Eye Contact (2 page)

It's a stretch, though, and it requires more work every year to stay optimistic about Adam's future in the face of the growing gap between him and his peers. He's in third grade now, and the list of things he can't do grows longer every year, more exacting, and in her mind more ominous. He can't tell time, can't grasp abstract time concepts: yesterday, tomorrow, next week. He can't play card games, still adds two dice by counting dots. “Shouldn't he be good at this math stuff?” a teacher once asked, thinking obviously:
Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman.
“He's
not,
” Cara said in a rare curt moment. “Autistic kids are all very different, and math is Adam's weakest subject. He's fine with reading.
Fine.
Grade level.” She said this emphatically, though there was actually some question about this, too, a lower score on comprehension than he'd gotten six months earlier, which she has to investigate but hasn't gotten around to because there are so many gaps, so many deficits now, countless questions that run through her mind every night:
Why worry about reading when the math is so low? Why worry about math when he is still, three days out of seven, not dressing himself? Why worry about any of these things when it has been
nearly a year since he's had a playdate?
Recently she has been falling asleep every night stewing about playdates, thinking:
I've got to try another one soon.
Kids like Adam well enough, or at least they don't mind coming over and playing with his things. Sometimes she'll get the type who will spend the whole time talking to her and she'll watch sweet Adam in the corner, hands clasped in joy at the ease of this get-together, how smoothly it is going, as if he wants to say,
I love my mother and look! So do you!
Afterward, she will have to go over it all, remind him that one has to
talk
to people to be their friend, has to answer questions, has to, for instance,
say hello.
And Adam's face will fall slowly, take in what she is saying in pieces—that it hasn't really been a success, that friendship requires something more complicated than standing in the same room, among the same toys, though Cara, with her own history of failed friendships, can hardly say with any certainty what this should be.

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 she 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.”