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to stop them. We were introduced to a new kind of space, and it wasn’t so much that silence was noticed and accounted for; the silence itself was beguiling and formed around us so gently that we could excuse it. Eventually, as the spaces grew larger and he did speak or sign, he could silence anyone around him. The words, when they swaggered in, became legendary.
    One such instance occurred when he was three and a half, and he walked into the bathroom where R and I were getting ready for the day. He stood with his fingertips on the counter’s edge and, miming our peppery speech, said with perfect clarity,
fuck
. At age four, he sat at our kitchen table with an untouched bowl of fruit, and R asked him—not expecting an answer, just posing the question because you never know, maybe someday an answer would come—why he hadn’t eaten any of it, and he responded,
It sucks
. Thestricken silence that followed must have lasted a full two minutes. The last times that he spoke, we were unaware that we wouldn’t hear words from him again. He was exact and said,
Bye
, at age six, and a year after that,
All done
.
    There are therapies but no particular sorcery for the problem of disappearing words, no way to pull them back. From the moment he was born, it seemed, there was much to be done. I was given to think that his development relied on my ability, together with that of countless therapists in various fields, to promote it, and that we had to overcome the invisible forces afflicting him with repetitions and skillful convincing. It seemed to me that I was supposed to solve the problem.
    The appearances and disappearances were accompanied by difference all around: he was almost two before he took his first steps. A physical therapy guru arrived from South America to give a workshop on his method, called MEDEK (translated into English, the acronym means Dynamic Method of Kinetic Stimulation), and those of us attending learned circuslike, improbable things. In a large room with a crowd of parents, the babies and toddlers were skillfully flipped and spun. He made the parents gasp by balancing the babies upright on outstretched hands, in just the way that a child learns to vertically balance a stick. We went home and turned our kitchens into therapy rooms, and under the tutelage of therapists practised this particular magic. And it was there that it happened, Gabriel the toddler, who had been unable previously to stand alone, balanced perfectly, cleanly, with his little feet on my palms; he grew, absurdly, from my open hands. Within weeks, he took his first steps.
    And yet. Words have been impervious to inducements and havedeveloped the slipperiness of what is most desired. It took years for us to understand that our entreaties would do nothing to bring his words back.

    I was walking through a building one day recently when I saw a sign admonishing people to be quiet. In fact, there were two copies of the sign, just in case the first went unnoticed: Be Quiet Because
Sounds Carry
. And the phrasing struck me suddenly, the suggestion that the sounds aren’t passive, but themselves do the carrying, like passengers hauling suitcases toward a train or rescuers laden with limp bodies from rubble. Even as sounds fly off in a rush, they’re burdened.
    I’ve come to view the seizures as thieves of Gabriel’s abilities. He was five months old when he started having them, what looked like involuntarily gestures, so apparently delicate that he had them in full view for a week without anyone understanding what they were. One after another, the seizures began in his brain and rippled out to his fingertips, so that he simply lifted his arms up to the ceiling, as many babies do to say they want to be picked up. However, in Gabriel, the gesture came with a vague look of surprise. The propulsive nature of the movement was concealed by his low muscle tone, which is characteristic of Down syndrome, and made the motion seem almost casual. He gestured