Eye Contact (13 page)

“Why not?”

“I don't know. I like this part. Solving puzzles.” A beeper on his belt goes off, cutting short the conversation. “Look, I've got to get back. Call if you need anything else.”

She holds up a hand to wave good-bye as he disappears out the door, already dialing one-handed a phone he has produced and unfolded from his pocket.

After he leaves, Cara gets an idea. It's only nine o'clock, still early enough that she can call Morgan and ask if he would mind meeting her at the school playground in the morning.

“Sure. I mean, you know, I could do that.”

“I want it to be just the three of us. If we go early, no one else will be there, right?”

“I guess. Okay.”

 

After the bathroom, Adam didn't want to see her at recess. He didn't want to go with her into the woods. He's never heard this rule, but he knows it must be one.
No going into the woods; no leaving the playground.
It scares him to break rules, and he doesn't want to. Then she found him at the swings and buzzed her lips together. A machine sound, like a lawn mower, no teeth, just lips. He leaned closer to see if she had a machine in her mouth making that noise.

“Elephant,” she said. Adam has never seen a real elephant, but this sounded the way the pictures looked. He smiled because he wanted her to do it again. She did once and then she told him it was time to go.

You go,
he wanted to say.
Not me.
After recess was spelling, after spelling was movement room. He didn't want to miss movement room.

“Come on, Adam. You said. Remember?”

 

When they arrive, Morgan is already there, wearing the same clothes he had on Saturday, which makes her heart lift: Does he know how much this helps, that Adam often recognizes people not by their faces but by their clothing? She sits down beside him, leaves Adam to stand in the geometric shadow pattern of the climbing structure. “I wanted to see if being here might help Adam tell us what happened. Not in words maybe, but in his own way. Maybe we could just watch him, get some clues.”

They look over at him. “Do you want to come over and say hi to Morgan?” she calls, though she doesn't expect this to work, because there's no urgency to her voice, no imperative behind it. Then he surprises her; he steps out of the shadow, walks over to the bench, and stands before them without rocking or humming, as if he's a perfectly fine boy; only with eyes that she recognizes: on the ground then way up to the sky. “Hi, Morgan.”

She shakes her head, stunned. In three days, he's chosen to say the same two words twice:
Hi, Morgan.
There must be a plan to this. He is gathering his words, deciding what to say, how and when to say it, and Morgan is part of this for no reason that she understands, but in his presence, the fog dissipates slightly—Adam can hear again, respond to suggestions. “Do you want to go over to the swings with Morgan?”

She watches. She's right: he's heard her, he's thinking about it.

“Uh, I have to say, swings make me a little bit sick to my stomach,” Morgan says. “I have this problem where I sometimes throw up.”

She doesn't take her eyes off of Adam. His expression changes as he looks over at the long chains and rubber
U
's dangling above muddy ruts. Maybe this is a bad idea. Maybe this will push him to some edge, but she has to find out. She speaks softly: “Adam sat with Amelia on the swing set. That's the last thing they did before they went for their walk. Do you remember that, Adam?”

“Oh wow,” Morgan says.

She can't look at Morgan, can't look away from Adam. “Why don't you go, Adam? Morgan will sit next to you. He doesn't have to swing. It'll be okay.” She has to believe this is right, that any movement at all is better than paralysis. Adam steps toward the swing set. “Go with him,” she whispers to Morgan. “Sit next to him and watch. I'm going to walk away, but tell him it's okay, I'll be right back. And then watch everything he does very carefully. I'll explain this later.”

As Morgan walks away, she calls, “Nod if it seems like he hears anything.”

Morgan turns around, nods experimentally,
Like this?

Yes,
she nods back, then slips around the back of the structure, the far wall of the school to the other side of the basketball court where a trash bin sits beside a muddy gully. Hidden behind the Dumpster, she watches the boys sit down on the swings. From this distance, she sees that Morgan's lips are moving, he is talking to Adam, though it's impossible to hear what he's saying so she waits for him to stop, then takes the chance: Just a decibel above a whisper, a hundred yards away, she says, “Say ‘Hi, Morgan,'” and waits.

Adam's head is dipped into his jacket, obscured by his collar. She can't see his face or his lips, but a second later, Morgan nods.

She moves back farther. The muddy gully extends to the start of the woods that has been roped off with fluttering yellow police tape marked
CAUTION
. It seems strange that the police aren't here, but perhaps three days after the fact, it's no longer necessary to keep a crime-scene vigil, though even she knows—she thinks it, as she moves closer:
Criminals always return to their scene.
This should be terrifying, being so close, yet oddly it's the opposite—more like a relief at last, because she wants to know what Adam saw. She doesn't go under the tape; she has to stay focused on the matter at hand. She is farther from Adam now, maybe seventy-five yards, and she needs to try different sounds. She has planned this out, has a purse full of possibilities. First, a telephone she can press to call herself, which she does. Even from this distance, she can see Adam's response: he turns around in the swing, looks toward the woods so quickly that she has to jump back in the shadows to avoid being seen. She moves again, farther away. She has a Walkman with headphones, which she knows is a stretch; Adam's hearing is extraordinary, far beyond most people's, but it isn't bionic. In the past, he has been able to identify the music someone wearing a Walkman two seats in front of them on the bus is listening to—but at this distance, which is, essentially, a football field away? She turns it on, way up, holds the headphone in the air. Nothing. No nod from Morgan.

“Excuse me?”

She spins around, so startled she drops the Walkman on the ground. There's a policeman behind her, emerging from the trees, his uniform dotted with bits of leaves. She knows that he's about to tell her to leave, this isn't safe, isn't allowed. “Wait—” she says, holding up a finger. A tiny bit of song spills from the headphone hole in the Walkman lying on the ground. It distorts the music—opera—so that it sounds like she's listening to chipmunks singing. “Just watch.” She holds up her hand to quiet him before he can speak because she needs perfect silence to demonstrate what she's just figured out: Morgan is nodding, Adam is turning, looking around. “He can hear it. He can hear a Walkman dropped in the woods.”

If it had been a telephone, or voices, Adam would have heard it but wouldn't have cared. He would have stayed where he was, parked safely on those swings, but she knows this because she knows her son, knows music is a string that pulls him up, through rooms, out doors, away from her. She knows before she turns around exactly what she'll see: Adam is out of the swings, crossing the field, moving toward them.

“The guy had a Walkman,” she tells the officer. “He had bare feet and a Walkman.”

“Cara—”

She turns around to see: it's not just any policeman, it's someone she knows, a face she can't place right away and then she does. “Oh my God,” she says, staring now. “Teddy?”

He nods, though it's instantly clear this isn't a reunion, or a happy coincidence. He's a policeman and she's in trouble. “You shouldn't be here. I've called the station. Detective Lincoln wants to meet you back at your house.”

She nods, and retrieves the Walkman. She wants to say,
It's so strange, Teddy, I've just been thinking about you and Suzette.
She wants to grab his hand, squeeze it and say,
How is she?
but he won't look her in the eye. She stands there, her face frozen in expectation as he speaks into a walkie-talkie and tells someone at the other end that he has the subject in custody.

 

Adam remembers hearing something. A tiny trill, like a bird singing, a perfect song of notes that climbs up and down. She heard it, too, because they were walking now, getting closer and she could sing back. “This is what we do,” she said. “He plays the flute and I sing it back.”

He wants to hear more, wants to look inside her throat. It's beautiful, not scary, and he moves closer, following her, walking so close their shadows bump and touch and then disappear into the unbroken shadow of trees and forest. The songs call and answer each other. A bird sings,
Come, it's okay.
Another sings back,
I'm on my way.
There's no spelling to worry about, nothing bad can happen, this is the language he understands perfectly, these notes flying high through the trees and leaves, meeting midair, dancing together, invisibly.

“Come on,” she says. “We're running out of time. He won't wait forever.”

 

Sitting beside Matt Lincoln on the sofa, Cara explains herself. “Music is the one thing Adam cares about the most. If every other neural pathway's been blocked, music is the superhighway open to Adam's brain. He has perfect pitch, a perfect memory for music. He can sing back anything he's heard once, any song, any language. I've been going over this and over this, and I keep thinking that for Adam to have fallen apart so completely, music must have had some part in it. Someone was singing, music was playing, something. Last night, for the first time in months, he asked to watch
The Magic Flute
and I kept thinking,
Why this one?
And then it occurred to me, it's so simple, really. There's a forest full of music. Papageno's playing his flute, the fairies are singing. That's what took him out there. There was music in the woods.”

Lincoln nods, writes all of this down. He is all business now, as if he never stopped by last night, as if they never got into high school reminiscences. He shakes his head: “It's interesting, I'll admit. But you shouldn't have gone there by yourself. Frankly, that was a dangerous and stupid thing to do.”

“I
had
to. I had to see what he could hear. And it's amazing—he could
hear
a Walkman.”

“Why are you so sure he heard music?”

“That's what draws him. That would have compelled him enough to break a rule about leaving the playground.”

“Any music?”

“He has favorites. An opera would have been the biggest lure. Something more contemporary would have been less likely. He doesn't really respond to rap or hip-hop.”

Surely he sees the way this helps, that it rules out a world of teenage suspects.

“All right, Cara, I'm going to be honest with you,” he says. “These ideas are good, but I've got a DA's office that's already written Adam off. That's how these guys think. They want a perfect witness who can testify in court, they want a case they can prosecute, neat and tidy. Now, my instincts are different. I think, if I've got the right guy, I'll build the case. I'll shred his alibis, I'll get a confession. I'll do whatever I have to. But in this instance, I have to say—I agree with them. I don't think anything Adam does or says is going to tell us much.” He shifts in his seat, looks at the door Adam and Morgan have disappeared behind. “Watching Adam now, the way his eyes stay down on the ground, the way he shuts out what's around him, I have to say: I don't think he saw anything.”

Cara shakes her head. “Of course he saw something.
Look
at him.”

“There's no question he's traumatized, I don't doubt that. He knows everyone around him is upset. He knows something bad happened, but does he know the girl is dead? Have you
talked
to him about it? Explained dead?”

What can she say?
We're getting there? I will?
“No,” she says.

“Look, it's not just Adam. A lot of kids are terrible witnesses. This happens all the time, a kid stands ten feet from a murder, and you want to know what they can usually tell you? The color of the guys' pants. They're too scared to look up. Faces are scary. Most of the time, a kid standing in the same room when a murder takes place can't tell you what weapon was used. They can't
see
that stuff. Their brains don't process it.”

Cara guesses he's talking about three-or four-year-old witnesses—that the preschool brain is developmentally unable to fathom such a thing. And maybe he's right to put Adam in this group. It's sad yet also a relief, actually: Maybe the mazes and walls of his impenetrable brain have, in some way, spared him.