“Absolutely.” He claps his hands together and turns to the door. “Absolutely. Call.”
She watches him walk back into the building. He doesn’t mean it, of course. Even a nice man willing to give an autistic boy the benefit of the doubt has his limits. Earlier in the day, she heard a sergeant on the telephone say, matter-of-factly, “The witness is retarded, so we’ll see if we get anything.” She’d wanted to stand on her chair, offer a stationwide lecture on autism, but in the end what difference would it have made, when Adam has offered up nothing at all?
When she finally gets him home, Cara calls the first person she can think of, Phil, who’s been Adam’s aide for over a year.
“Oh shit, Cara. This whole thing. I’m just so sorry—” Phil says.
She cuts him off because she doesn’t want his sympathy; she needs to ask questions. “Did you ever see Adam with Amelia before?” She assumes the answer will be no, that if Adam and Amelia had talked to each other, she would have heard about it.
“Yeah. A few times, at recess. More lately. I think she started it, but I’m not sure.”
Oh God, Cara thinks. Let it not be a girl with some mission like I was. “Who is she?”
“She might have had some special needs herself, I’m not sure. I never heard anyone talk about her before today. I just noticed that she and Adam sometimes sat together on the swings. Or she came over to him when he sat inside the tires.”
“And they talked to each other?” An hour earlier, she had told Lincoln this wasn’t possible.
“Yes, I think so. I know I heard them singing a few times.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this?”
“I thought I did. I meant to. It wasn’t a big deal. It was just a nice little thing. You know.” Technically, Phil is too young for this job, twenty-one and working at night on his college degree. He was hired because she had fought for a man, preferably young, had made the school run a newspaper ad until they found one, because she wanted someone who would talk to Adam the way real boys talk, which Phil does. In the year that he’s been Adam’s aide, she’s loved listening to the patter of Phil’s slang, the way he’ll tell Adam that math might be a bummer, but then it’ll be cool, because they’ll go outside, shoot some hoops. Usually, she loves the rhythm of Phil’s talk, loves hearing Adam say, earnestly, cool instead of yes, when she offers him dinner. Now she fears this is a story Adam won’t have the vocabulary to tell correctly. “Phil, please. This is Adam we’re talking about.”
“I know, Cara. I know what you’re saying, but he was into her. He liked her clothes. The last few days he’d come in from recess singing some little song about a color and finally I figured out it was the color of her socks that day.”
She can hardly bear this detail because she remembers it, too; she can hear him singing yellow, yellow, yellow under his breath in the back of the car. Her socks? She reminds herself: He’s nine years old. The girl was ten. They weren’t seventeen caught in the tidal pull of hormonal impulses. Still, the possibility haunts her: Adam liked her clothes? Dwelled on her socks? Was she some precocious little girl making promises to remove them?
All his life, Adam has shown more interest in the inside of machines than in any mystery the human body might hold. The closest they’ve ever come to a discussion of sex is the time he watched Cara go to the bathroom and asked why she peed out her fanny. She pointed out what he’d apparently never noticed before—that she had no penis—and he shrugged, lost interest, went back to whatever he had been doing. She tells herself no, she hasn’t missed something crucial, some leap he’s made in privacy, apart from her.
But the truth is, if Adam has changed in recent months, so has she, in ways that no one else might recognize or notice but to her feel monumental. When he was still a baby, she didn’t know other babies, didn’t realize hers was so much harder than most. It was months before she understood that her baby cried louder and longer than other babies, that he was different in many ways: he threw up all or most of everything he ate, his greatest comfort came not in her arms but in his mechanical swing. When he was eight months old, she watched him fly around in his doorway bouncer one day, twisting and spinning wildly, and for the first time she thought: Wait, is this normal? When he was a year, she understood, No it isn’t. She watched other babies at the park babble in their play, point pudgy fingers at dogs and puddles, wave bye-bye, blow kisses, while her own child sat for an hour at a time, content to watch sand slide through his fingers, and she accepted it in stages. First she told herself: He’ll be a late talker. Gradually, she began to see: He’ll be different in other ways, too. When he wasn’t walking by sixteen months, there was talk of low muscle tone, referrals to a physical therapist, a phone number passed along for early intervention services. Then, when Adam was two and a half, his bow-tied pediatrician sat down on his rolling stool, clipboard on his lap, and said, “He should see a neurologist, get some tests done.”
No, she wanted to scream, but didn’t. Instead, she asked calmly, “What can a neurologist say—that Adam’s delayed? That he’s going to be different? I know that. I accept it.”
“It may be worse than that, I’m afraid,” the doctor told her.
The pediatrician knew, of course, as did anyone who knew anything about toddlers and watched hers: lost in his own world, no language at all, no communication. Still, she waited six months to make the appointment.
How was it possible to live so long in a state of denial? She can only say this: It is. You tell yourself you’re not interested in labels, that the problem these days is too many labels. You can understand that your child is too extreme in many ways, both overly sensitive and impervious, and you can believe you are working on those things, that they are steadily improving, albeit not by much, but how is a doctor’s assessment going to help get you in and out of a grocery store without a tantrum? You want to have faith, believe in your child’s right to be different. You narrow your eyes and see an older boy you remember from high school: the quiet one who was good at math and never looked up from his shoes, or the band member no one noticed until the final talent show when he played a saxophone solo that broke every girl’s heart. You can know he isn’t normal and still think it’s possible: Maybe he’s extraordinary.
Once, when Adam was eighteen months old and her parents were still alive, she set him down beside their aging, oversize stereo speakers with classical music playing softly and, for forty-five minutes, he never touched the toy she put in front of him. He lifted his head up, lost to the music, and Cara watched him the whole time, mesmerized by the adult expressions flickering over his face—a lifting of his eyebrows, as if to say Ah, flutes, then a lowering: That’s nice, cellos. Even her father, who for a year had been silent on the subject of this squalling baby, grew more interested and brought out his old vinyl records of operas he’d loved. They held their breath and watched Adam close his eyes to take in the wonder of this new music: surround-sound vibrato in a foreign language. Adam loved opera from the first time he heard it; when a record ended, he cried until someone could get to the turntable, lift the needle up, and start it again. “Pretty remarkable,” her father said, making anything seem possible—that Adam was a genius, that her life was going to be different than she expected but not worse. Not worse.
He was three and a half before he was finally diagnosed: too long, too late, she knows now. After the diagnosis came, she shifted gears swiftly, put all her energy into reading books about autism and the children who’d recovered, all with a tireless mother at the center, demanding play, pushing interaction, language, response. She became obsessive because she understood you had to be—that autism was a war and recovery necessitated a clear battle plan. She got her parents’ financial support and lined up therapists three hours a day to drill flash cards, build vocabulary, go over, with a shoe box and a toy car, basic prepositions: “Put the car inside the box. Now put the car outside the box.” Interestingly, Adam could learn nouns with relative ease, but every concep
t involving relationships was a stumbling block for him. Put two things together and ask which is bigger, or heavier, and he struggled, fought, wept in frustration. Outside of therapy, she didn’t let up. She made him play with her, forced his hands into puppets, wrapped them around Play-Doh, dragged him through rounds of Go Fish and Candy Land, torture he endured for the promise of an opera he could watch at the end. But even when it worked, as it did in incremental steps—he would learn to pretend a banana was a phone, a sofa was a mountain—she would wait for the miracle that was meant to follow such breakthroughs: the initiated conversation, the glimpse of interest in another child’s play, and in all honesty—though it was painful to admit, and heartbreaking—it never came.
What he really learned, she guesses now, was how to please her. That to make her happy, he might hold a banana to his ear and speak into its bottom, or pull a sock on his hand and talk with the toe, but none of these activities held any genuine interest for him, none were as compelling as, say, a lawn mower, or a transistor radio tuned to static. Nothing changed him fundamentally from what he began as, a boy most interested in being alone, in studying machines, in privately pursuing complicated music, delivered to him in languages no one they knew spoke.
It wasn’t easy to decide to stop fighting quite so hard. It started during the summer, after a long period of resistance to the one goal she’d made for the school vacation: riding a bike. To Adam, a goal like this had no point. What he loved about riding his bike was tilting on his training wheels, watching the wonder of his front tire turn its slow revolutions. He hadn’t lifted his eyes, noticed the neighborhood children growing older on every side of him, didn’t see that big boys rode real bikes now, certainly didn’t recognize that he looked ridiculous.
“This summer the training wheels come off,” she had said to Adam back in May, though he didn’t register the news until the Saturday morning in June when he watched her work for an hour with pliers and screwdrivers to remove them and then wept in protest. She stuck to her guns, made him work at it every afternoon until her back ached with the effort of holding him up. Eventually, she had to set a timer and promise a reward. “Five minutes on the bike and we’ll turn on the hose.”
“No bike, please. Hose, thank you.”
“I know, babe. I know you want the hose. Look at me. Here’s the timer. Here’s the hose. Five minutes up and down the driveway, and you’re all done. That’s it. All done.”
“All done. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye yourself. Get on the bike. I’m counting to three.”
Then one evening they had a particularly trying session; he wouldn’t put his feet on the pedals, wouldn’t even hold the handlebars, and she got fed up. She told him if he didn’t start trying harder, she’d cut up the hose with her garden shears. Later, when she called him for dinner, he didn’t answer. She searched the house, all of the places he would ordinarily be, and couldn’t find him anywhere. He knew not to walk outside by himself, had never done such a thing before, but when she stepped outside, she heard a noise and followed it, running, to find Adam alone in the garden shed beside his fallen bike pouring a bottle of glue into its gears. “Back on,” he said, tears streaming down his face as he pressed the training wheels into the mess. She thought of the hours Adam used to spend riding his tilted bike up the street, eyes on his wheel, ringing his bell at every driveway. She had been so sure that removing the training wheels was the right thing—that it would expand his life, not take away one of his few reliable pleasures. She felt her heart rise up, take hold of her throat. Never again would she be so sure she knew what was right for him, she decided. Never again.
It wasn’t negativity that made her list Adam’s deficits so emphatically to Lincoln (when for years she’d been doing the opposite, insisting that people see him as more normal than not, forcing open doors, signing him up for soccer, saying, “He’ll be fine,” though he usually wasn’t). It was an attempt to be clear, to love Adam without denial or delusion. This is my son; he isn’t fine, she was essentially saying, because she believed this was better, that real love acknowledged a child’s perimeters, accepted the givens, shouldn’t be conditional.
In September, for the first time, her initial teacher conference wasn’t a cheerleading performance on her own part, as it had been the year before when she’d gaily insisted, “Adam loves science! Maybe he could participate in the science fair!” only to realize, too late, what a bad idea this was, the effort and self-motivation that volcano models and homemade batteries required. This year she was clearer: “Adam can’t handle fire drills, and he doesn’t do well in regular PE. He’ll need an assigned seat at lunch and a teacher with him.”
This was better, she felt sure. In the six weeks of school so far, she’d seen a happier Adam in general, one who wasn’t being pushed in directions that were meaningless to him. She wasn’t forcing him to learn Uno (the way she did when he was in first grade and saw the other kids playing), wasn’t drilling him on Yu-Gi-Oh cards (so that he might recognize a trend if it passed under his nose). She was letting him follow his own impulses this year. After homework was finished, she put on the operas that she had previously limited in the belief that he needed to watch what other kids did, that knowing SpongeBob was important, too.
After she hangs up with Phil, there is only one other call she can think to make, a number she finds easily in the phone book, the only listing with this last name.
“Mrs. Warshowski?” she says.
“Yes?” The voice on the other end sounds older than she expected. Cara introduces herself, and a silence follows that extends so long she fears the woman might hang up. “Look, I know there was a miscommunication about recess. I don’t even want to ask you about that. I wanted to ask you about Adam’s morning, about what happened before recess.”
“I told the police, it wasn’t my fault. Nobody told me he was a runner.”
“He’s not a runner,” Cara says, knowing that this is shorthand for kids who slip away, that aides get paid slightly more for working with a runner. “Besides, you weren’t out with him at recess. Nobody told you that you were supposed to be. It’s not your fault.”
“No, I’m talking about before. When he got away in the morning.”
Cara hesitates. “He got away in the morning?”
“Didn’t anybody tell you? After he got off the bus, I was right there. I told him to stay, I needed to get another student, then I turned around and he was gone. Just like that.”
“And you’d told him very clearly to stay with you?”
“Sure, I even signed it. My son is deaf, I’m in the habit, and I could tell he liked it.”
Adam did love sign language, and he knew all the basic commands. Stay would have been clear to him. This makes no sense. “I take it he wasn’t gone long?”
“Ten minutes maybe. Long enough for me to get pretty worried.”
“Where did you find him?”
“I thought you knew all this. With her. Amelia. In the boys’ bathroom.”
It doesn’t take long to get Lincoln on the phone. “Why didn’t you tell me about this bathroom incident?”
“I’m sorry, I thought you knew.” Lincoln sighs. “Yes, they were found together in the main boys’ bathroom across from the library that morning. Fully dressed. Standing by the sinks. Neither one of them said what they were doing. Both were sent to their classrooms. Technically, school hadn’t begun, there were three minutes until the bell. He hadn’t done anything wrong—she was the one in the boys’ bathroom. It’s possible he went to the bathroom and she followed him in.”
“But this is what makes you think they had planned something?”
“Seems possible, right? They were alone. Three hours later they disappeared.”
That night, Adam eats dinner, undresses, bathes, climbs into bed, all in silence. Cara peppers him with questions unrelated to the day. If a murder has driven him into this shell, she’ll remind him of everything else there is to pull him out. “What m
usic should we listen to? What can we eat here? Does it feel cold to you, sweetheart?” Her voice has the nervous warble of a hostess pushing her way through a bad dinner party, as if Adam has suddenly become a stranger, someone she hardly recognizes. Finally, she gives up. Tomorrow, she thinks wearily. I’ll make him start talking again tomorrow. Instead, she watches him carefully, and the way his body has closed around itself, his hooded eyes turned within. He’s not moving anymore or running circles, so he must register that he’s at home, where it’s safe enough to hold perfectly still, to sit for twenty minutes on the sofa, then twenty more at the kitchen table, but his absence is so complete, so impenetrable, it feels as if something worse than regression is taking place. Even in the old days when Adam was at his worst—tantrumming in public, screaming for things he couldn’t name or even point to—he was there in his body, putting up a fight. She’s never seen anything like this total withdrawal before. This walking, swallowing, compliant catatonia.
Later, after Adam has gone to bed, she turns on the TV with Amelia’s picture frozen—beautiful and dead—in the corner of what feels like every channel she turns to. When Cara can stand it no more, she turns off the TV and wanders the empty home of her childhood, the house they have occupied but hardly changed since her parents’ death. Her mother’s tiny handwriting still labels the spices; the doorway to the pantry still bears the pale pencil markings of her own childhood growth—lines with dates, because there were no siblings, no need to label which child they were charting. Once, she pointed these out to Adam: “Look, sweetheart. This is how tall I was when I was your age.” Even as she said it, she knew he wouldn’t understand such a complicated concept: Mama little? Now, she wonders if living here is a mistake after all. As she paces these floors, the past walks beside her, larger and clearer than it should be. It’s here now, ghosts whispering accusations, the feeling that the events of this day must be her fault, because trying to conjure the picture of Adam and this girl together on the playground, swinging side by side, she sees only the memory of her fifth-grade self, fixing her sights, like a set of crosshairs, on a pale, injured boy.