Eye Contact (19 page)

“PLUMBER,” Dr. Katzenbaum says.

In the old days, Cara designed Adam's curriculum into units: holidays, seasons, workers in the community. She used photograph flash cards of workers to drill a standard answer. “What's a plumber, Adam?” she'd say, and to get his reward, he'd have to give an exact answer: “A plumber fixes pipes.”

Now Adam answers, “SINK.”

It takes Cara's breath away. He hasn't gone for the obvious choice:
pipes.
He has carved a different pathway in his brain, has put a word to what he saw in the picture and then—this is the thrilling part—has
memorized his own thought.

She turns to Lincoln. “This is extraordinary,” she says.

He nods, speaks into a microphone in his hand. “Good, Dorothy. Why don't you start?”

Cara looks at him.
Start what?

Dorothy nods. “GIRL,” she says.

Adam shakes his head. “BOY.”

“GIRL IN THE PINK DRESS.”

Oh God, no,
Cara thinks, then watches Adam carefully. “WOODS,” he says.

“Very good, Adam. You can say ‘stop' anytime. MAN IN THE WOODS.”

Adam rocks and hums. Cara holds her breath. “YELLOW.”

“Good, Adam. Yellow what?”

“Yellow…”

“Yellow pants?”

Cara can see Adam's agitation mounting. Others might not see his fingers curling around the lip of the chair, but she can.

“Yellow shirt?”

“Yellow shirt,” he says and his eyes travel to the mirror they are watching him through.

“Yellow shirt, very good. You've done a good job, Adam. Do you want to take a break?”

He stands up without answering and moves over to the mirror. Usually Adam hates mirrors; once, he broke one that a speech therapist was using, but now Cara watches, her breath held in anticipation of catastrophe, some revisitation of his morning outburst.
He's going to throw himself against it, shatter the glass,
she thinks, but this is nearly the exact opposite, a quieting of his whole body, one finger outstretched with the silent concentration it would take to catch dust. His hand opens and he presses one palm, then the other, to the mirror, hard so the flesh lines look like a starfish's underbelly inching along the glass tank wall. She would stop this now, but his face is serene, intrigued by this strange rectangle, this mirror that isn't really a mirror. She leans in; if he can see through this thing, her face is right here, so close he could touch it. Maybe he smells her, or hears her heart beat. She almost whispers,
Adam,
and then his mouth opens. “Hair,” he says.

“Jesus Christ,” Lincoln says behind her and stands up. “Go,” he points to a uniformed officer in the room with them. “Right now. Tell Lou.”

Cara turns around. “What?”

He doesn't answer, speaks into the microphone. “That's enough for now, Dorothy. We're going to take him downstairs.”

“What is it?” There is movement all around them, except for Adam, who stays glued to this mirror, suspended in the utterance of this one word.

Lincoln turns to her. “The guy we've got downstairs is bald.”

 

With Amelia's drawings tucked safely in his backpack, Morgan gets home from school to find his mother standing in the kitchen, holding his notebook. He's been waiting for this, knew it was coming. He never tried to hide the notebook; in fact, he's done the opposite: some nights it sat on the dining room table, beside the papers his mother spent the meal reading. He's wanted her to find it, and get this over with, just not now, not today, when he has made arrangements to take Chris over to Cara's, when he has a backpack full of pictures to show her.

“What are we going to do?” she says.

He takes a stab. “Nothing?”

“No, Morgan. That is exactly what we're
not
going to do. I'll tell you what we're going to do—we're going to go to the police.”

“But I'm supposed to meet someone. A friend.”

For a second, this stops her. “Who?”

“You don't know him.”

He sees the surprise on her face.
First a fire, now this? Out of nowhere, a friend?
“Well, sorry. We're going to the police. We're telling them what happened.”

In the car, she is surprisingly quiet. She doesn't ask the questions he readied answers for by writing them down. She doesn't scream or cry, as he assumed she would.
When it all comes out,
he thought,
it will be over. This bubble we're living in will break like glass.
She speaks for the first time when they pull into the police station parking lot. “Five years I've worked on saving that wetland. Five years of my life up in smoke.” Her voice is steady and flat. She turns away from him and opens her car door.

“Mom,” he says, but she is gone, marching toward the double glass doors, gripping her purse, circling around a broken beer bottle in the parking lot.

Inside, Morgan hears her ask a police secretary if they might speak to an officer in charge, please. “About what, ma'am?”

“It's private,” his mother says, too loudly. “But important. My son has information about a crime.” Saying this, she attracts the attention of two uniformed police officers standing by the front desk. Morgan hopes they'll think this is related to Amelia's death and let him speak to someone working on that. By comparison, his own crime will seem minor. Then his mother folds her arms over her chest. “It seems he's set a fire.”

This is what happens,
Morgan plans to say.
People go crazy. It can happen to anyone at any time.
Look how it happened to him. His mother didn't see, didn't understand how bad it was. She didn't think he needed a group. “You're fine, Morgan, my God. A lot of people don't have friends.
I
never had any friends,” she said.

The secretary tells them to wait, have a seat please, that someone will be with them in a moment. His mother sits beside him, her open purse piled in her lap. “You want gum or something?” she says, digging through her bag. He shakes his head. This isn't anything like what he imagined. His mother seems to be her ordinary self—eyes darting, impatient with bureaucracy. “Nice to keep us waiting,” she says, folding some gum into her mouth.

When he first told her about joining the group, she seemed angrier than she is now. To him it had come as such a relief:
There's a group at school, Mom. Where they explain everything you're doing wrong. They tell you exactly what your problem is and then you fix it. You make friends because you're not doing all the wrong things anymore. They tell you what's wrong with your clothes, what kind of shoes you should be wearing.
She hated the idea, everything about it. “It's all a lot of brainwashing,” she said. “It's going to be a group that says you need hundred-dollar sneakers. I can't stand that. Some people are different. Some people do odd things. In my day, that wasn't a crime.”

She doesn't see how much depends on having friends, how without them, you've got lunch hours, passing periods, bus rides, before and after school, great chunks of the day to spend trying to be invisible.

When they are finally assigned a police officer to speak with, there is some debate about whether his mother should go in with him.

“I'd prefer to speak with him alone,” the officer, who is a woman, says.

“I'd like to hear what my son has to say.”

Morgan stares at the ground, fearing this will lead to the explosion he's anticipated. His mother doesn't mind making public scenes—it's even possible she prefers them.

“Why don't we let him decide?”

Morgan studies his shoes—the flesh-colored orthopedic ones, the same shoes he wears all the time now, to punish himself. He can't look at her face. “Alone, please,” he says, his voice tiny.

His mother folds her arms over her chest. “Fine,” she says.

“If you'll just wait here, we'll call you in after we're through.”

He tells the woman the whole story, that he went out there intending to burn his shoes, not the land, not fourteen acres of salamander habitat and home to a nesting beaver pair. “They're wetlands. You don't think of wetlands burning,” he points out, though of course at the end of a dry summer, they will, he's learned.

“This is very serious,” she says. He wants to point out that it could have been worse, he could have killed a girl and he didn't. “I can tell you right now the best-case scenario and the worst-case scenario.” The best case is a probation period with a mandatory weekly attendance at a fire-starters group where he will learn about fires and the damage they cause. He will be given assignments about fire safety, personal fire prevention, community service related to fires. He wants to explain that this isn't necessary, that he has no interest in fires, no intention to start any more.

The other possibility is detention time. She studies her own notes, as if it might be up to her right now to decide. “Can you tell me a little bit more about what you were thinking? Why you went into the woods with these matches?”

He does the best he can: he tells her that he wanted his life to change, wanted his mother to see that he had problems, that his shoes were a problem.

“Shoes?” she says.

He points to his feet. “They're orthopedic.” She looks down and nods, makes a note.

He doesn't say the other part, that there was more to it than his shoes. He doesn't tell her there was a plan behind the whole thing, because the plan didn't work so what would be the point in mentioning it at all?

 

Cara lets Dr. Katzenbaum take Adam downstairs while she walks with Lincoln, who explains: “We were going with some of the things you've given us. This guy walked into Nancy's Diner on Route 19, wearing flip-flops, two hours after the murder took place. His hands had dirt on them—no blood, but dirt—and his demeanor was agitated. Here's the thing, though: He was carrying a tin whistle in his pocket and he played it, went around from table to table, asking other customers if they wanted to buy one, saying it was good for bird calls.”

“Oh my God,” Cara says.

“Does a little flute in the woods sound like something that might have drawn Adam?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“We figured. The man has no alibi. He admits he was out walking in woods that day, but doesn't remember which woods. We wanted to see if we could get Adam to come up with any link before we took him down. I'd say this was a pretty good one. Better than I'd even hoped for. Apparently he used to be some kind of musician, but there's a history of relatives pressing him into treatment and him refusing. Last time he was on the Bayfield Psych Unit was three months ago. He has no prior arrests, no history of violence, though there's one incident of aggressive behavior reported against a nurse at Bayfield. We're getting more specifics as fast as we can. My hunch right now is that we've got him. I gotta say, Adam saying
hair
right now…” He shakes his head, lets his mouth turn upward. It's the first time since that night at her house when they talked about high school that she's seen him look relaxed, even happy. He's even told her to call him Matt. “You were right. You said barefoot and music.” He laughs. “You ought to think about getting into this line of work.”

The elevator stops. The doors open on Adam standing beside Dr. Katzenbaum wearing a smile, as if to say
Mom! You're here, too! Isn't this wild!
This is how life with Adam has been: frozen in the past for days, and now he's here again, every hour surprising her: first a morning outburst and now this—composure, compliance. “Hi, buddy! Fancy seeing you here.”

“Police!” he whispers, grinning.

“I know. Isn't it funny? There's police everywhere. I think because it's a police station.”

Adam laughs, and everyone laughs with him at the impossible wonder:
A police station!
They all smile, shake their heads, and open the door to what feels, at last, like the beginning of the end.

Dr. Katzenbaum takes charge of Adam for the lineup, which Cara is grateful for because when the men walk in, it takes her a minute to recall how, but she remembers one of them. Finally it hits her: he was a musician giving children's concerts back in the days when she drove anywhere for an outing that would hold Adam's attention. Cara moves away. She understands that she must stand back, not let Adam see which one she recognizes. There are six men in all, four of them bald, or nearly so, which Matt has explained is necessary—Adam can't just pick out one dominant feature; he's got to get the right person.

“Look at me, Adam,” Dr. Katzenbaum says, his face to hers. She knows the commands exactly as Cara would give them: simple, direct, with as few words as possible. “Now, point to…
man in the woods.
”