Eye Contact (25 page)

After she hangs up, she decides that's not all she wants. There's something else. She runs outside. Holding her sweater closed against the cold, she taps on the window of Teddy's police car and bends down as it lowers. “I want to see Suzette,” she says. “I need to talk to her.”

For a long time, Teddy stares at her, as if he's absorbing what she's asking in pieces. “Right now?”

“Yes, right now. School's not out for two hours. I want to go now.”

 

For the rest of the day, Morgan visits the bathrooms as often as he possibly can. For three hours, his graffiti goes without response, then at the end of the day, he climbs the stairs to pee in the privacy of an empty third-floor bathroom and finds, written in pencil below his Magic Marker message:
Yeah, I know.
The writing is tiny, but thrilling, so pale it's as if the person wrote it halfheartedly, a handwritten whisper.

He needs to act fast. In five minutes this bathroom will have people moving in and out of it. He has thought of several contingency plans for this possibility:
Write me a note and push it through locker number 2536
might become an invitation to the derelicts who push lit matches into lockers. His best hope is a message that will be missed by the thugs and read by the person that matters.
Meet me in Rogers Park after school,
he writes in pale pencil, and then, to ensure privacy, he blackens out what came before. After that, he moves down hallways, studies the faces of strangers for the shadowy, haunted look of knowledge. Someone at this school knows something, he thinks, counting off the minutes until he will, too.

 

Maybe this will be a mistake, but Cara doesn't want to doubt herself now or question what she's doing. Kevin's call has shot her full of adrenaline, and she's on a mission to make some amends, offer apologies and explanations and get some of her own. For years, she's thought of her past as a shadowy series of misunderstandings best left unexamined. Whenever anyone has asked about Suzette, she's said the same thing, “Something happened but I don't really know what,” as her only explanation. “We don't talk anymore.” Now they
will
talk and she'll understand better what happened all those years ago to drive them so far from each other's lives.

The apartment that Teddy and Suzette share in Chester is a twenty-minute drive away, which is a risk. If Adam has another episode and the school calls, it will take some time to get back to him, but so be it, she decides. She needs to do this. As they drive, Teddy fills in the details, tells her a bit more than she got from Kevin.
Suzette has kept up with her painting, she works from home as a graphic designer for Web pages. And no, she never leaves the apartment, hasn't for more than a year.

Cara shakes her head. “A year? Really?”

“It's more common than you think. Especially these days, when people can work at home, and order groceries online. She doesn't really need me to live with her, but I don't want to move out yet. Even though she says I can, I don't want to leave her alone.”

Cara hears all this and tries to take it in. “I didn't know, Teddy.”

“No. Of course you didn't.” Without having directly addressed the issue, he seems to have let go of his anger, which is a relief.

“When we were kids”—her voice wavers—“she was so sure of herself in ways that I wasn't. She didn't care what other people thought. She felt so strongly about certain things.” She tries to remember exactly what she means, and can only think of the last subject Suzette felt strongly about: Kevin.
Friendship means you help the other person. You stand by them.
Why didn't she remember this and realize Suzette couldn't possibly have lied about her friendship with Kevin? How had Cara managed, at such a crucial juncture, to see so little?

“Having Adam was the first time I was absolutely sure of what I was doing. It's the only time in my life like that. And I remember thinking,
I just want to do this one thing, be like Suzette and sure of myself on this.
I don't think I ever could have done it if I wasn't friends with her first.” She's never thought about this before, but saying it now, she realizes it's true.

Chester is a fading, sad town, once dominated by a now-defunct aluminum factory. The playgrounds have signs declaring
DRUGS WILL NOT BE TOLERATED HERE
,
NO LOITERING
,
NO TRESPASSING AFTER HOURS
,
NO GLASS CONTAINERS
, precautions against crime they grew up oblivious to. The apartment is behind a post office, with a long ramp sloping downward to the front door so that, going inside, Cara feels like she is entering a basement. Inside the front hallway, Cara hunches over when her head almost whacks a copper pipe. It's not a basement, though, it is an apartment, with narrow windows along the top of three walls and—for a second Cara's breath catches—Suzette's art on all the walls. She recognizes one piece, done after they graduated from high school. It's a self-portrait, though Suzette never called it that because it's a headless study of her naked body after a bath, reflected in a full-length mirror as she bends over to dry her leg with a towel. Cara had always loved this one, mostly because the body was so accurately rendered, so instantly recognizable: the mole on Suzette's ankle, her knobby kneecaps, her pointy, cornucopia-curved breasts.

Teddy calls out, “Suze! I'm home. I brought a surprise.”

There's a silence, and then a voice from the bedroom that Cara recognizes perfectly. “What does that mean?”

Before Cara can say anything, the bedroom door opens for a second and closes again. Though Cara didn't see her, didn't turn around fast enough, Suzette obviously saw Cara.

“What the hell are you doing, Teddy?” she calls.

Cara steps toward the closed door. “Don't be mad at him, Suze. I made him bring me. He wanted to call first, and I wouldn't let him because I didn't want you to say no. I just want to talk to you. I want to figure out what happened between us.”

As she talks, she sees the knob on the door turn. “What happened between us?” she calls without opening the door. “Maybe we should just start with hi first.”

Cara smiles. “Hi.”

The door opens. “Hi.”

She looks beautiful. Her old hair, thin and wavy, a battle of cowlicks she used to fight and lose, is entirely gone, and a crew cut stands up haphazardly, away from her head, so short in spots her scalp is visible. It's a terrible haircut, but it doesn't matter; she still looks good. Without much hair, her face jumps out, her eyes look huge and beautifully blue. “Wow. Look at you, Suze. You look great. You really do.”

“That's not true, but it's nice of you to say.”

“No, it is true. I like your hair that way. Short like that.” She wonders why this is the first thing she can think to say when they were never friends who focused on looks. They never dyed each other's hair, never did each other's nails.

Suzette runs a flat hand over the bristly rug of hair. “This is kind of sudden.”

“I know, I'm sorry.” She recognizes this new Suzette better in parts— she knows her hands, her shoulders, better than this whole creature she's become. “Teddy, would it be all right if Suzette and I talked for a few minutes by ourselves? Would that be okay with you, Suzette?”

“I guess,” she says, softly.

“All right,” Teddy says. “I'll go for a walk and be back.”

Suzette tells her she needs a minute to save what she's working on and change her clothes. She's wearing a T-shirt that's so old Cara is almost sure she recognizes it and gray sweatpants with a red stain on the knee. When she comes back out, she's wearing jeans and a black turtleneck. She goes into the kitchen and pours herself a glass of water.

Cara starts with what she's planned to say: “I know this was all a long time ago, but I wanted to say I'm sorry, Suze, for everything that happened. I wanted the baby to be an answer for both of us. And it wasn't, of course. It was an answer for me, and I shouldn't have asked you to give up so much to help me with a baby you never planned or asked for.”

“I shouldn't have said yes, and then changed my mind.”

Cara shakes her head. “It's strange to remember it this way, but I honestly think one reason I let myself get pregnant is that I thought you would like it. I thought it would bring us back together again and give you a baby to take care of the way you'd taken care of Teddy.”

Suzette smiles and shakes her head. “Nice thought. Apparently not the right one.”

“I've been trying to understand why you got so angry with me, though—why we couldn't see each other at all.”

“You didn't even know, did you?”

“Know what?”

Suzette turns to the one window in the kitchen that looks out over the childless playground. A pair of birds perch on the motionless swing set. “Kevin had this plan. He wanted to win you over and dump you, but he wanted it to be big, like you were supposed to really fall in love with him and then he could hurt you the way you had hurt him back in high school. I was supposed to talk about how great he was and act like I was in love with him and that would open the door. Pique your interest.”

Cara has come here wanting to talk about Kevin, and the surprise is that Suzette brings him up first. “Why did you want to help him do something like that?” Cara asks.

“I was so confused, and you were so…” Suzette goes to the sink, turns on the water, and lets it run. “Sure of yourself.”

“That's not true.”

“That's what I saw. It was such an awful time for me, and you were so oblivious.”

“I knew you weren't happy.”

“But you were supposed to be devastated. Your life was supposed to be ruined, and you didn't even see that. You were just happy to be having a baby.”

“I
was
happy.”

“So you see—it didn't work. First Kevin left, then I left, and you didn't care.”

“Yes I did. I cared.” It's been nine years and Cara still thinks of stories to tell her. In her mind, Suzette is still there. Surely she can see this, can sense it. Or maybe not. Maybe too many years have passed now and they are both too altered by the lives they've ended up with. For a while, they stand there, each of them weighing her own regret. “I don't know if he told you he was going to do this, but Kevin called me and asked if we could see each other sometime.”

Suzette nods. “I figured he would. Sooner or later.”

“I want to see him, but I don't want it to be like last time. I don't want to sneak around.”

“Do you want to date him?”

“I don't think so. But I want to see him, see if it's possible for us to be friends. Do you think it is?”

“He's not the same person you remember. He's in a wheelchair now, did he tell you that?”

She tries not to let the surprise of this register on her face. “No.”

“He'll probably be mad at me for telling you. He wants you to think of him as nondisabled, mostly independent. Using the wheelchair is related to the kidney stuff. I think he can still stand occasionally, but not much. Not often that I've seen. We've stayed friends because look—” She gestures around. “Accessible apartment. An old man lived here before Teddy and me. Kevin can visit me and actually go to the bathroom by himself. The thing is, sometimes he's fine, and sometimes he's not. Sometimes he has dark periods and I don't hear from him. He disappears and I don't know what happens to him.”

Cara nods, and looks around the room at some of the paintings she's never seen before. They're different from her old work—more accessible, more realistic. One is of a beach, with water in the background. Though it has no person in it, it feels like a portrait nevertheless. A towel in the foreground is arranged with objects—a pack of cigarettes, sunglasses, the shadow of a dog. The more Cara looks at it, the more she thinks the dog—or more accurately, its shadow—is the real subject of the painting, the source of the tension. Where has the owner gone, leaving the dog behind like a possession? Then it occurs to her to wonder: How has Suzette painted the rocks, even the lichen, and the perfect light of a searing hot day from this hole in the ground?

“I paint from memory,” Suzette explains, before Cara has a chance to even ask. She points to the beach scene. “That's Truro, where we went as kids.”

Finally Cara is old enough to look at these paintings and offer a reaction. “They're much more realistic.” And they certainly are—the cigarettes have a brand name and matches tucked inside, the shadow has fur, clumped distinctly enough to know the dog is wet. Cara doesn't say what she's thinking: it's as if to see the world this clearly, Suzette has had to distance herself from it. “I love these,” Cara finally says. “I really do. If I had any money, I'd buy one from you.”

They smile and each offer a halfhearted laugh.

Cara means it, and Suzette obviously appreciates the sentiment, but she feels like it has left them without anything more to say. She hears Teddy's footsteps coming back up the hall and remembers something. “I brought some pictures I want to show you, get your opinion on…” She goes to her purse and pulls out the folder with a few of Amelia's drawings, the two she had kept and a few others that Olivia had given back to her, saying, “You keep some of these. I want other people to remember Amelia, too.” Cara wants to get to know this girl, understand her better, and maybe Suzette, with an artist's eye, can help. She hands them over, and Suzette looks through a few. “My God, did Adam do these?”