Excerpt of Eye Contact by Cammie McGovern
(Page 4 of 7)
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Adam is loved, by the adults of the
school anyway, who always talk about his big smile, the dancing joy on his face
when he comes in from recess. Though he’s still, at age nine, capable of the
occasional inexplicable tantrum that embarrasses everyone, he can also be
magically uncomplicated: offered the promise of a gumdrop or a chance to listen
in on afternoon band practice, he nearly explodes with delight. “No, really?”
he’ll say, a new favorite expression. “No really? A gumdrop?” In the middle of
an elementary school full of children aging too rapidly, dressing like pop
stars, carrying cell phones, Adam is, for some of these grandmotherly types, the
perfect eternal child—happy with the mundane, a pile of wood chips, a tuft of
dryer lint, nothing really. One year, even the principal, sensible Margot, with
her boxy orthopedic shoes and terrible crocheted vests, ended an IEP meeting by
saying, “Adam is a jewel, Cara, and we all love him. I just wanted to say that.”
Cara has always taken such comments as
hopeful beacons for the future. Adults love him, and one day he’ll be an adult,
too! The implication, in her hopeful heart’s logic: loved then, too! Appreciated
by people who are his age, not thirty years older!
It’s a stretch, though, and it
requires more work every year to stay optimistic about Adam’s future in the face
of the growing gap between him and his peers. He’s in third grade now, and the
list of things he can’t do grows longer every year, more exacting, and in her
mind more ominous. He can’t tell time, can’t grasp abstract time concepts:
yesterday, tomorrow, next week. He can’t play card games, still adds two dice by
counting dots. “Shouldn’t he be good at this math stuff?”
a teacher once asked, thinking obviously: Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman. “He’s not,”
Cara said in a rare curt moment. “Autistic kids are all very different, and math
is Adam’s weakest subject. He’s fine with reading. Fine. Grade level.” She said
this emphatically, though there was actually some question about this, too, a
lower score on comprehension than he’d gotten six months earlier, which she has
to investigate but hasn’t gotten around to because there are so many gaps, so
many deficits now, countless questions that run through her mind every night:
Why worry about reading when the math is so low? Why worry about math when he is
still, three days out of seven, not dressing himself? Why worry about any of these things when it has been nearly a
year since he’s had a playdate? Recently she has been falling asleep every night
stewing about playdates, thinking: I’ve got to try another one soon. Kids like
Adam well enough, or at least they don’t mind coming over and playing with his
things. Sometimes she’ll get the type who will spend the whole time talking to
her and she’ll watch sweet Adam in the corner, hands clasped in joy at the ease
of this get-together, how smoothly it is going, as if he wants to say, I love my
mother and look! So do you! Afterward, she will have to go over it all, remind
him that one has to talk to people to be their friend, has to answer questions,
has to, for instance, say hello. And Adam’s face will fall slowly, take in what
she is saying in pieces—that it hasn’t really been a success, that friendship
requires something more complicated than standing in the same room, among the
same toys, though Cara, with her own history of failed friendships, can hardly
say with any certainty what this should be.
The whole enterprise makes her sad,
unable to think about the great gray morass of Adam’s future. Math isn’t his
weakest subject, really. His weakest subject is life, and everything about
moving through it. Last week, lost in his own thoughts, Adam very nearly
followed the wrong woman off the bus. Cara had to reach out, snap his coat hood,
and bark, “Adam, look up.” “Oh, oh, oh,” he said, his face awash in gratitude
and relief: Almost lost and then saved! He pressed his forehead against her
chest, gasped and giggled and almost cried as he said, over and over, “You’re
okay, you’re okay.” Nine years old and in a panic, he still reverses his
pronouns, still echoes words of comfort exactly as they’ve been given to him.
“You are okay,” she said, ruffling his hair as he stood rocking beside her, her
baby boy, her preteen, his cheek pressed oddly to the side of her breast.
Excerpt from EYE CONTACT by Cammie McGovern. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from EYE CONTACT Copyright (c) Cammie McGovern, 2006
