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I am staring at a pregnancy test on the bathroom counter when the phone rings.

Since I have five kids, ages 7 through 14, the E.P.T. stick is no stranger to me; the man calling on the phone, however, is. He says our sons go to school together, that our families bumped into each other at the Bronx Zoo Butterfly Garden some years ago. "You were terrified of a big monarch," he says.

I remember the episode well — how I might have embarrassed my kids when I screamed — but I can't recall this man or his son. He says his name is Kurt, and he has news for me, and I know that it can't be good news when he begins by saying, "I hate having to phone you about this, but hey, listen, if it were my kid, I'd want to know."

He tells me that his son had seen my son slumping his head into his hands, sitting alone at the base of the flagpole in front of the boys' middle school. His son's Frisbee had landed near my son, and when he went to retrieve it, my boy had looked up at him and said, "I'm going suicide." Hence the awkward but responsible phone call to me, in the middle of a day while I'm waiting for the result of a pregnancy test.

As the man goes on about the incident, I recall last week, when my son Calvin* cried about a classmate who was probably speaking out of honesty rather than meanness when he said, "Dude, why can't you speak right?" Asperger's and social conversation do not harmonize well in a world of 13-year-olds. My sweet boy hits a brick wall of awkwardness, a mumbo jumbo of monotone words, his voice deep, his back stiff. At the time, I'd thought this was normal middle school drama magnified by my son's nature. I'd thought, This is nothing; this will pass. But that evening, he had turned away from me, pulling the covers over his head. "People don't get me," he said, his voice muffled through the blanket.

"I get you," I said. His three younger sisters, knowing their brother was sad, joined us on the twin bed, each of them putting a hand on their lump of a brother under the quilt. "Look," I said. "We all get you."

But now Calvin has gone outside the family bubble, expressing his sadness to this boy who is nothing more than a face in the hallway, an acquaintance at the zoo. I strangle my hand with the telephone cord. It's not nothing; it isn't passing.

"Hello?" the man says in response to my silence.

I tell him thank you, and that yes, of course, I will look into this and thank you, thank you. I hang up and hurry to my son's room, searching the history on his computer. He has Googled "suicide." Horrific images fill the screen, frightening me so much that I cover my eyes and blindly press Escape. How could I have thought this was nothing?

Moments later, I am wrist-deep in my son's dresser drawers, churning socks and underwear. I find a small notebook. It is filled with random daily accounts, but one excerpt is about his "middle school hell." I read every word, sitting on the floor, my back against his bed. The worst part is a detailed description of his own funeral, including what his thoughts would be while lying in his coffin: It's easier now. I'm better.

The rest of my day goes by in a blur as I research adolescent depression, forgetting about the pregnancy stick until later, when the kids are home from school and my 7-year-old daughter emerges from the bathroom holding it up to me. "What's this?" she asks. I tell her it is Mommy's special pen, and thank you for finding it. When she passes me in the hallway, her little body disappearing into the next room, I look at the stick's result.

Positive. Positive.

The faint blue crucifix means there will be less of me for all of my kids, less of me for this troubled boy, less of me for the newborn. I kneel on the floor and, knowing I cannot be everything to everyone, press my cheek into the carpet and focus on one strand, just one strand. Hundreds of minuscule tangled and twisted fibers make up this one thread of carpet. At any moment the strand can be stepped on, flattened.

My son is a gatherer of information, a facts man. At 7, he was fixated on the woolly mammoth. He researched the prehistoric animal so much that cousins and aunts and uncles would gather around him at family parties, quizzing my boy about the mammoth's size and what it ate and where it roamed. He would answer all of them, proudly standing up from his dining room chair, even drawing on his dinner napkin if he needed diagrams.

He also spent many afternoons illustrating the woolly mammoth in his sketchbook, concentrating on the curl of the tail, the drooping bottom lip and the mixing of the same two Crayola crayons: brown and burnt sienna. One glorious mammoth was brought to life on each page, and with each afternoon he drew them better and better. That same year the mayor of our town presented Calvin with a certificate at the village hall after he had won a local essay contest. He had written about how he'd love to "ride a woolly mammoth, to grip a handful of his hair and steer him home."

But now, at 13, that boy seems extinct to me. Home from school, he's draped over the couch facedown, his unopened book bag on the floor.

"Hey," I say. "We need to talk." I sit on the edge of the couch, my palm on his back, and gently tell him about the man's phone call. "Is it true?" I ask. "Is that how you feel?"

With his face buried in his folded arms, he nods.

"Oh," I say. There is so much that needs to be discussed, so much about what was written in his journal, about the value of his life and about how he is a gifted writer and illustrator. I need to remind him how in kindergarten, he knew how to spell "pterodactyl"; I need to remind him how in fifth grade, his artwork was chosen for the yearbook cover; I need to remind him that he has a family who will gather in his room when he cries.

But I don't get into that now. Instead, I rest my cheek on his back and, moving with the rise and fall of his chest, try with all my might to intercept my boy's negative thoughts, and I know I can't do it alone. I ask for God's help — not with a formal prayer, just with two solid words: Please, no.

Then I call Dr. Weck.*

"I dread how far he'll go to learn," I say later to my husband, as we lie awake in bed. But he doesn't answer; he flicks on the lamp on his nightstand and scrounges around the table to find a pencil. He scribbles something on the back of a random receipt. "Maybe it's time we tell him," he says. He shows me what he's written, a list of people who may have, or who it is speculated have had, Asperger's: Bill Gates, James Taylor, John Elder Robison, Einstein, Michelangelo, Robin Williams, Woody Allen, Tim Burton.

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When our son was first diagnosed three years ago, Dr. Weck told us not to tell him his diagnosis. "He'll think of himself as a victim," he said. "And you know what? He's not. He's fine."

As my index finger scans my husband's list, he puts his arm around me. Under the bedcovers, the lengths of our legs touch, his rough to my smooth, and now would be a tender time to speak about the pregnancy, but something tells me to be quiet. I don't even feel pregnant, I think. It's false.

"Abraham Lincoln," I say.

He nods as if to say, Good point, and scrawls down the name. In his face I see that he thinks he can beat this — that he can undo his son's sadness and he can tell the boy he has Asperger's and all will be OK.

But I'm not as sure. I tell him that maybe we should wait just a week or so, until Calvin is in a better place emotionally. My husband tucks the list in a drawer and summarizes our chat: "He needs to see Asperger's as a strength," he says, turning off the light, "not as a weakness."

Much later, in the middle of the night, as my husband breathes heavily with sleep, I grab a notebook from my night table. Following Dr. Weck's orders, I've listed information in it as I've accumulated it: the three awkward phone calls reporting the same news, dates and subject matter of my son's journal entries; the name of a library book he checked out, Suicide Notes; images he has Googled; and, last, stapled inside the back cover, my son's disturbingly detailed drawing.

With a flashlight, I skim through the pages, trying to understand my son, to wade into his experience — similar to how my husband, for many years, would enter our boy's "mammoth world," crawling around our family room floor with his arm a trunk, his voice trumpeting.

Under the small circle of light, I study my son's drawing: a hanged man. As usual, he's concentrated on the finest details — the dangling feet, the sloping head, the open eyes.

I am wearing a paper gown, sitting on an examination table, waiting for a technician to administer a sonogram, when I notice a magazine on a nearby stool. It is opened to a two-page spread of spring flowers; immediately I think, Plant cells.

For Calvin's science project a few weeks ago, he made a plant-cell cake. While most kids used poster board and markers and Styrofoam, my son used a rectangular pan, a box of Duncan Hines and assorted colorful candies. "I'll need 21 plates," he said, licking batter from a spoon, "and 21 forks."

A marbleized blue Fruit Roll-Up was the cell's vacuole, pieces of peppermint ribbon candy the mitochondria and Jujubes the ribosomes. It was a rainbow of a cake, with colorful candies matching colorful labels on toothpicks. "My cake will educate the eater," he said, practicing what he would say to classmates.

The next morning, he left for school with the cake in his hands and a glimmer of excitement in his eyes. That glimmer had a ripple effect on my daily chores: I caught myself smiling as I scrubbed hardened icing off the kitchen floor. But at his school's dismissal, when the minivan door slid open for the children to enter, I saw his plant- cell cake, untouched. It had not been eaten.

"What?" I asked. "Why?"

My son looked down at the cake on his lap and explained how everyone had eaten another boy's plant- cell cake. "A popular boy's…," he said. "They used my forks."

Right then I wanted to drive the minivan straight into Ms. Zott's* classroom, to crash down her walls, to jolt her from her desk. "Don't you know a plant cell's function?" I'd scream. "It's to have my boy connect with his classmates! To build his confidence!"

But I didn't do that.

Instead I took a deep breath, dug my index finger into the cytoplasm icing and licked it clean. "This is great," I said. "More for us." But Calvin didn't touch the cake. He just leaned back with closed eyes, the aluminum pan on his lap being plucked of sweets by his siblings.

Now, on the examination table, with the magazine flowers by my side, I am honest: I do not want another baby. There are no other options for me except to petition God Himself to make this pregnancy false, to tell Him, Hey, I'm barely keeping the five I have happy. The baby is really just a mass of cells at this point — a blob of a baby — but, remembering the plant cell, my imagination morphs it into a sticky cell cake. God, I pray, I am already full.

A little later, the technician tells me that detecting a heartbeat will confirm that my pregnancy is real. One of her hands plunks at computer keys while the other hand holds a wand, and when the camera focuses on a dark mass with a gray flickering light at its center, she freezes the screen. "That's the heart," she says. "See it beating?"

I nod and smile and say thank you to the woman, and in my mind I process the information: This is real.

My hands squeeze each other. Please. No.

*Names have been changed to protect privacy.

Evan Sklar/Offset

Evan Sklar/Offset

Late that night, when my family is asleep, I go to our church. I had tried talking to Him while lying in bed, but felt nothing. My faith, I begin to fear, is a wet rag wrung dry. I can't change my mind: I do not want this baby. I figure that if I go to His house, I'll feel differently. He'll get through to me; He'll tell me that all will be OK. I need to feel secure before I tell my husband about my pregnancy, before I inform my son of his diagnosis. With these two secrets held close, I plant my bottom in a pew, feel the hard wood and hear nothing except for the thoughts in my brain, my breath through my nostrils.

I make the sign of the cross with my hands; I look up and around. Unlike during crowded Sunday Masses, the church is empty and still, the only movement from flickering candle flames, which give off dim light with twitching shadows. Standing alone at night in a building with cathedral ceilings, I feel I'm in the dark belly of a whale that has just swallowed me whole.

A painting near my pew tells the story of Abraham and Isaac from the Bible's Old Testament, which depicts an era when God openly communicated with humans. God tested Abraham's faith, told him to sacrifice his son, Isaac — and even though Abraham did not understand God's plan, he obeyed. As he raised a dagger to sacrifice his son, with tears in his eyes, an angel of the Lord stopped him and granted Abraham many blessings for obeying. The moral: Have faith. God has a plan.

My hands are folded in prayer, but I might as well just twirl my thumbs: I feel nothing. Please, I pray. I am not Abraham; I do not want another child.

Similar to how my boy seems out of my reach, I feel that God is treating me the same way.

I slump my head down and apologize to the unborn baby for not wanting it, for trying not to even think about it, wondering if I'm guilty of being out of reach as well.

If I hadn't been awake in the middle of the night, coming home from church, I might not have heard the faint sound, the turning of pages. I follow the noise to see light stream from Calvin's bedroom. I touch the door just enough for my face to peek in unnoticed. He sits up in bed, his hair a rumpled mess, his hand vigorously writing in a notebook. "Hey," I whisper, and he looks at me.

He holds up his notebook as if to say, I'm writing. I sit next to him, and he lets me read what he has written: It's about a boy who ponders how the world has lost its beauty. No more can the boy feel the warmth of the sun; no more are the mountains majestic. I put my arm around his shoulders, trying to hold him as I read, but he closes the book before I can finish.

He's begun therapy, but so far nothing has changed. One minute he's lethargic, his eyes glazed, watching Lord of the Rings. The next minute he's intense, turbulently writing in his journal: My classmates will understand how their words pierced me no differently than a knight's sword through a dragon, who was only breathing fire out of sadness, when no one understood him, when no one cared, when no one would sit with him and try to understand his language.

Calvin takes a swig from a water bottle, his hand squeezing the plastic body until it is empty and crushed. His eyes dart from me to his book to me.

"What?" he says, his lips wet with water.

"I'm worried," I say. My fingers comb his hair, smoothing it away from his forehead, but he reaches up to stop me, his hand holding my wrist. "Mom, you can fix the outside of me," he says, still looking beyond me. "But you can't fix the inside."

Dr. Weck's mahogany desk is wide and long and blank — a slab of wood so glossy I cannot appreciate the grain. In front of him, there is a black leather desk set with a gray-plumed pen; in front of me, there is a lump of what looks like putty on a silver plate.

He suggests medication to control my son's moods. "Now, I know what you're thinking," he says, leaning over his folded hands. "You don't believe in this sort of thing."

I focus on the putty — a faceless human head, Caucasian in color, bereft of a brain.

"But answer me this," the doctor says. "If he were diabetic, would you give him insulin?"

I nod feebly. "Well, there you have it. This is his insulin." Dr. Weck pulls a laminated chart from his desk drawer. He points his feather pen to different medication options, but all I see are unpronounceable words, and rather than nod and smile, pretending to understand, I grab the slab of putty on the silver plate. It looks wet but feels dry, and I twist it inside and out, churning its guts, and stretch it as far as I can, pulling the ends of it in opposite directions.

Dr. Weck puts the chart down; he leans back in his chair and folds his hands across his belly. The putty lies in a long line, across the length of his desk.

"I'm sorry," I say.

"It's OK," he says. "Keep stretching. Knock yourself out."

The prescription is in my pocket. I wait in line at Value Drugs, noticing how my sneakers have earned the curl at the toes. My life, for years, has been running in circles: a constant marathon of chores and meals and activities and hugs, caring for five kids, one who has particular needs — oh, and one I try not to think about at all except for after breakfast, when I swallow my daily stone of a prenatal vitamin.

I pull the script from my pocket and read over Dr. Weck's checklist for Calvin at the bottom: Eat snacks in between meals; exercise; and do enjoyable things. Immediately I think: Bronx Zoo. We'd walk to see the exhibits ("exercise"), eat the popcorn and peanuts ("snacks") and all the while he'd love it ("do enjoyable things"). Check, check and check. I text my husband the idea. Maybe next week we'll take him.

A few years ago at the Bronx Zoo's Congo exhibit, while my other kids jumped from window to window, Calvin sat on the floor near the gorilla named Pattycake, his palm flattened on the glass between them, and he waited — for her to look at him, for her to touch his hand, for her to make any connection. When I stepped close to check on him, he wouldn't move his hand from the glass. He just kept his eyes on the animal and rattled off facts: Gorillas communicate through facial expression and posture. They can also grunt, cough, hoot, nod and cup their hands against their chests. Except for a few glances and a rubbing of her nose, Pattycake didn't do much, but then her baby came rolling by and stopped with a thud against his mother, shaking his head at the window separating them from Calvin, whose hand was still patiently waiting. My gut told me to press Record on my camera. I videotaped the baby pressing his little black hand up to my son's hand. Calvin smiled, his shoulders back, his head nodding once at the young animal. Spectators gathered around, and my elder son presented the scene like a game show host, one arm outstretched. "My brother," he said into the camera, "the animal expert."

Show Calvin the home movie tonight, I think. The tape runs about two minutes of his happy face, but maybe that's all he needs to bring out his Kong side, to cup his hands against his chest and fill his lungs with air, to roar depression goodbye.

The pharmacist calls me to the counter. "Drop-off or pickup?" he asks.

"Drop-off," I say, slapping the script on the counter, and I am just as surprised as the pharmacist when I add, "Let's nip this."

When I get home, my husband has the kids all packed up in the minivan, and he announces, "We're going to the Bronx Zoo."

"Now?" I say. "It's drizzling. The forecast says heavy rain."

"Good," he says. "Less crowds." His face has an urgency to it: Get son happy now. Put this suicide nonsense behind us.

I show him the white pharmaceutical bag. "Tomorrow he starts," I say. He takes it from me, places it in the kitchen cupboard and tells me to grab my poncho, to hurry to the car.

"This will be good," he insists. "Like old times."

At the zoo's entrance, we are greeted by Manny the Mammoth from the movie Ice Age, who roams the zoo promoting his new "4-D" ride. The girls run ahead to shake his trunk.

"And you thought mammoths were extinct, Cal," my other son jokes to Calvin, delivering a noogie to his scalp.

A park attendant asks if the kids would like a photo with Manny, and of course they would. They pose for the camera, Calvin looking up at the mammoth; his lips press together — not a smile, but close.

On the walk to the Congo exhibit, the light rain turns torrential, and my family huddles under two umbrellas. We find refuge in the Butterfly Garden. "You go on," I say to my husband as I stand in the covered foyer, thunder crackling.

Too scared to enter, I watch my family through the glass door. The garden bursts with flowers — reds, pinks, yellows, purples, blues — and thousands of butterflies fly from blossom to blossom, human to human. My husband and kids, in wet yellow ponchos, turn in full circles where they stand, reaching up for the winged beauties; one lands on my husband's head without his even knowing.

And just when I start to think about how insects terrify me, how this garden is not for me, I feel something — call it adrenaline, call it faith, call it whatever — but I imagine I feel no different than a person who's about to walk across hot coals. I push open the door and march into my fear. A fluttering wall of butterflies.

My children surround me, and as if God speaks through them, they say, "Ma, it's gonna be OK." "Don't be afraid." "You'll be fine." "Trust!"

I circle where I stand. I am in a funnel, surrounded by a blur of color and wings and blossoms and voices and Him. And maybe it's the hormones and maybe it isn't, but I begin to cry.

"Form a wrist circle," Calvin says. We gather together, each of us holding the wrist of the person next to us. A monster of a monarch butterfly, bigger than any I've ever seen, lands on Calvin's hand. "Don't move," he says, eyes focusing on the insect. "Let it go where it wants to go."

My husband and I exchange glances. For the moment, we know Calvin is in a better place. He's smiling. Maybe tonight we'll tell him. Maybe tonight he'll understand himself better. He'll adjust. And isn't that really what life is, a series of adjustments — to your faith, your marriage, your child, yourself? Adjustments to keep your boat steady, so it sails forward in the direction it was meant to go.

I lean into my husband's ear and whisper, "I'm pregnant," and he tilts his head as if to say, Stop, you're joking. I nod to reassure him it's true. The monarch, now on his hand, waves its wings just once, very slowly, as if it's flexing a muscle.

"This is nuts," he says, but in his face I see he's thrilled; he's squeezing my wrist and he's grinning.

The monarch then crawls from his hand to mine. My muscles tense with fear. The face has two black marbles for eyes, two long antennae with clubbed ends and a long, coiled-up tongue like a lizard's. I want to shake it away, to scream. I smile and cry at the same time — my dimples frozen, my cheeks wet — and just when I am about to break away from the wrist circle, my animal expert speaks.

"Don't focus on the bug part, Mom," Calvin says. "Focus on the wings." And I do. The wings are the color of a setting sun, with black veins and specks of white in a perfect design I can't wholly understand. Its threadlike legs press into my skin, securing where it stands, making its presence known, making me see that the butterfly is not as delicate as she looks, that she can fly up to the cathedral ceiling of this garden, look through the glass and flutter her colorful wings in the midst of this storm, of any storm. And she does.

Jackie Mercurio lives with her husband, five children and a black Lab in New York. She is pleased to report that, taking his own advice to "focus on the wings," her son Calvin is a happy boy today and is collaborating with her on writing a longer version of this story. Visit her at jackiemercurio.com.

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Photos: Getty Images; Evan Sklar/Offset

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