On the couch, Tim winced as he touched the bruising under his eye. “And just so you know,” he went on, “I agree with you. It wasn’t her place, and I told her so. Do you remember when I said that she was naive sometimes? That’s what I meant. She wants to help people, but sometimes it doesn’t come across that way.”
“It wasn’t just her,” I said. “It was me, too. Like I said, I overreacted.”
His gaze was steady. “Do you think she might be right?”
I brought my hands together. “I don’t know. I don’t think so, but . . .”
“But you don’t know. And if so, whether it even matters, right?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. “Been there, done that,” he said. “I remember what my parents and I went through with Alan. For a long time we didn’t know what, if anything, was wrong with him. And you know what I’ve decided after all this time? It doesn’t matter. I still love him and watch out for him, and I always will. But . . . learning about his condition did help make things easier between us. Once I knew . . . I guess I just stopped expecting him to behave in a certain way. And without expectations, I found it easier to accept him.”
I digested this. “What if he doesn’t have Asperger’s?” I asked.
“He might not.”
“And if I think he does?”
He sighed. “It’s not that simple, especially in milder cases,” he said. “It’s not as if you can pull a vial of blood and test for it. You might get to the point where you think it’s possible, and that’s as far as you’ll ever get. But you’ll never know for sure. And from what Savannah said about him, I honestly don’t think much will change. And why should it? He works, he raised you . . . what more could you expect from a father?”
I considered this while images of my dad flashed through my head.
“Savannah bought you a book,” he said.
“I don’t know where it is,” I admitted.
“I’ve got it,” he said. “I brought it from the house.” He handed me the paper bag. Somehow the book felt heavier than it had the night before.
“Thanks.”
He rose, and I knew our conversation was nearing the end. He moved to the door but turned with his hand on the knob.
“You know you don’t have to read it,” he said.
“I know.”
He opened the door, then stopped. I knew he wanted to add something else, but, surprising me, he didn’t turn around. “Would you mind if I asked a favor?”
“Go ahead.”
“Don’t break Savannah’s heart, okay? I know she loves you, and I just want her to be happy.”
I knew then that I’d been right about his feelings for her. As he walked to the car, I watched him from the window, certain that he was in love with her, too.
I put the book aside and went for a walk; when I got back to the house, I avoided it again. I can’t tell you why I did so, other than that it frightened me somehow.
After a couple of hours, however, I forced the feeling away and spent the rest of the afternoon absorbing its contents and reliving memories of my father.
Tim had been right. There wasn’t any clear-cut diagnosis, no hard-and-fast rules, and there was no way I’d ever know for certain. Some people with Asperger’s had low IQs, while other, even more severely autistic people—like the Dustin Hoffman character in Rain Man—were regarded as geniuses in particular subjects. Some could function so well in society that no one even knew; others had to be institutionalized. I read profiles of people with Asperger’s who were prodigies in music or mathematics, but I learned that they were as rare as prodigies among the general population. But most important, I learned that when my dad was young, there were few doctors who even understood the characteristics or symptoms and that if something had been wrong, his parents might never have known. Instead, children with Asperger’s or autism were often lumped with the retarded or the shy, and if they weren’t institutionalized, parents were left to comfort themselves with the hope that one day their child might grow out of it. The difference between Asperger’s and autism could sometimes be summed up by the following: A person with autism lives in his own world, while a person with Asperger’s lives in our world, in a way of his own choosing.
By that standard, most people could be said to have Asperger’s.
But there were some indications that Savannah had been right about my father. His unchanging routines, his social awkwardness, his lack of interest in topics other than coins, his desire to be alone—all seemed like quirks that anyone might have, but with my father it was different. While others might freely make those same choices, my father—like some people with Asperger’s—seemed to have been forced to live a life with these choices already predetermined. At the very least, I learned that it might explain my father’s behavior, and if so, it wasn’t that he wouldn’t change, but that he couldn’t change. Even with all the implied uncertainty, I found the realization comforting. And, I realized, it might explain two questions that had always plagued me regarding my mother: What had she seen in him? And why had she left?