Eye Contact by Cammie McGovern Read Free Book Online

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?
    â€œI 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,