with you and like you
Friday morning, while the light’s still new, Adam slides his Father’s Day gift out of hiding.
“Play golf,” Adam says, pausing the game he’s playing on the Xbox, sauntering over to where Kevin and I stand talking, dropping the words like a couple of coins in Kevin’s palm. Adam watches our faces, looking for something–a flash of delight, maybe, or at least our agreement. This is an invitation, that much Adam conveys clearly, but that’s also why we’re confused. Sixteen years, and Adam has never, by his own initiative, invited one of us to do something with him purely for fun.
“Do you mean on the Xbox,” I ask after a moment, searching for clarity, “or outside?”
“Outside,” Adam says.
“You want to go play golf outside?” Kevin says, and we exchange a glance, even more confused that the invitation involves leaving home, which has never been an entertaining idea to Adam. Even when we go to the movies, we have to reassure Adam that yes, we will indeed come back home after the movie finishes.
“Yes. Go to play golf outside,” Adam says, and the words sound foreign, the way they feel, as though he’s just testing out the syllables. Adam turns on his heel, satisfied, returning to his game, leaving us as quickly and purposefully as he arrived.
It’s like he plopped his gift in Kevin’s lap and left us blinking at it, trying to decide what it is and whether or not we should open it. Changes in Adam’s life happen this way often, like a sudden torrent we could hardly have expected. We pray and love and live, and then God’s more-than-we-ask-or-imagine suddenly comes, like the first drop of rain after a famine. And then we stand with our palms in the air, holding questions in our eyes, asking if maybe just maybe it could be rain at last. On Friday morning, we shrug and spin into the whirl of the day. Sometimes, it takes us a while to catch on.
Saturday, Kevin and Adam take a father-son trip to the barber shop. Adam picks up his gift from the place where we abandoned it barely corner-torn and takes it along. In the car on the way home, he holds it in the space between them; he sketches out the edges with words.
“Go play golf,” Adam says again.
“You want to go play golf?” Kevin says, and I’m not there, but even now I can see Adam blinking the way he does when he’s wondering why we can’t seem to understand.
“Yes. Want,” Adam pauses, wrangling with the words. Verbal dyspraxia is something we can see; we watch our autistic son reach into his mind and tug out words, gripping the stuck things, sighing sometimes over the effort. “Go to play golf.”
“Who do you want to go play golf with?”
“Go play golf.”
“I understand,” Kevin says, “but with who? What people?” We’ve been talking this way for years–rephrasing, repeating, reiterating our way across broken chasms of communication. Our words fly across empty space like grappling hooks looking for purchase. Sometimes they reach the other side and hold fast so that we can scale across; sometimes, they fall into the bottomless void.
Adam looks across the seat at Kevin, considering. “Dad and Adam,” Adam says slowly, carefully, as though the challenge with words belongs to his father and not to him.
“Okay,” Kevin says, “we’ll go.”
Maybe because it’s Saturday, Adam thinks they’ll go almost immediately. All afternoon, whenever Kevin walks in the room, Adam stops whatever he’s doing and marches over to his father’s side, ready, expectancy wide-open on his face. It’s this grand anticipation that moves Kevin to make plans to spend his Father’s Day afternoon on a par 3 golf course in the blazing heat with his son, who can finally then relax in the details.
This gift of Adam’s is not merely a drop of rain in our upheld palms, after all; it is a downpour. God’s glory comes on like a flood.
I was not there to hear Adam narrate their golf game in the voices of the announcers from his Xbox game–“it’s on the green” and all that, nor did I see the driving storm that broke the heat and soaked the course and threatened, cracking lightening. I didn’t hear Adam choose waiting with his dad in the dripping shelter over coming home, but I can imagine his voice now, soft and sure over the pounding sound of the rain, just as, knowing him, I imagine the angle of his long, lean arms and the way he steadied his elbows on his knees and rested his chin in his hands. In my heart, I can see the two of them walking side by side across the green after the storm, the one a copy of the other, only now slightly smaller. I will keep the gift and carry it, tucking it somewhere safe.
Before they leave though, I do see this: Our tall, angular boy, lightly touching the top of his head and the nearly-new NFL embroidered cap Kevin gives him to protect his forehead from the sun; our boy, anticipating the time, loving his dad, and ready.
Adam glances at Kevin, who wears a slightly different kind of cap, something mesh-backed and emblazoned with an IronMan logo, and suddenly Adam leaves the room.
“Where did Adam go?” Kevin finally says after gathering all the needed things, turning in circles and leaning to peer through doorways.
And almost immediately, Adam returns, having disappeared into the closet for another cap, one with mesh and and an IronMan logo, one more closely resembling His dad’s.
“That one’s a lot dirtier than the other one, Adam,” Kevin says, but I can see that this fact hardly matters. Because for the child who loves the Father, with you and like you will always far outweigh sweat and dirt and any sacrifice of anxiety bound up in a trip outside of comfort.
And so it will be, I’m thinking, as they leave me and I stand in the doorway and wave, with each one of us.
