by Jodi Picoult
But Nathaniel doesn’t utter a word.
“Okay,” Caleb murmurs, releasing Nathaniel’s hand into his lap. “It’s okay.” He smiles as best he can, and gets off the bed. “I’m going to be right back. In the meantime, you can start on that hot chocolate, all right?”
In his own bedroom, Caleb picks up the phone. Dials a number from a card in his wallet. Pages Dr. Robichaud, the child psychiatrist. Then he hangs up, balls his hand into a fist, and punches a hole in the wall.
• • •
Nathaniel knows this is all his fault. Peter said it wasn’t, but he was lying, the way grown-ups do in the middle of the night to make you stop thinking about something awful living under the bed. They’d taken the bagel out of the store without letting the machine ring up its numbers; they’d driven to his house without his car seat; even just now, his dad had brought cocoa to the bedroom when no food was ever allowed upstairs. His mother was gone, all the rules were getting broken, and it was because of Nathaniel.
He had seen Peter and said hi, which turned out to be a bad thing. A very, very bad thing.
This is what Nathaniel knows: He talked, and the bad man grabbed his mother’s arm. He talked, and the police came. He talked, and his mother got taken away.
So he will never talk again.
• • •
By Saturday morning, they have fixed the heat. They’ve fixed it so well that it is nearly eighty degrees inside the jail. When I am brought to the conference room to meet Fisher, I’m wearing a camisole and scrub pants, and sweating. Fisher, of course, looks perfectly cool, even in his suit and tie. “The earliest I can even get to a judge for a revocation hearing is Monday,” he says.
“I need to see my son.”
Fisher’s face remains impassive. He is just as angry as I would be, in his shoes—I have just complicated my case irreparably. “Visiting hours are from ten to twelve today.”
“Call Caleb. Please, Fisher. Please, do whatever you have to do to make him bring Nathaniel down here.” I sink into the chair across from him. “He is five years old, and he saw me being taken away by the police. Now he has to see that I’m all right, even in here.”
Fisher promises nothing. “I don’t have to tell you that your bail is going to be revoked. Think about what you want me to say to the judge, Nina, because you don’t have any chances left.”
I wait until he meets my eye. “Will you call home for me?”
“Will you admit that I’m in charge?”
For a long moment, neither of us blinks, but I break first. I stare at my lap until I hear Fisher close the door behind him.
• • •
Adrienne knows I’m anxious as visiting hours come to an end—nearly noon, and still I have not been called to see anyone. She lies on her stomach, painting her nails fluorescent orange. In honor of hunting season, she said. As the correctional officer walks past for his quarter-hour check, I stand up. “Are you sure no one’s come yet?”
He shakes his head, moves on. Adrienne blows on her fingers to dry the polish. “I got extra,” she says, holding up the bottle. “You want me to roll it across?”
“I don’t have any nails. I bite mine.”
“Now, that is a travesty. Some of us just don’t have the sense to make the most of what God gives us.”
I laugh. “You’re one to talk.”
“In my case, honey, when it came to passing out the right stuff, God was having a senior moment.” She sits down on her lower bunk and takes off her tennis shoes. Last night, she did her toenails, tiny American flags. “Well, fuck me,” Adrienne says. “I smudged.”
The clock has not moved. Not even a second, I’d swear it.
“Tell me about your son,” Adrienne says when she sees me looking down the hallway again. “I always wanted to have me one of them.”
“I would have figured you’d want a girl.”
“Honey, us ladies, we’re high maintenance. A boy, you know exactly what you’re getting.”
I try to think of the best way to describe Nathaniel. It is like trying to hold the ocean in a paper cup. How do I explain a boy who eats his food color by color; who wakes me in the middle of the night with a burning need to know why we breathe oxygen instead of water; who took apart a microcassette recorder to find his voice, trapped inside? I know my son so well, I surprise myself—there are too many words to choose from.
“Sometimes when I hold his hand,” I answer slowly, finally, “it’s like it doesn’t fit anymore. I mean, he’s only five, you know? But I can feel what’s coming. Sometimes his palm’s just a little too wide, or his fingers are too strong.” Glancing at Adrienne, I shrug. “Each time I do it, I think this may be the last time I hold his hand. That next time, he may be holding mine.”
She smiles softly at me. “Honey, he ain’t coming today.”
It is 12:46 P.M., and I have to turn away, because Adrienne is right.
• • •
The CO wakes me up in the late afternoon. “Come on,” he mutters, and slides open the door of my cell. I scramble upright, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. He leads me down a hallway to a part of the jail I have not yet visited. A row of small rooms, mini-prisons, are on my left. The guard opens one and guides me inside.
It is no bigger than a broom closet. Inside, a stool faces a Plexiglas window. A telephone receiver is mounted to the wall at its side. And on the other side of the glass, in a twin of a room, sits Caleb.
“Oh!” The word comes on a cry, and I lurch for the telephone, picking it up and holding it to my ear. “Caleb,” I say, knowing he can see my face, read my words. “Please, please, pick up the phone.” I pantomime over and over. But his face is chiseled and hard; his arms crossed tight on his chest. He will not give me this one thing.
Defeated, I sink onto the stool and rest my forehead against the Plexiglas. Caleb bends down to pick something up, and I realize that Nathaniel has been there all along, beneath the counter where I could not see him. He kneels on the stool, eyes wide and wary. He hesitantly touches the glass, as if he needs to know that I am not a trick of the light.
At the beach once, we found a hermit crab. I turned it over so that Nathaniel could see its jointed legs scrambling. Put him on your palm, I said, and he’ll crawl. Nathaniel had held out his hand, but every time I went to set the crab on it, he jerked away. He wanted to touch it, and he was terrified to touch it, in equal proportions.
So I wave. I smile. I fill my little cubicle with the sound of his name.
As I did with Caleb, I pick up the telephone receiver. “You too,” I mouth, and I do it again, so Nathaniel can see how. But he shakes his head, and instead raises his hand to his chin. Mommy, he signs.
The receiver falls out of my hand, a snake that strikes the wall beside it. I do not even need to look at Caleb for verification; just like that, I know.
So with tears running down my face, I hold up my right hand, the I-L-Y combination that means I love you. I catch my breath as Nathaniel raises one small fist, unfurls the fingers like signal flags to match mine. Then, a peace sign, the number two handshape. I love you, too.
By now, Nathaniel is crying. Caleb says something to him that I cannot hear, and he shakes his head. Behind them, the guard opens the door.
Oh, God, I am losing him.
I rap on the glass to get his attention. Push my face up against it, then point to Nathaniel and nod. He does what I’ve asked, turning his cheek so that it touches the transparent wall.
I lean close, kiss the barrier between us, and pretend it isn’t there. Even after Caleb’s carried him from the visiting room, I sit with my temple pressed to the glass, convincing myself I can still feel Nathaniel on the other side.
• • •
It didn’t happen just that once. Two Sundays afterward, when Nathaniel’s family went to Mass, the priest came into the little room where Miss Fiore was reading everyone a story about a guy with a slingshot who took down a giant. “I need a volunteer,” he said, and even
though all the hands went up, he looked right at Nathaniel.
“You know,” he said in the office, “Esme missed you.”
“She did?”
“Oh, absolutely. She’s been saying your name for days now.”
Nathaniel laughed. “She has not.”
“Listen.” He cupped his ear, leaned in to the cat on the couch. “There you go.”
Nathaniel listened, but only heard a faint mew.
“Maybe you have to get closer,” the priest said. “Climb up here.”
For just a moment, Nathaniel hesitated, remembered. His mother had told him about going off alone with strangers. But this wasn’t really a stranger, was it? He sat down in the priest’s lap, and pressed his ear right against the belly of the cat. “That’s a good boy.”
The man shifted his legs, the way Nathaniel’s father sometimes did when he was sitting on his knee and his foot fell asleep. “I could move,” Nathaniel suggested.
“No, no.” The priest’s hand slipped down Nathaniel’s back, over his bottom, to rest in his own lap. “This is fine.”
But then Nathaniel felt his shirt being untucked. Felt the long fingers of the priest, hot and damp, against his spine. Nathaniel did not know how to tell him no. His head was filled with a memory: a fly caught in the car one day when they were driving, which kept slamming itself into the windows in a desperate effort to get out. “Father?” Nathaniel whispered.
“I’m just blessing you,” he replied. “A special helper deserves that. I want God to know that every time He sees you.” His fingers stilled. “You do want that, don’t you?”
A blessing was a good thing, and for God to keep an extra eye on him—well, it was what his mother and father would want, Nathaniel was sure of it. He turned his attention back to the lazy cat, and that was when he heard it—just a puff of breath—Esme, or maybe not Esme, sighing his name.
• • •
The second time I am called out by a correctional officer is Sunday afternoon. He takes me upstairs to the conference rooms, where inmates meet privately with their attorneys. Maybe Fisher has come to see how I am holding up. Maybe he wants to discuss tomorrow’s hearing.
But to my surprise, when the door is unlocked, Patrick is waiting inside. Spread out on the conference table are six containers of take-out Chinese food. “I got everything you like,” he says. “General Tso’s chicken, vegetable lo mein, beef with broccoli, Lake Tung Ting shrimp, and steamed dumplings. Oh, and that crap that tastes like rubber.”
“Bean curd.” I lift my chin a notch, challenging him. “I thought you didn’t want to talk to me.”
“I don’t. I want to eat with you.”
“Are you sure? Think of all the things I could say while your mouth is full, before you have a chance to—”
“Nina.” Patrick’s blue eyes seem faded, weary. “Shut up.”
But even as he scolds me, he holds out his hand. It rests on the table, extended, an offering more tantalizing than anything else before me.
I sit across from him and grab on. Immediately, Patrick squeezes, and that’s my undoing. I lay my cheek on the cold, scarred table, and Patrick strokes my hair. “I rigged your fortune cookie,” he confesses. “It says you’ll be acquitted.”
“What does yours say?”
“That you’ll be acquitted.” Patrick smiles. “I didn’t know which one you’d pick.”
My eyes drift shut as I let down my guard. “It’s okay,” Patrick tells me, and I believe him. I place his palm against my burning face, as if shame is something he might carry in the cup of his hand, fling someplace far away.
• • •
When you call someone on the prison pay phone, they know it. Every thirty seconds a voice gets on the line, informing the person on the other end that this transmission is taking place from the Alfred County Jail. I use the fifty cents Patrick gave me that afternoon, and make the call on my way to the shower. “Listen,” I say, the minute I reach Fisher at his home number. “You wanted me to tell you what to say on Monday morning.”
“Nina?” In the background I hear the laughter of a woman. The sound of glasses, or china, in a sink.
“I need to talk to you.”
“You’ve caught us in the middle of dinner.”
“Well, for God’s sake, Fisher.” I turn my back as a line of men straggles in from the outside courtyard. “Why don’t I just call back then when it’s more convenient for you, because I’m sure I’ll have another opportunity, in, oh, three or four days.”
I hear the distant noise growing more faint; the click of a door. “All right. What is it?”
“Nathaniel isn’t speaking. You need to get me out of here, because he’s falling apart.”
“He isn’t speaking? Again?”
“Caleb brought him yesterday. And . . . he’s signing.”
Fisher considers this. “If we get Caleb down here to testify, and Nathaniel’s psychiatrist—”
“You’ll have to subpoena him.”
“The psychiatrist?”
“Caleb.”
If this surprises him, he doesn’t admit it. “Nina, the fact is, you messed up. I’m going to try to get you out. I still think it’s unlikely. But if you want me to give it a shot, you’re going to have to sit tight for a week.”
“A week?” My voice rises. “Fisher, this is my son we’re talking about. Do you know how much worse Nathaniel might get in a week?”
“I’m counting on it.”
A voice cuts in. This call is being made from the Alfred County Jail. If you wish to continue, please deposit another twenty-five cents.
By the time I tell Fisher to go screw himself, the line has already been disconnected.
• • •
Adrienne and I are given a half hour together outside in the exercise courtyard. We walk the perimeter, and then when we get cold, we stand with our backs to the wind beneath the high brick wall. When the CO goes inside, Adrienne smokes cigarettes that she makes by burning down orange peels she collects from the cafeteria trash, and rolling the ash in onion-skin pages torn from Jane Eyre, a book her Aunt Lu sent for her birthday. She has already ripped through page 298. I told her to ask for Vanity Fair next year.
I sit cross-legged on the dead grass. Adrienne kneels behind me, smoking, her hands in my hair. When she gets out, she wants to be a cosmetologist. Her nail makes a part from my temple to the nape of my neck. “No pigtails,” I instruct.
“Don’t insult me.” She makes another part, parallel to the first, and begins to braid in tight rows. “You’ve got fine hair.”
“Thank you.”
“It wasn’t a compliment, honey. Look at this . . . slips right out of my fingers.”
She pulls and tugs, and several times I have to wince. If only it were that easy to tighten up the tangles inside my head, too. Her glowing cigarette, smoked down to within an inch, sails over my shoulder and lands on the basketball court. “There,” Adrienne says. “Ain’t you the bomb.”
Of course, I can’t see. I touch my hands to the knobs and ridges the braids have made on my scalp, and then, just because I am feeling mean-spirited, begin to unravel all Adrienne’s hard work. She shrugs, then sits down next to me. “Did you always want to be a lawyer?”
“No.” Who does, after all? What kid considers being an attorney a glamorous vocation? “I wanted to be the man at the circus who tames the lions.”
“Oh, don’t I know it. Those sequined costumes were something.”
For me, it hadn’t been about the outfits. I’d loved the way Gunther Gebel-Williams could walk into a cage full of beasts and make them think they were house cats. In this, I realize, my actual profession has not fallen that far off the mark. “How about you?”
“My daddy wanted me to be the center for the Chicago Bulls. Me, I was angling for Vegas showgirl.”
“Ah.” I draw up my knees, wrap my arms around them. “What does your daddy think now?”
“He ain’t doing much thinking, I i
magine, six feet under.”
“I’m sorry.”
Adrienne glances up. “Don’t be.”
But she has retreated somewhere else, and to my surprise, I find I want her back. The game that Peter Eberhardt and I used to play swims into my mind, and I turn to Adrienne. “Best soap opera,” I challenge.
“What?”
“Just play along with me. Give your opinion.”
“The Young and the Restless,” Adrienne replies. “Which, by the way, those fool boys in Minimum don’t even have the good sense to listen to on their TV at one P.M.”
“Worst crayon color?”
“Burnt sienna. What is up with that, anyway? They might as well call it Vomit.” Adrienne grins, a flash of white in her face. “Best jeans?”
“Levi’s 501s. Ugliest CO?”
“Oh, the one who comes on after midnight that needs to bleach her moustache. You ever see the size of her ass? Hello, honey, let me introduce you to Miss Jenny Craig.”
Then we are both laughing, lying back on the cold ground and feeling winter seep into us by osmosis. When we finally catch our breath, there is a hollow in my chest, a sinking feeling that here, of all places, I should not be capable of joy. “Best place to be?” Adrienne asks after a moment.
On the other side of this wall. In my bed, at home. Anywhere with Nathaniel.
“Before,” I answer, because I know she’ll understand.
• • •
In one of Biddeford’s coffee shops, Quentin sits on a stool too small for a gnome. One sip from his mug, and hot chocolate burns the roof of his mouth. “Holy shit,” he mutters, holding a napkin to his mouth, just as Tanya walks in the door in her nurse’s outfit—scrubs, printed with tiny teddy bears.
“Just shut up, Quentin,” she says, sliding onto the stool beside him. “I’m not in the mood to hear you make fun of my uniform.”
“I wasn’t.” He gestures to the mug, then just gives up the battle. “What can I get you?”
He orders Tanya a decaf mochaccino. “You like it, then?” he asks.
“Coffee?”
“Nursing.”
He had met Tanya at the University of Maine when she was a student, too. What’s this, he’d asked at the end of their first date, trailing his fingers over her collarbone. A clavicle, she said. And this? His hand had run down the xylophone of her spine. The coccyx. He’d spread his fingers over the curve of her hip. This is the part of you I like best, he said. Her head had fallen back, her eyes drifting shut as he bared the skin and kissed her there. Ilium, she’d whispered.