CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Dr. Sylvia Kohn is somewhere in her sixties and has an office on the second floor of a medical building with a bad elevator.
There are no butterflies in it. There is no rug shaped like a frog. There is a low table, four chairs of different heights, a bin of ordinary blocks, a window, and a clock on the wall that you can see from every seat in the room, which I understood the point of about six weeks later.
She has plain, useful hands, and she does not do the voice.
She took Danny for twenty-five minutes and me for fifteen and then both of us for five, and on the way out of the first appointment my son said, “She’s okay,” which from him is a standing ovation.
I told her about Room 12.
She listened to the whole thing without writing anything, and when I got to the part about the three walls she put her pen down on the table, which she had not been using anyway.
“Say that part again.”
“He said there’s a wall on three sides so he only had to watch one way.”
“He said that afterward, or he told you he thought it at the time?”
“He said it like it was obvious.”
Dr. Kohn sat back.
“All right,” she said. “I’m going to tell you something and I want you to hear it correctly, because people hear this wrong. That is not a child coping. That is a child who has built a procedure.”
“Is that bad?”
“It is extremely useful and it is not free,” she said. “Seven-year-olds do not build procedures unless something has taught them that the adults are a variable.”
Then she gave me the three things.
I have them on a piece of paper in my kitchen. She wrote them out herself on a prescription pad because I asked her to, and I have moved them twice.
One. The school tells us about every drill in advance. Every single one, every time, no exceptions, in writing. She said she would put it in a letter to the district and she did, and it took nine days, and there has not been an unannounced tone in that building for him since.
Two. He has a plan and he can say it out loud. Which adult he goes to. Which door he uses. That the tone means practice. And a sentence he can say to a grown up that gets him thirty seconds, which is I need a minute, and every adult in that building has been told what it means.
I told her he had already invented most of that himself, behind a bookshelf, in four minutes.
“Yes,” she said. “So we are going to give him the rest of it, and we are going to say it out loud in front of him, so that it stops being a thing he made alone in an emergency and starts being a thing the adults agreed to.”
“Does that matter?”
“That’s the entire treatment,” Dr. Kohn said.
Three. Home is predictable.
She said the first two are technique and the third one is the medicine, and that if we did the third one and nothing else he would still get better, slowly, and if we did the first two and not the third one he would not.
Open doors. The light. The same order of things. Meals at roughly the same time, bed at roughly the same time, the same person doing the same thing.
“And adults who do what they said they were going to do,” she said. “Every time. Not most times. Not with a good reason for the exception.”
“That’s a high bar.”
“It’s a very low bar,” she said. “It’s just an unforgiving one.”
At the end of that appointment, with her hand on the door, I asked her the thing I had been circling for fifteen minutes.
“Can I ask you about my husband.”
“You can ask me anything. I’ll tell you what I won’t answer.”
“He wants to be around. Not living with us. Around. More than Saturdays.”
Dr. Kohn took her hand off the door.
“I don’t advise people about their marriages,” she said. “I want to say that plainly because you are going to be told a great many things this year by people who are not qualified to tell you them, and I am not going to be one of them. That is not my field and it is not my business.”
“Okay.”
“But you understand what an adult who can disappear means to a child like this.”
That is all she said.
She said it in a completely level voice with her hand back on the door handle, and it was not advice and it was not a recommendation and there is no version of it that appears in a note anywhere.
I stood in a hallway on the second floor of a medical building and understood that I had my answer, and that it was not the answer I had been carrying around since November.
I had been saying no to him out of the twelfth of November. Out of a stairwell and a smile in a garage and a shirt collar turned under.
That is anger, and anger is fine, and anger also gets tired. Anger would have run out sometime around next winter and I would have found myself standing in a kitchen thinking, well, the kids miss him.
This is not anger.
This is that my son has a procedure, and that the treatment is adults who do what they said, and that the specific injury in this house is a man who could be reached and chose not to be, and you do not treat that by putting the man back in the room and hoping.
That is a much better reason and it does not get tired.
The ring came off on the twenty-fourth of March.
Nothing happened. That is what I promised at the beginning of this and it is what I am going to deliver.
I was at the sink in the shared kitchen at the Fenwick Residence washing out a pan, and the water was hot and my hands were slick, and I was working at the bottom of it with a pad, and it came off my finger and went down into the sink with the water.
I fished it out of the strainer basket with two fingers.
I stood there holding a wet wedding ring in a room with a bare bulb in the ceiling, and there was a skillet in the sink and a boy down the hall and a quarterly due on Friday.
I put it on the windowsill.
Then I finished the pan, and dried my hands, and picked the ring up and put it in the front pocket of my purse, in the little zipped one where I keep the spare key.
It is still in there. It has been in there ever since and I do not think about it and I have not opened that pocket in months.
Four seconds, and I did not feel one thing.
The band on my finger was two shades lighter than the rest of my hand.
I looked at it for a while under that bulb, and I thought about a rectangle on a burnt refrigerator and a rectangle on a lobby wall, and I understood that it is the same thing three times.
Something sits flat against a surface for years, and the light goes around it and never gets under it, and then it comes off, and what is left is a clean place in the shape of the thing that was there.
That is all any of them are.
I filed on the twenty-fifth.
Milwaukee County Circuit Court, family division, second floor, take a number. A filing fee, on a card I was going to have to pay off in April.
The form has a section on it about the marriage and there is a line where you say what the situation is.
I wrote Beyond repair.
The clerk was maybe fifty, with reading glasses on a chain, and she turned the form around and read it and turned it back and put her finger on that line.
“Honey, the court needs the actual words.”
“Which words?”
“There’s a statute.” She pulled a sheet out from under her counter, one of those laminated ones they keep for exactly this. “Right there.”
The marriage is irretrievably broken.
I crossed out what I had written and I copied it out underneath in my own handwriting, and I want to record that I stood at that counter and thought, that is a better sentence than mine.
Mine had a person in it. Somebody did something and somebody else assessed it and found it beyond repair.
Theirs does not. Theirs is about the thing itself. It does not say who broke it. It says it will not go back.
“Wisconsin’s got a hundred and twenty days,” the clerk said, stamping. “From service. Then you get your hearing.”
“A hundred and twenty.”
“Four months. It’s so people think about it.”
I put my copy in my bag.
“I’ve had four months,” I said.
The Fire and Police Commission met the next morning at nine.