“I just wanted to meet him. That’s all. I’d seen him once before, about three years ago, at the library. He wandered away from you and came right up to me. I saw what he looked like and I thought, This is it, she’s going to come over and we’re going to talk about this. And then he walked away. He knew you were looking for him, and I watched him smile and hide between two stacks. You kept saying, ‘Adam, this isn’t funny,’ and then you’d laugh, and I wanted to say something, but it was nice just watching you play the game.”
She actually remembers the time he’s talking about. She’d worked for so long at teaching Adam hide-and-seek, had labored through so many failed attempts, when she closed her eyes, counted, then opened them to find him standing beside her, confused. On her hiding turns, she had to be blatant—hide only her head under a pillow or stick two feet out from under the table—or Adam would forget the game entirely and wander over to his window. She remembers the library because it was the first time she really couldn’t find him. It’s hard to wrap her mind around this: that Kevin’s been floating around, seeing them, knowing bits and pieces, but not the whole story.
“I knew there was something wrong with him—that he didn’t talk or something—but seeing you guys laughing, I thought, They must be okay. They look okay. It made me want to get to know him. That’s all.”
She doesn’t want to think about this, that in denying Kevin his paternity she made some huge, irrevocable mistake. “Tell me what happened in the woods.”
“I used to go out there and watch him. I could see him from the woods and I just liked watching the things he did. He always walked this yellow line first, back and forth, and then he’d go to the tires and sit inside. And I saw there was one girl this year who sought him out— Amelia. She’d find him in the tires and sit down next to him. One day that girl came out to the woods, like she knew I was there, waiting for someone to help. So I talked to her, got to know her a little bit, and she said she’d bring him out. We set the whole thing up, and they came, and for a while I just couldn’t believe it: he’s so beautiful, Cara. I’d only ever seen him close up that one time. I just—I didn’t know what to say to him. I wanted to say, ‘I think I’m your father,’ but I was scared. I didn’t know if he’d understand that. I kept thinking I should have had a present with me. Something to break the ice. That’s what absent fathers do, they show up again with presents. I hadn’t gotten ready like I should have. I kept trying to talk to him, and I couldn’t get very far—”
Cara can picture this all too easily. In any situation where conversation is expected of him, Adam will wander away, avoid it if he possibly can.
“Then I looked up and saw that Amelia had found a knife on the ground. She held it up and I told her to give it to me, but she wouldn’t. She saw that it was making me nervous, and I know it’s terrible to say this, but the truth is, she was a weird little girl. She seemed like she was trying to play games or something. Then this guy walked up, wearing no shoes—pretty agitated. He kept saying ‘What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘Nothing, we’ll leave, it’s fine,’ and then he saw the knife and he said, ‘What’s that?’ He was obviously very upset or disturbed, or something, so I said, “‘Give it back to the man.’”
Cara shakes her head. “That’s what you said?”
“I keep going over it in my mind. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wanted to deflect the tension; I thought the knife would be safer in his hands than a kid’s. Obviously, I regretted it the minute I said it. Right away, I saw this was dangerous, so I tried to get to Adam first, make sure he stayed away. When I turned around, Amelia had given the guy the knife, and I knew, the way he was holding it, it wasn’t his. He was turning it over in his hands, and she was standing a few inches away from him, and when I got closer, I could hear she was talking to him, asking him why his clothes were so dirty, why he had no shoes on.”
“Oh God.” Cara can hardly bear to hear this.
“I tried to get her to stop, Cara. I tried to get over to her, but when I finally did, it was too late. It just happened so fast.”
“Why didn’t you go to the police right away?”
His hands hang limp in his lap. Even in the gray, dim light of the entryway, she can see that he is crying. “I couldn’t, Cara. What would they have said? I was trespassing on school grounds, soliciting juveniles. In my mind, I’ve kept thinking: I finally meet Adam, and talk to him and if I go to the police, the next time I see him I’ll be sitting in jail. But now I’ve decided I have to do whatever’s best for Adam. You tell me what to do. You decide.”
She doesn’t hesitate: “Go to the police, Kevin. I’ll come with you. There’s a detective there I like. He’ll understand. I promise.”
All day at school, June overheard every possible rumor about Chris— that he was dead, that he’d been kidnapped, that he’d run away and was living in a garbage can now. She listened carefully, as Marianne had told them to do, and in a whole day of conversation, there was only one thing she heard that had a ring of truth to it. It came late in the morning as she was trying to segue the group into reading time. “I know that kid. I’ve seem him out there before,” Jimmy said.
June stopped, her hands full of workbooks she was handing out. “Where?”
“In the woods.”
“You saw Chris Kolchak in the woods?”
“Yeah. It was weird. It was like he was talking to himself. Or crying or something.”
“Was anyone with him?”
Jimmy thought about this, folded his lips up, and shook his head. “Nah, I don’t think so.”
“When?” she asked, even as she told herself, Don’t dwell on this, don’t scare the other kids.
“I don’t know. Maybe a week ago.”
She knew it was possible—that the kids played farther out on the field than they were technically supposed to. Something about the way Jimmy said it, and the way no one else in the room picked up on it except her, made her think it must be true. He wasn’t trying to shock anyone, because he hadn’t realized, apparently, that this might be important.
When she got home this afternoon, she’d put in a call to Teddy, and now she’s waiting by her phone for him to call her back. She feels like this has been her last four evenings—waiting by the phone, worrying about him, saying very little when he finally comes over. It’s as if love has reduced her to long wordless nights spent picturing the day he will be borne away from her, injured or killed, or simply taken in by a woman more suited than she is to being with a cop. June knows all the reasons she’s not a good candidate: she worries excessively, she doesn’t own an iron or any black shoe polish. There are women who are good at caring for these details—she met them last August, at the station picnic, where every other woman except her carried a baby in her arms. They were nice and interesting—some were cops, too, or had been for a while, all of them as committed to the job as they were to their men. “It’s a little like marrying into the army,” one of them had said, staring at June hard, to make sure she understood.
June doesn’t know if this is what keeps them from discussing their future and moving in together, or if it’s just Teddy and the duty he feels to take care of his sister. “She practically raised me,” he’s told her, to explain. “When I was six, my mother fell apart and Suzette did everything for me—cooked dinners, played games, read me books. I’m not crazy today pretty much because of her,” he would say, cheerfully, perhaps not even recognizing the irony: But do you see? She is.
In any conversation about Suzette, he always insists this is a phase, something she will pass through and get out of in time. Only once, that June knows of, did Suzette try getting treatment for her agoraphobia. It involved behavioral retraining, and leaving the house in gradual increments. You don’t go out and try to make it through the grocery store the first day. You drive halfway to the store, then turn around and come home. You don’t set up failure, you reward yourself in small stages, first for walking ten feet from home, then twenty, then
half a block. You train your nerves to exercise willpower, build up the muscles of calming thoughts. At the time, Teddy worked with her every day after he got off from his shifts. They’d go out late—eleven o’clock at night—and take a twenty-foot walk down the street. “Wouldn’t she be less scared during the day?” June would ask.
“No. The night is good for her. She sees less. Too much light is one of the problems.”
Back then, June had felt hopeful; one night they made it to the grocery store and bought strawberries as a reward. Then Suzette announced that she was no longer interested in going to this doctor or trying these trips. “My life is fine,” she said. “I like it the way it is.”
When Teddy finally calls, he tells June he won’t be coming over tonight, that he needs to go home and be with his sister. She should expect this, she knows; he hasn’t been home in days; Suzette needs him, too, and June has had more than her usual share of his time. She decides to skip telling him what Jimmy said today and concentrate on something far harder for her to say. “Teddy? There’s something I want to tell you.”
“Yes?”
She doesn’t know where he is calling from, if he’s alone in his car or at the station surrounded by people he can’t talk in front of. For a week now, she’s been perched on the edge of speaking her most guarded thoughts aloud to him. She has been in love before, certainly, has had her heart broken, more than once, but it’s never felt quite this precarious, as if the drop will be greater, the fall worse somehow. “Ever since this business with Amelia, I keep thinking how important it is to tell people when you have a chance, what they mean, how important…” June, with her degrees, all the words in the world, stammers over the only ones she can find to say. “I care about you, Teddy. So much. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
Is this what she means?
Among all her fears about getting more involved with Teddy—that she’ll lose interest in him, that he’ll lose interest with her—there is also this: cops get hurt and they die. It’s like marrying into the army.
“What are you talking about, June? Are you breaking up with me?”
“No!”
How has she tried to communicate one thing and accomplished the opposite? “Look—I’ve got to go…” he says and a second later, he’s gone.
After Cara has spent the ride over in Teddy’s car reassuring Kevin that Matt Lincoln will be sympathetic, he is nothing but officious and terse when they get to the station. In less than a minute, he’s separated them into different interview rooms and now he sits across from Cara in narrow-eyed disbelief of the story she’s told him.
“When was the last time you saw Kevin Barrows?”
“About four months before Adam was born.”
“And you’ve never seen him since?”
“No.”
“Any contact in any fashion? Phone calls? Letters? Anyone in your family have any contact with him?”
“Not that I was aware of.”
“But presumably he’s developed an interest in Adam because…”
“He believes he’s Adam’s father.”
“Is that true?”
She takes a deep breath. “It’s possible. I don’t know for sure.”
He shakes his head in a way that Cara has a hard time reading: Maybe Cara should have told him this sooner; maybe it’s old-fashioned disapproval on his part, that after all these years, it’s still possible to judge her for the unpardonable crime of once sleeping with two men in the same month. “You know, I have to believe that my decade-old sex life isn’t the issue, here. The issue is that you have a witness—a perfectly cogent, verbal witness—saying that Busker Bob—Robert Phillips—is the guy. Whatever it is, Kevin has his own reason for not coming forward sooner, but four days late is better than never, right?”
Matt’s obviously not going to back down. “It’s not quite that easy, Cara. Number one, Phillips passed a polygraph test. Admittedly, these aren’t one hundred percent reliable, but in this case, I feel like it’s fairly significant. Number two, we’ve picked up his footprints about forty yards away from the crime scene, but there’s nothing around them—no partials, nothing. Even if the guy took off his thongs and tiptoed up to the scene, crawled, got there on his knees, there should be something, and there’s not. As far as we can tell, what he’s told us is true: He never got closer than forty yards away. He says he heard a little girl singing when he played his flute, that’s it.”
“He’s also been diagnosed with a mental illness, am I wrong?”
Matt holds up a flat hand. “I’ll grant you. But we’ve also got Barrows telling us a story that has some problems to say the least. If the girl picked up the knife and handed it to Phillips, where is the knife now? Phillips had nowhere to hide something like that. We would have found it by now—it would have turned up in the woods, buried in a bush, or under some leaves.”
“What does that have to do with Kevin’s story?”
“The reason we can’t find the knife is that it went home with someone.”
She stares at him. “You think Kevin took the knife home with him? That’s absurd.” Even as she says this, she understands what he’s getting at: Kevin’s story doesn’t hold up completely. He has painted a picture of himself in the woods, tongue-tied and awkward, saying too little or all the wrong things, so why would Adam have echoed words of anger? It’s a question, certainly, but in her mind, not a major one, because she believes that if he’s lied about the details of this story, its essence is true. His guilt is tied up to his own bad judgment: his being there at all, his contacting Adam without her permission. These aren’t small matters, and she will certainly have to think a long time about whether Kevin can see Adam in the future, but this also isn’t a matter for the police to make judgments on, and she feels hugely annoyed that an hour earlier, she was making great claims to Matt’s sensitivity. If she could, she’d lean forward and tell him off: tell him that maybe he doesn’t understand the nature of long and embroiled friendships, that people can affect each other without seeing one another. That they can undermine and hurt each other even if they also, in a fashion, love each other, too. And that these relationships, fraught as they are, produce actions that don’t always follow logical paths.
The longer she sits here, the more certain she is that she’s right. Whatever the holes in Kevin’s story are, whatever he’s too embarrassed to say, he was there out of love, acting in the driving force of its name. And what she can’t get over—what kills her, really—is that it wasn’t love for her that sent him sneaking around, on a mission of subterfuge. It was love for Adam.
“Kevin didn’t kill her. I know him. He couldn’t have. I’m sure of it.”
He holds up a finger, as if to say, Wait, one more thing. “I’m assuming there’s something Barrows probably hasn’t told you.” Cara stares at him and waits. “He probably hasn’t told you that he’s spent some time in jail.”
Chris doesn’t know how long he’s been here. He knows he fell asleep and woke up. He knows it was dark for a while and then light again. He’s eaten through all the food he brought, a backpack stuffed with fruit. He can’t help himself, every time he gets nervous, hears a noise, imagines what might happen here, he returns to his backpack and eats some more. He’s needed to go to the bathroom for about six hours now, but he doesn’t want to try until he’s finished with what he has to do. He’s got his designs, his notebook propped open under a rock. For a while he thought this would be too hard for him, his arms weren’t strong enough; he’d only brought what he could fit in his backpack, so he doesn’t have a real shovel, only a garden trowel of his mother’s.
He planned for this to take two hours.
That he’s been here at least twenty-four is further proof that nothing works out for him the way it’s supposed to.
But now it’s okay. Now he’s getting somewhere, crouched on the soles of his feet, hugging his knees as he stabs at the rocky ground. It’s a beautiful hole, deep enough that it’s an effort f
or him to get out, long enough that he can lie flat without touching any sides. These are the dimensions he needs. It must look like a coffin, he’s decided, because that’s what it will be.
Morgan didn’t expect it would be this easy. With Cara gone, and a nervous old lady in her place, he can ask Adam anything he wants. He could even suggest going up to Adam’s room, which he does. Wendy doesn’t follow them. She isn’t like Cara, who hardly lets Adam out of her sight. So far, he’s asked Adam about a few of the names—Randall Im, Wilson Burnstein—and Adam has said nothing, just stared at him blankly. “How about a guy with glasses?” Morgan asks, and Adam blinks. Forget it, he decides.
He’ll try something else.
Alone in Adam’s room, he pokes around for a bit—Adam kneels on his bed, picks up a small blue blanket, and drapes it around his shoulders.
“So Adam,” he says. “About this girl, Amelia?”
He hears footsteps on the stairs. He’ll have to act fast, then he thinks of something else. He kicks the door shut and the footsteps stop.
Cara has to leave Kevin at the police station, she has no choice. She doesn’t believe what Matt is suggesting, that Kevin might be guilty, but she can’t stay any longer to argue her point. It’s nearly six o’clock and Adam will need her; he’ll want dinner soon, and his usual routine, especially after this unprecedented length of time with another child.
She isn’t allowed to see Kevin or say good-bye, so she asks a station secretary to call his mother, tell her where he is and what’s going on. On the drive home with an officer she’s never met before, she wonders for the first time: Where is Kevin’s mother? She remembers Suzette, in the flush of discussing her friendship with Kevin, talking as frequently about his mother as she did about him. I don’t think she has so many problems. At least she talks about them. At least she’s honest. In all these years, Cara has thought very little about those months before she first became pregnant, when Suzette came alive again with stories to tell, about Kevin and his mother. She realizes now that she never believed his mother was the patient. That whole time, all those stories, she assumed Kevin was the patient, volunteering with children who were in the hospital. She assumed this because it fit the picture of Kevin, forever in her head, lying in bed, whispering: “My body is finally falling apart.” Kevin was the weak link, his mother the steely rod anchoring him to life, pulling him back, time and again. How could the woman Cara remembers, with her lipstick and curlers, her gaze fixed so steadily on the face of her fragile son, have allowed herself a breakdown?