Eye Contact (24 page)

If it's one of these guys and Chris knows, one thought occurs to him: Maybe other people know, too. Surely it's possible, but how can he ask without anyone finding out? He looks over his list and gets an idea.

During lunch, he visits every bathroom in the school and leaves the same Magic Marker message:
DO YOU KNOW WHO KILLED AMELIA BEST
?

IF SO
,
PLEASE WRITE YES BELOW
. On the last three bathrooms, he added,
Please NO Jokers or Fakes. This is Serious. You will Not Have to be Personally Identified. We Respect Anonymity.

Of the four stalls he writes this in, he spells
anonymity
different each time.

 

As Cara drives home from Olivia's house, her mind fills up with all the questions she didn't get to ask of this woman who feels like the first new friend she's made in years. Does she know what Adam and Amelia talked about? What they said in their private moments on the swings at recess? Cara assumes that Amelia, with more language at her disposal, did far more talking, but is it possible that Adam told her some version of the terrible bike story? Did he say
Bike ruined, no bike anymore
? Is it possible he said, in some way that Amelia understood,
My mother drives me crazy, she cares about the stupidest things
?

He must have said something, or pointed her out, at least; otherwise, how would the girl have known who she was? Why would she have drawn a picture of Cara wearing an expression that looks mostly like fierce and angry determination? All she's ever wanted for Adam was what this girl got: a chance at recovery, to make connections, friends of his own. Cara knew the path to such a goal could look serpentine, but there was a logic to her efforts. Forcing him to learn how to ride a bike, to play Uno, to watch television shows that didn't interest him was part of that plan. She'd watched other boys his age ride bikes together, play cards on the bus. She saw how little they talked during such activities and she thought,
My God, he could do this.
But she'd never explained it to him that way, never told him the real goal behind pushing him into activities he instinctively resisted. It stuns her to realize she never had a conversation where she explained:
It's good to make friends. Here's one way to do it.
She always assumed he wouldn't understand.

And yet, surely what he had with this girl qualifies as friendship. Though it might have looked quaint to others, like little more than singing side by side on the swing set, in their world it was private and monumental. In all the emotions washing through Cara, one of them must be happiness. Adam has made his own friend once, he'll do it again; he's taken a step into his own life, away from her. It's what she's wanted and prayed for all this time. But now that he has, she wonders: If Adam is getting better, even incrementally, where does that leave her?

At home, she walks in as the telephone rings and picks it up gratefully, because any voice at all would be preferable to the lonely thoughts ricocheting around her brain. “Cara? Is that you?” she hears and looks out the kitchen window, thinking it must be Teddy, calling from his car parked in front of her house. They've had a handful of strained exchanges as he periodically makes use of her bathroom. “How's your family?” she tried once, to which he said only, “I don't have one. I'm not married.” Maybe he's calling now to make amends for such an absurd response and finally talk about what they have in common.

“Teddy?” she says, squinting out the window.

“No,” the man says, and she sees that Teddy is in the car, but he isn't on the phone. He's sipping coffee, staring ahead.

“Who is this?” She looks down at the phone, this voice she recognizes but can't place.

“It's me. Kevin.”

“Oh my God.”

This call is so strange, coming on the heels of her visit with Olivia. Any other time her defenses would be up. With her tone of voice, she would say,
No, Kevin, it doesn't work this way. You can't drop in and out of people's lives; you can't be both charming and deceitful.
But being with Olivia has been so unsettling, and has reminded her of the past, when she had people her own age to talk about her life with. The whole drive home she's been thinking about Kevin and Suzette, her last real friends, and here he is now, as if summoned by her thoughts, calling again.

“Hi, Kevin,” she says quietly. She certainly isn't going to let all her guard down, laugh with delight, say,
Long time, no see, Kevin.
But she also can't deny this: it's nice to hear his voice.

“I just wanted to see how you were doing. I heard what happened to Adam, and I wanted to say I'm sorry. I'm just so sorry. You must be having a terrible time.”

“How did you hear?” Maybe she should get used to this by now. Theoretically, Adam's name has been kept out of the papers, carefully withheld, but the reality is, everyone knows.

“Suzette told me. I—she heard from her brother, I guess.”

Jesus,
she thinks.
I should hang up now.
All of these years, he's still in touch with
Suzette
? Still friends with her after nonchalantly denying he ever ran into her?

“I've tried to keep up with her. She's not doing that great, and I don't want her to think I've abandoned her.”

You didn't mind abandoning me,
Cara wants to scream, but instead, because this is something she hasn't heard before, she asks softly, “What's wrong with Suzette?”

“She gets these panic attacks, and it's left her scared to leave her apartment. She doesn't go out at all anymore, as far as I know. I try to get there once or twice a month at least. I don't always make it, but I try.”

It's sad to hear this, but not a shock. She had always had an agoraphobic's aversion to leaving their apartment. (“Why go out for beer when there's two in the fridge?” used to be one of her favorite responses to Cara's invitations.) To Cara, what's interesting is the way he says this, making it perfectly clear that there's no romance, making sure she knows:
I do the decent thing, I stop by.
Maybe she's being too hard on him, to still wonder about that lie he told so many years ago. It was a complicated time; everyone acted badly, in one way or another. “Oh, Kevin,” she breathes. “I wish—”

“What?”

“I wish I hadn't asked so much of Suzette. I asked for too much from her and made it impossible to stay friends at all.” She wants to understand all of this better, understand how they came to be at such an impasse.

“You're not the reason she has panic attacks, Cara. She's had this problem for a long time. Medication hasn't helped, neither has therapy. She just lives with it, works at home. Her brother lives with her, so that helps. Panic attacks limit what you can do. She tends to avoid whatever sets them off, which is probably why she's avoided you.”

It's never occurred to Cara that Adam's meltdowns might have been worse for Suzette than they were for her. At the time, Cara was so caught up in her own frantic efforts to stop his wailing that she didn't think about anything else, but surely it's possible they left Suzette feeling breathless, too, paralyzed by her own inability to help. They were like best friends who'd gone to war together and were forever driven apart by the terrible sights they'd jointly witnessed. Maybe that isn't a fair comparison, but it feels right somehow—they haven't wanted to see each other because they can't bear what they've seen each other go through.

“I don't know, Cara. I've wanted to call you for so long. I've thought about it and thought about it. Finally I decided just to do it.”

She doesn't like the image of Kevin sitting at home for the last ten years, debating the pluses and minuses of making a phone call—it makes him seem sad, with too little to do with his time—but there's also this: all her other well-wishers and phone callers have dribbled away. He's here now, being what seems at least reasonably genuine.

He keeps going: “Sometimes, when I'm driving to work—or my mother's driving me—I remember these strange things from high school. Does that ever happen to you?”

“Sure, Kevin. Of course.”

“I remember something you said in class about
The Scarlet Letter
. How maybe Hester liked having the
A
on her chest, because it freed her from having to live the same life as everyone else. Do you remember that?”

“No.”

“You said it sounds nice to have no obligations to anyone except her child.”

Did she really say such a prescient thing? Anticipate her own future spent with a scarlet
A
for autism printed over everything? “That's weird. I don't remember that.”

“Maybe I remember too much.”

“It's okay,” she says because the truth is, she doesn't mind hearing this—doesn't mind having him remind her who she was before Adam came along to make her someone else.

“I remember the way you watched me in fifth grade, turning around in your seat.”

She blushes, grateful that he isn't here to see. “You're right, I did.”

“Of course, what was I doing?” He laughs. “Staring at your little out-fits. I think maybe we were watching each other all those years we never talked.”

It's funny,
she thinks: they've never before mentioned the time between fifth grade and twelfth.

“I was waiting, getting myself ready for some big move, and then I kept getting so sick. But the other day it occurred to me: that's what worked, didn't it? Almost dying. That always got your attention. That's why I didn't go to graduation.”

“What do you mean?”

“If I went, you might not have talked to me, but if I didn't go, I knew you'd notice.”

She remembers sitting on stage that day, five rows behind the empty seat left symbolically open. “That's Kevin's chair,” Mrs. Murphy, the orchestrator of the day's pageant, said. Other missing students had their places filled in, so the picture from the bleachers was a solid continuance of black robes with a single, folding-chair hole. Cara spent the length of graduation watching the chair, expecting Kevin to appear at any moment, in a wheelchair, or behind a walker, inching his broken body into it.

“I did.” She knows it's dangerous, going too far back, admitting too much. “I noticed.”

“I remember the letter I sent you.”

She doesn't say anything, but wonders where this conversation is heading.

“And what you sent back.”

Should she remind him that she was a nervous teenager, afraid of everything he represented—real love, commitment, everything that would entail? Should she tell him she composed different answers, one he probably would have liked better? There's danger in anything she says, so she stays quiet.

“So why don't you tell me about your life?” he says to rescue them from silence.

“Maybe you already know this, but Adam has developmental delays. And that's been my whole life, pretty much. Just focusing on him, helping him get better.”

“Is he? Better?”

What can she say? What would Kevin's mother say about Kevin? Suddenly she doesn't want to dance around the word, she wants to be honest. “He's still autistic,” she says. “He always will be, I imagine, but he's better than he was. He reaches out more, tries to connect. He had a kind of friendship with this girl, apparently. They played on the playground, and sang songs. I wouldn't have believed it, but everyone keeps telling me it's true. She chose him or they chose each other—I don't know. So, yes, I think maybe he's better.”

“Good,” he finally says. “And what about you? Are you better?”

How can she answer this? Once, she wanted love to come into her life and take it over and then, with Adam's arrival, it did. At the time, it had felt as if the long wait was part of it, the way this child mirrored the men that came before, the reticence she had always been drawn to. All her life, she picked men who eluded her and then was given a child who did, too. “What do you mean?”

“Are you happy? Are you married?”

Married? Surely he knows this much. “No, Kevin. I'm not married.”

“Because maybe we could have lunch someday. Or dinner. Any meal would be okay.”

She laughs. Her heart softens, begins to see a new possibility. Surely she doesn't need to tell him it's too late for romance, too much has happened, but it occurs to her that perhaps this is a chance to learn what she has spent nine years trying unsuccessfully to teach Adam—the delicate and fragile intricacies of real friendship. It has been so hard without any of her own to hold up as examples. Perhaps this is what they need more than playdates for Adam or social skills groups, or Friendshipmakers.com, a Web site devoted to teaching conversation and play to children that Cara leaped on when she first heard about it, ran home and subscribed to, only to discover list after list of dubiously helpful advice, like one of their top-ten suggested conversation starters: “Do you have a favorite doughnut?” Maybe what they need are less of those things and more examples for Adam to observe of friendship around them, of people talking to each other, asking questions and listening to the answers. Maybe—after all this time—this is what she and Kevin can ask of each other and offer back in return. “Sure, Kevin. I'd like that.”