Strip Search by William Bernhardt Page B

informed them that their child was autistic.
    God, he barely knew what the word meant back then. But he learned soon enough. What, he’d asked, can we do about this? Basically—nothing. Get your kid in a “special” school. Accept that he will never be normal, that he will never be emotionally satisfying in the way parents want their children to be. Be prepared for a lot of work. And be forewarned that it will never end, because Darcy will never be able to leave home, can never hope to take care of himself, no matter how long he lives.
    O’Bannon read all the books on the disorder, such as there were. Then as now, no one really understood what autism was. They called it a “spectrum disorder” to disguise the fact that it took so many forms, that no one could come up with a consistent description (much less diagnosis) that fit all cases. His wife, Connie, who seemed to cope with the bad news much better than he did, took Darcy to California for a month of intensive training and behavioral intervention therapy with Dr. Ivar Lovass, while simultaneously administering a barrage of diet and drug therapies. It drained every penny they had in savings, but that was okay, anything to get their boy fixed. Which was, of course, impossible. By the time the money ran out, she had learned enough to continue the program at home, to train other volunteers to work with him.
    Her efforts made a profound difference. Slowly but surely, Darcy became more communicative, more disciplined, easier to control. But fixed? Hardly. Cured?
    For autism, there was no such thing.
    A few years later, Connie died and left him a widower, Darcy motherless. Her heart had given out. Many people thought she had worked herself to death. But that wasn’t O’Bannon’s theory. Oh, she’d worked diligently all right, more than any woman in the history of the world ever worked, his Connie. But what hurt her most was the emotional vacuum where her firstborn son was supposed to be. The child who never said “Good night,” much less “I love you.” The boy who never gave nor returned a hug, who shied away from displays of affection. That’s what hurt Connie the most. That was what killed her.
    Since that time, O’Bannon and Darcy had muddled on in their own way, coexisting, but never truly living together. Friends had suggested that he put Darcy in some kind of home, but he couldn’t. Darcy was his boy. His only son. He knew Darcy was frustrated. He knew he thought his father was holding him back. But the truth was—he was protecting him. He’d watched this boy for twenty-six years. He knew what he could do and what he could not do. He was not going to set him up for disappointment. He would not put him in a position where he would be belittled, made the object of a sniggering freak show. He had been very reluctant when Susan first started involving him in her casework. But Susan looked after him, protected him. She had a gift for taking what seemed like inane autistic ramblings to everyone else and turning them into pertinent investigative information. She made him useful.
    But could Darcy function on his own? No, not now, not ever. Without Susan his directionless observations would be worse than useless. He could never hold a position of real authority, a job where people depended upon him. A job that forced him to interact in the real world, to try to understand people’s minds and motivations. It was absurd. Impossible. He was an innocent, a child. He couldn’t possibly allow Darcy to visit the scene of a crime where some maniac had melted a man’s face off with boiling hot cooking oil. He was the boy’s father, damn it. Darcy had been through so much, had borne so many struggles normal boys never had to face. He would not set him up for failure. Not like that.
    He glanced at his son, still lying on the carpet. He turned a page every now and again, but O’Bannon didn’t think he was really reading. For a kid who supposedly didn’t grasp