back again
In the early morning, Adam and I sit waiting again beside the waterfall-on-a-wall in the oral surgeon’s office, me with my scrubbed face and the early hour puffing around my eyes, he with his hair still snarled in the back where he always forgets to brush. He did not complain when I wrote our schedule on a sticky note and pressed it down on his desk next to his coffee and that half-eaten bowl of Fruit Loops, just flicked his eyes, full of silent questions, from the note to me.
“It’ll be okay,” I told him this morning. “It’s just a check-up.”
Just a check-up, because a few days ago I had noticed a swollen spot on his cheek and pressed my fingers lightly against his jawbone.
“Feel better,” Adam said, reassuring me. “Good. Feels good.”
I had felt the borders of a mysterious knot, my mind going first to the extraction of Adam’s wisdom teeth in the summer. Could it be an infection? Some food trapped that festered deep? It had been a project to protect him. He’s sensitive about his mouth, and although he had managed to keep his protests mild, Kevin and I had wondered if our best efforts to irrigate his healing wounds had been effective.
After that, my mind went to worrying the edges of other possible pains, and my body prepared for the worst.
I will not Google it, I told myself. I’ll wait. I’ll pray. I’ll talk to the doctor. I will not fear evil, because You are with me, Lord.
The first time a person walks through the valley of shadow, it comes as a surprise. You’re meandering along, gazing at the trees, at the way the branches seem to curve in canopies over your head, and then suddenly you find yourself on scorched earth and the sun seems to have disappeared and you trip and fall into a pit. You sit at the bottom with tears streaming, touching your skinned knees, feeling fire in your skin and bones while mud soaks the seat of your shorts, wondering, How did I get here? In your head, the words sound like a silent scream.
A friend of mine says, “the bubble bursts.” In other words, something shatters that illusory sense of safety, that strange idea you had that hardship happens to other people, when you suddenly realize it’s happening to you. Something dies that first time. You grieve, and then, as they say, you wind up with “a new normal,” which is a neat way to sum up traveling in strange, skeptical places, never to return to that sense of safety.
The oral surgeon has helpfully provided pamphlets, displayed neatly in an acrylic holder on the table next to Adam’s chair. I look up from Wordle on my phone to find Adam carefully peeling back a corner of the nearest trifold. When he senses my eyes, he turns toward me, folds his hands in his lap. I look over at the pamphlets, black, with bold titles. The one he’d been peaking at cap-shouts PERIODONTAL, with a rather gruesome closeup of someone’s gums. I glance back at Wordle and feel Adam immediately lean toward the pamphlets. This time, he’s peeling back the edge of one that alarmingly cries, DENTAL IMPLANTS. He locks eyes with me and lets go, examines his fingertips, lightly taps his splayed hands together in front of him.
“You can read those, if you want to,” I tell him. But you want the wisdom teeth one.
“No,” he says quietly, still tapping his fingertips. It looks mature, the gesture, and suddenly I’m thinking about his long fingers, the rough knuckles. He’s an adult. Sometimes the age of his body catches up to me, the broad shoulders, the angles. My Autistic children live with a strange mix of old and young, not only their bodies, but also their thoughts. In some ways, they’ve the innocence of children, but their eyes hold years, and their challenges, their griefs, have aged them. His body knows to anticipate shadows. He’s restless, alert. Just like me, he makes do here with limited language and a clouded perspective. Just like me, he struggles to trust the one who takes care of him more than what he thinks he can know from the shreds of information he can gather.
I touch Adam’s knee and wait until he looks at me.
“It’s okay. Just a check-up today,” I reiterate. He glances away from me, toward the door the dental assistants open when they call patients to come back.
When they call him, the dental assistant looks at me with some surprise as I get up to follow, dropping my phone into my purse. I’m used to this too, especially now that my kids are older. Adam stands taller than me, all long and lean. His chin and cheeks look scruffy with stubble in certain places. He looks old enough to do all this without me. I could send him back and wait the beat or two it takes for her to realize he can’t really answer her questions, the beat or two it takes for her to remember he has Autism and think, oh, that’s why, and come to get me, but I don’t care about that as much as I care about the way Adam glanced at me and then at that stand of pamphlets when she called his name, the wary way he walks toward the door. So, I smile as she starts to speak and then stops, as she finds something lingering in the back of her mind that makes her wait on whatever she had been about to say, and I follow Adam through the door.
The dental assistant presses her gloved hands against Adam’s jaw. She tells him to open his mouth wide so she can see.
“Ahhh,” she says, and then, “Don’t bite me, now,” as she runs her fingers along his gums, the insides of his cheeks, the healed places where he had his incisions.
“Does it hurt?” She asks Adam.
“No,” he says firmly.
“It doesn’t? It doesn’t hurt?” She says. “Your eyes say something different.”
“Well, he just wants to leave,” I tell her. “He’ll say whatever he thinks it takes.”
Adam drills me with his eyes, and catching the exchange, she smiles.
“Well, we’ll take an x-ray,” she tells Adam, “and then the surgeon will take a look. Come on, let’s take some pictures.” She gestures with her hand, moving toward the door.
Adam glances at me. I am the one he trusts, and he wants me to go with him or he doesn’t want to go. In this office, painful things happen when it seems like I’m not near.
“It’s just an x-ray,” I say. “It doesn’t hurt. You’ve had them before, remember?”
“Yeah, buddy, just like before,” the dental assistant says as Adam hesitates at the door.
“I’ll be right here,” I say.
Wisely, the dental assistant leaves the door open so Adam can see me while she reminds him how to stand, where to rest his jaw, where to put his hands on the machine, which will slowly spin around his head to take a panoramic x-ray. He watches me, lets his shoulders drop.
While we wait on the doctor, Adam leans forward in the dental chair, splays his fingers and practices lining them up, one hand matching the other. His long hair falls, dangling like a curtain in front of his eyes. He glances up, sits back against the chair again when the doctor walks in the room.
“The x-ray doesn’t show any signs of an infection,” the doctor says to me, “but his bones still haven’t completely healed, and there could be an infection we can’t see in the x-ray.” He prescribes a week of antibiotics and anti-inflammatories, says we’ll need to come back for a follow-up, when they’ll determine what happens next.
Adam looks relieved when we get up to leave, but that quickly disappears when we get to reception and the scheduler and I start discussing the next appointment. On the desk, Adam finds another acrylic stand full of those helpful pamphlets, with their slick black fronts and cap-shout titles, with those gruesome close-up photographs. He peels back the corner of the one that says WISDOM TEETH, adjusting his body so he can scan a little further down.
“You can read that, if you want,” I say again, appreciating the allure.
Anyone who has walked the valley before expects to return, if not to the same place, to another equally barren one. At least we can be ready for the pain, as if that will minimize it somehow, as if not knowing was ever the reason for our grief.
I read once that forest fires occur naturally to clear the forest floor of debris and low-growing underbrush, nourishing it and opening it up to sunlight, ultimately allowing for the growth of stronger, healthier trees. It’s hard to imagine, looking at a wasteland, that anything good could ever spring forth. It’s hard to remember that valleys turn lush when the living waters rain down from the mountain tops. I think maybe that’s why the psalmist chose the valley for his shadows.
“No,” Adam says quietly, dropping the edge of the pamphlet, reaching instead for me.
