Eye Contact (17 page)

He nodded through all this. “Good,” he said, and looked away, apparently uncomfortable with a tale of problems so similar to his own.

He worked now, four days a week, at a record store in town. Once, on the eve of Suzette's planned return, she walked in and surprised him. The instant he saw her, she could see this wasn't a good idea. He was seated on a wooden stool, behind a cash register, wearing round wire-frame glasses she'd never seen before. When he saw her, he took the glasses off. “What are you doing here?” he said, not smiling.

“I just thought I'd stop by. Maybe pick something out for Suzette. She's moving back in next week.” She flipped through the contents of a rack as if this really had been her intention. Her back hurt these days and she'd begun to feel something like movement, a rippling flicker, like a fish swimming freely inside her. “I'm
allowed,
right? To come into your store?”

She meant this as a joke, a way to let him know how unfriendly the expression on his face was. “It's just”—he looked around though they were alone—“kind of a
girlfriend
thing to do.”

She stared at him and a minute later walked out, her abdomen sloshing.

For weeks, she kept expecting him to call, kept planning explanations she'd offer to Suzette, who had never, in the four months since she moved out, mentioned his name. When the time came, she decided she would be honest:
He told me he never ran into you.
They would have the conversation, leave all this behind.

But he didn't call; he never called, and her calling him would only necessitate an explanation, at last, of the baby that was now making himself known, visible every night when she lay in bed and watched tiny bumps roll across the drum of her stomach. She and Suzette established a cautious balance with each other. Suzette talked about needing to have some boundaries from the start, and Cara understood from her tone that this meant more than rules about housekeeping duties. “We need to decide what we're going to expect. We're not going to just make plans and not tell each other.”

Cara understood the mistakes she had made in the past, leaving Suzette alone too often. With her due date looming, her stomach growing, she felt a desperate certainty. “I'll be home, I promise. I won't do that old stuff.”

Suzette nodded. “We need to share in apartment work.”

“I know. I will.”

“I can't be the only one who buys milk and coffee.”

“That's right. You're right.”

“And on weekends, I may need to go home. I can't promise I'll always be here, either.”

“Okay. That's fine.”

In between conversations like this one, there were also good times—going to birthing classes, buying baby supplies. Cara kept busy with preparations and gave herself no time to consider what had happened to Kevin or why their friendship had dissolved so swiftly in the wake of a single, inexplicable misstep on her part. She assumed that it was her fault, that visiting him at work violated some rule to the measured friendship they'd erected. She missed him but, truthfully, felt a certain sense of relief that not seeing him at all, by some choice on his part, left her with one less person to explain herself to. It had been hard enough with her parents, who greeted her announcement with perfect silence and then, from her mother, an uncharacteristic burst of tears. The tears came during what she'd anticipated as the hardest part of the conversation: the question of paternity. During the course of her prenatal visits, a sonogram had determined the fetus to be smaller, less developed than he should be, given the dates she'd provided. Cara heard this, unable to pull her eyes away from the frozen black-and-white picture on the monitor screen—he looked like a Martian, painted gray, with a broken string of pearls loosed from his neck. “That's the spine,” the technician had said, slightly bored, as if it were obvious, and Cara felt a trembling sense of pride at the miracle of this accomplishment, a feeling she hadn't experienced in years. She'd done it! Something her mother had struggled with so, and only succeeded at once. “He's normal,” the doctor said, “Just smaller than we'd expect, which means you might have been slightly off on your dates.”

Only later did she contemplate this long enough to consider the possibility that when she slept with Kevin claiming protection she didn't have, she wasn't already pregnant. “I don't know who the father is,” she told her parents. This was easier, she'd decided, than any other explanation she could offer:
He's married; he was a friend, now he's not.
She tried to make it clear, even through their tears,
It doesn't matter.

Explaining any of this to Kevin, including the slim possibility he was involved, would only be a trial, one she was happy to avoid, mostly because she was happy about everything. As the pregnancy progressed, her happiness grew until she felt guilty by the size of it. Her parents came around, agreed to help her financially; Suzette was back, doing well. The world was lining up to allow this wonder to be truly hers. Soon, she'd have a baby.

The last night of their birthing class, she and Suzette went out to dinner to celebrate an end to meeting with people they had nothing but due dates in common with. They sat, giddy with excitement, toasting with their water glasses, and Cara looked up to see, across the restaurant, Kevin and his mother standing in the doorway.

He made slow progress toward them, his expression shifting as he took in her changes. She didn't warn Suzette who was approaching slowly behind her. Instead she let a silence fall, and when he got to their table, she understood—in Suzette's gasp of surprise, in the awkward way Kevin stepped back and looked away—that all those months ago, Suzette hadn't lied. Kevin had.

After that, came a terrible night of confession.

“I only slept with him once,” Cara said. “After you moved out and he told me he'd never run into you at all. I didn't know what to think. You were gone and I needed a friend.” She hesitated, wanting Suzette to understand—it hadn't been Oliver who broke her heart. “It felt like you were my family, and you left.”

“That's ridiculous,” Suzette snapped. “You have a family.”

“There's a difference. You're my chosen family. And Kevin and I were just friends. Right away, we decided just to be friends. He was the one who insisted on that. He was the one who didn't want anything more to happen.”

Suzette stood in their living room, shaking her head, looking around the room slowly as if she were trying to memorize its contents before she stepped out of it. “I can't do this, Cara,” she said. “I don't want to do this.”

Cara leaned over her enormous belly. Sometimes in Suzette's presence she tried to draw less attention to her pregnancy, to sit straighter, keep her hands off her abdomen. Now, with three weeks to go, it was impossible. “Do
what
?” She was growing defensive, already self-protective. She had a baby to think about, something more important than these dramas.

“I can't keep doing this. Living your life.”

“Is that what it is?”

“My God, don't you
see
it? This baby will come and I won't be his mother. I'll be what I've always been—your friend. That's ridiculous. It's idiotic. Nobody should do that.”

Cara sat back. They had talked about this, of course. Not enough, perhaps, but they had said it would be a new kind of family. “Someday, there'll be a sit-com of this and we'll have lived it,” Cara had said, straining slightly, as she always did, to see things optimistically.

Suzette stared at her, long and hard, her eyes trembling with the weight of words she wasn't saying. “I'm not going to be your labor coach. It's too much for me. I can't do it.”

“Fine,” Cara said, thinking of Kevin's words:
Too much drama isn't good for me. To me, you're drama.

“This isn't really friendship, Cara. Don't you see that?”

The next day, Cara came home to find cardboard boxes stacked up in the hallway. Seeing them, she actually felt a little relieved. She was nine months pregnant, on the brink of becoming a mother and a new person with a past she could divorce herself from. She didn't have the time to wonder why she had this effect on people, why her friendship was more than Suzette or Kevin could bear. She couldn't examine it, could only decide:
Never again.
Never again would she risk this mistake, believing that real love, sustained love, lived safest and longest, went deepest in friendship. Suzette had already moved out once and broken her heart. Kevin had abandoned her for the crime of stopping by work. Never again would she reach out to people who might recoil from an outstretched hand. And she hadn't.

After Suzette moved out, there was some attempt at rapprochement. Cara's mother stood in as her labor coach, but Suzette came to the hospital bearing a guilty bouquet of Mylar balloons. “He's beautiful,” she said, pushing the balloons in the door. “I can't believe how beautiful he is.”

To Cara's exhausted post-delivery eyes, Suzette seemed too cheerful, too obviously relieved to have spared herself from assisting in Adam's arrival to the world. She hugged Cara, who sat stiffly in bed and whispered, “Thanks.”

“I want to come visit when you get him home.”

“Okay,” Cara said, too weak to argue.

Two days later, Adam came home, a wailing, howling infant, beset by eczema, chronic ear infections, a digestive tract that produced only vomit and viscous green diarrhea. Within a month it was clear she needed help, so she moved back in with her parents. Within six months she felt as if she had aged a decade—had become an exhausted, middle-aged twenty-one-year-old who pushed a stroller for miles to service a baby who needed constant movement to sleep and soothe his nerves. Suzette visited a handful of times, and invariably each visit ended in some eruption from Adam, wails that jolted Suzette out of her chair, out of the house, leaving in a flurry that felt more like an escape. Cara remembers all those visits as strained and awful, full of nervous small talk, everything real between them unspeakable.

Alone with her mother, Cara kept up a front of stoic cheer about her squalling baby. Every night they asked themselves the same questions as he cried in their arms—Is he tired? Is he hungry?—when he was none of those things. He was a boy at no peace inside his skin. If other babies quieted by being picked up, he would squirm from the hands that held him, arch away from Cara's breast, stiffen in her arms. In the terrible isolation of Adam's infancy, she felt certain the problem lay with her, and she wanted to understand what she hadn't had the courage to ask Suzette before:
What am I doing wrong? Why is my love such a terrible thing?

Once—on Suzette's final visit, the last time she laid eyes on her only friend—in the quiet reprieve of a nap from Adam, Cara whispered the truth that she needed to tell someone: “There's something wrong with me, Suze. My baby doesn't want me. I'm not meant to be a mother.” It was terrifying to speak this way, in a frantic, candid rush, but she had to, had to get it all out, dredge up the truth and lay it out for someone. “He tries to get away. Even when I hold him, he doesn't look at me. Sometimes he's fine and he'll only start crying when I pick him up. Last week, I took him to the doctor's office and the only person who could calm him was the receptionist.” Suzette stared at her. “I need to know,” Cara said, frantic with exhaustion. “Just tell me, what's wrong with me? What am I doing that's so awful?”

Suzette never spoke, never answered the question.

“W
OW
,” L
INCOLN WHISTLES
after Cara tells him what Adam said. For the story to have any impact at all, she has to explain echolalia and how it works: “There's immediate echolalia, where he repeats the last thing you've just said. Usually that's a way of processing or affirming what's been said. I ask, ‘Adam, you want a cookie?' and he says ‘Cookie?' which means yes. But there's also delayed, where it comes later, sort of a playback mode. Sometimes it's lines from movies, or things teachers have said. He tends to repeat warnings a lot, or rules. I think it's his way of remembering them.” Of course maybe Lincoln knows this already.

“And you think this was something he heard in the woods?”

“Yes, I'm sure of it.”

“It's not from any video, right? David, my nephew, does videos.”

“These days the only thing he watches is opera. If he was echoing an opera, he would have sung it. The thing is—there was definitely an accent to it.” She takes a moment to remember exactly how he said it.
Wach youseff
.

“Can he do it on command? Could we get a tape of it?”

“No, it's too unpredictable.”

“But there was an accent, you'd say?”

“Yes. Definitely.”

She also tells him about the rabbit's foot and the only thing it could mean:
Yes, Adam was looking, yes, he saw what happened and was telling them, in his own way, what weapon had been used.

“We should pick up that rabbit's foot. If it belonged to Amelia, maybe we can trace where she bought it.”

“Is there a toy store that sells these things?” Cara asks. It seems so macabre—a dead animal's fur-covered appendage.

“We'll see,” Lincoln says. “No stone unturned.”

Cara doesn't tell him the other part of the story, the thing that happened after she pried up the rabbit's foot and showed it to Adam. She expected him to break down, have an episode of some kind, and instead he seemed to snap out of whatever trance he'd been in. He looked at the rabbit's foot, then down at the book they'd been reading, and smiled to discover what it was. He took the spoon and began feeding himself. A minute later, he pointed to the book as if he couldn't think why she wasn't reading it.

The next morning in the kitchen, it's the same. He doesn't speak, but he's back with her in some way that he hasn't been for days. He's hungry, opening the refrigerator, bending down in search of something to eat. Eventually he reaches for some orange juice, pulls it out, gets himself a cup. “Adam?” she says, watching all this.

He looks up at her and smiles.

“Good morning,” she says.

“Good morning,” he says.

A half hour later comes another shock. Standing in the kitchen, she turns around to discover he's right behind her, fully dressed, with his backpack on. Just as she catches her breath from this surprise, there is another, fast on its heels.

“School,” he says. The first word he's spoken, unechoed, in four days.

 

Morgan can't control the places his thoughts take him. Like recently he's been thinking this: Maybe if he gets to be good enough friends with Cara, she'll consider inviting him for a sleepover, something he's never done before because he doesn't have any friends. Maybe if she does that, he can pack enough clothes for two nights, and if it goes well, he'll just stay on. He'll tell her he can stay with Adam if she wants to run an errand, which he could, she's already said Adam likes him. Hard to be sure when someone doesn't talk, but he believes her.

Of course, it could also be a disaster. There would be food to think about—he'd have to bring his own, unless he told her which brand of macaroni and cheese to buy. Which hot dogs he can eat. A lot of people think hot dogs are all the same, because they don't realize they're not. There are very different colors, and some hot dogs have things that can only be described as skins. But if he made a list—what he'd need, what to remember—it might work out.

He might spend one night a week, then four. Something like that.

Then he wouldn't have to be here when his mother figures out what he's done. Wouldn't have to face what he imagines she'll say. “My son,” she'll call him. “My
son
did this.” He has thought about it a hundred times. Maybe she'll start by saying, “My son did
this
?”

It's only a matter of time before she finds out. He knows that much.

When he looks back, Morgan can see that he's been making certain mistakes all his life. In kindergarten, he once cried when the paper apples fell off the paper-apple name tree—cried for so long and so hard that his mother was called and appeared in the nurse's office to say, “For God's sake, Morgan, stop crying already,” which he did because he was so surprised to see her, so grateful and relieved.
My mother!
he thought, understanding that with her here, it was over now, the paper-apple-tree nightmare.

After that, there were more mistakes, episodes he can't explain. In first grade Tianna Bradley hit him on the playground, and instead of hitting her back, he hit himself, over and over, until a small group of children gathered around him to laugh. “Why'd you do
that
?” his mother asked him when he told her about it, later, in tears. He couldn't explain himself, or why these things happened.

In second grade, he decided to stop crying so much. “That sounds good,” his mother said when he told her. “If you see me crying, pinch me really hard,” he told her, based on a
NOVA
show he'd seen the night before about mice being trained with electrical shocks. His mother thought about this, then nodded and shrugged. “If you say so.” He stared at her, suddenly anxious. What if he was crying over something real, a lost jacket, for instance? Would she really pinch him then?

For two weeks he's been carrying this horrible weight around, picturing his mother's face, imagining her disappointment. He certainly didn't mean to start the fire. He'd meant only to ruin his shoes so his mother would be reasonable and buy him a new pair. If they were melted, he thought, she'd see he couldn't wear them. She wouldn't say things like “They cost three hundred dollars, Morgan. They're orthopedic, of course they're ugly. I'm sorry, but you have flat feet. You got them from your father, don't blame me.”

They looked plastic.

In homeroom, a girl named Wendy with blond hair asked if they were.

“No.” Because he couldn't think of anything else, he added, “They're orthopedic.”

“Oh my God,” she said and turned away.

This was the problem: they didn't burn. They didn't even melt. He sat there for an hour holding up match after match and nothing happened. The mistake—and he knows this now, no question in his mind— was wondering if something was wrong with his matches. They weren't really burning, he thought. They weren't really matches. That's when he tried them, as an experiment, on a bush. Did that mean it was an accident? He couldn't be sure. Would anyone believe that he'd tried to stop it, even peed on the bush, as he'd seen his father do once on a camping trip? “Nature's fire hydrant,” he'd said, peeing forever, as his father could, a happy smile on his face.

Of course, for Morgan it didn't work because nothing worked for him the way it was supposed to. Could he explain that to people? That he was good at many things, or had been once—geography, spelling, science fair projects—but he had a small bladder?

“I have learned this,” he wrote in his confession. “There are times in your life when only one thing matters. You have what it takes or you don't.”

 

Adam wants to get back to school, to find the girl, warn her not to go into the woods again because he remembers what the woods has now: leaves on the ground, muddy dirt that squishes brown moons onto their shoes, a man with a yellow shirt, waiting. He needs to talk to her, not anyone else, because the rules are very clear. “Don't tell anyone,” she said. “Whatever you do, don't tell.”

He is surprised at first. His mother says yes.

“If you're sure about this,” she says. She claps her hands together, turns around, and says to the refrigerator, “He says he wants to go back to school.”

On the bus, though, he starts to worry. Things feel different. Glenn, the driver who usually calls him Chief, who should say “Howdy, Chief,” instead puts out his hand and says, “Good to see you, Chief.” Adam walks by the hand he can't touch into the seat behind Glenn that looks the same but feels different because there isn't enough noise, there's the thrum of the engine but no voices on top of it, no screaming children.

When he gets off, Phil is there, putting a hand on his shoulder, which he shouldn't do. “Good to have you back, buddy,” Phil says, but he can't answer because there's a crowd of shoes around him. He has to concentrate on these if he wants to find the girl's brown sandals. Most days she wears yellow socks, but sometimes she wears other colors, too. Pink. Or orange. If he sees them, he will go closer, tell her what he needs to:
Don't keep walking.

There are rules to school that get him from one place to another safely without looking up. He walks along walls, knows from the floor pattern and the sound of pipes where the water fountain is, so he can circle around, can touch each letter on the silver bar: P-U-S-H.

He can't look for the girl now, with so many people and voices all around him.

He hears his name, feels people touch his shoulder, his backpack, but he doesn't look up. He needs the classroom, the schedule of the day posted on the wall, math, language arts, social studies. He needs everything to move around him as it always does, until 11:15, when the clock hands click onto the tilted
L
where they need to be for everyone to stand, move into lines that say, at last, it's recess.

 

All morning Cara keeps moving around the house, too nervous to sit. To busy herself, she's tried calling Carol, the school occupational therapist, to ask if she worked with Amelia at all. Mostly she's curious to find out if the girl was clumsy, if maybe she fell down on their walk and grabbed Adam's sweater on the way. Carol said she knew Amelia a bit, and had done some initial testing the first week of school, but hadn't been able to come up with much. “She was a puzzle. There was quite a bit she couldn't do, which made me worry that I'd started the testing at too high a level, which can frustrate the kids, make them shut down and skew the results. But she seemed unfazed by the whole thing. At the end she asked me if I had any pets and we talked about animals for a while.”

Two hours earlier, Cara had put Adam on the bus because she wanted to reward him for a nearly perfect morning. She checked with Bill, the officer stationed in the car out front that morning, who radioed the station where they'd said fine, they'd send extra security. Now she worries about everything that might happen: other children pointing at Adam, whispering around him, extra security officers who will feel, to him, like terrifying strangers, pressing down. Why didn't she think of this? Adam will go to school expecting what he cherishes most—everything the same—and it won't be so. There will be new rules, more people, differences he'll feel but not understand. She needs to go there, sit as inconspicuously as possible in the back of the room and watch signs of the composure he kept all morning to break, for anxiety to replace it, and then fear, then a fit.

On her way out the door, the telephone rings. She lets the answering machine click on, hears Matt Lincoln's voice behind her: “Okay, Cara, it looks like we've got something at last. I've told everyone about the rabbit's foot, and they think maybe he can help us. We need Adam to come down again after school today. We've got another psychologist in, a Dr. Katzenbaum, who says she knows him. We're going to try and get Adam to ID the guy.”

 

“You don't have to finish it now, buddy,” Phil says, pointing to a worksheet of number problems. “We have a little bit of catching up to do, but not that much.”

Adam thinks,
If I don't have to, I won't
. I'll choose
“No, thank you.”

He could say
No, thank you,
out loud with his voice, but it doesn't seem like he has to even do that. The worksheet disappears.

“You want to just hit the library? Check out the music books, maybe?”

The clock is in a
V
, 11:07—if they go to the library, he won't be here for lineup. He will miss recess, which sometimes happens. It disappears without him.

He doesn't answer. Doesn't move.

Phil stands up. “How 'bout it, big guy. Library time?”

No, he shakes his head. Points to the clock.

“I know what time it is. We're not going out to recess today. We're doing something else. We're going to the library, or the resource room. Your choice.”

No. He has to go to recess. He has to find her.

Phil sits back down, leans into his ear too close. “Look, it's not my decision; they're telling me you can't go outside for recess, okay? Ms. Tesler, the principal, says so. You don't want me to get in trouble with Ms. Tesler, do you?”

Adam hears himself say his first word of the day: “Recess.”

“Nice job. Nice to hear you talk again.”

He says it again. “Recess.”

“Just not today. Maybe tomorrow or the next day.”