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I knew I should have been gratified and even excited by this progress, but it scared me. Why had it taken Dylan leaving me for him to start making these strides? What had I missed? What had I done?
“How have you been, Beth?” Sue asked as Dylan went to play with the ever-enticing train table. “Busy, you said?”
“Um, yeah.” I glanced at Dylan; he was happily running a train along the wooden track. If there were any other kids here, I’d be nervous of a screeching meltdown, but I thought he should be fine on his own. Still, I felt a little nervous, as I always did in public places. At any moment, some snotty-nosed kid could swoop in and swipe his train.
“Things okay?” Sue asked, eyebrows raised, and I forced myself to look back at her.
“Yes, they’re fine. Good.” I was not about to explain.
“Dylan seems well.” She nodded towards the train table. “A little less shy than he usually is.”
“Yeah.” My stomach churned at the thought. “Yeah, he does.”
I kept a discreet eye on Dylan as I moved around the children’s sections of the library, selecting books for him. He was involved in the trains, and not once did he glance up and look at me, as he usually would.
Normally I wouldn’t venture far, making sure he could always see me, and I’d rush forward if I sensed anything that could be a threat. Wasn’t that the right thing to do? How else is a mother supposed to manage, with a child who can scream for over an hour without stopping, provoked by the smallest or most unexpected thing?
Yet right then, watching Dylan from afar, I second-guessed everything. And when a boy came into the library with his dad and careened towards the train table, I hesitated for a fraction of a second, just to see.
The new kid started commandeering all the trains on the table except for the one clutched in Dylan’s hand. I couldn’t see the expression on my son’s face as this new boy began to take over the table, but I could feel myself tense with both outrage and fear. Normally by now I’d be over there, hustling Dylan away, glaring at the other child. This time I stood frozen, waiting, although I wasn’t sure what for. Then the kid made a grab for the train in Dylan’s hand. There were a dozen or more trains on the table, but he wanted my son’s. I didn’t wait for Dylan’s response, I just charged over.
“Come on, Dylan, sweetheart.” I touched his shoulder, and he turned to me, his mouth opening in what I knew would be that unholy screech. “Dylan…”
Dylan started to scream, and the kid backed away, looking shocked, and I took Dylan’s hand and led him out of the library without checking out any books.
It was only when we were walking back towards Ally’s house that he finally stopped screaming. And it was only when we were going up the path to her front door that I wondered if he’d started not because of that boy, but because of me.
The day after the library incident, Susan called me to set an appointment to go over Dylan’s psychiatric evaluation sometime after Thanksgiving. I asked for the bottom line over the phone, and with a sigh, she said, “It’s clear Dylan has severe anxiety issues. The psychiatrist believes most of his behavioral challenges stem from an underlying anxiety.”
Well, I basically knew that—I knew Dylan was afraid of a lot of things, that situatio
ns and people and even grapes made him anxious. Yet somehow it felt different, hearing it from Susan.
“Underlying anxiety about what?” I asked.
“We can go over this next week, Beth. I really don’t know that it’s an appropriate conversation to have over the phone.”
I didn’t press, even though I wanted to. Of course Dylan had anxiety. He’d been scared of so much ever since he was small, just a toddler. Susan wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t know, so why did it feel so different now?
It was a question I didn’t want to examine too closely, never mind actually answer. I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts spiraling through me, and so I texted Mike and asked him if I could come to his mother’s for Thanksgiving after all. I didn’t entirely want to go, but I definitely didn’t want to be alone, wondering if I was the worst mother in the world.
So now I’m here, in the passenger seat of Mike’s Toyota, driving towards his mother’s house in Windsor, about twenty minutes from West Hartford, having no idea what to expect.
It’s a bright yet bleak day, the grass all withered and brown, the trees stark and leafless. It’s always been a difficult time of year for me—this month sandwiched between family holidays where the world stops as everyone comes together. I haven’t had a family holiday in years; my mother has invited me to New Hampshire a couple of times and I went when Dylan was a baby, but it felt too difficult after that and she didn’t seem particularly heartbroken when I said no. My father, of course, never made the invitation.
“So it will just be you, me, and your mom?” I ask a bit anxiously as he heads down the I-84.
“Well…” Mike gives me a sheepish smile. “My sister and her kids will be there too. But they’re very relaxed.”
“You didn’t tell me that before!”
“I thought it might make you nervous.”
“Well, it does,” I say a bit tetchily. “So it would have been good to know beforehand.”
“Beth.” Briefly, Mike rests his hand on mine before returning it to the steering wheel. “What’s wrong?”
I look out the window at the brown, barren landscape of almost-winter. “I’m just tired. And nervous.”
