Eye Contact by Cammie McGovern Read Free Book Online Page B

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?”
    â€œYes. 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?”
    â€œYes. 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.
    â€œShe got closer and realized they weren’t talking, they were singing. ”
    Oh my God, Cara thinks. Her mouth goes dry.
    â€œShe 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.
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œShe 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