I’m driving in a cloud. The sun shines but I don’t see it.

Blue lights flash. A policeman pulls me over. He is a bug on the windshield, a ghost in the glass.

He tells me I ran a stop sign. I break into tears. He frowns, says, you shouldn’t be driving if your head’s not screwed on straight.

Everything is fuzzy and my nerves buzz with shock. The policeman has torn the curtain, and the sun is piercing the cloud.

My son is two. He has autism. I found out today.  

The radio plays as I drive to the preschool, where they do not know. Words stream by me like a faint breeze. I’m in my cloud. When I turn my head, my neck zings with shock. People stream like ants along the sidewalk, their colored clothes spots among the trees. I arrive. I collect him. I get us home.

My laughing, blond-haired boy with the wise blue eyes. He is a prince among children, a high-strung ruler of his own world. Once I made a sound like a lamb bleating, to amuse him, and he cried with the same bleats, mee, mee, for two days.

A phone call. The doctor who saw him last week. She waited to tell me.  

I am fragments. I comb my hair and run lipstick over my mouth. My son has autism. I go out. I’m eating lettuce, listening to a woman chatter about a restaurant in San Francisco. My son is autistic.

I lie in bed with my husband and create a spectacular fight. We spiral and explode. Blue flames, pieces fall to earth.

We were shining stars, a firmament of three. My boy, our sun. He knew the alphabet at eighteen months.

He calls himself he.

He gleams in his bed, beautiful.

I am a writer, my husband a thinker. I flee to bookstores. I rake pages.

The books say “autism” stems from the Greek word autos, meaning “self.” Children shun other people, perform bizarre rituals, and speak strangely or not at all. No one knows what causes it. There is no cure.

What should we do? He may have a chance at “recovery.” He talks, he smiles, he hugs. He bit me every day for a year.

His eyes are the gray-blue of warmed ice. Black lashes fringe their immensity. Sometimes he won’t look at us. He plays with water. He stares at lights. He reads the same page over and over.

He flaps his hands like an unsettled dove.

He loves me more than anyone. He loves his father, and he loves his best friend. They hit each other, they kick and push, but his friend rolls his eyes and says, “I’m sorry” while my son only gazes, a tomb angel.

My son loves vacuum cleaners.

We drive home from preschool: “Go home, see the vacuum cleaner.” Repeat.

Of a boy out the window: “He happy, have vacuum cleaner.” Repeat.

He lines them up after school, his beloved vacuum cleaners. Two upright tin soldiers, shoulders like mechanics. He pulls their gray cords to the wall, chattering, happily straightening the lines. Plugs them into invisible sockets.

Two days later, a doctor comes to our home. The doctor, a wiry man of seventy, gets our son to put water on a pretend fire, to jump an imaginary rope, things we’ve never seen him do. The doctor watches the scrape of a chair at dinner give him an aural flinch, make him bang his spoon and throw his rice. “Even the radio,” he says, nodding to the soft jazz washing from the speaker, “is too much.” Our quiet household is revealed to be a cacophony of sound.

“Sing your words to him,” he says. “Play with him, follow his lead. Talk about his actions, so he knows he exists.”  

Come Monday, we trundle off to preschool again. It’s a modest little school across from an auto body shop, a jewel in a working neighborhood. There are three other inexplicable boys, a Down’s girl of nine with the mental age of four. There are three diabetic children who can’t go shoeless in the sand. One has deaf parents. All mix well with the “typically developing” kids.

We creep into circle time this morning. No one meets our eyes. Two boys are introduced to the crowd. Twins, but one has a wheelchair and a walker. He has CP, cerebral palsy, and he grins as the children are warned “hands off” his cool wheelchair.

My son often bites a girl there. She loves him, and she just can’t stay away from him. It is their way, these blond waterbabies of two. He loves her with a hurtful kiss, sometimes light, sometimes deep. She was a biter too. I saw her family in the grocery store once, but the mother wouldn’t look at me.

Today it’s decided: they’re throwing us out. “Honeymoon’s over,” says the director. “We have to think of the other kids.” She’s right. I don’t even cry as she gives me three weeks notice, a lifetime considering he’s been there only six weeks. She says maybe he can stay if I hire a shadow, someone to follow him around. I feel love for her.

We’re hiring teachers now, “trainers” at $25-45 an hour, groping our way to 40 hours a week of “behavioral intervention.” This program will teach him how to live.  

Every day, I watch grandchildren evaporate. So do girlfriends, his driver’s license, a car at sixteen. I see a man in a lonely room lined with pictures of vacuum cleaners. My husband cannot hear these things. I cannot stop thinking of them.

My son cannot eat a cookie now. He’s on the special autism diet, a clean zone bereft of wheat, dairy, gluten, casein, apples, sugar, chocolate, bananas. Some children get better quickly, but many don’t.  

Tonight we go to a familiar restaurant. We order meat and vegetables, no pasta, no bread. My husband and I are sipping wine, talking carefully, while our son flips a fork. Then he sees some spaghetti at the next table and throws a fit, begging, “Want a piece of pasta” over and over until I carry him off crying, stunned as if with an axe-blow, his bright head bobbing like a cut flower.

Today I make him gluten-free cookies, his first home-baked cookies ever. I’d been saving that for when he turned three, something for us to do together. But I carry the cooling cookies to the living room and do a homemaker twirl for visiting relatives. I am home, baking cookies and standing by my little man, and I feel good.

I hire a shadow. She will follow him at preschool, interpret the unreadable world. They say this is not something the mother can do.  

I spend an entire week in natural grocery stores. I am shopping alongside white boys dressed like Rastafarians, pregnant women in tie-dyed dresses, portly couples fresh from Weight Watcher meetings. I buy a new cereal, a holistic version of rice crispies. We take a plastic baggie of the cereal on a trip the next day. I watch him eat from it greedily with both hands.

Now the bag lies on the kitchen counter, and I examine the grains idly. One of them moves, then many of them move, heaving softly inside the plastic bag. I get very depressed. I return them to the store and they say it’s my pantry, that I harbored meal worms and they leapt to the new cereal instantaneously. But my pantry was clean, not a worm in sight. I get my money back.  

Slowly I find out the politics of this world. Either you do the diet or you let your child eat his way to destruction. You either do behavioral therapy with a team of therapists or you warehouse your child in the school-district ghetto, three aimless hours a day at a special preschool. As “new diagnosis parents,” we turn out to be in the aggressive camp. We phone people, get on experts’ waiting lists, read tomes on autism and biological treatments.

I call strangers on the phone. They give me an hour or more, listing phone numbers from memory, books to read, in voices lined with sighs. They help and frighten at the same time. A father cautions me not to lose our house as we search for treatment. The father has a daughter. Boys are the norm, four for every girl, so he normally gets daughter calls, dazed new members of a rare girls’ club. He mentions the kids at her school. “Wheelchairs, ventilators, plus this . . . thing. See it like that. Sometimes it helps.”

A “trainer” of good repute has not called us back. I ask an afflicted neighbor why not. I mentioned a rival clinic, she says, and now the trainers are leery of us. It was our first week, I tell her.

“In this business, you snooze, you lose,” she says, as we stand in her kitchen, surrounded by garbanzo bean flours and exotic duck-and-buffalo patties. She used to be an attorney, but she retired when they got the diagnosis. She was thirty-five.

I won’t hand him a cup of juice-flavored water now unless he says, I. Say, I, I tell him. “Please, please,” he wails, offering the fruit of old, innocent lesson. He cries and cries. I cry, too. I will help you, I tell him. I am with you. I will not leave you. Say I.

I’m not hysterical about vaccines, heavy metals, mercury, yeast, and viral infections, yet. I order the medical records of his birth. I pore over them and find a soupcon of birth medications, a vacuum-assisted delivery, a cold and flu during my pregnancy, late-term antibiotics. “Pregnancy normal, birth uncomplicated,” notes my doctor’s confident stroke.

It’s the end of the second week, a Friday. I take him to preschool with a lunch of chicken and taro chips, then drive to the earthiest grocery store, where I tack up a flyer. “Love to bake? Seek help in baking for special needs child.” I spend two hours in this store, an hour in another, searching for tapioca and quinoa flours. I end up in a daze in the bulk-goods section. It is far past lunch when I finally eat.

My husband is coming home early now. Now we know there’s a reason we had to force our son into bed at ten, ten-thirty, eleven. Now we know why we had to hold his bedroom door shut at night while he pounded it, screaming, with his entire body for nearly two hours. Why I’d take him to the park to exhaust him and end up chasing him over acres of green fields, so tired I’d wake up in his bed at midnight.

My husband is tired. We decide not to have more children.

My son and I are at McDonald’s. He is hungry, despite the sodden rice pasta I made for him and the handfuls of blanched almonds and gluten-free ginger cookies. He is stuffing himself with too-hot fries, as they are allowed. He looks out the window into the dark parking lot. He points. “What’s that?”

It is his first question. Ever. Seconds pass. I look outside. There is the finest minivan, gleaming like Cinderella’s coach, like a Rolls Royce, silver in the dark. It’s a car, I tell him.

He looks again. “There’s cars in there,” he says. We clutch the hot fries and eat, our red-and-yellow booth a private dining room filled with conversation and steaming food.

One month has passed and diagnosis day is here, the official one at a famous clinic. I dress him in his blue plaid shirt and brown corduroy pants, and fill his lunchbox with crumbly wheatless cookies and canola-oil potato chips. My husband drives us two hours along a distant freeway.

I look out the window at the dry fall hills and acknowledge the fantasy in my brain. Will we find avenging angels in the clinic? Maybe they will say, “It’s all a mistake. We’ll clear this up in no time.”

He starts to sing-song behind me in his car seat: “Justin, oh, Justin. Justin, oh, Justin. Justin, oh, Justin.” Justin is his cousin. He hasn’t seen him for nearly a year. The words emerge with the inflection of Justin’s brother, Andrew. An echo, nine months old, emerging.

The building is pastoral, a woodland green saltbox tucked under a freeway. We push the buzzer. Hi, it’s us, the little autistic family from the coast.

We’re an hour early so we wait in the playroom. “I’m going to play the number eight,” he says, kneeling by the numbered floor puzzle. The perforated space is empty of its eight. “Where number eight?” he says, a nine and six in each hand. Images of number-runners, hardworking old-time ghetto hustlers, come to mind. The numbers, the game, the despair.

The white cover of American Psychologist magazine stares at me with blank artful eyes. Shrinks used to say mothers caused it. Cold mothers, refrigerator mothers. Open and shut mothers.

We go inside. There is the Grand Poobah of autism. Twenty-two years of experience with thousands of kids, but she looks young. We lean forward, separately, my husband straining to answer questions about my pregnancy. I don’t interrupt.

My golden boy plays in the corner. “I’m going to go in the tunnel,” he says. I’m going to go in the tunnel, I tell her. He said that. She listens.

Almost two hours pass. He ignores us for a long while, playing with the array of gimcracks and structures he doesn’t have at home. She turns and approaches him, and strokes his hair. He plays cat-and-mouse with her hands, a shy grin on his beautiful face, a triangle of smile, eyes and lashes.

“Well, he is definitely autistic,” she says.

Something, she is saying something important. “We would recommend the forty hours per week for his program. He can really benefit from it.” Then she lines it out. First two months, language will shoot upward. Behaviors will lessen. First year, “could be more or less depending on how fast he learns,” language will be on track and we’ll address the social and emotional deficits.

What kind of deficits, I ask. I grasp his waist and check his diaper, fending off an image, fourth grade, white powder on a blackboard, having to leave my slide-rule crowd to go learn subtraction with the slows.

“Theory of mind,” she says. “Like, can they tell what another person thinks or feels.” Show me who can, I do not say.

She is speaking again, something about regular kindergarten by age five, “with a shadow, of course.” First grade by six.

And if he doesn’t pass theory of mind? “Well, he’ll just be odd,” she says.

Odd. It’s a delightful, crooked word. Slightly pedigreed. I would love him odd. My odd, wonderful grown-up son.

And if he does? “Everything could be completely gone by the age of six.”

I look at her. Gone?

“You would never know he’d had anything.”

I would know.

Trainers start coming to the house. They drive nice cars, are young and beautiful. Strong will is a requirement. “Look at me,” they say. “Look at me.”

He fights. He twists his head like a heretic in a torture box. The teachers hold toys, pencils, bits of cookie to their eyes. “Look at me. Look at me.”

Even a flash of eye is rewarded. “Good looking!” they say.

He learns quickly, but he is stubborn. Not autistic sometimes, just stubborn.

Relatives still call to see how he is doing. His great-grandmother calls. “Well, so what if he’s artistic?” she says, the twist of her mountain speech bringing tears to my eyes. “You’ll just love him all the more.”

They don’t think of us as damaged goods. They think of us as family.

I don’t speak much. Someone speaks and she answers to my name but it isn’t me. A flyer comes. “How to plan for a special needs child in your will.” Will. As in triumph of. Will has nothing to do with plans. I speak mainly to my son.

Slowly, he changes. “Want to make wee-wee in the potty, “ he says. He sits. “Want to use the step-stool,” he says. He puts his feet, square little feet like tamales, his babysitter used to say, now strong and fine, on the step-stool. He makes his baby-boy grunts. “Wee-wee coming,” he says. It comes. It is gold, pale yellow, sometimes clear, like nectar. There are boys his age who can’t do this. Jubilate Deo. Triumph.

He grabs at store cookies but no longer fights for them. Surrenders, accepts. It is a gesture of memory now, a thing remembered, like a foreign film from years ago.

Cups fly. Every day, every evening, every morning. Cups and spoons and plates crash with regularity. It is a crash landing strip, this kitchen, the marble tiles somehow regal, impervious. I am not.

A large plastic bus takes off, crashes. I slap his hand, sharply, twice. He cries. Finally, he realizes he’s been hurt, intentionally. He never noticed before. He cries, quickly, with sadness and betrayal. Mother, patient tow-truck driver of crashing objects, has made him cry. I cower with shame and happiness.

My baby is becoming.

We break him of vacuums. Now he loves drains. “Water going down the drain,” he says. No, baby, we’re in the car. We’re driving. “Water going down the drain.”

Listen to me. We are driving in the car. See the stop sign? “One, two, three four, five, six drains.”

We pass the ocean. A stack of condos. “See the houses?” he says. “Ocean.” He said houses and ocean. He figured it out. “Water going in the ocean. Going down the drain.”

Pretend play. It’s important. We’re on the patio. See the toy cat, baby? What’s the cat doing? He puts the cat by the drain. “Meow, meow, cat crying down the drain.”

Municipal water system designer. Drain Man.

My husband mixes cocktails. Citrus-flavored floats with cod-liver oil, B-6 megadoses, flavored multivitamins. They stink of peaches and fish. My son gulps them down, liquid bursts whooshing from his sippy cup.

We divide the work. I take food, trainers and doctors. My husband takes insurance, vitamins and the school board. We walk at dusk. I notice shapes in the clouds, a fish skeleton, a warhead, below the jet contrails. Red lights illuminate the jogging stroller so no one will hit us.

Today we go to a local clinic to meet our program supervisor, who will be in charge of the case. He is gentle, sweet, and when he lifts our son to see out the window I forgive his muskrat haircut. I notice I am shallow. Dive into me and break your neck.

Our son makes a good showing. There’s a basket with a toy banana and a plastic hotdog. He lifts the banana, and we watch him think. “It’s yellow hotdog,” he says, clear as a fairy bell. I am proud. It’s a metaphor, I say. Nobody listens.

I am driving again, to a store for teachers, where I buy lace-up beads, construction paper and flash cards. After I leave, I run into the back of someone. Out gets a grizzled man in coveralls, a tow-truck driver, and we exchange licenses. I notice his birthday is the day before mine, which just happened, and I apologize for the lousy present. He tells me it’s the only one he got. He gives me a pen and tells me we have to stop meeting this way.

Dinner spins on an axis these days, revolving between the expiration date of the refrigerated chicken and the availability of a McDonald’s. I imagine this makes me no different from millions of mothers. I forget to eat much, and grow thin and doughy on leftover French fries.

Tonight I lie down with him, but he doesn’t want to sleep. In the dark he kisses me repeatedly on the mouth. His lips are a sweet immutable bow, wet and pure, and his eyes stare into mine in the light from his bedroom window. Dark waves of gratitude engulf me.

“Say I want some milk,” he says the next morning. I hand it to him. It’s fake milk, potato-based, but it’s got vanilla flavor and he loves it.

When he was little he loved his milk.

His first words came at nine months.

When he was born he lifted his head from my shoulder and looked in my eyes.

I can’t see anything else.