Eye Contact

by Cammie McGovern

  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 in
strument 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.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I like this part. Solving puzzles.” A beeper on his belt goes off, cutting short the conversation. “Look, I’ve got to get back. Call if you need anything else.”

  She holds up a hand to wave good-bye as he disappears out the door, already dialing one-handed a phone he has produced and unfolded from his pocket.

  After he leaves, Cara gets an idea. It’s only nine o’clock, still early enough that she can call Morgan and ask if he would mind meeting her at the school playground in the morning.

  “Sure. I mean, you know, I could do that.”

  “I want it to be just the three of us. If we go early, no one else will be there, right?”

  “I guess. Okay.”

  After the bathroom, Adam didn’t want to see her at recess. He didn’t want to go with her into the woods. He’s never heard this rule, but he knows it must be one. No going into the woods; no leaving the playground. It scares him to break rules, and he doesn’t want to. Then she found him at the swings and buzzed her lips together. A machine sound, like a lawn mower, no teeth, just lips. He leaned closer to see if she had a machine in her mouth making that noise.

  “Elephant,” she said. Adam has never seen a real elephant, but this sounded the way the pictures looked. He smiled because he wanted her to do it again. She did once and then she told him it was time to go.

  You go, he wanted to say. Not me. After recess was spelling, after spelling was movement room. He didn’t want to miss movement room.

  “Come on, Adam. You said. Remember?”

  When they arrive, Morgan is already there, wearing the same clothes he had on Saturday, which makes her heart lift: Does he know how much this helps, that Adam often recognizes people not by their faces but by their clothing? She sits down beside him, leaves Adam to stand in the geometric shadow pattern of the climbing structure. “I wanted to see if being here might help Adam tell us what happened. Not in words maybe, but in his own way. Maybe we could just watch him, get some clues.”

  They look over at him. “Do you want to come over and say hi to Morgan?” she calls, though she doesn’t expect this to work, because there’s no urgency to her voice, no imperative behind it. Then he surprises her; he steps out of the shadow, walks over to the bench, and stands before them without rocking or humming, as if he’s a perfectly fine boy; only with eyes that she recognizes: on the ground then way up to the sky. “Hi, Morgan.”

  She shakes her head, stunned. In three days, he’s chosen to say the same two words twice: Hi, Morgan. There must be a plan to this. He is gathering his words, deciding what to say, how and when to say it, and Morgan is part of this for no reason that she understands, but in his presence, the fog dissipates slightly—Adam can hear again, respond to suggestions. “Do you want to go over to the swings with Morgan?”

  She watches. She’s right: he’s heard her, he’s thinking about it.

  “Uh, I have to say, swings make me a little bit sick to my stomach,” Morgan says. “I have this problem where I sometimes throw up.”

  She doesn’t take her eyes off of Adam. His expression changes as he looks over at the long chains and rubber U’s dangling above muddy ruts. Maybe this is a bad idea. Maybe this will push him to some edge, but she has to find out. She speaks softly: “Adam sat with Amelia on the swing set. That’s the last thing they did before they went for their walk. Do you remember that, Adam?”

  “Oh wow,” Morgan says.

  She can’t look at Morgan, can’t look away from Adam. “Why don’t you go, Adam? Morgan will sit next to you. He doesn’t have to swing. It’ll be okay.” She has to believe this is right, that any movement at all is better than paralysis. Adam steps toward the swing set. “Go with him,” she whispers to Morgan. “Sit next to him and watch. I’m going to walk away, but tell him it’s okay, I’ll be right back. And then watch everything he does very carefully. I’ll explain this later.”

  As Morgan walks away, she calls, “Nod if it seems like he hears anything.”

  Morgan turns around, nods experimentally, Like this?

  Yes, she nods back, then slips around the back of the structure, the far wall of the school to the other side of the basketball court where a trash bin sits beside a muddy gully. Hidden behind the Dumpster, she watches the boys sit down on the swings. From this distance, she sees that Morgan’s lips are moving, he is talking to Adam, though it’s impossible to hear what he’s saying so she waits for him to stop, then takes the chance: Just a decibel above a whisper, a hundred yards away, she says, “Say ‘Hi, Morgan,’” and waits.

  Adam’s head is dipped into his jacket, obscured by his collar. She can’t see his face or his lips, but a second later, Morgan nods.

  She moves back farther. The muddy gully extends to the start of the woods that has been roped off with fluttering yellow police tape marked CAUTION. It seems strange that the police aren’t here, but perhaps three days after the fact, it’s no longer necessary to keep a crime-scene vigil, though even she knows—she thinks it, as she moves closer: Criminals always return to their scene. This should be terrifying, being so close, yet oddly it’s the opposite—more like a relief at last, because she wants to know what Adam saw. She doesn’t go under the tape; she has to stay focused on the matter at hand. She is farther from Adam now, maybe seventy-five yards, and she needs to try different sounds. She has planned this out, has a purse full of possibilities. First, a telephone she can press to call herself, which she does. Even from this distance, she can see Adam’s response: he turns around in the swing, looks toward the woods so quickly that she has to jump back in the shadows to avoid being seen. She moves again, farther away. She has a Walkman with headphones, which she knows is a stretch; Adam’s hearing is extraordinary, far beyond most people’s, but it isn’t bionic. In the past, he has been able to identify the music someone wearing a Walkman two seats in front of them on the bus is listening to—but at this distance, which is, essentially, a football field away? She turns it on, way up, holds the headphone in the air. Nothing. No nod from Morgan.

  “Excuse me?”

  She spins around, so startled she drops the Walkman on the ground. There’s a policeman behind her, emerging from the trees, his uniform dotted with bits of leaves. She knows that he’s about to tell her to leave, this isn’t safe, isn’t allowed. “Wait—” she says, holding up a finger. A tiny bit of song spills from the headphone hole in the Walkman lying on the ground. It distorts the music—opera—so that it sounds like she’s listening to chipmunks singing. “Just watch.” She holds up her hand to quiet him before he can speak because she needs perfect silence to demonstrate what she’s just figured out: Morgan is nodding, Adam is turning, looking around. “He can hear it. He can hear a Walkman dropped in the woods.”

  If it had been a telephone, or voices, Adam would have heard it but wouldn’t have cared. He would have stayed where he was, parked safely on those swings, but she knows this because she knows her son, knows music is a string that pulls him up, through rooms, out doors, away from her. She knows before she turns arou
nd exactly what she’ll see: Adam is out of the swings, crossing the field, moving toward them.

  “The guy had a Walkman,” she tells the officer. “He had bare feet and a Walkman.”

  “Cara—”

  She turns around to see: it’s not just any policeman, it’s someone she knows, a face she can’t place right away and then she does. “Oh my God,” she says, staring now. “Teddy?”

  He nods, though it’s instantly clear this isn’t a reunion, or a happy coincidence. He’s a policeman and she’s in trouble. “You shouldn’t be here. I’ve called the station. Detective Lincoln wants to meet you back at your house.”

  She nods, and retrieves the Walkman. She wants to say, It’s so strange, Teddy, I’ve just been thinking about you and Suzette. She wants to grab his hand, squeeze it and say, How is she? but he won’t look her in the eye. She stands there, her face frozen in expectation as he speaks into a walkie-talkie and tells someone at the other end that he has the subject in custody.

  Adam remembers hearing something. A tiny trill, like a bird singing, a perfect song of notes that climbs up and down. She heard it, too, because they were walking now, getting closer and she could sing back. “This is what we do,” she said. “He plays the flute and I sing it back.”

  He wants to hear more, wants to look inside her throat. It’s beautiful, not scary, and he moves closer, following her, walking so close their shadows bump and touch and then disappear into the unbroken shadow of trees and forest. The songs call and answer each other. A bird sings, Come, it’s okay. Another sings back, I’m on my way. There’s no spelling to worry about, nothing bad can happen, this is the language he understands perfectly, these notes flying high through the trees and leaves, meeting midair, dancing together, invisibly.

  “Come on,” she says. “We’re running out of time. He won’t wait forever.”