The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son by Ian Brown Page A

seldom change .
    Our best bet, Margie says, is to get help from a new branch of an established social service provider that specializes in “children who are unusual and hard to serve.”
    I’m sickened by the idea of Walker living anywhere else, but my guilt is by now a luxury. We must act. He can’t be alone for even a minute, twenty-four hours a day. Eventually he’ll have to move. Margie says it’s a good idea to begin the transition early. At eighteen, it will be too hard .
    The first visit takes place in our living room. Margie’s older than us, maybe early sixties, and tall, with shoulder-length grey hair. She is extremely calm, and listens about ten times more than she talks. She doesn’t use social services jargon, which immediately puts her in my good books. Even Johanna agrees to sit and talk to her about long-term care—a surprise .
    “Walker responds to love,” Johanna tells Margie. “We want him to go somewhere where they love all of him, not just some of him.”
    But she doesn’t mean it. Like me, she doesn’t want him to go anywhere at all .
    My father and Walker have something, some indefinable thing, between them. The old man’s in his nineties. He still goes to work, still performs fifteen minutes of calisthenics every morning, but he feels his weakness, and he hates it. He gave up his car at the age of ninety-three, after hurting his neck, and still thinks he’s going to drive again. It won’t happen, but the car is his great equalizer: he can no longer walk as fast as some people, but in a car he’s the man he was. His name is Peter; his second name, Henry, I gave to Walker.
    I drive out on weekends to help my parents. They live alone in a small house by a river, the last remnant of country land on the fringe of an omnivorous suburb. He needs me and my car for errands. The barber, the liquor store, various recycling drop-offs, the grocery store, the hospital for weekly visits to have my father’s varicose veins wrapped, keeping my mother happy—these are his pleasures now. He’s desperate to stay mobile, hence the three-act exits from the car: door open, legs swung to the side—“ Can you manage ?” “ Yes , yes .”—the arms spread to the sides of the door frame, as if he were about to parachute to the distant ground from the bay of a Cessna. The rock back, the catapult up and … out! Steady! Counterweight to prevent the pitch forward! Has he … yes! Hurrah. The human slingshot, enacted merely to fetch milk or pay the bills at the bank—one of two banks he and my ninety-four-year-old mother use, so as not to risk keeping all their money in one place.
    My father’s skin is as vulnerable as onion paper in a bible. I used to clap my arm around his shoulders when we met; he flinches if I forget and try it now. I could dislocate something. Dislocation is to be avoided at all costs, in all its forms. Routines cannot vary—the bank, the empties, then the grocery store, in that order—and neither can the route. “Why are you going this way?” he asks in the car, as if I had questioned the existence of carbon molecules themselves. He arrives forty-five minutes early for scheduled appointments. He carries a handkerchief to wipe spittle from the left side of his mouth when he thinks I’m not looking. Old age isn’t just something he dislikes: he’s personally offended by it. His mood is altered, slightly peevish. As his strength has failed, so has his famous reserve: he’s crabbier now, except with Walker. They seem to understand each other’s frailty; they have patience for each other.
    Each time they meet, the same thing happens. The boy stands in front of the old man, and my father holds his hands and looks into his eyes. “Hello,” he says. They are both smiling. My father knows what to do without ever having been told. “Hello there, Snodgrass.” As he used to say to me, and to my brother. Then Walker climbs into his lap and doesn’t move for twenty minutes. Walker