Dirty Chick Read Free Page A

pecking at the ground and one another, climbing on their siblings in a roiling sea of cuteness. Without ceremony, he grabbed half a dozen puffballs and tossed them in the box and then handed it to me.
    â€œThirty dollar,” he barked. I could barely hear him over the din.
    â€œThat’s it?” I asked. “I don’t get to pick them out? How do you know they’re good ones?”
    He looked at me as if I were speaking Inuit. Then his mouth broke into an easy smile, a wide, gummy gap in the front. “All good,” he assured me. “Chicken’s not good, ya chuck it in the pot!” Then he laughed as if this were a hilarious joke.
    After a few months, we had fresh eggs for our family, with a few left over to share with the backpackers. It still didn’t occur to me to farm, though. I was too busy running the youth hostel and urging Silas to talk or point or at least say something other than “da.” By eighteen months old, he still wasn’t walking, either, and we figured he was just a little behind.
    But then the tourist season ended, and my job at the youth hostel came to a close. We packed up our things and gave the chickensaway to a neighbor. Residency permits in hand, we prepared to move back north, where the sunshine was warm and the winters were mild.
    And that’s when we confronted the fourth reason for our unusual life choices, the one thing that kept us in New Zealand for good: DNA.

CHAPTER TWO
    FREAKY EGGS
    A t first Silas was nothing but a joy in our lives. He sat up on time, giggled and chortled at all the right moments, and loved being cuddled and kissed. Some things about him were different, but I didn’t know they were
wrong
. He never pointed or gestured. He never imitated the sounds I made. And when he cried, there were never any tears. At nineteen months, he still wasn’t walking or talking, and soon after, we learned why. Silas has a minute typographical error deep in his genetic code, just a tiny section missing, a flaw so small that it took specialized computers in Australia to find it. It’s no one’s fault. It’s just a fluke.
    Silas has a global developmental delay, which means that he’s behind in most areas and probably intellectually disabled, though no one knows by how much. At five years old, he could say a few hundred words, but he used only a handful of them, and then only one at a time. “Mih,” he would say for
milk
, and “pees” for
please
.
    Most of the time I was okay with this, because Silas was also anaffectionate little imp. He’d crawl into my bed first thing in the morning and throw his arms around my neck, and when I cuddled him back, his face lit up with joy. The one toy he loved more than anything was a little blue handheld mp3 player, which we called the Dart. I’d loaded this player with recordings of my own voice singing to Silas and reading his favorite books, as well as a selection of Broadway musicals. The music was so calming for him that watching him use the device was like watching a lion get shot with a tranquilizer dart. When his favorite songs came on, when his eyes grew wide with wonder and he hopped up and down with the sheer pleasure of song, I thought to myself that talking wasn’t the only way to communicate.
    But there was no denying that he made our lives more complicated. It was hard not knowing how Silas would turn out, and it broke my heart to think his life would be limited. There were stacks of paperwork involved in coordinating his care: medical specialists, therapists, teacher aides, and all those appointments for scans, checkups, and tests. And while we took care of Silas’s many needs, we still had our savage daughter to tame.
    Miranda was born two years after Silas. A typical three-year-old, she chatted nonstop about party dresses and princesses. She also loved riding bikes, jumping on the trampoline, and hacking her own hair off with dull scissors,