by Jodi Picoult
Stuyvesant, the bartender, flips over a tarot card from a deck. From the looks of it, he’s playing solitaire. Patrick shakes his head. “That’s not what they’re for, you know.”
“Well, I don’t know what the hell else to do with ’em.” He is sorting them by suit: wands, cups, swords, and pentacles. “They got left behind in the ladies’ room.” The bartender stubs out his cigarette and follows the line of Patrick’s gaze toward the door. “Jesus,” he says. “When are you going to tell her?”
“Tell her what?”
But Stuyvesant just shakes his head and pushes the pile of cards toward Patrick. “Here. You need these more than I do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Patrick asks, but at that moment Nina walks in. The air in the room hums like a field full of crickets, and Patrick feels something light as helium filling him, until before he knows it he has gotten up from his seat.
“Always a gentleman,” Nina says, tossing her big black purse beneath the bar.
“And an officer, too.” Patrick smiles at her. “Go figure.”
She isn’t the girl who used to live next door, hasn’t been for years. Back then she had freckles and jeans with holes at the knees and a ponytail yanked so tight it made her eyes pull at the corners. Now, she wears pantyhose and tailored suits; she has had the same short-bob hairstyle for five years. But when Patrick gets close enough, she still smells like childhood to him.
Nina glances at his uniform as Stuyvesant slides a cup of coffee in front of her. “Did you run out of clean laundry?”
“No, I had to spend the morning at an elementary school talking about Halloween safety. The chief insisted I wear a costume, too.” He hands her two sugars for her coffee before she asks. “How was your hearing?”
“The witness wasn’t found competent.” She says this without betraying a single emotion on her face, but Patrick knows her well enough to realize how much it’s killing her. Nina stirs her coffee, then smiles up at him. “Anyway, I have a case for you. My two o’clock meeting, actually.”
Patrick leans his head on his hand. When he went off to the military, Nina was at law school. She’d been his best friend then, too. Every other day that he was serving on the USS John F. Kennedy in the Persian Gulf, he received a letter from her, and through it, the vicarious life he might have had. He learned the names of the most detested professors at U of Maine. He discovered how terrifying it was to take the bar exam. He read about falling in love, when Nina met Caleb Frost, walking down a brick path he’d just laid in front of the library. Where is this going to take me? she had asked. And Caleb’s answer: Where do you want it to?
By the time Patrick’s enlistment was up, Nina had gotten married. Patrick considered settling down in places that rolled off the tongue: Shawnee, Pocatello, Hickory. He went so far as to rent a U-Haul truck and drive exactly one thousand miles from New York City to Riley, Kansas. But in the end, it turned out that he’d learned too well from Nina’s letters, and he moved back to Biddeford, simply because he could not stay away.
“And then,” Nina says, “a pig leaped into the butter dish and ruined the whole dinner party.”
“No shit?” Patrick laughs, caught. “What did the hostess do?”
“You’re not listening, Patrick, goddammit.”
“Sure I am. But Jesus, Nina. Brain matter on the passenger seat visor that doesn’t belong to anyone in the car? Might as well be a pig in the butter dish you’re talking about.” Patrick shakes his head. “Who leaves his cerebral cortex behind in someone else’s rig?”
“You tell me. You’re the detective.”
“Okay. My best guess? The car’s been reconditioned. Your defendant bought it used, never knowing that the previous owner drove to a secluded rest stop and blew his brains out in the front seat. It got cleaned up well enough for resale value . . . but not for the indomitable Maine State Lab.”
Nina stirs her coffee, then reaches across to Patrick’s plate to take a French fry. “That’s not impossible,” she admits. “I’ll have to trace the car.”
“I can get you the name of a guy we used as an informant once—he ran a reconditioning business before he started dealing.”
“Get me the whole file. Leave it in my mailbox at home.”
Patrick shakes his head. “I can’t. That’s a federal offense.”
“You’re kidding,” Nina laughs. “It’s not like you’re leaving a bomb.” But Patrick doesn’t even smile; for him the world is a place of rules. “Fine, then. Leave it outside the front door.” She glances down as her beeper sounds, pulls it from the waistband of her skirt. “Oh, damn.”
“Problem?”
“Nathaniel’s preschool.” She takes her cell phone from her black bag and dials a number. “Hi, it’s Nina Frost. Yes. Of course. No, I understand.” She hangs up, then dials again. “Peter, it’s me. Listen, I just got a call from Nathaniel’s school. I have to go pick him up, and Caleb’s at a job site. I’ve got two motions to suppress on DUIs; can you cover for me? Plead the cases, I don’t care, I just want to get rid of them. Yeah. Thanks.”
“What’s the matter with Nathaniel?” Patrick asks as she slips the phone back into her bag. “Is he sick?”
Nina looks away from him; she almost seems embarrassed. “No, they specifically said he wasn’t. We got off to a rocky start today; I’m betting he just needs to sit on the porch with me and regroup.”
Patrick has spent plenty of hours on the porch with Nathaniel and Nina. Their favorite game in the fall is to bet Hershey’s kisses on which leaf will drop from a given tree first. Nina plays to win, just like she does with everything else in her life, but then she claims she is too stuffed to reap the bounty and she donates all her chocolate to Nathaniel. When Nina is with her son, she seems—well, brighter, more colorful—and softer. When they are laughing with their heads bent close, Patrick sometimes sees her not as the attorney she is now but as the little girl who was once his partner in crime.
“I could go get him for you,” Patrick suggests.
“Yeah, you just can’t leave him in my mailbox.” Nina grins and grabs the other half of Patrick’s sandwich from his plate. “Thanks, but Miss Lydia made a personal request to see me, and believe me, you don’t want to get on that woman’s bad side.” Nina takes a bite, then hands the rest to Patrick. “I’ll call you later.” She hurries out of the bar before Patrick can say good-bye.
He watches her go. Sometimes he wonders if she ever slows down, if she’s moving so fast through her own life that she cannot even realize the physics of the trajectory she’s taken: Bend the curve of time, and even yesterday looks unfamiliar. The truth is, Nina will forget to call him. And Patrick will phone her instead and ask if Nathaniel is all right. She’ll apologize and say she meant to get back to him all along. And Patrick . . . well, Patrick will forgive her, just like he always does.
• • •
“Acting out,” I repeat, looking Miss Lydia in the eye. “Did Nathaniel tell Danny again that I’d put him in jail if he didn’t share the dinosaurs?”
“No, this time it’s aggressive behavior. Nathaniel’s been ruining other children’s work—knocking down block structures, and at one point he scribbled over a little girl’s drawing.”
I offer my most winning smile. “Nathaniel wasn’t quite himself this morning. Maybe it’s some kind of virus.”
Miss Lydia frowned. “I don’t think so, Mrs. Frost. There are other incidents . . . he was climbing the swing set today, and jumping off the top—”
“Kids do that kind of thing all the time!”
“Nina,” Miss Lydia says gently, Miss Lydia who in four years has never used my first name, “was Nathaniel speaking before he came to school this morning?”
“Well, of course he—” I begin, and then I stop. The bed-wetting, the rushed breakfast, the black mood—there is much I remember about Nathaniel that morning, but the only voice I hear in my mind is my own.
• • •
I would
know my son’s voice anywhere. Pitched and bubbled; I used to wish I could bottle it, like the Sea Witch who stole from the Little Mermaid. His mistakes—hossipal and pisghetti and apple spider—were speed bumps that might keep him from growing up too soon; correct them and he’d reach that destination long before I was ready. As it is, things are already changing too quickly. Nathaniel no longer mixes up his pronouns; he has mastered dipthongs—although I sorely miss hearing him say brudder like a Bowery cop. Just about the only hiccup in speech I can still lay claim to is Nathaniel’s absolute inability to pronounce the letters L and R.
In my memory, we are sitting at the kitchen table. Pancakes—shaped like ghosts, with chocolate chip eyes—are stacked high in front of us, along with bacon and orange juice. A big breakfast is the way we bribe Nathaniel on the Sundays that Caleb and I feel guilty enough to go to Mass. The sun hits the lip of my glass and a rainbow spills onto my plate. “What’s the opposite of left,” I ask.
Without missing a beat, Nathaniel says, “White.”
Caleb flips a pancake. As a kid, he lisped. Listening to Nathaniel brings abject pain, and the belief that his son will be teased mercilessly, too. He thinks we should correct Nathaniel, and asked Miss Lydia if Nathaniel’s pronunciations could be fixed by a speech pathologist. He thinks a child going into kindergarten next year should have the eloquence of Laurence Olivier. “Then what’s the opposite of white?” Caleb asks.
“Bwack.”
“Rrrright,” Caleb stresses. “Try it. Rrrrright.”
“Wwwwhite.”
“Just leave it, Caleb,” I say.
But he can’t. “Nathaniel,” he presses, “the opposite of left is right. And the opposite of right is . . .?”
Nathaniel thinks about this for a moment. “Ewase,” he answers.
“God help him,” Caleb mutters, turning back to the stove.
Me, I just wink at Nathaniel. “Maybe He will,” I say.
• • •
In the parking lot of the nursery school, I kneel down so that Nathaniel and I are face-to-face. “Honey, tell me what’s wrong.”
Nathaniel’s collar is twisted; his hands are stained red with fingerpaint. He stares at me with wide, dark eyes and doesn’t say a thing.
All the words he isn’t speaking rise in my throat, thick as bile. “Honey,” I repeat. “Nathaniel?”
We just think he needs to be at home, Miss Lydia had said. Maybe you can spend this afternoon with him. “Is that what you need?” I ask out loud, my hands sliding from his shoulders to the soft moon of his face. “Some quality time?” Smiling hard, I fold him into a hug. He is heavy and warm and fits into my arms seamlessly, although at several other points in Nathaniel’s life—his infancy, his toddlerhood—I have been certain that we matched equally as well.
“Does your throat hurt?” Shake.
“Does anything hurt?” Another shake.
“Did something upset you at school? Did someone say something that hurt your feelings? Can you tell me what happened?”
Three questions, too many for him to process, much less answer. But that doesn’t keep me from hoping that Nathaniel is going to respond.
Can tonsils become so swollen they impede speech? Can strep come on like lightning? Doesn’t meningitis affect the neck first?
Nathaniel parts his lips—here, he’s going to tell me now—but his mouth is a hollow, silent cavern.
“That’s okay,” I say, although it isn’t, not by a long shot.
• • •
Caleb arrives at the pediatrician’s office while we are waiting to be seen. Nathaniel sits near the Brio train set, pushing it in circles. I’m glaring daggers at the receptionist, who doesn’t seem to understand that this is an emergency, that my son is not acting like my son, that this isn’t a goddamned common cold, and that we should have been seen a half hour ago.
Caleb immediately goes to Nathaniel, curling his big body into a play space meant for children. “Hey, Buddy. You’re not feeling so great, huh?”
Nathaniel shrugs, but doesn’t speak. He hasn’t spoken now in God knows how many hours?
“Does something hurt, Nathaniel?” Caleb says, and that’s about all I can take.
“Don’t you think I’ve already asked him?” I explode.
“I don’t know, Nina. I haven’t been here.”
“Well, he isn’t talking, Caleb. He isn’t responding to me.” The full implications of this—the sad truth that my son’s illness isn’t chicken pox or bronchitis or any of a thousand other things I could understand—make it hard to stand upright. It’s the strange things, like this, that always turn out to be awful: a wart that won’t go away, which metastasizes into cancer; a dull headache that turns out to be a brain tumor. “I’m not even sure if he’s hearing what I say to him, now. For all I know it’s some . . . some virus that’s attacking his vocal cords.”
“Virus.” There is a pause. “He was feeling sick yesterday and you shoved him off to school this morning, regardless—”
“This is my fault?”
Caleb just looks at me, hard. “You’ve been awfully busy lately, that’s all I’m saying.”
“So I’m supposed to apologize for the fact that my job isn’t something I can do on my own clock, like yours? Well, excuse me. I’ll ask if the victims would be kind enough to get raped and beaten at a more convenient time.”
“No, you’ll just hope that your own son has the good sense to get sick when you’re not scheduled in court.”
It takes me a moment to respond, I’m that angry. “That is so—”
“It’s true, Nina. How can everyone else’s kid be a priority over your own?”
“Nathaniel?”
The soft voice of the pediatric nurse practitioner lands like an ax between us. She has a look on her face I cannot quite read, and I’m not sure if she’s going to ask about Nathaniel’s silence, or his parents’ lack of it.
• • •
It feels like he’s swallowed stones, like his neck is full of pebbles that shift and grind every time he tries to make a sound. Nathaniel lies on the examination table while Dr. Ortiz gently rubs jelly under his chin, then rolls over his throat a fat wand that tickles. On the computer screen she’s wheeled into the room, salt and pepper blotches rise to the surface, pictures that look nothing like him at all.
When he crooks his pinky finger, he can reach a crack in the leather on the table. Inside it’s foam, a cloud that can be torn apart.
“Nathaniel,” Dr. Ortiz says, “can you try to speak for me?”
His mother and father are looking at him so hard. It reminds him of one time at the zoo, when Nathaniel had stood in front of a reptile cage for twenty whole minutes thinking that if he waited long enough, the snake would come out of its hiding place. At that moment he’d wanted to see the rattlesnake more than he’d ever wanted anything, but it had stayed hidden. Nathaniel sometimes wonders if it was even in there at all.
Now, he purses his mouth. He feels the back of his throat open like a rose. The sound rises from his belly, tumbling over the stones that choke him. Nothing makes its way to his lips.
Dr. Ortiz leans closer. “You can do it, Nathaniel,” she urges. “Just try.”
But he is trying. He is trying so hard it’s splitting him in two. There is a word caught like driftwood behind his tongue, and he wants so badly to say it to his parents: Stop.
• • •
“There’s nothing extraordinary on the ultrasound,” Dr. Ortiz says. “No polyps or swelling of the vocal cords, nothing physical that might be keeping Nathaniel from speaking.” She looks at us with her clear gray eyes. “Has Nathaniel had any other medical problems lately?”
Caleb looks at me, and I turn away. So I gave Nathaniel Tylenol, so I’d prayed for him to be all right because I had such a busy morning coming. So what? Ask nine out of ten mothers; they all would have done what I did . . . and that last one would have thought hard about it before discounting the idea.
“He
came home from church yesterday with a stomachache,” Caleb says. “And he’s still having accidents at night.”
But that’s not a medical problem. That’s about monsters hiding under the bed, and bogeymen peering in the windows. It has nothing to do with a sudden loss of speech. In the corner, where he is playing with blocks, I watch Nathaniel blush—and suddenly I’m angry with Caleb for even bringing it up.
Dr. Ortiz takes off her glasses and rubs them on her shirt. “Sometimes what looks like a physical illness isn’t,” she says slowly. “Sometimes these things can be about getting attention.”
She doesn’t know my son, not nearly as well as I do. As if a five-year-old might even be capable of such Machiavellian plotting.
“He may not even be consciously aware of the behavior,” the doctor continues, reading my mind.
“What can we do?” Caleb asks, at the same moment I say, “Maybe we should talk to a specialist.”
The doctor responds to me, first. “That’s exactly what I was going to suggest. Let me make a call and see if Dr. Robichaud can see you this afternoon.”
Yes, this is what we need: an ENT who is trained in this sort of illness; an ENT who will be able to lay hands on Nathaniel and feel an impossibly small something that can be fixed. “Which hospital is Dr. Robichaud affiliated with?” I ask.
“He’s up in Portland,” the pediatrician says. “He’s a psychiatrist.”
• • •
July. The town pool. A hundred and two degrees in Maine, a record.
“What if I sink?” Nathaniel asked me. I stood in the shallow end, watching him stare at the water like it was quicksand.
“Do you really think I’d let you get hurt?”