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.”
And then it’s as if a silence has engulfed them; words have left the car and only their hands can speak for them; he picks hers up, sandwiches it carefully between his, pressing her fingers, curling his palm into hers. “Yes,” he finally whispers. “That sounds like a good idea.”
As soon as she gets home, Cara tries to put together the pieces of everything that’s happened, make sense of it in her mind. In the eerie silence after Mrs. Barrows was led away, Cara crawled inside the house and roused Suzette, who sat up and blinked as she looked around, trying to remember where she was. She was better soon enough, or at least able to move into the kitchen, where Cara got her a glass of water and pointed out the decoupage box on the wall. “Didn’t we used to do things like that?” she said, and Suzette rolled her eyes, as if to say Speak for yourself. Cara desperately wanted to understand everything—How was Suzette friends with Kevin’s mother? How did she know to arrive just then?—but she also wanted to find the common ground of their old friendship, remember the ways they used to log in the hours of their life together.
Eventually Suzette explained: Kevin had always tried to work; he was happier being busy, getting out of the house. But in the last few years it hadn’t been easy and he’d been fired from a few jobs. When his settlement money ran out, he had to take a job he didn’t much like in an office supply store a half-hour drive away. It was in Chester, near Suzette’s apartment, and after dropping him off, his mother would stop in and visit Suzette. Sometimes she would stay a few hours, talking as Suzette worked. “For some reason, it didn’t drive me crazy. I don’t know why. I was fond of her, I guess. I always have been. I suppose because I always thought she was a good mother to Kevin. I always admired her—I really did.”
Cara shook her head in disbelief. “Did she talk about going with Kevin to the woods?”
“No, never.” She thought about it for a moment. “The thing is, she talked about you a lot. She was always a little obsessed with you. Even more than Kevin was, I think. It was her idea, years ago, that I should lie and tell you she was in the hospital, not Kevin. She wanted you to think that Kevin might have a few physical problems, but mostly he was fine.
“Why did it matter what I thought?”
“I don’t know. She always wanted you to believe that Kevin had made a lot of progress.”
In truth, Cara understood this impulse: she did the same thing with people who saw Adam infrequently—especially doctors who ran their assessment tests every other year. She would drill him for weeks ahead of time, try to guess the questions that might be asked, all so she could hear a lab-coated stranger say, “He’s getting better.” There were so few ways to measure success, one simply did this, chose arbitrary judges. She thought of Mrs. Barrows pulling out the scrapbook, insisting that Cara look and be reminded that it was a long, hard road. She knew already, knew the road well.
In the end, the conversation ran out of steam. Cara couldn’t bring herself to say, Tell me, really, what your life is like, embarrassed at the thought of the limited answers she would get, and Suzette never asked anything about Adam, even the most basic questions like what grade he was in now, or what he liked to do. They filled the time as they never had when they were little girls, with talk of other people: Kevin, his mother, classmates they’d both long ago lost touch with. When the time came to leave because Teddy and June showed up at the door, they both seemed grateful for the reprieve from the conversation they were having such a hard time sustaining.
Now, she wishes she’d tried a little harder. Maybe she should have mentioned Matt Lincoln, seen if Suzette remembered him sitting with his sister in the cafeteria, which she probably would. She would remember odd details—that he wore a Def Leppard T-shirt or had clear braces, but she’d also remember what was important. “He was a nice kid,” she’d say. “I remember that.”
That night, after Cara has finally gotten Adam to sleep, she moves around the house, straightening up and trying to put Evelyn Barrows out of her mind, when the doorbell rings. She moves toward it tentatively; it’s close to midnight, too late for visitors; it can’t be an officer needing the bathroom, because for the first time in days, no police car is parked in front of their house. She snaps on the porch light and sees, first, the silver bars of a wheelchair.
“I need to talk to you, Cara,” Kevin calls through the door.
“It’s late, Kevin. You shouldn’t be here.”
“I don’t know why my mother is doing this. She didn’t kill the girl.”
Her heart begins to race. If it wasn’t his mother, that only leaves one person. “I can’t let you in, Kevin. I’m sorry.”
“She wasn’t even there.”
“Yes, she was. She told me she was.”
“She was there the times before, when I talked to Amelia. But when I finally went to meet Adam, I didn’t tell my mother I was going. I didn’t want her to be part of it. I wanted this for myself. I wanted to look like a real father and I didn’t think I could with her around.”
Cara hears the emotion in his voice; she knows he must be telling the truth now, just as she knew, vaguely, that he wasn’t before. She opens the door and steps outside. “I’ll talk to you on the porch. I don’t want you to come inside. Adam’s asleep. I don’t want him to wake up.” In truth, for all his acute hearing, Adam wouldn’t wake up; once he’s asleep nothing wakes him up except the mysterious rhythms of his own brain.
“I got Scott to bring me. He laid out the cardboard, and then I told him I wanted to be alone and he went back and waited in the van at the edge of the woods.”
“Why did your mother let everyone think she killed Amelia?”
“I don’t know. She must be thinking I did it. That she has to protect me.”
“Did you?”
“No. Cara, listen to me. Here’s the truth I couldn’t tell you before. I left. I set the whole thing up, and then I panicked. After all this time, I finally saw Adam—he showed up with the girl and he was wearing these funny little shoes, those slip-on sneakers, and I thought, Jesus, all these years you’ve been buying him shoes. You take him to the shoe store and he probably doesn’t like it and you talk him through it, promise him something if he’ll try on this pair. I just thought, if I had this kid I wouldn’t know how to buy him shoes. I wouldn’t know how to talk to him, how to get him through something.”
“You learn it, Kevin. It’s not that hard.” It’s late and she’s tired; she’s running low on patience.
“When I saw him standing there, I knew the whole thing was a mistake. He was humming and rocking back and forth, and I could tell he was nervous. The girl started talking to him; I couldn’t hear what she said, but I could tell it helped. She was trying to get him to come over to me and then he looked up at me and made this perfect eye contact. Like he recognized me and he understood. I swear that’s what it felt like.”
She knows this feeling, the magic of Adam’s eye contact when it comes; she also knows how it can be unsettling, and make her forget whatever she’d been trying to say.
“And I panicked. I looked at him and thought—My God, he’s got a life, here. He’s got you, he’s got school, he’s got this friend. If I come along, I’ll just screw it up somehow and I thought it would be better if I left. So I did.”
“You didn’t tal
k to him at all?”
“No. I rolled myself back up to the car and told Scott to get the cardboard. He did—it took him about a minute and we left.”
“You didn’t say anything?” How could Adam have echoed him if he didn’t talk?
“I might have yelled something to Scott, I don’t remember.”
“‘Watch yourself ’?”
“Yeah, I guess. I didn’t want him to talk to them or say anything.”
“So maybe you said, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’”
He looks down in his lap. “Maybe.”
“Why did you tell me that whole story before about the homeless guy?”
“I knew the police had him. I assumed he did it, and I didn’t want to tell you the real story.”
“But that man couldn’t have. He never got close enough.”
“I don’t know, Cara. Someone else must have been there, then.”
“But who?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long were you there?”
“Five minutes. Maybe less.”
Which meant there was plenty of time, forty-five minutes, maybe; anyone could have come along. “You left two scared kids alone in the woods and you just drove away?” She says this, though she’s no longer thinking about his irresponsibility or his terrible judgment. She’s only thinking, My God, we’re back at the beginning. Someone is out there still who killed Amelia and will, if it’s possible, want to kill Adam.
“It’s not Evelyn Barrows,” Matt Lincoln tells Cara needlessly, when she calls him after Kevin has left. “The knife isn’t even close to a match. She’s a crazy lady telling a crazy story. It’s sad, but it happens. I’m sorry you got caught in the middle.”
“And Kevin?” she asks tentatively.
“Not him, either.”
“How do you know?”