Eye Contact (32 page)

And then it's as if a silence has engulfed them; words have left the car and only their hands can speak for them; he picks hers up, sandwiches it carefully between his, pressing her fingers, curling his palm into hers. “Yes,” he finally whispers. “That sounds like a good idea.”

 

As soon as she gets home, Cara tries to put together the pieces of everything that's happened, make sense of it in her mind. In the eerie silence after Mrs. Barrows was led away, Cara crawled inside the house and roused Suzette, who sat up and blinked as she looked around, trying to remember where she was. She was better soon enough, or at least able to move into the kitchen, where Cara got her a glass of water and pointed out the decoupage box on the wall. “Didn't we used to do things like that?” she said, and Suzette rolled her eyes, as if to say
Speak for yourself.
Cara desperately wanted to understand everything—
How was Suzette friends with Kevin's mother? How did she know to arrive just then?
—but she also wanted to find the common ground of their old friendship, remember the ways they used to log in the hours of their life together.

Eventually Suzette explained: Kevin had always tried to work; he was happier being busy, getting out of the house. But in the last few years it hadn't been easy and he'd been fired from a few jobs. When his settlement money ran out, he had to take a job he didn't much like in an office supply store a half-hour drive away. It was in Chester, near Suzette's apartment, and after dropping him off, his mother would stop in and visit Suzette. Sometimes she would stay a few hours, talking as Suzette worked. “For some reason, it didn't drive me crazy. I don't know why. I was fond of her, I guess. I always have been. I suppose because I always thought she was a good mother to Kevin. I always
admired
her—I really did.”

Cara shook her head in disbelief. “Did she talk about going with Kevin to the woods?”

“No, never.” She thought about it for a moment. “The thing is, she talked about you a lot. She was always a little obsessed with you. Even more than Kevin was, I think. It was her idea, years ago, that I should lie and tell you she was in the hospital, not Kevin. She wanted you to think that Kevin might have a few physical problems, but mostly he was fine.

“Why did it matter what I thought?”

“I don't know. She always wanted you to believe that Kevin had made a lot of progress.”

In truth, Cara understood this impulse: she did the same thing with people who saw Adam infrequently—especially doctors who ran their assessment tests every other year. She would drill him for weeks ahead of time, try to guess the questions that might be asked, all so she could hear a lab-coated stranger say, “He's getting better.” There were so few ways to measure success, one simply did this, chose arbitrary judges. She thought of Mrs. Barrows pulling out the scrapbook, insisting that Cara look and be reminded that it was a long, hard road. She knew already, knew the road well.

In the end, the conversation ran out of steam. Cara couldn't bring herself to say,
Tell me, really, what your life is like,
embarrassed at the thought of the limited answers she would get, and Suzette never asked anything about Adam, even the most basic questions like what grade he was in now, or what he liked to do. They filled the time as they never had when they were little girls, with talk of other people: Kevin, his mother, classmates they'd both long ago lost touch with. When the time came to leave because Teddy and June showed up at the door, they both seemed grateful for the reprieve from the conversation they were having such a hard time sustaining.

Now, she wishes she'd tried a little harder. Maybe she should have mentioned Matt Lincoln, seen if Suzette remembered him sitting with his sister in the cafeteria, which she probably would. She would remember odd details—that he wore a Def Leppard T-shirt or had clear braces, but she'd also remember what was important. “He was a nice kid,” she'd say. “I remember that.”

That night, after Cara has finally gotten Adam to sleep, she moves around the house, straightening up and trying to put Evelyn Barrows out of her mind, when the doorbell rings. She moves toward it tentatively; it's close to midnight, too late for visitors; it can't be an officer needing the bathroom, because for the first time in days, no police car is parked in front of their house. She snaps on the porch light and sees, first, the silver bars of a wheelchair.

“I need to talk to you, Cara,” Kevin calls through the door.

“It's late, Kevin. You shouldn't be here.”

“I don't know why my mother is doing this. She didn't kill the girl.”

Her heart begins to race. If it wasn't his mother, that only leaves one person. “I can't let you in, Kevin. I'm sorry.”

“She wasn't even there.”

“Yes, she was. She told me she was.”

“She was there the times before, when I talked to Amelia. But when I finally went to meet Adam, I didn't tell my mother I was going. I didn't want her to be part of it. I wanted this for myself. I wanted to look like a real father and I didn't think I could with her around.”

Cara hears the emotion in his voice; she knows he must be telling the truth now, just as she knew, vaguely, that he wasn't before. She opens the door and steps outside. “I'll talk to you on the porch. I don't want you to come inside. Adam's asleep. I don't want him to wake up.” In truth, for all his acute hearing, Adam wouldn't wake up; once he's asleep nothing wakes him up except the mysterious rhythms of his own brain.

“I got Scott to bring me. He laid out the cardboard, and then I told him I wanted to be alone and he went back and waited in the van at the edge of the woods.”

“Why did your mother let everyone think she killed Amelia?”

“I don't know. She must be thinking I did it. That she has to protect me.”

“Did you?”

“
No.
Cara, listen to me. Here's the truth I couldn't tell you before. I left. I set the whole thing up, and then I panicked. After all this time, I finally saw Adam—he showed up with the girl and he was wearing these funny little shoes, those slip-on sneakers, and I thought, Jesus, all these years you've been buying him shoes. You take him to the shoe store and he probably doesn't like it and you talk him through it, promise him something if he'll try on this pair. I just thought, if I had this kid I wouldn't know how to buy him shoes. I wouldn't know how to talk to him, how to get him through something.”

“You learn it, Kevin. It's not that hard.” It's late and she's tired; she's running low on patience.

“When I saw him standing there, I knew the whole thing was a mistake. He was humming and rocking back and forth, and I could tell he was nervous. The girl started talking to him; I couldn't hear what she said, but I could tell it helped. She was trying to get him to come over to me and then he looked up at me and made this perfect eye contact. Like he recognized me and he understood. I swear that's what it felt like.”

She knows this feeling, the magic of Adam's eye contact when it comes; she also knows how it can be unsettling, and make her forget whatever she'd been trying to say.

“And I panicked. I looked at him and thought—
My God, he's got a life, here.
He's got you, he's got school, he's got this friend. If I come along, I'll just screw it up somehow and I thought it would be better if I left. So I did.”

“You didn't talk to him at all?”

“No. I rolled myself back up to the car and told Scott to get the cardboard. He did—it took him about a minute and we left.”

“You didn't say
anything
?” How could Adam have echoed him if he didn't talk?

“I might have yelled something to Scott, I don't remember.”

“‘Watch yourself '?”

“Yeah, I guess. I didn't want him to talk to them or say anything.”

“So maybe you said, ‘What the fuck are you doing?'”

He looks down in his lap. “Maybe.”

“Why did you tell me that whole story before about the homeless guy?”

“I knew the police had him. I assumed he did it, and I didn't want to tell you the real story.”

“But that man couldn't have. He never got close enough.”

“I don't know, Cara. Someone else must have been there, then.”

“But
who
?”

“I don't
know.
”

“How long were you there?”

“Five minutes. Maybe less.”

Which meant there was plenty of time, forty-five minutes, maybe; anyone could have come along. “You left two scared kids alone in the woods and you just drove away?” She says this, though she's no longer thinking about his irresponsibility or his terrible judgment. She's only thinking,
My God, we're back at the beginning.
Someone is out there still who killed Amelia and will, if it's possible, want to kill Adam.

 

“It's not Evelyn Barrows,” Matt Lincoln tells Cara needlessly, when she calls him after Kevin has left. “The knife isn't even close to a match. She's a crazy lady telling a crazy story. It's sad, but it happens. I'm sorry you got caught in the middle.”

“And Kevin?” she asks tentatively.

“Not him, either.”

“How do you know?”

“A few reasons. The wound, primarily. Had to have been delivered by someone standing, someone probably between five-six and five-eight. We tried to get Barrows to admit he could stand up, which he never did, but the real clincher came when he tried to sign his statements. The guy has phenomenally weak hands; he can hardly hold a pen.” She thinks about the cartons of yogurt she used to open for him.
My God,
she thinks,
he's right.

“Did he tell you the whole story?”

“That he left them alone there? Yeah, basically. It's like this guy did all the sinister stuff—the planning and prepping—and then left them alone long enough for someone else to come along and do the dirty work.”

“Does it seem strange, that all these people were out in the woods that morning?”

“No, actually. There's two footpaths, one from the road and another, less obvious, from the middle school. On any given day, we're guessing seven to ten people on average might come through there. Kids come down from the middle school. They're not supposed, but they do. You probably heard we found the missing boy, and that's where he was. In the woods.”

She hasn't heard. In the last five hours, she hasn't turned on the news. “And…?”

“And he's fine. I'm going over to talk to him right now. So far, he's not saying anything about why he was there. But we're figuring, odds are, it's got to be related.”

After she hangs up, she turns on the news to a reporter standing in front of the local hospital where Chris has been brought. She describes his condition as fair, dehydrated but stable, after a twenty-four-hour absence in which he eluded a townwide search to find him. “The school and these woods are nine miles from his home. Local authorities are currently investigating how he made it so far from his house without being seen, and how he could have remained so close to school personnel the whole day and still escaped detection. So far, we have little information to go on, except that he was determined to stay hidden and he did.”

That night she lies in bed, picturing the path Matt Lincoln described, leading from the middle school into the woods. Maybe she has all along been scared of the wrong things—of menacing strangers and the faces from her unresolved past—when the greatest danger is really the inevitable future: Adam growing up and going on to middle school, where the world will move at a less forgiving pace and those who can't keep up will suffer the consequences. She thinks about Morgan and the fire he started, his strange determination to solve a murder that has, for almost a week, stumped everyone else. Suddenly, she remembers an arrangement, made with the middle school guidance counselor for Morgan to bring a boy named Chris over. Is it possible Morgan knows this boy? She keeps coming back to his confidence that he could solve this case, and she wonders:
Why would he be so certain of that unless he knows something the rest of them don't?

 

When Morgan wakes up, he can hardly believe his eyes: Cara is standing in his room, staring down at him. At first, he thinks he must be dreaming, and then he looks around the room, sees that it's almost nine o'clock. His mother must have decided he doesn't have to go to school today. He feels like finding his notebook, writing it down:
Surprise Number Seven From My Mother: School isn't necessary after you've spent an evening afraid your son is dead.
Come to think of it, there's also this—
Surprise Number Eight: She let Cara in.

“I'm sorry to wake you up, Morgan, but I have to ask, how well do you know Chris?”