Eye Contact (8 page)

Cara reached for his hand. “No it's not,” she whispered, as if it were possible for her to control such things.

After they walked out, Suzette surprised her. “You're right about Kevin,” she said, in response to nothing. “All these years I hadn't realized, but he's interesting, isn't he?” Cara turned and looked at her. She couldn't remember Suzette saying even this much about a boy before.

Two weeks later, on the eve of Kevin's transplant, Cara got a letter in the mail, one sheet of notebook paper folded into a white envelope with only her name and address on the front. Inside she found a note, handwritten in large, unevenly spaced letters:
Here is my introductory paragraph. For seven years, I have loved you.

Kevin survived the operation, though barely. This time, Cara's information came from Scott, the football player, who visited Kevin in the hospital and told everyone that for three days his fever ran so high he spoke gibberish. “I heard it, too. It was wild,” Scott said.

As he spoke, Cara thought about the letter she hadn't answered, though Kevin's hospital address was still written on the chalkboard, double-boxed with
DO NOT ERASE
printed above it. Mrs. Green still pointed to it occasionally: “In these situations…” she'd say, and Cara now understood what she meant by this—in matters of life and death.

She bought two cards, one with flowers on the front, one with a cartoon drawing of a woman with what looked like an animal on her head that said inside, “Better hair next time.” She drafted different messages: “We've been friends for a long time. I wish I knew you better. I wish it was possible to know people better.” This one struck her as the most honest and also, potentially, the cruelest. Perhaps she could say,
I feel the same way,
which occasionally she did, until she considered the awkwardness a full recovery would precipitate, seeing each other at school again, faces frozen in expectation.

Eventually, she sent the flower card with a single sentence that tried, as best she could, to incorporate Suzette's sentiment: “I am thinking about you and so is everyone else.” She hoped that would at least mitigate his mother's distrust of her. She imagined his mother reading it aloud, balancing it on his bedside table, thinking to herself,
Well, that's something anyway.

Now Cara sees everything from the mother's perspective, how a young girl might have left her feeling terrified, powerless. Maybe she tore it up in fury.

Eventually, Kevin recovered enough to go back home and, though there was talk of getting assignments to him, Cara never raised her hand to volunteer for the job. He never returned to school. At graduation, his name was read and greeted with a thunderous applause he didn't hear because he wasn't there.

“Y
OU WANT TO
hear what I think about autism?” Martin says, sitting at a tiny bar table across from June.

No,
June thinks.
I don't.
It has been a day full of unimaginable horror, and now she finds herself at the end of it, sitting across from Martin, a school guidance counselor she has never particularly liked, though the kids all do, especially the boys who horseshoe around him in the hallway to talk about sports scores. He works hard at his own popularity, dresses in jeans that bag a bit in the way the older, sixth-grade boys wear them, and his lunch-hour talking groups fill up so quickly that other adults sometimes wonder—is it appropriate for kids to be so eager for counseling? In the last year or so, June has avoided lunches and long hallway chats with him. That they are having a drink now is a testimony to the way this day has unmoored them all. They both live alone, and both—she suspects—are afraid to go home tonight.

“I think about this guy my buddy took care of for a while. He was an adult, okay? Nonverbal. Incontinent. Pretty out of it. But one time I visited my friend at work and a child started crying outside the window of his apartment and, I swear to God, the guy did everything he could to get to that kid. Rocking, moaning. My friend had to hold him in his lap. Both grown men. You ask yourself, did the guy have a connection to other people—to that kid, to his caretakers? My God. They loved each other. No sex, no words, all the stuff that jumbles it all up. I sat there watching and I thought: This is the purest love I've ever seen.”

It's odd that Martin is thinking more about Adam when everyone else has been thinking about Amelia.

“When I was in college, I worked for a summer at a camp for autistics. You want to know what I used to think?” She doesn't answer. He leans forward to tell her anyway, his thumb and forefinger pinched together. “I used to think: Here are a bunch of kids so brilliant, so truly ahead of us all, intellectually, they came out of the womb, took one look around this screwed-up world and said to themselves, ‘Good-bye. I'll go on living but not here. Not on this planet.'”

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.”