“Then what’s with the face?” I asked, tossing her a bag of chips off the table.
“Nothing, I’m just happy.” She shrugged her shoulders and stuffed the chips into a huge reusable grocery bag. “And I’m spending the day with my favorite girls and my favorite guy, at my favorite swimming hole.”
“Hopefully your favorite girls won’t be too tired after an hour,” I said dryly, then called for Rebel.
“She’s still having a hard time sleeping?”
“Not really,” I said, shaking my head. “She’s just waking up at the ass crack of dawn. It might be nine for you, but it’s practically lunch time for us.”
Little footsteps came barreling down the hall, and Rebel slid to a stop on the linoleum, her hair wild around her head. She was already dressed in her little swim suit with built-in pockets for floaty things, but she’d refused to take her socks off so I could put sandals on her feet.
“You can’t wear socks and sandals,” Mel told Reb, crouching down to meet her eyes. “It’s against the law.”
“Socks,” Reb answered, looking down at her feet with a decisive nod.
She was such a cool kid, but so goofy. I laughed at her annoyed expression. She wouldn’t let me paint her toenails because she couldn’t stand the feeling of the brush sliding over her nails, but it was a fight to get her to wear sandals because her feet weren’t ‘pretty’ like mine.
“Hey, Reb,” I called, walking toward the door where I’d hung my purse high on a hook. I’d started hanging it at eye level when Rebel had started getting into everything she could reach.
The knives were stored above the fridge. All medicines and vitamins were kept in a lockbox on the top shelf of a bookcase in my room.the trunk of my car. There were outlet covers on all of the electrical sockets, safety latches on all the cabinets and my dad had installed slide locks high on all doors leading outside and the bathrooms. I couldn’t be too careful.
The older Rebel got, the more we were able to understand her and her quirks. We’d realized after she’d begun talking that she was definitely on the autism spectrum, though that wasn’t uncommon in kids with Down syndrome. It was just another facet of Reb, nothing more, nothing less. She had sensory issues, but I’d already known that. And she didn’t talk as much as other kids who were three and a half years old, but that wasn’t really a surprise, either.
The tubes in her ears had helped with her verbal skills, though. It was like she’d finally been able to hear herself unmuffled for the first time, and the words had come pouring out. Doctor Mendez reminded me more than once that that wasn’t how the tubes worked, but I still wasn’t convinced. After the tubes had been placed, Rebel had started speaking like never before.
I hated that her second word was Will’s name, but I chose not to think about it. She’d asked for him almost every day for a full year before she’d finally let it go, but there were still days when she’d look at me and say his name like she was wondering if he was real. I’d learned to change the subject.
She had the memory of an elephant. If I told her that we were going to my dad’s and we weren’t able to, she’d remind me every day for a month in a mixture of modified sign language and a spattering of spoken words.
There still weren’t full sentences. I didn’t expect them.
I pulled out a pair of water shoes from my purse and moved back toward Rebel. “Look what I got you. These are shoes for the river.” She tried to take them out of my hand, but I lifted them above her head, making her huff in annoyance. “You can’t wear them with socks.”
“Socks,” she ground out, throwing her arms up in her sign for I’m sick of your shit.
“No socks, Rebel,” I said, still holding her water shoes out of her reach.
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
She threw her arms up again, and watched me closely for a reaction. When I didn’t give her one, she plopped down on her bottom and slowly peeled the socks from her feet. Then she stuck her hand out for the shoes.
“You need help?” I asked as I handed them to her.
Reb’s hand made a shooing motion and I heard Mel’s choked laugh behind me.
“She told you.”
“Can you imagine her as a teenager?” I asked in exasperation, standing up and grabbing a pair of scissors from the top of the fridge.
Yeah, scissors went up there, too. For a while, I’d tried to hide that I’d put everything sharp up there, but Rebel had figured it out and one morning, I’d caught her using a chair to climb onto the counter so she could reach them. My dad had helped me tie the chairs to the table legs after that.