Eye Contact (23 page)

They live in a condominium sandwiched between identical units with no numbers over the door. “We're the one with the red Dodge minivan parked in front,” she said, though she could just as easily have said,
We're the ones who look like a plastic toy factory exploded on our front lawn.

Olivia answers the door wearing a pink jogging suit and holding the baby. “You'll have to excuse the mess,” she says. In her free hand is a half-eaten apple, in the other, beneath the baby's bottom, is a wadded-up paper towel. She introduces her children, baby Benjamin and three-year-old Katie, sitting inches from the TV and pointing a stubby finger at the screen. “It's on the lamp, Steve! Look on the lamp!” Cara can hardly believe such a sentence coming out of such a tiny person, but she always feels this way around typically developing kids—to her, they all seem wildly precocious.

“I'm sorry about this, but the only thing I can offer you is an apple. My husband brought home a crate of apples from the store and I've got apples, apples, apples coming out my ears.”

“An apple sounds great,” Cara says, realizing she's hungry, that in the surprise of Morgan's visit, she forgot to eat breakfast. “Here are the drawings,” Cara says, laying the pile on the kitchen table. She has taken the one of herself out and left it at home on the kitchen table, along with one of Adam, which she wants to show him when the time is right. “She was very talented.”

For a minute Olivia says nothing. She puts the baby on the floor, turns to the pile, and touches the top one. Cara watches him crawl straight for the apple box, pick one out, and roll it toward his mother's feet. When she looks up, she sees tears in Olivia's eyes. “I'm sorry,” Cara whispers. “Maybe I shouldn't have brought them.”

She shakes her head. “No, it's all right. You say your friend found these at school?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where?”

“I guess in one of the games.”

She nods. “She must have been hiding them. I told her she wasn't allowed to draw at school anymore. That's all she did at her old school. They never demanded anything of her, never held her to any expectations at all. She couldn't
read
because they let her do this all day long.” She points to the drawings and steps back, accidentally kicking an apple by her foot.

Cara knows that Amelia was in the special ed room, but no one has ever told her why, or what Amelia's diagnosis was. “She had trouble reading?” Cara says, then adds quickly, “Adam had a lot of trouble, too. Especially in the beginning.”

“She was years behind. We had to get her out of the old school; they weren't doing anything for her. It was terrible.” It's amazing to see: Olivia
is
angry, but not at
this
school. “They told me she'd never learn to read, that I wasn't doing her any favors by pushing her to do things she couldn't.” Across the room, the baby has begun a game of freeing every apple from the confines of the crate. Around him, a dozen apples rock gently. “You want to know who taught her to read? I did. This summer. Ten years old and she finally learned to read.”

“What was the trouble exactly?”

“She had about four different diagnoses. We used to say her medical record looked like an alphabet soup. Finally they settled on PDD-NOS.”

Cara stares at her, stunned. She knows this shorthand: PDD-NOS, pervasive developmental disorder—not otherwise specified.

“It's a way of saying she was on the autistic spectrum, but they don't really know exactly what's going on.”

“She was on the spectrum?”

“Oh sure.” Olivia nods. “More so when she was younger. She drew all the time, played with her stuffed animals, hated going anywhere, hated leaving the house. We had these window blinds and she would open and close them, open and close them all day long.”

How is this
possible
? “Why didn't anyone tell me this?”

“No one at the school knew. I kept her records back. Her father and I never agreed on this. He didn't see the progress she was making, but I did. I was with her all day, I heard her talk about wanting friends. At night, she would lie in bed and talk about wanting playdates and then, when I tried to set them up, everyone said no.” The tears still hover in her eyes as she busies herself picking up apples. “With one girl I broke down and begged her mother. I said, ‘My Amelia needs help with this. She needs to practice playing with other children her own age. Would Katie consider just coming over once and baking some cookies with Amelia?'”

“What did she say?”

“That she felt bad, but she didn't think she could force her daughter to do it.” She wipes her eyes and shakes her head. “I was going to give them her records, I just wanted to wait a little bit—see if she did better without the label.”

Cara almost can't bear to ask. “Did she?”

“I think so. She liked this school. She was learning some things. I could see that.”

Cara can't get over it: Amelia was once autistic and now recovered enough that no one along the way—June, Phil, no one—had recognized this possibility? What had Phil said?
She might have had some special needs?
She wants to say it's not possible, and then she wants to ask,
How did you do it? What worked?
“She must have been doing so well,” Cara says softly. “What therapies did you use?”

“We tried a lot of things. I think changing her diet made a difference.”

Cara nods. When Adam was first diagnosed, the Internet was full of research saying that autism could be an extreme manifestation of a food allergy. Every mother she met online yanked dairy and wheat out of their houses, and the testimonials flew back and forth, everything punctuated with exclamation points. “He's speaking in sentences now!” “I can vacuum the house without hysterics!” “He plays with something other than the bath plug!” After starting him on the diet, Cara saw changes with Adam, too—saw the fog start to lift. In three months, he gained nine months of language. He started putting words together, using short sentences, talking with something like emotion in his voice. Now the years have crept by and she's lost touch with all those mothers, stopped logging on for company every night, though she's always wondered: did the others keep going, or did it work the way it had with Adam, in bits and pieces that sometimes made it seem as if nothing good had happened at all? He has sentences now, and language, but all of it is a far cry from normal. She knows the diet works because when they slip off of it, he slips, too, and spends a day spinning circles in the corner, but she's always wondered: if this was the problem and it's been corrected, why isn't he normal?

She looks at Olivia. “The diet did it?”

“I don't know. Sometimes I thought so, but she still had stomach issues. She wasn't always continent, exactly.”

Cara nods. “Adam has accidents, too.”

“It used to be she didn't care. Then recently she started being very embarrassed.” She hesitates. “And secretive. Some days she came home without any underpants on, and I would ask her what happened and she wouldn't tell me.” She isn't crying anymore, but her voice betrays the effort not to. “I've wondered if maybe she went out to the woods to bury them. I don't think it was her first time there.” Her head bends under the weight of this admission. “Once she brought home a bag of underpants that were covered in dirt, two pairs, and I didn't know what to think. I said, ‘Amelia, what is this?'”

Cara thinks about the rabbit's foot, found and never explained, these conversations without answers. She knows what it means to have a child who remains, in every fundamental way, a mystery. “What did she say?”

“Nothing.” She shakes her head and bends down to collect the apples. “I'm sorry she took your son out there, too. I'm sorry he got involved.”

Cara reaches over and touches Olivia's arm. “You mustn't think it was her fault.”

“No, I know. I just wanted you to know that I'm sorry. She liked Adam so much.”

Cara stops. It's the first time she's ever heard someone say this. “What did she say about him?”

“Oh, funny things. That he hummed a lot. His hands—what did she say about his hands?—they danced when he was happy. That's how I guessed he was probably autistic, too. These last few weeks she didn't want to go to school, and then she'd remember: ‘Recess Adam?' And I'd say, ‘You have to go to school to see Recess Adam, right?'”

My God—it sounded like a conversation from her own house.

“She wanted to invite him over, and then she changed her mind. She knew where he lived, and I think she was scared of what he'd think of this apartment.”

Adam?
Was she serious?

“I told her he probably wouldn't care, but she was nervous. She actually said, ‘He'll think we're poor,' and I said, ‘Honey, we
are
.'”

Driving over here, Cara had tried to imagine what she would say, what she would want to hear if the situation were reversed. She could only guess this: she'd want to hear people tell her any minuscule anecdote they remembered about him. She'd want to gather proof that for all of his deficits, Adam mattered to others, had an effect, a place on this earth. She reaches across the table to touch this woman's hand. “I know that Adam was changed by Amelia. He's different now, since his friendship with her.”

This seems to be the right thing. Olivia looks up, a damp smile on her face. “How?”

“Well…” Cara tries to think: what is a good example? “Adam isn't as verbal as she was. Especially in describing anything abstract like his own emotions. But I can see him thinking about her sometimes. He went to school the other day, and got very upset, had more of a meltdown than I've seen in years, and I have to assume it's because he misses her. It was right before recess when they usually saw each other—” She stops speaking. For the first time, it occurs to her:
Did he think he would see Amelia at recess yesterday? Is it possible he doesn't realize she's dead?
“He can't tell me what happened in the woods or why they went out there, but I can tell he's thinking about it. He keeps wanting to watch this opera,
The Magic Flute
, where everyone's in the woods and magical things are happening and I keep”—she hesitates, choosing her words carefully— “hoping that's what it was like. That they were on an adventure, sharing it with each other.”

Olivia nods, crying quietly, a hand over her face. “I just wish—”

“What?”

Her eyes are red, filled with tears. “I wish I'd been more patient with her. I have the two little ones, and sometimes Amelia was more work than both of them, going on and on, repeating and repeating, hanging on my arm. Sometimes I would say, ‘Amelia you have to go to your room, I can't stand it anymore.'”

Cara has had these moments, too. Adam stuck in a groove. A few months ago they had a blowup when he wouldn't stop saying “An old man in Texas,” a phrase he'd heard on the radio, over and over. “What does it even
mean
?” she screamed, and left the room, slamming the door so he would understand: he couldn't just do this, annoy people to death. Afterward, she went into his room, where he'd buried himself in his bed. She lay down beside him and whispered, “I'm sorry,” which gave him new words to lock on to. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” he said over and over. They were terrible, those fights.

“I've done the same thing,” she says softly. “I know how you feel.”

 

Now that he's put the pieces together, Morgan walks back to algebra and thinks about the one time he saw Chris actually being bullied. It was early in the morning, before school started, and at first he didn't realize it was Chris. He recognized three ninth-graders from their black leather jackets circling around a kid who held a purple backpack in front of his face, and then he recognized the familiar, high-pitched voice. “God, you guys. Why don't you just leave me
alone
?” They were poking at him with sticks, jabbing his knees and then his shoes.

Now Morgan realizes there are things he might have done to help. He could have yelled; he could have found a teacher or Marianne. At the time, though, none of these possibilities occurred to him. When he recognized Chris's voice, he turned his eyes away, down to the floor. He walked away and tried to forget the whole thing, the way he does when he isn't sure, but suspects, people are being mean to him. He didn't really know the boys, who hardly come to school and study so little they carry no backpacks, but there are other bullies, a list he could start with the oversize woodshop boys who are fourteen and already shaving: Randall Im, Chris Wyant, Brad Stonewall. He could also include the small-but-mean boys: Harrison Rogers, Wilson Burnstein, who once, in fifth grade, called Morgan a homo for going into a bathroom stall to pee. For a month afterward, Morgan drank nothing at breakfast and never peed at school. A comment like this can be much worse than name-calling, Morgan has learned. Someone whispers, “Freak,” when you're walking down the hall and it's possible to believe that he might be thinking of a book or singing a song. Someone looks you in the eye and calls you retarded, though, and it's harder to ignore.