Dysfluency
I pour a cup of coffee and eye the phone in his hand. “Stay home today,” I say.
“I can’t.”
“You don’t look well.” I want him to be sick. I want him to have the flu. Something to stop him in his tracks.
I stare at the phone, willing it to vibrate again, here where I can see Auggie’s face and he can see me watching. Auggie puts it into his back pocket. “I feel alright,” he says. But the end of the word is drawn out, just slightly too long.
All day, I cannot sit still. I put on a sweater and take it off. I open my laptop and Google Pinkgrrl and Bridgeport State University. A list of Twitter accounts comes up. An image of a blonde girl with a cat ears, a Japanese YouTube channel. Where do I begin? The phone records, then, but I cannot make heads or tails of the options on the Verizon website. If this is the girl, and Auggie has pictures of her, I need to delete them. Maybe I should cancel Auggie’s line altogether, erase everything. Sink the phone in an old can of paint in the basement. Except it’s my only link to her.
I want to scream at Auggie until he cracks. When he stuttered, I would pull his face to my chest and hold him there, until he was calm enough to speak clearly. Now, I might not be able to let go. I might hold him too tightly, cutting off airways. Bruising flesh. Snapping ribs.
I call Lana’s lawyer friend.
*
I used to wish my grandmother could see Auggie, somehow, from wherever she was, so she would understand that there was no reason to feel sorry for me. A reverse séance. The living sending out a message to the dead: You don’t have to worry, everything’s okay here. I believed Auggie was different. More a part of me, somehow, as if our cells carried within them a memory of proximity. I knew him, therefore he was.
Now I am not sure.
I took him to a language pathologist for the stutter. She had a name for it, something clinical that I can’t remember. Auggie hated the sessions. He would come out of her office holding back tears, though by the time we got to the car the tears would be gone, replaced with a sourness that verged on contempt. Still, the sessions worked. Auggie learned to sense when the stuttering was coming and to relax into it, to release the tension rather than fight it. By ninth grade, the stutter had resolved. He spoke less but without hesitation. I didn’t realize until it was too late that part of him had been sacrificed—the part of him that couldn’t hide. The part that spoke directly to my heart. Auggie was never good with words, but, without the stutter, we were both lost.
Sons grow up and leave. And what will you do?
Auggie is in the shower. The cat sits by the bathroom door. I pick a decent shirt from his closet, a lavender one with a stiff collar, and khakis with the tags still on. A striped tie. He needs to look the part. Clothes and papers litter the floor of his room, but, if I block them out, his room looks the same as it did when he was twelve—the wrinkled world map poster over his bed, the cross-stitched brontosaurus with Auggie’s name written in red thread across its back. A boy’s room. Soon, I will drive him to the school’s admissions building. The board members will be waiting. A decision will be made.
Last night, the lawyer told us the hearing is largely perfunctory: Protocol determines the outcome regardless of the truth. But what the truth is—the lawyer didn’t ask. What scares me most is that I’ll never know. We’ll go on—Auggie will transfer schools, Ron will pay to have things forgotten, I’ll scrape another winter’s ice from my front steps—and I’ll never really know. And how can I love him if I can’t know him?
I set the clothes on Auggie’s bed. The shower is still going. From under the mess of sheets, I hear a vibration, and, without thinking, I dig for it. I burrow like a madwoman. I throw the sheets onto the floor, and the phone hits with a thud, still vibrating. I pick it up. Pinkgrrl. The phone is alive in my hand. My heart swells with hope.
And what will you do? What will you do?