In the midst of the same monologue about her father, Brittany told me that she’d rebuked her mother for marrying a man who would defraud his own daughter, for not seeing through her husband’s lies, for seeing him, for so long, as something other than what he was. But she also blamed herself.
“Why didn’t I see it happening?” she asked. “How could I have missed all this?”
I understood at that moment that part of the reason Brittany was with me was because I was incapable of deceiving her as her father had. I wasn’t a practiced liar who always had the right word at the ready with a wink and a smile. Just seven months before, I’d spoken my first full sentence in eighteen years. Brittany’s need to never again be less cunning and cruel than the people she loved should have worried me, but I buried any worry beneath the pleasure I took in listening to Brittany reveal her innermost self. My voice had delivered me to that moment, but as Brittany made herself understood, I kept my eyes on hers, I nodded at the right times, and I didn’t say a word.
I wished I could go back and tell the boy I’d been, the kid who’d yearned for the kind of human connection made impossible by his refusal—and then inability—to speak, that he’d been right about needing a voice, but wrong about connection. How could I have known—alone in my room, daring to believe I might speak again one day—that I’d experience my life’s most exhilarating moment of closeness in silence?
•••
ON A SUNDAY morning in the August before our senior year, Brittany and I lay in bed, relishing the languor of half-sleep.
Brittany broke the silence by saying, “When we first met, I thought you had Asperger’s.”
I’d heard of Asperger’s syndrome, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. Even so, my face reddened with new embarrassment at whatever I’d done when I met Brittany to make her think I was strange.
“You’re offended now,” she said.
“I’m not offended.”
Staring at the ceiling, I replayed our first meeting in my mind. We were sitting in our adjacent, assigned seats in the back row of a nearly empty lecture hall, a few minutes before the second class session of a course, “Mathematics 139: Finite Math,” we were both taking to fulfill a requirement, when I felt a mobile phone’s rhythmic, intermittent vibration in my feet. The vibration came from Brittany’s bag, which lay on the floor between us.
Brittany made no move to answer or silence the phone. As the heels of her sandaled feet were tucked up onto the front edge of her chair, making a platform of her bare knees as she examined her nails, I thought it was at least possible that she could not feel the vibration.
So I waggled, leaned toward her, and said, “Your phone is ringing.”
The look she gave me communicated, in not so many words, that no one had ever told her anything more obvious and less helpful.
“Thanks,” she said, leaving her phone where it was.
The sting of the exchange stayed with me throughout the hour-long lecture. By the time the professor dismissed us, I’d decided I could either say something to this woman before she left, or sit next to her in uncomfortable silence, twice a week, for the next fifteen weeks. So I hid a waggle in a glance at the floor and said, “See you next week, then.”
Brittany, already heading for the exit, responded with only one word: “Yep.”
But all-importantly, she smiled just a little as she said it.
Looking back, I could see that I’d been awkward, but I couldn’t recall that I’d done anything pathological, or even strange, which made me feel worse. Maybe everything I did was strange, and I just couldn’t see it.
I waited another moment before I said, “What made you think I had Asperger’s?”
“Well, I thought your little headshakes were a tic or something.”
That was reasonable. I couldn’t conceal every waggle I needed, and most people needed no waggles at all.
“And I thought you were, you know, missing social cues,” she said.
I groaned at the thought that I was giving this impression to everyone I met. “It’s not that I miss them,” I said. “It’s just that, sometimes, I don’t know what to say when I see them.”
“I get that now.”
“I know what other people might say,” I said, “but I didn’t speak for almost two decades. I haven’t had enough conversations to know what I should say.”
“I know.”
“Or I know what I should say, but I really want to say something else, and I’m trying to figure out if what I want to say will make trouble.”
“Simon,” she said. “I know.”
I waggled and tried again. “It’s like, I get the cues, but I’m still learning my lines.”
I turned my head to look at Brittany. She rolled her eyes and threw off the covers.
“What?” I asked.
“Your metaphor melted down, Simon,” she said, getting out of bed.
“Where are you going?”
“To the bathroom,” she said. “You should’ve come on to me a half hour ago. You missed that cue.”
•••
THE FOLLOWING APRIL, on the night before Connor made his only visit to Carbondale, Brittany was watching television on the couch in my apartment, a one-bedroom on the first floor of an old home long since divided into rental units. Her bare legs were hugged to her chest and swaddled in a thin fleece blanket. I was sitting alongside her, but only the hem of her blanket touched me. Brittany didn’t like to be touched while she watched television. “I can’t concentrate if there’s touching,” she’d say.
On the old Panasonic box I’d purchased at a Carbondale garage sale, a woman in an orange jumpsuit was bemoaning her imprisonment for a capital crime—the murder of her former lover—that she swore she hadn’t committed. The frizzy ends of the woman’s ponytail whipped back and forth, punctuating her denial. Brittany leaned her head over her knees, hanging on the woman’s every word.
I had decided in the show’s first five minutes that I agreed with its producers: this woman had killed her boyfriend. But I kept watching and kept my seat. Near the end of a dinner of spaghetti and jarred tomato sauce, I’d agreed to put off until after the show a conversation about Connor’s visit to Carbondale the next day. I knew that Brittany’s doing what I planned to ask of her became less likely with each passing minute, so I wanted to be with her when the credits rolled. And even without touching her, sitting close to her made me excited for what lay ahead for us in Chicago.
After some difficult conversations on the matter, Brittany had finally decided to move to Chicago with me. We would share an apartment and try to turn our longtime professional dreams into careers. I’d look for representation as a voiceover artist, and Brittany would scour estate sales and auctions to build her stock of the rare books she hoped to buy and sell for a living.
We had money saved, though Brittany had much less than she’d expected. By the time her father was indicted, the balance in her trust, once more than four hundred thousand dollars, had been reduced to nine thousand. To preserve what capital remained for her entry into the rare-books business, she’d forsaken the heavy financial burden of a private-college education for the low tuition and renowned rare-volumes collection of Southern Illinois University.