Eye Contact (20 page)

 

He's meant to do something, but he doesn't know what. The buzzing gets louder like it always does if no one is telling him what's going to happen but something is meant to.

“Just look around, Adam. See if anyone looks familiar.”

There were pants, brown pants with lines down them that ran shadows to his feet, which were dirty with leaves between his toes. All these pants are tan called khaki or blue called jeans, and all of these men are wearing shoes, so there's nothing for him to do or say except that every time he turns around someone tells him to keep looking.

“He's here,” the girl said. “He just wants to talk to you.”

The man shook his head. “He just wants to meet you, that's all.”

He remembers all this, but doesn't know what it means. There was more than one man. There were other feet, other voices. He remembers voices:
Shit. What the fuck?
Words his mother says don't ever say, so he doesn't, though he doesn't know why. Once, his mother called them unpleasant, which is the same thing she sometimes calls certain smells he can't smell so he also doesn't understand. He starts to rock, but it's better here, he's okay. He's not at school, where he has to worry about the girl. He knows she's not here, not at a police station, he doesn't have to worry about her here, so it's okay. He remembers they were in trouble, remembers someone saying, “Shit, we're gonna get in trouble.” But he was buried by then, in a hole of bushes.

 

Cara thinks of something: “Adam has a hard time with faces, but he might recognize feet. Can you have them take off their shoes?”

Matt squints his eyes and considers this idea. Finally, he nods and a voice announces over a loudspeaker to the men in line, “Please remove your socks and shoes.”

The man Cara remembers complies without bending down. He steps out of shoes that are too big and unpeels his socks with toes as dexterous as fingers. They all watch, momentarily mesmerized by this mini freak-show demonstration. When the socks finally come off, Adam backs away from the window, shaking his head.

Dr. Katzenbaum kneels down beside him. “Use your words, Adam.”

They wait forever.

 

Something grumbles inside him, words rising, being pulled like a magnet up. Now, they're here, inside of him. He opens his mouth. “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING!”

 

Morgan will get a court date, the officer explains. He'll tell his story to a judge who will decide on his punishment, taking into account his clean record, his actions since the crime, his willingness to come forward and volunteer the information. “Some of these things will work in your favor,” she says. “But you have to bear in mind this was the worst fire our conservation land has suffered in ten years. It decimated an ecosystem, countless animals suffered. You will need to be mindful of that in every choice you make for the rest of your life. You've seen how easily life can be taken away, how actions have tremendous consequences.”

He nods; he has. Knowing they are coming to an end because she's moving toward the door, he takes a chance. “Can I ask how you're doing on the Amelia Best case?”

She stops beside her desk. “I can't talk about that, Morgan. But why do you ask?”

“I know someone who might know something.”

She narrows her eyes, weighs this possibility. “Hmm. I can tell you, because it's going to be on the news soon. We've got a suspect in custody.”

“Who is it?”

“I can't tell you.”

“Is it a kid?”

“I can tell you that much. No. Why?”

He thinks about Chris. “I believe a kid did it. A kid who's making threats on other kids who might know.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I can't tell you.”

She smiles. “All right. I'll tell them what you've said, but just so you know, kids can do terrible things, but it's not very likely that one did this. You shouldn't worry about this, Morgan. You should worry about yourself.”

Out in the hallway again, the station has swelled with people and it feels suddenly like a hubbub of activity. This must be related to Amelia, he thinks, remembering the officer's words:
We've got a suspect in custody.
He looks around the room to see if there's anyone he recognizes in the crowd and then he does: Cara across the room, standing between two policemen. She sees him at the same time he sees her. “Morgan!” she calls, smiling and raising one hand up. “Did you hear? They've got the guy.”

Morgan looks back to where his mother was sitting but isn't anymore. Her purse is gone, her jacket, too. “That's great,” he says, and then he sees Adam, too, standing beside an older woman wearing glasses. He doesn't want his mother to walk up and see him talking to Cara. “I should go,” he says.

“Okay, well. I'm happy, we're all happy. We'd love to see you soon, Morgan. And bring this friend of yours. Marianne called and told me all about him.”

For the first time since they got to the police station, he remembers that he was supposed to pick up Chris to go over to Adam's this afternoon. He never called, never told Chris he wouldn't make it, but how could he? “Okay,” Morgan says, wishing it was possible to come right out and tell Cara what's on his mind:
I was wondering if I could come live with you for a while. Not forever, of course. Just until this fire business blows over with my mother.

Instead of walking away, Cara steps closer, puts her hand on Morgan's shoulder. “Even if this investigation is over, Morgan—if Adam goes back to school—we'd still love to see you.” Before he spots it coming, or braces himself for it, she wraps him up in a hug. “Your friendship has meant a lot to both of us.”

The whole ride home, Morgan's mother is silent. He can't stop thinking of Cara's hug, and her hair that smelled like coconut shampoo. The way she asked him to keep coming over, makes him feel like he
can
go there for a sleepover, like she might say yes, even if he tells her he needs certain foods and can't sleep with any kind of fan on in the room or doors open even a crack. He looks over at his mother, who has said nothing since they got in the car. He's pretty sure she's thinking up punishments, trying to decide exactly the right one. Grounding him won't work because he never goes anywhere; forbidding TV isn't good because he hardly watches it. He knows why his mother is having trouble with this: he doesn't do much, except visit Adam.

Realizing this fills him with dread, though. What if she takes this away? What if he can't show Cara the pictures that Amelia drew, and sit beside her as she goes through them? What if he can't watch her face when she gets to the last three pictures in the stack?

They get home and walk inside without a word. He tries to read her body language as she slides off her shoes and rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. Though it's six-thirty, fifteen minutes after their usual dinnertime, she makes no move to start cooking. It scares him not knowing what will happen next, what she'll finally say when she says it. As she moves around the kitchen and punches Play on the answering machine, he imagines his mother did see Cara hug him and is about to tell him he must never—will never—see that woman again, or her son, whatever his problem is. When his mother gets going, she can be horribly mean; sometimes he can't believe the names she's called people who walk by their card table. He is so busy imagining what she might say, he almost doesn't hear what is being said: Marianne's voice on the answering machine, asking him to please call her at home, that there's a problem with Chris. That he seems to be missing.

 

An hour after they get home, Cara's happiness begins to dampen. The whole time at the police station she'd felt euphoric—Adam had communicated! Had solved the crime after all! In his own fashion, he'd been as useful as a typical nine-year-old. While he never pointed to one suspect, echoing when he did, at exactly the moment the man Cara recognized took off his socks, communicated enough. He'd said what he had to—
hair
and the words this man had given him—they all heard it, no one doubted what it was or thought for a second that those might have been Adam's own words. She watched a smile pass from one officer to another, watched as it turned into nods, then laughter, a single hand clap, then action. They didn't even need what she had to offer, whispered to Matt as he issued instructions to officers around him. “We know that guy. We've seen him before.”

Matt stopped. “How?”

“He's a children's musician. He calls himself Busker Bob. We went to his concerts when Adam was younger.” She remembers him surprisingly well: the trademark pair of patchwork pants that he always wore, quilted from beautiful pieces of velvet and satin, dotted with small mirror chips and buttons and safety pin chains he'd link charms onto. The pants must have weighed four or five pounds and made a tinkly sound when he moved. Ironically, one of the things Cara remembers most about him was his unusual gentleness. With a wide, plate face and a big smile, he must have been the quietest children's performer they ever saw, leaning over his guitar, as if every song was a secret he could only tell the kids, who knelt, breathless, in the front row. It had a funny effect—kids inched forward, one knee at a time until he had a horseshoe of sticky faces breathing into his guitar. “Oh, don't touch,” he'd whisper, holding up a single finger. “Don't touch.”

In those days, surrounded by other three-or four-year-olds, Adam could often pass as fine—even better than fine, sometimes. He was a boy who sat motionless, enrapt for the duration of any musical offering, and she often got compliments on his looks and his perfect concentration. Other mothers would say,
Is that one yours? I'm impressed.
With his little adult face, the way he cocked his head and wrinkled his eyebrows at people's laughter, the exact expression an adult would use to say
That's not funny
, Adam often impressed people, especially in an environment like a concert where he was at his best. But there was something else she remembers: Busker Bob could tell.

After his shows, Busker Bob always opened a duffel bag filled with maracas and bottle-cap shakers and let children play as he moved around the room in some fashion of a parade. Sometimes it worked, sometimes, with too many toddlers in need of naps, it didn't—but Adam was always there, trotting behind, as close as possible without physically touching. One time, parading Bob made an unexpected turn and the laws of physics worked against Adam, crashing him into the object of his obsession. Afterward, Bob watched Adam go through one of his standard touched-by-a-stranger responses: he turned in three circles, said
I'm sorry, I'm sorry,
under his hand. Bob looked down at him and up at her. “He's a little different, isn't he?” She's never forgotten that moment or the horrible way it cemented something about Adam's future—that even in places where they came to get away, they didn't, really.

“How many concerts of his did you see?” Matt asked her.

“Five maybe, but that's a guess. Maybe less.”

“But that would qualify you as a regular, wouldn't it?”

“I don't know. He had a once-a-month gig Saturday mornings at the community center. Some days, he got thirty or forty people there.”

“Is it possible he registered Adam's autism?”

“Yes, actually. I think he might have.”

“What did he say?”

“‘He's a little different, isn't he?'”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That's what he said to me. There were maybe thirty kids there, and he picked out mine and that's what he said to me. My only son. Four years old.”

Matt noted all of this, scribbling furiously, nodding as she spoke. Cara smiled in spite of herself. This story was good, she could see, more than they'd even hoped for. This man knew Adam's limitations, let him live because of them. Around them, people moved by, patted her on the shoulder, offered congratulations. “Great thinking about the shoes,” a man she'd never seen before said.

Before they'd left the station, she looked for Matt again across the room, crowded with people. When she caught his eye, she mouthed
Thank you, Matt,
and he smiled in a way that caught her breath. For the first time, she thought:
My God, he's a person. An unmarried person who isn't afraid of Adam or his autism.
She felt a little silly, unsure what to do, so she made her hand into a phone.
I'll call you,
she mouthed and a second later, he did the same, looked as silly as she had.
I'll talk to you,
he said into his pinky finger.

Back home, Cara feels her relief dissipate into a growing shadow of doubt. They all heard the way Adam said his echoed words: in the accent she heard before and could describe, but couldn't place. They heard each man say his name, a tiny snippet of a voice sample, five words for each of them—“My name is…”—and in that sliver, Robert Phillips, Busker Bob, was the quietest, the one who seemed closest to tears or emotion, which they all must have noticed (impossible not to), but did they also hear what she did, right away? There was no accent.