LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter Five

      March 30, evening

      South Colby

      Steven and Kendall Stark lived in a gray and white 1920s bungalow above Yukon Harbor in South Colby, a few miles outside Port Orchard on the way to the Southworth ferry landing. Since her childhood in nearby Harper, Kendall had admired the house and how it sat on an incline backed with an impressive grove of moss-covered maples and silver-barked alders. It didn’t take any convincing to get her husband to share her dream. In fact, when the house went on the market five years into their marriage, it was Steven who surprised his wife with an open-house flyer and a promise “to make this happen for you, babe.”

      A stone-edged walkway led from the street to wide front steps and a covered porch that seldom saw a summer evening without the presence of someone kicking back with a beer or a soda, watching the bay turn from blue to ink. It was a home that felt instantly comfortable, like those favorite brown leather slippers some dads wear for decades until they split at the toes. The place had been remodeled in the 1980s by a couple who likely didn’t realize the benefits of restoring a vintage home to its original charm. Wall-to-wall carpeting was easy enough to remove to expose original fir floors, but layers of mauve and kelly green paint over the rest of the woodwork was a daunting challenge. It took Steven and Kendall almost a year to scrape, sand, and re-stain the doors and trim. In the end, the house was any young couple’s vision of the perfect first home—enough room for children, a lawn that rolled from the front door to the main road, and a view of Blake Island and the harbor interrupted only by a few power lines and the frontage road.

      Steven destroyed the kitchen making his specialty for dinner, lasagna layered with roasted red bell peppers and sweet apple sausage. Between sales calls, he picked up a loaf of French bread at the Albertsons on Mile Hill Road and slathered it with garlic butter—Cody’s favorite.

      By the time Kendall made it home, the house smelled like an Italian restaurant. And a pretty good one at that. If she was stuck with the dishes (“You cook, I’ll clean”), the deal seemed fair enough.

      “Where’s the wine?” she asked, setting down her things and taking off her coat.

      “Uncorked and breathing.” He went for the glasses, the last pair that matched from their wedding stemware. “Cody’s in his room.”

      The words were familiar. Cody’s way of coping was isolation.

      “We have to talk,” she said.

      “I know.”

      Kendall nuzzled the back of her husband’s neck as he poured the wine, a dark, almost syrupy cabernet that infused the glasses with the glow of a glass full of rubies.

      “We can’t pretend he’s going to be okay,” she said.

      “I stopped pretending a long time ago.”

      She took a sip of her wine and thought carefully. “You know what I mean. We’re going to have to reconsider Inverness or something like it. He’s got his whole life ahead of him, and we have to find out what is best for him.”

      Steven’s eyes narrowed on his wife. The year before she’d cut her medium-length blond bob to a shorter cut. Sometimes when she hastily ran the hair product through her hair in the mornings, she ended up with an almost spiky do. It suited her. It made her deep blue eyes more pronounced and more of a mirror of what she was thinking.

      “He’s not living there, and you know that,” he said.

      Kendall set her wineglass on the still-mauve laminate kitchen countertop.

      “We have to do what’s best,” she said. “I just wish I knew what that was.” A tear threatened to roll down her cheek, and she wiped it away.

      There would be plenty of time for crying later. Her husband was more certain about the future, taking a kind of optimistic approach that she’d abandoned. Partly it was because of her job, but also because her dreams for her little boy had faded over time too.

      “I’m going to check on Cody,” she said, heading down the hallway to Cody’s room with its captain’s bed, orca wallpaper, and array of toys that would be the envy of any child his age, or maybe a little younger. He was playing with a puzzle that he liked to put together, wrong side up.

      Kendall let her mind wander back to the first moment she had any inkling that something was different about Cody. She never allowed the words wrong and aberrant to find their way into her thoughts. Even the euphemisms like special or challenged were banished from her vocabulary when she replayed any of the instances in which her beautiful boy seemed, well, different. He was three months old, a bundle of pink skin and downy blond hair swathed in a pale blue blanket. The cat had jumped up on the coffee table and knocked over a tippy vase of daffodils, sending it crashing to the floor. The noise startled Kendall but not Cody. Not at all. He just stayed still, a slight smile on his rosebud lips, his blue eyes fixed on the table lamp. Kendall worried that Cody’s lack of response could indicate hearing impairment. She snapped her fingers in his face.

      Again nothing. A trip to the pediatrician the next day confirmed that his hearing was fine.

      It was more serious than mere deafness.

      “It’s too early to say, of course,” the doctor said, “but this kind of intent, uninterruptible gaze can sometimes foretell autism.”

      Kendall felt the air rush from her lungs.

      “Are you sure?”

      “Look, Kendall, I’ve been a pediatrician long enough to see the early warnings. Testing will need to be done, certainly. But the truest indicator will be time itself.”

      “But

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