Mortal Bonds by Michael Sears Read Free Book Online Page A

nondairy cheese, and wheatless bread spill out onto the table. Then he would take a second bite, chew a few times, and repeat the openmouthed drool. I don’t know how either of us lasted the week.
    While he finished the Cheerios, I laid out his clothes. Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday were the easy days. Colors were allowed. They didn’t even have to match. Blue pants and a red shirt. Or a yellow shirt. Or green. Monday was blue. Wednesday and Saturday were beige or khaki. Fridays were black—all black and only black.
    “Do you know what I did yesterday?” I said, coming back into the room.
    The Kid looked thoughtful for a minute. “No,” he finally answered.
    “Sorry,” I mumbled, speaking more to myself than to him. Of course he didn’t know what I had done yesterday. “I got to ride in a helicopter.” Which had left me feeling nauseated, weak-kneed, and feverish. “It was cool.”
    The Kid had learned that this kind of vocalization from another person was called conversation and that some response was expected.
    “Why?” he said after a long pause.
    Heather had taught him a few stock phrases—“That’s nice,” “Sounds good,” and others—but he was still uncomfortable with them. “Why?” was his old reliable.
    “I had to go to Newport. On business. They picked me up in the helicopter.”
    He thought about this for another long time. “That’s nice,” he said.
    Too bad it wasn’t a twenty-year-old Ford Pinto or an old Gremlin, I thought. Then we’d have something to talk about. The Kid lit up only for cars.
    “Okay, get yourself washed and dressed, my man. Then we’ll do flash cards.”
    “Stupid,” he said. But he padded off to the bathroom.
    Despite his comment, the Kid was ready and back in record time. I got the flash cards, and we sat down across from each other.
    The cards had photographs on one side—of people interacting, or of faces in differing emotional states. On the back was a one- or two-word description of each. The subtleties of emotional communication, which most children pick up almost osmotically, were a mystery to my son. His school recommended the cards—maybe they helped. Some days the Kid scored one hundred percent; other days he was lucky to get one out of three.
    “Happy.” The Kid was supporting his head with one hand on his cheek, the elbow on the table, and his whole body slumped at a thirty-degree angle. If there had been a picture for it, the word on the back would have been “Bored.”
    “Very good.” I always gave him “Happy” first. He never got it wrong, and I thought it helped for him to get an easy one to start. I flipped up the next card—a snarling, red-haired little girl.
    His eyes flicked to the card and then rolled up to the ceiling. “Angry.”
    “Very good. Why would she be angry? Can you think of any reason?”
    He thought for a moment and then tapped his free hand to his cheek in imitation of a slap. The Kid had been slapped once by my ex-wife’s second husband. Once.
    “Okay. Maybe she got slapped. I guess that would make her angry.”
    He gave one emphatic nod. We were making great progress.
    “Okay. Next.” I held up the next card. It said “Worried” on the back.
    The Kid blew air out through tight lips.
    “Come on. You remember.”
    He mumbled.
    “No fair. No mumbling.” Mumbling led to humming, which led to stimming and thence to a trance and so on. The key was to keep him engaged.
    “Jared.”
    “What?”
    “Jared,” he repeated, and pointed at the picture.
    I flipped it around and looked at it. There was a Jared in his class, but he looked nothing like the picture. Jared was white, for one thing, and the picture showed a very concerned black boy.
    “No, Kid. This is not Jared. Try again.”
    He rolled his eyes back to the ceiling again. “Stupid.”
    “What’s stupid? The game?”
    He pointed at me.
    “I’m stupid. Maybe so, but this is not Jared. Come on, you can do it.”
    He blew air out again. He pointed