the window and sits on the stool. I pick up the phone, hoping he will follow my lead, but he isn’t making eye contact. Eventually, he reaches for his receiver, and for a moment, I see some of the joy that used to spread across his face when he discovered something startling and came to share it with me. He turns the receiver over in his hands and then holds it to his ear. “I saw these on CrimeBusters. On the episode where the suspect turned out to be a cannibal.”

  “Hey, baby,” I say, and I force myself to smile.

  He is rocking as he sits. His free hand, the one not holding the receiver, flutters, as if he is playing an invisible piano.

  “Who hurt you?”

  He touches his fingers gingerly to his forehead. “Mommy? Can we go home now?”

  I know precisely the last time Jacob called me that. It was after his middle school graduation, when he was fourteen. He had received a diploma. Mommy, he had said, running up to show me. The other kids had heard him, and they burst out laughing. Jacob, they teased, your mommy’s here to take you home. Too late, he had learned that, when you’re fourteen, looking cool in front of your friends trumps unadulterated enthusiasm.

  “Soon,” I say, but the word comes out like a question.

  Jacob doesn’t cry. He doesn’t scream. He just lets the receiver drop from his hand, and then he puts his head down.

  I automatically reach toward him, and my hand smacks into the Plexiglas.

  Jacob’s head lifts a few inches, and then falls. His forehead strikes the metal plate of the counter. Then he does it again.

  “Jacob! Don’t!” But of course, he can’t hear me. His receiver dangles from its metal umbilicus, where it fell when he let go.

  He keeps hitting his head, over and over. I throw open the door to the visitation booth. The officer who brought me there is standing outside, leaning against the wall. “Help me,” I cry, and he glances over my shoulder to see what Jacob is doing, then runs down the hallway to intervene.

  Through the window of the visitation booth, I watch him and a second officer grab Jacob by the arms and haul him away from the window. Jacob’s mouth is twisted, but I cannot tell if he is screaming or sobbing. His arms are pinned behind his back so that he can be handcuffed, and then one of the officers shoves him in the small of the back to propel him forward.

  This is my son, and they are treating him like a criminal.

  The officer returns a moment later, to take me back to the jail lobby. “He’s going to be fine,” I am told. “The nurse gave him a sedative.”

  When Jacob was younger and more prone to tantrums, a doctor put him on olanzapine, an antipsychotic. It got rid of his tantrums. It also got rid of his personality, period. I would find him sitting on the bedroom floor with one shoe on, the other still on the floor beside him, staring unresponsively at the wall. When he began to have seizures, we took him off the drug and never experimented with any others.

  I picture Jacob lying on his back on the floor of a cell, his pupils dilated and unfocused, as he slips in and out of consciousness.

  As soon as I reach the lobby, Oliver approaches with a big smile on his face. “How’d it go?” he asks.

  I open my mouth and burst into tears.

  I fight for Jacob’s IEPs, and I wrestle him to the ground when he goes ballistic in a public place. I have carved a life out of doing what needs to be done, becaus