by Jodi Picoult
To occupy myself, sometimes I cook. I have made penne alla rigata, coq au vin, potstickers. I choose dishes from foreign places, anywhere but here. Today, though, I am cleaning the house. I have already emptied the coat closet and the kitchen pantry, restocked their items in order of frequency of use. Up in the bedroom, I’ve tossed out shoes I forgot I ever bought, and have aligned my suits in a rainbow, from palest pink to deepest plum to chocolate.
I am just weeding through Caleb’s dresser when he comes in, stripping off a filthy shirt. “Do you know,” I say, “that in the hall closet is a brand-new pair of cleats fives sizes bigger than Nathaniel’s foot?”
“Got them at a garage sale. Nathaniel’ll grow into them.”
After all this, doesn’t he understand that the future doesn’t necessarily follow in a straight, unbroken line?
“What are you doing?”
“Your drawers.”
“I like my drawers.” Caleb takes a torn shirt I’ve put aside and stuffs it back in all wrinkled. “Why don’t you take a nap? Read, or something?”
“That would be a waste of time.” I find three socks, all without mates.
“Why is just taking time a waste of it?” Caleb asks, shrugging into another shirt. He grabs the socks I’ve segregated and puts them into his underwear drawer again.
“Caleb. You’re ruining it.”
“How? It was fine to start with!” He jams his shirt into the waist of his jeans, tightens his belt again. “I like my socks the way they are,” Caleb says firmly. For a moment he looks as if he is going to add to that, but then shakes his head and runs down the stairs. Shortly afterward, I see him through the window, walking in the bright, cold sun.
I open the drawer and remove the orphan socks. Then the torn shirt. It will take him weeks to notice the changes, and one day he will thank me.
• • •
“Oh, my God,” I cry, glancing out the window at the unfamiliar car that pulls up to the curb. A woman gets out—pixie-small, with a dark cap of hair and her arms wrapped tight against the cold.
“What?” Caleb runs into the room at my exclamation. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing!” I throw open the door and smile widely at Marcella. “I can’t believe you’re here!”
“Surprise,” she says, and hugs me. “How are you doing?” She tries not to look, but I see it—the way her eyes dart down to try and find my electronic bracelet.
“I’m . . . well, I’m great right now. I certainly never expected you to bring me my report in person.”
Marcella shrugs. “I figured you might enjoy the company. And I hadn’t been back home for a while. I missed it.”
“Liar,” I laugh, pulling her into the house, where Caleb and Nathaniel are watching with curiosity. “This is Marcella Wentworth. She used to work at the state lab, before she bailed on us to join the private sector.”
I’m positively beaming. It’s not that Marcella and I are so very close; it’s just that these days, I don’t get to see that many people. Patrick comes, from time to time. And there’s my family, of course. But most of my friends are colleagues, and after the revocation hearing, they’re keeping their distance.
“You up here on business or pleasure?” Caleb asks.
Marcella glances at me, unsure of what she should say.
“I asked Marcella to take a look at the DNA test.”
Caleb’s smile fades just the slightest bit, so that only if you know him as well as I do would you even catch the dimming. “You know what? Why don’t I take Nathaniel out, so that you two can catch up?”
After they leave, I lead Marcella into the kitchen. We talk about the temperature in Virginia at this time of year, and when we had our first frost. I make us iced tea. Then, when I can stand it no longer, I sit down across from her. “It’s good news, isn’t it? The DNA, it’s a match?”
“Nina, did you notice anything when you read the medical file?”
“I didn’t bother, actually.”
Marcella draws a circle on the table with her finger. “Father Szyszynski had chronic myeloid leukemia.”
“Good,” I say flatly. “I hope he was suffering. I hope he puked his insides out every time he got chemotherapy.”
“He wasn’t getting chemo. He had a bone marrow transplant about seven years ago. His leukemia was in remission. For all intents and purposes, he was cured.”
I stiffen a little. “Is this your way of telling me I ought to feel guilty for killing a man who was a cancer survivor?”
“No. It’s . . . well, there’s something about the treatment of leukemia that factors into DNA analysis. Basically, to cure it, you need to get new blood. And the way that’s done is via bone marrow transplant, since bone marrow is what makes blood. After a few months, your old bone marrow has been replaced completely by the donor’s bone marrow. Your old blood is gone, and the leukemia with it.” Marcella looks up at me. “You follow?”
“So far.”
“Your body can use this new blood, because it’s healthy. But it’s not your blood, and at the DNA level, it doesn’t look like your blood used to. Your skin cells, your saliva, your semen—the DNA in those will be what you were born with, but the DNA in your new blood comes from your donor.” Marcella puts her hand on top of mine. “Nina, the lab results were accurate. The DNA in Father Szyszynski’s blood sample matched the semen in your son’s underwear. But the DNA in Father Szyszynski’s blood isn’t really his.”
“No,” I say. “No, this isn’t the way it works. I was just explaining it the other day to Caleb. You can get DNA from any cell in your body. That’s why you can use a blood sample to match a semen sample.”
“Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, yes. But this is a very, very specific exception.” She shakes her head. “I’m sorry, Nina.”
My head swings up. “You mean . . . he’s still alive?”
She doesn’t have to answer.
I have killed the wrong man.
• • •
After Marcella leaves, I pace like a lion in a cage of my own making. My hands are shaking; I can’t seem to get warm. What have I done? I killed a man who was innocent. A priest. A person who came to comfort me when my world cracked apart; who loved children, Nathaniel included. I killed a man who fought cancer and won, who deserved a long life. I committed murder and I can no longer even justify my actions to myself.
I have always believed there is a special place in Hell for the worst ones—the serial killers, the rapists who target kids, the sociopaths who would just as soon lie as cut your throat for the ten dollars in your wallet. And even when I have not secured convictions for them, I tell myself that eventually, they will get what’s coming to them.
So will I.
And the reason I know this is because even though I cannot find the strength to stand up; even though I want to scratch at myself until this part of me has been cut away in ribbons, there is another part of me that is thinking: He is still out there.
I pick up the phone to call Fisher. But then I hang it up. He needs to hear this; he could very well find out by himself. But I don’t know how it will play in my trial, yet. It could make the prosecution more sympathetic, since their victim is a true victim. Then again, an insanity defense is an insanity defense. It doesn’t matter if I killed Father Szyszynski or the judge or every spectator in that courtroom—if I were insane at the time, I still wouldn’t be guilty.
In fact, this might make me look crazier.
I sit down at the kitchen table and bury my face in my hands. The doorbell rings and suddenly Patrick is in the kitchen, too big for it, frantic from the message I’ve left on his beeper. “What?” he demands, absorbing in a single glance my position, and the quiet of the household. “Did something happen to Nathaniel?”
It is such a loaded question, that I can’t help it—I start to laugh. I laugh until my stomach cramps, until I cannot catch my breath, until tears stream from my eyes and I realize I am s
obbing. Patrick’s hands are on my shoulders, my forearms, my waist, as if the thing that has broken inside me might be as simple as a bone. I wipe my nose on the back of my sleeve and force myself to meet his gaze. “Patrick,” I whisper, “I screwed up. Father Szyszynski . . . he didn’t . . . he wasn’t—”
He calms me down and makes me tell him everything. When I finish, he stares at me for a full thirty seconds before he speaks. “You’re kidding,” Patrick says. “You shot the wrong guy?”
He doesn’t wait for an answer, just gets up and starts to pace. “Nina, wait a second. Things get screwed up in labs; it’s happened before.”
I grab onto this lifeline. “Maybe that’s it. Some medical mistake.”
“But we had an ID before we ever had the semen evidence.” Patrick shakes his head. “Why would Nathaniel have said his name?”
Time can stop, I know that now. It is possible to feel one’s heart cease beating, to sense the blood hover in one’s veins. And to have the awful, overwhelming sense that one is trapped in this moment, and there is just no way out of it. “Tell me again.” My words spill like stones. “Tell me what he told you.”
Patrick turns to me. “Father Glen,” he replies. “Right?”
• • •
Nathaniel remembers feeling dirty, so dirty that he thought he could take a thousand showers and still need to clean himself again. And the thing of it was, the dirty part of him was under his skin; he would have to rub himself raw before it was gone.
It burned down there, and even Esme wouldn’t come near him. She purred and then hopped onto the big wooden desk, staring. This is your fault, she was saying. Nathaniel tried to get his pants, but his hands were like clubs, unable to pick up anything. His underwear, when he finally managed to grab it, was all wet, which made no sense because Nathaniel hadn’t had an accident, he just knew it. But the priest had been looking at his underpants, holding them. He’d liked the baseball mitts.
Nathaniel didn’t want to wear them again, ever.
“We can fix that,” the priest said, in a voice soft as a pillow, and he disappeared for a moment. Nathaniel counted to thirty-five, and then did it again, because that was as high as he could go. He wanted to leave. He wanted to hide under the desk or in the file cabinet. But he needed underpants. He couldn’t get dressed without them, they came first. That was what his mom said when he forgot sometimes, and she made him go upstairs to put them on.
The priest came back with a baby pair, not like his dad’s, which looked like shorts. He’d gotten these, Nathaniel was sure, from the big box that held all the greasy coats and smelly sneakers people had left behind in the church. How could you leave without your sneakers, and never notice? Nathaniel always had wanted to know. For that matter, how could you forget your underpants?
These were clean and had Spiderman on them. They were too tight, but Nathaniel didn’t care. “Let me take the other pair,” the priest said. “I’ll wash them and give them back.”
Nathaniel shook his head. He pulled on his sweatpants and tucked the boxers into the kangaroo part of his sweatshirt, turning the icky side so that he didn’t have to touch it. He felt the priest pet his hair and he went perfectly still, like granite, with the same thick, straight feelings inside.
“Do you need me to walk you back?”
Nathaniel didn’t answer. He waited until the priest had picked up Esme and left; then he walked down the hall to the boiler room. It was creepy inside—no light switch, and cobwebs, and once even the skeleton of a mouse that had died. No one ever went in there, which is why Nathaniel did, and stuffed the bad underwear way behind the big machine that hummed and belched heat.
When Nathaniel went back to his class, Father Glen was still reading the Bible story. Nathaniel sat down, tried to listen. He paid careful attention, even when he felt someone’s eyes on him. When he looked up, the other priest was standing in the hallway, holding Esme and smiling. With his free hand he raised a finger to his lips. Shh. Don’t tell.
That was the moment Nathaniel lost all his words.
• • •
The day my son stopped speaking, we had gone to church. Afterward, there was a fellowship coffee—what Caleb liked to call Bible Bribery, a promise of doughnuts in return for your presence at Mass. Nathaniel moved around me as if I were a maypole, turning this way and that as he waited for Father Szyszynski to call the children together to read.
This coffee was a celebration, of sorts—two priests who had come to study at St. Anne’s for some sort of Catholic edification were going back to their own congregations. A banner blew from the base of the scarred table, wishing them well. Since we were not regular churchgoers, I had not really noticed the priests doing whatever it was they were supposed to be doing. Once or twice I’d seen one from behind and made the assumption it was Father Szyszynski, only to have the man turn around and prove me wrong.
My son was angry because they had run out of powdered sugar doughnuts. “Nathaniel,” I said, “stop pulling on me.”
I’d tugged him off my waist, smiling apologetically at the couple that Caleb was speaking to; acquaintances we had not seen in months. They had no children, although they were our ages, and I imagine that Caleb liked talking to them for the same reason I did—there was that amazing What if permeating the conversation, as if Todd and Margaret were a funhouse mirror in which Caleb and I could see who else we might have become, had I never conceived. Todd was talking about their upcoming trip to Greece; how they were chartering a boat to take them from island to island.
Nathaniel, for reasons I could not fathom, sank his teeth into my hand.
I jumped, more shocked than hurt, and grabbed Nathaniel by the wrist. I was caught in that awful limbo of public discipline—a moment when a child has done something truly punishable but escapes without penalty because it isn’t politically correct to give him the quick smack on his behind that he deserves. “Don’t you ever do that again,” I said through my teeth, trying for a smile. “Do you hear me?”
Then I noticed all the other kids hurrying down the stairs after Father Szyszynski, a Pied Piper. “Go,” I urged. “You don’t want to miss the story.”
Nathaniel buried his face underneath my sweater, his head swelling my belly again, a mock pregnancy. “Come on. All your friends are going.”
I had to peel his arms from around me, push him in the right direction. Twice he looked back, and twice I had to nod, encouraging him to get a move on. “I’m sorry,” I said to Margaret, smiling. “You were talking about Corsica?”
Until now, I did not remember that one of the other priests, the taller one who carried a cat as if it were part of his clerical attire, hurried down the steps after the children. That he caught up to Nathaniel and put his hand on his shoulder with the comfort of someone who had done it before.
Nathaniel said his name.
A memory bursts and stings my eyes: What’s the opposite of left?
White.
What’s the opposite of white?
Bwack.
I remember the priest at Father Szyszynski’s funeral who had stared through my veil as he handed me the Host, as if my features were familiar. And I remember the sentences printed carefully on a banner beneath the coffee table on that last day, before Nathaniel stopped speaking. PEACE BE WITH YOU, FATHER O’TOOLE. PEACE BE WITH YOU, FATHER GWYNNE.
Tell me what he told you, I’d asked Patrick.
Father Glen.
Maybe that is what Patrick heard. But that isn’t how Nathaniel would have said it.
• • •
“He wasn’t saying Father Glen,” Nina murmurs to Patrick. “He was saying Father Gwynne.”
“Yeah, but you know how Nathaniel talks. His L’s always come out wrong.”
“Not this time,” Nina sighs. “This time he was saying it right. Gwen. Gwynne. They’re so close.”
“Who the hell is Gwynne?”
Nina rises, her hands splayed through her hair. “He’s the one, Patrick. He
’s the one who hurt Nathaniel and he’s still, he could still be doing this to a hundred other boys, and—” She wilts, stumbling against the wall. Patrick steadies her with one hand, and he is startled to feel her shaking so hard. His first instinct is to reach for her. His second, smarter response is to let her take a step away.
She slides down the side of the refrigerator until she is sitting on the floor. “He’s the bone marrow donor. He has to be.”
“Does Fisher know about this yet?” She shakes her head. “Caleb?”
In that moment, he thinks of a story he read long ago in school, about the start of the Trojan War. Paris was given a choice to be the richest man in the world, the smartest man in the world, or the chance to love another man’s wife. Patrick, fool that he is, would make the same mistake. For with her hair in knots, her eyes red and swollen, her sorrow cracked open in her lap, Nina is every bit as beautiful to him now as Helen was back then.
She lifts her face to his. “Patrick . . . what am I going to do?”
It shocks him into a response. “You,” Patrick says clearly, “are not going to do anything. You are going to sit in this house because you’re on trial for a man’s murder.” When she opens her mouth to argue, Patrick holds up his hand. “You’ve already been locked up once, and look what happened to Nathaniel. What do you think’s going to happen to him if you walk out that door for more vigilante justice, Nina? The only way you can keep him safe is to stay with him. Let me . . .” He hesitates, knowing that on the edge of this cliff, the only way out is to retreat, or to jump. “Let me take care of it.”
She knows exactly what he has just vowed. It means going against his department, going against his own code of ethics. It means turning his back on the system, like Nina has. And it means facing the consequences. Like Nina. He sees the wonder in her face, and the spark that lets him know how tempted she is to take him up on his offer. “And risk losing your job? Going to jail?” she says. “I can’t let you do something that stupid.”
What makes you think I haven’t already? Patrick doesn’t say the words aloud, but he doesn’t have to. He crouches down and puts his hand on Nina’s knee. Her hand comes up to cover his. And he sees it in her eyes: She knows how he feels about her, she has always known. But this is the first time she has come close to admitting it.