“Holy crap,” Jeff whispered. He blotted maple syrup on his fingers with a paper napkin. Little ribbons of white napkin stuck to his palm like feathers. “So what do we do about it?”
Henry lifted his cup of coffee and took a long swig. He shook his head. “Stay out of the crossfire.”
THE LAST CONFESSION
BY JOHN LESCROART
They didn’t call it Asperger’s Syndrome in those days, but my younger brother Julian probably had it.
Certainly, everybody who remembers him agreed that he was not quite normal and probably had some highly functioning version of autism. When he was very young, he was silent, withdrawn, and clumsy much of the time, although excellent at almost all mental games, and blessed with a sly sense of humor that was all the more surprising for his lack of verbal skills. He is the one, for example, who put the Saran Wrap over the toilet bowl in my parents’ bathroom, although I think that to her dying day, in spite of my denials, my mother thought it was me.
I was the firstborn, a baby boomer in 1948. Julian and I were “Irish twins,” eleven months apart in age to the day. I guess big brothers can go one of two ways with awkward siblings, especially if they are close in age. I could either ignore the difficult little rat who was taking so much of my parents’ time and energy, or as a dutiful first child I could become my parents’ ally as his protector, playmate, and friend. I don’t remember actually choosing, but by the time he started school, I had fallen into and was completely committed to the latter role.
We were a good Catholic family, which meant we belonged to St. Benedict’s parish and went to Mass every Sunday, and confession at least every two weeks. I was an altar boy from second grade on, and amazingly to everyone (except me, who tutored him relentlessly), Julian followed me one year later. He couldn’t always get out what he knew in English, but he could memorize and spew Latin as well as or better than anybody.
Of course, being a good Catholic family also meant that my parents followed the rhythm method for birth control, which in turn meant that the other kids followed along on a regular schedule. Michelle arrived twenty-one months after Julian, then in short order followed Paul, Louise, Marian, and Barbara. With each new child, and my parents’ commensurate lack of time for any individual one of us, my responsibility to Julian became greater. I understood his moods, I could entertain him, translate for him, and occasionally, very occasionally, I would let him win at some physical contest—hoops, ping-pong, mini golf.
And then, when he was in sixth grade, Julian suddenly changed in a fundamental way. And perhaps more remarkably, some of the other kids stopped treating him like a freak. Astoundingly, and maybe because the director wanted to make a point that whom so many called the “retard” actually had a good brain, he was cast as Rolfe in the school musical, The Sound of Music, and it turned out that he had a beautiful singing voice. The rehearsed words in the play came out with a natural ease that somehow carried over to his day-to-day speech. Still in sixth grade, he later won the school’s Spelling Bee, and went on to place second in the entire county. Kitty Rice, the prettiest girl in his class at St. Benedict’s, got a crush on him and they actually walked around the school yard holding hands for a couple of months.
In short, Julian had become “normal”—though of course not in all ways. And not to someone who knew him as well as I did. Not to his protector and confidante and best friend.
The basic problem, and it was a paramount issue for a preadolescent young man in the late 1950s, was that in spite of his achievements and advances in apparent normalcy, he suffered from a medical condition over which he had little control. He was, in fact, different, even as he improved in his day-to-day coping with the Asperger’s.
He felt things more than other people did.
That was simply a fact.
When Kitty Rice broke up with him, for example, he went into a brooding silence that went on for over a month. Another time, our younger brother Paul had shot a really beautiful bird out in the backyard with his BB gun, and when he’d brought it inside to show it off, Julian took the little broken thing into his hands, petting it, breathing on it, trying to will it back to life. Afterward, exuding silence like a black miasma, he hid himself away in his secret place in our unfinished attic and slept up there until the next morning.
And some kids still teased him. Friendly and trusting by nature, Julian was sometimes smart enough to realize that people were having fun at his expense, but unfortunately he lacked the gene for irony. Consequently, he could be led a long way down the primrose path before he realized that he was the butt of a joke. All too often, being a year ahead of him, I wasn’t around to cut things off and shut the bullies up before he got hurt.
These not-infrequent episodes would always leave him demoralized, depressed, and silent, and they drove me to near-homicidal rage that I only rarely acted on. But I was a good Catholic, and anger was one of the deadly sins, so I generally offered my anger up to the poor souls in Purgatory, and life went on.
But sometimes, it almost didn’t.
By the time Julian was in eighth grade, I’d moved on to Mother of Mercy (“MOM”) High School in Burlingame, just south of San Francisco, and so for the very first time in Julian’s life, he was on his own back at St. Benedict’s without my protection at school. It wasn’t a good time for him, as the hazing and general abuse kicked up a big notch or two. Doubly upsetting to me, though, was his reaction to it. Instead of fighting back or lashing out, as I would have done, he reverted back into his silent shell.
And then the big event: another one of the girls, Andrea, in his class asked him to the first dance of the year and instead, without canceling with Julian, went with another guy. As it happened, I was at MOM’s homecoming dance that same night and got home around midnight. The rest of the house was asleep, but in our shared room, Julian wasn’t in his bed. I waited for him, figuring he was late getting home from his own dance, but all too soon it was near one o’clock, and that was just plain wrong.
(Times were different then. My parents tended not to wait up and felt no guilt about it. When my own daughter went out on dates through high school, Bonnie and I would never sleep until she got home.)
On my way to wake up my parents to see if they knew something about Julian being gone, I thought to check the attic hideaway and found him there.
“How you doing?”
No answer.
“Did something happen?”
He just looked at me for a long time.
“Come on out,” I said finally. “Let’s go downstairs and get a Coke.”
He shook his head. “No Coke.”
“Okay, no Coke.” I sat down across from him, Indian-style in the tiny enclosure. One bare dim bulb glowed from the low ceiling. Julian’s face looked empty and lost.
“What happened?” I asked again.
He stayed silent for a long time. Then: “It’s not worth it,” he said.
“What’s not worth what?”
“Life.”
“What are you talking about? Of course it is.”
“Maybe for you. You’ve got a future.”
“So do you.”
Staring at some place behind me, he shook his head. “No.” Gradually he told me about his night—my Mom driving him by Andrea’s house to pick her up and being told by her mother that there must have been some misunderstanding. Andrea had been going steady with Kevin Jacobs for months now—surely Julian knew about that.
This was bad enough, but on top of Julian’s super sensitivity…