Morgan hasn’t thought of this: people will be scared, might not go to school.
Another mother comes on the screen, wearing a fur-lined hood. “I’m just thinking about those two little children. We’re praying for Amelia’s family. We’re praying for Adam.”
The reporter’s eyes creep off the woman and toward the camera, and even Morgan can see the problem—she’s said the name she wasn’t supposed to, has put it out there: Adam.
Morgan remembers one Adam who was sometimes in the SPED room. Once, he and his aide, Phil, were there playing Boggle at the same recess time he was playing checkers with Leon. He remembers watching them because Morgan used to watch all kids with aides and fantasize about having one of his own. Of course, technically no one wanted an aide and what it said about your coping abilities, but he would imagine the comfort of having his own assigned adult, someone whose job it was to listen to whatever was on his mind, and sometimes he thought it might be worth it. That time, he remembers watching Adam and thinking, How weird, that kid can read. And then it was obvious, he could not only read but he was pretty good at Boggle. His list of words ran down the page, was twice as long as Phil’s. Morgan leaned closer, to see what Adam was writing. Some were words and some weren’t: Blip, Ting, Bing. “Those don’t count,” Morgan had said because this was before Emma had talked to him, before he knew to shut up most of the time.
Phil looked up from his own list. “We play a little different. We play that sounds count.”
The sounds are everywhere, too many for Adam to sort out. The hummzzzzz of the lights. The kitchita, kitchitaa of a Xerox machine that he would find and stand beside if he could because he loves Xerox machines. Loves paper appearing magically from gray lips to settle onto a hard tongue, all square and neat, a white rectangle nestled onto a gray one.
He’d go look, but he doesn’t dare. He can’t make his body move because moving isn’t safe, he remembers now, and must remember forever. He must sit here and keep a watch on his knees, his pants, keep a hold on his arms. These parts he still has. His face may be gone, he doesn’t know yet, doesn’t dare feel for it.
There is a phone ringing, a pencil writing, a chair wheel squealing, someone chewing gum. Up the hall, there’s the hiss of pipes behind a metal water fountain which he would go to if he could move, but he can’t.
There are also people talking, he thinks. Right here, all around him. There is no way to follow what they are saying, so he doesn’t bother trying. Their silences are hard, though, and make him nervous. He worries that he’s meant to say something to fill them.
“You have to answer,” his mother sometimes says. “You can say ‘I don’t know.’”
He could say I don’t know.
He hears his name. He thinks: I don’t know. But nothing comes, his mouth doesn’t move, because he’s almost sure now, his face must be gone. He can’t feel anything, can’t smell, can’t open his eyes to see. All he can do is hear every sound.
For two hours, Cara and Adam have sat side by side in plastic chairs across from a man who looks too young to be a detective. Adam has not been questioned yet—has, in fact, not spoken a single word, even when Cara leaned into his ear and whispered “Are you okay?” and “Do you want some juice?” (both times, he answered only by rocking and humming louder). So far, this detective—Matt Lincoln is his name—has told her it’s fine if she does the talking and so she has answered all his questions: No, Adam doesn’t willingly break rules. No, he has never mentioned this girl. No, he won’t be able to tell us what he saw; he can’t tell a story in that way.
They are waiting for a team of specialists to come: a child psychologist, apparently, a social worker, and a detective specialist from the juvenile division. She has figured out that in Adam’s presence, all talk of the crime must be suspended, anything that might plant suggestions or contaminate Adam’s testimony in any way. “With kids it’s hard,” Lincoln had said earlier. “Their memories are shorter, they’re more suggestible. That’s why we try to do this as fast as possible. The less he sees, the fewer people he talks to, the better his story will be.”
Does she need to tell him that this won’t be a problem here, that Adam isn’t suggestible in the way other children are? Strangely, though he wears no wedding band and looks too young to be a divorced dad, he’s the only person they’ve talked to so far who knows instinctively what to do with Adam. When they first walked in, he bent down in front of Adam, caught his eyes without touching his body, asked him questions that went unanswered, though Cara could see—the way his body stilled, the humming ceased momentarily—that they were heard. When Adam is finally led out of the room by a female police officer who tells them they are ready, Lincoln explains: “I have a nephew with the same thing. My sister’s little boy. He’s three years old.”
Cara hears this and knows what he’s probably thinking: three is still young enough to hope for everything—magical cures, full recovery. For a second, she wishes he hadn’t told her. Now he’ll be watching Adam the whole time for signs of his nephew’s future. When Adam was a newly diagnosed preschooler, she hated seeing older children lost in the grip of autistic behaviors for fear it would jinx the blind faith that sustained her. Every time she saw one, she said to herself, Adam at age twelve won’t be like that. Or that. Or that. Now she doesn’t think along those lines anymore. She thinks: Adam is Adam.
It has been decided that Cara won’t stay with Adam while he’s being interviewed. She offered this with the explanation “If I’m there, he tends to let me do all the talking,” so that everyone will understand, he can talk even if they’ve seen no evidence of it yet. Once they get inside the observation room, with its eerie silver-gray light and the one-way mirror into the room where Adam will be interviewed, she wonders if this will be a mistake. There are three buckets of toys on the floor, none of which will be in the least bit interesting to Adam.
Once they’re seated, Lincoln is all business again, explaining the rules and how it will go. “I have to watch the doctor, make sure she’s asking the right questions, not leading Adam in any way. You need to watch Adam, see if there’s anything he’s doing or saying that might tell us something. The doctor will also be wearing an earpiece that will let us make suggestions Adam won’t hear, but she will. The idea here is that anything we can get from Adam, anything at all—skin color, shirt color, facial hair, tall, short, anything—is going to give us a starting point. Right now, we’ve got very little to go on.”
Cara’s heart sinks a bit at this. He’s a kind man, sympathetic; she wants Adam to magically produce answers that will help him, but how can he when she’s never put skin color on his curriculum, never drilled him on the gradations of difference? It looks brown, but we call it black. Some people think skin color matters, but really it doesn’t; underneath everyone is just the same. How can she teach Adam this, when he’s never noticed?
“I have to say, I don’t think Adam’s going to be able to tell us any of those things. He can’t describe a person who isn’t standing right in front of him.”
He looks at her. “Really? If someone asked him, ‘Does your mother have brown hair or blond?’ he couldn’t say?”
Instinctively, she touches her hair and shakes her head no, though of course she doesn’t know for sure. They’ve never been in this situation before. She’s never asked him those questions. “Why don’t we see,” he says. “Maybe he’ll surprise us.”
They turn to the window and she finds herself looking for a moment, not at the interview room, but at the outline of this detective’s face. He isn’t attractive in any standard sense of the word; his face is too boyish, with eyebrows that creep across the bridge of his nose in a way that reminds Cara of a joke Suzette once made describing a teacher: His eyebrows look like they’re shaking hands. She can only think: how strange it is that someone who doesn’t know him, who has only seen Adam at his worst, looking more autistic than he has in years, should hold out more hope for a breakthrough from him than s
he does.
As they wait, watching the empty room, Lincoln is apparently free to explain some particulars about what they’ve found: “Here’s the thing,” he says softly. “We’ve got a couple of unusual factors here. The first one is: no one noticed these two kids leaving. I mean no one. None of the teachers, not a single student, and we’ve talked to all three classrooms at this point. Something like this, you’d expect a ripple effect—one person dared them, one person saw them, told another person. Nothing like that. As far as we can tell, there was no one else involved in their leaving.”
Cara nods. To her this makes sense. Adam wouldn’t leave the playground on a dare because he wouldn’t recognize what one was.
Lincoln shifts in his seat. “The other thing is: we’ve got forty officers at the site right now, gathering evidence. Outdoor crime scene like this, hard to tell how useful any of it’s going to be. You collect two hundred cigarette butts, five of them with lipstick, what does that tell you? Someone wearing lipstick has been there, smoking. Nothing, basically. The point is, we’ve got one thing going for us: the ground is soft. It’s been raining, right, so we’ve been able to pull up some footprints—good ones—but only of the kids. We can find lots of evidence of the two kids there, a lot that shows us what we should be able to find, but we can’t. Bear in mind, adults are heavier, so usually it’s much easier to get their footprints. This is the opposite of what you’d expect.”
The door opens, and Adam walks into the interview room, followed by a middle-aged female psychologist Cara has met, another woman, and a man Cara hasn’t seen before. The psychologist starts by pulling out crayons, paper, and two cloth dolls, one a boy and one a girl. Cara knows these won’t work, that Adam won’t draw a picture voluntarily, and dolls are meaningless to him—the table might as well be scattered with clothing. Adam sees what the woman is putting on the table and drifts away to the far wall of the room.
“There are also no tire marks on the dirt-road entry. No one—so far—has reported seeing anyone on the road. Now, it’s still early and this may very well change. But so far we can’t find evidence of anyone else in the woods.”
Jesus, Cara thinks as she watches Adam do something he hasn’t done in years—stand in the corner of the room, facing the wall, and rock.
“Now, a guy can be good, okay? He can be very meticulous and organized about covering his tracks and cleaning up afterward, which it looks like this guy was, okay? But he can’t run around in a little girl’s shoes, you know what I’m saying?”
Wait a second. She turns and looks at him: What is he saying? “Does someone think Adam did this?”
“We’ve got to consider the possibility. He was there, no evidence anyone else was.”
“Adam couldn’t have possibly—”
He holds up a hand. “Here’s the thing, though. It doesn’t really fit. Where would he have gotten a knife? He has no blood on him. He’d have had to do a lot of covering up, burying the evidence, changing his clothes.”
“He wouldn’t have done that.”
“Right. We’ve talked to his teachers, talked to people who know him. Bottom line is, anyone sitting with him for three minutes is going to pretty much agree he didn’t do this thing. So, no, he’s not a suspect at this point.” Cara takes a deep breath, feels the knot in her stomach loosen. “But we’re trying to get a picture of what the hell happened. How did two kids get away and across a soccer field, without being seen? Was this planned somehow?”
She shakes her head. How many different ways can she tell him no, Adam wouldn’t do that? “Has somebody said they saw them together?”
“Yes. At eleven-fifteen, Carla McQuiston, a second-grade teacher, saw them sitting together on the swings.” He shuffles through his notes. “She said it looked like they were talking to each other and she was curious what they might be saying. She knows Adam, right?”
“Yes. She was his teacher last year.” She turns back to the room, where Adam has started moving compulsively. He’s up on his toes, humming and keening, wiggling his fingers in his beloved peripheral vision, looking like a grown version of the toddler she remembers before intensive therapy, eight hours a day, dragged him out of his shell. Those were the days when everything had to be drilled: Look up, look at me, hands quiet in your lap, no humming, no toe-walking. In the past, some of these stims have revisited periodically—Adam will hum for a minute, do this business with his fingers—but in five years she’s never seen all of them appear at once and take over, lock him up in this way.
“She got closer and realized they weren’t talking, they were singing.”
Oh my God, Cara thinks. Her mouth goes dry.
“She decided not to interrupt what seemed like a nice moment and turned away. For a few minutes, she got involved with some boys rolling rocks down the slide. When she looked back, five minutes later, they were gone. Nobody remembers seeing either one of them after eleven-twenty. All indications are, they left together.”
It doesn’t help that these people are all strangers. For five minutes Cara watches them struggle valiantly with Adam, who won’t sit, won’t stop moving in a circle around the periphery of the room. “Three people might be too much in the room. It’s making him nervous,” she says, though this is only a guess. She can’t be sure what will help right now.
Lincoln speaks into the microphone he holds in his hand. A moment later, two of the adults in the room tell Adam they have to go. Alone with Adam, the woman psychologist starts moving, trying to keep pace with Adam’s flight around the room.
“What are we, Adam? Are we airplanes or birds?”
Cara knows this strategy—join the child in play that looks empty, force him to attach some meaning to it, make a connection, interact somehow. And if the child won’t answer, give him a choice of answers, let him pick one. “Are we flying, Adam, or running?”
Ordinarily Adam is so trained in this technique, he can make a joke out of it, or his version of a joke: “We’re fly-running,” he’ll say. Or, “We’re bird-helicopters.” Not funny, exactly, but something. Now there’s nothing. Two people in an oval, orbiting chase, with no response.
“She needs to tell him quiet hands and quiet feet. Make him attend to what she’s saying.”
Lincoln hands Cara the microphone. “Tell her.”
She does and then listens, a moment later, as her words come out of the doctor’s mouth. Adam pauses in the far corner of the room, and Cara watches his face register the confusion of hearing his mother’s words come out of a stranger’s mouth. He knows, Cara thinks. He knows I’m somewhere watching this.
His fingertips come up, to press first his chin, then the side of his face. She knows this old habit. As a three-year-old, he used to wake up at night and cry until she lay down beside him, one arm draped like a scarf around his neck, giving him a way to feel his own chin, to know that his head was still on. This has always been the body part he most needs reminding of. His hands he can see; his legs, his stomach. But how can he be certain his face is still there? Eventually she found a ribbed baby blanket that worked as well, and every night since, he’s gone to bed with it tucked gently around his neck and chin. These days, for the most part, he sleeps through. Now his fingertips move across his cheeks, arrive at his nose, and, as suddenly as it came on, the worry vanishes. He returns to his buzzing flight around the room.
“This isn’t Adam,” Cara whispers, though of course, maybe it is. The longer she watches, the more afraid she grows: he doesn’t look like a boy who’s been traumatized; he looks like a boy happy to be doing things he’d forgotten he’d loved. She lets it continue until she can bear it no more. “This isn’t working.”
“Maybe we could try something else? Get one of the men in there?”
She shakes her head. She has to get Adam home, surround him with his things: his blanket, his food, his operas, her voice. Start the process of returning him to his body again. “This won’t work. I know my son,” she says emphatically, though it’s exactly
the point she’s no longer sure of. In the details of this day, doubt has opened up and spread its wings. They were on the swing. They sang together. A minute later, they broke all the rules and disappeared. None of this aligns with the Adam she knows, the Adam she has spent nine years working with, the Adam who now moves like a broken helicopter powered by some instinct to go back in time, and start everything over.
Afterward, Cara and Lincoln speak briefly in the hall. By pulling Adam out of the interview after only half an hour, she has earned a collective glance of disapproval from everyone. Once Adam leaves here, nothing he says will be of much use. He’ll have watched TV, seen the newspapers; anything he says will be distorted or colored. She wants Adam home, alone with her so she can ease him back into his skin, into being himself again, but she can’t help feeling bad. They are failing at an effort that is obviously important. “I’m sorry,” she says softly to Lincoln, the only one who accompanies them down the hall to the front door.
“Hey, he did his best. What’s important now is making sure you guys are okay.”
She has already turned down his suggestion that they find a friend to stay with tonight. “You might feel safer,” he said. She shook her head, and told him Adam needed to be in his own home.
“Sure. I understand.”
Outside the front door, they stand under the surprise of a darkening sky. Somehow they have lost a whole day inside. “You know, what you said before is true. Adam may surprise us.”
He nods, digs his hands into his pockets. “Sure.”
“He may wake up tomorrow and start talking about this.” This isn’t a wholly unreasonable hope; in recent years, he has surprised her, coming home from school to tell a perfect, three-sentence story about a girl who spilled her milk and cried in the cafeteria. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. “So if he says anything, I should call you, right?” Maybe this sounds ridiculous—too little, too late.