by Jodi Picoult
• • •
I find him at the third job site, making a stone wall. Caleb’s face lights up as he recognizes my car. He watches me get out, and then he waits, expecting Nathaniel. It’s enough to propel me forward, so that by the time I reach him I am nearly at a dead run, and I slap him as hard as I can across the face.
“Nina!” Caleb catches my wrists and holds me away from him. “What the hell!”
“You bastard. How could you, Caleb? How could you?”
He pushes me away, rubbing his fingers against his cheek. My hand rises on it, a bright print. Good. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Caleb says. “Slow down.”
“Slow down?” I spit out. “I’ll make it really simple: Nathaniel told us. He told us what you did to him.”
“I didn’t do anything to him.”
For a long moment, I don’t say a word, just stare. “Nathaniel said I . . . I . . .,” Caleb falters. “That’s ridiculous.”
It is what they all say, the guilty ones, and it makes me unravel. “Don’t you dare tell me that you love him.”
“Of course I do!” Caleb shakes his head, as if to clear it. “I don’t know what he said. I don’t know why he said it. But Nina, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.”
When I don’t respond, every year we’ve spent together unspools, until we are both standing knee deep in a litter of memories that don’t matter. Caleb’s eyes are wide and wet. “Nina, please. Think about what you’re saying.”
I look down at my hands, one fist gripping the other tightly. It is the sign for in. In trouble. In love. In case. “What I think is that kids don’t make this up. That Nathaniel didn’t make this up.” I raise my gaze to his. “Don’t come home tonight,” I say, and I walk back to my car with great precision, as if my heart has not gone to pieces inside me.
• • •
Caleb watches the taillights of Nina’s car disappear down the road. The dust that’s kicked up in her wake settles, and the scene still looks like it did a minute ago. But Caleb knows things are completely different now; that there is no going back.
He will do anything for his son. Always has, always will.
Caleb looks down at the wall he’s been crafting. Three feet, and it took him the better part of the day. While his son was in a psychiatrist’s office, turning the world inside out, Caleb has been lifting stone, fitting it side by side. Once when he’d been dating Nina he’d shown her how to set together rocks with proportions that did not seem to meet. All you need is one edge in common, he’d told her.
Case in point, this jagged piece of quartz, kitty-corner to a fat, low block of sandstone. Now, he lifts the piece of sandstone and hurls it into the road, where it breaks into pieces. He raises the quartz and sends it spinning into the woods behind him. He demolishes the wall, all this work, piece by careful piece. Then he sinks into the pile of rubble and presses his dusty hands to his eyes, crying for what cannot be put back together.
• • •
I have one more place to go. In the clerk’s office of the East District Court, I move like an automaton. Tears keep coming, no matter how I try to will them away. This is not a professional demeanor, but I couldn’t care less. This is not a professional matter, it’s a personal one.
“Where do you keep the protective order forms for juveniles?” I ask the clerk, a woman who is new to the court, and whose name I have forgotten.
She looks at me as if she’s afraid to answer. Then she points to a bin. She fills it out for me, as I feed her the answers in a voice that I can’t place.
Judge Bartlett receives me in chambers. “Nina.” He knows me, they all do. “What can I do for you?”
I hold the form out for him and lift my chin. Breathe, speak, focus. “I am filing this on behalf of my son, Your Honor. I’d prefer not to do it in open court.”
The judge’s eyes hold mine for a long second, then he takes the paper from my hands. “Tell me,” he says gently.
“There is physical evidence of sexual abuse.” I am careful not to say Nathaniel’s name. That, I cannot bear yet. “And today, he identified the abuser as his father.” His father, not my husband.
“And you?” Judge Bartlett asks. “Are you all right?”
I shake my head, my lips pressed tight together. I grasp my hands so tightly that I lose feeling in the fingers. But I don’t say a word.
“If there’s anything I can do,” the judge murmurs. But there is nothing he can do, or anyone else, no matter how many times the offer is extended. Everything has already been done. And that is the problem.
The judge scrawls the craggy landscape of his signature across the bottom of the form. “You know this is only temporary. We’ll have to have a hearing in twenty days.”
“That’s twenty days I have to figure this out.”
He nods. “I’m sorry, Nina.”
So am I. For not seeing what was under my nose. For not knowing how to protect a child in the world, but only in the legal system. For every choice I’ve made that has brought me to this moment. And, yes, for the restraining order that burns a hole in my pocket the entire drive back to my son.
These are the rules at home:
Make your bed in the morning. Brush your teeth twice a day. Don’t pull the dog’s ears. Finish your vegetables, even if they’re not as good as the spaghetti.
These are the rules at school:
Don’t climb up the outside of the slide. Don’t walk in front of the swings while a friend is swinging. Raise your hand in Circle if you have something to say. Everybody gets to play a game, if they want to. Put on a smock if you’re going to paint.
I know other rules, too:
Buckle your seat belt.
Never speak to a stranger.
Don’t tell, or you’ll burn in Hell.
THREE
Life, it turns out, goes on. There is no cosmic rule that grants you immunity from the details just because you have come face-to-face with a catastrophe. The garbage cans still overflow, the bills arrive in the mail, telemarketers interrupt dinner.
Nathaniel comes into the bathroom just as I put the cap back on the tube of Preparation H. I read once that rubbing it into the skin around the eyes makes the swelling go down, the red fade. I turn to him with a smile so bright he backs away. “Hey, sweetie. Did you brush your teeth?” He nods, and I take his hand. “Let’s read a book, then.”
Nathaniel scrambles onto his bed like any other five-year-old—it is a jungle, and he is a monkey. Dr. Robichaud has said that the children bounce back fast, faster even than their parents do. I hold onto this excuse as I open the book—one about a pirate blind in one eye who cannot see that the parrot on his shoulder is actually a poodle. I make it through the first three pages, and then Nathaniel stops me, his hand splayed across the bright painted pictures. His index finger waggles, and then he holds that hand up to his forehead again, making a sign I wish I could never see again.
Where’s Daddy?
I take the book and set it on the nightstand. “Nathaniel, he’s not coming home tonight.” He’s not coming home any night, I think.
He frowns at me. He doesn’t know how to ask why yet, but that is what’s caught in his head. Is he thinking that he’s responsible for Caleb’s exile? Has he been told there will be some kind of retribution, for confessing?
Holding his hands between mine—to keep him from interrupting—I try to make this as easy as I can. “Right now, Daddy can’t be here.”
Nathaniel tugs his arms free, curls his fingers up and in. I want.
God, I want, too. Nathaniel, angry, turns away from me. “What Daddy did,” I say brokenly, “was wrong.”
At that, Nathaniel bolts upright. He shakes his head vehemently.
This, I’ve seen before. If a parent is the one sexually abusing a child, the child is often told that it’s a measure of love. But Nathaniel keeps shaking his head, so hard that his hair flies from side to side. “Stop. Nathaniel, please stop.” When he does, he looks at m
e with the strangest expression, as if he does not understand me at all.
It is why I say the words out loud. I need to hear the truth. I need confirmation from my son. “Did Daddy hurt you?” I whisper, the leading question Dr. Robichaud would not ask, would not let me ask.
Nathaniel bursts into tears and hides under his covers. He will not come out, not even when I say I’m sorry.
• • •
Everything in the motel room is the color of wet moss—the frayed rug, the bowl of the sink, the bilious bedspread. Caleb turns on the heat and the radio. He takes off his shoes and sets them neatly beside the door.
This is not a home; this is barely a residence. Caleb wonders about the other people staying at these efficiency cabins here in Saco. Are they all in limbo like him?
He cannot imagine sleeping here one night. And yet he knows he will live here a lifetime, if that is what it takes to help his son. He would give anything, for Nathaniel. Even, apparently, himself.
Caleb sits on the edge of the bed. He picks up the phone, then realizes he has no one to call. But he holds the receiver to his ear for a few moments, until the operator gets on and reminds him that no matter what, on the other end, someone is listening.
• • •
There is nothing for it: Patrick can’t start his day without a chocolate croissant. The other cops rib him about it constantly—Too upscale for doughnuts, are you, Ducharme? He brushes it off, willing to suffer some teasing as long as the police secretary who orders the daily tray of baked goods includes his personal favorite. But that morning, when he walks into the cafeteria to grab his snack and fill his coffee cup, Patrick’s croissant is missing.
“Aw, come on,” he says to the beat cop standing next to him. “Are you guys being assholes? Did you hide it in the ladies’ room again?”
“We didn’t touch it, Lieutenant, swear.”
Sighing, Patrick walks out of the cafeteria to the desk where Mona is checking her e-mail. “Where’s my croissant?”
She shrugs. “I placed the same order as always. Don’t ask me.”
Patrick begins to walk through the police station, scanning the desks of the other detectives and the room where the street officers relax during their breaks. He passes the chief in the hall. “Patrick, you got a second?”
“Not right now.”
“I have a case for you.”
“Can you leave it on my desk?”
The chief smirks. “Wish you were half as single-minded about your police work as you are about your damn doughnuts.”
“Croissants,” Patrick calls to his retreating back. “There’s a difference.”
In the booking room, seated next to the bored desk sergeant, he finds the perp: a kid who looks like he was playing cop in his dad’s uniform. Brown hair, bright eyes, chocolate on his chin. “Who the hell are you?” Patrick demands.
“Officer Orleans.”
The desk sergeant folds his hands over his ample stomach. “And the detective who’s about to rip your head off, here, is Lieutenant Ducharme.”
“Why’s he eating my breakfast, Frank?”
The older cop shrugs. “Because he’s only been here a day—”
“Six hours!” the kid proudly corrects.
Frank rolls his eyes. “He don’t know better.”
“You do.”
“Yeah, but if I told him so I wouldn’t have gotten to see all this excitement.”
The rookie holds out the remaining bite of the croissant, his peace offering. “I, uh, I’m sorry, Lieutenant.”
Patrick shakes his head. He considers going to the fridge and raiding the lunch the kid’s mom has probably packed him. “Don’t let it happen again.”
Hell of a way to start a day; he counts on the combination of caffeine in the chocolate and his coffee to get him jump-started. By ten o’clock, no doubt, he’ll have a monster headache. Patrick stalks back to his desk and plays his voice mail—three messages; the only one he really cares about is Nina’s. “Call me,” it says—that’s all, no name, nothing. He picks up the phone, then notices the file that the chief has left on his desk.
Patrick opens the manila folder, reads the report from BCYF. The telephone receiver falls to the desk, where it lies buzzing long after he has run out of his office.
• • •
“All right,” Patrick says evenly. “I’m going to get right on this. I’ll go and talk to Caleb the minute I leave here.”
It’s about all I can take, the incredible level calm of his voice. I drive my hands through my hair. “For God’s sake, Patrick. Will you just stop being such a . . . such a cop?”
“You want me to tell you that I feel like beating him unconscious for doing this to Nathaniel? That then I’d beat him up all over again for what he’s done to you?”
The fury in his voice takes me by surprise. I tilt my head, playing his anger over in my mind. “Yes,” I answer softly. “I do want you to tell me that.” He rests his hand on the back of my head. It feels like a prayer. “I don’t know what to do.”
Patrick’s fingers cup my skull, separate the strands of my hair. I give myself up to this; imagine that he’s unraveling my thoughts. “That’s why you’ve got me,” he says.
• • •
Nathaniel balks when I tell him where we’re going. But if I stay inside for another minute, I am going to lose my mind.
Light falls through the stained-glass ceiling panels of St. Anne’s, washing Nathaniel and me in a rainbow. At this hour, on a weekday, the church is as quiet as a secret. I walk with great care, trying not to make any more of a sound than is absolutely necessary. Nathaniel drags his feet, scuffing his sneakers along the mosaic floor.
“Stop that,” I whisper, and immediately wish I hadn’t. My words reverberate against the stone arches and the polished pews and come running back to me. Trays of white votives glow; how many of these have been lit for my son?
“I’ll only be a minute,” I tell Nathaniel, settling him in one of the pews with a handful of Matchbox cars. The polished wood makes a perfect racetrack—to prove this, I send a hot rod speeding to the other end. Then I walk toward the confessionals before I change my mind.
The booth is tight and overheated. A grate slides open against my shoulder; although I cannot see him, I can smell the starch Father Szyszynski uses on his clerical shirts.
There is a comfort to confession, if only because it follows rules that are never broken. And no matter how long it’s been, you remember, as if there is a collective Catholic subconscious. You speak, the priest answers. You begin with the littlest sins, stacking them like a tower of alphabet blocks, and the priest gives you a prayer to knock them all down, so that you can start over.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been four months since my last confession.”
If he’s shocked, he does a good job of hiding it.
“I . . . I don’t know why I’m here.” Silence. “I found out something, recently, that is tearing me apart.”
“Go on.”
“My son . . . he’s been hurt.”
“Yes, I know. I’ve been praying for him.”
“I think . . . it seems . . . it’s my husband who did this to him.” On the small folding chair, I am doubled over. Sharp pains move through me, and I welcome them—by now, I had thought myself incapable of feeling anything.
There is such a long silence I wonder if the priest has heard me. Then: “And what is your sin?”
“My . . . what?”
“You can’t confess for your husband.”
Anger bubbles up like tar, burning my throat. “I didn’t intend to.”
“Then what did you want to confess today?”
I have come to simply speak the words aloud to someone whose job is to listen. But instead I say, “I didn’t keep my son safe. I didn’t see it at all.”
“Innocence isn’t a sin.”
“How about ignorance?” I stare at the latticework between us. “How about being naïve
enough to think that I actually knew the man I fell in love with? How about wanting to make him suffer the way Nathaniel’s suffering?”
Father Szyszynski lets this statement stand. “Maybe he is.”
My breath catches. “I love him,” I say thickly. “I love him just as much as I hate him.”
“You need to forgive yourself for not being aware of what was happening. For wanting to strike back.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“Well, then.” A pause. “Can you forgive him?”
I look at the shadow that is the priest’s face. “I am not that godly,” I say, and exit the confessional before he can stop me.
What’s the point; I am already living my penance.
• • •
He doesn’t want to be here.
The church, it sounds the way it does inside his head—a whooshing that’s louder than all the words that aren’t being spoken. Nathaniel looks at the little room his mother has gone into. He pushes a car down the pew. He can hear his heart.
He sets the rest of the Matchbox cars into their parking spots and inches his way out of the pew. With his hands burrowed under his shirt like a small animal, Nathaniel tiptoes down the main aisle of the church.
At the altar he kneels down on the steps to pray. He’d learned a prayer in Sunday school, one he was supposed to do at night that he usually forgot. But he remembers that you can pray for anything. It’s like a birthday candle wish, except it goes straight to God.
He prays that the next time he tries to say something with his hands, everyone will understand. He prays that he will get his daddy back.
Nathaniel notices a marble statue beside him—a woman, holding Baby Jesus on her lap. He forgets her name, but she’s all over the place here—on paintings and wall hangings and more stone sculptures. In every one, there’s a mother with a child.
He wonders if once there was a daddy standing on that pedestal, in that painting, portrayed with the rest of the holy family. He wonders if everyone’s father gets taken away.
• • •
Patrick knocks on the door of the cabin that the manager of Coz-E-Cottages has pointed out. When it swings open, Caleb stands on the other side, red-eyed and unshaven. “Look,” Patrick says right away, “this is incredibly awkward.”