by Jodi Picoult
But now I’m the parent, and it is my child, and that changes everything.
• • •
One Saturday I took Nathaniel to my office, so that I could finish up some work. It was a ghost town—the Xerox machines sleeping like beasts, the computers blinking blind, the telephones quiet. Nathaniel occupied himself with the paper shredder while I reviewed files. “How come you named me Nathaniel?” he asked, out of the blue.
I checked off the name of a witness on a pad. “It means ‘Gift from God.’”
The jaws of the paper shredder ground together. Nathaniel turned to me. “Did I come wrapped and everything?”
“You weren’t quite that kind of a gift.” As I watched, he turned off the shredder and began to play with the collection of toys I kept in the corner for children who had the misfortune of being brought to my office. “What name would you rather have?”
When I was pregnant, Caleb would end each day by saying good night to his baby with a different name: Vladimir, Grizelda, Cuthbert. Keep this up, I had told him, and this baby’s going to arrive with an identity crisis.
Nathaniel shrugged. “Maybe I could be Batman.”
“Batman Frost,” I repeated, completely serious. “It’s got a nice ring to it.”
“There are four Dylans in my school—Dylan S. and Dylan M. and Dylan D. and Dylan T.—but there isn’t another Batman.”
“Which is an important consideration.” All of a sudden I felt Nathaniel crawling under the hollow of my desk, a warm weight on my feet. “What are you doing?”
“Batman needs a cave, Mom, duh.”
“Ah. Right.” I folded my legs underneath me to give Nathaniel more room, and scrutinized a police report. Nathaniel’s hand stretched up to grab a stapler, an impromptu walkie-talkie.
The case was a rape, and the victim had been found comatose in the bathtub. Unfortunately, the perp had been smart enough to run the water, thereby obliterating nearly any forensic evidence we might have gotten. I turned the page in the file and stared at gruesome police photos of the crime scene, the sunken eggplant face of the woman who had been assaulted.
“Mom?”
Immediately I whipped the photo facedown. This was precisely why I did not mix my work life and my home life. “Hmm?”
“Do you always catch the bad guys?”
I thought of the victim’s mother, who could not stop crying long enough to give a statement to the police. “Not always,” I answered.
“Most of the time?”
“Well,” I said. “At least half.”
Nathaniel considered this for a moment. “I guess that’s good enough to be a superhero,” he said, and that was when I realized this had been an interview for the position of Robin. But I didn’t have time to be a cartoon sidekick.
“Nathaniel,” I sighed. “You know why I came in here.” Specifically, to get ready for Monday’s opening arguments. To go over my strategy and my witness list.
I looked at Nathaniel’s waiting face. Then again, maybe justice was best served from a Batcave. An oxymoron chased through my mind: I am going to get nothing done today. I am doing everything I want to. “Holy Guacamole, Batman,” I said, kicking off my shoes and crawling underneath my desk. Had I ever known that the interior wall was made of cheap pine, and not mahogany? “Robin reporting for duty, but only if I get to drive the Batmobile.”
“You can’t be Robin for real.”
“I thought that was the point.”
Nathaniel stared at me with great pity, as if someone like me really ought to have learned the rules of the game this far along in life. Our shoulders bumped in the confines of my desk. “We can work together and everything, but your name has to be Mom.”
“Why?”
He rolled his eyes. “Because,” Nathaniel told me. “It’s who you are.”
• • •
“Nathaniel!” I call out, blushing a little. It’s not a sin, is it, to have no control over one’s child? “I’m sorry, Father,” I say, holding the door wide to let him inside. “He’s been . . . shy lately with visitors. Yesterday, when the UPS man came, it took me an hour to find where he was hiding.”
Father Szyszynski smiles at me. “I told myself I should have called first, instead of dropping in unannounced.”
“Oh, no. No. It’s wonderful that you came.” This is a lie. I have no idea what to do with a priest in my house. Do I serve cookies? Beer? Do I apologize for all the Sundays I don’t make it to Mass? Do I confess to lying in the first place?
“Well, it’s part of the job,” Father Szyszynski says, tapping his collar. “The only thing I have to do on Friday afternoons is eavesdrop on the ladies’ auxiliary meeting.”
“Is that considered a perk?”
“More like a cross to bear,” the priest says, and smiles. He sits down on the couch in the living room. Father Szyszynski is wearing high-tech running sneakers. He does local half-marathons; his times are posted on the News and Notes boards, next to the index cards that request prayers for the needy. There is even a photo of him there, lean and fit, without his collar, crossing a finish line—in it, he looks nothing like a priest; just a man. He’s in his fifties, but he appears to be ten years younger. Once, I heard him say that he’d tried to make a pact with Satan for eternal youth, but he couldn’t find the devil’s extension in the diocese phone book.
I wonder which nosy gossip in the church rumor mill told the priest about us. “The Sunday school class misses Nathaniel,” he tells me. He’s being politically correct. If he wanted to be more accurate, he’d say that the Sunday school class misses Nathaniel more than half the Sundays of the year, since we don’t make it regularly to Mass. Still, I know that Nathaniel likes coloring pictures in the basement during the service. And he especially likes afterward, when Father Szyszynski reads to the kids from a great, old illustrated children’s Bible while the rest of the congregation is upstairs having coffee. He gets right down onto the floor in their circle, and according to Nathaniel, acts out floods and plagues and prophecies.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Father Szyszynski says.
“Do you.”
He nods. “That in the year 2001 it’s archaic to assume the Church is such a large part of your life it could offer you comfort at a time like this. But it can, Nina. God wants you to turn to Him.”
I stare right at the priest. “These days I’m not too high on God,” I say bluntly.
“I know. It doesn’t make much sense, sometimes, God’s will.” Father Szyszynski shrugs. “There have been times I’ve doubted Him myself.”
“You’ve obviously gotten over it.” I wipe the corner of my eyes; why am I crying? “I’m not even really a Catholic.”
“Sure you are. You keep coming back, don’t you?”
But that’s guilt, not faith.
“Things happen for a reason, Nina.”
“Oh, yeah? Then do me a favor and ask God what reason there could possibly be for letting a child get hurt like this.”
“You ask Him,” the priest says. “And when you’re talking, you might want to remember you have something in common—He watched His son suffer, too.”
He hands me a picture book—David and Goliath, watered down for a five-year-old. “If Nathaniel ever comes out,” he pitches his voice extra loud, “you tell him that Father Glen left a present.” That’s what they call him, all the kids at St. Anne’s, since they can’t pronounce his last name. Heck, the priest has said, after a few tall ones, I can’t pronounce it myself. “Nathaniel particularly enjoyed this story when I read it last year. He wanted to know if we could all make slingshots.” Father Szyszynski stands up, leads the way to the door. “If you want to talk, Nina, you know where to find me. You take care.”
He starts down the path, the stone steps that Caleb placed with his own hands. As I watch him go I clutch the book to my chest. I think of the weak defeating giants.
• • •
Nathaniel is playing with a boat, sinking it, then watching it bob to
the surface again. I suppose I should be grateful that he’s in this tub at all. But he has been better, today. He has been talking with his hands. And he agreed to this bath, on the condition that he take off his own clothes. Of course I let him, struggling not to run to his aid when he couldn’t work a button through a hole. I try to remember what Dr. Robichaud told us about power: Nathaniel was made helpless; he needs to feel like he’s gaining control of himself again.
I sit on the lip of the tub, watching his back rise and fall with his breathing. The soap shimmers like a fish near the drain. “Need help?” I ask, lifting one hand up with the other, a sign. Nathaniel shakes his head vigorously. He picks up the bar of Ivory and runs it over his shoulder, his chest, his belly. He hesitates, then plunges it between his legs.
A thin white film covers him, making him otherworldly, an angel. Nathaniel lifts his face to mine, hands me the soap to put back. For a moment, our fingers touch—in our new language, these are our lips . . . does that make this a kiss?
I let the soap drop with a splash, then circle my pursed mouth with a finger. I move my index fingers back and forth, touching and retreating. I point to Nathaniel.
Who hurt you?
But my son doesn’t know these signs. Instead, he flings his hands out to the sides, proud to show off his new word. Done. He rises like a sea nymph, water sluicing down the sides of his beautiful body. As I towel off each limb and pull pajamas over Nathaniel, I silently ask myself if I am the only person who has touched him at this place, at that one, until every inch of him is covered again.
• • •
In the middle of the night Caleb hears a hitch in his wife’s breathing. “Nina?” he whispers, but she doesn’t answer. He rolls onto his side, curls her closer. She’s awake, he can feel it coming from her pores. “Are you all right?” he asks.
She turns to him, her eyes flat in the dark. “Are you?”
He pulls her into his arms and buries his face in the side of her neck. Breathing her calms Caleb; she is his own oxygen. His lips trace her skin, hold over her collarbone. He tilts his head so that he can hear her heart.
He is looking for a place to lose himself.
So his hand moves from the valley of her waist to the rise of a hip, slips beneath the thin strip of her panty. Nina draws in her breath. She is feeling it too, then. She needs to get away from here, from this.
Caleb slides lower and rocks his palm against her. Nina grabs tighter at his hair, almost to the point of pain. “Caleb.”
He is hard now, heavy and pressed into the mattress. “I know,” he murmurs, and he goes to slide a finger inside.
She is dry as a bone.
Nina yanks at his hair, and this time he rolls off her, which is what she’s wanted all along. “What is the matter with you!” she cries. “I don’t want to do this. I can’t, now.” She throws back the covers and pads out of the bedroom into the dark.
Caleb looks down, sees the small drop of semen he’s left on the sheets. He gets out of bed and covers it up, so that he will not have to look at it. Then he follows Nina, searching her out by sheer instinct. For long moments, he stands in the doorway of his son’s bedroom, watching her watch Nathaniel.
• • •
Caleb does not accompany us to the psychiatrist’s office for our next appointment. He says he has a meeting he cannot reschedule, but I think this is only an excuse. After last night, we have been dancing around each other. Plus, Dr. Robichaud is working on signing now, until Nathaniel gets his voice back, and Caleb disagrees with that tactic. He thinks that when Nathaniel is ready to tell us who hurt him, he will, and until then, we are only pushing.
I wish I had his patience, but I cannot sit here and watch Nathaniel struggle. I can’t stop thinking that for every single moment Nathaniel is silent, there is someone else in this world who should have been rendered speechless, stopped in his tracks.
Today, we have worked our way through practical signs for food—cereal, milk, pizza, ice cream, breakfast. The terms in the ASL book are grouped like that—in units that go together. There is a picture of the word, the written letters, and then a sketch of a person making the sign. Nathaniel gets to pick what we study. He has jumped from the seasons, to things to eat, and is now flipping the pages again.
“Where he’ll stop nobody knows . . .” Dr. Robichaud jokes.
The book falls open to a page with a family on it. “Oh, that’s a good one,” I say, trying the sign at the top—the F handshapes making a circle away from oneself.
Nathaniel points to the child. “Like this, Nathaniel,” Dr. Robichaud says. “Boy.” She mimics touching the bill of a baseball cap. Like many of the signs I’ve learned, this one is a perfect match to the real thing.
“Mother,” the psychiatrist continues, helping Nathaniel hold out his hand, touch the thumb to the side of his chin, and wiggle the fingers.
“Father.” The same sign, but the thumb touches the side of the forehead. “You do it,” Dr. Robichaud says.
• • •
Do it.
All those thin black lines on the page have tangled together, a fat snake that’s coming toward him, grabbing him by the neck. Nathaniel can’t breathe. He can’t see. He hears Dr. Robichaud’s voice all around him, father father father.
Nathaniel lifts his hand, puts a thumb to his forehead. He wiggles the fingers of his hand. This sign looks like he’s making fun of someone.
Except it isn’t funny at all.
• • •
“Look at that,” the psychiatrist says, “he’s better than we are, already.” She moves on to the next sign, baby. “That’s good, Nathaniel,” Dr. Robichaud says after a moment. “Try this one.”
But Nathaniel doesn’t. His hand is jammed tight to the side of his head, his thumb digging into his temple. “Honey, you’re going to hurt yourself,” I tell him. I reach for his hand and he jumps back. He will not stop signing this word.
Dr. Robichaud gently closes the ASL book. “Nathaniel, do you have something you want to say?”
He nods, his hand still fanning out from the side of his head. All the air leaves my body. “He wants Caleb—”
Dr. Robichaud interrupts. “Don’t speak for him, Nina.”
“You can’t think that he—”
“Nathaniel, has your daddy ever taken you somewhere, just the two of you?” the psychiatrist asks.
Nathaniel seems confused by the question. He nods slowly.
“Has he ever helped you get dressed?” Another nod. “Has he ever hugged you, in your bed?”
I am frozen in my seat. My lips feel stiff when I speak. “It’s not what you’re thinking. He just wants to know why Caleb isn’t here. He misses his father. He wouldn’t have needed a sign if it was . . . if it was . . .” I can’t even say it. “He could have pointed, a thousand times over,” I whisper.
“He might have been afraid of the consequences of such a direct identification,” Dr. Robichaud explains. “A label like this gives him an extra layer of psychological protection. Nathaniel,” she continues gently. “Do you know who hurt you?”
He points to the ASL book. And signs father again.
• • •
Be careful what you wish for. After all these days, Nathaniel has given a name, and it is the one I would never have expected to hear. It is the one that renders me as immobile as a stone, the very material Caleb prefers to work with.
I listen to Dr. Robichaud make the call to BCYF; I hear her tell Monica there is a suspect, but I am a hundred miles away. I’m watching with the objectivity of someone who knows what will happen next. A detective will be put on the case; Caleb will be called in for questioning. Wally Moffett will contact the Portland DA’s office. Caleb will either confess and be convicted on the strength of that statement; or else Nathaniel will have to accuse him in open court.
This nightmare is only just beginning.
He could not have done it. I know this as well as I know anything about Caleb after so many years.
I can still see him walking the halls at midnight, holding an infant Nathaniel by his feet, the only position in which our colicky baby would stop screaming. I can see him sitting next to me at Nathaniel’s graduation from the two-day class in preschool, how he’d cried without shame. He is a good, strong, solid man; the kind of man you would trust with your life, or your child’s.
But if I believe that Caleb is innocent, it means I don’t believe Nathaniel.
Small memories prick at my mind. Caleb, suggesting that Patrick might be the one to blame. Why bring up his name, if not to take the heat off himself? Or Caleb telling Nathaniel he didn’t have to learn sign language if he didn’t want to. Anything, to keep the child from confessing the truth.
I have met convicted child molesters before. They don’t wear badges or brands or tattoos announcing their vice. It’s hidden under a soft, grandfatherly smile; it’s tucked in the pocket of a button-down shirt. They look like the rest of us, and that’s what makes it so frightening—to know that these beasts move among us, and we are none the wiser.
They have girlfriends and wives who have loved them, unaware.
I used to wonder how mothers wouldn’t have some inkling that this was going on in their homes. There had to have been a moment where they made a conscious decision to turn away before they saw something they didn’t want to. No wife, I used to think, could sleep next to a man and not know what was playing through the loop of his mind.
“Nina.” Monica LaFlamme touches my shoulder. When did she even arrive? I feel like I’m coming awake from a coma; I shake myself into consciousness and look for Nathaniel right away. He’s playing in the psychiatrist’s office, still, with a Brio train set.
When the social worker looks at me, I know that this is what she’s suspected all along. And I cannot blame her. In her shoes, I would have thought the same thing. In fact, in the past, I have.
My voice is old, stripped. “Have the police been called?”
Monica nods. “If there’s anything I can do for you . . .”
There is somewhere I need to go, and I cannot have Nathaniel with me. It hurts to have to ask, but I have lost my barometer for trust. “Yes,” I ask. “Will you watch my son?”
