Read Online The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son by Ian Brown - Free Book Online Page A

everyone napped after a day swimming—the Canadian version of paradise—that Johanna snapped a shot of him on the soft blue couch in the living room, the afternoon sun glowing through the wraparound windows:

    He looks utterly normal, the spitting image of his father as a kid, and of his grandfather before him. Perhaps that’s why I liked it: it was proof of our bond. I see his slim thighs, his tan—a tan! He has laid his head on his hands, and his knees are up; he’s wearing a pair of checked shorts (Hayley’s castoffs), and a blue sweatshirt. It’s as close as we got to a picture of what might have been. It even feels slightly dishonest.

    In my favourite photograph of them all, he is six. He’d started at a new school by then, and had blossomed. Beverley Junior Public School was ten minutes by car from where we lived, and right next to a tiny office I had in those days: I could stand outside and look over the fence at him, swinging in the playground. It was a gorgeous school, huge and open, designed with skylights and low windows for the children who spent most of their day on their backs. There was space.
    The snapshot was taken just after he started. Walker is standing in the sunroom of our house, gazing intently at my old manual typewriter. He has his hands and fingers splayed across the keys. It was the feel of the keys on his itchy palms that drew him, of course, the give of the keys, the sensation of manipulation. But he looks as if he’s making progress, an illusion not uncommon to people who make their living as writers. He’s dressed in the red plaid shirt I gave him, and he’s ready to type, with plenty to say and the glint of someone eager to say it. Maybe he had seen his parents hunched that way so often. It’s a charming scene; who knows, maybe what it depicts is genuine curiosity, a moment of clarity in that fogged-in head. Or so I think—until the charm falls away, and the space around my eyes begins to ache, and I can’t look at the picture any longer. Every instant of joy with him is like this, lined at some eventual depth with the lead of sadness, a reminder of—well, never mind that. No need to go too big too fast. But I have to put the pictures of him aside now; that’s as long as I can stand it. It took me ages to let these fantasies go; I daren’t let them back.

    During bad stretches, my wife and I made two or three trips to the hospital a week. Infections of the ears, gasping colds, epic constipations, rashes, bleeding, dehydration and constipation (on at least one memorable occasion), toothaches, and—most of all—unstoppable crying. One evening I was at the Hospital for Sick Children at 11:30 a.m., stayed until midnight, and was back again the next morning from 9 to 12.
    Reality goes 3-D in the inferno of the emergency ward at a children’s hospital. The default noise level, for starters, is usually half a dozen children crying at once, each in a different key and scale. Rossini would have made an opera from it. The staff bounce from one crisis to another, human balls in pastel blue and green fatigues, utterly dedicated to the welfare of the children: overeager residents, overworked nurses as calm as reeds, the doctors hovering above it all, trying not to fall too deeply into the actual screaming pissing puking aching fray. And of course the equally raucous sound, one you can’t always hear but can always feel as a roaring in your ears—the anxieties of the parents. Some of them are so graceless as to talk back to the doctors and nurses and worry and push their kids ahead of yours because their need is greater or they have been waiting longer. There are two categories of mothers in Emergency, the ones who hate being there and the others who secretly love it, because here they are finally among other people who recognize the pre-eminence of their child. Emerg was the full sociological pageant: otherwise healthy-looking kids with strange bruised welts on their unsuspecting legs