Eye Contact (7 page)

What he really learned, she guesses now, was how to please her. That to make her happy, he might hold a banana to his ear and speak into its bottom, or pull a sock on his hand and talk with the toe, but none of these activities held any genuine interest for him, none were as compelling as, say, a lawn mower, or a transistor radio tuned to static. Nothing changed him fundamentally from what he began as, a boy most interested in being alone, in studying machines, in privately pursuing complicated music, delivered to him in languages no one they knew spoke.

It wasn't easy to decide to stop fighting quite so hard. It started during the summer, after a long period of resistance to the one goal she'd made for the school vacation: riding a bike. To Adam, a goal like this had no point. What he loved about riding his bike was tilting on his training wheels, watching the wonder of his front tire turn its slow revolutions. He hadn't lifted his eyes, noticed the neighborhood children growing older on every side of him, didn't see that big boys rode real bikes now, certainly didn't recognize that he looked ridiculous.

“This summer the training wheels come off,” she had said to Adam back in May, though he didn't register the news until the Saturday morning in June when he watched her work for an hour with pliers and screwdrivers to remove them and then wept in protest. She stuck to her guns, made him work at it every afternoon until her back ached with the effort of holding him up. Eventually, she had to set a timer and promise a reward. “Five minutes on the bike and we'll turn on the hose.”

“No bike, please. Hose, thank you.”

“I know, babe. I know you want the hose. Look at me. Here's the timer. Here's the hose. Five minutes up and down the driveway, and you're all done. That's it. All done.”

“All done. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye yourself. Get on the bike. I'm counting to three.”

Then one evening they had a particularly trying session; he wouldn't put his feet on the pedals, wouldn't even hold the handlebars, and she got fed up. She told him if he didn't start trying harder, she'd cut up the hose with her garden shears. Later, when she called him for dinner, he didn't answer. She searched the house, all of the places he would ordinarily be, and couldn't find him anywhere. He knew not to walk outside by himself, had never done such a thing before, but when she stepped outside, she heard a noise and followed it, running, to find Adam alone in the garden shed beside his fallen bike pouring a bottle of glue into its gears. “Back on,” he said, tears streaming down his face as he pressed the training wheels into the mess. She thought of the hours Adam used to spend riding his tilted bike up the street, eyes on his wheel, ringing his bell at every driveway. She had been so sure that removing the training wheels was the right thing—that it would expand his life, not take away one of his few reliable pleasures. She felt her heart rise up, take hold of her throat. Never again would she be so sure she knew what was right for him, she decided. Never again.

It wasn't negativity that made her list Adam's deficits so emphatically to Lincoln (when for years she'd been doing the opposite, insisting that people see him as more normal than not, forcing open doors, signing him up for soccer, saying, “He'll be fine,” though he usually wasn't). It was an attempt to be clear, to love Adam without denial or delusion.
This is my son; he isn't fine,
she was essentially saying, because she believed this was better, that real love acknowledged a child's perimeters, accepted the givens, shouldn't be conditional.

In September, for the first time, her initial teacher conference wasn't a cheerleading performance on her own part, as it had been the year before when she'd gaily insisted, “Adam loves science! Maybe he could participate in the science fair!” only to realize, too late, what a bad idea this was, the effort and self-motivation that volcano models and homemade batteries required. This year she was clearer: “Adam can't handle fire drills, and he doesn't do well in regular PE. He'll need an assigned seat at lunch and a teacher with him.”

This was better, she felt sure. In the six weeks of school so far, she'd seen a happier Adam in general, one who wasn't being pushed in directions that were meaningless to him. She wasn't forcing him to learn Uno (the way she did when he was in first grade and saw the other kids playing), wasn't drilling him on Yu-Gi-Oh cards (so that he might recognize a trend if it passed under his nose). She was letting him follow his own impulses this year. After homework was finished, she put on the operas that she had previously limited in the belief that he needed to watch what other kids did, that knowing SpongeBob was important, too.

After she hangs up with Phil, there is only one other call she can think to make, a number she finds easily in the phone book, the only listing with this last name.

“Mrs. Warshowski?” she says.

“Yes?” The voice on the other end sounds older than she expected. Cara introduces herself, and a silence follows that extends so long she fears the woman might hang up. “Look, I know there was a miscommunication about recess. I don't even want to ask you about that. I wanted to ask you about Adam's morning, about what happened before recess.”

“I told the police, it wasn't my fault. Nobody told me he was a runner.”

“He's not a runner,” Cara says, knowing that this is shorthand for kids who slip away, that aides get paid slightly more for working with a runner. “Besides, you weren't out with him at recess. Nobody told you that you were supposed to be. It's not your fault.”

“No, I'm talking about before. When he got away in the morning.”

Cara hesitates. “He got away in the morning?”

“Didn't anybody tell you? After he got off the bus, I was right there. I told him to stay, I needed to get another student, then I turned around and he was gone. Just like that.”

“And you'd told him very clearly to stay with you?”

“Sure, I even signed it. My son is deaf, I'm in the habit, and I could tell he liked it.”

Adam did love sign language, and he knew all the basic commands.
Stay
would have been clear to him. This makes no sense. “I take it he wasn't gone long?”

“Ten minutes maybe. Long enough for me to get pretty worried.”

“Where did you find him?”

“I thought you knew all this. With
her.
Amelia. In the boys' bathroom.”

It doesn't take long to get Lincoln on the phone. “Why didn't you tell me about this bathroom incident?”

“I'm sorry, I thought you knew.” Lincoln sighs. “Yes, they were found together in the main boys' bathroom across from the library that morning. Fully dressed. Standing by the sinks. Neither one of them said what they were doing. Both were sent to their classrooms. Technically, school hadn't begun, there were three minutes until the bell. He hadn't done anything wrong—
she
was the one in the boys' bathroom. It's possible he went to the bathroom and she followed him in.”

“But this is what makes you think they had planned something?”

“Seems possible, right? They were alone. Three hours later they disappeared.”

That night, Adam eats dinner, undresses, bathes, climbs into bed, all in silence. Cara peppers him with questions unrelated to the day. If a murder has driven him into this shell, she'll remind him of everything else there is to pull him out. “What music should we listen to? What can we eat here? Does it feel cold to you, sweetheart?” Her voice has the nervous warble of a hostess pushing her way through a bad dinner party, as if Adam has suddenly become a stranger, someone she hardly recognizes. Finally, she gives up.
Tomorrow,
she thinks wearily.
I'll make him start talking again tomorrow.
Instead, she watches him carefully, and the way his body has closed around itself, his hooded eyes turned within. He's not moving anymore or running circles, so he must register that he's at home, where it's safe enough to hold perfectly still, to sit for twenty minutes on the sofa, then twenty more at the kitchen table, but his absence is so complete, so impenetrable, it feels as if something worse than regression is taking place. Even in the old days when Adam was at his worst—tantrumming in public, screaming for things he couldn't name or even point to—he was there in his body, putting up a fight. She's never seen anything like this total withdrawal before. This walking, swallowing, compliant catatonia.

Later, after Adam has gone to bed, she turns on the TV with Amelia's picture frozen—beautiful and dead—in the corner of what feels like every channel she turns to. When Cara can stand it no more, she turns off the TV and wanders the empty home of her childhood, the house they have occupied but hardly changed since her parents' death. Her mother's tiny handwriting still labels the spices; the doorway to the pantry still bears the pale pencil markings of her own childhood growth—lines with dates, because there were no siblings, no need to label which child they were charting. Once, she pointed these out to Adam: “Look, sweetheart. This is how tall I was when I was your age.” Even as she said it, she knew he wouldn't understand such a complicated concept:
Mama little?
Now, she wonders if living here is a mistake after all. As she paces these floors, the past walks beside her, larger and clearer than it should be. It's here now, ghosts whispering accusations, the feeling that the events of this day must be her fault, because trying to conjure the picture of Adam and this girl together on the playground, swinging side by side, she sees only the memory of her fifth-grade self, fixing her sights, like a set of crosshairs, on a pale, injured boy.

A
FTER THEIR LAST
lunch together in fifth grade, Cara lost the courage to open her mouth in Kevin's presence, though she continued to watch him as they moved from one classroom to another, from elementary school to the junior high up the hill. In the fall of ninth grade, Kevin stunned everyone by coming back to school with a beard so full it looked as if he had fashioned a costume for himself. Though the beard didn't last long (guidance counselors protested, pointed to grooming rules no one had ever heard of before), that was the year Kevin became a regular notation in Cara's diary, not as a crush or a friend, but as an example of someone carrying on in the face of obstacles larger than she could imagine or claim. In December, he got pneumonia and was out of school for four weeks, only to return in January so thin his clothes looked empty, his face creased with new age lines. In tenth grade, the one kidney he had left after the accident began failing. She knew this from Kevin's aunt, who was still a secretary for Suzette's father. From this same woman, she also learned that Kevin struggled with depression, that winters tended to be hard for him, sometimes requiring medication. This was the first time Cara ever heard the word
antidepressant,
and she thought of it every time she saw him at school, laughing with his friends, standing by his locker, thumbing through a guitar magazine, balanced on his forearm, his bad hand hanging uselessly below. She was fifteen by then, and, in all that time, strangely, they'd never spoken to each other since that last fifth-grade lunch.

Perhaps it wasn't that odd. Each new school they moved into had been double the size of the school they left. Though Kevin talked now, his words came slowly, weighted, like an old person with an immigrant's accent. Because Kevin had learning disabilities, his courses were a scattershot of special ed and regular classes. Surprisingly, he took and dressed for regular gym, then sat beside the teacher recording statistics, a role he must have liked, because in eleventh grade he became the unlikely football statistician.

Cara watched Kevin, thought about him, privately cheered his progress, but never, in all that time, expected what happened the first day of their senior year in high school: to walk into her English class and find him sitting there. They stared at each other for so long it would be impossible not to speak, or pretend they didn't recognize each other. “Oh my God,” she finally said. “Hi.”

He looked down, and blushed. “Hi,” he whispered.

That morning, Cara had made a conscious effort to change her look from the baggy shirts and overalls she'd come to school in all her life, to a tight spaghetti-strap T-shirt and tiny shorts. “Jesus, Cara, I can read your bra label,” Suzette told her—and did, to prove it. Over the years, they had stayed friends in spite of their differences. While Cara still pined for nods of approval and party invitations from the popular table, Suzette floated obliviously, above it all, her bank account stuffed with the money she made babysitting every weekend. More and more, Suzette cared little about the classes she so easily aced, and instead spent hours in the school art studio, painting canvases Cara had a hard time thinking what to say in response to. Suzette was obviously a good artist—she won awards, everyone said so—but her primary interest was abstract expressionism, which always left Cara nervously trying to guess what the pictures were of: “Wow,” she'd say. “I love this one. Is it flowers?”

Suzette would roll her eyes. “It's Teddy,” she'd say, her younger brother and frequent subject of her paintings. Three years ago, Suzette's life had been turned inside out when her father fell in love with another woman, leaving her mother to fall apart in the privacy of her bedroom, spending most days in her nightgown, sleeping and flipping through the magazines she kept scattered across his side of the bed. “I don't even want to talk about my mother,” Suzette would say, shaking her head. And she wouldn't. Instead she took over the lion's share of the cooking and other household chores, packing Teddy's lunch every morning, and, even though he was eight years old, waiting with him at the bus stop so he wouldn't be alone with the fifth-graders who scared him.

“Teddy is a sensitive soul,” she said to explain constructing their after-school schedule around Teddy and his bus drop-offs. “I don't want his life to be any harder.”

That was the year Suzette started making and keeping rules. “We have to go to my house. I don't want Teddy to be home alone,” she'd say. And though of course their mother was home, Cara never pushed the matter. She knew the divorce had taken a toll on Suzette, had left her scared of anything that suggested change. Cara knew this about Suzette and also knew her own new clothes weren't a mistake. She'd seen it in several surprised faces, saw it now in the half of Kevin's face that revealed emotions.

“Why don't I sit in front of you and it can be just like we're in fifth grade? I can talk on and on and embarrass myself all over again.”

Kevin laughed and Cara slid into the seat in front of him, thrilled with her own daring. When they spoke again after class, his voice, soft and halting, surprised her: he breathed between words, like someone with a stutter. “I wanted to try a regular…English class. I don't know, though. Reading can give me…very bad headaches. My eyes…” He seemed to search the sky for the words he needed. “Aren't strong.”

“I can help you,” she said, simply. Meaning: real help, what he needed, not the showy help of the past, where she peeled the tops off yogurt containers and dipped his spoon in for him. “I could read the books aloud. Make tapes for you. Would that be good?”

He shut his eyes, smiled in his old crooked way. “Yes. It would.”

Was it friendship, exactly, what they moved into? The exchange of tapes was always furtive, as if they were both slightly embarrassed, he by the need, she by the effort she unaccountably put into it. She told him it wasn't a big deal, that she was such a slow reader, doing it aloud took no more time, but this wasn't true. Reading aloud, page after page, was a laboriously slow task. Doing it this way, she learned how little she had actually read of these dense books. Dialogue, scenes, first and last sentences of every paragraph. This effort to help left her trapped, not with him, but with the endless descriptions of Puritan life in
The Scarlet Letter
. Finally, after two weeks, she abridged the text. “There's a whole bunch of stuff in here about dresses and what they wear, but I swear it doesn't matter, Kevin,” she said into the tiny microphone.

The next day he passed her a note, smiling. “I want to know about their dresses.”

She wrote at the bottom, “The weird part is they all wore bathing suits underneath. Little red bikinis.”

Soon they had two secrets: the tapes she never mentioned to anyone, including Suzette, and the notes they wrote steadily, all through English class. They were always funny, and maybe the best part was that she was a little funnier. Not by a vast distance, but a little. “How would you describe the hair today?” he wrote, with an arrow pointing to the teacher, Mrs. Green, whose hair was an ever-changing terrain. Some days it was curled into a dramatic flip that separated over her shoulders like individual sausage links; that day, it was piled on top of her head, high enough to clear the chalkboard. “Conical,” she wrote back.

On paper, she learned why he had friends—he was a good straight man, he set up jokes, let the other person tell them—but after a while, she began to worry this had gone too far. He wrote too much, saved their notes. He labeled her tapes
Cara, Part One
, as if she were the book. It felt like a mistake to let him go on, get the wrong idea.

“So, Kevin,” she wrote after a month or so of note exchanges. “I don't think I can read the next book for you. I'm getting kind of swamped these days.”

For the whole period, the paper didn't come back. Then as they packed up, he dropped the rectangle in her lap. “No prob,” it said.

Cara decided it was better not to discuss it. When partners were needed for a class project, she leaned forward in her seat, to a girl named Yolanda, and said to herself,
It's kinder this way. I'm thinking of him.
And it was, presumably. Scott, the one football player in the class, who, owing to his size and his prematurely deep voice, seemed as out of place in the room as Kevin, leaned across two desks and said in the surprising voice they rarely heard: “Kevin, dude, you and me.” Cara exhaled in relief.
He's not my responsibility,
she thought.

Suzette was the one who pointed out, weeks later, after Cara thought the whole business behind her, “Have you ever noticed how Kevin Barrows
stares
at you?”

Cara flushed, swiveled around in her seat. “No he doesn't,” she said, feeling her stomach turn to rock. She'd done this herself, created something terrible.

After that, Cara stopped talking to him completely.

At the semester break, when Mrs. Green suggested changing their seats to break up the monotony, Cara took one across the room and left Kevin to sit in behemoth Scott's hulking shadow. She focused all her attention on her new crush, Peter, who she'd met working props on
Guys and Dolls
, the musical he was the star of. Before this, Cara had only dated one boy, Robbie, who had never been a particularly dutiful or attentive boyfriend. Some weekends went by without any calls, and when they were together, Robbie was often restless, wishing their town had more to offer, which left her scrambling for ideas: “My parents will be gone. You could come over,” she'd offer, her voice suggestive of things he never picked up on. Sex wasn't nearly as interesting to him as it was to her.

“That's because he's gay,” Suzette declared after Cara and Robbie had been dating for three months. “I'm sorry, but it's true.”

Cara blinked, dumbfounded by the possibility. “Robbie's not
gay,
” she said, new doubt opening a vortex of worry in her stomach.

Robbie
was
gay, as it turned out, a fact revealed six months after they broke up and he came to school one day in a dress polo shirt and a pink triangle sticker on his backpack. Cara had learned her lesson: she tried to hold back this time, let the boy make the effort, come to her, and from the start this one felt different. Peter flirted with her all through rehearsals, until their last performance, when he whispered backstage, “So what are you going to do after this? Go back to being Cara, pretty girl with one friend?” She blinked up at him, shocked that he'd noticed the one defining truth of her life so far—she only had one friend. That night they kissed in the darkened back row of the auditorium seats, and a week later they became the couple that surprised everybody. She saw it on their faces:
Why's Peter with her? Props girl and star?
A month later, she understood the answer when he broke down and confessed, with teary uncertainty, about a friend he'd met at tennis summer camp. “He's just a friend,” Peter said, but she was old enough now to recognize these tears and know she'd heard enough.

The weekend after she broke up with Peter, Kevin went into the hospital. His kidney was failing, they were told; he was flying up the organ donor lists. “I think anyone who knows him ought to visit him in the hospital,” Mrs. Green told the class. “In these situations, you want to make sure you've done everything you can.”

Cara felt as if the whole class were staring at her.

“Look, I'll go with you,” Suzette said later. “I think our insane teacher might be right, actually.”

Cara hoped the visit would resolve the terrible guilt she felt, that she would stand alone with Kevin in the room, hold his good hand, and whisper apologies as his eyes opened and closed peacefully. Instead, his mother stood in the doorway when they walked up, her forehead corrugated into creases of worry. “What are you doing here?” she said, a greeting that so stunned Cara, she said nothing, leaving Suzette to fill in the gap.

“We're friends of Kevin's from school. We just wanted to say hi.”

His mother shook her head. “I don't remember him ever mentioning any girls.”

“We've known him a long time. My father's secretary is his aunt Joanne.”

His mother pursed her lips and shook her head. “I don't like Joanne. She talks too much. She tells everyone our business.”

“Actually, you're probably right,” Suzette said. “She does talk too much.”

With this, the older woman seemed to soften. She let them into Kevin's room, but only with the promise that they wouldn't stay longer than five minutes and wouldn't talk about anything that might upset Kevin. “He's exhausted and he needs all his strength right now. The most important thing is, he doesn't need any distractions.”

When they walked in, he opened his eyes and smiled with the good side of his face. He looked pale, thinner than he had three weeks ago.

“Hi,” Cara whispered, unsure what to say with his mother standing there. “So you're not missing much in English. Right now we're writing different introductory paragraphs. Like for essays you're just pretending to write. Argumentative, personal, analytical, whatever.”

After this, a silence fell over them and Kevin closed his eyes again. “My body is finally falling apart,” he said, and the three of them stood, paralyzed by the truth of this simple statement.