Jodi Picoult - House Rules

The Steinbergs also include a photocopied note that chronicles everything they have been doing over the years. I’ve read about their daughter, Sarah, who went from taking gymnastics lessons to being accepted at Vassar to joining a consulting firm to moving to an ashram in India and adopting a baby. I’ve come to know Marty Steinberg’s big career breaks at Lehman Brothers and his shock at being out of a job in 2008, when the company folded; and how he went on to teach business at a community college in upstate New York. I’ve seen Vicky, his wife, go from being a stay-at-home mom to an entrepreneur selling cookies with the faces of pedigreed dogs on them. (One year there were samples!) This year, Marty took a leave of absence, and he and Vicky went on a cruise to Antarctica-apparently a lifelong dream that was now possible since Eukanuba had bought out Vicky’s company. Sarah and her partner, Inez, got married in California, and there was a picture of Raita, now three, as the flower girl.

Each Christmas season, I try to get to the Steinbergs’ letter before my mother does. She tosses them into the trash, saying things like Don’t these people ever get the message when the Jenningses don’t send a card back? I fish the card out and put it in a shoe box I have reserved specially for the Steinbergs in my closet.

I don’t know why reading their holiday cards makes me feel good, the same way a warm load of laundry does when I’m lying underneath it, or when I take the thesaurus and read through an entire letter’s words in one sitting. But today, after I come home from my meeting with Jess, I suffer through the obligatory conversation with my mother (Mom: How did it go? Me: Fine. ) and then go straight up to my room. Like an addict who needs a fix, I go right for the Steinberg letters and I reread them, from the oldest to the most recent.

It gets a little easier to breathe again, and when I close my eyes I don’t see Jess’s face on the backs of my lids, grainy like a drawing on an Etch A Sketch. It’s like some kind of cryptogram, and A really means Q and Z really means S and so on, so the twist of her mouth and the funny note that jumped in her voice are what she really wanted to say, instead of the words she used.

I lie down and imagine showing up on the doorstep of Sarah and Inez.

It is so good to see you, I’d say. You look exactly like I thought you would.

I pretend that Vicky and Marty are sitting on the deck of their ship. Marty is sipping a martini while Vicky writes out a postcard with a picture of Valletta, Malta, on the front.

She scrawls, Wish you were here. And this time, she addresses it directly to me.

Nobody dreams of being an agony aunt when they grow up.

Secretly, we all read advice columns-who hasn’t scanned Dear Abby ? But sifting through the problems of other people for a living? No thanks.

I thought that, by now, I’d be a real writer. I’d have books on the New York Times list and I’d be feted by the literati for my ability to combine important issues with books that the masses could relate to. Like many other writer wannabes, I’d gone the back route through editing-textbooks, in my case. I liked editing. There was always a right and a wrong answer. And I had assumed that I’d go back to work when Jacob was in school full-time-but that was before I learned that being an advocate for your autistic child’s education is a forty-hour-a-week profession in and of itself. All sorts of adaptations had to be argued for and vigilantly monitored: a cool-off pass that would allow Jacob to leave a classroom that got too overwhelming for him; a sensory break room; a paraprofessional who could help him, as an elementary school student, put his thoughts into writing; an individualized education plan; a school counselor who didn’t roll her eyes every time Jacob had a meltdown.

I did some freelance editing at night-texts referred to me by a sympathetic former boss-but it wasn’t enough to support us. So when the Burlington Free Press ran a contest for a new column, I wrote one. I didn’t know about photography or chess or gardening, so I picked something I knew: parenting. My first column asked why, no matter how hard we were trying as moms, we always felt like we weren’t doing enough.

The paper got over three hundred letters in response to that test column, and suddenly, I was the parenting advice expert. This blossomed into advice for those without kids, for those who wanted kids, for those who didn’t. Subscriptions increased when my column bumped from once a week to twice a week. And here’s the really remarkable thing: all these people who trust me to sort out their own sorry lives assume that I have a clue when it comes to sorting out my own.

Today’s question comes from Warren, Vermont.

Help! My wonderful, polite, sweet twelve-year-old boy has turned into a monster. I’ve tried punishing him, but nothing works. Why is he acting up?

I lean over my keyboard and start to type.

Whenever a child misbehaves, there’s some deeper issue driving the action. Sure, you can take away privileges, but that’s putting a Band-Aid over a gaping wound. You need to be a detective and figure out what’s really upsetting him.

I reread what I’ve written, then delete the whole paragraph. Who am I kidding?

Well, the greater Burlington area, apparently.

My son sneaks out at night to crime scenes, and do I heed my own advice? No.

I am saved from my hypocrisy by the sound of the telephone ringing. It’s Monday night, just after eight, so I assume it’s for Theo. He picks up on an extension upstairs and a moment later appears in the kitchen. “It’s for you,” Theo says. He waits till I pick up and disappears into the sanctuary of his bedroom again.

“This is Emma,” I say into the receiver.

“Ms. Hunt? This is Jack Thornton… Jacob’s math teacher?”

Inwardly, I cringe. There are some teachers who see the greater good in Jacob, in spite of all his quirks-and there are others who just don’t get him and don’t bother to try. Jack Thornton expected Jacob to be a math savant when that’s not always part of Asperger’s-in spite of what Hollywood seems to think. Instead, he’s been frustrated by a student whose handwriting is messy, who transposes numbers when doing calculations, and who is far too literal to understand some of the theoretical concepts of math, like imaginary numbers and matrices.

If Jack Thornton is calling me, it can’t be good news.

“Did Jacob tell you what happened today?”

Had Jacob mentioned anything? No, I would remember. But then again, he probably wouldn’t confess unless he was directly asked. More likely, I would have read the clues through his behavior, which would have seemed a little off. Usually when Jacob’s even more withdrawn, or stimming, or conversely too talkative or manic, I know something’s wrong. In this way, I am a better forensic scientist than Jacob would ever guess.

“I asked Jacob to come up to the board to write out his homework answer,” Thornton explains, “and when I told him that his work was sloppy, he shoved me.”

“ Shoved you?”

“Yes,” the teacher says. “You can imagine the reaction of the rest of the class.”

Well, that explains why I didn’t see a deterioration in Jacob’s behavior. When the class started laughing, he would have assumed he’d done something good.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll talk to him.”

No sooner have I hung up the phone than Jacob appears in the kitchen and takes the carton of milk out of the fridge.

“Did something happen in math class today?” I ask.