Eye Contact (3 page)

Morgan looks up at the clock, sees he's out of time, and folds his notebook closed. Twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, he eats lunch with a group that has no name but meets in Room 257. In his mind, Morgan thinks of it as the Group for People Who Need a Group Like This. To him, this means people who have no other friends, though he doesn't know this for a fact. No one has ever said, “I have no friends”; that just seems to be a given in most of their discussions, which so far have been on topics like Having a Conversation, Controlling Your Anger, and Dealing With Anxieties. Morgan doesn't have all of these problems, only some of them. Controlling his anger, for instance, has never been his problem, though people might be less likely to believe that now.

There are five other boys, plus himself, plus Marianne Foster, who runs the group. Some of them have very obvious problems: Derek, for instance, stutters so badly that he hardly speaks. Everything makes Sean anxious: lines in the cafeteria, spoiled fruit, school bells, gym class, the idea of growing up. Chris probably has the widest variety of problems: asthma, eczema, glasses that don't stay on his nose. He is also afraid of water, even in a cup. “I never touch it,” he says. “I don't swim, I don't go in boats, I don't drink it or bathe. I wash with a powder my mother sends away for.” Someday Morgan wants to ask if Chris
never
showers, or just not very often. Maybe the others want to ask the same question and are afraid to—he can't be sure.

At first, today is like any other day. Marianne starts by asking how people have done on their goals. They each have goals they are working on, though Morgan doesn't know what anyone else's are, except for Howard, who told his the first meeting, not realizing he didn't have to: “I'm working on asking other people questions about themselves and not playing with my penis through my pocket,” he said. After that, everyone else chose not to tell his goals.

“All right, then, if nobody wants to share today, we'll press on to what I promised last time I would talk about: your semester project.” Marianne turns around and writes on the blackboard:
Volunteering in Our Community
. She explains that for the assignment they'll choose a placement and meet once a week with a person who needs their help. “For instance, it might be an elderly person. What might you do for an elderly person?”

Sean raises his hand. “Excuse me, Marianne, but I've tried something like this once and it made me extremely anxious.”

“For right now, Sean, let's just listen to what I'm saying with open ears and an open mind and try not to get too worried before I tell you what you're doing.”

“I'm just saying—”

“I understand, okay, Sean? I hear what you're saying.”

Morgan likes Marianne, likes that they get to call her Marianne, which he hasn't done with a teacher since preschool. He understands she isn't technically pretty, that her body is fine but her face has more chins than it technically should have, which she explained once was because she has lupus and takes certain medicines that make her face swell. Morgan likes that she tells them things like this, just says them out loud.

She checks her watch. “You're going to be able to pick from four choices: a retirement community, a preschool, a soup kitchen, and bilingual conversation practice for non-native English speakers. Think about what you'd be most interested in doing.”

As she speaks, the door opens and a woman from the main office walks in. For an instant, they all look around. Even Marianne looks shocked. “Barbara! You shouldn't—”

This group is a private place,
Marianne told them in the beginning.
No one needs to know who's here; no one should ever repeat what's said.
Barbara holds up a hand, a small folded piece of paper in it. “I'm sorry, Marianne, but there's been an emergency.”

Marianne takes the note and reads it. “Oh my God, I have to go,” she says, standing. “I'm sorry about this, guys. We'll talk more next time.”

A minute later, she is gone.

Now she knows,
Morgan thinks.
The note must have been about me.

For all of fifth period, Morgan feels edgy and nervous.

In sixth-period science, an announcement comes over the loudspeaker from the principal, canceling all after-school activities. “Parents are being notified,” he tells them. “Everyone is to proceed directly onto school buses following dismissal.” Morgan raises his hand, gets a bathroom pass from Mr. Marchetti, then walks to the hallway outside Marianne's office door. He wants to go in there, show her his confession, explain everything, but instead he stands beside the open door to the main office and hears an overlap of raised voices, something about an ambulance: “The police are already there. These kids are going to see it.”

“We have to make sure they don't. Get all of them onto a bus or into a parent's car.”

“Jesus, Paul.”

“That's what we've been told so far. That's all we know. We have no choice.”

Morgan hears footsteps coming up behind him, and he moves away, too late.

“Morgan,” he hears, and turns around to find Marianne, her face splotched with bright red patches. “I don't know what you just heard, but something very sad has happened.” She reaches out a hand and—he can't believe it, he thinks for a minute his heart will stop—takes his. For the first time it occurs to him:
Maybe this isn't about me.
“A girl has died. Over at the elementary school. Everyone will probably know soon enough, so it's better to just say it, I think.” She squeezes his hand. “Hopefully, I'm right. What's important now is to follow directions and listen very carefully and do exactly what you are told, okay?”

Morgan nods and holds on to Marianne's hand. He imagines, for an instant, being married to her, living at her house, helping her pick out which turtleneck she'll wear. She bends down, catches his eye. “This is serious, Morgan.”

“Oh I know,” he says.

 

For Adam, language has always been a struggle. His first words didn't come until he was three, and then they arrived as only a scatter of nouns, the words most important to him: musical instruments, composers, machines he was fascinated by. By the time he was four, he could identify a clarinet, an oboe, and a bassoon, but couldn't, even when pressed, point to a pair of pants. This is the peculiarity of the autistic brain, the way some pathways work and others do not. Why can one autistic child learn to read before he can organize his mouth into speaking words? Why can another memorize a menu in the time it takes most people to read it? Over the years Cara has learned that the brain can move in lurching dissonance, travel at high speed and no speed simultaneously. Once, in the same four-minute conversation, Adam identified a piece of elevator music as Bach but was unable to give the impressed stranger in the elevator his own name or age. Cara knew he wouldn't be able to because she knew his brain and the walls it contained. “What's your name?” was still a question he couldn't, at age four, answer without prompts, without her touching his chin and starting the answer, “Aaaa…” The hard part was the pronoun. To Adam,
your
meant the other person, and how would he know that person's name? There is logic to the countless things he can't do, a way his thinking makes sense.

For years, he never strung his words together, never adopted those baby phrases that get you through a meal:
All gone! More please!
Then, in the course of a single morning four years ago, it changed. Cara remembers all of it, exactly: the lunch she was arranging on his plate, the ham slice, the pickle beside it. Sitting sideways on the chair, one hand mysteriously raised, he began to speak in a heart-stopping monologue: “You can't just step off curbs like that. This is a street, with cars. They go fast and don't
look.
They could run you over, squash you. Flat.”

It was a speech she'd delivered the day before on an afternoon walk to the park. For a long time, she couldn't move, didn't dare carry the plate over to the table. Before this he had never put more than three words together, and then he only did it with prompts and rewards, marshmallows and gummy worms, when he found his words and got them out. This was twenty-five, maybe thirty words in a row, handed over for free, sent into the air, just like that, though she knew she couldn't make too much of it. The whole trick to breakthroughs was not going overboard with praise after them. “Wow,” she said softly, laying his plate in front of him. “I remember that. When you were standing on the curb. What made you think of it, I wonder?”

Instantly, he was lost again, focused on the food, which took all his concentration, so she kept talking as she was used to doing. “Maybe it scared you when I said that?” He looked at the place over her shoulder where she believed he put his eyes when he was listening to what she said. “That must be it. That must have scared you a lot, I think. It's good to be scared of cars, but remember nothing bad can ever happen when I am with you.”

She thinks about those words now, and how patient she has had to be courting him out of his self-imposed absences, to join her in this world with all of its imagined and legitimate dangers. As the main office around her fills up with strangers, Cara prays that he hasn't taken in whatever he's just witnessed. That when she gets to him, she will find him confused by the attention, by the policemen at school, by everything so out of the ordinary when all he did was walk out to the woods at recess. She also knows that Margot is right—he has been changing recently. He has registered and gotten upset about unexpected things—another child on the playground getting a splinter, two children on the bus fighting over gum. Still, there's a chance. Four years ago, when both of Cara's parents died in a car accident, he came to the funeral, came to the wake, came everywhere with her because she couldn't bear to part with him in the days that followed, but in that whole time, surrounded by tears and somber faces, he seemed unaffected. He loved his grandparents but, even so, never once asked where they were or what had happened. For a whole week she let him do whatever he wanted: dribble stones outside, push little pieces of paper through the opening of a soda can. She didn't pull him to a table, didn't line up the flash cards she'd made to build his vocabulary, magazine photographs pasted to colored index cards. She didn't say once, to his body, rocking at her side, “Point to lettuce. Point to plate.” She wanted to wait, see what he would do, if the fact of his grandparents' deaths had gotten through to him, and by all evidence it hadn't. The night after the funeral, they ate their hot dogs in the silence that would always reign if she let it. They listened to a tape of
Sesame Street
songs. He had a bath. In bed, she read him the story of Christopher Robin leaving the wood. Did he understand this was about loss and saying good-bye, about love that continued even when you didn't see the people again? No, she finally decided, hoping then it was a blessing, praying now it would still be true: he didn't take in the terrible pain of the world, didn't understand the finality of death.

For some immeasurable time, she isn't allowed to see Adam. He's fine, she is told, he's all right, there's an EMT on the scene checking him out. Finally, a tall, surreally thin policeman leans into her chair: “Are you the mother?” he whispers, and she nods, though of course there must be another mother somewhere, the girl's. “Follow me. And bring your things. We'll need you to go to the station afterward.”

She follows the officer outside, stands beside him as he points to an ambulance parked in the middle of the field where, two years ago, she brought Adam for a season of Saturday soccer, fifteen games in which he never touched the ball once. If she asked about soccer now, he would probably remember the oranges at halftime and the shin guards he always wore on his arms for the car ride home.
Please,
she prays, starting toward the ambulance.
Let him be untouched by this. Let him remember this field, look around, and wonder where the oranges are.

When she gets there, though, she knows before she climbs inside that it is too late.

She has never seen him in this posture before, bent over like this, with his arms gripped to his sides. She races to him, bends down to get his face on her shoulder. “Adam. It's okay. Mom's here.” Is he even breathing? She kneels at his feet, her arms around his shoulders. “Just breathe, baby. Keep breathing.”

Outside the ambulance door, there is a crowd growing, more police cars, a television news van. She hears someone say, “The mom's with him now,” and she finds his face with her hand, cups his cheek. He doesn't move, doesn't respond to her voice. She's never felt anything like this knot he's wrapped himself up into.

 

For three hours, June Daly, Greenwood's special ed teacher, grades four through six, tells the police officer what she remembers of Amelia: that she usually wore dresses to school (or had for the month and a half she was there); she was cooperative and quiet, but also learning disabled, and perhaps—if the testing had been done that was suggested—even mildly retarded. This wasn't in Amelia's records (which were sketchy and in transit, being sent by her old school), but there were tasks June noticed she couldn't complete in her early assessment: simple addition worksheets, first-grade readers. The officer writes all this down, then comes back to a subject he's already asked about—the boys in her class. “Any of them seem particularly interested in her?”