Perfect Match

by Jodi Picoult

  I set him down at the counter with a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios while I pack his lunch. "Noodles," I announce with flair, trying to boost him out of his blue funk. "And ... ooh! A drumstick from dinner last night! Three Oreos ... and celery sticks, so that Miss Lydia doesn't yell at Mommy again about nutrition pyramids. There." I zip up the insulated pack and put it into Nathaniel's backpack, grab a banana for my own breakfast, then check the clock on the microwave. I give Nathaniel two more Tylenol to take--it won't hurt him this once, and Caleb will never know. "Okay," I say. "We have to go."

  Nathaniel slowly puts on his sneakers and holds out each small foot to me to have the laces tied. He can zip up his own fleece jacket; shimmy into his own backpack. It is enormous on those thin shoulders; sometimes from behind he reminds me of Atlas, carrying the weight of the world.

  Driving, I slide in Nathaniel's favorite cassette--the Beatles' White Album, of all things--but not even Rocky Raccoon can snap him out of this mood. Clearly, he's gotten up on the wrong side of the bed--the wet side, I think, sighing. A tiny voice inside me says I should just be grateful that in approximately fifteen minutes it will be someone else's problem.

  In the rearview mirror, I watch Nathaniel play with the dangling strap of his backpack, pleating it into halves and thirds. We come to the stop sign at the bottom of the hill. "Nathaniel," I whisper, just loud enough to be heard over the hum of the engine. When he glances up, I cross my eyes and stick out my tongue.

  Slowly, slow as his father, he smiles at me.

  On the dashboard, I see that it is 7:56. Four minutes ahead of schedule.

  We are doing even better than I thought.

  The way Caleb Frost sees it, you build a wall to keep something unwanted out ... or to hold something precious in. He considers this often when he builds, fitting sparkling granite and craggy limestone into niches, a three-dimensional puzzle drawn thick and straight across the edge of a lawn. He likes to think of the families inside these baileys he constructs: insulated, safe, protected. Of course, this is ridiculous. His stone walls are knee-high, not castle-worthy. They have large gaps in them for driveways and paths and grape arbors. And yet every time he drives past a property he's shaped with his own heavy hands, he pictures the parents sitting down to dinner with their children, harmony wrapping the table like mosquito netting, as if literal foundations might lay the pattern for emotional ones.

  He stands at the edge of the Warren property with Fred, their contractor, as they all wait for Caleb to put on a show. Right now, the land is thick with birches and maples, some tagged to show the potential location of the house and the septic system. Mr. and Mrs. Warren stand so close they are touching. She is pregnant; her belly brushes her husband's hip.

  "Well," Caleb begins. His job is to convince these people that they need a stone wall surrounding their property, instead of the six-foot-fence they are also considering. But words are not his specialty; that's for Nina. Beside him, Fred clears his throat, prompting.

  Caleb cannot sweet-talk this couple; he can only see what lies ahead for them: a white Colonial, with a screened porch. A Labrador, leaping to catch monarch butterflies in his mouth. A row of bulbs that will, next year, be tulips. A little girl riding a tricycle, with streamers flying from the handlebars down the length of the drive, until she reaches the barrier Caleb has crafted--the limit, she has been told, of where she is safe.

  He imagines himself bent over this spot, creating something solid in a space where there had been nothing before. He imagines this family, three of them by then, tucked within these walls. "Mrs. Warren," Caleb asks with a smile, the right words finally coming. "When are you due?"

  In one corner of the playground, Lettie Wiggs is crying. She does this all the time, pretends that Danny socked her when the truth is she just wants to see if she can get Miss Lydia to come running from whatever it is Miss Lydia's doing. Danny knows it too, and Miss Lydia, and everyone, except for Lettie, who cries and cries as if it's going to get her somewhere.

  He walks past her. Walks past Danny, too, who isn't Danny anymore, but a pirate, clinging to a barrel after a shipwreck. "Hey, Nathaniel," says Brianna, "Check this out." She is crouched behind the shed that holds soccer balls as soft as ripe melons, and the ride-on bulldozer that you can only ride on for five minutes before it's someone else's turn. A silver spider has stretched a web from the wood to the fence behind it, zagged like a shoelace. At one spot a knot the size of a dime is tangled in the silk.

  "That's a fly." Cole pushes his glasses up on his nose. "The spider, she wrapped it up for her dinner."

  "That's so gross," Brianna says, but she leans closer.

  Nathaniel stands with his hands in his pockets. He thinks about the fly, how it stepped onto the web and got stuck, like the time Nathaniel walked into a snowdrift last winter and lost his boot in the muck at the bottom. He wonders if the fly was just as scared as Nathaniel had been of coming in barefoot through the snow, of what his mother would say. Probably the fly had just figured it was going to take a rest. Probably it had stopped for a second to see how the sun looked like a rainbow through that web, and the spider grabbed him before he could get away.

  "Bet she eats the head first," Cole says.

  Nathaniel imagines the wings of the fly, pinned to its back as it is turned and wrapped tight. He lifts his hand and slashes it through the web; walks away.

  Brianna is fuming. "Hey!" she yells. And then, "Miss Lydia!"

  But Nathaniel doesn't listen. He looks up, surveying the top beam of the swings and the jungle gym with the slide that's as shiny as the blade of a knife. The jungle gym is taller by a few inches. Settling his hands on the rungs of the wooden ladder, he begins to climb.

  Miss Lydia doesn't see him. His sneakers send down a rain of tiny pebbles and dirt, but he balances. Up here, he is taller than his father, even. He thinks that maybe the cloud behind him has an angel fast asleep in its center.

  Nathaniel closes his eyes and jumps, his arms glued to his sides like that fly's. He doesn't try to break his fall, just hits hard, because it hurts less than everything else.

  "Best croissants," Peter Eberhardt says, as if we have been in the middle of a conversation, although I've only just walked up to stand beside him at the coffee machine.

  "The Left Bank," I answer. We might as well be in the middle of a conversation, come to think of it. Except this one has been ongoing for years.

  "A little closer to home?"

  This I have to think about. "Mamie's." It's a diner in Springvale. "Worst haircut?"

  Peter laughs. "Me, in my middle school yearbook."

  "I was thinking of it as a verb, not a noun."

  "Oh, well, then. Wherever Angeline gets her perm." He holds out the coffee and fills my cup for me, but I'm laughing so hard some of it spills on the floor. Angeline is the clerk of the South District Court, and her coiffure resembles something between a muskrat curled on her head and a plate of buttered bowtie noodles.

  This is our game, Peter and me. It began when we were both assistant DAs in the West District, splitting our time between Springvale and York. In Maine, defendants can come to court and plead innocent, guilty, or request to meet with the prosecutor. Peter and I would sit across from each other at a desk, trading court complaints like aces in a poker game. You do this traffic ticket, I'm sick of them. Okay, but that means you get this trespassing charge. I see Peter far less now that we are both trying felonies in the superior court, but he is still the person I'm closest to in the office. "Best quote of the day?"

  It is only ten-thirty; the best may be to come. But I put on my prosecutor's face and look solemnly at Peter, and give him an instant replay of my closing in the rape case. "In fact, ladies and gentlemen, there is only one act that would be more criminally reprehensible, more violating, than what this man did--and that would be to set him free to do it again."

  Peter whistles through the space in his front teeth. "Ooh, you are the drama queen."

  "That's why the
y pay me the big bucks." I stir creamer into my coffee, watch it clot like blood on the surface. It reminds me of the brain matter case. "How goes the domestic abuse trial?"

  "Don't take this the wrong way, but I am so freaking sick of victims. They're so ..."

  "Needy?" I say dryly.

  "Yes!" Peter sighs. "Wouldn't it be nice to just get through a case without having to deal with all their baggage?"

  "Ah, but then you might as well be a defense attorney." I take a gulp of the coffee, leave the cup on the counter, three-quarters full. "See, if you ask me, I'd rather get through a case without them."

  Peter laughs. "Poor Nina. You've got your competency hearing next, don't you?"

  "So?"

  "So, whenever you have to face Fisher Carrington you look ... well, like I did in that middle school yearbook. On the verge of being scalped."

  As prosecutors, we have a tenuous relationship with the local defense attorneys. Most of them we hold a grudging respect for; after all, they are just doing their jobs. But Carrington is a different breed. Harvard-educated, silver-haired, stately--he is everyone's father; he is the distinguished elder gentleman offering advice to live by. He is the sort of man juries want to believe, just on general principle. It has happened to all of us at one time or another: We put up a mountain of hard evidence against his Newman-blue eyes and knowing smile, and the defendant walks.

  Needless to say, we all hate Fisher Carrington.

  Having to face him at a competency hearing is like getting to Hell and finding out that the only food available is raw liver--insult added to injury.

  Legally, competency is defined as being able to communicate in a way that the fact finder can understand. For example, a dog may be able to sniff out drug evidence but can't testify. For children at the center of sexual abuse cases--ones where the abuser hasn't confessed--the only way to get a conviction is to get the kid to testify. But before that happens, the judge has to determine that the witness can communicate, knows the difference between the truth and a lie ... and understands that in court you have to tell the truth. Which means that when I am trying a sexual abuse case with a young child, I routinely file a motion for a competency hearing.

  So: Imagine you are five years old and have been brave enough to confess to your mother that your daddy rapes you every night, although he's said he'll kill you for telling. Now imagine that, as a practice run, you have to go to a courtroom that seems big as a football stadium. You have to answer questions a prosecutor asks you. And then you have to answer questions fired at you by a stranger, a lawyer who makes you so confused that you cry and ask him to stop. And because every defendant has the right to face his accuser, you have to do all this while your daddy is staring you down just six feet away.

  Two things can happen here. Either you are found incompetent to stand trial, which means the judge throws out the case, and you don't have to go to court again ... although you have nightmares for weeks afterward about that lawyer asking you horrible questions, and the look on your father's face, and most likely, the abuse continues. Or, you are found competent, and you get to repeat this little scene all over again ... this time, with dozens of people watching.

  I may be a prosecutor, but I'm also the first to tell that if you cannot communicate in a certain way, you cannot get justice in the American legal system. I have tried hundreds of sexual abuse cases, seen hundreds of children on that stand. I have been one of the lawyers who tugs and pulls at them, until they reluctantly let go of the make-believe world they've dreamed to block out the truth. All this, in the name of a conviction. But you cannot convince me that a competency hearing itself doesn't traumatize a child. You cannot convince me that even if I win that hearing, somehow, the child doesn't.

  As defense attorneys go, Fisher Carrington is quite respectful. He doesn't reduce children to jelly on their high stools in the witness box; he doesn't try to disorient them. He acts like a grandfather who will give them lollipops if they tell the truth. In all but one case we both tried, he managed to have the child declared incompetent to stand trial, and the perp walked out free. In the other case, I convicted his client.

  The defendant spent three years in jail.

  The victim spent seven years in therapy.

  I look up at Peter. "Best-case scenario," I challenge.

  "Huh?"

  "Yeah," I say softly. "That's my point."

  When Rachel was five, her parents got a divorce--the kind that involved bitter mudslinging, hidden bank accounts, and cans of paint splashed on the driveway at midnight. A week later, Rachel told her mother that her daddy used to stick his finger inside her vagina.

  She has told me that one time, she was wearing a Little Mermaid nightgown and eating Froot Loops at the kitchen table. The second time, she was wearing a pink Cinderella nightgown and watching a Franklin video in her parents' bedroom. Rachel's mother, Miriam, has verified that her daughter had a Little Mermaid nightgown, and a Cinderella nightgown, the summer she was three years old. She remembers borrowing the Franklin video from her sister-in-law. Back then, she and her husband were still living together. Back then, there were times she left her husband alone with their little girl.

  There are a lot of people who'd wonder how on earth a five-year-old can remember what happened to her when she was three. God, Nathaniel can't even tell me what he did yesterday. But then, they have not heard Rachel tell the same story over and over. They have not talked to psychiatrists, who say that a traumatic event might stick like a thorn in the throat of a child. They do not see, as I do, that since her father has moved out, Rachel has blossomed. And even without all that--how can I overlook the word of any child? What if the one I choose to discount is one who has been truly hurt?

  Today, Rachel sits on my swivel chair in my office, twirling in circles. Her braids reach the tops of her shoulders, and her legs are as skinny as matchsticks. This is not the optimal place to hold a quiet interview, but then again, my office never is. There are cops running in and out, and the secretary I share with the other district attorneys chooses this moment, of course, to put a file on my desk. "Is it going to take long?" Miriam asks, her eyes never veering from her daughter.

  "I hope not," I tell her, and then greet Rachel's grandmother, who will be in the gallery for emotional support during the hearing. Because she is a witness herself, Miriam isn't allowed to be there. Yet another catch-22: The child on the stand, in most cases, doesn't even have the security of a mother close by.

  "Is this really necessary?" Miriam asks for the hundredth time.

  "Yes." I say it flatly, staring her in the eye. "Your ex-husband has rejected our offer of a plea. That means Rachel's testimony is the only thing I've got to prove it even happened." Kneeling in front of Rachel, I stop the motion of the swivel chair. "You know what?" I confess. "Sometimes, when my door's closed, I spin around too."

  Rachel folds her arms around a stuffed animal. "Do you get dizzy?"

  "No. I pretend I'm flying."

  The door opens. Patrick, my oldest friend, sticks his head inside. He's wearing full dress blues, instead of his usual detective's street clothes. "Hey, Nina--did you hear that the post office had to recall its series of Famous Defense Attorney stamps? People didn't know which side to spit on."

  "Detective Ducharme," I say pointedly. "I'm a little busy now."

  He blushes; it sets off his eyes. As kids, I used to tease him about those. I convinced him once, when we were about Rachel's age, that his were blue because there was no brain in his skull, just empty space and clouds. "Sorry--I didn't realize." He has captivated all the women in the room just like that; if he wanted to, he could suggest they do jumping jacks and they'd probably begin calisthenics right away. What makes Patrick Patrick is that he doesn't want to; he never has.

  "Ms. Frost," he says formally, "are we still on for our meeting this afternoon?"

  Our meeting is a long-standing weekly luncheon date at a hole-in-the-wall bar and grill in Sanford.

 
"We are." I'm dying to know why Patrick's dressed to the nines; what's brought him to the superior court--as a detective in Biddeford, his stomping grounds are more often the district courthouse. But all this will have to wait. I hear the door close behind Patrick as I turn back to Rachel. "I see you brought a friend with you today. You know, I think you're the first kid who's ever brought in a hippo to show to Judge McAvoy."

  "Her name is Louisa."

  "I like that. I like your hairdo, too."

  "I got to have pancakes this morning," Rachel says.

  That earns a nod of approval for Miriam; it's crucial that Rachel's eaten a good breakfast. "It's ten o'clock. We'd better go."

  There are tears in Miriam's eyes as she bends down to Rachel's height. "This is the part where Mommy has to wait outside," she says, and she's trying hard not to cry, but it's there in her voice, in the way the sounds are too round, overstuffed with pain.

  When Nathaniel was two and broke his arm, I stood in the ER as the bones were set and put in their cast. He was brave--so brave, not crying out, not once--but his free hand held onto mine so tightly that his fingernails left little half-moons in my palm. The whole time I was thinking that I would gladly break my arm, my heart, myself, if it meant my son wouldn't have to hurt like this.

  Rachel is one of the easier ones; she is nervous but not a wreck. Miriam is doing the right thing. I will make this as painless as possible for both of them.

  "Mommy," Rachel says, the reality hitting like a tropical storm. Her hippo falls to the floor and there is no other way to describe it: She tries to crawl inside her mother's skin.

  I walk out of my office and close my door, because I have a job to do.

  "Mr. Carrington," the judge asks, "why are we putting a five-year-old on the stand here? Isn't there any way to resolve this case?"

  Fisher crosses his legs and frowns a little. He has this down to an art. "Your Honor, the last thing I want is for this case to proceed."

  I'll bet, I think.

  "But my client cannot accept the state's offer. From the first day he set foot in my office, he's denied these events. Moreover, the state has no physical evidence and no witnesses.... All Ms. Frost has, in fact, is a child with a mother who's hell-bent on destroying her estranged husband."