The Song is You (2009) by Arthur Phillips Page A

(“Where is it?” she insisted to her smiling and uncomprehending parents. “Where’s the music gone? Why won’t you play it again?” She slapped her father’s legs and fell weeping into her mother’s lap. “Please, play it,
please
.”)
11

    AFTER THE INCIDENT , the edges of Aidan’s personality softened, became porous, as they had after their mother’s death (but not their father’s). He became vulnerable to doubts about his reality or past. And then the borders sealed up again, and Aidan resolidified. When Rachel gently asked him to move out, after seven weeks’ rest stay, it was because she saw him regaining his shape.
    After dinner one night he said, “Thank you, Rachel, for everything,” and she patted his hand and answered, “Please, you’re welcome, but I haven’t done anything you wouldn’t do for me.”
    And he nodded but then started—unavoidably and visibly—to think. “Do you think it could’ve happened to you?” he asked.
    “Aidan, you’re just much smarter than I am, so I don’t know how I would’ve ever been in a position to make that mistake. I could never be on a game show, you know.”
    “I know,” he snapped, then recovered. The driblet of dopamine at being called
smarter
, the evaporation of it at the word
mistake
, his inability, despite maneuvering, to make her spontaneously recite the soothing formula “Yes, it could have happened to anyone (of a certain incalculably rare intelligence)”: Rachel recognized these signs of his vigorous health, and she smiled at her work, which annoyed him. “Stop grinning like a chimp. If you
were
on a show like that, it could’ve happened to you, too.”
    “That’s hard to say, Aidan.” She was teasing now, happy to see him back to his old self. “You have a very special mind, you know. I can’t even imagine how you hold all that information in your—”
    “Yes, yes, yes.” He’d heard that twitty compliment (the awe one feels for a freak) all his life. “But if you
were
, or could, just put yourself in my shoes and imagine, you
could
have done the same thing I did, right?”
    “I don’t know, Aidan,” Rachel said in measured tones.
    “Why not? How can you not know? You have all the empathy that God gave to humankind. You got
all
of it. I obviously got none. So answer me,” he demanded, desperate to hear Rachel admit that she could have accidentally slandered an entire religion in the middle of a game show. “I mean, you’ve said the wrong thing in your life, haven’t you?”
    “I suppose so.”
    “Suppose? Term of avoidance. Have you never done anything without being able to stop yourself?”
    “Of course I have,” she said softly, and Aidan regretted at once having pushed her to think of all that. But still he couldn’t stop himself from marking his Pyrrhic victory: “So it
could
have happened to you.
Thank you.”
    He moved back home the next day, just in time. He had come to love Rachel, not surprisingly, even as he desperately wanted her to return to his brother. The strength of that second desire surprised him more. He had fallen in love, over seven weeks, with the idea of her returning to Julian. He missed their Wednesday-night dinners, how he relaxed in their company, the only people on earth around whom he could relax. He missed keeping autistic count of the glancing touches and touching glances between them, missed the way Julian acted toward him when Rachel was around, missed how she made Julian laugh in a way Aidan could not. Obviously these recollections dated from before Carlton, but still.
    And when he moved out, he expressed his gratitude in those terms. He bent forward to hug her, their bodies meeting at the shoulders, forming in profile a rickety inverted
V
. He said, “I’ll do anything to help you two come back to each other.” His beard draped over her shoulder, and he smelled something spicy in her hair. He forced himself upright to stare at the ceiling through his off-kilter glasses, and