I make this deduction from the following facts:

1. The room that I am in is monochromatic-floor, walls, ceiling all the color of pale flesh.

2. The room is soft. When I walk, it feels like walking on a tongue. When I lean against the walls, they lean against me, too. I cannot reach the ceiling, but it stands to reason it is the same. There’s one door, without any windows, or a knob.

3. There is no noise except for my breathing.

4. There is no furniture. Just a mat, which is flesh-colored, too, and soft.

5. There is a grate in the middle of the floor, but when I look down inside it, I cannot see anything. Maybe that’s the tunnel that leads back to earth.

Then again, there are other factors that lead me to believe that I might not actually be dead after all.

1. If I were dead, why would I be breathing?

2. Shouldn’t there be other dead people around?

3. Dead people don’t have fierce headaches, do they?

4. Heaven probably does not have a door, knob notwithstanding.

I touch my hand to my scalp and find a bandage shaped like a butterfly. There is blood on my shirt that has dried brown and stiff. My eyes are swollen, and there are tiny cuts on my hands.

I walk around the grate, giving it a wide berth. Then I lie down on the mat with my arms crossed over my chest.

This is what my grandfather looked like, in his coffin.

This is not how Jess looked.

Maybe she’s what is inside that grate. Maybe she is on the other side of that door. Would she be happy to see me? Or angry? Would I look at her and be able to tell the difference?

I wish I could cry, like other humans do.

Jacob’s medicines and supplements fill two full gallon-size Ziploc bags. Some are prescription-antianxiety meds given by Dr. Murano, for example-and others, like the glutathione, I get online for him. I am waiting outside the visitors’ entrance of the jail, holding these, when the door is unlocked.

My mother used to tell me how, when she was a little girl, her appendix burst. That was back in the day before parents were allowed to stay with their children during hospitalizations, and so my grandmother would arrive four hours before visiting hours began and would stand at the front of a roped-off queue that my mother could see from her hospital bed. My grandmother would just stand there, smiling and waving, until they let her in.

If Jacob knows I’m waiting for him, if he knows that I will see him every day at nine o’clock-well, that’s a routine he can cling to.

I would have expected there to be more people waiting with me for the front door to open, but maybe for the rest of the mothers who have come to jail to visit their sons, this is old hat. Maybe they are used to the routine. There is only one other person waiting with me, a man dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase. He must be a lawyer. He stamps his feet. “Cold out,” he says, smiling tightly.

I smile back. “It is.” He must be a defense attorney, coming in here to see his client. “Do you, um, know how this works?”

“Oh, first time?” he says. “It’s a piece of cake. You go in, give up your license, and go through the metal detectors. Kind of like checking in for a flight.”

“Except you don’t go anywhere,” I muse.

He glances at me and laughs. “That’s for damn sure.”

A correctional officer appears on the other side of the glass door and turns the lock. “Hey, Joe,” the lawyer says, and the officer grunts a greeting. “You see the Bruins last night?”

“Yeah. Answer me this. How come the Patriots and the Sox can win championships but the Bs are still skating like crap?”

I follow them to a control booth, where the officer steps inside and the lawyer hands over his driver’s license. The lawyer scribbles something on a clipboard and hands his keys to the officer. Then he walks through a metal detector, heading down a hall where I lose sight of him.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” the officer asks.

“Yes. I’m here to visit my son. Jacob Hunt.”

“Hunt.” He scans a list. “Oh, Hunt. Right. He just came in last night.”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’re not approved yet.”

“For what?”

“Visitation. You’ll probably be clear by Saturday-that’s when visiting hours are, anyway.”

“Saturday?” I repeat. “You expect me to wait till Saturday?”

“Sorry, ma’am. Until you’re cleared, I can’t help you.”

“My son is autistic. He needs to see me. When his routine gets changed, he can get incredibly upset. Even violent.”

“Guess it’s a good thing he’s behind bars, then,” the officer says.

“But he needs his medication…” I lift the two Ziploc bags and set them on the lip of the counter.

“Our medical staff can administer prescription meds,” the officer says. “I can get you a form to fill out for that.”

“There are dietary supplements, too. And he can’t eat glutens, or caseins-”

“Have his doctor contact the warden’s office.”

Jacob’s diet and supplements, however, weren’t mandated by a doctor-they were just tips, like a hundred others, that mothers of autistic kids had learned over the years and had passed down to others in the same boat, as something that might work. “When Jacob breaks the diet, his behavior gets much worse…”

“Maybe we should put all our inmates on it, then,” the officer says. “Look, I’m sorry, but if we don’t get a doctor’s note, we don’t pass it along to the inmate.”

Was it my fault that the medical community couldn’t endorse treatments that autistic parents swore by? That money for autism research was spread so thin that even though many physicians would agree these supplements helped Jacob to focus or to take the edge off his hypersensitivity, they couldn’t scientifically tell you why? If I’d waited for doctors and scientists to tell me conclusively how to help my son, he would still be locked in his own little world like he was when he was three, unresponsive and isolated.

Not unlike, I realize, a jail cell.

Tears fill my eyes. “I don’t know what to do.”

I must look like I’m about to fall apart, because the officer’s voice gets softer. “Your son have a lawyer?” he asks.

I nod.

“Might be a good place to start,” he suggests.

From Auntie Em’s column:

What I Know Now That I Wish I’d Known Before I Had Kids

1. If you stick a piece of bread in a VCR, it will not come out intact.

2. Garbage bags don’t work as parachutes.

3. Childproofing is a relative term.

4. A tantrum is like a magnet: eyes cannot help but lock onto you and your child when it happens.

5. Legos are not absorbed by the digestive tract.

6. Snow is a food group.

7. Kids know when you are not listening to them.

8. A Brussels sprout covered in cheese is still a Brussels sprout.

9. The best place to cry is in a mother’s arms.

10. You’ll never be as good a mother as you want to be.

From my car, I call Oliver Bond. “They won’t let me in to see Jacob,” I say.

In the background I can hear a dog bark. “Okay.”

“Okay? I can’t see my son, and you think that’s okay?”

“I meant okay, as in tell me more. Not okay as in… Just tell me what they said.”

“I’m not on some approved visitors list,” I shout. “Do you think Jacob has any idea that he needs to tell the jail who can and cannot visit him?”

“Emma,” the lawyer says. “Take a deep breath.”

“I can’t take a deep breath. Jacob does not belong in jail.”

“I know. I’m sorry about that-”

“Don’t be sorry,” I snap. “Be effective. Get me in to visit my son.”

He is quiet for a moment. “All right,” Oliver says finally. “Let me see what I can do.”

I can’t say it’s a surprise to find Theo at home, but I am so mentally drained that I don’t have the fortitude to ask him why he is here, instead of at school. “They wouldn’t let me in to see Jacob,” I say.