Eye Contact Page 8

  “Well, sure,” Chris says. “But see, I don’t like to think about those things. I don’t like to think about almost dying.”

  Down the table, a trio of older boys blow straw wrappers in their direction. They watch as the paper tubes float and dance toward them. “Yeah, all right. Very funny. Ha ha,” Chris says. “I’m putting them on my list.” He seems to be talking to the wrappers.

  “What list?” Morgan asks.

  “My list, all right? My list of people who are going to get in trouble for harassment very soon. We’re trying to eat lunch here, right? This is what I can’t stand.”

  “It’s just straw wrappers.”

  “Yeah, to you maybe. You don’t see half of it. You don’t see what’s really going on.”

  Maybe Chris is right, Morgan thinks, but when he looks up the table, the boys have walked away.

  That afternoon, class schedules are changed to accommodate an all-school assembly about safety with strangers, led by a woman no one has ever seen before. She starts the meeting by standing onstage, a microphone in her hand, and saying nothing for so long that people grow nervous, turn around in their seats looking for a teacher who might explain. Then with a click of her thumb and a tiny peel of feedback, she begins: “You all know why we’re here. You all know Amelia Best, a ten-year-old girl, was murdered in broad daylight during school hours about three hundred yards away from where we’re sitting right now. You may be children, but you’re not stupid. You know the perpetrator hasn’t been caught. That a very real danger to all of you—every single one—is still out there.”

  Morgan watches a girl in front of him start to cry. Beside her, another girl puts an arm around her shoulder. “He’s not going to kill you, Amy,” she says. “He’s not.” Morgan twists around in his seat, looks to see if other people are crying. No one is.

  After the assembly, Morgan walks to Marianne’s office. To his surprise, two kids he’s never seen before are already waiting outside her office. Just as he arrives, Marianne pokes her head out. “Jeff, why don’t you come in, and then you, Fiona. And Morgan—” She smiles. “Do you mind sticking around?”

  “Not at all,” he says, nodding.

  He sits down across from the girl, who in any other context would terrify him. Dressed all in black with dark makeup around her eyes and silver jewelry everywhere possible: her thumbs, her ears, even her nose. Maybe he is studying her too intently, because after a minute or two she surprises him by speaking: “You want to know what I heard?”

  He shakes his head.

  “I hear that she did it to herself. She was a cutter.”

  Morgan has a hard time judging jokes, but he’s pretty sure this must be one until she looks up to the light and he sees she is crying. He’s had this problem himself before. After his conversation with Emma, crying at school was always a danger, and could happen any minute if he wasn’t careful. Once, when Leon caught him in the hallway off guard and pulled him into a hug, he came away with his eyes filled, like this girl’s. He had to go to the bathroom, sit down on a toilet until it passed. “I don’t think so. I think she was killed, like they said.”

  She turns from the light and stares at him. “But maybe she wanted it. Did you ever think about that? Maybe she was a sad girl who wanted something to happen to her. Maybe she saw the guy in the woods and thought, ‘I’m going to go out there and see what happens to me.’”

  Morgan stares at her. This is the first time a girl has talked to him in middle school. Ever since Emma, he has been so scared of them. He wants to argue with this girl, but the words escape him, he can’t think what to say. A minute later, Jeff walks out and the girl stands up.

  By the time he gets inside her office, Marianne looks exhausted. “Do you mind if I eat while we talk, Morgan? This has been such a long day, I haven’t even gotten a chance.” She pulls out a vinyl lunch bag, lifts half a sandwich out of it. “So here’s the question, Morgan. Why are you picking this kid to volunteer with?”

  “Well, I know him a little bit. I remember him. And I don’t know what’s wrong with him, but he’s not—you know—retarded.”

  “He’s autistic.”

  “Oh.”

  “That shouldn’t scare you necessarily. It’s what makes this potentially a good idea. But we’d have to be very careful.”

  “Okay.” He smiles. He loves that she said “we.”

  “He’s obviously been through a traumatizing experience. Something more terrible than we can imagine. I don’t know very much about him, but I brought up your idea in a meeting we just had. I learned that he has a single mother, and he’s considered moderately high functioning. They told me that he is generally very affable and well liked and that over at the elementary school, everyone is very worried about the toll this is going to take on him. As far as anyone knows, he hasn’t spoken since the murder and has gone into a kind of regression.”

  Morgan nods. He can’t believe she’s telling him all this.

  “Here’s the thing, though. I called over to the elementary school and spoke to the guidance counselor about your idea. She wants to run it by some people, but she didn’t automatically say no. What she said was, it might actually be a decent idea. There’s more and more research these days that says as these kids get older, the best thing for them is not necessarily more one-on-one time with adults, but simply being with other kids. Especially kids who are willing to be patient with a conversation that might take extra time.” She reaches into her bag, pulls out a granola bar. “There’s this fascinating study, actually. We’ve always thought that the plasticity of children’s brains stops at a certain point. That with developmentally delayed children early intervention is everything—you try to cram as much in before they’re five or six years old, because after that there’s not too much you can do. The gains they might make are much slower, more incremental. Now there’s new research saying that the cusp of puberty is another opportunity—that the brain opens up again, grows more malleable, and certain strides can be made later as well.

  “The point being that I’m going to argue for this. I think it’s something to try, at least. But we’d have to have some strict guidelines. This couldn’t be about spending time with the kid who saw the murder. You couldn’t go in there and ask him about it. Do you understand? That’s for the professionals to do. Okay, Morgan? Are you listening?”

  Yes, he nods, realizing as she says it, all the possibilities. At home he has started a list of possible suspects, including the school principal, Ms. Tesler, because she keeps sounding so defensive on the news. Last night, she said on TV, “There are one hundred and fifty elementary schools in this state without fences around them,” though the reporter hadn’t asked any question about fences. When Morgan tried to look up the fact, he found nothing on the Internet about elementary schools and fences and can only assume she is making up facts, which leads him to believe she might be a suspect.

  Also on his list is Mr. Herzog, the music teacher who asks people who can’t keep rhythm “to please not clap.” Mr. Herzog wears brown suits and brown shoes, and once he told them, “I play in a jazz band, but it doesn’t matter really, because nobody cares about jazz anymore,” which Morgan realizes now is an angry thing to say. Morgan remembers a time he saw Mr. Herzog in the hallway, pushing a rolling cart loaded with black instrument cases, with his head bent down so his glasses slipped off and got run over by the heavy, unstoppable cart. When he picked them up, they hung like a W in his hand. “Excuse me,” he said, squinting up the hall to Morgan. “But my worthless life just got worse, I’m afraid, and I need a bit of tape. Could you help me?” Morgan remembers all this, but never knew what to make of it before. Now he does. It means Mr. Herzog is sad and possibly mad about many things: jazz, glasses, students with no interest or talent. Maybe Amelia pushed him over the edge—blew chewing gum into a clarinet, made fun of his glasses, something.

  Morgan formulates a plan in his mind: if he can’t ask Adam about the murder directly, maybe he can
make a list of names and work them, one by one, into their conversation.

  Around school, June hears the stories that are springing up and taking on a life of their own—whispered at first and then spoken aloud, outside on the playground: He’s going to try again, maybe at Halloween. He wants the kid who saw him, but if he can’t get that one, he’ll take somebody else. Teachers have been told that in discussing Amelia’s murder with the kids, it is important to be open, to let the kids talk, but to emphasize facts as often as possible, keeping speculation to a minimum. “Here’s what we know,” they’ve been told to say. “Here’s what we don’t know.” The more facts they are given, the more reassured kids will feel, so they are meant to use facts to arrive back at the same point: The police are here, doing all they need to, everyone is safe, everything is fine. But anyone can see that children hear this and tell themselves something else: He could be someone we already know. He probably is. A neighbor, a custodian, someone who doesn’t look crazy, but is.

  In June’s classroom, they have found someone new to suggest every hour: Mr. Fawler, who runs the computer lab and has, more than once, hunted for glasses that were sitting on top of his head. “He carries a pocketknife,” Jimmy tells her group, and they are all silenced for a moment, forced to imagine a man so overweight he can’t button his cardigan sweaters, standing in the woods, wielding a switchblade. There’s also Perry, on the maintenance crew for thirty years and so quiet most students have never heard him speak. “Check it out, you guys. I heard Perry lives with his mother. Like that guy in Psycho,” Brendan says, and June is floored: Brendan is in fifth grade and he’s seen this movie? And he expects everyone else has too?

  “Please, people,” she says, and stares at Brendan hard, not looking over at Leon, though she doesn’t have to. They all understand: There are children here, don’t scare them. She’ll have a moment like that—clear cut, unambiguous, and an hour later she’ll find herself wanting to dial Teddy’s number, whisper into the receiver, Has anyone checked out Perry, the custodian? Did anyone realize he still lives with his mother?

  Teddy has come over every night since the murder, though sometimes he doesn’t get there until eleven or twelve because now, of course, he works double shifts. The first night she saw him, after her drink with Martin, she fell into his arms and wept all over again. Now he walks in and they sit at her kitchen table, hands curled around mugs of tea.

  Theoretically, this relationship with Teddy is meant to be a lark. He is six years younger than June and better-looking than any man she’s dated in years. In college and graduate school, June sat at the top of all her classes and usually attracted some variation of the same man: brainy and pale, stomach going to paunch, glasses that slipped down his nose as they debated into the night about education and philosophy. Teddy is the opposite of all that: he is beautiful and young; his eyes, a rusty brown, flecked orange; his curly hair, dark blond; his freckled face, as her mother might have said, a map of Ireland. He is a cop she met when he pulled her over for speeding and the first thing he said to her, bending down to her window was “Gosh, hi.” He’s someone she’s never imagined herself with—a boy in a uniform, who is sweet and, on matters of any weight, inarticulate. For a year, she refused to take him seriously. He was a treat she gave herself late at night when he called from the parking lot of Dunkin’ Donuts to ask, shyly, what she was doing, as if he didn’t want to presume anything, even the empty spot beside her in bed.

  “It’s fine, Teddy. You can come over.”

  “Really?” he’d always say. “Now?”

  She used to make jokes, point to a gray hair and tell him time will not smile on a match like theirs. “When you’re forty, I’ll look a hundred and fifty,” she used to say. Now she doesn’t make these jokes anymore because something has changed. She wonders if they are both feeling this, moving toward a change, something deeper, and more, but they are both feeling too tongue-tied to say anything. For her, this is no longer a lark, or a brainy woman’s revenge for a lifetime of being overlooked by the best-looking boys. He isn’t just beautiful anymore—he is also smart in the quietest way she’s ever seen a man be, thoughtful and reflective, decent and loyal. Part of this is owing to the last five years he’s spent taking care of his sister, Suzette, which in her mind makes him all the more compelling, but it also limits their time and keeps him at a certain distance. They never make plans more than two days ahead, never talk about the future, never mention living together, which is impossible, she understands, with Suzette in the picture. Dating Teddy has worked so far because she’s accepted the givens: that he will leave on a moment’s notice, that a single phone call from Suzette will end an evening inside of three minutes, the time it usually takes him to put his clothes back on. But there’s also this: since the murder that turned their world upside down, he has come every night to be with her.

  In the beginning, he told her everything he knew about the investigation. “They say there’s an eighty percent chance the perpetrator knew the girl before today. He’s a family member, a neighbor, someone she’s had some contact with in the last six weeks. Chances are, they talked. Maybe she petted his dog, maybe she bought an ice cream from him, something, and he fixated on her. They think he’s probably been watching her from the woods for a while. So we’ll canvass the neighborhood, knock on doors, and sooner or later we’ll find someone who’s seen him.” That first night, she let herself believe in his certainty. “In twenty-four hours, this’ll be over.”

  Now that hasn’t happened and they are obviously stumped, looking for ideas anywhere they can. “She took swimming lessons at the Y, so we’re interviewing every person with a pass to that pool, anyone who might have seen her in a bathing suit.”

  June stares at him. “But there wasn’t any sexual assault.”

  “Supposedly she wore this little pink polka-dot bikini. A few people have mentioned it.”

  June nods and thinks of her own first reaction—that Amelia, who had always seemed so oblivious to her own beauty, must not have been, that she must have done something, drawn attention to herself somehow.

  “There’s something I haven’t told you,” he says, turning his mug in his hands. “About the little boy who was with her.”

  “Adam?”

  He nods. “I knew his mom once. She was an old friend of Suzette’s.”

  “You’re kidding.” It’s hard to imagine Suzette with a friend, but then it’s hard to imagine her with anyone or anywhere beside the apartment she hasn’t left in a year. “Does she know about this? That it’s her friend’s son?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  Suzette’s self-imposed exile from the world began a year ago, after a summer full of visits to the emergency room complaining of chest pains and rapid heartbeat. Teddy was never with her when these episodes happened, and the calls usually came from pay phones and nurses’ stations. “I’m at the hospital! I think I’m dying!” Suzette would say, and Teddy would run, mumbling excuses: “It’s this heart thing again,” or “She says her fingers are numb.” When he was told these were the symptoms of a classic panic attack, June would ask what she was afraid of, but there were never clear triggers; once, it happened in a Laundromat, another time, the library. Now June understands better the fruitlessness of that question. That the mind is a powerful thing and the physical symptoms of its unrest are real.

  Now Suzette doesn’t go out at all and, for June, the strangest part of this withdrawal from the world is the apparent peace Suzette seems to have found in it. By all evidence, she has solved her problems and has needed no more ambulance rides. She reads a great deal, watches TV, keeps up with one friend that June knows of, though she’s never met him, a clerk at a store near her apartment. He is always referred to as “just a friend” and, oddly, never by name. He is only mentioned occasionally. “My friend came by yesterday, drove me crazy for three hours.” June used to honestly wonder if this friend was real, but then she would see evidence of his presence around the apartment—an
ashtray forested with cigarette butts, an empty can of beer (Suzette certainly didn’t smoke or drink beer)—and she would understand that, yes, Suzette had a more complicated life than they understood, a web of her own secrets, tying her to the world by invisible threads.

  For a long time Teddy put off introducing them. When June finally met Suzette, the surprise was how much she liked her. For someone so afraid of the world, Suzette still kept up with it, kept a ubiquitous TV tuned to news, read two newspapers daily. She was warmer than June expected her to be, even surprisingly sweet about the age difference. “I’m so happy you’re not a twenty-two-year-old waitress, I can’t tell you,” she said.

  June wasn’t sure what to say. “I never was a twenty-two-year-old waitress, if that’s any consolation.”

  “Neither was I. When I was twenty-two, I was crazy.” Except for a remark like this, Suzette seemed mostly fine, certainly capable of surviving on her own. She worked from home as a graphic designer and kept up with her painting, which, from what June could tell, she was pretty good at. When she told Teddy that Suzette seemed healthier than she expected, he nodded. “Yeah, she can seem that way. Fine, like that.”

  Sometimes she wonders if Teddy is too close and can’t see the ways his help might fuel Suzette’s problems. Once, she tried to gently suggest this. “Maybe what she needs is medication, Teddy, not you there, doing everything for her.”

  His response was curt. “She’s tried medication. It didn’t work.”

  Now June thinks about Suzette and this connection to Adam. She has only had a handful of encounters with him this year, but she has noticed that his eyes are up more, looking around, taking in other children. Once she watched a line of kids, all taking a turn at whapping a garbage can as they walked in from recess. There was no point to the game, nothing much happened, but here was the surprise: at the end of the line, on his turn, Adam did it, too. It was a tiny thing, really, but for an autistic child, unusual. He watched twenty-two examples and without being prompted, he did it, too. “You should tell Suzette what’s going on. Adam’s mother is probably going out of her mind. Maybe Suzette can help.”