He means to fill our emptiness with song.

It’s one of my favorite sounds: his bounding up the stairs, coupled with the “Ooh! Ooh! OOH!” proclamations of excitement that mark the end of another two-hour basement therapy session. Then he enters the kitchen (where I am, because I’m a woman and I know my place) and races up to me, halting at my knees and pointing his chin to the sky so he can stare into my eyes, two and a half feet above him. And as we greet each other according to our custom, his therapist enters the room and gives her report, the initial surprise at his achievements having given way long ago to the “just as I thought” repetition of expectation: but for the verbals, he takes whatever she throws at him and aces it…operating at a five-year-old level…and I have to smile to myself as she takes some ownership of what I told her from the beginning, what I tell plenty of people who know better until they don’t, until he proves them wrong, until they know him: that he’s not what you expect. That he defies categories. That, much like Baby, you can’t put The Kid in a corner.

Because this is how it works with him: he has to be found. I remember telling The Husband, a Pacific-dweller for much of his life, about a far-off place called the Gulf of Mexico, about sugar-sand beaches, about clear water and none of this ice-cold nonsense with wet suits and earthquakes, and he assented because, though it was our wedding, he’s a man and he knows his place, and now he wants to go back every year. (Don’t worry–I allow him every opportunity to thank me for enlarging his territory and improving his life.) And, like the shores along 30A, TK waits to be discovered, not handing himself to you on a platter but waiting: a gift to be unwrapped over time, stones to be unturned on a journey.

Which is all well and good when I’m in a trusting, idealistic mood. But then TH takes a day-trip to Canada and the nanny decides to move across the country next month (it’s not a job you can do long-distance–believe me, I’ve tried) and just like that, I’m not sleeping and the knots in my shoulders are back and I’m acting as though worry is a survival technique and I’m engaging fear more than life and when all that is going on, a shroud drops down to cover everything and the dark thoughts show up with it: What if he never talks? What if he disappears? What if Melvin was right?

Then it’s one in the afternoon and I hoist Little Brother up on my hip and we see TK through the door and he runs to us. And one teacher looks at the other and asks, “Did you tell her about the blessing?” and they both turn to me and here’s the real story: that every day at lunch, when the blessing starts and the other kids recite it with the teachers, TK sings alongside them, his own tune and words, and stops when they stop, and over the next few hours this seeps into the dark places, into the knots and the unspoken fears, into the spaces where I’m gripping onto my illusion of control.

Because there’s this: where others have words, he has music.

Neil Gaiman wrote about stories, about words, that they “can furnish you with armor, with knowledge, with weapons, with tools you can take back into your life to help make it better…It’s a real escape–and when you come back, you come back better-armed than when you left.” And they’ve done this for me, plus they’ve been therapeutic and enlivening and, sometimes, a life preserver in a storm. So of course, even beyond the talking, I’ve wanted that for him–I’ve wanted him to know words like I do. But maybe I had it wrong (that’s happened, after all, once or twice): maybe he doesn’t need armor so much right now as he needs an anthem. Words, I am sure, will one day be all to him that they need to be, that they can be; but for now he can use mine. For now, he has music.

And right now, maybe that’s what I need too.

Isn’t it plain the sheets of moss, except that they have no tongues, could lecture all day if they wanted about spiritual patience? wrote Mary Oliver, and I wonder about all the words I’m missing from those who don’t speak. From those who, instead, wave in the wind, crash on the shore, or…sing their blessings. And there are a thousand different ways this story could go, and I am not writing it, but when the shroud lifts I see a few of those ways and they are no longer threats but possibilities: that the two of them, TK and LB, could learn to talk together, to teach each other. That we may yet fulfill our dream of living in London and raising boys with not Southern, but British accents. So ridiculous as to be sublime. Because who really knows could be not a fearful shout but a laughing anthem: his voice filling the stairway and then the kitchen while I hear the chords of grace in his song.