How to Buy a Rainbow
by Alice Wyman
I am worried about the pistol. How its blank pop will rip the air apart. I am worried about everything really— the start, the finish, and every twist in between—for all the good it’ll do.
The boy finds me in the crowd and waves like a castaway signaling a vessel. I raise a hand—yes, I see you jigging at the front of the pack, mop of hair tucked beneath your father’s running cap. His exultant fists pummel the air as he bounces on the balls of his feet, then leans in, waiting for the race to begin.
“Will I win?”
The boy has asked me so often, I’ve thought about writing the answer on my forehead to save us both time.
“Just run your best race,” I say, wary of the way his face will fall, a sandcastle chiseled away by the tide.
He never seems to hear me, though, not when he doesn’t want to. He is grinning, the taste of his victory already on his tongue. The music pumping out of speakers throbs in my eardrums and echoes through the corporate park. It doesn’t seem to bother him—a minor miracle for the boy who sleeps in my closet when thunderstorms roll over the Piedmont. I finger his noise-canceling headphones, stuffed in my purse just in case.
Lifting my phone, I try to frame a picture, but my quaking hands blur the scene, and I give up. Silent, shuddering sobs clamber up my throat. I must look deranged, but I can't help it. It’s all too normal for me to take: I wasn’t sure we’d ever have a day like this one.
Then the gun fires. The crowd cries out, and the runners charge forward in their neon green T-shirts, like an overturned crate of limes. Losing sight of the boy, I head for the next good viewing point, tugging his siblings behind me.
We wait a long time, searching faces. My younger children droop and whine in the heat. Soon, the sign they’ve decorated with star stickers and Sharpie pens lies abandoned on the grass beneath a tree, curled up with the humidity. Boy after boy runs past; none are mine.
Later I hear how, after the first breakneck straightaway, the faster runners bumped him. His father’s cap winged off his head and vanished under their trampling feet. Startled, short of breath, stride broken, he drifted toward the edge of the asphalt and folded down onto the curb. It was clear now: he wouldn’t win, couldn’t win. He buried his face in the open book of his palms and began to weep, one reed-thin boy with his feet in the gutter, while the racers passed by him in their hundreds.
* * *
Our starting line—the boy’s and mine—comes in the darkest part of the night, before sunrise in the late autumn.
All the months of my pregnancy, my body has felt strange and sacred, like I’ve swallowed the moon in secret. Now, in this place where he is about to be born, with the slick linoleum beneath my feet and the strong floral stench of antiseptic, the air hums a single note, and the ground seems to tremble, as if a finger has plucked a bowstring once and waits to continue the melody.
All that first night in the birthing center, he never cries. Instead he hums, the off-key note rising and falling, like he’s trying to find a melody.
The pain is coming, galloping toward this bed. I rivet myself to the bed rail and brace my feet shoulder-width apart, doubled over the mattress. A contraction, the midwife says lightly, as if it were a common thing, and I suppose for her it is. She tells me I am doing well, and from beyond the pain I think how much I’d like to throttle her. But then her voice fades into the gleaming white walls. I am alone in the squall, every muscle pulled so tight it must shatter. A keening fills the room.
The pain loosens, and I pant, thighs quivering. The midwife urges me onto the bed, but I will not move. I mouth the words of an old Irish prayer I learned once: “O Christ, will you help me on the wild waves? O Christ, O Christ, O Christ ...”
Three breaths. The words leave me, and the pain rises again. The wave of it bears me downward.
“I can’t do this,” I tell the midwife. “I can’t.”
But the boy is born eleven minutes after dawn. His coming tears me. After the midwife sews me back together—the worst part of the whole business—I hold him in the crook of my left arm. His sea-blue eyes, solemn and wise, roam the handspan between our faces. He finds the dark bullseye of my breast and suckles, reassuring me that he knows what he is doing, even if I do not.
All that first night in the birthing center, he never cries. Instead he hums, the off-key note rising and falling, like he’s trying to find a melody.
* * *
Six days after the birth, my husband returns to work, and everyone who came to hold the baby and fill the fridge has gone away.
Alone with the boy in our apartment, I fill a shallow basin with water. It’s time to bathe him. This first bath for my firstborn feels absurdly consequential, like a maternal aptitude test.
But something is wrong. Terribly, infinitely wrong. At the first touch of the water, he pulls his fingers into walnut fists. He slams his eyes shut and screeches like I’ve pricked him with a needle.
I try the water’s temperature on the thin, paperwhite skin inside my wrist. The water is not too hot, not too cold. Goldilocks water. I remove the boy's fleece pajamas, the diaper cover, the cloth diaper and its silicon fasteners (his cord stump is a dried rosebud in the center of his milk-rounded belly), and lower him gently into the basin.
But something is wrong. Terribly, infinitely wrong. At the first touch of the water, he pulls his fingers into walnut fists. He slams his eyes shut and screeches like I’ve pricked him with a needle.
I raise him, slick and bare and scarlet-faced, to the curve of my neck, so he can smell me. I smooth my palm over the pearly bumps of his spine and shh-shh-shh into the pink shell of his ear until he calms. I feel the water again with one finger. Barely warm now. Gingerly, I lower him again. Again he arches away from the baptism, rigid, as if scalded.
Murmuring bewildered apologies, I run a soapy washcloth over his slippery limbs, his healing stump, his feathery hair. He keeps on screaming. I wrap him in a dry towel and bring him to my breast. Furious, he sucks, fists still clenched. Oh-so-slowly, we soothe each other’s anguish, bringing our hearts back into rhythm. At last, he crumbles into exhaustion, fingers loose against the towel. I sit on the living room sofa, holding him until my arm falls asleep below the elbow, wondering what has happened. Outside, shadows stretch the day into dusk.
* * *
The walls and the ceiling tiles are gray, like the sky before a hard snow. The carpet is gray—a darker, muddled shade of it—and the long conference table is gray too. My husband and I are sitting on one side. Across from us sits the psychologist from the district preschool assessment office, flicking a ballpoint pen against a thick stack of manila folders. Rat-tat-tat. Other women are there too—a special education teacher, an occupational therapist, a speech pathologist—waiting to say a few words before the psychologist gets to the point.
The psychologist peaks soothingly, as if my husband and I were children. I lose track of her words, but I fixate on the tone of them, the tone people use to say you better sit down before their words cleave your world into Before and After.
“I know this is hard to hear,” she says, glancing at the clock on the wall.
The assessment team has laid out its findings in little photocopied graphics. There is a chart, like a diagram of sedimentary rock in a geology textbook. All the children they evaluate are laid out in black and white and gray lines:
At the top, the exceptional children
Then, those with promise
Farther down, those with average scores, average prospects
Farther still, the unfortunate children treading water,
Who might be pulled upward with some help,
And there, lowest of all, is the score for the boy
A small, lonely dot resting on the x-axis, as if lost at the bottom of a crevasse.
* * *
Later someone asks me if the label we got that day—autism—really makes such a difference; we already knew the boy was not like other children. What does a word matter?
But it does. I’d be lying if I said otherwise.
For me, after the first shock of grief, comes the self-examination … How did it happen? Was it something I did or failed to do? Was it a typo in my genes? A punishment for sin or a crucible for faith?
Because, when someone puts your baby in your arms, you are handed, along with the diaper cream samples and the mesh underwear, a script of how that child’s life ought to go. There are milestones, benchmarks, and assessments, even before the birth. Bookstore shelves groan with the weight of volumes devoted to the notion that parents, especially mothers, can know “what to expect.” And on this well-marked trail, you hope to find everything you want for your child: all the cherished hopes, all the happy dreams.
But when your child is different, you find yourself off-trail without a map or compass, crashing through the underbrush as you try to find a landmark you recognize. The milestones everyone else seems to reach without trying are not just out of reach but irrelevant, the foreign constellations of a distant galaxy.
So you fear for your child. You grieve the version of your life together that will not be.
For me, after the first shock of grief, comes the self-examination. The questions are an impossible staircase, never-ending and leading nowhere, but still I ask them: How did it happen? Was it something I did or failed to do? Was it a typo in my genes? A punishment for sin or a crucible for faith?
And, most painfully, shouldn’t I have known? A good mother is supposed to know when something is wrong. And if I look backward, there were signs enough.
There was his joyous loose-limbed bouncing, carving his own cradle in the space around his body. The goose egg rising before my eyes when he dashed his forehead against the entryway tiles, a stranger whose tears I could not stem. His wooden blocks, set out in primary-color patterns—the chaotic jumble of the world smoothed into a pleasing certainty. (Was he telling us even then, long before his words would run in proper order, like magnetic trains pegged engine to caboose?)
And then there was his name.
For years, the boy would turn at every sound that interested him—a plane droning toward the airport, a delivery truck throttling up our steep hill. But when I called for him? Nothing. The sounds of his name, that emphatic first syllable with its strong consonants, the second trailing softly behind it, were a meaningless noise, a cipher without a key.
So I sat with him and took his small hand in mine, thumping it against my chest.
“I’m Mama.”
I placed our twined hands over his heart.
“Who are you?”
He gazed unblinking out the window, absorbed in the way light shifted through the mass of English ivy. Indifferent as a cat. I could toss out the name I chose for him like a ball in a game of catch, but I could not make him pick it up.
Over and over I tried. I pictured him lost in a supermarket, unable to tell a stranger this one, small thing. The idea threaded my voice with urgency.
“What’s your name?”
No answer ever came.
* * *
After his diagnosis, in place of answers, the boy and I have routines. There are appointments with a speech
therapist who spends months getting him to request a toy.
Blocks.
More blocks.
More blocks please.
There is an occupational therapist who shows him how to draw straight lines and fasten a button, and a teacher at the preschool for autistic children who tells me how long it takes him to stop clawing at the door after I leave.
Sometimes I wonder if even God can see us anymore, or whether we are in some land where the nail-scarred hands don’t reach.
Do these things, we’re told, and he’ll improve. He might creep a little higher on the chart. Maybe one day, he’ll seem like a normal boy. Pinocchio, I think. “No longer meets the diagnostic criteria” is the term dangled by a study I read late at night, peering into the sunless mouth of every internet cave.
I segment what I cannot bear to swallow whole. I write down every new word the boy learns and enter it into a spreadsheet. I strategize every trip to the grocery store to prevent meltdowns in the checkout line, like I was planning a landing on Omaha Beach. Once I go to a support group for parents, but they are all too much like me: confused and despairing. I don’t go back.
Church is no longer a sermon and communion, grace dissolving sweetly on the tongue; it’s wandering with the boy through empty fellowship halls and around the parking lot, counting cars to try to teach the boy numbers, counting every minute until the service ends, because the Sunday school volunteers really have tried but all he does is scream the moment I leave and once I catch him streaking through the narthex, a tiny fugitive with two adults hot on his heels. So we go through the motions of attending, but we’re not there. Not part of it. It’s like we’ve turned invisible.
Sometimes I wonder if even God can see us anymore, or whether we are in some land where the nail-scarred hands don’t reach. I don’t want to think this way; all my life I’ve heard Him whisper in the stillness, seen His shadow in the furnace. But on the bad days when the boy loses himself, like a volcano spewing magma for no reason that I can tell, when I lock us in his bedroom so that he can’t hurt himself, and he screams and strikes my face and tears at my hair, well ... Then I hear no whispers, see no shadows. I can see no reason at all. On the bad days my husband says I have a thousand-yard stare.
* * *
One day I take the boy to the park downtown. It’s cool there under old shade trees, and a broken sprinkler drips into a mud puddle. Other mothers in yoga pants stand around talking, disposable coffee cups in hands with manicured nails that gleam in the sunlight, gazes flitting occasionally to their children. I hover alone at the edge of the mulch like a vigilant dragonfly, watching the boy climb up and down slides by himself.
Another little boy, baby sister toddling behind, approaches him. I hold my breath.
“Hey, do you want to play with us?” the other boy asks.
Deep in a world all his own, my boy ignores the other children. He turns away and flutters his wrists like a bird about to take flight.
The other boy looks confused for a moment, as if trying to solve a puzzle, then—
“You can’t play with us. You’re too weird!” he says, little face furrowed in anger. Then he raises his hand and strikes my boy on the back of the head.
“When I wake up … I’m a butterfly.”
I am frozen, as if sunk ankle-deep into the mud. I wait for my boy to scream, to hit back. But he only lifts his forefinger to the spot, as if surprised to find it hurts. His slight movement—not the sudden violence—jerks me out of my shock. Surging forward, I say something to the other boy and his mother—I don’t remember what—and rush back to the car, the long-limbed boy, too old for carrying, on my hip. The hard rubber soles of his sneakers knock against my knees and leave mud on my skirt. I discover the tears on my face only when I reach into my purse for my car keys and feel them sliding, hot, down my chin and onto my neck.
On the drive home, I break down what I’ve just seen. I start to strategize. We’ll work on this with the behavioral therapist: responding to invitations to play. We can practice with my sister’s kids, maybe, the next time they’re in town.
I get on the phone with my mom and tell her what happened, trying to process it.
“I get that his reaction wasn’t socially appropriate,” I say, “but I just wish—”
“Not socially appropriate?” she snaps. “What that boy did, that was socially inappropriate. Yours did nothing wrong, OK? Do you get that? The world isn’t good enough for him.”
I look in the rearview mirror, always tilted downward so I can watch the boy’s face—an early monitoring system. He is calm now, watching the cars out the window.
“Yeah,” I say, because she expects it. “Yeah.”
When we get home, the boy asks me to wrap him in a blanket from his neck to his feet, trapping his arms.
“More tight,” he says. “More tight.” I have to do it several times before he is satisfied. Then he has me carry him up the stairs and lay him on his bed.
“Good night!” he says.
“Good night?” I ask. (Darkness is hours away.) “You want to sleep like that?”
He nods.
“When I wake up,” he says with conviction, “I’m a butterfly.”
* * *
Some mornings I whisper to the alarm clock, “I cannot do this. I cannot do this. I cannot do this,” a mantra to will the sun back below the horizon and cover me again in shadows. It never works.
Instead I brew coffee and belly down next to the boy’s bunk bed, where he hides when he doesn’t want to go to school. I coax and wheedle. When that fails, I stretch out my arm as far as it will go and wrap it like a manacle around the first limb I touch. Tug. Into the light for both of us.
Trapping him in the ell of my bent leg, I thread flailing arms into sleeves and shove kicking feet into mismatched socks. I bite my lip to hold the curse behind my teeth when he strikes me. An accident. I know it’s an accident.
Still, I say it— “You’re going to be late!”—more sharply than I should.
He looks spooked, and I force my expression into softer lines.
I slip peanut butter toast into his hands—a peace offering—and buss his head. I wipe off his tears with my thumb before buckling him into the car.
Instead I am a human suit of armor, deflecting the world for him, trying to make the impossible weight of ordinary days into a thing we both can bear.
At school I walk him to his classroom in the special education annex. He wails and clings, wedging his body against the door so I can’t open it. I offer him french fries and lemonade and Finding Nemo—all the bribes he likes best—if he’ll just walk through the door and hang his backpack on the curved metal hook. But he is past negotiation. At last an aide pries him off my leg. I stride away, avoiding eye contact with the parents whose children skip at their sides, oversized backpacks bouncing against the backs of their knees.
When I make it back to the car, I rest my forehead on the steering wheel.
“Don’t you know that I only wanted a little life? A normal one?” I say to God. I don’t know if I’m pleading or confessing.
The pictures in my head were so clear: I would take my children out on a summer morning and pluck blackberries from the brambles until our hands were purply and cross-hatched. I would teach them to bake pie and eat it with a fork from the tin. I would read them The Chronicles of Narnia by flashlight inside a tent made from bedsheets and dining room chairs.
Instead I am a human suit of armor, deflecting the world for him, trying to make the impossible weight of ordinary days into a thing we both can bear.
Is it so terrible to want that little, normal life? I run over the could-have-beens in my mind and afterwards feel ashamed, a traitor to the holy. I turn the key in the ignition.
Later, after school, I find the boy crying by his window, where the afternoon sun paints him golden.
“What’s wrong, love?” I ask. I live in fear of cruel-tongued bullies and shoves in the hallway—traumas I can’t even name and that he’ll never tell me about. When he’s away from me, I imagine horrors that I can’t kiss away.
“I’m mad!” he says.
“Why?”
“The rain stopped.”
“Why does that make you mad? Now you can play.”
“Because,” he says, meeting my eyes, “now the rain won’t be beautiful on my window.”
* * *
It’s late March of his second-grade year. The boy has brought home the usual pile of St. Patrick’s Day crafts. One’s a teetering leprechaun trap made out of lime-green pipe cleaners. Another has rainbow strips of construction paper glued to a black pot full of gold coins, except the coins look more like yellow ice cubes. (Circles are hard for him to cut, their fine edges evading his blunt blades.)
He holds up the paper pot of gold close to my face. It’s creased and torn from being stuffed into his bag, and he has written something along the bottom, a row of daddy longlegs rushing across the page. I can’t make it out.
“What does it say, love?” I ask.
The teacher asked the students what they would buy if they found a pot of gold.
“Raven,” said the creator, “what burdens? Don’t you know that those are wings?”
The boy has written, “If I found a pot of gold, I would buy the rainbow.” I can barely answer the boy when he asks me if I like it. I smooth back his sunbeam hair and send him to the kitchen for a snack.
A line of cumulus clouds has been marching past the windows. One passes, and the light in the room shifts, sharpening to a knife’s edge. I sit on the boy’s bunk bed for a long time and trace the pad of one finger over his scrawl.
I would buy the rainbow. Would I?
I heard a story once about how, before the first dew dried on the first grass, the birds didn’t know how to fly. They hopped along on two spindly legs, envious eyes fixed on the leaping gazelles and the loping wolves. Feeling ill-treated, the birds decided to complain. They sent the raven to speak to the creator on their behalf.
“All the other creatures get around freely,” the raven croaked. “We’ve got nothing but legs that won’t walk or run. And the worst part is you’ve put these burdens on our backs. It’s not fair!”
“Raven,” said the creator, “what burdens? Don’t you know that those are wings?”
The boy knows intuitively what has eluded me for years: the gift I thought had been denied me has already been poured into my hands, a full measure running over. The rainbow is mine, the wings are mine, but I would not speak its name.
* * *
Twelve has come, for the boy, with its usual trickiness. He is very old and very young: when his little brother cries, the boy tells him God loves him. When he doesn’t stop at once, the boy asks me why the message gives no comfort.
One day after school, I find the boy by the kitchen door, sandy brows lowered under his thatch of mussed hair. I notice the pieces I cut unevenly after his last Sunday bath. I want to take him to a barber—a real one—but he won’t hear of it.
I search his face for the baby I bore, but I find a not-quite stranger. The boy is all sleek angles now, with grave denim eyes and muscles clenched in his temples and jaw—a thundercloud uncertain of whether to rain. This year my husband and I moved him from the public school to a private one—“a place where school isn’t horrible for neurodivergent kids,” the director told me when we toured it.
The boy tells me he is tired of the questions we ask about his new school: questions about what he learned in social studies class and whether he talked to his classmates at recess.
“The questions are so annoying,” he snarls.
And now I can hear it, his heartbeat like the rush of eager feet upon a hill, and I am reminded: The path I walk is still a path; I am not lost.
To me he sounds less angry than lost, bewildered by an impatience he can’t yet name. He says he never wants to leave home—always wants to stay in his boyhood room with the teddy bears arranged on his bed just so and his comic books waiting to fit into his palms, their spines flush and glossy. But he asks, too, about college, and what will happen when he grows up. The answers are spectral things, floating over the horizon, but the future, whatever it brings, frightens me less than it used to.
Later, when he has quieted down, we are in the kitchen again. I am making dinner. He is packing his usual lunch—carrot sticks, a banana, some crackers—and humming, in his ambling, off-key way, a tune I don’t know.
“I wish God could lean in for a hug,” he says without preamble.
“Why?” I ask, plucking on the string of his thought, seeing if we can follow it together a ways.
“Because I love Him,” he shrugs. “But I guess He can’t. He’s like a ghost—with no arms.”
I am silent a while, wondering for the millionth time who he is, this boy I am supposed to be raising.
“I think God is spirit, with us everywhere ...” I begin, but the boy answers on a topic I can’t make sense of. His mind is like a helicopter, blades whirring, always readier than mine for lateral motion. The door, briefly opened, is shut again.
I am slicing onions. Their ivory arcs litter the cutting board, and the knife gleams with their liquid starch. I sniff the burning air, glad for something to blame, and remove my glasses to wipe my eyes. How I want to be the mother this boy deserves, for hands strong enough to cup the splendid halo of his light. But in moments like this I still hear the menacing whisper: I can’t I can’t I can’t.
The boy has come up behind me on cat feet. His long, tanned arms bow around my waist, and he clasps his laced hands there for a moment while he rests his cheek on my shoulder. And now I can hear it, his heartbeat like the rush of eager feet upon a hill, and I am reminded: The path I walk is still a path; I am not lost. The gift in my palm is bread and not a stone. In this moment I could lay my hand on a Bible and swear to it: God is leaning in.
* * *
It should be any moment now. I wipe the rainwater off my brow and watch the wintering trees. A few leaves cling, stubborn and golden on the stems.
They’re not here yet, but already I am crying—I am the crying mom at the end of many a race— and tears mix on my face with the rain, falling steady and bracing from a pewter sky. The clay underfoot is cold, apricot slurry, and I slip as I shift for a better view.
In the end I hear them before I see them. The familiar song of the race begins: First someone rings a cowbell in a clenched fist—the clapper singing out its tling-tling, tling-tling. Then voices swell, urging and whooping.
The lead runners break from the tree line, legs spattered thigh-high with mud. They swing their elbows and crank their knees, their steps a drumbeat up the final slope.
Here in the straggling pack comes the boy. He looks cold, his damp hair clumped into porcupine quills that slap against his forehead. But he’s pushing ahead, his stride a metronome. When he runs, he doesn’t need me. I’ve seen him run smooth and light as a greyhound in the quivering August heat. I’ve seen him run a seven-minute mile incandescent with fever, and I’ve seen him keep going even when his shoe flew off, pirouetting in the air. I’ve seen things that once I would not have dared believe.
“C’mon,” I whisper, “you can do this.” He finds me in the crowd and kicks up his tempo, crossing the orange cones that mark the finish line. Tears crest and overflow down my face. Joy. I don’t care if the rain still hides it.
Alice Wyman is an essayist and poet whose work explores the revelation of outlandish grace in small, daily things. Her work has appeared in Darling, The Washington Post, and other publications. She makes her home in the Carolinas with her husband and three children.
