by Jodi Picoult
“I’ll get Nathaniel at four-thirty,” Caleb says, a line that, in the language of parenting, means what I love you once did.
I feel his lips brush the top of my head as I work the clasp on the back of my skirt. “I’ll be home by six.” I love you, too.
He walks toward the door, and when I look up I am struck by pieces of him—the breadth of his shoulders, the tilt of his grin, the way his toes turn in in his big construction boots. Caleb sees me watching. “Nina,” he says, and that smile, it tips even more. “You’re late too.”
• • •
The clock on the nightstand says 7:41. I have nineteen minutes to rouse and feed my son, stuff him into his clothes and his car seat, and make the drive across Biddeford to his school with enough time to get myself to the superior court in Alfred by 9:00.
My son sleeps hard, a cyclone in his sheets. His blond hair is too long; he needed a haircut a week ago. I sit on the edge of the bed. What’s two seconds more, when you get to watch a miracle?
I wasn’t supposed to get pregnant five years ago. I wasn’t supposed to get pregnant, ever, thanks to a butcher of an OB who removed an ovarian cyst when I was twenty-two. When I had been weak and vomiting for weeks, I went to see an internist, certain I was dying from some dread parasite, or that my body was rejecting its own organs. But the blood test said there was nothing wrong. Instead, there was something so impossibly right that for months afterward, I kept the lab results taped to the inside of the medicine cabinet of the bathroom: the burden of proof.
Nathaniel looks younger when he’s asleep, with one hand curled under his cheek and the other wrapped tight around a stuffed frog. There are nights I watch him, marveling at the fact that five years ago I did not know this person who has since transformed me. Five years ago I would not have been able to tell you that the whites of a child’s eyes are clearer than fresh snow; that a little boy’s neck is the sweetest curve on his body. I would never have considered knotting a dish towel into a pirate’s bandanna and stalking the dog for his buried treasure, or experimenting on a rainy Sunday to see how many seconds it takes to explode a marshmallow in the microwave. The face I give to the world is not the one I save for Nathaniel: After years of seeing the world in absolutes, he has taught me how to pick out all the shades of possibility.
I could lie and tell you that I never would have gone to law school or become a prosecutor if I’d expected to have children. It’s a demanding job, one you take home, one you cannot fit around soccer games and nursery school Christmas pageants. The truth is, I have always loved what I do; it’s how I define myself: Hello, I’m Nina Frost, assistant district attorney. But I also am Nathaniel’s mother, and I wouldn’t trade that label for the world. There is no majority share; I am split down the middle, fifty-fifty. However, unlike most parents, who lie awake at night worrying about the horrors that could befall a child, I have the chance to do something about them. I’m a white knight, one of fifty lawyers responsible for cleaning up the state of Maine before Nathaniel makes his way through it.
Now, I touch his forehead—cool—and smile. With a finger I trace the slight bow of his cheek, the seam of his lips. Asleep, he bats my hand away, buries his fists under the covers. “Hey,” I whisper into his ear. “We need to get moving.” When he doesn’t stir, I pull the covers down—and the thick ammonia scent of urine rises from the mattress.
Not today. But I smile, just like the doctor said to when accidents happen for Nathaniel, my five-year-old who’s been toilet trained for three years. When his eyes open—Caleb’s eyes, sparkling and brown and so engaging that people used to stop me on the street to play with my baby in his stroller—I see that moment of fear when he thinks he’s going to be punished. “Nathaniel,” I sigh, “these things happen.” I help him off the bed and start to peel his damp pajamas from his skin, only to have him fight me in earnest.
One wild punch lands on my temple, driving me back. “For God’s sake, Nathaniel!” I snap. But it’s not his fault that I’m late; it’s not his fault that he’s wet the bed. I take a deep breath and work the fabric over his ankles and feet. “Let’s just get you cleaned off, okay?” I say more gently, and he defeatedly slides his hand into mine.
My son tends to be unusually sunny. He finds music in the stifled sounds of traffic, speaks the language of toads. He never walks when he can scramble; he sees the world with the reverence of a poet. So this boy, the one eyeing me warily over the lip of the tub, is not one I recognize. “I’m not mad at you.” Nathaniel ducks his head, embarrassed. “Everyone has accidents. Remember when I ran over your bike last year, with the car? You were upset—but you knew I didn’t mean to do it. Right?” I might as well be talking to one of Caleb’s granite blocks. “Fine, give me the silent treatment.” But even this backfires; I cannot tease him into a response. “Ah, I know what will make you feel better . . . you can wear your Disney World sweatshirt. That’s two days in a row.”
If he had the option, Nathaniel would wear it every day. In his room, I overturn the contents of every drawer, only to find the sweatshirt tangled in the pile of soiled sheets. Spying it, he pulls it free and starts to tug it over his head. “Hang on,” I say, taking it away. “I know I promised, but it’s got pee all over it, Nathaniel. You can’t go to school in this. It has to be washed first.” Nathaniel’s lower lip begins to tremble, and suddenly I—the skilled arbitrator—am reduced to a plea bargain. “Honey, I swear, I’ll wash this tonight. You can wear it for the rest of the week. And all of next week, too. But right now, I need your help. I need us to eat fast, so that we can leave on time. All right?”
Ten minutes later, we have reached agreement, thanks to my complete capitulation. Nathaniel is wearing the damn Disney World sweatshirt, which has been hand-rinsed, hastily spun through the dryer, and sprayed with a pet deodorizer. Maybe Miss Lydia will have allergies; maybe no one will notice the stain above Mickey’s wide smile. I hold up two cereal boxes. “Which one?” Nathaniel shrugs, and by now I’m convinced his silence has less to do with shame than getting a rise out of me. Incidentally, it’s working.
I set him down at the counter with a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios while I pack his lunch. “Noodles,” I announce with flair, trying to boost him out of his blue funk. “And . . . ooh! A drumstick from dinner last night! Three Oreos . . . and celery sticks, so that Miss Lydia doesn’t yell at Mommy again about nutrition pyramids. There.” I zip up the insulated pack and put it into Nathaniel’s backpack, grab a banana for my own breakfast, then check the clock on the microwave. I give Nathaniel two more Tylenol to take—it won’t hurt him this once, and Caleb will never know. “Okay,” I say. “We have to go.”
Nathaniel slowly puts on his sneakers and holds out each small foot to me to have the laces tied. He can zip up his own fleece jacket; shimmy into his own backpack. It is enormous on those thin shoulders; sometimes from behind he reminds me of Atlas, carrying the weight of the world.
Driving, I slide in Nathaniel’s favorite cassette—the Beatles’ White Album, of all things—but not even “Rocky Raccoon” can snap him out of this mood. Clearly, he’s gotten up on the wrong side of the bed—the wet side, I think, sighing. A tiny voice inside me says I should just be grateful that in approximately fifteen minutes it will be someone else’s problem.
In the rearview mirror, I watch Nathaniel play with the dangling strap of his backpack, pleating it into halves and thirds. We come to the stop sign at the bottom of the hill. “Nathaniel,” I whisper, just loud enough to be heard over the hum of the engine. When he glances up, I cross my eyes and stick out my tongue.
Slowly, slow as his father, he smiles at me.
On the dashboard, I see that it is 7:56. Four minutes ahead of schedule.
We are doing even better than I thought.
• • •
The way Caleb Frost sees it, you build a wall to keep something unwanted out . . . or to hold something precious in. He considers this often when he builds, fitting sparkling granite and
craggy limestone into niches, a three-dimensional puzzle drawn thick and straight across the edge of a lawn. He likes to think of the families inside these baileys he constructs: insulated, safe, protected. Of course, this is ridiculous. His stone walls are knee-high, not castle-worthy. They have large gaps in them for driveways and paths and grape arbors. And yet every time he drives past a property he’s shaped with his own heavy hands, he pictures the parents sitting down to dinner with their children, harmony wrapping the table like mosquito netting, as if literal foundations might lay the pattern for emotional ones.
He stands at the edge of the Warren property with Fred, their contractor, as they all wait for Caleb to put on a show. Right now, the land is thick with birches and maples, some tagged to show the potential location of the house and the septic system. Mr. and Mrs. Warren stand so close they are touching. She is pregnant; her belly brushes her husband’s hip.
“Well,” Caleb begins. His job is to convince these people that they need a stone wall surrounding their property, instead of the six-foot fence they are also considering. But words are not his specialty; that’s for Nina. Beside him, Fred clears his throat, prompting.
Caleb cannot sweet-talk this couple; he can only see what lies ahead for them: a white Colonial, with a screened porch. A Labrador, leaping to catch monarch butterflies in his mouth. A row of bulbs that will, next year, be tulips. A little girl riding a tricycle, with streamers flying from the handlebars down the length of the drive, until she reaches the barrier Caleb has crafted—the limit, she has been told, of where she is safe.
He imagines himself bent over this spot, creating something solid in a space where there had been nothing before. He imagines this family, three of them by then, tucked within these walls. “Mrs. Warren,” Caleb asks with a smile, the right words finally coming. “When are you due?”
• • •
In one corner of the playground, Lettie Wiggs is crying. She does this all the time, pretends that Danny socked her when the truth is she just wants to see if she can get Miss Lydia to come running from whatever it is Miss Lydia’s doing. Danny knows it too, and Miss Lydia, and everyone, except for Lettie, who cries and cries as if it’s going to get her somewhere.
He walks past her. Walks past Danny, too, who isn’t Danny anymore, but a pirate, clinging to a barrel after a shipwreck. “Hey, Nathaniel,” says Brianna. “Check this out.” She is crouched behind the shed that holds soccer balls as soft as ripe melons, and the ride-on bulldozer that you can only ride on for five minutes before it’s someone else’s turn. A silver spider has stretched a web from the wood to the fence behind it, zagged like a shoelace. At one spot a knot the size of a dime is tangled in the silk.
“That’s a fly.” Cole pushes his glasses up on his nose. “The spider, she wrapped it up for her dinner.”
“That’s so gross,” Brianna says, but she leans closer.
Nathaniel stands with his hands in his pockets. He thinks about the fly, how it stepped onto the web and got stuck, like the time Nathaniel walked into a snowdrift last winter and lost his boot in the muck at the bottom. He wonders if the fly was just as scared as Nathaniel had been of coming in barefoot through the snow, of what his mother would say. Probably the fly had just figured it was going to take a rest. Probably it had stopped for a second to see how the sun looked like a rainbow through that web, and the spider grabbed him before he could get away.
“Bet she eats the head first,” Cole says.
Nathaniel imagines the wings of the fly, pinned to its back as it is turned and wrapped tight. He lifts his hand and slashes it through the web; walks away.
Brianna is fuming. “Hey!” she yells. And then, “Miss Lydia!”
But Nathaniel doesn’t listen. He looks up, surveying the top beam of the swings and the jungle gym with the slide that’s as shiny as the blade of a knife. The jungle gym is taller by a few inches. Settling his hands on the rungs of the wooden ladder, he begins to climb.
Miss Lydia doesn’t see him. His sneakers send down a rain of tiny pebbles and dirt, but he balances. Up here, he is taller than his father, even. He thinks that maybe the cloud behind him has an angel fast asleep in its center.
Nathaniel closes his eyes and jumps, his arms glued to his sides like that fly’s. He doesn’t try to break his fall, just hits hard, because it hurts less than everything else.
• • •
“Best croissants,” Peter Eberhardt says, as if we have been in the middle of a conversation, although I’ve only just walked up to stand beside him at the coffee machine.
“The Left Bank,” I answer. We might as well be in the middle of a conversation, come to think of it. Except this one has been ongoing for years.
“A little closer to home?”
This I have to think about. “Mamie’s.” It’s a diner in Springvale. “Worst haircut?”
Peter laughs. “Me, in my middle school yearbook.”
“I was thinking of it as a verb, not a noun.”
“Oh, well, then. Wherever Angeline gets her perm.” He holds out the coffee and fills my cup for me, but I’m laughing so hard some of it spills on the floor. Angeline is the clerk of the South District Court, and her coiffure resembles something between a muskrat curled on her head and a plate of buttered bowtie noodles.
This is our game, Peter and me. It began when we were both assistant DAs in the West District, splitting our time between Springvale and York. In Maine, defendants can come to court and plead innocent, guilty, or request to meet with the prosecutor. Peter and I would sit across from each other at a desk, trading court complaints like aces in a poker game. You do this traffic ticket, I’m sick of them. Okay, but that means you get this trespassing charge. I see Peter far less now that we are both trying felonies in the superior court, but he is still the person I’m closest to in the office. “Best quote of the day?”
It is only ten-thirty; the best may be to come. But I put on my prosecutor’s face and look solemnly at Peter, and give him an instant replay of my closing in the rape case. “In fact, ladies and gentlemen, there is only one act that would be more criminally reprehensible, more violating, than what this man did—and that would be to set him free to do it again.”
Peter whistles through the space in his front teeth. “Ooh, you are the drama queen.”
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks.” I stir creamer into my coffee, watch it clot like blood on the surface. It reminds me of the brain matter case. “How goes the domestic abuse trial?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I am so freaking sick of victims. They’re so . . .”
“Needy?” I say dryly.
“Yes!” Peter sighs. “Wouldn’t it be nice to just get through a case without having to deal with all their baggage?”
“Ah, but then you might as well be a defense attorney.” I take a gulp of the coffee, leave the cup on the counter, three-quarters full. “See, if you ask me, I’d rather get through a case without them.”
Peter laughs. “Poor Nina. You’ve got your competency hearing next, don’t you?”
“So?”
“So, whenever you have to face Fisher Carrington you look . . . well, like I did in that middle school yearbook. On the verge of being scalped.”
As prosecutors, we have a tenuous relationship with the local defense attorneys. Most of them we hold a grudging respect for; after all, they are just doing their jobs. But Carrington is a different breed. Harvard-educated, silver-haired, stately—he is everyone’s father; he is the distinguished elder gentleman offering advice to live by. He is the sort of man juries want to believe, just on general principle. It has happened to all of us at one time or another: We put up a mountain of hard evidence against his Newman-blue eyes and knowing smile, and the defendant walks.
Needless to say, we all hate Fisher Carrington.
Having to face him at a competency hearing is like getting to Hell and finding out that the only food available is raw liver—insult added to injury.
/> Legally, competency is defined as being able to communicate in a way that the fact finder can understand. For example, a dog may be able to sniff out drug evidence but can’t testify. For children at the center of sexual abuse cases—ones where the abuser hasn’t confessed—the only way to get a conviction is to get the kid to testify. But before that happens, the judge has to determine that the witness can communicate, knows the difference between the truth and a lie . . . and understands that in court you have to tell the truth. Which means that when I am trying a sexual abuse case with a young child, I routinely file a motion for a competency hearing.
So: Imagine you are five years old and have been brave enough to confess to your mother that your daddy rapes you every night, although he’s said he’ll kill you for telling. Now imagine that, as a practice run, you have to go to a courtroom that seems as big as a football stadium. You have to answer questions a prosecutor asks you. And then you have to answer questions fired at you by a stranger, a lawyer who makes you so confused that you cry and ask him to stop. And because every defendant has the right to face his accuser, you have to do all this while your daddy is staring you down just six feet away.
Two things can happen here. Either you are found incompetent to stand trial, which means the judge throws out the case, and you don’t have to go to court again . . . although you have nightmares for weeks afterward about that lawyer asking you horrible questions, and the look on your father’s face, and most likely, the abuse continues. Or, you are found competent, and you get to repeat this little scene all over again . . . this time, with dozens of people watching.
I may be a prosecutor, but I’m also the first to tell that if you cannot communicate in a certain way, you cannot get justice in the American legal system. I have tried hundreds of sexual abuse cases, seen hundreds of children on that stand. I have been one of the lawyers who tugs and pulls at them, until they reluctantly let go of the make-believe world they’ve dreamed to block out the truth. All this, in the name of a conviction. But you cannot convince me that a competency hearing itself doesn’t traumatize a child. You cannot convince me that even if I win that hearing, somehow, the child doesn’t.