by Jodi Picoult
“Amen,” I answer.
When I turn my gaze falls on the front left pew, where a woman in black is bent over at the waist, sobbing so hard she cannot catch her breath. Her iron-gray curls wilt beneath her black cloche hat; her hands are knotted so tightly around the edge of the pew I think she may splinter the wood. The priest who has given me Communion whispers to another clergyman, who takes over as he goes to comfort her. And that is when it hits me:
Father Szyszynski was someone’s son, too.
My chest fills with lead and my legs melt beneath me. I can tell myself that I have gotten retribution for Nathaniel; I can say that I was morally right—but I cannot take away the truth that another mother has lost her child because of me.
Is it right to close one cycle of pain if it only opens up another one?
The church starts to spin, and the flowers are reaching for my ankles. A face as wide as the moon looms in front of me, speaking words that I cannot hear. If I faint, they will know who I am. They will crucify me. I summon all the strength I have left to shove aside the people in my way, to lurch down the aisle, to push open the double doors of St. Anne’s and break free.
• • •
Mason, the golden retriever, has been called Nathaniel’s dog for as long as Nathaniel can remember, although he was part of the family for ten months before Nathaniel was even born. And the strange thing is, if it had been the other way around—if Nathaniel had gotten here first—he would have told his parents that he really wanted a cat. He likes the way you can drape a kitten over your arm, the same way you’d carry a coat if you got too hot. He likes the sound they make against his ear, how it makes his skin hum, too. He likes the way they don’t take baths; he likes the fact that they can fall from a great height, but land on their feet.
He asked for a kitten one Christmas, and although Santa had brought him everything else, the cat didn’t happen. It was Mason, he knew. The dog had a habit of bringing in gifts—the skull of a mouse he’d chewed clean, the body of a thrashed snake found at the end of the drive, a toad caught in the bowl of his mouth. God knows, Nathaniel’s mother said, what he’d do to a kitten.
So that day when he wandered in the basement of the church, the day he’d been looking at the dragon painting in Father Glen’s office, the first thing Nathaniel noticed was the cat. She was black, with three white paws, as if she’d stepped into paint and realized, partway through, that it wasn’t such a good idea. Her tail twitched like a snake charmer’s cobra. Her face was no bigger than Nathaniel’s palm.
“Ah,” the priest said. “You like Esme.” He reached down and scratched between the cat’s ears. “That’s my girl.” Scooping the cat into his arms, he sat down on the couch beneath the painting of the dragon. Nathaniel thought he was very brave. Had it been him, he’d be worried about the monster coming to life, eating him whole. “Would you like to pet her?”
Nathaniel nodded, his throat so full of his good fortune that he couldn’t even speak. He came closer to the couch, to the small ball of fur in the priest’s lap. He placed his hand on the kitten’s back, feeling the heat and the bones and the heart of her. “Hi,” he whispered. “Hi, Esme.”
Her tail tickled Nathaniel under the chin, and he laughed. The priest laughed too, and put his hand on the back of Nathaniel’s neck. It was the same spot where Nathaniel was petting the cat, and for a moment he saw something like the endless mirror in a carnival’s fun house—him touching the cat, and the priest touching him, and maybe even the big invisible hand of God touching the priest. Nathaniel lifted his palm, took a step back.
“She likes you,” the priest said.
“For real?”
“Oh, yes. She doesn’t act this way around most of the children.”
That made Nathaniel feel tall all over. He scratched the cat’s ears again, and he would have sworn she smiled.
“That’s it,” the priest encouraged. “Don’t stop.”
• • •
Quentin Brown sits at Nina’s desk in the district attorney’s office, wondering what’s missing. For lack of space, he has been given her office as a base of operations, and the irony has not been lost on him that he will be planning the conviction of this woman from the very seat in which she once sat. What he has learned, from observation, is that Nina Frost is a neat-freak—her paper clips, for the love of God, are sorted by size in small dishes. Her files are alphabetized. There is not a clue to be found—no crumpled Post-it with the name of a gun dealer; not even a doodle of Father Szyszynski’s face on the blotter. This could be anyone’s workspace, Quentin thinks, and therein lies the problem.
What kind of woman doesn’t keep a picture of her kid or her husband on her desk?
He mulls over what this might or might not mean for a moment, then takes out his wallet. From the folds he pulls a worn baby photo of Gideon. They’d had it taken at Sears. To get that smile on the boy’s face, Quentin had pretended to hit Tanya on the head with a Nerf football, and he’d inadvertently knocked out her contact lens. He sets the photograph square, now, in the corner of Nina Frost’s blotter, as the door opens.
Two Biddeford detectives enter—Evan Chao and Patrick Ducharme, if Quentin recalls correctly. “Come in,” he says, gesturing to the seats across from him. “Take a seat.”
They form a solid block, their shoulders nearly touching. Quentin lifts a remote control and turns on a television/VCR on the shelf behind them. He has already watched the tape a thousand times himself, and imagines that the two detectives have seen it as well. Hell, most of New England has seen it by now; it was run on all the CBS news affiliates. Chao and Ducharme turn, mesmerized by the sight of Nina Frost on the small screen, walking with a preternatural grace toward the railing of the gallery and lifting a handgun. In this version, the unedited one, you can see the right side of Glen Szyszynski’s head exploding.
“Jesus,” Chao murmurs.
Quentin lets the tape run. This time, he isn’t watching it—he’s watching the reactions of the detectives. He doesn’t know Chao or Ducharme from a hole in the wall, but he can tell you this—they’ve worked with Nina Frost for seven years; they’ve worked with Quentin for twenty-four hours. As the camera tilts wildly, coming to rest on the scuffle between Nina and the bailiffs, Chao looks into his lap. Ducharme stares resolutely at the screen, but there is no emotion on his face.
With one click, Quentin shuts off the TV. “I’ve read the witness statements, all 124 of them. And, naturally, it doesn’t hurt to have the entire fiasco in living color.” He leans forward, his elbows on Nina’s desk. “The evidence is solid here. The only question is whether she is or isn’t guilty by reason of insanity. She’ll either run with that, or extreme anger.” Turning to Chao, he asks, “Did you go to the autopsy?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“And?”
“They already released the body to the funeral home, but they won’t give me a report until the victim’s medical records arrive.”
Quentin rolls his eyes. “Like there’s a question here about the cause of death?”
“It’s not that,” Ducharme interrupts. “They like to have all the medical records attached. It’s the office protocol.”
“Well, tell them to hurry up,” Quentin says. “I don’t care if Szyszynski had full-blown AIDS . . . that isn’t what he died of.” He opens a file on his desk and waves a paper at Patrick Ducharme. “What the hell was this?”
He lets the detective read his own report about the interrogation of Caleb Frost, under suspicion for molesting his own son. “The boy was mute,” Patrick explains. “He was taught basic sign language, and when we pressed him to ID the perp, he kept making the sign for father.” Patrick hands back the paper. “We went to Caleb Frost first.”
“What did she do?” Quentin asks. There is no need to spell out to whom he’s referring.
Patrick rubs a hand over his face, muttering into his hand.
“I didn’t quite catch that, Detective,” Quentin says.
“Here?”
“In Biddeford.”
“I want a copy of that.”
Patrick shrugs. “It was vacated.”
“I don’t care. Nina Frost shot the man she was convinced molested her son. But just four days earlier, she was convinced it was a different man. Her lawyer’s going to tell a jury that she killed the priest because he was the one who hurt her child . . . but how sure was she?”
“There was semen,” Patrick says. “On her son’s underwear.”
“Yes.” Quentin rifles through some more pages. “Where’s the DNA on that?”
“At the lab. It should be back this week.”
Quentin’s head comes up slowly. “She didn’t even see the DNA results on the underwear before she shot the guy?”
A muscle jumps along Patrick’s jaw. “Nathaniel told me. Her son. He made a verbal ID.”
“My five-year-old nephew tells me the tooth fairy’s the one who brought him a buck, but that doesn’t mean I believe him, Lieutenant.”
Before he has even finished his sentence, Patrick is out of his chair, leaning across the desk toward Quentin. “You don’t know Nathaniel Frost,” he bites out. “And you have no right to question my professional judgment.”
Quentin stands, towering over the detective. “I have every right. Because reading your file on the investigation, it sure looks to me like you fucked up simply because you were giving a DA who jumped to conclusions special treatment. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you do that again while we prosecute her.”
“She didn’t jump to conclusions,” Patrick argues. “She knew exactly what she was doing. Christ, if it were my kid, I would have done the same thing.”
“Both of you listen to me. Nina Frost is a murder suspect. She made the choice to commit a criminal act. She killed a man in cold blood in front of a courtroom of people. Your job is to uphold laws, and no one—no one—gets to bend those to their own advantage, not even a district attorney.” Quentin turns to the first policeman. “Is that clear, Detective Chao?”
Chao nods tightly.
“Detective Ducharme?”
Patrick meets his eye, sinks into his chair. It is not until long after the detectives have left the office that Quentin realizes Ducharme never actually answered.
• • •
Getting ready for winter, in Caleb’s opinion, is only wishful thinking. The best preparation in the world isn’t going to keep a storm from catching you unaware. The thing about nor’easters is that you don’t always see them coming. They head out to sea, then turn around and batter Maine hard. There have been times in recent years that Caleb has opened the front door to find a chest-high drift of snow; has dug his way free with a shovel kept in the front closet to find a world that looks nothing like it did the night before.
Today, he is readying the house. That means hiding Nathaniel’s bike in the garage, and unearthing the Flexible Flyer and the cross-country skis instead. Caleb has covered the shrubs in the front of the house with triangular wooden horses, little hats to keep their fragile branches from the ice and snow that slide off the roof.
All that is left, now, is storing enough chopped wood to last through the winter. He’s brought in three loads now, stacking them in crosshatches in the basement. Slivers of oak jab his thick gloves as he moves in rhythm, taking a pair of split logs from the pile dumped down the bulkhead and laying them neatly in place. Caleb feels a wistfulness press in on him, as if each growing inch of the woodpile is taking away something summerish—a bright flock of goldfinches, a raging stream, the steam of loam overturned by a tiller. All winter long, when he burns these stacks, Caleb imagines it like a puzzle. With each log he tosses on a fire, he is able to remember the song of a cricket, or the arc of stars in the July sky. And so on, until the basement is empty again, and springtime has flung itself, jubilant, over his property.
“Do you think we’ll make it through the winter?”
At Nina’s voice, Caleb startles. She has come down the basement stairs and stands at the bottom with her arms crossed, surveying the stacks of wood. “Doesn’t seem like much,” she adds.
“I’ve got plenty.” Caleb places two more logs. “I just haven’t brought it all in yet.”
He is aware of Nina’s eyes on him as he turns and bends, lifts a large burl into his arms, and deposits it at the top of a tall stack. “So.”
“Yes,” she answers.
“How was the lawyer’s?”
She shrugs. “He’s a defense attorney.”
Caleb assumes this is meant as an insult. As always in legal matters, he doesn’t know what to say in response. The basement is only half full, but Caleb is suddenly aware of how big he is, and how close he is to Nina, and how the room does not seem able to hold both of them. “Are you going back out again? Because I need to go to the hardware store to get that tarp.”
He doesn’t need a tarp; he has four of them stored in the garage. He does not even know why those words have flown from his mouth, like birds desperate to escape through a chimney flue. And yet, he keeps speaking: “Can you watch Nathaniel?”
Nina goes still in front of his eyes. “Of course I can watch Nathaniel. Or do you think I’m too unstable to take care of him?”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“You did, Caleb. You may not want to admit it, but you did.” There are tears in her eyes. But because he cannot think of the words that might take them away, Caleb simply nods and walks past her, their shoulders brushing as he makes his way up the stairs.
He doesn’t drive to the hardware store, naturally. Instead he finds himself meandering across the county on back roads, pulling into Tequila Mockingbird, the little bar that Nina talks about from time to time. He knows she meets Patrick there for lunch every week; he even knows that the ponytailed bartender is named Stuyvesant. But Caleb has never set foot in the place, and when he walks through the door into the nearly empty afternoon room, he feels like a secret is swelling beneath his ribs—he knows so much more about this place than it knows about him.
“Afternoon,” Stuyvesant says, as Caleb hovers at the bar. Which seat does Nina take? He stares at each of them, lined up like teeth, trying to divine the one. “What can I get you?”
Caleb drinks beer. He’s never been much for hard liquor. But he asks for a shot of Talisker, a bottle he can read across the bar whose name sounds just as soothing on the tongue as, he imagines, the whiskey it describes. Stuyvesant sets it down in front of him with a bowl of peanuts. There is a businessman sitting three stools away, and a woman trying not to cry as she writes a letter at a booth. Caleb lifts the glass to the bartender. “Sláinte,” he says, a toast he once heard in a movie.
“You Irish?” Stuyvesant asks, running a cloth around the polished hood of the bar.
“My father was.” In fact, Caleb’s parents had both been born in America, and his ancestry was Swedish and British.
“No kidding.” This from the businessman, glancing over. “My sister lives in County Cork. Gorgeous place.” He laughs. “Why on earth did you come over here?”
Caleb takes a sip of his whiskey. “Didn’t have much choice,” he lies. “I was two years old.”
“You live in Sanford?”
“No. Here on business. Sales.”
“Aren’t we all?” The man lifts his beer. “God bless the corporate expense account, right?” He signals to Stuyvesant. “Another round for us,” he says, and then to Caleb: “My treat. Or rather, my company’s.”
They talk about the upcoming Bruins season, and the way it feels like snow already. They debate the merits of the Midwest, where the businessman lives, versus New England. Caleb doesn’t know why he is not telling the businessman the truth—but prevarication comes so easily, and the knowledge that this man will buy anything he says right now is oddly liberating. So Caleb pretends he’s from Rochester, New Hampshire, a place he has never actually been
. He fabricates a company name, a product line of construction equipment, and a history of distinguished achievement. He lets the lies tumble from his lips, gathers them like marker chips at a casino, almost giddy to see how many he can stack before they come crashing down.
The man glances at his watch and swears. “Gotta call home. If I’m late, my wife assumes I’ve wrapped my rental car around a tree. You know?”
“Never been married,” Caleb shrugs, and drinks the Talisker through the sieve of his teeth, like baleen.
“Smart move.” The businessman hops off the stool, headed toward the rear of the bar, a pay phone from which Nina has called Caleb once or twice when her own cell phone’s battery died. As he passes, he holds out his hand. “Name’s Mike Johanssen, by the way.”
Caleb shakes. “Glen,” he answers. “Glen Szyszynski.”
He remembers too late that he is supposed to be Irish, not Polish. That Stuyvesant, who lives here, will surely pick up on the name. But neither of these things matters. By the time the businessman returns and Stuyvesant thinks twice, Caleb has left the bar, more comfortable wearing another man’s unlikely identity than he feels these days in his own.
• • •
The state psychiatrist is so young that I have a profound urge to reach across the desk separating us and smooth his cowlick. But if I did that, Dr. Storrow would probably die of fright, certain I mean to strangle him with the strap of my purse. It is why he chose to meet me at the court in Alfred, and I can’t say I blame him. All of this man’s clients are either insane or homicidal, and the safest place to conduct his interview—in lieu of jail—is a public venue with plenty of bailiffs milling around.
I have dressed with great deliberation, not in my usual conservative suit, but in khaki pants and a cotton turtleneck and loafers. When Dr. Storrow looks at me, I don’t want him to be thinking lawyer. I want him to remember his own mother, standing on the sidelines of his soccer game, cheering him to victory.