He raced to the light switch by the door, then over to his desk, where he grabbed the most recently filled book of equations and a number-two pencil. He had a cup full of them—twenty-four, to be exact, because the number was the product of two cubed times three, and Eddie liked that. Each pencil was properly sharpened and awaiting its turn.
The math was a blur, simply flying out of him at stunning speed. Lost in a torrent of thoughts, he went through one pencil quickly, maintaining its sharpness with an electric sharpener that was over ten years old. Having filled the remaining pages of the current notebook, he readily went through another. And two more pencils in the process.
Like a composer lost in his own world, the incomprehensible equations were pouring out of him so rapidly that his writing hand struggled to keep up with his brain. It was frenzied and spontaneous moments of revelation like this that had made him wonder, earlier in life, if he should learn to write with both hands simultaneously, thereby doubling his already tremendous output. But his left hand proved to be less adept at writing, and although he had two eyes, the two hemispheres of his brain refused to act independently of each other, forever condemning him to the one-handed pace of the rest of us.
Whatever he was hearing in his head, he was not hearing anything else. Nothing in his room or outside the windows. Nothing down the hall. It was as if his remarkable sense of hearing had shut down to focus all his considerable processing power on the singular task at hand. When a person experiences extreme cold, frostbite results from the body trying to survive by withdrawing blood circulation from the extremities to protect the critical organ, the heart. That same principle seemed to be at work as Eddie continued writing wildly. Two hours passed. Then three. He showed no signs of slowing down.
Eddie didn’t notice that five thirty, his usual wake-up time, had already come and gone. So did dawn’s first light. So did his would-be morning singing companions, a red-necked grebe and a northern gannet. The birds left the branches outside his window quickly, as if the light through the window of Eddie’s room told them there would be no chorus today. He was visible at his desk, still writing away furiously.
Occasionally he would pause, looking up from his notebook, staring at the wall, not looking at anything in particular. Nothing tangible, anyway. What he was seeing was anybody’s guess. His pencil would remain motionless. He wouldn’t blink, and barely seemed to breathe. A human mannequin. Just as quickly as these frozen moments would start, they would stop again, and the graphite in Eddie’s number-two pencil would resume its frenzied trail across page after page.
A short while later, Eddie put his pencil down and quickly turned on his laptop supercomputer, which he had dubbed the Hummer because of the DRONE the machine’s cooling fan produced whenever it was left on for an extended period of time. Fast, it was. Quiet, it was not. Not by Eddie’s standards, anyway. But right now, that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that his calculations would prove correct, and that the Hummer would finally be able to interpret the inaudible recordings made by the echo-box microsatellites.
CHAPTER 20
Parking Lot, Harmony House, May 23, 7:02 a.m.
Skylar pulled into the lot and quickly walked up the stairs to her small office on the second floor. The desk was utilitarian, and was probably older than she was. A scuffed Formica top with a metal frame. The sliding drawers were a little rusty, but she didn’t have much use for them, anyway. The only decoration she’d brought in so far was a photograph that sat on her desk. The five-by-seven walnut frame contained her favorite image of her and Jacob, taken while she was still at Harvard.
Along one of the walls were two dozen storage boxes containing materials related to Eddie. No other patient in the facility had more than three boxes of materials, but no other resident produced anywhere close to the volume of papers Eddie did. She had decided to start at the beginning, in the oldest box, with the first communication Dr. Fenton had received about Edward Parks. The single-page letter was from Eddie’s child psychiatrist in Philadelphia, Dr. Gordon Tuffli. The doctor was part of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which, while respected within the medical community, had the misfortune of possessing the initials CHOP. How they ever got a single parent to take a child for treatment at CHOP left something to the imagination.
Tuffli stated that he had never once, in his twenty-seven years of practice, encountered a child like Eddie, who was eight at the time. Autism was diagnosed much less frequently in those days, and Asperger’s had only recently been reintroduced into the lexicon. What little literature there was included nothing about how to properly deal with a special-education child whose IQ was within spitting distance of two hundred. The boy was doing calculus, but couldn’t tie his shoes. He had completed a Rubik’s Cube in less than two minutes the first time he saw one, but couldn’t look another human being in the eye. Any type of physical contact instantly triggered a screaming rage, and the boy’s only method for expressing frustration was to slap himself in the face, or worse. His father, Victor Parks, had claimed to Dr. Tuffli that Eddie once slapped himself so many times that he had to take the boy to the emergency room. The medical staff doubted the father’s story until something in the ER triggered the reaction in the boy, and Victor was cleared of suspicion.
Little Eddie Parks was a genius savant; there was no doubt about it. The only question was what to do with him. Every teacher or aide who attempted to help him quickly realized how ill-equipped they were for the task. No one on the staff at CHOP had any idea, either. Dr. Tuffli wrote to Fenton hoping that he might know what to do with the boy.
Skylar could only imagine Fenton licking his chops as he read this letter.
Fenton had then commenced his typically thorough due diligence on the boy, retrieving every available medical record going back to Eddie’s birth, which was an emergency C-section. It wasn’t clear from the records exactly what went wrong during the delivery, but Michelle Parks lost a tremendous amount of blood and never recovered. Dr. Wolfgang Oelkers declared her dead when her son was forty-three minutes old. She never got to see her beautiful and unique baby boy. It took his father almost three days before he would hold his son.
What surprised Skylar most was the extent of Dr. Fenton’s research into Eddie’s past. Fenton left no stone unturned when it came to his examination of this wonder child. He corresponded with or interviewed every doctor, teacher, and therapist who had ever come in contact with the boy. But the research didn’t stop there. Fenton examined every record he could find about the father: his employment, his health, his academic and credit files. Skylar didn’t understand what these things had to do with a potential patient. It was clearly an invasion of privacy, but Fenton obviously had no trouble gathering the information, so somebody must have approved the release of the data.
It never occurred to Skylar that he might be as thorough with his hires as he was with his patients.
Breakfast in Harmony House was served at seven thirty, so Skylar went to look for Eddie there. Besides, she was in dire need of coffee. While a double-shot nonfat Starbucks latte might have been enough to get her through the drive to Woodbury, it certainly wasn’t enough to keep her going through the morning. But when she arrived in the cafeteria, there was no sign of Eddie. That was strange, she thought. People with Asperger’s never deviated from their routines.
Coffee in hand, she walked toward Eddie’s room. Passing Fenton’s office, she noticed a silhouette sitting in a chair next to Eddie’s door. It was Nurse Gloria, who was reading the latest issue of People magazine. Skylar quickened her step. Hoping not to disturb Eddie, she whispered, “Is everything okay?”
Gloria whispered reassuringly, “Everything’s fine.”
“Why are you here?”
“To make sure it stays that way.” She turned back to her magazine article about some reality-show contestant’s recent weight loss after pregnancy. “Dr. Fenton hasn’t told you about Eddie’s sessions, has he?”
He hadn’t. “I’m still getting up to speed.” Skylar began to doubt whether starting at the beginning was the right way to study Eddie’s history. She wondered if she should have started with the most recent reports and worked her way backward, so that she would be better prepared for something like this.