It was a speech she’d delivered the day before on an afternoon walk to the park. For a long time, she couldn’t move, didn’t dare carry the plate over to the table. Before this he had never put more than three words together, and then he only did it with prompts and rewards, marshmallows and gummy worms, when he found his words and got them out. This was twenty-five, maybe thirty words in a row, handed over for free, sent into the air, just like that, though she knew she couldn’t make too much of it. The whole trick to breakthroughs was not going overboard with praise after them. “Wow,” she said softly, laying his plate in front of him. “I remember that. When you were standing on the curb. What made you think of it, I wonder?”
Instantly, he was lost again, focused on the food, which took all his concentration, so she kept talking as she was used to doing. “Maybe it scared you when I said that?” He looked at the place over her shoulder where she believed he put his eyes when he was listening to what she said. “That must be it. That must have scared you a lot, I think. It’s good to be scared of cars, but remember nothing bad can ever happen when I am with you.”
She thinks about those words now, and how patient she has had to be courting him out of his self-imposed absences, to join her in this world with all of its imagined and legitimate dangers. As the main office around her fills up with strangers, Cara prays that he hasn’t taken in whatever he’s just witnessed. That when she gets to him, she will find him confused by the attention, by the policemen at school, by everything so out of the ordinary when all he did was walk out to the woods at recess. She also knows that Margot is right—he has been changing recently. He has registered and gotten upset about unexpected things—another child on the playground getting a splinter, two children on the bus fighting over gum. Still, there’s a chance. Four years ago, when both of Cara’s parents died in a car accident, he came to the funeral, came to the wake, came everywhere with her because she couldn’t bear to part with him in the days that followed, but in that whole time, surrounded by tears and somber faces, he seemed unaffected. He loved his grandparents but, even so, never once asked where they were or what had happened. For a whole week she let him do whatever he wanted: dribble stones outside, push little pieces of paper through the opening of a soda can. She didn’t pull him to a table, didn’t line up the flash cards she’d made to build his vocabulary, magazine photographs pasted to colored index cards. She didn’t say once, to his body, rocking at her side, “Point to lettuce. Point to plate.” She wanted to wait, see what he would do, if the fact of his grandparents’ deaths had gotten through to him, and by all evidence it hadn’t. The night after the funeral, they ate their hot dogs in the silence that would always reign if she let it. They listened to a tape of Sesame Street songs. He had a bath. In bed, she read him the story of Christopher Robin leaving the wood. Did he understand this was about loss and saying good-bye, about love that continued even when you didn’t see the people again? No, she finally decided, hoping then it was a blessing, praying now it would still be true: he didn’t take in the terrible pain of the world, didn’t understand the finality of death.
For some immeasurable time, she isn’t allowed to see Adam. He’s fine, she is told, he’s all right, there’s an EMT on the scene checking him out. Finally, a tall, surreally thin policeman leans into her chair: “Are you the mother?” he whispers, and she nods, though of course there must be another mother somewhere, the girl’s. “Follow me. And bring your things. We’ll need you to go to the station afterward.”
She follows the officer outside, stands beside him as he points to an ambulance parked in the middle of the field where, two years ago, she brought Adam for a season of Saturday soccer, fifteen games in which he never touched the ball once. If she asked about soccer now, he would probably remember the oranges at halftime and the shin guards he always wore on his arms for the car ride home. Please, she prays, starting toward the ambulance. Let him be untouched by this. Let him remember this field, look around, and wonder where the oranges are.
When she gets there, though, she knows before she climbs inside that it is too late.
She has never seen him in this posture before, bent over like this, with his arms gripped to his sides. She races to him, bends down to get his face on her shoulder. “Adam. It’s okay. Mom’s here.” Is he even breathing? She kneels at his feet, her arms around his shoulders. “Just breathe, baby. Keep breathing.”
Outside the ambulance door, there is a crowd growing, more police cars, a television news van. She hears someone say, “The mom’s with him now,” and she finds his face with her hand, cups his cheek. He doesn’t move, doesn’t respond to her voice. She’s never felt anything like this knot he’s wrapped himself up into.
For three hours, June Daly, Greenwood’s special ed teacher, grades four through six, tells the police officer what she remembers of Amelia: that she usually wore dresses to school (or had for the month and a half she was there); she was cooperative and quiet, but also learning disabled, and perhaps—if the testing had been done that was suggested—even mildly retarded. This wasn’t in Amelia’s records (which were sketchy and in transit, being sent by her old school), but there were tasks June noticed she couldn’t complete in her early assessment: simple addition worksheets, first-grade readers. The officer writes all this down, then comes back to a subject he’s already asked about—the boys in her class. “Any of them seem particularly interested in her?”
June looks down at her hands, sees the pinky on her left one is trembling. “No,” she says, in answer to the officer’s question, though this isn’t true, exactly. Amelia was beautiful and the only girl in her class of five students—all the boys were interested in her. They called her nicknames, offered her Tic Tacs, wooed her with jokes, even though she mostly ignored them, sitting in class with the hand-clasped primness of a little librarian. She was an odd mix, though. She could be reticent like that, go days hardly speaking to anyone in class, and then, unpredictably, she could spend a whole morning out of her seat, hovering a nervous two inches from June, leaning onto her arm, resting a chin on June’s shoulder. In the early days of school this year, when the summer heat hung on longer than usual and Amelia’s nervous hovering became skin-sticking and uncomfortable, June thought of talking to Amelia about personal space; then she never did, fearing it might seem too unfriendly, like an overworked teacher on the brink of burnout though it was only September. And some days it never happened. Some days, Amelia sat self-contained and fine, in her seat all day.
It’s not one of her boys, though, she knows that.
“Any unusual behavior after recess?”
“No. My kids aren’t particularly adept at duplicity—it takes me about forty-five seconds to know if something’s happened at recess, if there’s been a fight, and there was nothing today. She simply didn’t come back from recess.”
She knows what the world thinks of her kids. Years ago, June got into special education because these were the students who intrigued and also terrified her most. It also seemed to be the population with whom the right teacher at the right time could make the greatest difference. And she has made a difference. She thinks of Jimmy, who came to her class as a ten-year-old, reading at a first-grade level, and who now reads aloud proudly from the library of Captain Underpants books she has bought with her own money. (One of her reading strategies is providing the books kids are genuinely interested in, which might produce more diaper and fart jokes than she would otherwise care for, but it’s worth it to get a book report from Jimmy—as she had two weeks ago—with booger and bowel movement spelled correctly. “I loved this book,” he wrote, “because it’s a subject I care about.”) She has these success stories, but she also has students she hasn’t reached yet, who have sat in her class in wary silence, uncharmed by any of her tricks or jokes. This year, Amelia had been one of those.
“Why was she in the special ed room?”
“Her mother requested it.”
“So she had an IEP?”
br /> “Yes. A child can’t be placed in my classroom without one.”
“What do you remember about her mother from the meeting?”
June remembers a thin woman dressed in a grape-colored suit whose primary goal seemed to be getting Amelia placed out of a regular fourth-grade classroom and into the special ed room. These days, most parents want the opposite: aides, interpreters, whatever it takes to keep their child in the regular classroom. Usually June’s room is the last resort, the final straw after months of disruptive, explosive behavior. Because the mother wanted Amelia in special ed, the meeting was a relatively brief one. June must have asked what Amelia liked to do and what she was good at, because she made a point always to ask those questions—to give parents a chance to talk about their child’s strengths. She vaguely remembers the mother saying that Amelia loved to draw, but she didn’t elaborate, which was odd. Most of those conversations go on and on and have to be stopped by someone coughing and pointing to the wall clock.
“Did you have any contact with the mother after the initial IEP meeting?”
“Yes. Once a week or so, she brought Amelia into school, which isn’t uncommon. Sometimes parents do that to check in regularly.”
“Hmm…Any particular conversations or exchanges that you remember?”
“I remember one time she asked if I knew anyone Amelia could be friends with. It was hard for her, because she was the only girl in the class.”
“Did you have any suggestions?”
“I told her I would ask some fourth-grade teachers. Sometimes we try to pair kids in my room with their regular ed peers who may need a break from their classroom for whatever reason. We give them a project to do. Measuring all the doors in the school, something like that. We’ve found that’s a good way to get math in with active boys.”
“But she wasn’t an active boy.”
“Right.”
“So what did she do with her partner?”
June hesitates. What else can she do but admit the truth? She meant to follow up on the mother’s request, partner Amelia with another girl. She was going to—she’d even approached one teacher—and in the end, she hadn’t done it. She’d never found a friend for the student.
Later, after the police have left with as many of Amelia’s belongings as June could find—her writing journal, her notebook, her backpack, even her pink cardigan sweater, still hanging neatly on the back of her chair until the senior officer picked it up, pinched between fingers wearing latex gloves, and placed it in a Ziploc bag—it occurs to June there is one story she didn’t tell, one she’d almost forgotten about completely.
It happened late in the morning, the second week of school, or the third, when the room was enjoying a brief quiet spell. Liam, her usual troublemaker, was in with the guidance counselor and Jimmy was home sick, so it was three of them, actually working, bent over a reading assignment, pencils in hand. It was such a rare moment of peace that when the smell first wafted in her direction, she feared the morning would be lost to fart jokes and accusations. But nobody spoke. The stench remained, so heavy in the air that she quietly stood up and opened the door (they were windowless, of course, a center room, low priority), and when it lingered for five, then ten minutes, she quietly asked if anyone needed to use the bathroom. No one did.
She didn’t move through the room, didn’t try to pinpoint the source of the stench, though she must have suspected. She let it go, released them to the cafeteria for lunch, and staggered to the teachers’ lounge. Later, when the afternoon passed uneventfully, smell gone, she went into the girls’ bathroom and looked halfheartedly for evidence of a cleanup. She felt guilty by then. Don’t make a janitor face what I can’t, don’t let another child find soiled panties and make a story of it, she told herself. She walked from one stall to the next, checking everywhere, around the toilets, the trash. Nothing. When everyone was gone, she checked the boys’ room, and found nothing. By then she knew, without a shred of doubt, it was the girl, this fair-haired, quiet Amelia.
Huh, she thought afterward, meaning to make a note of it, to write it down so they could begin to put the pieces together on this puzzling child. And then, one thing and another—how would she explain? she wasn’t absolutely sure, didn’t see the panties, didn’t try to help—she never made the note.
On the day Amelia Best died, her file had all of four pieces of paper in it.
Morgan’s mother hates TV, which she says is because she was addicted to it when she was young. “I wasted my childhood watching nothing but trash,” she used to say, and Morgan thought she meant literally, watching a garbage can. These are the kinds of mistakes Morgan sometimes makes, until she explains, “No, Morgan, my God. Bad TV, I’m talking about, The Price Is Right, The Love Boat. That kind of trash.”
Usually, Morgan is allowed one hour of TV after she’s checked his plan book and all his homework assignments. Now it’s clear that after a murder is committed in your neighborhood, TV must be okay because it’s still afternoon and they’ve been watching it steadily for almost two hours, with no mention of his plan book, no talk of homework. Morgan wishes he had his notebook to write down what he’s learned, the facts as the reporter lays them out: “Pending autopsy, the girl appears to have died from a single knife wound to the chest.”
“Oh my God,” his mother says, clapping a hand over her mouth, making him wonder if she is going to throw up. If she throws up, Morgan knows he will, too, because it’s happened before, in school, twice to be exact.
But his mother lowers her hand, swallows, and they keep watching.
It’s strange to be spending all this time sitting on a sofa beside his mother. Usually for dinner, she makes him some food and stands while he eats, reading a thick pile of stapled pages in her hand. His mother works as a lawyer for an environmental action group, which means if she isn’t reading, she’s making telephone calls. “I have a compulsive polluter to call tonight,” she’ll say and he’ll shrug, ask no questions. She has her problems and he has his. Now they sit together, blinking at the screen.
A picture of Amelia flashes up—blond hair curled into ringlets, pulled into two ponytails below her ears. The reporter tells them: “We don’t know what she was doing in the woods, or how she got out there unnoticed by any playground supervisor.” Margot Tesler, the principal, has something to say on this: “Parents need to know this playground is very well supervised. Student safety is the number one priority of this school.”
Morgan’s mother shakes her head. “Well sure. It is now.”
The reporter tells them what they know about Amelia: “She liked animals and drawing. She had a bird named Yo Yo.” Morgan hears these things and files them away to write down later in his notebook. Then there is this: “Amelia was enrolled in the special education program at the school. Her specific diagnosis, or whether that was a factor in her abduction, is unknown at this time.” To Morgan, it seems strange they would say this now that she is dead. Then her mother comes on camera: “We’ve only lived here six weeks. We came to this school district because the special ed program was supposed to be so great. We moved here from Fitchburg and now this—” She is holding a baby, looking at someone off-camera.
“Oh my God, can you imagine?” Morgan’s mother says.
Morgan shakes his head. He can’t imagine. He’s never been to Fitchburg.
Morgan can imagine this much, though. He knows the SPED room at Woodside because last year, when he was still a Woodside student, he volunteered to go there one recess a week and play games with the younger kids. His teacher, Ms. Heinz, suggested it to him. “You’d be sort of a big brother to them. Someone they can look up to,” she’d said. Morgan assumed he’d gotten the assignment because even though he was in the sixth grade, he tested at an eighth-grade reading level, which would someday very soon put his brain in high school. He was paired with a boy named Leon who had Down’s syndrome and it was okay, as Morgan remembered—a way to get out of recess, anyway, which had always been empty, po
intless time to Morgan. Because Leon didn’t say much, they usually played checkers while Morgan talked to the teacher, Ms. Daly. It had all been fine until Emma, a girl in his class, told him she’d heard some teachers say they picked people for the job who needed help, too. “Like socializing and stuff,” she said. “It’s supposed to help everyone.” It was the first time someone pointed out what Morgan had never noticed before: that other people had friends, did something on their birthday besides go to a restaurant with their mother. “It’s not really your fault, Morgan,” Emma had said, twirling a tiny piece of her hair, touching the ends to her tongue. “It’s just that nobody really gets what you talk about.”
A year ago, Morgan used to talk all the time, too much he knows now. That was back in elementary school, when he was still smart and recited books and facts he’d read from memory, when he didn’t think up movie stories in his head, but imagined his life was a movie, that a camera followed him wherever he went, because everything was interesting, even his sock choice. Now he is in middle school, and everything has changed. He understands that he can’t be the person he once was who sat in the cafeteria and recited facts about the Trojan War. He understands that people laugh when you speak what you’re thinking unedited. Now he weighs everything and second-guesses even yes-and-no answers. After that conversation with Emma, he resigned from his SPED room visits, went stiff when Leon tried to hug him in the hall.
After two and a half hours of watching TV, they learn that another child disappeared with Amelia. “He is in police custody, where it is being determined how much, if anything, he saw,” the reporter says. There are parents on TV, gathering at the middle school cafeteria for an emergency response meeting. News cameras aren’t allowed inside, so they talk to people wearing puffy jackets outside the building. One mother speaks over her scarf. “I want to find out what the school is doing. I want to know if it’s safe for my son to come to school tomorrow.”