Eye Contact (31 page)

June doesn't know if this is right or not, but Suzette has insisted that she drop her off. “I'll be fine. I promise you,” she said, though she didn't look fine anymore. Her eyes darted from house to house, window to window; her hand shook slightly as she reached for the door. “I have to do this by myself. I'm asking you, please. Come back in an hour.” In her voice, June heard a core of steel, a determination to do whatever she had to without assistance. She thought,
Maybe this will be a breakthrough, like she never had taking her two-block walks with Teddy.

“Okay,” she said. “I'll be back.” Maybe this is a mistake or maybe it's what Suzette needs most: to be trusted, given a chance.

With an hour to kill, the only place June can think to go is the parking lot behind the school that overlooks the woods. She won't go hunting, won't do anything dangerous, but maybe she'll see if there's any sign of Chris. When she gets there, it's amazing: there are no other cars, no sign of life, but there in the woods, a light is flashing. It's a dim orange glow, a weak flashlight on the last of its batteries.

Before getting out of the car, June makes one last call to Teddy's cell phone and, miraculously, he answers. She's so relieved to hear his voice again, so happy he's alive and apparently fine, that she almost tells him she loves him right on the spot.

But of course that would be silly. What's important now is finding Chris, tracking down this light in the woods. She tells him where she is, what she's seen. “He's been out there before apparently, during school hours.”

“All right. I'm coming over. Stay right where you are. Don't go in by yourself, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Promise me.”

In the distance, the light turns off, as if whoever's holding it has seen her car, or somehow heard this phone call. She gets out of the car and moves soundlessly across the field where she knows the older children sometimes play a complicated game of tag that, until Amelia's murder, supervising adults had allowed in a tacit agreement to choose some battles over others. No one, that she's heard, has ever mentioned this fact to the police, but she wonders if it isn't an important facet of what happened: that children had been allowed to extend their own boundaries.

At the edge of the wood, she steps in the direction she believes the light was coming from.

She hears a sound that no animal could make—a stick hitting dirt, with labored breathing behind it. As she moves into the grove of trees, a branch catches her shirt and she cries out in startled terror. Beneath a moonless sky, it's impossible to see anything but the branches directly in front of her face, so she moves by feel, inching forward, her hands in front of her, trying to make as little sound as possible. If the killer is out here, he won't have an easy time finding her, she tells herself, and creeps forward in the direction the sound was coming from. But what will she do if she does find danger? She has no protection, nothing on her that resembles a weapon. If someone lunged at her right now, she hardly knows what she would do except execute the vaguest plan of self-defense—a knee to the crotch, fingers to the eyeballs.

Except for the leaves beneath her feet, the only sound in the woods now seems to be coming from her own body—her heart pounding, blood rushing in her ears. Then she sees it again, a flash of yellow light. Out of the silence, she hears something high-pitched and, after a moment, realizes what it must be: a child crying.

She moves faster, ignoring the branches that snag at her clothes. Something tears her sleeve and she yanks it free, and only feels, a few seconds later, that it's scratched her, too. She touches her arm and feels a trickle of blood.

She finds him, finally, by nearly falling on top of him. In the fading glow of his dying flashlight, she can see the outline of the boy—the hunch of his shoulders, his shoes, the edge of his glasses—curled at the bottom of an oval-shaped hole, five feet long and several feet wide. He is so bent on his work digging this hole, he doesn't look up and see her standing over him. She levels her voice to a whisper and tries to calm her thundering heart: “Are you okay?”

It's amazing, really: he keeps stabbing at the dirt, doesn't even lift his head to see who she is, to realize he's being rescued right now.

“I'm digging a hole,” he says.

From what she can tell, it's an extraordinary hole, a feat of persistence. “Why?”

“I can't tell you.”

In the distance she sees the lights of Teddy's car pull into the parking lot. “Everyone's been looking for you, Chris. They're all worried about you. They think maybe you've been hurt or kidnapped.”

“No, I had to do this.”

There's a trick she has from her years of teaching, an intuitive strategy that sometimes works wonders and sometimes backfires:
Join them. Bend down. Look at the same thing they're looking at.
“Do you mind if I get in? See how deep it is?”

“Right now, eleven inches.”

“Wow,” she sits down, lets her feet dangle in. They can touch the bottom, but barely. “So you've been at this for a while?”

“All night. I didn't want to sleep, but I might have, for a little while.” He is squatting on his feet, hugging his knees.

“Gosh. Quite a project.”

“If I didn't have to I wouldn't, believe me. It's not like I enjoy this kind of thing.”

“Okay.” She nods, and because this feels like an opening, she takes a risk: “Why did you have to do it?” She tries to make this sound casual, conversational, as if her next question might be what kind of music he likes.

“Because it was
my knife,
all right? The whole thing was
my fault.
”

“Oh,” she nods. “You brought a knife to school?”

“I
had
to. I had no choice.”

Behind her, she hears Teddy approaching. He's got a flashlight, a radio squawking. In a minute this will all be over, out of her hands. He'll have called for backup, alerted the throngs of searchers, and she'll be a hero for finding this boy, but she knows he will clam up the minute this begins. “Wait!” she calls loud enough for Chris to snap his head up, look at her for the first time, so she can see his face, covered in dirt except where his glasses are, making him look like a caught animal at the bottom of some terrifying shoe box.

“Why did you have to bring a knife to school?” she asks.

And he tells her the whole story, staring up, tears leaking muddy trails down his cheeks, so sad that she fears that even when Teddy slips up beside her, takes her hand in his, she will cry herself for the pain these children have endured, for the ways they have found to carry on.

 

Cara tries, but can't hear what they're talking about. Kevin's mother is angry, working herself into a rage, screaming at Suzette, who stays amazingly calm. She can only hear snippets of what they say: “I tried to call you—” “Where is he now?” “You don't have any choice, Evelyn.”

She creeps around the side of the house until she finds a place from which she can hear better. “You need to go, Evelyn. Now. It will only get worse for him.”

Mrs. Barrows is silent, seated in a chair, her head bent. Whatever she was yelling about is over. “We can call now, or we can wait for my brother's girlfriend to come back.”

How extraordinary to watch Suzette move carefully around this woman. She touches her shoulder briefly, then moves away, picks up the knife that has dropped to the ground. Cara thinks of the old Suzette she remembers so well, carrying food to her mother, tapping lightly with a fingertip on her door. She's been good at this her whole life.

Suzette goes to the phone and picks it up. “I'm going to call and in a minute, they'll be here, and everything will be okay.” She moves into the other room to make the call, and Cara watches Mrs. Barrows sit by herself, her head in her hands, as she breathes slowly, in and out.

When the patrol car comes, the driver turns off the lights halfway up the street. She can hear the radio when both doors open and two officers step out. She is paralyzed by the spectacle, unable to leave, as she watches Mrs. Barrows, still wearing her bathrobe, hands cuffed behind her, walk out to the car. It's an oddly slow drama, and also quiet; no words are spoken that she can hear, no sounds at all but the crackle of their radio. It's only a full minute after they've pulled out that she realizes Suzette didn't go with them, that she must still be inside, making no sound. She creeps around to the front door and peeks. There she is on the floor, the phone still in her hand: in the wake of the stress she didn't show a few minutes earlier, Suzette has fainted.

 

Once Chris starts talking, he apparently can't stop. He keeps going and going, telling June everything as they walk to the ambulance and ride to the hospital, where they are greeted by news cameras, doctors, police, and his parents. By the time he's settled into a room, he has told her the whole story, in large and small detail, and when she is finally alone with Teddy again, she tells him what he said: “Apparently he's been persecuted every morning at school for the last year and a half. It started innocuously enough, with bus-stop teasing, but built up from there. Eventually this group of boys—there were three of them, primarily— stole his glasses and broke them. From there, it escalated: two weeks ago, somebody urinated in his backpack, and last week he found a brown bag of
crap
in his locker.”

“Jesus,” Teddy says, shaking his head.

“He went to the authorities, tried to get these kids put on report, but it didn't do any good. They'd already been put on detention. The guidance counselor was involved. Apparently he was being told to try solving the problem himself. He was meant to take steps to avoid these guys, stay out of their way, not do anything to provoke them, as if this might all be
his
fault.”

In the ambulance, Chris told her what precipitated the knife. “They said that somebody had offered to pay twenty-five dollars to break my arm and thirty dollars to break my leg.”

“Who would have—” she started to ask, then stopped. The detail is so odd, she fears it must be true.

“I don't know. They wouldn't say who offered it. Apparently someone who hates me and has a lot of money to throw away.”

She nodded her head to tell him,
Keep going.

“So I knew they would do it. They'd already taken these scissors and cut bald patches in my hair. And another time, they poured gasoline on my shoes.” He held out a fist, uncurled a finger for every infraction he'd endured. When he got to five, he curled it up again. “I had to bring a knife. I had to do something. I was trying to fight back.”

June nodded, heard herself say, “It sounds like a good idea.”

When June finally left Chris in his room, alone with his mother and father, she walked out beside Teddy and got into his police car. She had already been photographed and filmed, told she would be on the evening news. When asked to give a statement meant to reflect the euphoria of the moment—
He's fine! He's been found! He's with his parents now!
—she looked into the blinding white light of the camera and said, “I hope the children who are responsible for this know who they are and will come into their own justice very soon.”

Now June sits alone beside Teddy, who has remained at her side, nearly silent through all of this. He offers what must feel, to him, like the best thing to say, “I had some trouble with bullies when I was younger. People made fun of me because I was odd and shy and my mother sometimes walked outside wearing her nightgown.”

He has said so little about this part of his life before now that June isn't sure what to say. “What did you do?”

“My sister helped. Or at least she tried to. I still spent most of my childhood afraid of bullies. I remember in junior high, they used to make me eat the lit embers of cigarettes.”

June stares at him. She can't help it; she's crying again. “Oh my God, that's terrible.”

“It was. But you know what? I've never smoked a single cigarette. I could thank them for that.” He shakes his head. “Kids survive. You'd be amazed what they go through and survive. He'll be okay.”

She wants to tell him now how she feels, wants to tell him maybe they should do something more than just survive. “Earlier tonight, Teddy, I wanted to say something—”

“What?”

“That I love you, and I don't know why it's so hard for me to say it.”

He takes her hand, pulls it into his lap, and spreads it over his knee. “Because it's hard. But I love you, too.”

But there's more. For the first time in her life, she doesn't want to hold back. She wants to make a scene, make demands, say something absurd like,
You need to choose me, not your sister.
She wants him to feel what she feels—torn open by this. “I want us to have more.” Her voice is tiny; it sounds as if a stranger is speaking. “I want us to live together.”