Eye Contact (12 page)

He planned a speech insisting that he will need to come back, but he hasn't planned any words for her holding up his coat like he's still a child and saying, “When can we have you back? Would that be okay? Would you mind coming back? Maybe tomorrow?”

“Oh sure,” he says. “I mean, you know. I don't mind.”

He can't look at her. He's afraid that if he does, something bad will happen, that he'll say the wrong things, make his confession, break the spell of her praise.

“I know it doesn't seem like much, but Adam
responded
to you,” she whispers, though Adam is in the other room, listening to music, not to them. “He felt safe with you. He wasn't scared, and he's been scared of everything since—” Her voice wavers. “Everyone's telling me, take him to the doctor, get him to therapists, send him back to school, but I can't do that to him. School is going to be terrifying to him, right?”

Is she asking him a question that he's meant to answer? He's never had a conversation like this before. He tries this: “Right.”

“Then you called, and I thought let's just try this. Bring the world back to him, one child at a time. Let him see it's okay, he's safe.”

 

For the rest of the day, Adam disappears into his silence. Cara studies his back, outlined by the window, and watches his movements. Why did he emerge for a few minutes with Morgan, only to retreat again? There are clues here, she thinks, if only she could read them, add them all up, understand what they mean. She needs to think like Adam thinks, follow the movement of his body and imagine the reasons, the explanations behind them.

They are there, she knows.

For years she didn't understand the pleasure of sand dribbled through his fingers—then an ophthalmologist told her that Adam can see far better than most people, every grain of sand in motion. “I imagine it's quite a beautiful thing,” he said. What looks pointless and empty isn't always. She must remember this, look for reasons, watch everything he does.

This reminds her of the time after her parents' death, when the puzzling details around their accident became her obsession and she couldn't stop going over a handful of questions in her mind: Why, in a freezing rain with black ice on the road, was her father, a compulsively cautious driver, going fifty miles an hour in a thirty-mile zone? Why did the people in the car behind them, who called in the accident and waited with them until help arrived, also report seeing him run a stop sign a quarter mile before he lost control? In the terrible days that followed the accident, as their house filled with neighbors and casseroles they would never eat their way through, Cara tried to put the pieces together. They'd gone to the theater that night to see a three-hour movie about World War II. The accident occurred forty minutes after the movie let out, though the theater was only ten minutes from their house. It wasn't like her parents to stop for a drink, but was it possible they had? Why else would her father have driven recklessly in conditions that, more typically, would have slowed him to a crawl, driving the road shoulder with his hazard lights blinking? A year later, she rented the movie they saw that night, thinking it might contain clues—something that had upset her father enough to come out of it driving erratically. Halfway through, she stopped watching. The tragedy of war and mass carnage of young lives offered no comfort or insight into her own terrible loss.

After Morgan's visit, Cara starts a list of observable changes in Adam since the murder.

1. He walks differently,
   she writes, unsure how to describe his new loping hunch with his hands poised, robotically, midair, as if he is carrying an invisible tray.
   
2. Except for echoing “Hi, Morgan,” he hasn't talked since the murder.
   
3. This rabbit's foot.
   A token? A gift? Something he stole? As small as it may seem, to her recollection this has never happened before. Adam has never taken anything belonging to another child.
   
4. Socks
   . This is perhaps the oddest change of all. Last night, straightening his covers after he'd fallen asleep, she found him wearing socks—a new pair, not the ones he'd worn all day, but ones he'd apparently gotten out of bed, in the dark, to find and put on. All his life, Adam has hated wearing socks; one wrinkle and they'd have to start all over again, smoothing and straightening, getting it just right inside his shoe. She thinks of what Phil said, wonders if socks are somehow a connection to Amelia. Did she like them, so now he likes them as well?
   

That night, Matt Lincoln surprises her by stopping by. He tells her he was in the neighborhood following some leads and just wanted to check up on them, see how they were doing. She shows him the list she's made, explains what's on it. “You said you had a hard time finding footprints, right?”

“Yes.”

“Is it possible the guy might have been barefoot?” Lincoln doesn't say anything. She had just thought of this when he knocked on the door, but now she's thrilled that he's here to share it with. “Because all of a sudden Adam wants to have socks on, all the time, but he hates socks. He's always hated socks. So I'm wondering if maybe that's what he saw: some guy's
feet.
”

“Interesting. It's true—bare footprints would be harder to pick up. We could have missed them.” He doesn't seem as intrigued as she might have hoped. He goes to the refrigerator and studies the collage of Adam's schoolwork and pictures taped to it. “But look at the temperature that day—you had a high of fifty-eight degrees. How is a guy going to walk barefoot down the road and not get noticed by somebody? Or what—he took off his shoes, went into the woods, killed the girl, and then put them back on? It's an interesting idea, but it's also a long shot.”

She can hear the patient disinterest in his voice. He's seen Adam at his worst and has given up on the idea of his being of much use. Two days ago she'd insisted he wouldn't be. Now she's less sure. Everything about Adam is different, and she believes that in these differences lie clues to what happened, if she can interpret them correctly. Earlier in the night, he had come to her holding an old video copy her father had made of
The Magic Flute
. They hadn't watched it for a long time—so long in fact, that her father's handwriting on the case was a sad shock, like finding the closest thing they have to a letter from him, addressed to Adam. Why this one, she wondered, with its dark witches of the night, forest fairies, and other creatures? Surely it means something—the first video he's asked for, the first request he's made since the murder—but what? “Okay,” she said, starting it up, and then turned around to the second surprise of the night: Adam standing behind her, his back to the TV, waiting as if he couldn't bear to watch, could only bring himself to listen to the music.
Okay,
Cara thought, leaving him alone.
One thing at a time.
When she came back an hour later, he hadn't moved.

“Can I make you some tea?” she offers.

Lincoln smiles gratefully. “Yes, thank you.” He looks different away from the station, handsomer than she remembers and more awkward also, as if there is something he wants to ask her and isn't sure how.

She wonders if this visit is standard procedure or something slightly more personal, connected to his nephew. One thing she knows: when your child is autistic, your whole extended family wishes they could do more for you. “So how is your nephew doing?” she asks, meaning:
Exactly how autistic is he? Does he talk about trains a little too much or does he not talk at all?

“He's okay, I guess. They're starting this thing, ABA, with him.” He shakes his head. “Did you ever try that?”

“For a while, yes,” she says. Applied behavior analysis, ABA, is a time-consuming, often money-draining commitment that involves many hours a week, ideally forty, of the child with a one-on-one therapist breaking down and drilling all components of language acquisition and learning. For Adam, Cara did a modified form of ABA, with trained therapists ten hours a week and herself theoretically filling in the other thirty, drilling compliance and vocabulary flash cards. Though Adam got better, improving incrementally at pointing and repeating, he never got used to the demands the sessions made on him, never started one without protesting, never got through the two hours without crying at some point. After a while, it drained her resources and her reservoir of determination. When Adam was five, halfway through kindergarten, she decided to let it go: stop the after-school therapy, shelve the notebooks of carefully recorded data—goals outlined, drills mastered.

“We did it for a while,” she repeats, and thinks about Adam at the station, rocking back and forth with his fingers in his ears, looking more autistic than he had in years. “I thought it was good. It's worked for a lot of kids.” What else can she say? She can hardly point to Adam and say,
Look, see how well?

“David's got some words. Mostly what he does is line up cars, along his bed, and desk.”

She nods. Though Adam never did this, she's heard of it, of course: the beautiful patterns, Matchbox-car art.

“See, I'm telling my sister, I don't know about ABA. Shouldn't kids this age be learning how to play, not sitting at a table doing work?”

“But if there's no other way a child is going to learn how to communicate, you do whatever you have to. Adam was never very good at playing.”

He nods. “Yeah.”

It's a sad subject, all of this—choosing therapies, trying to imagine the future that lies ahead. When Adam was three, she couldn't talk about it with anyone except her parents. “Are you close with your sister?”

“Yes, actually. We're twins.”

Cara remembers one set of twins, a boy and a girl she went to high school with who were two or three years younger. She doesn't remember their names, only that in their freshman year they ate lunch together every day in one corner of the cafeteria. “Wait a minute.” She looks at his face again. “Did you go to Whitmore High?”

Apparently this isn't a shock to him, because he nods, smiling again. “Yes, indeed. Played saxophone for
Guys and Dolls
.”

He
did
? Maybe this shouldn't be such a surprise, but it is. High school seems like a different world to her now, though come to think of it, she remembers his sister, that she was pretty, and shy. “How is your sister doing now?”

“She's okay. It's hard. David's their first baby, and he's the first grandchild. Our parents, everyone, is kind of—” He cups his hand around his head, makes a crazy motion. “We're all trying to help. What else can we do, right?”

Listening to him, she feels a pang for the loss of her parents, for the way having people to share it with mitigated the pain after Adam's diagnosis. “If your sister ever wants someone to talk to, she's welcome to call.” She's never offered this before, never wanted the role.

“Thanks. I'll tell her.”

She remembers his sister's name now: Mary. People called them Mary and Mattie, though they weren't a joke. They were something else: a sight people remembered because they didn't see it too often, a brother-and-sister pair sitting alone for the length of a lunch period, finding something to talk about the whole time.

He wanders into the living room, stops at a picture on the mantel of her graduation, where she stands between her parents, smiling cross-eyed at the tassel dangling from her mortarboard. “You want to know what I remember about you from high school?”

Her heart quickens as she imagines any number of embarrassing details he might recall:
You dated gay boys, you had an elaborate hairstyle.
(“Yes,” she would have to admit, remembering the hours she spent wielding a curling iron in the bathroom, more often than not with Suzette perched on the toilet, saying: “Jesus, Cara, enough already. You're not curing cancer there.”) She wanted so much back then, costumed herself so elaborately to get it.

“I remember you used to play the flute. Is that right?”

It's such an odd thing that she laughs. “Yes, that's right, I did.” Her first two years in high school, and of course it was the flute, the instrument choice of all shy girls. She quit junior year when playing in the band required marching at the football games, where she would have had to wear an embarrassing uniform with a hair-crushing hat. “I didn't play for very long. I wasn't very good.”

He shrugs. “I don't know why I remember. I must have seen you at a concert.” Again, he lets his hands say something he isn't. “Older girl…”

She blushes and looks away, as it occurs to her: he's younger than she is, by two years at least. “How did you become a detective so young?”

He shrugs. “Small department. It's not so hard.”

“Were you a regular police officer for a while?” She doesn't know the lexicon of this world.

“On street patrol? Sure.”

She tries to imagine him wearing a uniform, writing out tickets, breaking up parties. “Some people love that, they're good at it, and they stay with it. I didn't.”