Eye Contact (21 page)

She worries this over in her mind for hours. Maybe she didn't make the rules of echolalia clear enough. They don't understand that Adam has no ability to fabricate or embroider, to apply an accent or borrow one. His brain is a tape recorder with an invisible Play button. This accent is part of it, and the man they've got doesn't have one.

Later, she thinks of something else: Adam knows the word
bald.
They drilled it as a joke when they were teaching him the adjectives
long
and
short
with pictures of hair cut out from magazines. They added two pictures of bald heads because Adam loved them, thought they were so funny. They would flip through the cards and Adam would say, “Long, long, short, long, short, short,
bald!,
long, short.” So why would he say
hair
to describe its absence? There's only one answer: he wouldn't.

That night, Cara thinks of an experiment to try. In the old days, Cara used to buy every CD being peddled by any performer they went to because it was a way to teach past tense, to retell their stories.
(Remember his pants? Remember that guitar?)
Did she buy Busker Bob's? She fears his comment about Adam might have made her mad enough not to. Then she digs through the shoe boxes in the bottom of their stereo closet and is astonished to find a cheaply reproduced CD cover with Busker Bob's photograph on the front, a red, hand-colored background. “Adam?” she says. “I want you to listen to something.”

She turns it over, unsure if Adam will put this together, or react at all. She holds up the picture for him. “Do you recognize this guy? We saw him in a concert a long time ago and now we just saw him again at the police station.” She tries to keep any weight out of her voice, to sound only passingly curious,
Do you remember this coincidence?
She puts on the CD, and Adam does what he's done his whole life when music plays: he crouches beside the speaker, presses his ear to it. His head nods in time and, after two choruses of “If I Had a Rooster,” she asks, “Do you remember this guy at all? It was a long time ago. Maybe you don't.”

He can't possibly. The last time they saw him was five years ago, half his lifetime. Then she looks down and he's staring at her, his face furrowed in thought. “Pants?” he says.

She moves quickly, finds a newspaper with Amelia's picture in it. He remembers this guy, he's calm, he's here, responding, she can't lose the opportunity. She turns off the music and asks him to come sit next to her on the sofa for a minute. “This is Amelia, Adam. The girl you went into the woods with. She was your friend. You talked to her on the playground sometimes, she sang songs. And then you went out to the woods and she got hurt. Very badly hurt. Do you remember that?”

He doesn't look up. When someone steps out from behind the tree, he sees toes, a bare foot, and looks away.

“She got hurt in the woods and they're trying to figure out who did it. Sometimes this happens, baby. Sometimes people do terrible things. They don't know what they're doing, they don't mean to, really, they have a bad brain that's telling them to hurt somebody.”

He sees shadows and hears her voice. He didn't know her name, didn't know she had one.

“Do you remember seeing Busker Bob, Adam? Was he there in the woods? You need to answer this question, Adam. You can nod yes or no.”

He remembers this, knows the answer. He nods yes. Yes, he nods. He was there. Yes.

“Okay,” she breathes out. “He was there. Good job, baby. And did he hurt her? Did he have a knife?”

His face twitches in surprise, almost a readably normal expression:
A knife?
And it occurs to her,
My God, no one's made this distinction, asked him this question specifically: Was he the one who hurt her?
In weighing their questions carefully, paring them down for simplicity, they've entirely forgotten this possibility: he might have been there and not done it; there might have been someone else.

Later, after Adam has drifted off to sleep, Cara calls Matt and tells him about the conversation. She has waited three hours because she wants these doubts to have no merit. She wants him to say,
We've got a confession. It's over. Don't worry anymore.
“I'm wondering if more than one person might have been in the woods. I know you've said you don't think that's possible.”

All the buoyancy she heard in his voice earlier in the day is gone. “Unfortunately, we can't arrest the guy. Something's happened.”

She doesn't speak because suddenly fear knots her stomach, as if she knows what he's going to say before he does: “Another kid is missing.”

 

June never watches the morning news shows, never turns on the TV for company, fearing that if she does, she might begin to resemble Suzette, who spends her days in the flickering presence of ubiquitous TV news. Usually, Suzette watches without the sound, but she never turns it off, even when Teddy asks her to. “I like to see what's happening,” she says, as if this is her compromise with the world she can't live in. She will keep it on, in the corner, thirteen inches wide, even as she goes about her day, working on her paintings and at her computer, in the dancing light of stories playing silently on the screen. June turns it on this morning because her nerves are frayed and she can't stop thinking about Teddy, who came over last night after his shift spent parked in front of Cara and Adam's house. He is changed by what's happened, more unsettled, more talkative; maybe they both are. Instead of falling into bed and sleep, they sat on June's sofa side by side, holding hands. She watched his face, listened to him circle around the things he couldn't tell her, until he decided what he could. “I keep thinking about Adam and what Suzette used to say about him.” She knows he hasn't been home in three nights, that he comes to her cottage now for showers and food, perhaps to avoid facing his sister, though he doesn't say this directly. “She hasn't seen him since he was a baby, but I remember she used to talk about him a lot. She used to say he scared her, that even though he was just a baby, he seemed to understand what was going on around him.”

June only knows a small piece of this story—that Cara and Suzette were once roommates who planned to raise the baby together, and at the last minute Suzette backed out.

“At first, she thought it was her, that he knew what she'd done and cried more whenever she came to the house. She thought he was freakishly gifted or something. Then, on her last visit, she realized, no, there was something wrong with him—very wrong—and she couldn't go back. She couldn't see him anymore. She was scared that it was somehow her fault.”

“What would that have to do with what's happened?”

“I keep thinking there's something compelling about this kid that the investigation is missing. They're focusing everything around the girl— where she's been, who she's talked to. But I look at how the body was found, in a little clearing, ten feet in front of the bush Adam was hiding in, and I'm thinking, isn't it possible—isn't there a chance the guy was after
him
? That Adam was his target and the girl was just
there
?”

After that, June lay in bed for hours and imagined someone targeting Adam, someone still out there. This morning, when she woke up, Teddy was long gone. She remembers him getting up in the middle of the night, talking on the phone in the kitchen and then coming back, fully dressed, to lean over her and say, “Something's happened. I'll call you later.”

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.