Eye Contact
Page 21
“I was happy.”
“So you see—it didn’t work. First Kevin left, then I left, and you didn’t care.”
“Yes I did. I cared.” It’s been nine years and Cara still thinks of stories to tell her. In her mind, Suzette is still there. Surely she can see this, can sense it. Or maybe not. Maybe too many years have passed now and they are both too altered by the lives they’ve ended up with. For a while, they stand there, each of them weighing her own regret. “I don’t know if he told you he was going to do this, but Kevin called me and asked if we could see each other sometime.”
Suzette nods. “I figured he would. Sooner or later.”
“I want to see him, but I don’t want it to be like last time. I don’t want to sneak around.”
“Do you want to date him?”
“I don’t think so. But I want to see him, see if it’s possible for us to be friends. Do you think it is?”
“He’s not the same person you remember. He’s in a wheelchair now, did he tell you that?”
She tries not to let the surprise of this register on her face. “No.”
“He’ll probably be mad at me for telling you. He wants you to think of him as nondisabled, mostly independent. Using the wheelchair is related to the kidney stuff. I think he can still stand occasionally, but not much. Not often that I’ve seen. We’ve stayed friends because look—” She gestures around. “Accessible apartment. An old man lived here before Teddy and me. Kevin can visit me and actually go to the bathroom by himself. The thing is, sometimes he’s fine, and sometimes he’s not. Sometimes he has dark periods and I don’t hear from him. He disappears and I don’t know what happens to him.”
Cara nods, and looks around the room at some of the paintings she’s never seen before. They’re different from her old work—more accessible, more realistic. One is of a beach, with water in the background. Though it has no person in it, it feels like a portrait nevertheless. A towel in the foreground is arranged with objects—a pack of cigarettes, sunglasses, the shadow of a dog. The more Cara looks at it, the more she thinks the dog—or more accurately, its shadow—is the real subject of the painting, the source of the tension. Where has the owner gone, leaving the dog behind like a possession? Then it occurs to her to wonder: How has Suzette painted the rocks, even the lichen, and the perfect light of a searing hot day from this hole in the ground?
“I paint from memory,” Suzette explains, before Cara has a chance to even ask. She points to the beach scene. “That’s Truro, where we went as kids.”
Finally Cara is old enough to look at these paintings and offer a reaction. “They’re much more realistic.” And they certainly are—the cigarettes have a brand name and matches tucked inside, the shadow has fur, clumped distinctly enough to know the dog is wet. Cara doesn’t say what she’s thinking: it’s as if to see the world this clearly, Suzette has had to distance herself from it. “I love these,” Cara finally says. “I really do. If I had any money, I’d buy one from you.”
They smile and each offer a halfhearted laugh.
Cara means it, and Suzette obviously appreciates the sentiment, but she feels like it has left them without anything more to say. She hears Teddy’s footsteps coming back up the hall and remembers something. “I brought some pictures I want to show you, get your opinion on…” She goes to her purse and pulls out the folder with a few of Amelia’s drawings, the two she had kept and a few others that Olivia had given back to her, saying, “You keep some of these. I want other people to remember Amelia, too.” Cara wants to get to know this girl, understand her better, and maybe Suzette, with an artist’s eye, can help. She hands them over, and Suzette looks through a few. “My God, did Adam do these?”
“No. Amelia. The girl who—”
Suzette nods, and keeps looking. “Wow, how old was she?”
“Ten.”
Suzette shakes her head. “Remarkable.” She begins studying each one slowly, as Cara watches, waiting for Suzette to get to the one of her. Maybe this is why she’s brought them—to see if Suzette will recognize the sad portrait faster than Cara did. Behind her, the door opens and Teddy steps in. “We should get going, Cara. School will be letting out soon.”
“In a minute,” Cara says. She wants Suzette to go faster, get to the ones on the bottom. She doesn’t even care about the one of her anymore, she wants her to see the portraits of Adam. There he is, she’ll say quietly. There’s our baby.
When she gets to the one of Cara, it’s clear right away that she does recognize it. She stops, looks up at Cara and back down at the picture. She stays on it for so long that Cara begins to worry it was a mistake to bring these; this picture reveals too much about her life. She can tell Suzette that she’s fine, that she and Adam are doing well, moving along with their lives, but Suzette has only to look at this and see for herself that it’s only half true. For a long time, they stand there, with Teddy now looking on, and then Suzette surprises her: she says nothing, but she reaches out and takes Cara’s hand. Maybe this picture has done it, has told her as much as she needs to know to even the balance between them—Suzette’s had her struggles, and so has Cara.
Cara wants to say something, but the moment passes. Suzette moves on to the next picture and the next, until she stops again on one of an old woman with curly hair and exaggerated lines on her face. “Oh my God,” Suzette whispers, and Cara leans closer to see what has struck her about this one. It’s not anyone Cara recognizes. She looks angry and unsettled, as if this is the only emotion the girl knew how to draw. “These are just very good,” Suzette says, shaking her head. And that’s all.
Driving home with Teddy, Cara studies his profile from the passenger seat. She thinks about the little boy she remembers him being—how he lived for Suzette’s attention, how some afternoons Cara would come over and find them curled on the sofa reading Dr. Seuss books. It’s never occurred to Cara before how watching Suzette mother another from the age of twelve might have shaped her. All their lives, Suzette seemed older than their peers, wiser and more mature, because she cared nothing about her own social standing: she had this at home, a boy who depended on her completely. At the time, Cara complained about all that it took away—they hardly went shopping, they rarely went out—but somewhere she must have registered everything it gave to Suzette: The strength to care little about smaller matters, the confidence to make her own decisions. Of course, it was also a complicated blessing. Suzette probably didn’t go away to college because she didn’t want to leave Teddy. Moving out to live with Cara, she fell apart away from him. Now he is caring for her in a life that must look to other people like a limited and sad one, but is it? Or is it something else entirely—closer to the life Cara has had: attending to the needs of another, so delicate and so great there are times Cara thinks no one who hasn’t done this can know how it feels, how sacrifice rewards itself, how large and consuming this kind of love can be. Sometimes she thinks: This is more than most parents are lucky enough to have.
She stares at Teddy’s face, inscrutable and distant, and wishes it was possible to ask.
At the park, Morgan expects to find someone he recognizes: maybe a fellow group member or another school wallflower who’s been lurking in the same shadowy corners as he has for the last three months. Someone who’s listened in on the conversations of people who don’t even see that he’s there. He isn’t afraid until he walks up the street and sees, in the distance, a girl he recognizes: Fiona, the black-haired, braceleted girl he had once talked to outside of Marianne’s office. Surely, this is a coincidence or a mistake, he thinks, until she walks up to him and says, “I thought it might be you.”
How is this possible?
“I use that bathroom sometimes,” she says, matter-of-factly. “No one ever goes in. No one cares. I can’t deal with the girls’ bathrooms. You should go in one, you’ll know what I mean.”
Morgan doesn’t want to think about girls’ bathrooms or talk about them, either. “What do you know about Amelia
?”
“It’s not Amelia I know about, it’s Chris. He’s on my bus.” She stares at him, twisting a piece of her hair, as if now that she’s here, she’s not sure she wants to say anything.
Morgan nods. “And?”
“The day after the murder Chris sat in front of me and started saying all this stuff about how he hopes people realize how bad it can get, that people can die from bullying.”
“Like bullies killed her?”
“That’s what I thought, but then yesterday on the bus, he told me it was all over, he wasn’t going to go to school anymore, that he was going to go to the police and turn himself in.”
“For what?”
“He said he was the reason Amelia was dead, and he couldn’t live with the guilt anymore.”
Wow, Morgan thinks. This is extremely interesting and he’s an extremely good detective to have gotten to the bottom of this. “So Chris killed her?”
“He said no, but that he was responsible.” Her voice begins to waver a bit, and Morgan steps back. He has seen her cry once; he certainly doesn’t want to see it again.
“You don’t have to cry,” he says more abruptly than he means to, and suddenly it’s too late, the tears are there again, rolling down her cheeks.
“He was trying to tell me something more. He was trying to talk to me and I cut him off because I didn’t want people on the bus to think we were friends. I told him I had to do my homework. Now maybe he’s dead and it’s my fault because I was so mean to him.”
Morgan wonders: if he died, how many people would cry when they remembered how badly they’d treated him? For now, he offers this: “You can hope maybe he’s not dead. If he isn’t, I think you should tell him you’re sorry and offer to sit next to him on the bus. For like a week. That would be good.”
Fiona looks up at him and wipes at the tears with the back of her hand. “Maybe you’re right.”
Afterward, Morgan walks away and marvels at what he has learned: Chris is involved in some way, or at least feels responsible for Amelia’s death, and also this—sometimes people feel bad afterward for being mean.
At home, Cara thinks about Kevin and everything Suzette told her—that he loved her and also wanted to hurt her. There has been so much she hasn’t seen, ways she has hurt people that she only recognizes now as she guards Adam against such pain. How can she blame Kevin? She went to great lengths to befriend him, to make tapes for him, then dropped the friendship once it gathered the weight of expectation. She thinks about him being in a wheelchair, and the oddity that he didn’t tell her himself, that he’s kept certain secrets for reasons she doesn’t understand.
Of course, it occurs to her: so has she.
If an impartial outsider looked at their lives, weighed the sins of omission, it’s likely that Cara would be found at far graver fault. As she waits for Adam’s school bus, she can’t shake the uneasiness her visit with Suzette has left her with. It’s such a sad picture to look back on, how each of them had approached adulthood and independence but then retreated into her own isolation. Without seeing each other for nine years, they have defined the outlines of each other’s lives—as if having tried to connect and failed once, they both decided they would no longer try.
Cara wonders what would have happened to her friendship with Suzette if Kevin had never entered the picture. Surely for a time, Suzette had fallen in love with Kevin, with all his potential, and had seen what her presence in his life could help him achieve. She broke every tenet of her self-determined path: she attended college with him, made his success her goal, and—what happened? Did he tell her, No, it’s Cara I want, or did she sense it gradually, with conversations that returned to winning some battle Cara never knew was taking place? Maybe—Cara hopes— she wasn’t the central issue. She thinks of Suzette’s words: Sometimes he has dark periods… He disappears. She’s thought so little about the end of her friendship with Kevin and his disappearance; now that she does, it occurs to her that she’d seen glimmers of it coming. The week before she stopped by his work and saw him for the last time, they’d gone out to dinner and Kevin had gotten infuriated at a waiter who couldn’t understand what he was trying to order. After trying twice, the waiter turned to Cara and asked distractedly, “What’s he saying?”
“I’m sitting right here!” Kevin screamed. “And I’m saying grilled chicken sandwich.”
Though Cara understood, when Kevin got angry, his words got tangled in his mouth, grew more incomprehensible. It sounded like he was saying girl chicka satchel. Cara translated quietly, and the waiter disappeared, but that single outburst left Kevin breathless, choking down his water. “I’m sorry,” he must have said three times as the red drained out of his face, and they searched for some topic to recover their evening with. Eventually they found one and all was fine until the waiter brought their food and laid each place before them saying, “Here you go, ma’am,” and then, very pointedly to Kevin, “I’m sorry, sir.”
Kevin huffed at the apology and instead of accepting, said gruffly, “Just watch yourself.”
She remembers this moment, etched in her mind because even then she had had the thought: He really holds on to grudges; he doesn’t forgive easily. Now, watching Adam get off the bus, it feels as if her heart is turning over in her chest. Just watch yourself, he said.
And then it’s as if she’s swimming through water, hearing and not hearing voices above her, knowing they are there, shouting something, the aural version of a smudge, a blur, words erased, and then she emerges out of water to perfect clarity—it’s her mother, laughing, her father beside her, a grill in the distance, meat popping on it, all of it fine, except that it’s not. Suddenly her heart freezes at the thought: she knows who Adam is echoing. It’s not an accent; it’s a speech impediment, muscles lost, control gone, one side overcompensating another, a face at war with itself. It’s Kevin’s voice. He’s been echoing Kevin.
In his mind, Morgan makes a list of things he needs to tell Cara about: (1) About the fire. (2) About Fiona. (3) About Chris, who may be responsible for Amelia’s murder, but also might not.
“Oh, Morgan, I’m so glad you’re here,” Cara says when he gets there.
Something is obviously going on. There is an old lady and a policeman in the kitchen, and Cara is pulling on a jacket. “I have to go out for a little while, but Wendy is going to stay here.” She points to the old woman, who holds up her hand. “I promise I won’t be gone long. You guys can—” She stops for a second. “What can you do? Play games, I guess. Whatever you want. Adam’s in the family room, there’s food in the refrigerator. Are you hungry?”
He shakes his head, and her eyes settle on the suitcase still standing in the corner of the kitchen. “You brought your own food, right? You can eat that if you need to.”
She is obviously nervous—three sets of eyes watching her—which makes Morgan feel surprisingly relaxed. What he needs to tell her can wait; in a minute, she’ll be gone and he’ll be alone with Adam in the family room, asking anything he wants. Maybe they’ll play Boggle, or maybe he’ll just ask if Adam has seen any boys with glasses in the woods carrying knives lately.
Cara has called over Wendy, the retired nurse and old family friend who lives next door and has, in a pinch, babysat for Adam in the past, though Cara rarely calls on her, in part because she rarely needs a babysitter, but also because seeing Wendy—her mother’s age and her mother’s old friend—is always a little sad for both of them. Usually they can’t make it through an evening without Wendy saying at some point, her eyes shining with tears, “She’d be so proud of you, Cara. Everything you’ve done. How Adam’s doing. She’d be very proud.” Cara loves hearing this, but can’t bear the flood of emotion it precipitates in her chest: the terrible throat tightening, the fear that she, too, will break down and cry. Now, struggling to keep control of herself and everything she must do, she is all business and instructions with Wendy: dinner here, games in the family room, Morgan may eat whatever he wants.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call first, Kevin, but I have to ask if you’ve seen Adam or been with him anytime lately.” There’s no sense in exchanging pleasantries or saying hello when this is what she’s come to ask him. She doesn’t even want to look at him, doesn’t want to take in what’s different, what’s the same. Instead, she stares at the wheelchair he sits in and the faded running shoes he’s wearing.
“I was there,” he finally says. “In the woods. Did he tell you?”
She wants to back out and run straight to Teddy’s car, tell him to call Matt right away.
“Let me tell you what happened, Cara. Let me tell you the whole story before you do anything. I didn’t kill that girl, if that’s what you’re thinking. I didn’t do anything, but for four days I’ve been trying to figure out what I should do, and finally I thought, I’ll tell Cara everything and let her decide. That’s why I wanted to get together. I need you to know exactly what happened.”
Hearing this, she lets herself look up from the wheelchair, at his face; she has gone so long without seeing him, she’s forgotten the very details she has lived with all these years—that his dark hair curls in the same way around his ears, which also stick out just a fraction. His eyelashes are the same as Adam’s, the shape of his fingernails. She isn’t sure what to think of it—if he really looks beautiful, or if she just loves the pieces of his face that she looks at every day. “Okay,” she says. “Tell me.”