"Look," William called. "Pete's helping!"
I heard the sound of dismayed discovery behind me. "What do we do with these?" Diana stood by the counter, holding the tapers and floral sprig that I'd tried to leave hidden in the bottom of my bag. She looked at me dead on. Her eyes started to water.
"Light them, of course." But recovery came two beats too late. I shrugged, and even that hurt. This is why I asked you not to ask me here.
Diana put the tapers in elaborate candlesticks that she first had to unwrap from newspapers. We lit them and doused the lights. But the darkness scared Peter. He coiled forward against himself. Diana turned the lights back on. We let the candles burn.
William had more fun with the shells than with the insides. He did, however, enjoy dipping his mussels in the wine sauce and dribbling all over the table. Peter worked away at his compote. He insisted on trying one mussel. He got half of it down, with a look of utter stupefaction.
'They're both going to have the runs for days," Diana said.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be silly. They get the runs from jelly toast."
William bit his cheek. I didn't know how badly, at first. All at once, he stopped talking. I thought it was a clown act. Pantomime. I started to laugh, until William's silent, red-faced distress made Peter break out in tears and lower his face into his plate. Diana was up in a fraction of a second, before I knew what was happening. "It's okay. Petey, it's okay." Diana lifted her boy and hugged him to her. She repeated the litany various ways, glossing with a flurry of hand motions.
"You sign to him?"
"A little. It's easier for him to reply. Words will come slowly. Fine motor is tricky for him."
"What is he saying?"
* 'William is going away'? No, sweetheart." Diana signed her assurance. "William just has a little owie. It's so strange," she confided, aside. "He has this incredible bodily empathy. If any creature for blocks around is distressed, Peter starts weeping. Tell Peter you're all right, William."
William stood holding his cheek, still bawling silently. He walked over to his brother and put his hand on his back. "It's okay, Peter," he said. Stoicism cost him. He burst at last into audible sobs. His brother followed along, unquestioning companion.
The mildest household drama, but it wiped me out. How could I survive the first real crisis? William's fallen pyramid of shells, Pete's spilled, untippable cup, Diana's gap-toothed, hand-signing serenity, the candles blazing away in the brightly lit room: all too much. I thought, I'd never live. I'd hemorrhage halfway through week one.
The storm ended faster than it blew up. Suddenly William was laughing and clearing away dishes at the promise of cake. His mother teased him. Peter still had his head down in his plate, like a sunflower under the weight of autumn's end. But even he seemed to be accustoming himself to trust the return of happiness.
After dinner, we did the dishes. William asked to play Battleship.
"You don't have to," Diana said.
"Yes you do," said William. "That or Yahtzee."
He stuck all his ships in the corners, a clever evasion until I caught on.
"Boys." Diana shook her head. "A total mystery."
Peter threw both hands up in the air and let loose a chortle of euphoria at nothing. At domestic peace. It seemed a sign of imminent bedtime.
"Come on, guys. Upstairs. Roll out."
William balked, but a feeble rear guard. Diana carried Peter as far as the stairs, then set him down. "Watch this." Pete leaned into the steps. He took them like a half-track. His feet went up over his shoulders, lifting him from level to level. "He'd be walking by now, but he's so loose-limbed."
I stood downstairs during the bathroom rituals. I snooped Diana's bookshelves, learning nothing but that she was a cognitive neurologist who hoped to do some birding and furniture finishing in some alternate life.
William tore down the stairs in his new-wave pajamas. "Mom says you're Reader-in-Residence."
"I did not!" came the embarrassed denial from upstairs.
"Well," I wheedled. "Let's talk about this. What kind of books do you like?"
William shrugged. "I don't know. I read The Hobbit. In three days."
"Really? In-credible. Did you like it?"
"The dragon was pretty awesome."
We trooped upstairs. There, Peter propped up against the bars of his crib. He rocked himself methodically. His hands made curious cupping motions.
"What are you saying, Petie?" I stroked the curl of his ear.
Diana laughed. "Don't ask."
William started jumping on his bed. "He's saying, 'Read! Read!' " His hands picked up the sign and multiplied it into a mandate.
"Absolutely. What do you gentlemen want to hear?"
"Pete wants the counting book," Diana said. "It's his favorite these days."
She lifted him out of the pillowed prison and sat in a beanbag chair, Peter in her arms. She opened a radiant, pastel portal across his lap. "One," she announced. "One house. One cow. Petey do it?"
Peter brought his hand down across the page. On contact, Diana exclaimed, "One! That's it."
Each page brought one more house, one more cow, one more tree, une more in a circling flock of birds. Diana counted, pointing out each new figure on the page. Then Peter commenced a round of muscular spasms, pointing randomly but intently, while we three clicked off the numbers in chorus.
"He loves counting. He's so smart," Diana told me, shaking her head. "You are so smart!" she signed to Peter. Peter curled like an armadillo. Trisomy may have weakened his muscles, but the weights collapsing his human spine were fear and joy.
"So what's it going to be, my man?" I asked William.
He lay, narrow in his bed. He seemed so slight, such a vulnerable line. A lima bean tendril germinated on damp paper towel for the science fair. He reached a hand up blindly behind him, to the shelf above his head. He retrieved the totem and handed it to me, without looking.
"Na, naw. You cannot do the World Almanac as bedtime reading."
"It's what I want," he insisted. Singsong.
We did World Religions; Famous Waterfalls; Noted Political Leaders; and, of course, the beloved World Flags. More forgone quiz game than story time. William told me what lists to start. Then he blurted out the completion after only a few words of prompting. Every time I shouted, "How do you know that?" William smirked in triumph and Pete threw his hands in the air and gurgled.
Appeased, the boys went down without a fight. Anxiety revived only after Diana and I retired to the living room, alone.
It became a different house then. She became a different woman. She put something timeless on the player — Taverner's Western Wynde Mass. I wouldn't have picked her for it. But then, I wouldn't have picked her for freeze-drying monkey brains either. I didn't know the first thing about her. This evening's every note had proved that.
Closeness grew awful. Words had been spent on the boys. I felt the slack of all those who try to live by eloquence and find it useless at the end. I wanted to put my head in her lap. I wanted to disappear to Alaska.
"Their father?" I asked her, after agonizing silence.
"Their father found the drop from Will to Pete a bit steep for his tastes. About eleven months ago. Left me everything. But who's counting?"
She twisted her hair around one finger. Clockwise once, then counter. She never looked at me. A good thing.
"People have been wonderful. Harold. Ram. The others. It's work that saves you, finally. I keep thinking I'll find something in the hippocampus that will explain the man."
"I take it Lentz wasn't among the comforters."