Eye Contact (10 page)

“The point being that I'm going to argue for this. I think it's something to try, at least. But we'd have to have some strict guidelines. This couldn't be about spending time with the kid who saw the murder. You couldn't go in there and ask him about it. Do you understand? That's for the professionals to do. Okay, Morgan? Are you listening?”

Yes, he nods, realizing as she says it, all the possibilities. At home he has started a list of possible suspects, including the school principal, Ms. Tesler, because she keeps sounding so defensive on the news. Last night, she said on TV, “There are one hundred and fifty elementary schools in this state without fences around them,” though the reporter hadn't asked any question about fences. When Morgan tried to look up the fact, he found nothing on the Internet about elementary schools and fences and can only assume she is making up facts, which leads him to believe she might be a suspect.

Also on his list is Mr. Herzog, the music teacher who asks people who can't keep rhythm “to please not clap.” Mr. Herzog wears brown suits and brown shoes, and once he told them, “I play in a jazz band, but it doesn't matter really, because nobody cares about jazz anymore,” which Morgan realizes now is an angry thing to say. Morgan remembers a time he saw Mr. Herzog in the hallway, pushing a rolling cart loaded with black instrument cases, with his head bent down so his glasses slipped off and got run over by the heavy, unstoppable cart. When he picked them up, they hung like a
W
in his hand. “Excuse me,” he said, squinting up the hall to Morgan. “But my worthless life just got worse, I'm afraid, and I need a bit of tape. Could you help me?” Morgan remembers all this, but never knew what to make of it before. Now he does. It means Mr. Herzog is sad and possibly mad about many things: jazz, glasses, students with no interest or talent. Maybe Amelia pushed him over the edge—blew chewing gum into a clarinet, made fun of his glasses, something.

Morgan formulates a plan in his mind: if he can't ask Adam about the murder directly, maybe he can make a list of names and work them, one by one, into their conversation.

 

Around school, June hears the stories that are springing up and taking on a life of their own—whispered at first and then spoken aloud, outside on the playground:
He's going to try again, maybe at Halloween. He wants the kid who saw him, but if he can't get that one, he'll take somebody else.
Teachers have been told that in discussing Amelia's murder with the kids, it is important to be open, to let the kids talk, but to emphasize facts as often as possible, keeping speculation to a minimum. “Here's what we know,” they've been told to say. “Here's what we don't know.” The more facts they are given, the more reassured kids will feel, so they are meant to use facts to arrive back at the same point:
The police are here, doing all they need to, everyone is safe, everything is fine.
But anyone can see that children hear this and tell themselves something else:
He could be someone we already know. He probably is. A neighbor, a custodian, someone who doesn't look crazy, but is.

In June's classroom, they have found someone new to suggest every hour: Mr. Fawler, who runs the computer lab and has, more than once, hunted for glasses that were sitting on top of his head. “He carries a pocketknife,” Jimmy tells her group, and they are all silenced for a moment, forced to imagine a man so overweight he can't button his cardigan sweaters, standing in the woods, wielding a switchblade. There's also Perry, on the maintenance crew for thirty years and so quiet most students have never heard him speak. “Check it out, you guys. I heard Perry lives with his mother. Like that guy in
Psycho
,” Brendan says, and June is floored: Brendan is in fifth grade and he's
seen
this movie? And he expects everyone else has too?

“Please, people,” she says, and stares at Brendan hard, not looking over at Leon, though she doesn't have to. They all understand:
There are children here, don't scare them.
She'll have a moment like that—clear cut, unambiguous, and an hour later she'll find herself wanting to dial Teddy's number, whisper into the receiver,
Has anyone checked out Perry, the custodian? Did anyone realize he still lives with his mother?

Teddy has come over every night since the murder, though sometimes he doesn't get there until eleven or twelve because now, of course, he works double shifts. The first night she saw him, after her drink with Martin, she fell into his arms and wept all over again. Now he walks in and they sit at her kitchen table, hands curled around mugs of tea.

Theoretically, this relationship with Teddy is meant to be a lark. He is six years younger than June and better-looking than any man she's dated in years. In college and graduate school, June sat at the top of all her classes and usually attracted some variation of the same man: brainy and pale, stomach going to paunch, glasses that slipped down his nose as they debated into the night about education and philosophy. Teddy is the opposite of all that: he is beautiful and young; his eyes, a rusty brown, flecked orange; his curly hair, dark blond; his freckled face, as her mother might have said, a map of Ireland. He is a cop she met when he pulled her over for speeding and the first thing he said to her, bending down to her window was “Gosh, hi.” He's someone she's never imagined herself with—a boy in a uniform, who is sweet and, on matters of any weight, inarticulate. For a year, she refused to take him seriously. He was a treat she gave herself late at night when he called from the parking lot of Dunkin' Donuts to ask, shyly, what she was doing, as if he didn't want to presume anything, even the empty spot beside her in bed.

“It's fine, Teddy. You can come over.”

“Really?” he'd always say. “Now?”

She used to make jokes, point to a gray hair and tell him time will not smile on a match like theirs. “When you're forty, I'll look a hundred and fifty,” she used to say. Now she doesn't make these jokes anymore because something has changed. She wonders if they are both feeling this, moving toward a change, something deeper, and more, but they are both feeling too tongue-tied to say anything. For her, this is no longer a lark, or a brainy woman's revenge for a lifetime of being overlooked by the best-looking boys. He isn't just beautiful anymore—he is also smart in the quietest way she's ever seen a man be, thoughtful and reflective, decent and loyal. Part of this is owing to the last five years he's spent taking care of his sister, Suzette, which in her mind makes him all the more compelling, but it also limits their time and keeps him at a certain distance. They never make plans more than two days ahead, never talk about the future, never mention living together, which is impossible, she understands, with Suzette in the picture. Dating Teddy has worked so far because she's accepted the givens: that he will leave on a moment's notice, that a single phone call from Suzette will end an evening inside of three minutes, the time it usually takes him to put his clothes back on. But there's also this: since the murder that turned their world upside down, he has come every night to be with her.

In the beginning, he told her everything he knew about the investigation. “They say there's an eighty percent chance the perpetrator knew the girl before today. He's a family member, a neighbor, someone she's had some contact with in the last six weeks. Chances are, they talked. Maybe she petted his dog, maybe she bought an ice cream from him, something, and he fixated on her. They think he's probably been watching her from the woods for a while. So we'll canvass the neighborhood, knock on doors, and sooner or later we'll find someone who's seen him.” That first night, she let herself believe in his certainty. “In twenty-four hours, this'll be over.”

Now that hasn't happened and they are obviously stumped, looking for ideas anywhere they can. “She took swimming lessons at the Y, so we're interviewing every person with a pass to that pool, anyone who might have seen her in a bathing suit.”

June stares at him. “But there wasn't any sexual assault.”

“Supposedly she wore this little pink polka-dot bikini. A few people have mentioned it.”

June nods and thinks of her own first reaction—that Amelia, who had always seemed so oblivious to her own beauty, must not have been, that she must have done something, drawn attention to herself somehow.

“There's something I haven't told you,” he says, turning his mug in his hands. “About the little boy who was with her.”

“Adam?”

He nods. “I knew his mom once. She was an old friend of Suzette's.”

“You're
kidding.
” It's hard to imagine Suzette with a friend, but then it's hard to imagine her with anyone or anywhere beside the apartment she hasn't left in a year. “Does she know about this? That it's her friend's son?”

“No. Not yet.”

Suzette's self-imposed exile from the world began a year ago, after a summer full of visits to the emergency room complaining of chest pains and rapid heartbeat. Teddy was never with her when these episodes happened, and the calls usually came from pay phones and nurses' stations. “I'm at the hospital! I think I'm dying!” Suzette would say, and Teddy would run, mumbling excuses: “It's this heart thing again,” or “She says her fingers are numb.” When he was told these were the symptoms of a classic panic attack, June would ask what she was afraid of, but there were never clear triggers; once, it happened in a Laundromat, another time, the library. Now June understands better the fruitlessness of that question. That the mind is a powerful thing and the physical symptoms of its unrest are real.

Now Suzette doesn't go out at all and, for June, the strangest part of this withdrawal from the world is the apparent peace Suzette seems to have found in it. By all evidence, she has solved her problems and has needed no more ambulance rides. She reads a great deal, watches TV, keeps up with one friend that June knows of, though she's never met him, a clerk at a store near her apartment. He is always referred to as “just a friend” and, oddly, never by name. He is only mentioned occasionally. “My friend came by yesterday, drove me crazy for three hours.” June used to honestly wonder if this friend was real, but then she would see evidence of his presence around the apartment—an ashtray forested with cigarette butts, an empty can of beer (Suzette certainly didn't smoke or drink beer)—and she would understand that, yes, Suzette had a more complicated life than they understood, a web of her own secrets, tying her to the world by invisible threads.

For a long time Teddy put off introducing them. When June finally met Suzette, the surprise was how much she liked her. For someone so afraid of the world, Suzette still kept up with it, kept a ubiquitous TV tuned to news, read two newspapers daily. She was warmer than June expected her to be, even surprisingly sweet about the age difference. “I'm so happy you're not a twenty-two-year-old waitress, I can't tell you,” she said.

June wasn't sure what to say. “I never was a twenty-two-year-old waitress, if that's any consolation.”

“Neither was I. When I was twenty-two, I was crazy.” Except for a remark like this, Suzette seemed mostly fine, certainly capable of surviving on her own. She worked from home as a graphic designer and kept up with her painting, which, from what June could tell, she was pretty good at. When she told Teddy that Suzette seemed healthier than she expected, he nodded. “Yeah, she can seem that way. Fine, like that.”

Sometimes she wonders if Teddy is too close and can't see the ways his help might fuel Suzette's problems. Once, she tried to gently suggest this. “Maybe what she needs is medication, Teddy, not you there, doing everything for her.”

His response was curt. “She's tried medication. It didn't work.”

Now June thinks about Suzette and this connection to Adam. She has only had a handful of encounters with him this year, but she has noticed that his eyes are up more, looking around, taking in other children. Once she watched a line of kids, all taking a turn at whapping a garbage can as they walked in from recess. There was no point to the game, nothing much happened, but here was the surprise: at the end of the line, on his turn, Adam did it, too. It was a tiny thing, really, but for an autistic child, unusual. He watched twenty-two examples and without being prompted, he did it, too. “You should tell Suzette what's going on. Adam's mother is probably going out of her mind. Maybe Suzette can help.”

“I don't think so.”

“Why not? Maybe it would be good for her. I know Adam's mother—she's a single parent, she'd probably be grateful to hear from an old friend.”

“Cara was Suzette's best friend. All through school they were inseparable. After they graduated, they got an apartment together, but something happened. That was when Suzette fell apart.” He stares at June for a long time, as if he needs to make sure she understands. “See, Cara was the whole problem.”

 

That afternoon, Cara takes Adam's backpack up to her room, gingerly unzips it, and pulls out the communication book Phil has dutifully written daily notes in. She knows she won't find Amelia's name in here—he's not allowed to mention other students by name—but maybe there's something else she can find. She reads through a few entries:
Hard time after recess today. Wouldn't do his math. Spelling test went great! Only one word wrong!
She has needed these notes to know anything at all about Adam's day, but she can see how they tell only half the story. They are all about schoolwork, with almost nothing written of recess or lunch, the only times Cara remembers of her own elementary school days.