by Jodi Picoult
You’d think I’ve run a mile, I’m panting that hard. I lean against the wall outside the bathroom and listen to Caleb slam cabinets and drawers in the kitchen. Think like Nathaniel, I tell myself. Where would I be if I were five?
I would be climbing rainbows. I would be lifting rocks to find crickets sleeping underneath; I would be sorting the gravel in the driveway by weight and color. But these are all the things Nathaniel used to do, things that fill the mind of a child before he has to grow up. Overnight.
There is a thin drip coming from the bathroom. The sink; Nathaniel routinely leaves it on when he brushes his teeth. I suddenly want to see that trickle of water, because it will be the most normal thing I’ve witnessed all day. But inside, the sink is dry as a bone. I turn to the source of the noise, pull back the brightly patterned shower curtain.
And scream.
• • •
The only thing he can hear underwater is his heart. Is it like this for dolphins, too? Nathaniel wonders, or can they hear sounds the rest of us can’t—coral blooming, fish breathing, sharks thinking. His eyes are wide open, and through the wet the ceiling is runny. Bubbles tickle his nostrils, and the fish drawn onto the shower curtain make it real.
But suddenly his mother is there, here in the ocean where she shouldn’t be, and her face is as wide as the sky coming closer. Nathaniel forgets to hold his breath as she yanks him out of the water by his shirt. He coughs, he sneezes sea. He hears her crying, and that reminds him that he has to come back to this world, after all.
• • •
Oh, my God, he isn’t breathing—he isn’t breathing—and then Nathaniel takes a great gulp of air. He is twice his weight in his soaked clothes, but I wrestle him out of the tub so that he lies dripping on the bathmat. Caleb’s feet pound up the stairs. “Did you find him?”
“Nathaniel,” I say as close to his face as I can, “what were you doing?”
His golden hair is matted to his scalp, his eyes are huge. His lips twist, reaching for a word that doesn’t come.
Can five-year-olds be suicidal? What other reason can there be for finding my son, fully dressed, submerged in a tub full of water?
Caleb crowds into the bathroom. He takes one look at Nathaniel, dripping, and the draining tub. “What the hell?”
“Let’s get you out of these clothes,” I say, as if I find Nathaniel in this situation on a daily basis. My hands go to the buttons of his flannel shirt, but he twists away from me, curls into a ball.
Caleb looks at me. “Buddy,” he tries, “you’re gonna get sick if you stay like this.”
When Caleb gathers him onto his lap, Nathaniel goes completely boneless. He’s wide-awake, he’s looking right at me, yet I would swear that he isn’t here at all.
Caleb’s hands begin to unbutton Nathaniel’s shirt. But instead, I grab a towel and wrap it around him. I hold it close at Nathaniel’s neck and lean forward, so that my words fall onto his upturned face. “Who did this to you?” I demand. “Tell me, honey. Tell me so that I can make it better.”
“Nina.”
“Tell me. If you don’t tell me, I can’t do anything about it.” My voice hitches at the middle like a rusting train. My face is as wet as Nathaniel’s.
He’s trying; oh, he’s trying. His cheeks are red with the effort. He opens his mouth, pours forth a strangled knot of air.
I nod at him, encouraging. “You can do this, Nathaniel. Come on.”
The muscles in his throat tighten. He sounds like he is drowning again.
“Did someone touch you, Nathaniel?”
“Jesus!” Caleb wrenches Nathaniel away from me. “Leave him alone, Nina!”
“But he was going to say something.” I get to my feet, jockeying to face Nathaniel again. “Weren’t you, baby?”
Caleb hefts Nathaniel higher in his arms. He walks out of the bathroom without saying another word, cradling our son close to his chest. He leaves me standing in a puddle, to clean up the mess that’s been left behind.
• • •
Ironically, in Maine’s Bureau of Children, Youth and Family Services, an investigation into child abuse is not an investigation at all. By the time a caseworker can officially open a case, he or she will already have psychiatric or physical evidence of abuse in the child, as well as the name of a suspected perpetrator. There will be no guesswork involved—all the research will have been completed by that point. It is the role of the BCYF caseworker to simply go along for the ride, so that if by some miracle it reaches the trial stage, everything has been done the way the government likes.
Monica LaFlamme has worked in the Child Abuse Action Network of the BCYF for three years now, and she is tired of coming in during the second act. She looks out the window of her office, a squat gray cube like every other government office in the complex, to a deserted playground. It is a metal swing set resting on a concrete slab. Leave it to the BCYF to have the one play structure left in the region that doesn’t meet updated safety standards.
She yawns, pinches her finger and thumb to the bridge of her nose. Monica is exhausted. Not just from staying up for Letterman last night, but in general, as if the gray walls and commercial carpet in her office have somehow seeped into her through osmosis. She is tired of filling out reports on cases that go nowhere. She is tired of seeing forty-year-old eyes in the faces of ten-year-old children. What she needs is a vacation to the Caribbean, where there is so much color exploding—blue surf, white sand, scarlet flowers—that it renders her blind to her daily work.
When the phone rings, Monica jumps in her chair. “This is Monica LaFlamme,” she says, crisply opening the manila folder on her desk, as if the person on the other end of the line has seen her daydreaming.
“Yes, hello. This is Dr. Christine Robichaud. I’m a psychiatrist up at Maine Medical Center.” A hesitation, and that is all Monica needed to know what is coming next. “I need to report a possible case of sexual abuse against a five-year-old male.”
She takes notes as Dr. Robichaud describes behaviors she’s seen over and over. She scrawls the name of the patient, the names of his parents. Something nicks the corner of her mind, but she pushes it aside to concentrate on what the psychiatrist is saying.
“Are there any police reports you can fax me?” Monica asks.
“The police haven’t been involved. The boy hasn’t identified the abuser yet.”
At that, Monica puts down her pen. “Doctor, you know I can’t open an investigation until there’s someone to investigate.”
“It’s only a matter of time. Nathaniel is experiencing a somatoform disorder, which basically renders him mute without any physical cause. It’s my belief that within a few weeks or so, he’ll be able to tell us who did this to him.”
“What are the parents saying?”
The psychiatrist pauses. “This is all new behavior.”
Monica taps her pen on her desk. In her experience, when the parents claim to be completely surprised by the speech or actions of a child who has been abused, it often ends up that one parent or both is the abuser.
Dr. Robichaud is well aware of this, too. “I thought that you might want to get in at the ground level, Ms. LaFlamme. I referred the Frosts to a pediatrician trained in child sexual abuse cases, for a detailed medical examination of their son. He should be faxing you a report.”
Monica takes down the information; hangs up the phone. Then she looks over what she’s written, in preparation for beginning yet another case that will most likely fizzle before a conviction is secured.
Frost, she thinks, rewriting the name. Surely it must be someone else.
• • •
We lay in the dark, not touching, a foot of space between us.
“Miss Lydia?” I whisper, and feel Caleb shake his head. “Who, then?
Who’s alone with him, other than the two of us?”
Caleb is so quiet I think he’s fallen asleep. “Patrick watched him for a whole weekend when we went to your cousin’s wedding
last month.”
I come up on an elbow. “You’ve got to be kidding. Patrick’s a police officer. And I’ve known him since he was six.”
“He doesn’t have a girlfriend—”
“He’s only been divorced for six months!”
“All I’m saying,” Caleb rolls over, “is you may not know him as well as you think.”
I shake my head. “Patrick loves Nathaniel.”
Caleb just looks at me. His response is clear, although he never speaks it aloud: Maybe too much.
• • •
The next morning Caleb leaves while the moon is still hanging crooked on its peg in the sky. We have discussed this plan, trading our time like chips in a poker game: Caleb will finish his wall, then be home by midday. The implication is that I can go to the office when he returns, but I won’t. My work, it will have to wait. This all happened to Nathaniel when I wasn’t present to bear witness; I cannot risk letting him out of my sight again.
It’s a noble cause to champion—protecting my child. But this morning I am having trouble understanding lionesses that guard their cubs, and relating more to the hamster that devours her offspring. For one thing, my son hasn’t seemed to notice that I want to be his hero. For another, I’m not so sure I want to be one, either. Not if it means sticking up for a boy who fights me at every turn.
God, he has every right to hate me for being so selfish now.
Yet patience has never been my strong point. I solve problems; I seek reprisal. And even though I know it is not a matter of will for Nathaniel, I am angry that his silence is protecting the person who should be held accountable.
Today Nathaniel is falling apart at the seams. He insists on wearing his Superman pajamas, although it is nearly noon. Worse, he had an accident in his bed last night, so he stinks of urine. It took Caleb over an hour to get him out of his wet clothes yesterday; it took me two hours to realize I don’t have the emotional or physical strength to fight him this morning. Instead, I’ve moved on to another battle.
Nathaniel sits like a stone gargoyle on his stool, his lips pressed together, resisting my attempts to get some food into him. He has not eaten since breakfast the previous day. I have held up everything from maraschino cherries to a gingerroot, the whole contents of the refrigerator from A to Z and back again. “Nathaniel.” I let a lemon roll off the counter. “Do you want spaghetti? Chicken fingers? I’ll make you whatever you want. Just pick.”
But he only shakes his head.
If he does not eat, it isn’t the end of the world. No, that was yesterday. But there is a part of me that believes if I can do this—fill my son—it will keep him from hurting inside. There’s a part of me that remembers the first job of a mother is to feed her child; and if I can succeed at this one small thing, maybe it will mean I have not completely failed him.
“Tuna? Ice cream? Pizza?”
He begins to turn slowly on the stool. At first it is a mistake—a slip of his foot that sets him spinning. Then he does it deliberately. He hears me ask a question and he very purposefully ignores me.
“Nathaniel.”
Twirl.
Something snaps. I am angry at myself, at the world, but because it is easier, I lash out at him. “Nathaniel! I am speaking to you!”
He meets my gaze. Then lazily pivots away from me.
“You will listen to me, now!”
Into this charming domestic scene walks Patrick. I hear his voice before he finds us in the kitchen. “Armageddon must be coming,” he calls out, “because I can’t think of any other reason that would keep you away from work two days straight, when—” As he turns the corner, he sees my face and slows down, moving with the same care he’d use to enter a crime scene. “Nina,” he asks evenly, “are you all right?”
Everything Caleb said about Patrick last night hits me, and I burst into tears. Not Patrick, too; I couldn’t stand for more than one pillar of my world to crumble. I just cannot believe that Patrick might have done this to my son. Here’s proof: Nathaniel hasn’t run screaming from him.
Patrick’s arms come around me and I swear, if not for that, I would sink onto the floor. I hear my voice; it’s uncontrollable, a verbal twitch. “I’m fine. I’m a hundred percent,” I say, but my conviction shakes like an aspen leaf.
How do you find the words to explain that the life you woke up in yesterday is not the one you woke up in today? How do you describe atrocities that aren’t supposed to exist? As a prosecutor, I have buffeted myself with legalese—penetration, molestation, victimization—yet not a single one of these terms is as raw and as true as the sentence Someone raped my son.
Patrick’s eyes go from Nathaniel to me and back again. Is he thinking that I’ve had a breakdown? That stress has snapped me in half? “Hey, Weed,” he says, his old nickname for Nathaniel, who grew by leaps and bounds as an infant. “You wanna come upstairs with me and get dressed, while your mom, um, wipes down the counter?”
“No,” I say, at the same moment that Nathaniel bolts from the room.
• • •
“Nina,” Patrick tries again. “Did something happen at Nathaniel’s school?”
“Did something happen at Nathaniel’s school,” Nina repeats, the words rolling like marbles on her tongue. “Did something happen. Well, that’s the $64,000 question, now, isn’t it?”
He stares at her. If he looks hard enough, he will find the truth; he always has been able to. At age eleven, he knew that Nina had kissed her first boy, although she had been too embarrassed to tell Patrick; he knew that she’d been accepted to an out-of-state college long before she’d gotten the nerve worked up to confess that she was leaving Biddeford.
“Someone hurt him, Patrick,” Nina whispers, breaking before his eyes. “Someone, and I . . . I don’t know who.”
A shiver rumbles through his chest. “Nathaniel?”
Patrick has told parents that their teens have died in a drunken car crash. He has supported widows at the graveside of their suicidal husbands. He has listened to the stories of women who’ve lived through rape. The only way to get through it is to step back, to pretend you are not part of this civilization, whose members cause such grief to each other. But this . . . oh, with this . . . there is no distance.
Patrick feels his heart grow too large in his chest. He sits with Nina on the floor of her kitchen as she tells him the details of a story he never wanted to hear. I could walk back through that door, he thinks, and start over. I could turn back time.
“He can’t speak,” Nina says. “And I don’t know how to make him.”
Patrick pulls her back at arm’s length. “You do know how. You make people talk to you all the time.”
When she raises her face, he sees what he’s given her. You cannot be doomed, after all, as long as you can still see the faint outline of hope on the opposite shore.
• • •
The day after his son goes mute for reasons that Caleb does not want to believe, he walks outside the front door and realizes his home is falling apart. Not in the literal sense, of course—he’s too careful for that. But if you look closely, you notice that the things which should have been taken care of ages ago—the stone path in front of the house, the crest at the top of the chimney, the brick kneewall meant to circle the perimeter of their land—all of these projects had been abandoned for another commissioned by a paying customer. He puts his coffee mug down on the edge of the porch and walks down the steps, trying to look objectively at each site.
The front path, well, it would take an expert to realize how uneven the stones are; that’s not a priority. The chimney is a pure embarrassment; it’s chipped along the whole left side. But getting to the roof this late in the afternoon doesn’t make any sense, plus, it helps to have an assistant when you’re working that high up. Which means that Caleb turns first to the kneewall, a foot-wide hollow brick embellishment at the perimeter of the road.
The bricks are stacked at the spot where he’d left off nearly a year ago.
He got them from commercial contractors who knew he’d been looking for used bricks, and they come from all over New England—demolished factories and wrecked hospital wards, crumbling colonial homes and abandoned schoolhouses. Caleb likes their marks and scars. He fancies that maybe in the porous red clay there might be some old ghosts or angels; he’d be all right with either walking the edge of his land.
Thank goodness, he’s already dug below the frost line. Crushed stone rests six inches deep. Caleb hauls a bag of Redi-Mix into his arms and pours it into the wheelbarrow he uses for mixing. Chop and drag, set a rhythm as the water blends with the sand and concrete. He can feel it taking over as soon as he lays the first course of bricks, wiggles them into the cement until they seat—when he puts his whole body into his work like this, his mind goes wide and white.
It is his art, and it is his addiction. He moves along the edge of the footing, placing with grace. This wall will not be solid; there will be two smooth facings, crowned with a decorative concrete cap. You’ll never know that on the inside, the mortar is rough and ugly, smeared. Caleb doesn’t have to be careful on the spots that no one sees.
He reaches for a brick and his fingers brush over something smaller, smoother. A plastic soldier—the green army man variety. The last time he’d been working on this, Nathaniel had come with him. While Caleb dug the trench and filled it with stone, his son had hidden a battalion in the fort made of tumbled bricks.
Nathaniel was three. “I’m gonna take you down,” he had said, pointing the soldier at Mason, the golden retriever.
“Where did you hear that?” Caleb asked, laughing.
“I hearded it,” Nathaniel said sagely, “way back when I was a baby.”
That long ago, Caleb had thought.
Now, he holds the plastic soldier in his hand. A flashlight trips along the driveway, and for the first time Caleb realizes that it is past sunset; that somehow, in his work, he’s missed the end of the day. “What are you doing?” Nina asks.
“What does it look like I’m doing?”