Eye Contact (36 page)

When the doorbell rings a half hour early, Cara jumps up, and cries, “He's here! It's Morgan, Adam,” from the other room, before she opens the door to discover it's not Morgan.

It's Kevin, again. She steps back, and takes a breath.

“I wanted to talk to you a little bit. I thought if I called first, you might say no.”

He's probably right, but now that he's here, she doesn't have much choice. “It's okay, Kevin. You can come in.”

He rolls himself to the living room, to the shelf where Adam's baby pictures sit beside one of her parents at their thirtieth wedding anniversary, looking surprisingly young: her mother in a flowered dress, her father in a suit she later had to give to the funeral director to bury him in. For a long time, Cara doesn't say anything. Finally, Kevin breaks the silence.

“You probably heard I spent some time in jail.”

She nods, though he doesn't look at her.

“It was a first offense. My mother hired a good lawyer, so I could have gotten out of it, but I didn't even try, because the night I was arrested something bad happened.”

She thinks about what his mother had said:
Ask him if he knows anything about your poor parents.
She doesn't want to ask, though; she doesn't want to hear what he's about to tell her.

“I was with them the night they died, Cara. It was terrible. I'd been out with Scott, who was dealing coke back then, and we were driving around town celebrating, and we saw your parents coming out of a movie and the first thing I thought was,
Great, I can ask them how you're doing.
I forgot… that they wouldn't know who I was. That I only knew them because I knew everything about your life. When I walked up, they looked confused, so Scott said, ‘He knows Cara,' and right away, your mom said, ‘How?' and I felt bad. I was high and I'd walked up to some old people and started some conversation like I was out of my mind. I started to leave, and your dad grabbed my shoulder and said, ‘No, we'd like to hear how you know her.' Your mom was crying. Scott was so nervous he said, ‘Oh fuck,' and started to laugh.”

Cara can hardly bear to listen.

“I said, ‘I'm sorry. We were friends a while ago, no big deal.' And your father said, ‘It is a big deal. There's a child involved.' See, here's the whole thing, Cara—I knew you had a child, but I had
no idea
it could be mine.”

She stares at him. “What did you do?”

“They walked out to the parking lot. We got in our car and I told Scott to follow them.”

“
You
were in the car behind them?”

“We weren't that close. We didn't
do
anything. I swear to God, it wasn't our fault. I just wanted to know if Adam was my kid.”

“You were
with
them when they died?”

He nods. “I felt terrible, Cara. It was awful.”

How can he say these words—how terrible he feels, how awful it was—when he will never understand her loss that day, that one afternoon she had a family and the next day she did not?

After the accident she was desperate to get the name of the people in that car, because her loss so consumed her she thought knowing everything would alleviate it somehow. Though her mother, in the passenger seat, died instantly, she knew her father stayed alive for nearly an hour and she had always wanted to find out whether he said anything in those final moments. Now it doesn't matter; she doesn't want to hear. Her parents died in a terrible moment of confusion, their disorientation a measure of their great and often unspoken love for her. It's too much.

“You need to leave, Kevin,” she says simply.

“The police searched the car, busted us for possession—but I swear the accident wasn't our fault.”

He has said this so many times tonight, she fears he must believe it—that nothing is his fault, though he has been involved in the deaths of three people. “Get out. Right now, get out.”

Behind her the doorbell rings, startling her for a moment. She opens the door to find Morgan standing on the porch, a brown paper grocery bag in his hand. “I can't really come in. My mother's in the car. I just wanted to return some things I took.” He hands her the paper bag and she opens it to see, on top, the sweater Adam was wearing the day Amelia was murdered.

“Okay,” she says, trying to steady her voice. “Thank you.”

“I'd also like to say I'm sorry, and if you're ever looking for a volunteer again, you can call me. I promise if you invite me back, I won't steal anything next time. I like Adam. I like spending time with him.” He doesn't look her in the eye when he says this, but it doesn't matter. She believes him. His words are delivered with such sincerity that, for a moment, she forgets about her anger at Kevin.

To her surprise, Adam suddenly materializes beside her, which means he must have heard Morgan's voice and left his video to see him. She smiles down. “Morgan says he'd like to come over again, Adam. What do you think?”

Adam rocks and smiles. “Hi, Morgan! Sorree!!”

“Yeah. We could play that game again. I don't mind.”

“Sorreee. I don't mind Sorreee!”

“It's not my
favorite
game in the world, but it's all right.”

Adam turns a circle and stops, pointing his nose in Morgan's direction. Though his eyes drift sideways, she knows he is offering his best approximation of eye contact. She expects him to echo and in a sense he does: “What's your favorite game in the world?” he asks.

For a moment, it doesn't hit her right away. It's a question, a
WH
question, that he's asking voluntarily of another child. She hasn't prompted him, hasn't thought ahead of time of what he should say. She's never seen this before; in truth, she never thought it was possible.

“I don't know. Clue is all right, but I don't think we should play that.”

Cara's impulse to steer this conversation and cue Adam's responses is so strong, it's nearly impossible to stop. But she does. She takes a deep breath and waits.

“All right. No Clue, then.”

She exhales.
My God, they've done it. They've made a decision, a plan to not play something.
In the awkwardness that follows, Morgan peeks over her shoulder, sees Kevin sitting in the living room behind her. He looks at Kevin, then back at her. “Uh, Cara—could I speak to you in private for a minute? Like alone?” He points to the porch, and she follows him outside because Adam seems fine, humming obliviously.

“What is it, Morgan?”

“I just have to ask: Do you know that guy? The one in the wheelchair?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, because this is a little weird. This is what I wanted to ask you about. I've been talking to Chris, and he told me that in the woods, Amelia was looking for a man in a wheelchair. Supposedly she kept saying, ‘There's a man in a wheelchair and he needs my help.'”

Cara stares at him. “That's what she
said
?”

“Over and over. ‘He's scared and he needs help.'”

She looks inside through the glass pane of the door at Kevin. He has pushed himself into the kitchen and now sits across the room from Adam, who notices, for the first time, this delightful surprise: a wheelchair in his kitchen! Amazingly, he looks fine, as if he doesn't remember seeing Kevin before, he's only curious about this contraption and all its gizmos, interested enough to not mind stepping closer to the person it contains.

He's scared and he needs help.
“Those were her last words?”

“I guess.” She can't hear what's happening inside, but through the glass she can see: Kevin is talking about his wheelchair, pointing out the different parts, and Adam is listening, hovering inches from the joystick that has captured his attention. She could have told Kevin that talking to Adam wouldn't be as hard as he feared, that he's sitting in a wheelchair, which alone would hold Adam's interest for the better part of a week. Watching them is sweet, but it also makes her nervous.

“So anyway, what I might do is tell Chris that I think I've found the guy. He might want to come over, talk to him, find out what sort of help he needs.”

“I think I know,” she says.

Morgan looks up, surprised. “You
do?
”

This is part of something larger, part of letting Adam grow into his own life where pieces of it exist separate from her. Kevin has made bad choices in the past that have caused irreparable damage, but there's also this: so has she. And it's possible he could be good for Adam. She wants to try: for Adam's sake, and Kevin's, maybe her own; at this point, she can't even say for sure.

 

A week later, Cara sits in a local roadside hamburger stand that has been around so long she remembers riding bikes here with Suzette to split a paper boat full of fries. Now she watches Kevin, parked with a quarter resting on each of his knees, marveling at Adam, who is still playing the same game of pinball after ten minutes. “You'll see,” she said earlier, changing only one dollar. “Adam's weirdly good at pinball.” She can't remember when they made this discovery—maybe two years ago—but it's been a godsend on rainy days when she can take him to an arcade, steer him to the pinball machines no one else cares about and, for two dollars, can keep him occupied for most of an afternoon. She studies Kevin's face, the shocked look of awe and delight. “He's
unbelievable,
Cara.”

She laughs. “I told you.”

“It's like people should see this kid. I'm signing him up for competitions.”

“Sure, Kevin. What competitions are you talking about, exactly?”

“Don't they have pinball tournaments anymore?”

“Maybe in Russia.”

“I'm going to look into it.”

She laughs, even though it feels a little forced.

She wishes it was easier to talk to Kevin. This is their first outing, but he has called twice to set it up, and both times his voice on the telephone has filled her with some combination of panic and dread. She fears saying the wrong thing, leading him on, or not saying enough and losing him completely. It's a delicate balance, like tiptoeing through a mine-field of dangerous possibilities.

Earlier in the week, she invited Matt Lincoln to lunch, telling him she had some questions and a favor to ask him, presumably so he wouldn't get the wrong idea, and then she proceeded to change her outfit three times the morning before she met him. When he arrived, she almost laughed out loud, to see that he'd made a similar effort: his shirt was clean, freshly pressed, his face shaved, his hair damp, which could only mean he'd gone home from work and showered for lunch. After that, talking to him wasn't nearly as hard as she feared it would be. She remembered her old self, the jokes she used to make standing at parties, drinking beers and wearing halter tops. With him, she could even make some of the old ones—about teachers in high school, the old football coach. Eventually they got onto more serious topics. Matt told her more about his nephew, and she told him the one thing she thought was most important in the beginning. “Every parent wishes they'd started therapies—whichever ones—sooner. Try everything. The more, the better. He'll change a lot, you'll see.” He nodded at this. “Who knows? He might turn out fine. But whatever happens, life gets much easier, much better than you think it will be.” She also wishes someone had told her this—that adjusted expectations aren't a tragedy.

Technically, she asked him to lunch because she wanted him to return the bag of belongings that Morgan brought over, all things that apparently Adam had but that must've, at one point belonged to Amelia: a book with her name written inside, another with a horse on the cover she'd copied in one of her drawings. There was also a pencil, some rocks, and—Cara's heart almost stopped—two unmatched girl's socks. How did Morgan find these things, and know they were Amelia's, unless Adam understood what he was asking and told him somehow? She wanted to call Morgan and have him explain exactly what was said, what Adam did, and then she thought,
No, let this be private. Let them have their own friendship and their own exchanges.

In the last week she has realized that having so many answers has only opened up more questions, harder ones to answer. How did Amelia convince Adam to go with her? Did she say “Your father is waiting? He wants to meet you?” Could he understand such a promise? She thinks about her impulse to probe, to find out everything she can about Amelia, who will, in the end—whatever she finds out—be just a girl, a ten-year-old with a mysterious mix of strengths and deficits, calculation and innocence. She could accumulate details, a thousand scraps of information, and still never know what was said in the bathroom, what was sung on the swings. Maybe in the end what she's after doesn't have much to do with Amelia at all. Maybe what she wants is Amelia's perspective—what she saw in Adam, what drew her to him, because the real mystery of Cara's life has always been the same one: Adam.