Beth Hendrickson

Out of the Blue, Spiderman

My purse is full of our world. My book. Your book. My pen. You prefer pencil. Water bottles for us both. The current blanket I’m crocheting. It’s the size of a handkerchief. I crochet squares because you alone, my son, appreciate my efforts. Without looking directly in my eyes, you smile at me, and that flash of your teeth gnaws through the soft spot beneath my breastbone straight to my spine. You do need me, don’t you? For you, I empty my purse.

“What do you want?” I ask you with a suggestive shudder of my bag.

The train ride from city to suburbs is long but not monotonous provided someone—you—is willing to sit against the window to track the cracked concrete and graffiti turning to fields and weeds.

See? You say without actually saying it to me.

“I see,” I say. I say, “So much turning out there.” Turning is possible.

It’s a straight shot, this train route, but through your eyes, I see a curve of hope.

I keep my question simple—

“What do you want?” I match you, a man of few words.

Simple enough, but I’m ashamed by the immensity of expectation I have for what you’ve never given. I rattle that purse as though I could rattle you, too, to hear you speak what you’ve never said.

You blink, eyes fluttering at the yarn I’ve crocheted. I knot the blue square and hand it to you.

“It’s for you.” I say.

Your thank-you is silent, but I feel your gratitude. To soothe myself, I run my palms over the large envelope on my lap. That’s how I carry home your medical records. I don’t entrust that to my purse.

You didn’t find the view from the doctor’s window monotonous. Her office looked into the building’s airshaft. The tan brick wall opposite had graffiti. A red heart around a black tag I could not decipher. How on earth had someone climbed down an airshaft to spray that? Maybe the doctor had screeched up her pigeon-feces coated window and attacked the wall with paint. A heart around an indecipherable message. Really though, who could have done such a thing? You read my mind and answered out loud. Out loud!

“Spiderman.”

You are a little man of few words, but when you use them, your words are perfect.

Loudly and clear, you sitting so straight in the chair next to me, one leg wrapped around the other. The doctor had written your response. There, on her form. She wrote, Spiderman.

Then the doctor looked at you but asked me, “How long have you noted his condition?”

I answered cheekily, “As long as I’ve known him.”

“What do you want?” I ask again reaching for my purse as the train shoots us home.

I hear my tone. Pig farmers poke a stick that shocks hogs into a chute they are right to resist. You don’t look, smile, or answer.

Instead, as weeds leap out of the city’s concrete cracks flashing by your window and germinate the wildflower fields that come next, your gentle fingers caress the knit-one-purl-two bumps of my blue needlework. I want—a gnawing, prodding thing, this want of mine that nibbled into my chest cavity, encaged by my ribs, I want you to answer me directly.

“What do you want?” I cannot live on a small scrap of blue hope alone.

Your reflection in the window is a transparent but constant traveling companion. I tell that pale, round, high fore headed face in the window, “I talk to you all the time. Do you remember all those nights I lay with you curled into the cavity of my spine?” I talked at you then so certain you
listened, even if your only response had been squirming into a more comfortable fetal ball position. You had nestled into me; you had fully filled me.

“Has he always been like this?” The doctor had asked me directly.

Yes, I should have confessed. Since birth. I didn’t have to tell her.

She wrote it down.

Autism.

That’s the word on the paper in the envelope on my lap. You place my crocheted blanket between your cheek and your window twin. I remember how your cheek brushed my cheek when the nurse placed you on my bare chest after she’d rubbed the blue from your legs.

Now, finally, you look at me, and while you don’t say it out loud, you say you love me.

You rub the blanket, at first as gently as our newborn cheek caress, but then something pollutes your mood, dark and frantic. I reach over to press my fingers over yours. Under my hand, I feel your fingers pick at the blanket. How many handkerchiefs have I crocheted over the past four years? All meet this unraveled fate.

You find the knot and you pull and you pull and you pull and then you do not have a blanket but a snarl of blue in your hands. Your eyes wander back to the window. No cushion between you and the weeds out there now. I settle my hands flat against the envelope in my lap and will my own fingers not to pickpickpickpick at the flap.

“I love you too,” I say.

I thrust the envelope deep into my purse universe to lose it amongst all our other necessities. Chapstick. Crackers. A brush. Car keys. A toy Spiderman. Diagnoses. Most importantly, my crochet hook, waiting ready for the first loop of your next blanket.

End

Beth Hendrickson has been a riverboat deckhand, violinist, and substitute middle school Algebra teacher (in no particular order). She was long-listed for Jericho Writer’s 500 Novel contest, and her stories have appeared in The Quarter(ly) Journal and The Fourth River. She lives in Pittsburgh, PA with her husband, two daughters, and a self-centered dachshund.