Perfect Match

by Jodi Picoult

  They are all wearing Hazmat suits--Patrick and Evan Chao, Fisher Carrington and Quentin Brown, Frankie Martine, and the medical examiner, Vern Potter. In the black circle beyond their flashlights, an owl screams.

  Vern jumps a foot. "Holy sweet Jesus. Any minute now I keep expecting the zombies to get up from behind the tombstones. Couldn't we have done this in broad daylight?"

  "I'll take zombies over the press any day," Evan Chao mutters. "Get it over with, Vern."

  "Hokey-dokey." The medical examiner takes a crowbar and pries open Father Szyszynski's casket. The foul air that puffs from its insides has Patrick gagging. Fisher Carrington turns away and holds a handkerchief to his face mask. Quentin walks off briskly to vomit behind a tree.

  The priest does not look all that different. Half of his face is still missing. His arms lie at his sides. His skin, gray and wrinkled, has not yet decomposed. "Open wide," Vern murmurs, and he ratchets down the jaw, reaches inside, and pulls out a molar with a pair of tooth pliers.

  "Get me a couple wisdom teeth, too," Frankie says. "And hair."

  Evan nods to Patrick, calling him aside. "You believe this?" he asks.

  "Nope."

  "Maybe the bastard's just getting what he deserves."

  Patrick is stunned for a moment, until he remembers: There is no reason to believe Evan would know what Patrick knows--that Father Szyszynski was innocent. "Maybe," he manages.

  A few minutes later, Vern hands a jar and an envelope to Frankie. Quentin hurries away with her, Fisher close behind. The ME closes the casket and turns to the grave diggers. "You can put him back now," he instructs, then turns to Patrick. "On your way out?"

  "In a sec." Patrick watches Vern go, then turns to the grave, where the two big men have dropped the coffin again and are starting to shovel dirt over it again. He waits until they are finished, because he thinks someone should.

  By the time Patrick gets to the Biddeford District Court, he wonders whether Father Arthur Gwynne ever existed at all. He's driven from the graveyard, where the body was being exhumed, to the Catholic See in Portland ... where he was told by the chancellor that their records only showed Father O'Toole coming to visit Biddeford. If Father Gwynne was at the church too, it might have been a personal connection to the Biddeford chaplain that brought him there. Which, of course, is exactly what Patrick needs to confirm.

  The probate clerk hands him a copy of the priest's Last Will and Testament, which became a public record a month ago, when it was filed with the court. The document is simple to a fault. Father Szyszynski left fifty percent of his estate to his mother. And the rest to the executor of his will: Arthur Gwynne, of Belle Chasse, Louisiana.

  Enamel is the strongest material naturally found in the human body, which makes it a bitch to crack open. To this end, Frankie soaks the extracted molar in liquid nitrogen for about five minutes, because frozen, it is more likely to shatter. "Hey, Quentin," she says, grinning at the attorney, waiting impatiently. "Can you break a dollar?"

  He fishes in his pockets, but shakes his head. "Sorry."

  "No problem." She takes a buck from her wallet and floats it in the liquid nitrogen, then pulls it out, smashes it on the counter, and laughs. "I can."

  He sighs. "Is this why it takes so long to get results from the state lab?"

  "Hey, I'm letting you cut in line, aren't I?" Frankie removes the tooth from its bath and sets it in a sterile mortar and pestle. She grinds at it, pounding harder and harder, but the tooth will not crack.

  "Mortar and pestle?" Quentin asks.

  "We used to use the ME's skull saw, but we had to get a new blade every time. Plus, the cutting edge gets too hot, and denatures the DNA." She glances at him over her protective goggles. "You don't want me to screw up, do you?" Another whack, but the tooth remains intact. "Oh, for God's sake." Frankie plucks a second tooth out of the liquid nitrogen. "Come with me. I want to get this over with."

  She double-bags the tooth in Ziplocs and leads Quentin to the stairwell, all the way to the basement garage of the laboratory. "Stand back," she says, and then squats, setting the bag on the floor. Taking a hammer out of the pocket of her lab coat, Frankie begins to pound, her own jaw aching in sympathy. The tooth shatters on the fourth try, its pieces splintering into the plastic bag.

  "Now what?" Quentin asks.

  The pulp is brownish, slight ... but most definitely there. "Now," she says, "you wait."

  Quentin, who is unused to staying up in graveyards all night and then driving to the lab in Augusta, falls asleep on a bank of chairs in the lobby. When he feels a cool hand on the back of his neck, he startles awake, sitting up so quickly he is momentarily dizzy. Frankie stands before him, holding out a report. "And?" he asks.

  "The tooth pulp was chimeric."

  "English?"

  Frankie sits down beside him. "The reason we test tooth pulp is because it has blood cells in it ... but also tissue cells. For you and me and most people, the DNA in both of those cells will be the same. But if someone gets a bone marrow transplant, they're going to show a mixture of two DNA profiles in their tooth pulp. The first profile will be the DNA they were born with, and that'll be in the tissue cells. The second profile will be the DNA that came from their marrow donor, and will be in the blood cells. In this sample, the suspect's tooth pulp yielded a mixture."

  Quentin frowns at the numbers on the page. "So--"

  "So here's your proof," Frankie says. "Somebody else perved that kid."

  After Fisher calls me with the news, I go right into the bathroom and throw up. Again, and again, until there is nothing left in my stomach but the guilt. The truth is, a man was killed by my own hand, a man who deserved no punishment. What does this make me?

  I want to shower until I don't feel dirty; I want to strip off my own skin. But the horror is at the heart of me. Cut a gut feeling, watch yourself bleed to death.

  Like I watched him.

  In the hallway, I brush past Caleb, who has not been speaking to me anyway. There are no more words between us, each one has a charge on it, an ion that might attach to either him or to me and push us farther apart. In my bedroom, I kick off my shoes and crawl fully dressed under the covers. I pull them up over my head; breathe in the same cocoon. If you pass out, and there's still no air, what will happen?

  I can't get warm. This is where I will stay, because now any of my decisions may be suspect. Better to do nothing at all, than to take another risk that might change the world.

  It's an instinct, Patrick realizes--to want to hurt someone as badly as they've hurt you. There were moments in his career in the military police that his arrests became violent, blood running over his hands that felt like a balm at the time. Now, he understands that the theory can go one step further: It's an instinct to want to hurt someone as badly as they've hurt someone you care about. This is the only explanation he can offer for sitting on a 757 en route from Dallas-Fort Worth to New Orleans.

  The question isn't what he would do for Nina. "Anything," Patrick would answer, without hesitation. She had expressly warned him away from hunting down Arthur Gwynne, and all of Patrick's actions up to this point could be classified as information-seeking, but even he could not couch the truth, now: He had no reason to fly to Louisiana, if not to meet this man face-to-face.

  Even now, he cannot tell himself what is going to happen. He has spent his life guided by principle and rules--in the Navy, as a cop, as an unrequited lover. But rules only work when everyone plays by them. What happens when someone doesn't, and the fallout bleeds right into his life? What's stronger--the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it?

  It has been shattering for Patrick to realize that the criminal mind is not all that far away from that of a rational man. It comes down, really, to the power of a craving. Addicts will sell their own bodies for another gram of coke. Arsonists will put their own lives in danger to feel something go up in flames around them. Patrick has always believed, as an officer of the law, he
is above this driving need. But what if your obsession has nothing to do with drugs or thrills or money? What if what you want most in the world is to recapture the way life was a week, a month, a year ago--and you are willing to do whatever it takes?

  This was Nina's error; she wrongly equated stopping time with turning it backward. And he couldn't even blame her, because he'd made the same mistake, every time he was in her company.

  The question Patrick knew he should be asking was not what he would do for Nina ... but what he wouldn't.

  The flight attendant pushes the beverage cart like a baby carriage, braking beside Patrick's row. "What can I get for you?" she asks. Her smile reminds him of Nathaniel's Halloween mask from last year.

  "Tomato juice. No ice."

  The man sitting beside Patrick folds his newspaper. "Tomato juice and vodka," he says, grinning through his thick Texan drawl. "Yes, ice."

  They both take a sip of their drinks as the flight attendant moves on. The man glances down at his newspaper and shakes his head. "Ought to fry the sumbitch," he mutters.

  "Excuse me?"

  "Oh, it's this murder case. Y'all must have heard about it ... there's some fool who wants an eleventh hour pardon from death row because she's found Jesus. Truth is, the governor's afraid to give her the cocktail because she's a woman."

  Patrick has always been in favor of capital punishment. But he hears himself say, "Seems reasonable."

  "Guess you're one of those Yankee left-wingers," the man scoffs. "Me, I think it don't matter if you've got a pecker or not. You shoot someone in the back of the head at a convenience store, you pay the price. You know?" He shrugs, then finishes his drink. "You flying out on business or pleasure?"

  "Business."

  "Me, too. I'm in sales. Hav-A-Heart traps," he confides, as if this is privileged information.

  "I'm a lawyer with the ACLU," Patrick lies. "I'm flying down to plead that woman's case to the governor."

  The salesman goes red in the face. "Well. I didn't mean no disrespect--"

  "Like hell you didn't."

  He folds his newspaper again, and stuffs in into the seat pocket in front of him. "Even you bleeding hearts can't save them all."

  "One," Patrick answers. "That's all I'm hoping for."

  There is a woman wearing my clothes and my skin and my smell but it isn't me. Sin is like ink, it bleeds into a person, coloring, making you someone other than you used to be. And it's indelible. Try as much as you want, you cannot get yourself back.

  Words can't pull me back from the edge. Neither can daylight. This isn't something to get over, it is an atmosphere I need to learn to breathe. Grow gills for transgression, take it into my lungs with every gasp.

  It is a startling thing. I wonder who this person is, going through the motions of my life. I want to take her hand.

  And then I want to push her, hard, off a cliff.

  Patrick finds himself peeling off layers of clothing as he walks through the streets of Belle Chasse, Louisiana, past wrought-iron gates and ivytrellised courtyards. Christmas looks wrong in this climate; the decorations seem to be sweating in the humid heat. He wonders how a Louisiana boy like Glen Szyszynski ever survived so far north.

  But he already knows the answer. Growing up among Cajuns and the Creoles wasn't all that far a stretch from tending to the Acadians in his parish. The proof of that rests in his breast pocket, public records copied by a clerk at the Louisiana Vital Records Registry in New Orleans. Arthur Gwynne, born 10/23/43 to Cecilia Marquette Gwynne and her husband, Alexander Gwynne. Four years later, the marriage of Cecelia Marquette Gwynne, widowed, to Teodor Szyszynski. And in 1951, the birth of Glen.

  Half-brothers.

  Szyszynski's will was last revised in 1994; it is entirely possible that Arthur Gwynne is no longer a member of the Belle Chasse community. But it is a starting point. Priests don't go unnoticed in a predominantly Catholic town; if Gwynne had any contact at all with his neighbors, Patrick knows he can pick up a paper trail and track his whereabouts from there. To this end, there is another clue in his pocket, one ripped from the rear of a phone book. Churches. The largest one is Our Lady of Mercy.

  He doesn't let himself think what he will do with the information, once he gets it.

  Patrick turns the corner, and the cathedral comes into view. He jogs up the stone steps and enters the nave. Immediately in front of him is a pool of Holy Water. Flickering candles cast waves on the walls, and the reflection from a stained-glass window bleeds a brilliant puddle on the mosaic floor. Above the altar, a cypress carving of Jesus on the cross looms like an omen.

  It smells of Catholicism: beeswax and starch and darkness and peace, all of which bring Patrick back to his youth. He finds himself unconsciously making the sign of the cross as he slides into a pew at the rear of the building.

  Four women nod their heads in prayer, their faith settling softly around them, like the skirts of Confederate belles. Another sobs quietly into her hands while a priest comforts her in whispers. Patrick waits patiently, running his hands along the bright, polished wood and whistling under his breath.

  Suddenly the hair stands up on the back of his neck. Walking along the lip of the pew behind him is a cat. Its tail strokes Patrick on the nape again, and he lets out his breath in a rush. "You scared the hell out of me," he murmurs, and then glances at the carving of Jesus. "The heck," he amends.

  The cat blinks at him, then leaps with grace into the arms of the priest who has come up beside Patrick. "You know better," the priest scolds.

  It takes Patrick a moment to realize the cleric is speaking to his kitten. "Excuse me. I'm trying to locate a Father Arthur Gwynne."

  "Well." The man smiles. "You found me."

  Every time Nathaniel tries to see his mother, she's sleeping. Even when it's light outside; even when it's time for Franklin on Nickelodeon. Leave her alone, his father says. It's what she wants. But Nathaniel doesn't think that's what his mother wants at all. He thinks about how sometimes in the middle of the night he wakes up dreaming of spiders under his skin and screams that don't go away, and the only thing that keeps him from running out of the room is how dark it is and how far it seems from his bed to the door.

  "We have to do something," Nathaniel tells his father, after it has been three days, and his mother is still asleep.

  But his father's face squeezes up at the top, like it does when Nathaniel is yelling too loud while he's having his hair washed and the sound bounces around the bathroom. "There's nothing we can do," he tells Nathaniel.

  It's not true. Nathaniel knows this. So when his father goes outside to put the trash cans at the end of the driveway (Two minutes, Nathaniel ... you can sit here and be good for two minutes, can't you?) Nathaniel waits until he can no longer hear the scratch-drag on the gravel and then bolts upstairs to his bedroom. He overturns his garbage can to use as a stool and takes what he needs from his dresser. He twists the knob to his parents' room quietly, tiptoes inside as if the floor is made of cotton.

  It takes two tries to turn on the reading lamp near his mother's side of the bed, and then Nathaniel crawls on top of the covers. His mother isn't there at all, just the great swollen shape under the blankets that doesn't even move when he calls her name. He pokes at it, frowns. Then he pulls away the sheet.

  The Thing That Isn't His Mother moans and squints in the sudden light.

  Her hair is wild and matted, like the brown sheep at the petting zoo. Her eyes look like they've fallen too deep in her face, and grooves run the length of her mouth. She smells of sadness. She blinks once at Nathaniel, as if he might be something she remembers but can't quite fish to the front of her mind. Then she pulls the blankets over her head again and rolls away from him.

  "Mommy?" Nathaniel whispers, because this place cries for quiet. "Mommy, I know what you need."

  Nathaniel has been thinking about it, and he remembers what it felt like to be stuck in a dark, dark place and not be able to explain it. And he also remembers
what she did, back then, for him. So he takes the sign-language binder he got from Dr. Robichaud and slips it under the blankets, into his mother's hands.

  He holds his breath while her hands trace the edges and rifle through the pages. There is a sound Nathaniel has never heard before--like the world opening up at the start of an earthquake, or maybe a heart breaking--and the binder slips from beneath the sheets, cracking open onto the floor. Suddenly the comforter rises like the hinged jaw of a white whale and he finds himself swallowed whole.

  Then he is in the spot where he put the sign-language book, smack in the middle of her arms. She holds him so tight there is no room for words between them, spoken or signed. And it doesn't matter one bit, because Nathaniel understands exactly what his mother is telling him.

  Christ, I think, wincing. Turn off the lights.

  But Fisher starts laying out papers and briefs on the blankets, as if it is every day that he conducts meetings with a client too exhausted to leave her bedroom. Then again, what do I know? Maybe he does.

  "Go away," I moan.

  "Bottom line: He had a bone marrow transplant," Fisher says briskly. "You shot the wrong priest. So we need to figure out how to use that to our best advantage and get you off." Before he remembers to check himself, his eyes meet mine, and he cannot hide it: the shock and, yes, distaste of seeing me like this. Unwashed, undressed, uncaring.

  Yes, look, Fisher, I think. Now you don't have to pretend I'm crazy.

  I roll onto my side, and some of the papers flutter off the edge of the bed. "You don't have to play this game with me, Nina," Fisher sighs. "You hired me so that you won't go to jail, and goddammit, you're not going to jail." He pauses, as if he is about to tell me something important, but what he says doesn't matter at all. "I've already filed the paperwork requesting a jury, but you know, we can waive it at the last minute." His eyes take in my nightgown, my tangled hair. "It might be easier to convince one person that ... that you were insane."

  I pull the covers over my head.