by Jodi Picoult
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 clichéd 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 t
wisted 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.
“Maybe the psychiatrist is wrong,” Caleb says.
I turn in my seat. “You don’t believe Nathaniel?”
“What I believe is that he hasn’t said anything yet.” He glances in the rearview mirror. “I don’t want to keep talking about this, in front of him.”
“Do you think that’ll make it go away?”
Caleb doesn’t respond, and there is my answer. “The next exit’s ours,” I say stiffly, because Caleb is still driving in the left lane.
“I know where I’m going, Nina.” He brings the car to the right, signals at the exit sign. But a minute later, he misses the turnoff.
“You just—” The accusation dies as I see his face, striped by grief. I don’t think he even knows he’s crying. “Oh, Caleb.” I reach out to touch him, but that goddamned elephant is in the way. Caleb throws the car into park and gets out, walking along the road’s shoulder, drawing huge breaths that make his chest swell.
A moment later, he returns. “I’ll turn around and go back,” he announces—to me? To Nathaniel? To himself?
I nod. And think, If only it were that easy.
• • •
Nathaniel bites down hard on his back teeth so that the hum of the road goes right through him. He isn’t asleep, but he is pretending to be, which is almost as good. His parents are talking, the words so soft at the corners that he can’t quite hear. Maybe he will never sleep again. Maybe he will just be like a dolphin, and stay half-asleep.
Miss Lydia taught them about dolphins last year, after they’d turned the classroom into an ocean of blue crepe paper and glitter-glue starfish. So Nathaniel knows these things: that dolphins shut an eye and half their brain, sleeping on one side, while the other side watches out for danger. He knows that mommy dolphins swim for their resting babies, pulling them along in an underwater current, as if they are attached by invisible threads. He knows that the plastic rings which rope six-packs of Coke can hurt dolphins, make them wash up weak onshore. And that even though they breathe air, they’ll die there.
Nathaniel also knows that if he could, he would roll down the window and jump out, so far that he’d cross the highway barrier and the tall fence to plummet along the rocky cliff, landing in the ocean below. He’d have sleek silver skin and a smile curved permanently on his mouth. He’d have a special body part—like a heart, but different—filled with oil and called a melon, just like the thing you eat in the summertime. Except this would be in the front of his head and would help him find his way even in the blackest ocean, on the blackest night.
Nathaniel imagines swimming off the coast of Maine toward the other end of the world, where it already feels like summer. He squinches his eyes as tight as he can, concentrates on making a joyful noise, of navigating by those notes, of hearing them bounce back to him.
• • •
Although Martin Toscher, MD, is considered an authority in his field, he would gladly trade his laurels to completely eliminate his area of expertise. Examining one child for evidence of sexual abuse is more than enough; the fact that he’s logged hundreds of cases in Maine is phenomenally disturbing.
The subject of the examination lies on the OR table, anesthetized. It would be his suggestion, given the traumatic nature of the exam, but before he had even proposed it to the parents, the mother asked if it could be done that way. Now, Martin walks through the procedure, speaking aloud as he works so that his findings can be recorded. “The glans penis appears normal, Tanner 0.” He repositions the child. “Looking at the anal verge . . . there are multiple obvious healing abrasions, about one to one and a half centimeters up, that are approximately one centimeter in diameter, on average.”
He takes an anal speculum from the table nearby. Chances are if there are additional mucosal tears higher up in the bowel wall, they’d know—the child would be physically ill by now. But he lubricates the instrument and gently inserts it, attaches the light source, and cleans out the rectum with a long cotton swab. Well, thank God for that, Martin thinks. “The bowel is clean to eight centimeters.”
He strips off his gloves and mask, washes up, and leaves the nurses to fuss over the child in recovery. It’s a light anesthesia, it will wear off quickly. The moment he walks out of the operating room, he is approached by the parents.
“How is he?” asks the father.
“Nathaniel’s doing well,” Martin replies, the words everyone wants to hear. “He may be a little drowsy this afternoon, but that’s perfectly normal.”
The mother pushes past all these platitudes. “Were there any findings?”
“There did seem to be evidence consistent with an assault,” the doctor says gently. “Some rectal abrasions that are healing. It’s hard to say when they were incurred, but they’re certainly not fresh. Maybe a week or so’s gone by.”
“Is the evidence consistent with penetration?” Nina Frost demands.
Martin nods. “It’s not from falling down on a bicycle, for example.”
“Can we see him?” This from the boy’s father.
“Soon. The nurses will page you when he’s awake in recovery.”
He starts to leave, but Mrs. Frost stops him with a hand on his arm. “Can you tell if it was penile penetration? Digital? Or some foreign object?”
Parents ask whether their children still feel the pain from the assault. If the scar is something that will affect them later on. If they will remember, in the long term, what happened to them. But these questions, well, they make him feel as if he is being cross-examined.
“There’s no way to know that level of detail,” the doctor says. “All we can say at this point is, yes, something happened.”
She turns away and stumbles against the wall. Wilts. Within seconds she is a small, keening ball on the floor, her husband’s arms wrapped around her for support. As Martin heads back to the operating suite, he realizes it’s the first time that day he has seen her act like a mother.
• • •
It’s foolish, I know, but I’ve lived my life believing in superstitions. Not throwing spilled salt over my shoulder or wishing on eyelashes or wearing lucky shoes to trials—instead, I’ve considered my own good luck directly correlated to the misfortunes of others. Starting out as a lawyer, I begged for the sexual assaults and molestations, the horrors no one wants to face. I told myself that if I faced the problems of strangers on a daily basis, it would magically keep me from having to face my own.
Visiting violence repeatedly, you become inured to atrocity. You can look at blood without blinking, you can say the word rape and not wince. It turns out, though, that this shield is a plastic one. That all defenses break down when the nightmare happens in your own bed.
On the floor of his bedroom, Nathaniel is playing quietly, still groggy from the anesthesia. He guides Matchbox cars around a track. They zoom to a certain spot, a booster, and suddenly shoot with great speed up a ramp through the jaws of a python. If the car is just the tiniest bit too slow, the snake snaps its mouth
shut. Nathaniel’s car passes through with flying colors every time.
My ears are filled with all the things Nathaniel is not saying: What’s for dinner; can I play on the computer; did you see how fast that car went? His hands close around the Matchbox like the claw of a giant; in this make-believe world he is the one calling the shots.
The python’s jaws ratchet shut, so loud in this silence that it makes me jump. And then I feel it, the softest jelly-roll along my leg, the bumping up my spine. Nathaniel is holding the Matchbox car, running it up the avenue of my arm. He parks in the hollow of my collarbone, then touches one finger to the tears on my cheek.
Nathaniel puts the car onto the track and climbs into my lap. His breath is hot and wet on my collar as he burrows close. This makes me feel sick—that he should choose me to keep him safe, when I have already failed miserably. We stay like this for a long time, until evening comes and stars fall onto his carpet, until Caleb’s voice climbs the stairs, searching for us. Over the penance of Nathaniel’s head I watch the car on its track, spinning in circles, driven by its own momentum.
• • •
Shortly after seven o’clock, I lose Nathaniel. He isn’t in any of his favorite haunts: his bedroom, the playroom, on the jungle gym outside. I had thought Caleb was with him; Caleb thought he was with me. “Nathaniel!” I yell, panicked, but he can’t answer me—he couldn’t answer me even if he felt like giving away his hiding place. A thousand scenes of horror sprint through my mind: Nathaniel being kidnapped from the backyard, unable to scream for help; Nathaniel falling down our well and sobbing in silence; Nathaniel lying hurt and unconscious on the ground. “Nathaniel!” I cry again, louder this time.
“You take the upstairs,” Caleb says, and I hear the worry in his voice, too. Before I can answer he heads for the laundry room; there is a sound of the dryer door opening and then closing again.
Nathaniel is not hiding under our bed, or in his closet. He isn’t curled underneath cobwebs in the stairwell that leads to the attic. He isn’t in his toy chest or behind the big wing chair in the sewing room. He isn’t beneath the computer table or behind the bathroom door.
