I’ve been working on some different things and haven’t posted in a while. I thought I’d throw out a small blast from the past. These are two excerpts from my novel, The Practical Navigator, published in 2016.
*
“You seem particularly edgy today.”
“Do I? You don’t.”
In the five weeks that Anita’s been seeing Fari Akrepede, not once has she noticed so much as a dark strand of hair out of place. Make-up – check. Clothes – check. Expensive shoes – check. Unruffled mental and emotional state – check and double check. What must it be like to be so composed, so imperturbable, so regulated? I’ll never know. “Yeah, I am a little edgy. Maybe you could give me something for it.” Whatever you’re on.
“I can’t prescribe medication but I can recommend somebody who will. Right now though, I’d rather talk about what’s making you feel this way.”
Questions, questions, always questions when what you’re looking for is somebody to give you some answers. Anita rises abruptly from her chair and moves to look out the window. She can see the ocean in the distance, the ocean that always makes her think of Michael. “I’ve always felt this way.”
“What way is that?”
“Like…” Anita turns to look at this maddening sphinx of a woman. “Like I’m going to start chewing on my arm, if I don’t stop thinking all the time.”
“What is it you think about?”
“Lately?”
“Please.”
Fari watches as Anita Beacham hesitates, then moves back to her chair to pick her bag up off the floor where she’s left it. She opens the purse and after rummaging briefly, takes out a small photo. She offers it to Fari who takes it.
“This is my son.”
It’s one of those posed school photos. The boy blonde, possibly five or six is in a blue T-shirt. He stares blankly at the camera without expression. Something familiar. Fari hands it back. “He looks like you.”
“He’s autistic.”
“I’m sorry. That must be difficult.”
“You know some people think autism is caused by uncaring mothers? Refrigerator moms. Great, huh?”
In over a month, two sessions a week, Fari has yet to see Anita Beacham cry. She suddenly wonders if today will be the day. “They’re mistaken.”
“Are they? Are they really?”
“I’m not an expert on autism but it’s my understanding that genetics and environmental factors play the most important role.”
“Great. I gave him defective genes and should have stayed away from bars and toxic dumps while pregnant.”
Fari is silent as Anita turns her back to her again. Some patients can’t talk if you’re looking at them. Anita is one of them.
“I was a refrigerator.”
“I’m sorry?”
“A refrigerator mom. I might as well have been. I used to wake up every morning, dreading the day. I’d get out of bed, Michael would be gone – ”
Fari forces herself to keep breathing evenly.
“- and I’d be alone in the house, staring at walls. And then he’d start to cry. Jamie. And no matter what I did, feed him, hold him, change him, rock him, I couldn’t make it better. I couldn’t. I started hating him. My own baby and I hated him. And I was so afraid I was going to hurt him. That I was going to hurt me.”
A racing heart means adrenalin has kicked in. Adrenalin, Fari knows, allows you to use all your strength at once – but only once. “What you’re describing, Anita, is an extreme form of postnatal depression. Were you seeing anyone about it?”
Anita shakes her head. Her eyes are shiny pools. “I didn’t want anyone to know.”
“You mentioned a Michael. Who is Michael?” Good. Her voice was matter of fact. Even casual.
Anita turns from the window and again goes to her purse. She takes out and offers a second photo. “This is my husband.”
Fari takes it. The snapshot is probably ten years old. A man and a woman in their twenties. Arms around one another. Smiling. Sun kissed. Radiant in their love. My Michael. What a shame, thinks Fari, that innocence has only one season.
Something has happened and Anita isn’t sure what. Dr. Akrepede’s hand trembles slightly as she hands the photo back. Her eyes are blinking rapidly. Anita watches as the woman carefully composes herself. Maybe she isn’t always as together as she appears to be. It’s an encouraging thought.
“Tell me how you met,” Dr. Akrepede softly says to her. “Tell me all about your husband.”
Though the smile is still distant and professional, the voice, thinks Anita, is suddenly that of a long-lost friend.
*****************

Michael pulls to a stop in front of the elementary school and gets out. There’s a police car double parked ahead of him and near the entrance he can see Karen McKenzie and the school’s principal, Carol Udall, talking to two uniformed officers, one male, one female. Seeing him, Karen McKenzie excuses herself and approaches.
“They have another squad car going up and down the streets between your home and the school. They’ll call in if they see him.”
“Do they know he’s autistic?”
“Yes. We’re also calling parents to see if there’s any chance he went home with one of them.”
“He wouldn’t.” Michael reaches for his wallet. “It might help if the police have some photographs of him.”
“They have them. Your wife had several.”
Where is she?”
“Out on the playground.”
He sees Mrs. McKenzie hesitate. “What is it?”
“Michael, if I’d known she was going to be the one picking him up today…”
“Jamie was supposed to tell you.”
“He didn’t.”
Michael can see tears glinting. Karen McKenzie may be a rock but she’s a rock with feelings.
Anita sits on the low rung of a jungle gym, a lit cigarette between her fingers. The steel bar behind her is quite literally a pain in the ass but right now pain feels good. The jungle gym is also a good distance away from the children and teachers who surround the after-school activities table. The last thing she needs right now are small voices asking questions.
“Why do they call it a jungle gym?” she once asked her mother.
“Because,” Tisha replied, “Monkey bars is impolite.”
“Why do they call them monkey bars.”
“Because,” her mother answered with some impatience, “children play like monkeys.” Unspoken but implied was that children playing like monkeys was unacceptable behavior at best.
The material on the ground under and surrounding the climbing bars is a heavy blue, soft, thick plastic pad, obviously there to protect a child should he or she fall. She should make a dress of it. And then climb deep into the center of the jungle gym where no one can get to her.
“There’s no smoking.”
Anita opens her eyes to see Michael approaching. “Any news?” she asks, not dropping the cigarette.
“The cops are out looking between here and the house. They’ll call in when they find him.”
“When will that be?”
“They’ll find him, Anita.”
“And if they don’t?”
“Let’s not go there.”
“This is because of me.”
“Why, because you were late?”
“Because I insisted on picking him up. Because he doesn’t even know me.” Anita pushes her lower back into the metal joist, pushes harder. “Who am I? Some sleazy, stranger who shows up out of nowhere and inserts herself into his life. What was I thinking?”
“Stop.”
“I can’t stop, I can’t. If anything happens to him – “
“This is not about you.” Louder than Michael intended. Anita’s green eyes open wide. “He was looking forward to it, Anita. Now let’s just find him and then you can blame yourself all you want to later, okay?”
“Okay.” Almost inaudible.
He turns away.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m not leaving, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Nice.
*
Michael enters the empty classroom. He moves to what he knows to be Jamie’s desk and sees that his books are still there, that his backpack is slung over the chair. He crosses the room to the rows of cube storage units that line the wall to find that Jamie’s Power Ranger’s lunchbox is also still present and accounted for. He should call Penelope and ask if he’s come home yet. Only the little holster is empty because he’s left his cell phone in the truck and really what difference does it make because he knows Jamie is all right, knows someone is going to call in to the school at any second and they’ll all breathe a sigh of relief, and this will be over.
“I’ll get in a car. I’ll drive away. I’ll drive!” shouts Jamie
A dread akin to nausea surges in Michael and he bolts from the classroom.
*
He has every right to blame her. The right to say anything. Anita knows this. It’s no big deal.
“Words are just words,” as her mother would say. “They can’t hurt us.”
Wrong, Mom.
Words are more dangerous than jungle gyms. Words are what should be surrounded by protective padding. She wishes now she’d told Michael that it was her only cigarette, one long forgotten about and found in the bottom of her bag. And she isn’t even smoking it, not really. Just letting it burn to a nub in her fingers.
*
Entering the lavatory, Michael strides to the row of sinks and turns on a faucet. He cups his hands, fills them with water, drinks and spits. He splashes water onto his face. Breathe, he thinks.
Breathe.
“I need paper.”
He’s hearing things. He must be. A child calling from out in the yard. Ghosts in the pipes. Michael turns to face the row of toilet stalls that line the wall behind him.
“Jamie?”
He hears the lock turn. He sees the stall door open a crack. The little face peers out at him.
“Hi, Dad.”
Michael, moving to the stall, carefully pushes the door inward and kneels on the tiles so he is face to face with his son –
“Hi, Dad. Hi.”
– and scoops the boy up, half off the toilet seat, pulling him close, vaguely aware that he’s babbling as he does so. “Jamie, Jamie, what are you doing, what the hell, are you okay?”
“I have to wipe my bottom. There’s no paper.”
“You what?”
My akole, Dad.”
Akole. Hawaiian for asshole.
Hawaiian for me.
Sometimes you don’t know whether to laugh or cry and so Michael squeezes his son tight to his chest until it draws a protest – “Dad!” – and just like Anita but without the hiccups, alternates between both.
*
Karen McKenzie is trying to describe to a newly arrived plainclothes man what the missing boy was wearing and finding it difficult. The day, the students, clothes and her brain all keep running together. Primary colors mix and produce nothing but brown.
“- red polo, wait, no – T-shirt, I think. Jeans and sneakers. Just like every other little boy.”
“Like that one?” says the man in the suit, pointing behind her. McKenzie turns. And sags in exquisite relief. Michael is walking from the school entrance, Jamie at his side. Thank God. All is not yet quite right with the world, but her heart can beat again.
*
“Mom will pick me up,” Jamie is saying. A statement and a question.
“Go ask her,” says Michael.
He looks across the quiet playground, towards the jungle gym to see that no one is there.