We’re actually lucky because now that it’s lunchtime, he’ll eat soup or yogurt—but also supremely unlucky, because given the fiasco in the store this morning, I have neither on hand. Eddie simply needs a can of soup, or better still, some tubes of Go-Gurt if we can find some with the right label. I have to call Wade. I have to convince him to come from work via a store, and to bring something Eddie can eat, or better still, to come and take Eddie home. The reason I don’t want to do it is that I already know how this conversation is going to go.

It’s an emergency, I’ll say. I wouldn’t have asked if I had an alternative, but I can’t leave Babcia alone—she’s distressed enough as it is. And I don’t know how much longer Mom is going to be, but Eddie desperately needs to eat.

Wade will make all the right noises, and then there’ll be some impressive reason why he can’t help. He did say he had meetings, so I imagine he’ll refer back to that premade excuse again.

I think about just putting up with the endless robotic demands for lunch, lunch, lunch and waiting, but Eddie looks so frustrated—like he’s about to explode, actually—and now that I think about it, it’s a bonafide miracle we’ve made it this far today with only one meltdown. I sigh and dial Wade.

“Honey,” he answers on the first ring. “I’ve been so worried. How are things going?”

“Things are terrible,” I admit. “Babcia can’t speak and I don’t think she can understand us. She’s been using Eddie’s iPad and she’s told us she needs a box of photos from home, but Mom can’t find it. And Eddie didn’t get his yogurt this morning because there’s new packaging on the Go-Gurt at the Publix and he had this meltdown and now he’s starving so another one is coming and I can’t do this by myself today. I need your help. I know you said you were busy...”

“I’m so sorry, honey. I have these meetings...”

“There is no one else I can call, Wade.”

I’ve raised my voice, and Eddie and Babcia both look at me in surprise. Even if they don’t understand the words, the volume apparently speaks for itself. I wince as I offer them an apologetic shrug, then take a deep breath to calm myself a little.

“I can’t take him home, Alice,” my husband says, a little stiffly. “I just have too much—”

“Don’t worry, Wade. I’m not asking for anything unrealistic like you spending an afternoon alone with your son,” I say, then I hear his sharp intake of breath, and I realize we’re about to argue. Again. Probably because he’s being an ass, and that comment I just made fell somewhere on the spectrum between “mean” and “bitchy” so it’s guaranteed to get a defensive rise out of him. I close my eyes and aim for a much more conciliatory tone as I say, “I’m only asking you to go pick up some tins of soup or some Go-Gurt if you can find the old packaging. Bring them to me here at the hospital. I’ll handle everything else.” My tone shifts, and now I’m begging him. “Please, Wade. Please.”

He sighs, and in my mind, I can see him in his office on the phone. He’ll be sitting stiffly because I’m irritating him, and he’ll have instantly mussed up his hair because he’s upset at how I just spoke to him. Even now, in the awful silence as I wait for him to speak, I know he’ll be repeatedly running his hand over his hair, and when the exasperation gets too much, he’ll rest his hand against the back of his neck and slump.

But just as I can picture this with perfect clarify after so many years with Wade, I also know he’s going to do what I asked, because if he wasn’t, he’d have snapped right back at me and we’d have wound up this call with one or both of us hanging up in anger.

“I’ll come now.”

“If you go to the store near your office, they might have stock of the Go-Gurt with the old labels.” I hesitate, then ask cautiously, “You know what that looked like, right? I’ll text you the image. Same for the soup. You have to get the right soup.”

“I’m not an idiot, Alice,” he says impatiently, and I hear the sounds of movement at his end. “I’m leaving right now.”

Wade is an excellent father, although if you viewed his behavior only through the lens of his interactions with Eddie, you’d suspect the opposite. He rarely engages with Eddie, he’s constantly resistant to the therapies that help our son to survive in the world, he’s dismissive and impatient and he’s unsupportive.

But with our daughter, Pascale—or Callie, as we usually call her, Wade is a model parent. He’s genuinely busy with his job, but he finds a way to be at all of the key events in her life—debate club meets, ballet recitals, parent-teacher interviews, doctor’s appointments. Callie and Wade usually do her homework together, though she rarely needs his help. They are twelve chapters into the last Harry Potter book because they have read alternate pages aloud to each other every night without fail over the past three years. She had her first crush last year, and she told Wade about little Tyler Wilson before she even told me.

I can’t even remember the last time Wade and Eddie were alone together.

Wade would say we had a perfectly normal son until Eddie was eighteen months old and I took him to a doctor, who put a label on our boy, and that label tainted everything. Wade would say I was so convinced that something was wrong with Eddie that it became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, then I spent so much time trying to “fix” him that I actually made him broken.

And he’s kind of right about the paranoia, because from the moment I realized I was pregnant, I knew that something was different. Even I don’t understand how I knew, so I can appreciate that to Wade it might seem that I made all of this happen somehow—at least at first. Maybe that theory could have been valid, right up until Eddie was two, and the developmental pediatrician said the words Autism Spectrum Disorder. We didn’t yet understand how bad it was going to be, but surely that diagnosis was a clear sign that this situation was way out of my control.

It is beyond me how my brilliant husband, a man with a PhD and an entire research program under his guidance, can fail to understand how utterly helpless I am when it comes to our son. I am a puppet controlled by medical professionals and therapists. They tell me all the things I need to do to engage with Eddie. Some of those things, like the AAC on the iPad, help me to reach him, but most of their therapies don’t reach him at all—they simply enable us to survive. None of those therapies made him different—Eddie just is different. That’s where my opinion and Wade’s diverge.

Wade would say all of my efforts enable a spoiled little boy who could be closer to typical if we just pushed him more instead of pandering to him. Wade speaks to Eddie, because he can’t accept that Eddie’s language is really as restricted as I know it is. Wade views Eddie’s echolalia as a game—a way to insult and taunt us—and of proof that Eddie could use verbal language to communicate if he wanted to. It doesn’t help that when Eddie sees Wade, he often echoes the words not now, Edison, although I’m not even sure why that one has even persisted because Eddie no longer makes much of an attempt to engage with his father at all.