“That sounds awful.” Who would’ve thought that a three-thousand-square-foot house with a private theater in the family room and a swimming pool coupled with a tennis court in the backyard would be a home you needed to run away from? Her body is rigid with repressed emotion.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to be ten and abandoned by your mom? Overnight like you never meant anything to her?” Her eyes fill with huge tears. The wounds still so fresh. A mother’s rejection cuts to the core. It’s impossible not to feel her grief. “All her focus became about Mason. That’s when she got all obsessed with getting him diagnosed. She—”
I raise my hand to stop her. “Wait. That’s when your mom started taking Mason to doctors? After the two of you had a falling-out?”
“I was ten, so I don’t really think I can be responsible for being abandoned by my mom, but yes, that’s when Mason’s health took over her life. It’s been that way ever since.” She wipes her face with her sleeve, smearing mascara underneath her eyes. “He became her project.” She laughs, then quickly adds, “And her prize.”
“What do you mean by that?” I hand her my napkin since she doesn’t have one, and she quickly blows her nose. She takes a deep breath before going on.
“She’d never admit it in a million years, but I think part of her liked Mason being sick. She loved all the attention she got for all the sacrifices she made for him and how hard she worked taking care of him. There’s nothing she likes more than being the center of attention, and she got more attention the more messed up he got. She had all these new mom friends. Joined all these parent support groups and was always volunteering to speak in them. She started lugging Mason to conferences the way me and her used to go to pageants.” She twists her napkin in front of her on the table.
“What kind of conferences?” I can’t imagine how hard that must’ve been for Savannah on so many different levels, especially when she was that young.
“Anything that had to do with autism. There were so many of them, and it’s been so long that it’s hard to remember.” She looks up at the ceiling while she tries hard to pull and sort through memories. “She did lots of conferences and events on social skills, and for a while, she was super obsessed with giving him all these special vitamins and supplements. I remember those months because she was like a speed freak, running around the house and frantically ordering them from all over the country. Such a strange obsession, and then one day she just stopped. Didn’t give him another pill. I think after that she went on the green-smoothie kick for his intestines or something like that. It was always something.” She brings her elbow to the table and props her chin on her hand. “There are others I remember, too, like conscious discipline and potty training. How crazy is it that she spent an entire weekend talking about potty training?” She shakes her head, then quickly snaps her fingers. “Oh, and all the therapy stuff with horses. They did all that too. You name it, she probably went to it.”
“Did your dad go too?” He’s still such a mystery to me. He was never at any of Mason’s testing sessions. Genevieve was always the one who brought him and provided the parental report. When I first went through the reports, I thought nothing of it. Sometimes one parent will take over all the management of the child’s care when there’s an illness, especially if there’s a more controlling person in the relationship, or if one is overwhelmed by the problem and would just rather the other spouse handle it. Other times a parent is too busy or not in the picture at all. There are so many reasons why a parent would be absent, but it stands out here in a big way now.
“Nope. He was stuck home with me, but I’m not sure he would’ve gone even if it hadn’t been for me.” Her tone shifts the same way it did the last time we met and her dad was mentioned. She’s instantly somber.
“What makes you say that?”
“It’s just a feeling, you know?” She shrugs. “When you’re a kid, you feel things when they’re wrong. Everything goes by your feelings because you don’t really understand all the stuff going on around you.” She traces a pattern on the table while she speaks. Her chewed fingernails are painted black to match the rest of her outfit. “Anyway, Daddy was never on board when she started preaching about how we’d been neglecting Mason for all these years and needed to get him the help he deserved. She kept saying we were supposed to dedicate our lives to being his biggest advocates now. It was weird. Like she’d gotten some strange new religion. You ever seen that?” She doesn’t give me a chance to respond. “That’s exactly how Daddy treated it, too, in the beginning at least, but I’m pretty sure they started fighting about it at the end.”
“How come?”
“Daddy felt the same way I did—Mason seemed fine to us before. But she was convinced we’d missed all the signs. And all the help? The treatments? It was like the more help she got him, the worse he got.”
“Did you hear them fighting?”
“Oh my God. All the time.” She pushes the rest of her books aside and leans forward. “It was the biggest joke. Like, we’d be going somewhere, and they’d be screaming their heads off at each other in the car, but the minute those car doors were opened and we stepped outside?” She shakes her head. Disgust stamped on her features. “They were holding on to each other and smiling like they’d just come back from their honeymoon.”
“Was it always that way?”
She shakes her head. “Everything was fine before things got all weird with Mason.”
“You keep saying Mason was fine before. Can you tell me more about that?”
“Just what it means.” She gives me a shrug. “He was fine; there wasn’t anything different about him.”
I tread lightly because I know how sensitive these things are. “When you say ‘there wasn’t anything different about him,’ what exactly do you mean by that?”
She looks slightly annoyed that she’s having to break it down so specifically for me, like someone who’s a psychologist should already know these things, and she’s right, but that’s not why I’m asking. “I mean, nothing was wrong with him. He was just a regular kid. He did kid stuff. He was happy. Bubbly. Loved to play and be outside. He followed me everywhere, but I never cared because he was so adorable, especially when he was a toddler. He loved putting on my makeup with me. He’d babble the entire time.”
“Babble? How old was he?” All the reports show a lack of babbling.
“I guess that’s what you call it. And I don’t know . . . however old you are when you’re a toddler? He was still in diapers. Does that help?” she asks, looking to me for approval.
“It does.” I nod. That’s exactly when babbling should occur. “Did he talk?”
“Yeah, he talked. He wasn’t one of those kids that’s a nonstop chatterbox, but he talked. He was just shy, but there’s nothing wrong with being shy.”
“Absolutely not,” I agree. I was a shy kid. I’m a shy adult.