by Jodi Picoult
"Well, of course he--" I begin, and then I stop. The bedwetting, the rushed breakfast, the black mood--there is much I remember about Nathaniel that morning, but the only voice I hear in my mind is my own.
I would know my son's voice anywhere. Pitched and bubbled; I used to wish I could bottle it, like the Sea Witch who stole from the Little Mermaid. His mistakes--hossipal and pisghetti and apple spider--were speed bumps that might keep him from growing up too soon; correct them and he'd reach that destination long before I was ready. As it is, things are already changing too quickly. Nathaniel no longer mixes up his pronouns; he has mastered dipthongs--although I sorely miss hearing him say brudder like a Bowery cop. Just about the only hiccup in speech I can still lay claim to is Nathaniel's absolute inability to pronounce the letters L and R.
In my memory, we are sitting at the kitchen table. Pancakes--shaped like ghosts, with chocolate chip eyes--are stacked high in front of us, along with bacon and orange juice. A big breakfast is the way we bribe Nathaniel on the Sundays that Caleb and I feel guilty enough to go to Mass. The sun hits the lip of my glass and a rainbow spills onto my plate. "What's the opposite of left," I ask.
Without missing a beat, Nathaniel says, "White."
Caleb flips a pancake. As a kid, he lisped. Listening to Nathaniel brings abject pain, and the belief that his son will be teased mercilessly, too. He thinks we should correct Nathaniel, and asked Miss Lydia if Nathaniel's pronunciations could be fixed by a speech pathologist. He thinks a child going into kindergarten next year should have the eloquence of Laurence Olivier. "Then what's the opposite of white?" Caleb asks.
"Bwack."
"Rrrright," Caleb stresses. "Try it. Rrrrright."
"Wwwwhite."
"Just leave it, Caleb," I say.
But he can't. "Nathaniel," he presses, "the opposite of left is right. And the opposite of right is ...?"
Nathaniel thinks about this for a moment. "Ewase," he answers.
"God help him," Caleb mutters, turning back to the stove.
Me, I just wink at Nathaniel. "Maybe He will," I say.
*
In the parking lot of the nursery school, I kneel down so that Nathaniel and I are face-to-face. "Honey, tell me what's wrong."
Nathaniel's collar is twisted; his hands are stained red with finger-paint. He stares at me with wide, dark eyes and doesn't say a thing.
All the words he isn't speaking rise in my throat, thick as bile. "Honey," I repeat. "Nathaniel?"
We just think he needs to be at home, Miss Lydia had said. Maybe you can spend this afternoon with him. "Is that what you need?" I ask out loud, my hands sliding from his shoulders to the soft moon of his face. "Some quality time?" Smiling hard, I fold him into a hug. He is heavy and warm and fits into my arms seamlessly, although at several other points in Nathaniel's life--his infancy, his toddlerhood--I have been certain that we matched equally as well.
"Does your throat hurt?" Shake.
"Does anything hurt?" Another shake.
"Did something upset you at school? Did someone say something that hurt your feelings? Can you tell me what happened?"
Three questions, too many for him to process, much less answer. But that doesn't keep me from hoping that Nathaniel is going to respond.
Can tonsils become so swollen they impede speech? Can strep come on like lightning? Doesn't meningitis affect the neck first?
Nathaniel parts his lips--here, he's going to tell me now--but his mouth is a hollow, silent cavern.
"That's okay," I say, although it isn't, not by a long shot.
Caleb arrives at the pediatrician's office while we are waiting to be seen. Nathaniel sits near the Brio train set, pushing it in circles. I'm glaring daggers at the receptionist, who doesn't seem to understand that this is an emergency, that my son is not acting like my son, that this isn't a goddamned common cold, and that we should have been seen a half hour ago.
Caleb immediately goes to Nathaniel, curling his big body into a play space meant for children. "Hey, Buddy. You're not feeling so great, huh?"
Nathaniel shrugs, but doesn't speak. He hasn't spoken now in God knows how many hours?
"Does something hurt, Nathaniel?" Caleb says, and that's about all I can take.
"Don't you think I've already asked him?" I explode.
"I don't know, Nina. I haven't been here."
"Well, he isn't talking, Caleb. He isn't responding to me." The full implications of this--the sad truth that my son's illness isn't chicken pox or bronchitis or any of a thousand other things I could understand--make it hard to stand upright. It's the strange things, like this, that always turn out to be awful: a wart that won't go away, which metastasizes into cancer; a dull headache that turns out to be a brain tumor. "I'm not even sure if he's hearing what I say to him, now. For all I know it's some ... some virus that's attacking his vocal cords."
"Virus." There is a pause. "He was feeling sick yesterday and you shoved him off to school this morning, regardless--"
"This is my fault?"
Caleb just looks at me, hard. "You've been awfully busy lately, that's all I'm saying."
"So I'm supposed to apologize for the fact that my job isn't something I can do on my own clock, like yours? Well, excuse me. I'll ask if the victims would be kind enough to get raped and beaten at a more convenient time."
"No, you'll just hope that your own son has the good sense to get sick when you're not scheduled in court."
It takes me a moment to respond, I'm that angry. "That is so--"
"It's true, Nina. How can everyone else's kid be a priority over your own?"
"Nathaniel?"
The soft voice of the pediatric nurse practitioner lands like an ax between us. She has a look on her face I cannot quite read, and I'm not sure if she's going to ask about Nathaniel's silence, or his parents' lack of it.
It feels like he's swallowed stones, like his neck is full of pebbles that shift and grind every time he tries to make a sound. Nathaniel lies on the examination table while Dr. Ortiz gently rubs jelly under his chin, then rolls over his throat a fat wand that tickles. On the computer screen she's wheeled into the room, salt and pepper blotches rise to the surface, pictures that look nothing like him at all.
When he crooks his pinky finger, he can reach a crack in the leather on the table. Inside it's foam, a cloud that can be torn apart.
"Nathaniel," Dr. Ortiz says, "can you try to speak for me?"
His mother and father are looking at him so hard. It reminds him of one time at the zoo, when Nathaniel had stood in front of a reptile cage for twenty whole minutes thinking that if he waited long enough, the snake would come out of its hiding place. At that moment he'd wanted to see the rattlesnake more than he'd ever wanted anything, but it had stayed hidden. Nathaniel sometimes wonders if it was even in there at all.
Now, he purses his mouth. He feels the back of his throat open like a rose. The sound rises from his belly, tumbling over the stones that choke him. Nothing makes its way to his lips.
Dr. Ortiz leans closer. "You can do it, Nathaniel," she urges. "Just try."
But he is trying. He is trying so hard it's splitting him in two. There is a word caught like driftwood behind his tongue, and he wants so badly to say it to his parents: Stop.
"There's nothing extraordinary on the ultrasound," Dr. Ortiz says. "No polyps or swelling of the vocal cords, nothing physical that might be keeping Nathaniel from speaking." She looks at us with her clear gray eyes. "Has Nathaniel had any other medical problems lately?"
Caleb looks at me, and I turn away. So I gave Nathaniel Tylenol, so I'd prayed for him to be all right because I had such a busy morning coming. So what? Ask nine out of ten mothers; they all would have done what I did ... and that last one would have thought hard about it before discounting the idea.
"He came home from church yesterday with a stomachache," Caleb says. "And he's still having accidents at night."
But that's not a medical problem. That's
about monsters hiding under the bed, and bogeymen peering in the windows. It has nothing to do with a sudden loss of speech. In the corner, where he is playing with blocks, I watch Nathaniel blush--and suddenly I'm angry with Caleb for even bringing it up.
Dr. Ortiz takes off her glasses and rubs them on her shirt. "Sometimes what looks like a physical illness isn't," she says slowly. "Sometimes these things can be about getting attention."
She doesn't know my son, not nearly as well as I do. As if a five-year-old might even be capable of such Machiavellian plotting.
"He may not even be consciously aware of the behavior," the doctor continues, reading my mind.
"What can we do?" Caleb asks, at the same moment I say, "Maybe we should talk to a specialist."
The doctor responds to me, first. "That's exactly what I was going to suggest. Let me make a call and see if Dr. Robichaud can see you this afternoon."
Yes, this is what we need: an ENT who is trained in this sort of illness; an ENT who will be able to lay hands on Nathaniel and feel an impossibly small something that can be fixed. "Which hospital is Dr. Robichaud affiliated with?" I ask.
"He's up in Portland," the pediatrician says. "He's a psychiatrist."
July. The town pool. A hundred and two degrees in Maine, a record.
"What if I sink?" Nathaniel asked me. I stood in the shallow end, watching him stare at the water like it was quicksand.
"Do you really think I'd let you get hurt?"
He seemed to consider this. "No."
"All right then." I held out my arms.
"Mom? What if this was a pit of lava?"
"I wouldn't be wearing a bathing suit, for one."
"What if I get in there and my arms and legs forget what to do?"
"They won't."
"They could."
"Not likely."
"One time is all it takes," Nathaniel said gravely, and I realized he'd been listening to me practice my closings in the shower.
An idea. I rounded my mouth, raised my arms, and sank to the bottom of the pool. The water hummed in my ears, the world went slow. I counted to five and then the blue shimmied, an explosion just in front of me. Suddenly Nathaniel was underwater and swimming, his eyes full of stars and his mouth and nose blowing bubbles. I caught him tight and broke the surface. "You saved me," I said.
Nathaniel put his hands on either side of my face. "I had to," he said. "So you could save me back."
*
The first thing he does is draw a picture of a frog that is eating the moon. Dr. Robichaud doesn't have a black crayon, though, so Nathaniel has to make the night sky blue. He colors so hard the crayon breaks in his hand, and then wonders if someone is going to yell at him.
No one does.
Dr. Robichaud told him he could do anything he wanted, while everyone sat around and watched him play. Everyone: his mom and dad, and this new doctor, who has hair so white-yellow that he can see her scalp underneath, beating like a heart. The room has a gingerbread-style dollhouse, a rocking horse for kids younger than Nathaniel, a beanbag chair shaped like a baseball mitt. There are crayons and paints and puppets and dolls. When Nathaniel moves from one activity to another, he notices Dr. Robichaud writing on a clipboard, and he wonders if she is drawing too; if she has the missing black crayon.
Every now and then she asks him questions, which he couldn't answer even if he wanted to. Do you like frogs, Nathaniel? And: That chair is comfortable, don't you think? Most of the questions are stupid ones that grown-ups ask, even though they don't really want to listen to the answers. Only once has Dr. Robichaud said something that Nathaniel wishes he could respond to. He pushed the button on a chunky plastic tape recorder and the sound that came out was familiar: Halloween and tears all rolled together. "Those are whales singing," Dr. Robichaud said. "Have you ever heard them before?"
Yes, Nathaniel wanted to say, but I thought it was just me, crying on the inside.
The doctor starts to talk to his parents, big words that slide in his ear and then turn tail and run away like rabbits. Bored, Nathaniel looks under the table again for the black crayon. He smoothes the corners of his picture. Then he notices the doll in the corner.
It's a boy doll, he sees that the minute he turns it over. Nathaniel doesn't like dolls; he doesn't play with them. But he is tugged toward this toy, lying twisted on the floor. He picks it up and fixes the arms and the legs, so that it doesn't look like it's hurt anymore.
Then he glances down and sees the blue crayon, broken, still curled in his hand.
*
How cliched is this: The psychiatrist brings up Freud. Somatoform disorder is the DSM-IV term for what Sigmund called hysteria--young women whose reaction to trauma manifested itself into valid physical ailments without any etiological physical cause. Basically, Dr. Robichaud says, the mind can make the body ill. It doesn't happen as often as it did in Freud's day, because there are so many more acceptable outlets for emotional trauma. But every now and then it still happens, most often in children who don't possess the right vocabulary to explain what's upsetting them.
I glance over at Caleb, wondering if he's buying any of this. The truth is, I just want to get Nathaniel home. I want to call an expert witness I once used, an ENT in New York City, and ask him for a referral to a specialist in the Boston area who can look at my son.
Nathaniel was fine yesterday. I am not a psychiatrist, but even I know that a nervous breakdown doesn't happen overnight.
"Emotional trauma," Caleb says softly. "Like what?"
Dr. Robichaud says something, but the sound is drowned out. My gaze has gone to Nathaniel, who is sitting in the corner of the playroom. In his lap, he holds a doll facedown. With his other hand, he is grinding a crayon between the cheeks of its buttocks. And his face, oh his face--it's as blank as a sheet.
I have seen this a thousand times. I have been in the offices of a hundred psychiatrists. I have sat in the corner like a fly on the wall as a child shows what he cannot tell, as a child gives me the proof I need to go prosecute a case.
Suddenly I am on the floor beside Nathaniel, my hands on his shoulders, my eyes locked with his. A moment later, he is in my arms. We rock back and forth in a vacuum, neither of us able to find words to say what we know is true.
Past the school playground, on the other side of the hill, in the forest--that's where the witch lives.
We all know about her. We believe. We haven't seen her, but that's a good thing, because the ones who see her are the ones who get taken away.
Ashleigh says the feeling you get when the wind climbs the back of your neck and you can't stop shivering; that's the witch coming too close. She wears a flannel jacket that turns her invisible. She sounds like leaves falling down.
Willie was in our class. He had eyes sunk so far in his head they sometimes disappeared, and he smelled like oranges. He was allowed to wear his Teva sandals even after it got cold out, and his feet would get muddy and blue, and my mother would shake her head and say, "See?" and I did--I saw, and I wished I could do it too. The thing was, one day Willie was sitting next to me at snack, dunking his graham crackers into his milk until they all became a slushy mountain at the bottom ... and the next day, he was gone. He was gone, and he never came back.
At the hiding spot under the slide, Ashleigh tells us that the witch has taken him. "She says your name, and after that, you can't help it, you'll do anything she says. You'll go anywhere she wants."
Lettie starts to cry. "She'll eat him. She'll eat Willie."
"Too late," Ashleigh says, and in her hand is a white, white bone.
It looks too small to come from Willie. It looks too small to come from anything that ever walked. But I know better than anyone what it is: I found it, digging under the dandelions near the fence. I was the one who gave it to Ashleigh.
"She's got Danny right now," Ashleigh says.
Miss Lydia told us during circle time that Danny was sick. We'd put his face up on the Who's Here board, flipped
over to the sad side. After recess, we were all going to make him a card. "Danny's sick," I tell Ashleigh, but she just looks at me like I'm the dumbest person ever. "Did you think they would tell us the truth?" she says.
So when Miss Lydia isn't watching, we slip under the fence where the dogs and the rabbits sometimes get in--Ashleigh and Peter and Brianna and me, the bravest. We will save Danny. We will get him before the witch does.
But Miss Lydia finds us first. She makes us go inside and sit in Time Out and says we should never, never, ever leave the playground. Don't we know we could get hurt?
Brianna looks at me. Of course we know; it's why we left in the first place.
Peter starts to cry, and tells her about the witch, and what Ashleigh said. Miss Lydia's eyebrows come together like a fat black caterpillar. "Is this true?"
"Peter's a liar. He made the whole thing up," Ashleigh says, and she doesn't even blink.
That's how I know that the witch has already gotten to her.
TWO
Just so you know: if this ever happens to you, you will not be ready. You will walk down a street and wonder how people can behave as if the whole world has not been tipped on its axis. You will comb your mind for signs and signals, certain that one moment--aha!--will trip you like a twisted root. You will bang your fist so hard against the stall door in the public bathroom that your wrist will bruise; you'll start to cry when the man at the tollbooth tells you to have a nice day. You will ask yourself How come; you will ask yourself What if.
Caleb and I drive home with an elephant sitting between us. At least this is how it seems: this huge bulk driving us to our separate sides, impossible to ignore, and yet we both pretend we cannot see it. In the backseat, Nathaniel sleeps, holding a half-eaten lollipop given to him by Dr. Robichaud.
I am having trouble breathing. It is that elephant, again, sitting so close to me with one elbow crushing my chest. "He has to tell us who," I say finally, the words breaking free like a river. "He has to."
"He can't."
That is the issue, in a nutshell. Nathaniel is not able to speak, even if he wants to. He doesn't know how to read or write yet. Until he can communicate, there is no one to blame. Until he can communicate, this is not a case; this is just a heartache.