A VISION OF DORRIE                                            1,650 words

We were driving back from shopping in town yesterday, my Mom and Dad and me and Simon. And all of a sudden Simon goes, ‘Hey, I just saw Dorrie.’ He’d been quiet all the way back from town, so it was kind of weird, him suddenly speaking up like that. Nobody said anything. Dorrie and Mom had a big fight the last time they were together, and we all know that Simon couldn’t have seen her, but Simon’s got Asberger’s, which means he says and does really weird stuff sometimes, and we’re all used to it by now.

He's clueless, Simon. He knows about Dorrie and about the big argument she had with Mom, but he keeps talking about her anyway. When Dorrie comes back, he’ll say, or he’ll start talking about what Dorrie doesn’t like or what Dorrie wants.  Or someone’ll sit in the chair Dorrie used to sit in at the table and he’ll tell them Dorrie sits there. If he was anybody else, you’d want to hit him. The way Dorrie went slamming out of the house after the fight, the way Mom and Dad don’t talk about her anymore – you’d think he’d have gotten the idea. People who don’t know Simon might think that Simon’s stupid – but he isn’t. He’s just clueless: he never gets the idea. You can hint at things, you can raise your eyebrows at him and nudge him or shake your head and frown at him, but he never gets it. That’s because of the Asberger’s, actually. We all know that now, which is a big relief. Before we found out about the Asberger’s, we just figured Simon was mental.

Simon’s the middle kid. Dorrie was three years old when he was born. I’m five years younger than Simon. But without Dorrie, and with Simon being Simon, I might as well be the oldest.

When I was a little baby, Mom told Simon to give me a bottle one day. ‘This one?’ he goes – picking up a bottle of whisky that my Dad got for Christmas. Mom had her back turned, but she knew the baby bottle was right next to my crib, so she said Yeah, figuring that Simon knew what she was talking about.  She goes over to my crib a couple of minutes later and notices that the baby bottle is still there by the side of my crib – and I’m lying there, kicking, and there’s a whisky bottle right next to me. Mom says that if Simon had actually taken the lid off the bottle and stuck it in my mouth, it could have killed me. She says she should have known better than to ask Simon to give me a bottle, that even though Simon was five years old at the time, he didn’t have a lick of sense. Simon’s seventeen now, but you’d still be crazy to ask him to give a baby a bottle, I swear to God.

He’s always been like this. I’ve seen movies about people with Asberger’s and they’re always really smart. There was one movie about this guy who could look at a whole jar of marbles and know right away exactly how many of them there were in it; he could do card tricks and stuff, and if he wanted to, he could make a lot of money that way. Simon’s not like that. He’s just clueless about things and he never picks up hints or suggestions. He’ll ask you something and if he doesn’t get the answer he wants, he’ll just ask the question again, over and over, until you think you’re going to go crazy. It’d be really cool if he could figure out stuff like how many candies are in a jar or how much a cake weighs – at least we could win prizes with him sometimes.

Sometimes Dad and I kind of tease him. Dorrie and Mom used to get angry and say we shouldn’t. The thing is, we know it’s mean, but he really gets to you after a while, Simon. He’ll keep talking about stuff – things he’s interested in, like worms – and he just goes on and on until you’re bored half to death. Simon’s got this crazy thing about worms and he reads books about worms all the time. He’ll talk about them to anyone for as long as they’ll let him, whether they’re interested or not. So Dad and I will say, What do you call that worm again, Simon – the red one? Even though we know perfectly well ‘cause he’s already told us a million times. And he’ll tell us, but we’ll act like we’ve forgotten and make him tell us again. Eisenia Fetida, he’ll say, getting all agitated, I already told you!  That’s how we know that Simon’s not stupid. He knows everything there is to know about worms, I swear – probably even more than a worm scientist.

But yesterday when Simon said that he’d seen Dorrie – nobody teased him. In fact, nobody said anything at first. The car went dead quiet, then Mom goes to Dad, ‘I think we’re going to have to put another coat of paint on the bathroom walls, Jim, I really do.’ And Dad nods, even though I heard him telling Mom earlier that the bathroom doesn’t need another coat of paint, he’s already painted it three times. Then it’s quiet again and Simon, who can never take a hint, like I said earlier, goes ‘I just saw Dorrie back there – she waved at us!’ He’s all excited, and he can’t figure out why no one’s listening to him.

So Mom just sighs and says Simon, kind of quietly, and then she and Dad talk about when they’re going to put in the tiles in the bathroom, and what Mom’s going to cook for dinner. Mom’s still talking when all of a sudden Simon interrupts her and goes, ‘She was wearing that apricot top and hair-band you got at K-Mart.’

Mom lets out this kind of gasp and Dad, who’s driving, seems to hunch over the wheel a little. But neither of them says anything, so Simon says I saw her – she was waving at us.  They still don’t answer him.

That top and the head-band – they were sort of what caused the big fight between Mom and Dorrie. Mom bought Dorrie that top and the matching headband and Dorrie told her it was a stupid present to give someone her age. Especially someone who wears black tee shirts and beat-up jeans and Goth make-up. She said that if Mom wanted to get her a present, she could have just saved up the money and bought something that she could use instead, something that she actually might want to wear. Mom said that Dorrie didn’t seem to realize that we weren’t made of money and some kids would be grateful for what they got, just like she was when she was Dorrie’s age. Dorrie said that her friends got things from their parents like cars and iPods and even if Mom and Dad couldn’t have afforded something like that, they could have just given her the money instead of giving her a stupid top and head-band that she’d just give away if she could find someone who was lame enough to want them.

Mom and Dorrie have been fighting with each other for a long time, but this fight was the worst one ever. Dorrie moved in with a friend of hers after dropping out of college last year, but she still used to come home all the time and see us. But the day she and Mom had that fight she went slamming out of the house and said that she was never coming home again, not for anything, not even to visit. And she probably didn’t know it at the time, but she really wasn’t coming home. Mom and Dad have told Simon, but he acts like he knows better. Once Simon gets an idea about something in his head, you just can’t get it away from him – even if you prove that he’s wrong. Like Santa Claus. When we were really little, our Grandma used to tell us about Santa Claus. Dorrie knew that there wasn’t any Santa Claus, and I figured out right away that there wasn’t any such person, but not Simon. I’ll bet he still believes in Santa Claus, though Dad and I finally stopped teasing him about it ‘cause after a while it got kind of boring.

For a while no one talks, then suddenly Mom turns around in her seat and looks at Simon. She’s got this funny look on her face and she says, Where did you see her, Simon? Where exactly?

I know that Simon’s clueless, but I feel like punching him now for talking about Dorrie again, like he doesn’t know how Mom feels. Just back there, he says, back when I said. She was blowing us a kiss!  Now Dad makes this weird sort of noise – kind of strangled, like he’s trying to clear his throat. Just tell your mother where you saw her, son, he says.

And Simon’s all happy because everyone’s finally listening to him, so he tells Mom that it was just after the farm where they have the Vietnamese potbelly pigs, the place where there’s that really sharp bend in the road. That Dorrie was just standing there waving at us, dressed in her apricot top and matching head-band. Which is crazy because I happen to know that the last place they were was on the floor in Dorrie’s old room, where she’d thrown them, so Dorrie never wore them at all, not even once.

In fact, I happen to know that Mom left them there on the floor until almost a week after the car crash Dorrie was in. The day after Dorrie’s funeral.