“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.”
After she hangs up, she decides that’s not all she wants. There’s something else. She runs outside. Holding her sweater closed against the cold, she taps on the window of Teddy’s police car and bends down as it lowers. “I want to see Suzette,” she says. “I need to talk to her.”
For a long time, Teddy stares at her, as if he’s absorbing what she’s asking in pieces. “Right now?”
“Yes, right now. School’s not out for two hours. I want to go now.”
For the rest of the day, Morgan visits the bathrooms as often as he possibly can. For three hours, his graffiti goes without response, then at the end of the day, he climbs the stairs to pee in the privacy of an empty third-floor bathroom and finds, written in pencil below his Magic Marker message: Yeah, I know. The writing is tiny, but thrilling, so pale it’s as if the person wrote it halfheartedly, a handwritten whisper.
He needs to act fast. In five minutes this bathroom will have people moving in and out of it. He has thought of several contingency plans for this possibility: Write me a note and push it through locker number 2536 might become an invitation to the derelicts who push lit matches into lockers. His best hope is a message that will be missed by the thugs and read by the person that matters. Meet me in Rogers Park after school, he writes in pale pencil, and then, to ensure privacy, he blackens out what came before. After that, he moves down hallways, studies the faces of strangers for the shadowy, haunted look of knowledge. Someone at this school knows something, he thinks, counting off the minutes until he will, too.
Maybe this will be a mistake, but Cara doesn’t want to doubt herself now or question what she’s doing. Kevin’s call has shot her full of adrenaline, and she’s on a mission to make some amends, offer apologies and explanations and get some of her own. For years, she’s thought of her past as a shadowy series of misunderstandings best left unexamined. Whenever anyone has asked about Suzette, she’s said the same thing, “Something happened but I don’t really know what,” as her only explanation. “We don’t talk anymore.” Now they will talk and she’ll understand better what happened all those years ago to drive them so far from each other’s lives.
The apartment that Teddy and Suzette share in Chester is a twenty-minute drive away, which is a risk. If Adam has another episode and the school calls, it will take some time to get back to him, but so be it, she decides. She needs to do this. As they drive, Teddy fills in the details, tells her a bit more than she got from Kevin. Suzette has kept up with her painting, she works from home as a graphic designer for Web pages. And no, she never leaves the apartment, hasn’t for more than a year.
Cara shakes her head. “A year? Really?”
“It’s more common than you think. Especially these days, when people can work at home, and order groceries online. She doesn’t really need me to live with her, but I don’t want to move out yet. Even though she says I can, I don’t want to leave her alone.”
Cara hears all this and tries to take it in. “I didn’t know, Teddy.”
“No. Of course you didn’t.” Without having directly addressed the issue, he seems to have let go of his anger, which is a relief.
“When we were kids”—her voice wavers—“she was so sure of herself in ways that I wasn’t. She didn’t care what other people thought. She felt so strongly about certain things.” She tries to remember exactly what she means, and can only think of the last subject Suzette felt strongly about: Kevin. Friendship means you help the other person. You stand by them. Why didn’t she remember this and realize Suzette couldn’t possibly have lied about her friendship with Kevin? How had Cara managed, at such a crucial juncture, to see so little?
“Having Adam was the first time I was absolutely sure of what I was doing. It’s the only time in my life like that. And I remember thinking, I just want to do this one thing, be like Suzette and sure of myself on this. I don’t think I ever could have done it if I wasn’t friends with her first.” She’s never thought about this before, but saying it now, she realizes it’s true.
Chester is a fading, sad town, once dominated by a now-defunct aluminum factory. The playgrounds have signs declaring DRUGS WILL NOT BE TOLERATED HERE, NO LOITERING, NO TRESPASSING AFTER HOURS, NO GLASS CONTAINERS, precautions against crime they grew up oblivious to. The apartment is behind a post office, with a long ramp sloping downward to the front door so that, going inside, Cara feels like she is entering a basement. Inside the front hallway, Cara hunches over when her head almost whacks a copper pipe. It’s not a basement, though, it is an apartment, with narrow windows along the top of three walls and—for a second Cara’s breath catches—Suzette’s art on all the walls. She recognizes one piece, done after they graduated from high school. It’s a self-portrait, though Suzette never called it that because it’s a headless study of her naked body after a bath, reflected in a full-length mirror as she bends over to dry her leg with a towel. Cara had always loved this one, mostly because the body was so accurately rendered, so instantly recognizable: the mole on Suzette’s ankle, her knobby kneecaps, her pointy, cornucopia-curved breasts.
Teddy calls out, “Suze! I’m home. I brought a surprise.”
There’s a silence, and then a voice from the bedroom that Cara recognizes perfectly. “What does that mean?”
Before Cara can say anything, the bedroom door opens for a second and closes again. Though Cara didn’t see her, didn’t turn around fast enough, Suzette obviously saw Cara.
“What the hell are you doing, Teddy?” she calls.
Cara steps toward the closed door. “Don’t be mad at him, Suze. I made him bring me. He wanted to call first, and I wouldn’t let him because I didn’t want you to say no. I just want to talk to you. I want to figure out what happened between us.”
As she talks, she sees the knob on the door turn. “What happened between us?” she calls without opening the door. “Maybe we should just start with hi first.”
Cara smiles. “Hi.”
The door opens. “Hi.”
She looks beautiful. Her old hair, thin and wavy, a battle of cowlicks she used to fight and lose, is entirely gone, and a crew cut stands up haphazardly, away from her head, so short in spots her scalp is visible. It’s a terrible haircut, but it doesn’t matter; she still looks good. Without much hair, her face jumps out, her eyes look huge and beautifully blue. “Wow. Look at you, Suze. You look great. You really do.”
“That’s not true, but it’s nice of you to say.”
“No, it is true. I like your hair that way. Short like that.” She wonders why this is the first thing she can think to say when they were never friends who focused on looks. They never dyed each other’s hair, never did each other’s nails.
Suzette runs a flat hand over the bristly rug of hair. “This is kind of sudden.”
“I know, I’m sorry.” She recognizes this new Suzette better in parts— she knows her hands, her shoulders, better than this whole creature she’s become. “Teddy, would it be all right if Suzette and I talked for a few minutes by ourselves? Would that be okay with you, Suzette?”
“I guess,” she says, softly.
“All right,” Teddy says. “I’ll go for a walk and be back.”
Suzette tells her she needs a minute to save what she’s working on and change her clothes. She’s wearing a T-shirt that’s so old Cara is almost sure she recognizes it and gray sweatpants with a red stain on the knee. When she comes back out, she’s wearing jeans and a black turtleneck. She goes into the kitchen and pours herself a glass of w
ater.
Cara starts with what she’s planned to say: “I know this was all a long time ago, but I wanted to say I’m sorry, Suze, for everything that happened. I wanted the baby to be an answer for both of us. And it wasn’t, of course. It was an answer for me, and I shouldn’t have asked you to give up so much to help me with a baby you never planned or asked for.”
“I shouldn’t have said yes, and then changed my mind.”
Cara shakes her head. “It’s strange to remember it this way, but I honestly think one reason I let myself get pregnant is that I thought you would like it. I thought it would bring us back together again and give you a baby to take care of the way you’d taken care of Teddy.”
Suzette smiles and shakes her head. “Nice thought. Apparently not the right one.”
“I’ve been trying to understand why you got so angry with me, though—why we couldn’t see each other at all.”
“You didn’t even know, did you?”
“Know what?”
Suzette turns to the one window in the kitchen that looks out over the childless playground. A pair of birds perch on the motionless swing set. “Kevin had this plan. He wanted to win you over and dump you, but he wanted it to be big, like you were supposed to really fall in love with him and then he could hurt you the way you had hurt him back in high school. I was supposed to talk about how great he was and act like I was in love with him and that would open the door. Pique your interest.”
Cara has come here wanting to talk about Kevin, and the surprise is that Suzette brings him up first. “Why did you want to help him do something like that?” Cara asks.
“I was so confused, and you were so…” Suzette goes to the sink, turns on the water, and lets it run. “Sure of yourself.”
“That’s not true.”
“That’s what I saw. It was such an awful time for me, and you were so oblivious.”
“I knew you weren’t happy.”
“But you were supposed to be devastated. Your life was supposed to be ruined, and you didn’t even see that. You were just happy to be having a baby.”