Eye Contact Page 7

  Does he think Adam did it? She shakes her head; they all know Adam at least a little bit, and no one thinks this. He’s doing something she hates, actually—overromanticizing their most mysterious students—though it occurs to June that all day she’s been wrestling with something like the feeling he’s trying to express. When she thinks back over the few memories she has, she wonders if Amelia might have been smarter and more sophisticated than anyone realized. She came out tonight wanting to ask Martin what he remembers of Amelia, what his impressions were. Did she seem to him (to a man) to understand her beauty? They have already gotten the news (a surprise, a relief, if such a feeling is possible) that preliminary tests showed no sign of sexual molestation. That even though there was a window of time where it could have happened, the killer was apparently not interested in having sex with her. But here is what June can’t figure out: Was she interested, if not in sex, in the attention an older man might have paid her? Or was it something else—did she go out to the woods to play doctor games with Adam? Was she precocious in that way?

  If so, it wasn’t obvious. She still dressed like a little girl, in skirts and jumpers; most days, she wore her hair in pigtails. June needs the opinion of someone who might have seen things she hasn’t. While she has playground patrol once a week, Martin is out there every day. “Did you ever see Amelia talking to older boys? Doing anything like—I don’t know—flirting?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that.”

  “Did she ever touch you?”

  He shakes his head, frowning. “Not that I remember.”

  Strange that this comes as such a relief, but it does. She reaches for her wine, takes a sip. Maybe the problem lies only with her. She’s too uptight, too long at this job, too anxious not to have these children she loves mistake her for a parent.

  “Did she ever talk to you?” That would be a measure; Martin seemed to have some level of flirtation with every student he talked to.

  “Once, that I remember. She asked if I could help her find a rabbit’s foot that she’d dropped in the wood chips.”

  “Did you find it?”

  “Yes, eventually. It took a long time. I got interrupted and then I saw her again, still looking for it, and I came back. Eventually we found it inside the tires.”

  June remembers the rabbit’s foot that traveled in Amelia’s backpack, lay on her desk, sat on the floor next to her foot. It was the first thing Amelia talked about, June remembers, and suddenly she can hear Amelia’s tiny voice again, so soft she actually misheard it the first time, thought she was saying “You want to see my rabid foot?” She can picture Amelia reaching into her backpack, pulling out a closed fist and, like a child of five or six, holding it out, opening it up, one finger at a time. June thinks of this and, suddenly, the tears she’s avoided all day rise up. Before she knows it, she’s weeping so steadily Martin has no choice but to rise out of his chair, come around the table, and embrace her in the most awkward bar hug ever. “I’m all right,” she says, waving her hand, willing out of her mind the unbearable bits they’ve learned throughout the day—one knife wound, one punctured lung, surprisingly little blood. (“When he found her, the officer thought she was asleep.”) She pictures Amelia offering her the rabbit’s foot—the simplest of treasures, most childlike prize—and wonders, honestly, why her first thought in all this was to question Amelia’s innocence.

  If anyone asks, Cara says her life is easier than it used to be, which is true. Adam doesn’t make scenes with every trip to the grocery store; his oldest, most extreme fears—of covered parking lots, of digital clocks, of the unpredictable moves a skateboarder might make—are tempered now. He doesn’t respond to these mysterious triggers by screaming so loud he must cover his ears; it’s been years since she’s scraped him up off a public sidewalk or a store floor.

  For most of his life, her strategy has been the same one—she pushes her tentative son into the world by moving ten steps ahead of him and rearranging what he will find when he looks. She has thrown napkins over clocks, stored her own in a drawer; she has learned the places where skateboarders are most likely to be and parked two blocks away, finding a path that won’t cross theirs. She has done everything she can to reassure Adam that the world is not such a threatening place to be. “Look up,” she’ll say, knowing the peculiar things he will love—a mealybug inching down a branch, a man in a bucket truck fixing a wire. She knows the things that will be interesting enough to merit his attention, and in pointing them out she believes she’s helped him begin to see more, to look beyond the bug on the branch and see the tree, the sky, the surprising shapes clouds can make.

  Now she wonders if everything she’s done wasn’t a mistake. She has made him look up, look around, led him to believe the world is mostly a benevolent place, that strangers are people one should say hello to, that friends will help him and adults are, by and large, a trustworthy group. Has she done all this at the expense of the most obvious lesson of all, the one most children have down by the time they get to kindergarten? Don’t talk to strangers; don’t walk into woods where they might be waiting.

  In the morning she wakes to find Adam standing silently at her bedside, his eyes wide with terror, as if he’s been there for some time and isn’t sure she’s alive. She sits up. “It’s okay, baby.” She tries to read his thoughts, believes that she sometimes can. “I’m all right. I was just asleep.”

  His face softens into its loveliest expression: eyes wide, a closed-mouth smile. He has always been a beautiful child, with dark wavy hair and huge, soulful brown eyes that people notice. Once on the subway in New York City, a stranger pointed to Adam seated on the floor of the train—the only place he would ride, the only way he felt safe with everything moving—and asked if he had commercial representation. Adam was maybe four at the time, with thick bangs and his big eyes and—it was true—an unusually photogenic quality. Cara blushed and demurred, waving her hand as if the compliment had been directed to her.

  All morning, Cara weighs every expression on Adam’s face, every flicker of his eyebrows for some indicator of what is going on. Adam has certainly had phases in the past, ups and downs that usually follow a pattern. The beginning of the school year is always hard, and then at the end, when the exhaustion of nine months of school takes its toll, he’ll regress again, talk less when he gets home, go limp on tooth brushing or shirt buttoning, tasks he’s theoretically mastered. Already she can see something is different, though. This isn’t one skill mastered and lost, this is everything. Since he’s gained language, he’s never gone this long without using it—twenty hours and counting.

  She tries different tactics, anything to get a response out of him.

  “What do you want for breakfast?” she asks when they are standing in the kitchen. He looks vacantly around, as if this is a room he hardly recognizes. His eyes pause on the stove, the refrigerator, the pantry full of food, each a new mystery. “Do you want spiders maybe? Or worms?” This is an old joke, something she used years ago to teach him yes and no.

  She waits forever. Nothing. “Adam? Do you want a hammer for breakfast?”

  This should get a giggle out of him—it always has in the past. Instead, he blinks at her mystified. His beautiful face recognizes nothing, this room, these words, even her.

  “Hello, Adam? Can you say something?”

  Nothing.

  She doesn’t bother getting dressed that morning. Panic shoots through her, pumps her blood with adrenaline. If Adam has regressed and lost everything, she will have to start from scratch, go back to the beginning, pull out the boxes of flash cards and drill them the way they did six years ago. If he won’t talk, she will make him label flash cards. If he can’t do that, she will lay them in a row for some “Point to…” drills. This is right, she tells herself. Don’t waste time. Don’t let his brain resettle around what he’s seen. Don’t let it fill up with a movie that is only blood, his ears plugged with the sound of a little girl’s screams. She’ll bring him back with
his favorites, she thinks, shuffling through the deck, looking for lawn mowers and musical instruments. These are the gifts she can offer to her son who has never, in nine years, asked her to buy something—these pictures she has cut out and glued onto index cards of objects that he loves: a tractor, a piano, a fan, some keys. Maybe she doesn’t even want to run flash cards, she only wants to hear his yelp of pleasure when he sees one of his favorites coming. She won’t make it too hard, she decides, laying out pictures of a shirt, a piano, a bright red tractor. He’s had these for years. This will be like a game, like the family up the street whose children are ten and eleven now, but still occasionally play Go Fish for old times’ sake. This is their Go Fish.

  She gets him to the table, makes him sit down.

  “Okay, sweetheart. Look at me,” she says, and he does. He hasn’t lost this. His first command, the first words she was certain he understood. “Good boy.”

  His eyes are altered, though, in some way she can’t describe. It used to be that eye contact scared him enough to make his eyes tremble as she counted off the “one, two, three” he had to look at her to get his pretzel. Now the tremble is gone and in its place is an emptiness she hasn’t seen before. For five full seconds, they stare at each other.

  “Now, point to tractor,” she says, wondering if she has made a mistake, let him look too long into her eyes so that he’s lost track of the task at hand. “Right here, Adam.” She taps the table. “I see a tractor somewhere.”

  His expression doesn’t change. His eyes move incrementally, off hers, to stare at the blank distance over her shoulder. She leans forward, takes his face in her hands. “Baby, listen to me—you gotta try. I know you can do this. Point to tractor.”

  Her breath goes shallow. She wants to shake him—is afraid she actually will—then he narrows his eyes at a spray of sun filtering through the trees. He seems to have heard something else, not her pleas, but a noise in the light, something that makes him register, for the first time, that it is morning. His face shifts. His eyebrows seem to say, What was that? And then it’s gone.

  He doesn’t look again at her.

  He never notices the cards.

  His mother is mad. He can hear it in her voice. “Point to tractor,” she says and he can, with his eyes but not with his hands. His hands are the problem.

  Moving when someone tells him to move is the problem.

  “Move,” the boy said, his finger pointed in a Battle Zone gun. “Move or I’ll shoot.”

  If he points, his hand will become a gun. He will shoot his mother and accidentally kill her. People die in Battle Zone, he’s seen it before: the grassy hill behind the playground littered with bodies of fallen boys.

  He thinks about the girl, how her voice is like the sun and shadows she talks about all the time. It is light, skipping, singsongy, and then dark. “I hate those people. All of them,” she said. He didn’t know who she was talking about, but he watched her hands squeeze into egg ovals. “I hate every one of them.” One finger poked out. “Rat-a-tat-tat. There. I killed them all. We’re not allowed to talk to those kids now. That’s the rule.”

  Balled into fists, her thumb and fingers look like the whorled side of a snail’s shell. Or the pictures people draw of a snail’s shell. He’s never seen a real snail.

  He can follow that rule because it is easy; he never talks to kids, either. There are other rules, though, interesting ones: “I can only walk on shadows. If there’s no shadows I walk on my own. I walk backward if I have to, so I make a shadow.”

  The day they went for their walk was sunny. “Plenty of shadows,” she said, turning the sink faucet on and off. “We’ll have no problem.”

  And they didn’t. Once they walked so close their shadows touched. “Don’t let anyone see,” she said, “or they’ll shoot us with their stupid guns.” He followed her because he wanted to hear more of her singing, wanted to see her throat, where the sounds came from and how she bent the notes and then jiggled them. He imagined rubber bands inside her neck stretching and vibrating.

  Once, his mother brought him to a piano lesson where the teacher started by opening the piano to show him the inside. For the first time he saw how the sound was made, a million felt hammers gently striking strings, and after that he couldn’t bear to play. He wanted only to watch the mechanics of music, which is how he felt with her. He didn’t want to sing himself. He wanted to look in her throat, see if it held pianolike surprises.

  In the hallway at school, Marianne looks happy to see Morgan. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she says. “So many kids have stayed home, which is terrible. It just makes everyone more scared.” She is wearing a black turtleneck and gray skirt with stockings that have little white balls of dryer lint stuck to them.

  “I’m not scared,” Morgan says.

  “Good. I think it’s important that we show whoever did this he can’t control our lives.”

  “Only three people were in math. The teacher was supposed to give a quiz, but he canceled.”

  She shakes her head, looks around the hallway. “You see, I think that’s wrong. Even teachers are staying away. What are they thinking about?”

  He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what anyone else thinks about. Last night, after he and his mother had watched as much murder coverage as they possibly could, Morgan went into his room, closed the door, and opened his notebook. He had been thinking a great deal about clues, although until now he’d thought about clues to his own crime, not someone else’s. Here was a new place to put his thoughts: “This is How I Will Make Up For What I’ve Done,” he wrote. “I will solve this crime and people will understand I’m a good person, not a criminal. If I get a record someday, maybe this will be part of it: Committed One Crime; Solved Another.” He studies Marianne. “There’s something I wanted to ask you about.” He’s been thinking about this all night, has made up his mind to ask at their next meeting, but now she’s standing right here, so why not? “I had an idea about volunteering.”

  She narrows her eyes, confused. “Volunteering? Oh yes. I’d forgotten about that.”

  “I was thinking I could do something with that Adam guy. Play games with him after school maybe.”

  “What Adam guy?”

  “At the elementary school. The one who—”

  “Oh yes. Yes, of course. I don’t know, Morgan. I don’t know about that. Why don’t you stop by my office later and we can talk about it.”

  For the rest of the morning, he feels good. He thinks of things he can say to Marianne in their meeting. He knows she likes to stay on topic, so he will: he’ll tell her he’s volunteered before, with special ed kids, that he liked it fine, he isn’t scared of them. Of course, he won’t tell her about the terrible job he did, dumping Leon after five sessions, pretending later not to recognize him in the hall.

  At lunch Morgan gets his food and moves toward the table in the corner where he always sits alone and tries to eat as unobtrusively as possible, but then he sees Chris, from the group, sitting in his chair. Usually, the boys in group don’t talk to each other outside of group. They might say “Hi” and wave, but that’s it. Morgan considers taking a new seat, but what if a crowd shows up and yells at him, as people so easily can about seats in the cafeteria? Morgan slides his tray down across from Chris.

  “I’m not supposed to be here,” Chris says. “I usually eat in one of the offices because crowds make me extremely uncomfortable. I got kicked out today because everyone’s got meetings about the murder. Do you believe that?”

  Believe what? he wonders. That a girl got murdered? That there were meetings as a result? “Yeah,” Morgan says. “I believe it.”

  Chris takes a sip from a juice box. He is eating food no one else would pack in a lunch: sweet potatoes, pineapple chunks, a box of raisins. “I’m extremely allergic,” he says when Morgan watches him spear a sweet potato. “One piece of bread and I’m covered in hives. Once I tried pizza, and you want to know what happened?”

  Morgan
stares at him. “What?”

  “Hospital,” Chris says. “For three days. Oxygen tent and everything. It was okay, though. I don’t mind being in the hospital. At least then you don’t have to go to school. If things get bad enough, I might do it again.”

  Chris is older than Morgan. He has been through a year of middle school already, which makes Morgan wonder what he might mean. “How bad does it get?”

  “Believe me, you don’t want to know. Wait until winter, when it gets really ugly. You’ll be thinking an oxygen tent is nothing. Murder would be a relief.”

  Morgan stares at Chris.

  “Ha!” Chris says, so nervously Morgan wonders if he should put Chris on his list. “Just kidding.”

  In group, Chris has told stories about a summer camp he went to where, according to him, he was extremely popular and everyone loved him for who he was. “For two weeks I was voted Bunk Camper Overseer,” he told them. “Which means—you know—I oversaw things. Then at the end I won for Most Improved Athlete of the Summer.” At first, no one believed him because Chris is so thin he can’t wear watches or keep most socks pulled up his legs. When Sean asked, “You won best athlete?” Chris closed his eyes and shook his head. “Most improved. In the beginning I couldn’t kick a ball. By the end I made a soccer goal. At final campfire I got a standing ovation.” Anytime Chris mentions the summer camp, Morgan wants to come right out and ask him for the name. He tries to imagine standing up in the dusky light of a campfire, accepting an award to the music of a hundred people clapping for him.

  Morgan decides to take a risk, tell Chris what is on his mind. “I keep thinking about that guy. Who saw the whole thing.”

  “What about him?”

  “I just keep thinking—I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m thinking.” Talking to someone his own age is confusing; Morgan’s mind jumbles into a blur of words that won’t organize themselves. “That he almost died, for one thing.”