Echolalia

Echolalia Ann M. Bauer The end begins with a white card, stuck in the frame around the storm door at the front of the house. I assume he puUed it out, expecting to find an advertisement for something—gutter cleanings or lawn care. Or a note left by a friend, scribbled hastily on the back of a business card. When I get home, at 5:00, he wiU be in the kitchen, pacing, head butted forward, as ifhe is pushing something heavy aside. He'U meet me at the side door, the one I enter after I park my bicycle, and immediately begin shaking the card at me, its razor-like corners near my chin. "LOOK at this," he wfll shout. And I wiU. The letters DHS, large, silver-typed and inscrutable. But upon careful reading, I'U find they stand for Department of Human Services. There is a name: Paul Evans, a local telephone number, and a slanted, cramped note, written in miniature cursive, that says "Please caU ASAP." "I caUed,"Jack wfll shout. "They took Edward out of school today. And questioned him. They took him." SwaUowing. Looking, for a minute, as if he wfll spit whatever is left. "To their office." He will stand over me, his face gray and strange, his large body quivering as if he had been launched from a bow and just landed on the linoleum floor with great force. "They think I hurt him." A soft evening in late April. Out the back window, before dark settled, I looked up from my work and watched the apple tree in our back yard squeezing out new blossoms, one by one, tiny white buds that dangle with promise. Now, I pause to take a sip of coffee and a thought intrudes: I remember that last fall the apples themselves never developed fuUy. They moved from bud to flower to hard, green fruit but somehow missed the last step. The one that goes into becoming a rounded apple. Instead, they feU off mid-summer and lay like spent golf baUs, browning on the baked ground 194 Ann M. Bauer195 under the tree. Maybe there is something we can do—some fertihzer or organic spray we can use—to help the tree produce. It seems Uke such a waste: those perfect blossoms ending up aU dark and dry. I put down my cup and pick up a pen. I'm grading a stack offinal essays, correcting the blocky, ornate language many of my freshman students use. It is about this reason that we must pursue our liberty offree speech, one young woman wrote. Free expressment is a right promised fior in the Declaration of Independence and, as Americans, we are guaranteed our words to be heard. In class, she's articulate, even witty. She is majoring in biology, has a boyfriend who walks her to the classroom door each morning and kisses her sweetly. I wonder how she is able to puU it off: speaking and moving through what appears to be a normal life even though she cannot write or even read with acuity. I wish I could ask her. I sigh and look at my watch. Nine o'clock. Thirty minutes before the boys' bedtime, and someone must ask the question: Is your homework done? It hangs over us, as it does every night, the answer so cruel because Edward's work is never truly done, always just a guess at what the teachers want, what the questions reaUy mean, how to parse the language and use it the way other people do. Now that he's in junior high, there's homework from six different classes, but no homeroom teacher to organize it aU for him—just words floating in an assignment notebook, written in his perfect handwriting. Notes like "Grid Summary" or "Genus Identification Worksheet" with no context; sometimes he knows there should be a handout but can't find it, other times he seems completely lost and I wonder if he sat in class that day with the screens pulled down inside his head. Not listening to anyone at aU. I get up from my desk and go to where he...