Eye Contact, Page 2

  The whole enterprise makes her sad, unable to think about the great gray morass of Adam’s future. Math isn’t his weakest subject, really. His weakest subject is life, and everything about moving through it. Last week, lost in his own thoughts, Adam very nearly followed the wrong woman off the bus. Cara had to reach out, snap his coat hood, and bark, “Adam, look up.” “Oh, oh, oh,” he said, his face awash in gratitude and relief: Almost lost and then saved! He pressed his forehead against her chest, gasped and giggled and almost cried as he said, over and over, “You’re okay, you’re okay.” Nine years old and in a panic, he still reverses his pronouns, still echoes words of comfort exactly as they’ve been given to him. “You are okay,” she said, ruffling his hair as he stood rocking beside her, her baby boy, her preteen, his cheek pressed oddly to the side of her breast.

  Now Margot Tesler huffs into the room and sits down across from Cara to explain what happened: Phil, Adam’s regular aide, was out sick today, and Teresa, Adam’s usual sub, already had an assignment, so he had someone new today, a Mrs. Warshowski, who misunderstood what she was told and believed recess was her break time.

  Cara stares at her. Until this moment she hasn’t been terribly worried. She assumed he’d be found in one of his strange places, behind a vending machine, under the piano in the music room, that soon there would be some forced laughter and general embarrassment about the commotion this caused. Now she’s less sure. “He went out to recess alone?”

  “The playground supervisors were told. They were perfectly aware.”

  “But he was outside when he disappeared?”

  Margot meets her gaze and nods. “Yes.”

  Cara stands up. She hasn’t considered the idea that he might have been outside, might have really disappeared. She needs to get out there and start looking in all the spots Adam is most likely to have gone. “He must have heard something—a lawn mower maybe. Or some music. Did you check the maintenance room? Sometimes they leave their radio on.”

  “We checked. He’s not there.”

  Cara gathers her things. “How about the music room? Is the band practicing?”

  “We looked. They’re not.”

  “Adam can hear things other people can’t. If one kid is playing violin somewhere in the building, he’ll probably hear it and try to get closer.”

  Margot comes around the desk. “We’ve got people looking inside and outside.”

  “Let me go find him, Margot. I’m sorry this has caused such a disruption, but I’ll find him. He can’t have gone far.” In the old days, when Adam was younger and more driven by his compulsions to investigate machines, heating vents, water faucets not completely turned off, Cara lost him more often than she liked to admit. She knew the panic, the speed with which he could disappear, but she also knew, intuitively, how to find him: Stop. Listen hard for his humming, his tiny throaty bird noises, or for what he must have heard—music maybe, or the low compelling purr of a machine come to life.

  “They may ask for that in a minute or two, but for right now, you need to stay here.”

  “They? Who is they?”

  “The police.”

  The police? “How long has he been gone?”

  “A little over an hour. There’s a girl missing, too. The police say they think that’s a good sign, that it diminishes the possibility of stranger abduction. It’s virtually unheard of for someone to take two children at once.”

  Cara tries to swallow but finds it hard, her mouth filling up with something she can’t bear the taste of. She nods but doesn’t sit down. “What happened, Margot? Why wasn’t anyone watching him?”

  “There was actually more supervision than usual. Six adults were outside when it happened. There was no stranger on the playground, no unknown cars in the parking lot, no unusual interactions that anyone saw. We’re talking to the three classrooms of kids who were outside at the time, trying to find out if any kids talked to them, dared them to hide maybe, as a practical joke, or to walk over to the woods.”

  The woods, she thinks. Beyond the soccer fields on the far side of the playground, there is a lovely wood glade of pine trees that gives the school its name, Woodside Elementary. “Let me go outside, Margot.”

  “Not yet. They’re doing a systematic search, and for now they ask that you stay here.”

  Cara looks out the window. “What do they think happened?”

  “They think it was a prank. Someone picked two vulnerable kids and told them to do something stupid.” Margot shakes her head in disgust. “That’s why I called the police so fast. I want whoever’s responsible for this to understand they’re in big trouble.”

  In the past, Cara hasn’t worried excessively about bullying. Riding the bus with Adam the first week of school as she does every year, she got a glimpse of how little he registers to other children. They walk past him, look through him, hardly see him, beyond the obvious oddity of a third-grader riding the school bus with his mother. It is sad, of course, and also a relief. If bullies have an intuitive sense for who will burst into tears most easily, most spectacularly, it isn’t Adam. He might hum or walk away, but in all likelihood he will hear very little another child says to him. She has to be honest about this, has to remind herself, often, to remain clear on who Adam is and what he is capable of. “If another child told him to do something, I don’t think he would. That’s not like Adam.”

  “You never know, Cara. He’s changing. Adam’s changed a lot this year.”

  In any other context, she would take this as a cause for celebration. He’s changing! Even the principal noticed! Now it only seems worrisome. “Who is the girl?”

  “Amelia Best?” she says as a question, as if hoping this name might ring a bell, which it doesn’t. “She’s new this year. Fourth grade. She’s been at this school…what? Six weeks. Unusually pretty little girl. Very…” She tries to find the right word. “Blond.”

  Adam has disappeared with a notably pretty little girl? For the first time in years, she thinks of her fifth-grade fixation on Kevin Barrows and panics. “Are you sure they’re together?”

  “We don’t know. We know Adam better than we know her. We noticed Adam was missing first, because it’s so unlike him. He’s so compliant these days that when he didn’t line up at the first whistle, Sue knew something was wrong and called the office right away.”

  “Is it possible an older kid came over from the high school? Or middle school?”

  Margot presses her fingertips together. “Theoretically, they’re not allowed, but it’s possible.” The middle school sits within viewing distance of the elementary school—up a hill, with some soccer fields in between. “So I’m afraid I have to ask—where is Adam’s father?”

  Cara looks up. She hasn’t expected this. “He’s not…in the picture.” This is her standard answer, the one nobody ever presses her past.

  “Right, I know that, but where is he? I’m only asking because the police have asked several times. Apparently, an absent father is the first place they look.”

  Cara feels her mouth go dry. “I don’t know who his father is…exactly.”

  Margot raises her eyes in surprise. “Oh. So he’s never been in the picture?”

  “No. He wouldn’t know.”

  “At all? Anything about Adam? There’s no chance he’s involved in this?”

  Cara shakes her head. “None.”

  Margot holds up her hand. “That’s all I need to know.” She looks out the window of her office, as if she’s contemplating going out there right now, telling someone this. Then she turns back, with a new thought: “Do you think if Adam was out on the playground, he could have heard a radio, maybe, playing in the woods?”

  Cara’s stomach begins to pound, like a second heart. Let him not be in the woods, she prays. “Yes,” she says softly. “He could have heard something no one else did.”

  “Would he have gone if, say, he heard voices?”

  “No,” she whispers because she can’t bear the fact that sh
e isn’t sure. Adam is her life, her constant companion, the boy she gave up any other life for, but there is a truth to what Margot says: in the last few years, he has been changing. There is a new bravery to him at times, old fears mysteriously dropped. Even in this brief school year, there have been occasions when she warned the teacher needlessly—Adam can’t handle fire drills, Adam won’t do well in regular PE—both times she’s been wrong, has underestimated her son.

  Suddenly there is a flurry out in the hallway; two secretaries stand up at once. Through the glass window of the principal’s office, Cara can see one of them look directly at her and then away. When the door handle turns and the woman leans in, Cara doesn’t look up. “They’ve found him, Cara. Adam is all right. They’re bringing him out now.”

  Cara exhales, her relief so huge she cannot speak.

  “Where was he?”

  “In the woods, so he may have some scratches.”

  “And the girl? Did they find her, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “No.”

  “What happened?”

  “They found her body.”

  “This Is My Confession,” Morgan writes carefully across the top of the page. He wants to make it neat, get this right. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, except maybe myself, which I understand was stupid, and wrong, and NOT THE ANSWER, but I’m trying to be honest, and that’s the truth. Confessions are meant to be a factual re-telling of events in which the writer says, basically, It Was Me. For me to do this right, though, I have to make a few things clear. Number one: I am not, nor have I ever been, the type to get in trouble. In fourth grade, I got very upset about a misunderstanding over some graffiti written on the wall near my seat. When the teacher asked if I understood what school property means, I told her I didn’t do it, I wasn’t even the type. Here’s what I’ve learned, though: People can do certain things even when they are not the type of person to do them.”

  He is being neat, careful with his writing, staying in the lines, even though he doesn’t intend to show this to anyone. He is in study hall, which is a pointless period because no one studies and the proctor, Mr. White, is so old he doesn’t care what anyone does, which is mostly talk. Since no one cares, Morgan keeps writing. “Number two: While I’m not going to turn myself in because that would mean having no future for the rest of my life, and maybe going to jail, I am going to work in my own way, every single day to make up for what I’ve done, which was a terrible mistake.”

  Morgan looks up at the clock, sees he’s out of time, and folds his notebook closed. Twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, he eats lunch with a group that has no name but meets in Room 257. In his mind, Morgan thinks of it as the Group for People Who Need a Group Like This. To him, this means people who have no other friends, though he doesn’t know this for a fact. No one has ever said, “I have no friends”; that just seems to be a given in most of their discussions, which so far have been on topics like Having a Conversation, Controlling Your Anger, and Dealing With Anxieties. Morgan doesn’t have all of these problems, only some of them. Controlling his anger, for instance, has never been his problem, though people might be less likely to believe that now.

  There are five other boys, plus himself, plus Marianne Foster, who runs the group. Some of them have very obvious problems: Derek, for instance, stutters so badly that he hardly speaks. Everything makes Sean anxious: lines in the cafeteria, spoiled fruit, school bells, gym class, the idea of growing up. Chris probably has the widest variety of problems: asthma, eczema, glasses that don’t stay on his nose. He is also afraid of water, even in a cup. “I never touch it,” he says. “I don’t swim, I don’t go in boats, I don’t drink it or bathe. I wash with a powder my mother sends away for.” Someday Morgan wants to ask if Chris never showers, or just not very often. Maybe the others want to ask the same question and are afraid to—he can’t be sure.

  At first, today is like any other day. Marianne starts by asking how people have done on their goals. They each have goals they are working on, though Morgan doesn’t know what anyone else’s are, except for Howard, who told his the first meeting, not realizing he didn’t have to: “I’m working on asking other people questions about themselves and not playing with my penis through my pocket,” he said. After that, everyone else chose not to tell his goals.

  “All right, then, if nobody wants to share today, we’ll press on to what I promised last time I would talk about: your semester project.” Marianne turns around and writes on the blackboard: Volunteering in Our Community. She explains that for the assignment they’ll choose a placement and meet once a week with a person who needs their help. “For instance, it might be an elderly person. What might you do for an elderly person?”

  Sean raises his hand. “Excuse me, Marianne, but I’ve tried something like this once and it made me extremely anxious.”

  “For right now, Sean, let’s just listen to what I’m saying with open ears and an open mind and try not to get too worried before I tell you what you’re doing.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “I understand, okay, Sean? I hear what you’re saying.”

  Morgan likes Marianne, likes that they get to call her Marianne, which he hasn’t done with a teacher since preschool. He understands she isn’t technically pretty, that her body is fine but her face has more chins than it technically should have, which she explained once was because she has lupus and takes certain medicines that make her face swell. Morgan likes that she tells them things like this, just says them out loud.

  She checks her watch. “You’re going to be able to pick from four choices: a retirement community, a preschool, a soup kitchen, and bilingual conversation practice for non-native English speakers. Think about what you’d be most interested in doing.”

  As she speaks, the door opens and a woman from the main office walks in. For an instant, they all look around. Even Marianne looks shocked. “Barbara! You shouldn’t—”

  This group is a private place, Marianne told them in the beginning. No one needs to know who’s here; no one should ever repeat what’s said. Barbara holds up a hand, a small folded piece of paper in it. “I’m sorry, Marianne, but there’s been an emergency.”

  Marianne takes the note and reads it. “Oh my God, I have to go,” she says, standing. “I’m sorry about this, guys. We’ll talk more next time.”

  A minute later, she is gone.

  Now she knows, Morgan thinks. The note must have been about me.

  For all of fifth period, Morgan feels edgy and nervous.

  In sixth-period science, an announcement comes over the loudspeaker from the principal, canceling all after-school activities. “Parents are being notified,” he tells them. “Everyone is to proceed directly onto school buses following dismissal.” Morgan raises his hand, gets a bathroom pass from Mr. Marchetti, then walks to the hallway outside Marianne’s office door. He wants to go in there, show her his confession, explain everything, but instead he stands beside the open door to the main office and hears an overlap of raised voices, something about an ambulance: “The police are already there. These kids are going to see it.”

  “We have to make sure they don’t. Get all of them onto a bus or into a parent’s car.”

  “Jesus, Paul.”

  “That’s what we’ve been told so far. That’s all we know. We have no choice.”

  Morgan hears footsteps coming up behind him, and he moves away, too late.

  “Morgan,” he hears, and turns around to find Marianne, her face splotched with bright red patches. “I don’t know what you just heard, but something very sad has happened.” She reaches out a hand and—he can’t believe it, he thinks for a minute his heart will stop—takes his. For the first time it occurs to him: Maybe this isn’t about me. “A girl has died. Over at the elementary school. Everyone will probably know soon enough, so it’s better to just say it, I think.” She squeezes his hand. “Hopefully, I’m right. What’s important now is t
o follow directions and listen very carefully and do exactly what you are told, okay?”

  Morgan nods and holds on to Marianne’s hand. He imagines, for an instant, being married to her, living at her house, helping her pick out which turtleneck she’ll wear. She bends down, catches his eye. “This is serious, Morgan.”

  “Oh I know,” he says.

  For Adam, language has always been a struggle. His first words didn’t come until he was three, and then they arrived as only a scatter of nouns, the words most important to him: musical instruments, composers, machines he was fascinated by. By the time he was four, he could identify a clarinet, an oboe, and a bassoon, but couldn’t, even when pressed, point to a pair of pants. This is the peculiarity of the autistic brain, the way some pathways work and others do not. Why can one autistic child learn to read before he can organize his mouth into speaking words? Why can another memorize a menu in the time it takes most people to read it? Over the years Cara has learned that the brain can move in lurching dissonance, travel at high speed and no speed simultaneously. Once, in the same four-minute conversation, Adam identified a piece of elevator music as Bach but was unable to give the impressed stranger in the elevator his own name or age. Cara knew he wouldn’t be able to because she knew his brain and the walls it contained. “What’s your name?” was still a question he couldn’t, at age four, answer without prompts, without her touching his chin and starting the answer, “Aaaa…” The hard part was the pronoun. To Adam, your meant the other person, and how would he know that person’s name? There is logic to the countless things he can’t do, a way his thinking makes sense.

  For years, he never strung his words together, never adopted those baby phrases that get you through a meal: All gone! More please! Then, in the course of a single morning four years ago, it changed. Cara remembers all of it, exactly: the lunch she was arranging on his plate, the ham slice, the pickle beside it. Sitting sideways on the chair, one hand mysteriously raised, he began to speak in a heart-stopping monologue: “You can’t just step off curbs like that. This is a street, with cars. They go fast and don’t look. They could run you over, squash you. Flat.”