Eye Contact (6 page)

It doesn't help that these people are all strangers. For five minutes Cara watches them struggle valiantly with Adam, who won't sit, won't stop moving in a circle around the periphery of the room. “Three people might be too much in the room. It's making him nervous,” she says, though this is only a guess. She can't be sure what will help right now.

Lincoln speaks into the microphone he holds in his hand. A moment later, two of the adults in the room tell Adam they have to go. Alone with Adam, the woman psychologist starts moving, trying to keep pace with Adam's flight around the room.

“What are we, Adam? Are we airplanes or birds?”

Cara knows this strategy—join the child in play that looks empty, force him to attach some meaning to it, make a connection, interact somehow. And if the child won't answer, give him a choice of answers, let him pick one. “Are we flying, Adam, or running?”

Ordinarily Adam is so trained in this technique, he can make a joke out of it, or his version of a joke: “We're fly-running,” he'll say. Or, “We're bird-helicopters.” Not funny, exactly, but something. Now there's nothing. Two people in an oval, orbiting chase, with no response.

“She needs to tell him quiet hands and quiet feet. Make him attend to what she's saying.”

Lincoln hands Cara the microphone. “Tell her.”

She does and then listens, a moment later, as her words come out of the doctor's mouth. Adam pauses in the far corner of the room, and Cara watches his face register the confusion of hearing his mother's words come out of a stranger's mouth.
He knows,
Cara thinks.
He knows I'm somewhere watching this.

His fingertips come up, to press first his chin, then the side of his face. She knows this old habit. As a three-year-old, he used to wake up at night and cry until she lay down beside him, one arm draped like a scarf around his neck, giving him a way to feel his own chin, to know that his head was still on. This has always been the body part he most needs reminding of. His hands he can see; his legs, his stomach. But how can he be certain his face is still there? Eventually she found a ribbed baby blanket that worked as well, and every night since, he's gone to bed with it tucked gently around his neck and chin. These days, for the most part, he sleeps through. Now his fingertips move across his cheeks, arrive at his nose, and, as suddenly as it came on, the worry vanishes. He returns to his buzzing flight around the room.

“This isn't Adam,” Cara whispers, though of course, maybe it
is.
The longer she watches, the more afraid she grows: he doesn't look like a boy who's been traumatized; he looks like a boy happy to be doing things he'd forgotten he'd loved. She lets it continue until she can bear it no more. “This isn't working.”

“Maybe we could try something else? Get one of the men in there?”

She shakes her head. She has to get Adam home, surround him with his things: his blanket, his food, his operas, her voice. Start the process of returning him to his body again. “This won't work. I
know
my son,” she says emphatically, though it's exactly the point she's no longer sure of. In the details of this day, doubt has opened up and spread its wings.
They were on the swing. They sang together. A minute later, they broke all the rules and disappeared.
None of this aligns with the Adam she knows, the Adam she has spent nine years working with, the Adam who now moves like a broken helicopter powered by some instinct to go back in time, and start everything over.

Afterward, Cara and Lincoln speak briefly in the hall. By pulling Adam out of the interview after only half an hour, she has earned a collective glance of disapproval from everyone. Once Adam leaves here, nothing he says will be of much use. He'll have watched TV, seen the newspapers; anything he says will be distorted or colored. She wants Adam home, alone with her so she can ease him back into his skin, into being himself again, but she can't help feeling bad. They are failing at an effort that is obviously important. “I'm sorry,” she says softly to Lincoln, the only one who accompanies them down the hall to the front door.

“Hey, he did his best. What's important now is making sure you guys are okay.”

She has already turned down his suggestion that they find a friend to stay with tonight. “You might feel safer,” he said. She shook her head, and told him Adam needed to be in his own home.

“Sure. I understand.”

Outside the front door, they stand under the surprise of a darkening sky. Somehow they have lost a whole day inside. “You know, what you said before is true. Adam may surprise us.”

He nods, digs his hands into his pockets. “Sure.”

“He may wake up tomorrow and start talking about this.” This isn't a wholly unreasonable hope; in recent years, he
has
surprised her, coming home from school to tell a perfect, three-sentence story about a girl who spilled her milk and cried in the cafeteria. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. “So if he says anything, I should call you, right?” Maybe this sounds ridiculous—too little, too late.

“Absolutely.” He claps his hands together and turns to the door. “Absolutely. Call.”

She watches him walk back into the building. He doesn't mean it, of course. Even a nice man willing to give an autistic boy the benefit of the doubt has his limits. Earlier in the day, she heard a sergeant on the telephone say, matter-of-factly, “The witness is retarded, so we'll see if we get anything.” She'd wanted to stand on her chair, offer a stationwide lecture on autism, but in the end what difference would it have made, when Adam has offered up nothing at all?

When she finally gets him home, Cara calls the first person she can think of, Phil, who's been Adam's aide for over a year.

“Oh shit, Cara. This whole thing. I'm just so sorry—” Phil says.

She cuts him off because she doesn't want his sympathy; she needs to ask questions. “Did you ever see Adam with Amelia before?” She assumes the answer will be no, that if Adam and Amelia had talked to each other, she would have heard about it.

“Yeah. A few times, at recess. More lately. I think she started it, but I'm not sure.”

Oh God,
Cara thinks.
Let it not be a girl with some mission like I was.
“Who
is
she?”

“She might have had some special needs herself, I'm not sure. I never heard anyone talk about her before today. I just noticed that she and Adam sometimes sat together on the swings. Or she came over to him when he sat inside the tires.”

“And they
talked
to each other?” An hour earlier, she had told Lincoln this wasn't possible.

“Yes, I think so. I know I heard them singing a few times.”

“Why didn't you
tell
me this?”

“I thought I did. I meant to. It wasn't a big deal. It was just a nice little thing. You know.” Technically, Phil is too young for this job, twenty-one and working at night on his college degree. He was hired because she had fought for a man, preferably young, had made the school run a newspaper ad until they found one, because she wanted someone who would talk to Adam the way real boys talk, which Phil does. In the year that he's been Adam's aide, she's loved listening to the patter of Phil's slang, the way he'll tell Adam that math might be a bummer, but then it'll be cool, because they'll go outside, shoot some hoops. Usually, she loves the rhythm of Phil's talk, loves hearing Adam say, earnestly,
cool
instead of
yes,
when she offers him dinner. Now she fears this is a story Adam won't have the vocabulary to tell correctly. “Phil, please. This is
Adam
we're talking about.”

“I know, Cara. I know what you're saying, but he was
into
her. He liked her clothes. The last few days he'd come in from recess singing some little song about a color and finally I figured out it was the color of her socks that day.”

She can hardly bear this detail because she remembers it, too; she can hear him singing
yellow, yellow, yellow
under his breath in the back of the car.
Her socks?
She reminds herself: He's nine years old. The girl was ten. They weren't seventeen caught in the tidal pull of hormonal impulses. Still, the possibility haunts her:
Adam liked her clothes? Dwelled on her socks? Was she some precocious little girl making promises to remove them?

All his life, Adam has shown more interest in the inside of machines than in any mystery the human body might hold. The closest they've ever come to a discussion of sex is the time he watched Cara go to the bathroom and asked why she peed out her fanny. She pointed out what he'd apparently never noticed before—that she had no penis—and he shrugged, lost interest, went back to whatever he had been doing. She tells herself no, she hasn't missed something crucial, some leap he's made in privacy, apart from her.

But the truth is, if Adam has changed in recent months, so has she, in ways that no one else might recognize or notice but to her feel monumental. When he was still a baby, she didn't know other babies, didn't realize hers was so much harder than most. It was months before she understood that her baby cried louder and longer than other babies, that he was different in many ways: he threw up all or most of everything he ate, his greatest comfort came not in her arms but in his mechanical swing. When he was eight months old, she watched him fly around in his doorway bouncer one day, twisting and spinning wildly, and for the first time she thought:
Wait, is this normal?
When he was a year, she understood,
No it isn't.
She watched other babies at the park babble in their play, point pudgy fingers at dogs and puddles, wave bye-bye, blow kisses, while her own child sat for an hour at a time, content to watch sand slide through his fingers, and she accepted it in stages. First she told herself:
He'll be a late talker.
Gradually, she began to see:
He'll be different in other ways, too.
When he wasn't walking by sixteen months, there was talk of low muscle tone, referrals to a physical therapist, a phone number passed along for early intervention services. Then, when Adam was two and a half, his bow-tied pediatrician sat down on his rolling stool, clipboard on his lap, and said, “He should see a neurologist, get some tests done.”

No,
she wanted to scream, but didn't. Instead, she asked calmly, “What can a neurologist say—that Adam's delayed? That he's going to be different? I know that. I accept it.”

“It may be worse than that, I'm afraid,” the doctor told her.

The pediatrician knew, of course, as did anyone who knew anything about toddlers and watched hers: lost in his own world, no language at all, no communication. Still, she waited six months to make the appointment.

How was it possible to live so long in a state of denial? She can only say this: It is. You tell yourself you're not interested in labels, that the problem these days is too many labels. You can understand that your child is too extreme in many ways, both overly sensitive and impervious, and you can believe you are working on those things, that they are steadily improving, albeit not by much, but how is a doctor's assessment going to help get you in and out of a grocery store without a tantrum? You want to have faith, believe in your child's right to be different. You narrow your eyes and see an older boy you remember from high school: the quiet one who was good at math and never looked up from his shoes, or the band member no one noticed until the final talent show when he played a saxophone solo that broke every girl's heart. You can know he isn't normal and still think it's possible:
Maybe he's extraordinary.

Once, when Adam was eighteen months old and her parents were still alive, she set him down beside their aging, oversize stereo speakers with classical music playing softly and, for forty-five minutes, he never touched the toy she put in front of him. He lifted his head up, lost to the music, and Cara watched him the whole time, mesmerized by the adult expressions flickering over his face—a lifting of his eyebrows, as if to say
Ah, flutes,
then a lowering:
That's nice, cellos.
Even her father, who for a year had been silent on the subject of this squalling baby, grew more interested and brought out his old vinyl records of operas he'd loved. They held their breath and watched Adam close his eyes to take in the wonder of this new music: surround-sound vibrato in a foreign language. Adam loved opera from the first time he heard it; when a record ended, he cried until someone could get to the turntable, lift the needle up, and start it again. “Pretty remarkable,” her father said, making anything seem possible—that Adam was a genius, that her life was going to be different than she expected but not worse. Not worse.

He was three and a half before he was finally diagnosed: too long, too late, she knows now. After the diagnosis came, she shifted gears swiftly, put all her energy into reading books about autism and the children who'd recovered, all with a tireless mother at the center, demanding play, pushing interaction, language, response. She became obsessive because she understood you had to be—that autism was a war and recovery necessitated a clear battle plan. She got her parents' financial support and lined up therapists three hours a day to drill flash cards, build vocabulary, go over, with a shoe box and a toy car, basic prepositions: “Put the car
inside
the box. Now put the car
outside
the box.” Interestingly, Adam could learn nouns with relative ease, but every concept involving relationships was a stumbling block for him. Put two things together and ask which is bigger, or heavier, and he struggled, fought, wept in frustration. Outside of therapy, she didn't let up. She
made
him play with her, forced his hands into puppets, wrapped them around Play-Doh, dragged him through rounds of Go Fish and Candy Land, torture he endured for the promise of an opera he could watch at the end. But even when it worked, as it did in incremental steps—he would learn to pretend a banana was a phone, a sofa was a mountain—she would wait for the miracle that was meant to follow such breakthroughs: the initiated conversation, the glimpse of interest in another child's play, and in all honesty—though it was painful to admit, and heartbreaking—it never came.