Eye Contact

by Cammie McGovern

  Now she knows what it is: a child’s picture flashes on the television, a blond-haired boy, wearing glasses, who looks like he’s twelve or thirteen years old. “A town already on high alert following the murder of ten-year-old Amelia Best now faces the possible abduction of another child. Late yesterday afternoon Chris Kolchak, a thirteen-year-old boy who attends Kennedy Middle School a hundred yards away from where Amelia Best was found slain in the woods, disappeared from his home. Chris was last seen in front of his house, apparently waiting for a friend to pick him up. Nobody saw him leave, no witnesses saw any unusual activity or unfamiliar cars in the area. Anyone with any information is asked to call this number…” A minute later, his mother is on the screen, crying mascara down her face, staring directly into the camera: “If anyone knows anything, has any information about my baby, I’m begging you please, call the police. He’s a sick boy and he needs his medicines.”

  June holds on to the edge of the sink to steady herself. She’ll need to get to school as fast as possible; there will be more meetings, more outsiders telling them what to do. “In the slim chance of a repeat incident…” a counselor once told them, and June can’t even remember what followed because she hadn’t let herself hear it, couldn’t entertain the notion when the bulk of her job had become paranoia control.

  At school, the morning meeting is impromptu, with as many people here as are able to be. Marianne Foster, a guidance counselor at the middle school, leads the meeting, which includes enough faces June doesn’t recognize to presume this is a joint meeting for the two schools. June walks in on Marianne midpoint: “Chris has a degree of obsessive-compulsive behavior, and a diagnosed anxiety disorder. Following Amelia’s murder, he was exhibiting elevated signs of stress. He felt very persecuted, obsessed by bullies. It’s possible—we’re praying—he has run away to escape some imagined or legitimate danger. We’re asking people to tell the kids that we have no evidence Chris has been hurt. We are working on the assumption that he’s alive somewhere, hiding from what he perceives to be dangers, and we need any information kids might have about where he went. Chris can be quite a talker, as anyone who knows him can attest, and it’s our belief that wherever Chris has gone, he probably told someone.”

  June admires Marianne’s fiery conviction, this energetic certainty that good counseling efforts will find Chris and return him unharmed. But Marianne hasn’t yet had one of her own students die, hasn’t learned that it can happen in a matter of minutes, that her ardent belief it’s not possible will not make it so.

  Morgan wonders if this is all his fault. Obviously, to a certain extent, it is. If he’d picked Chris up as he was meant to, Chris wouldn’t have been standing outside, wouldn’t have gotten kidnapped. Last night, after they listened to Marianne’s message, Morgan’s mother asked him to please just tell her what was going on. He told her the truth, that he didn’t know. She kept going: “I just want to understand this, all right? All of the sudden I have no idea who you are—you’re setting fires, you’re hugging some strange woman at the police station. Who was that, Morgan? What’s going on here?”

  He has told her nothing of his two visits with Adam because if he is going to disappear, he needs to have a few secrets of his own. Sunday morning, before meeting Cara at the playground, he had told his mother he was going to the library. His heart beat as he said it, the first lie he’d ever told her, not counting, of course, the day of the fire when he sat for three hours in the same chair waiting for her return and then said, “No, nothing,” when she asked him, “Is anything wrong?” Now he wonders if Chris was thinking along the same lines, if he was arranging his own escape.

  “She isn’t anybody, Mom. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That woman at the police station wasn’t anybody?”

  “No, I’ve never seen her before.”

  “I don’t understand you, Morgan. You’re not a very good liar. You obviously know her somehow, right?”

  In his mind, he is already packing his suitcase, making a list of necessities. He will need a few things from the pantry his mother stands in front of.

  “Do you know what she’s talking about on this message? Do you know this Chris guy?”

  “I was supposed to meet him after school today.”

  “Oh my God, and now he’s missing?”

  He will need macaroni and cheese, bottles of Yoo-Hoo, Life cereal for the morning.

  “Morgan, that’s terrible.”

  It is. He knows it is. But what can he do? He’s guilty of too many things to be guilty of this, too. He thinks about water, tries to remember if Cara has a filter or if she drinks tap, which he can’t do. Drinking tap water, to him, tastes like drinking a pipe. “Do we have bottled water?” he asks and she stares at him.

  “Morgan.”

  “What?”

  “This boy might be dead.”

  “Oh I don’t think so,” he says, spying two bottles of water on the shelf above her shoulder.

  It’s seven o’clock in the morning when Cara opens her door, expecting one of the bleary-eyed policemen stationed outside awkwardly asking to use her bathroom, and instead she finds Morgan, standing on her porch with a suitcase beside him. “I have something to show you,” he says.

  He offers no explanation for the large suitcase he rolls in the kitchen. Instead, he opens his backpack, pulls out a file folder of papers. “Here they are,” he says.

  “What’s this?” She has hardly slept at all. Instead, she lay awake all night, going over the horrible roller coaster of her day. Last night, she made the mistake of watching the news until she couldn’t bear it anymore—a boy only four years older than Adam? What does it mean?

  Morgan hands her a stack of pictures. “Amelia drew these. I found them at school. No one’s seen them yet. Mostly they’re of animals and buildings. But there’s a few of people.”

  She flips through and sees that some of the drawings are remarkable— far more sophisticated than most ten-year-olds could do, though even as she thinks this, it also occurs to her: what does she know of how most ten-year-olds draw? She knows only Adam, who draws people as balloon-headed stick figures and animals that look like lopsided forks. Amelia’s drawings of horses are something else entirely: rich in detail, manes, bridles, whiskers, and even though it hardly seems possible, the suggestion of personality. She’s good at drawing eyes, which must be what distinguishes them—makes one horse look playful, another more reflective. Her furniture includes a desk and a chair with erased lines that show she was using these objects to work on perspective. Cara studies the desk drawing, which doesn’t work exactly—a pencil cup teeters on the edge of the desk as if it’s trying to throw itself over—but still: a ten-year-old recognizing there are rules to drawing and trying to teach herself?

  Upstairs, she hears Adam awake, moving around. She moves to the stairs and calls out, “Adam, sweetheart? Guess what? We’ve got a surprise! Morgan’s here.”

  Morgan follows her, keeping himself inches from the hand that holds the drawings he wants her to keep looking at. She wants to get breakfast on, get the morning started. She has decided what’s important is getting Adam back to school, into his routine. She doesn’t want to let his meltdown yesterday stop them, but apparently Morgan isn’t going to let her put his pile of paper treasure down. “Keep going,” he says, poking his finger at them. “It gets better.”

  She worries: What would “better” be in Morgan’s mind? She hears Adam on the steps and suddenly fears that he will come down in his pajamas and have Morgan see, right away, that he still wears a Pull-Up to sleep, that if he didn’t, she’d be washing sheets every morning. She shouldn’t care about these things, but she does, feels the embarrassment Adam never would. “Morgan, look. Adam can feel a little shy in the mornings. Would you mind sitting in the family room for a minute?”

  “Just keep looking.” He can’t let go of this, can’t read her hints.

  “Fine.” She keeps flipping through the drawi
ngs: a tree, some flowers, a dog sleeping on a rug. Toward the bottom, she finds the first sketches of people—about ten of them—which aren’t as detailed or alive as the earlier ones of animals: these are all flat, almond-eyed faces, staring angrily off the page. Except for the hair, it’s hard to tell the men from the women, the young from the old. She gets to the bottom and hands them back. “They’re great, Morgan. Good job. Maybe we should show them…” She hesitates. “I don’t know, to Amelia’s mother maybe?”

  “Don’t you get it?” “Get what?”

  “Look again.”

  “Morgan. It’s early. We’ve got school today.” She eyes his suitcase again. What’s he doing here this early? She looks at the pictures again just as Adam appears in the doorway, scratching his head, pajama bottoms wrinkled around the damp bulge of his Pull-Up.

  “See? See?” Morgan grins wildly now, so excited she fears he might stab a hole in the paper with his finger. “They’re of Adam. Three of them. All of Adam.” She goes back and looks. The last three are all of a young boy with—it’s true—similarities to Adam’s features: his wide brown eyes and (this startles her a bit: why didn’t she notice it the first time through?) his unusually long eyelashes. The nose might be off—too short, too flat—but the mouth is right, the shape of his lips, the tiny curve in the corners. The more she looks, the more she can’t get over that she missed it the first time: It is Adam, his hair, curlier on one side than it is on the other, his ears that stick out a bit behind his hair, one of the few physical flaws on a face that is otherwise so perfect.

  “My God, Morgan, you’re right. That’s amazing,” she says, though now she wants to put the pictures down, save them to look at when she can bear to contemplate the possibility they suggest: a girl so interested in Adam that she studied his face, memorized its details.

  “But did you see the other one?” Morgan says when she tries to lay them on the table.

  “Not right now, Morgan. It’s hard for me to look at them, okay? Do you get what I’m saying?”

  “Just this last one, I swear,” he says and reaches into the stack to pull one out that she saw originally and flipped past, thinking only generic woman, and her heart freezes: it’s a turtleneck she knows, earrings she recognizes. It’s unmistakable, though she passed right by it before: it’s a drawing of her.

  She turns away from Morgan, steers Adam back upstairs, to the toilet, to the sink, into clothes. When they come back down, Morgan is at their kitchen table, eating a bowl of cereal from a box of Life she doesn’t own. His suitcase is open, revealing its contents, which is mostly food. “Okay, Morgan, you need to tell us what you’re doing here.”

  Dressed and awake, Adam suddenly seems tickled by the novelty of Morgan at their table. Beside her, he rocks back and forth. “What are you doing!” He giggles and turns a little circle.

  “My mom has to go out of town for a night. I’m fine staying by myself, but I thought I’d drop these off and see if you, you know, needed anything or wanted maybe for me to sleep over tonight.”

  She laughs in surprise at the offer. They’ve never had a sleepover, of course; it’s possible Adam doesn’t even know what this means. But maybe this is a good idea; maybe it will get them through the day, take their minds off of Chris and everything else that’s going on.

  “What do you think, Adam? Do you want Morgan to sleep at our house tonight?”

  “Sleep at our house,” he says, tightening his circles, turning so quickly she finally puts a hand on his shoulder to slow him down.

  In every class, people are talking about Chris, but Morgan doesn’t want to think about Chris. He wants to think about sleeping over with Cara and Adam, about his mother coming home to find the house empty, her own suitcase gone. He imagines her not noticing at first. She will make some phone calls, start her evening reading and then it will dawn on her bit by bit, the missing food, his toothbrush gone, his clothes and books. And then she will see the only thing he’s left behind—his orthopedic shoes— and she will know that this is it, that he’s going to live with Cara, for two days at least, which is as long as he estimates his food supply will last.

  In social studies, Morgan gets a pink office summons slip, which is usually reserved for people in trouble, but in the office Marianne tells him, “You’re not in any trouble. This is about Chris, obviously,” and Morgan is relieved. Apparently she hasn’t heard about the fire yet, doesn’t realize that actually, yes, he is in trouble. “We’re talking to as many of his friends as we can today, but you’re the person we wanted to start with.”

  A police officer leans on the desk beside her, with a notebook in one hand and a pencil in the other. Morgan nods and tries to think what he might say.

  “You and Chris were meant to go over to Adam’s house yesterday afternoon, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what happened? Why didn’t you?”

  “My mother made me do something else. It wasn’t my choice.”

  “What did she make you do?”

  He hasn’t planned what to say, hasn’t decided ahead of time to lie, but then it comes so easily he can hardly believe it. “She made me go to visit my grandmother.” Lies are confusing, though. They mean anything could happen—Marianne could know his grandmother, could know that she died six years ago.

  “Okay.” She nods. “And did you call Chris to cancel your plans?”

  Morgan shakes his head. “No.”

  “Do you understand, Morgan, that when you make plans with people you have to be responsible to them, let them know if you can’t make it?”

  He feels the room start to spin. She’s saying that Chris missing is his fault, too. Everything is his fault. There’ll be no getting away from it, no escaping to Cara’s house, home of the one face who always looks happy to see him.

  “It’s okay, Morgan. You made a mistake, but it’s not your fault that Chris disappeared.”

  It’s too late. Morgan has started to cry, hard enough for the police officer to hand him a box of Kleenex. “Why don’t you tell us what you two talked about yesterday?”

  Morgan blows his nose: “His problems, I guess. That people liked to pick on him. Amelia’s murder.”

  “What about Amelia’s murder?”

  Here it seems okay to tell the truth: “That he knew something about it.”

  Marianne looks at the officer and back at him. “What did he know?”

  “He said he couldn’t tell me because then somebody would kill him.”

  “That’s what he said?”

  Only now does Morgan realize what he’s saying, what he’s known but hasn’t let himself register all this time. “I guess maybe Chris knows who did it.”

  “Did he tell you, ‘I know who killed Amelia Best’?”

  “No. But I think about the bullies and the people Chris was always talking about putting on a list, and I have to wonder.”

  “Wonder what?”

  “If one of them did it.”

  “Now, Morgan, there’s no question that Chris was distressed about bullying. People picked on him, and that made him very upset.”

  “Yes.”

  “But do you see how there’s a difference between Chris saying ‘I know people who should get in trouble for being mean’ and ‘I know the person who killed Amelia Best’?”

  “Yes. I see there’s a difference.”

  “Is it possible he was saying ‘I know people who are so mean they could have killed her’?”

  Morgan shakes his head. It’s obvious to him now, so obvious he can’t think why he didn’t see it sooner. “I think he knows whoever went into the woods. It’s one of the guys who likes to bully him.”

  There are three that he knows of, for sure. Maybe more. He needs to make a list, start writing names down.

  All morning, Cara moves restlessly around the pile of drawings she doesn’t want to contemplate. The picture of her sits on top, accurate enough for Morgan to identify, though he couldn’t even know what Amelia’s got righ
t—the clothes, the jewelry. What did he see to recognize this blank-faced woman with unsmiling, empty eyes, as her? Is it possible this is what she looks like now—that she wears her loneliness when she doesn’t even realize it, as a permanent expression on her unguarded face?

  For three days Cara has thought about making this call. The number is easy enough to find in the phone book; she dials it quickly before doubt can set in. “Mrs. Best? It’s Cara Miller, Adam’s mother. I wanted to call and tell you how sorry I am. If there’s anything I can do…” She has had no practice for this. She’s friends with no mothers of other children because she’s never known what to say to any of them.

  “Please,” the woman says. Her voice is soft, reassuring. “Call me Olivia. I’ve wanted to talk to you, too.”

  “I have some drawings that Amelia did at school. A friend found them and brought them to me.” She moves around the kitchen, picks up a dirty knife, then puts it back down. “They’re very good. I thought maybe you might want them.”

  In the background, Cara hears a little girl’s voice.

  “No, not that one, Katie,” the woman says.

  My God, Cara remembers, this is why she can sound reasonably normal: she has other children. She isn’t so horribly, unassailably alone, as Cara would have been if it had happened to her. “Maybe this isn’t a good time. I just wanted to let you know we’re thinking of you.” She hesitates. There’s more, of course, but how can she ask the question most pressing in her mind right now. Did Amelia talk about Adam at all? She looks down at the pictures, the drawing of Adam, touches the tiny line of his ear. Is it possible they were friends?

  The woman must be moving around. She hears a baby cry, and the TV come on. “Look—would you like to come over? We’re new in town, and I don’t really have any friends yet. Our days have been so full of police. It would be nice to talk to another mother.”

  Cara can hardly think what to say. “I could bring these drawings.”

  “Yes, please do. I’d like to see them.”