Perfect Match

by Jodi Picoult

  Caleb feels fire pooling like acid in the muscles of his shoulders. He is furious and stunned and maybe a little bit awed. He has traveled every inch of this woman, he understands what makes her cry and what brings her to rapture; he recognizes every cut and curve of her body; but he doesn't know her at all.

  Nina stands expectantly beside him, waiting for him to tell her she did the right thing. Funny, that she would flout the law, but still need his approval. For this reason, and all the others, the words she wants to hear from him will not come.

  When Nathaniel walks into the room with the dining room tablecloth wrapped around his shoulders, Caleb latches onto him. In this storm of strangeness, Nathaniel is the one thing he can recognize. "Hey!" Caleb cries with too much enthusiasm, and he tosses the boy into the air. "That's some cape!"

  Nina turns too, a smile placed on her face where the earnestness was a moment before. She reaches for Nathaniel, too, and out of pure spite, Caleb hefts the child high on his shoulders where she cannot reach.

  "It's getting dark," Nathaniel says. "Can we go?"

  "Go where?"

  In answer, Nathaniel points out the window. On the street below is a battalion of tiny goblins, miniature monsters, fairy princesses. Caleb notices, for the first time, that the leaves have all fallen; that grinning pumpkins roost like lazy hens on the stone walls of his neighbor's home. How could he have missed the signs of Halloween?

  He looks at Nina, but she has been just as preoccupied. As if on cue, the doorbell rings. Nathaniel wriggles on Caleb's shoulders. "Get it! Get it!"

  "We'll have to get it later." Nina tosses him a helpless look; there is no candy in this house. There is nothing left that's sweet.

  Worse, yet, there is no costume. Caleb and Nina realize this at the same moment, and it sews them close. They both recall Nathaniel's previous Halloweens in descending order: knight in shining armor, astronaut, pumpkin, crocodile, and, as an infant, caterpillar. "What would you like to be?" Nina asks.

  Nathaniel tosses his magical tablecloth over his shoulder. "A superhero," he says. "A new one."

  Caleb is fairly sure they could muster up Superman on short notice. "What's wrong with the old ones?"

  Everything, it turns out. Nathaniel doesn't like Superman because he can be felled by Kryptonite. Green Lantern's ring doesn't work on anything yellow. The Incredible Hulk is too stupid. Even Captain Marvel runs the risk of being tricked into saying the word Shazam! and turning himself back into young Billy Batson.

  "How about Ironman?" Caleb suggests.

  Nathaniel shakes his head. "He could rust."

  "Aquaman?"

  "Needs water."

  "Nathaniel," Nina says gently, "nobody's perfect."

  "But they're supposed to be," Nathaniel explains, and Caleb understands. Tonight, Nathaniel needs to be invincible. He needs to know that what happened to him could never, ever happen again.

  "What we need," Nina muses, "is a superhero with no Achilles heel."

  "A what?" Nathaniel says.

  She takes his hand. "Let's see." From his closet, she extracts a pirate's bandanna, and wraps this rakishly around Nathaniel's head. She crisscrosses a spool of yellow crime-scene tape Patrick once brought around Nathaniel's chest. She gives him swimming goggles, tinted blue, for X-ray vision, and pulls a pair of red shorts over his sweatpants because this is Maine, after all, and she is not about to let him go out half-dressed in the cold. Then she surreptitiously motions to Caleb, so that he pulls off his red thermal shirt and hands it to her. This she ties around Nathaniel's neck, a second cape. "Oh, my gosh, do you see who he looks like?"

  Caleb has no idea, but he plays along. "I can't believe it."

  "Who? Who!" Nathaniel is fairly dancing with excitement.

  "Well, IncrediBoy, of course," Nina answers. "Didn't you ever see his comic book?"

  "No ..."

  "Oh, he's the most super superhero. He's got these two capes, see, which allow him to fly farther and faster."

  "Cool!"

  "And he can pull people's thoughts right out of their heads, before they even speak them. In fact, you look so much like him, I bet you've got that superpower already. Go ahead." Nina squinches her eyes shut. "Guess what I'm thinking."

  Nathaniel frowns, concentrating. "Um ... that I'm as good at this as IncrediBoy?"

  She slaps her forehead. "Oh my gosh! Nathaniel, how'd you do that!"

  "I think I got his X-ray vision, too," Nathaniel crows. "I can see through houses and know what candy people are giving out!" He dashes forward, heading for the stairs. "Hurry up, okay?"

  With the buffer of their son gone, Caleb and Nina smile uncomfortably at each other again. "What are you going to do when he can't see through doors?" Caleb asks.

  "Tell him it's a glitch in his optical sensor that needs to be checked out."

  Nina walks out of the room, but Caleb stays upstairs a moment longer. From the window, he watches his ragtag son leap off the porch in a single bound--grace born of confidence. Even from up here, Caleb can see Nathaniel's smile, can hear the sharp start of his laugh. And he wonders if maybe Nina is right; if a superhero is nothing but an ordinary person who believes that she cannot fail.

  She is holding the gun that's a blow-dryer up to her head, when I ask. "What's the next thing after love?"

  "What?"

  The stuff I need to say is all tangled. "You love Mason, right?"

  The dog hears his name and smiles. "Well, sure," she says.

  "And you love Daddy more than that?"

  She looks down at me. "Yes."

  "And you love me even higher?"

  Her eyebrows fly. "True."

  "So what comes after that?"

  She lifts me and puts me on the edge of the sink. The countertop is warm where the blow-dryer has been sitting; it just might be alive. For a minute, she thinks hard. "The next thing after love," she tells me, "is being a mom."

  FIVE

  At one point in my life, I had wanted to save the world. I'd listened, dewy-eyed, to law school professors and truly believed that as a prosecutor, I had a chance to rid the planet of evil. This was before I understood that when you have five hundred open cases, you make the conscious decision to plead as many as you can. It was before I realized that righteousness has less to do with a verdict than persuasion. Before I realized that I had not chosen a crusade, but only a job.

  Still, it never entered my mind to be a defense attorney. I couldn't stomach the thought of standing up and lying on behalf of a morally depraved criminal, and as far as I was concerned most of them were guilty until proven innocent. But sitting in Fisher Carrington's sumptuous paneled office, being handed Jamaican coffee, $27.99 per pound, by his trim and efficient secretary, I start to understand the attraction.

  Fisher comes out to meet me. His Newman-blue eyes twinkle, as if he couldn't be more delighted to find me sitting in his antechamber. And why shouldn't he be? He could charge me an arm and a leg and knows I will pay it. He has the chance to work on a high profile murder that will net him a ton of new business. And finally, it's a departure from your run-of-the-mill case, the kind Fisher can do in his sleep.

  "Nina," he says. "Good to see you." As if, less than twenty-four hours ago, we hadn't met each other in the conference room of a jail. "Come back to my office."

  It is heavily paneled, a man's room that conjures the smell of cigar smoke and snifters of brandy. He has the same books of statutes lining his shelves that I do, and somehow that is comforting. "How's Nathaniel?"

  "Fine." I take a seat in an enormous leather wing chair and let my eyes wander.

  "He must be happy to have his mother home."

  More than his father is, I think. My attention fixes on a small Picasso sketch on the wall. Not a lithograph--the real thing.

  "What are you thinking?" Fisher asks, sitting down across from me.

  "That the state doesn't pay me enough." I turn to him. "Thank you. For getting me out yesterday."

  "Much
as I'd like to take the credit, that was a gift horse prancing in, and you know it. I didn't expect leniency from Brown."

  "I wouldn't expect it again." I can feel his eyes on me, measuring. As compared to my behavior at yesterday's brief meeting, I'm under much greater control.

  "Let's get down to business," Fisher announces. "Did you give the police a statement?"

  "They asked. I repeated that I'd done all I could do. That I couldn't do any more."

  "You said this how many times?"

  "Over and over."

  Fisher sets down his Waterman and folds his hands. His expression is a curious mix of morbid fascination, respect, and resignation. "You know what you're doing," he says, a statement.

  I look at him over the rim of my coffee mug. "You don't want to ask me that."

  Leaning back in his chair, Fisher grins. He has dimples, two in each cheek. "Were you a drama major before you got to law school?"

  "Sure," I say. "Weren't you?"

  There are so many questions he wants to ask me; I can see them fighting inside of him like small soldiers desperate to join this fray. I can't blame him. By now, he knows I'm sane; he knows the game I have chosen to play. This is equivalent to having a Martian land in one's backyard. You can't possibly walk away without poking it once, to see what it's made of inside.

  "How come you had your husband call me?"

  "Because juries love you. People believe you." I hesitate, then give him the truth. "And because I hated going up against you."

  Fisher accepts this as his due. "We need to prepare an insanity defense. Or go with extreme anger."

  There are no different degrees of murder in Maine, and the mandatory sentence is twenty-five years to life. Which means if I am to be acquitted, I have to be not guilty--(difficult to prove, given that the act is on film); not guilty by reason of insanity; or under the influence of extreme anger brought on by adequate provocation. That final defense reduces the crime to manslaughter, a lesser charge. It's somewhat amazing that in this state, it is legal to kill someone if they piss you off enough and if the jury agrees you had good reason to be pissed off, but there you have it.

  "My advice is to argue both," Fisher suggests. "If--"

  "No. If you argue both, it looks sleazy to the jury. Trust me. It seems like even you can't make up your mind why I'm not guilty." I think about this for a minute. "Besides, having twelve jurors agree on what justifies provocation is more of a long shot than having them recognize insanity when a prosecutor shoots a man right in front of a judge. And winning on extreme anger isn't an out-and-out win--it only lessens the conviction. If you get me off on an insanity charge, it's a complete acquittal."

  My defense is starting to form in my mind. "Okay." I lean forward, ready to let him in on my plan. "We're going to get a call from Brown for the state psychiatric investigation. We can go to that shrink first, and based on that report, we can find someone to use as our own psychiatric expert."

  "Nina," Fisher says patiently. "You are the client. I am the attorney. Understand that now, or this isn't going to work."

  "Come on, Fisher. I know exactly what to do."

  "No, you don't. You're a prosecutor, and you don't know the first thing about running a defense."

  "It's all about putting on a good act, right? And haven't I already done that?" Fisher waits until I settle back in my chair with my arms crossed over my chest, defeated. "All right, fine. Then what are we going to do?"

  "Go to the state psychiatrist," Fisher says dryly. "And then find someone to use as our own psychiatric expert." When I lift my brows, he ignores me. "I'm going to ask for all the information Detective Ducharme put together on the investigation involving your son, because that was what led you to believe you needed to kill this man."

  Kill this man. The phrase sends a shiver down my spine. We toss these words about so easily, as if we are discussing the weather, or the Red Sox scores.

  "Is there anything else you can think of that I need to ask for?"

  "The underwear," I tell him. "My son's underwear had semen on it. It was sent out for DNA testing but hasn't come back yet."

  "Well, that doesn't really matter anymore--"

  "I want to see it," I announce, brooking no argument. "I need to see that report."

  Fisher nods, makes a note. "Fine, then. I'll request it. Anything else?" I shake my head. "All right. When I get the discovery in, I'll call you. In the meantime, don't leave the state, don't talk to anyone in your office, don't screw up, because you're not going to get a second chance." He stands, dismissing me.

  I walk to the door, trailing my fingers over the polished wainscoting. With my hand on the knob, I pause, then look over my shoulder. He is making notes inside my file, just the way I do when I begin a case. "Fisher?" He glances up. "Do you have any children?"

  "Two. One daughter's a sophomore at Dartmouth, the other is in high school."

  It is suddenly hard to swallow. "Well," I say softly. "That's good to know."

  Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.

  None of the reporters or parishioners who have come to Father Szyszynski's funeral Mass at St. Anne's recognize the woman draped in black and sitting in the second-to-last row of the church, not responding to the Kyrie. I have been careful to hide my face with a veil; to keep my silence. I have not told Caleb where I am headed; he thinks I am coming home after my appointment with Fisher. But instead I sit in a state of mortal sin, listening to the archbishop extol the virtues of the man I killed.

  He may have been accused, but he was never convicted. Ironically, I have turned him into a victim. The pews are crushed with his flock, coming to pay their last respects. Everything is silver and white--the vestments of the clergy that have come to send Szyszynski off to God, the lilies lining the aisle, the altar boys who led the procession with their tapers, the pall over the casket--and the church looks, I imagine, like Heaven does.

  The archbishop prays over the gleaming coffin, two priests beside him waving the censer and the Holy Water. They seem familiar; I realize they are the ones that recently visited the parish. I wonder if one of them will take over, now that there is no priest.

  I confess to Almighty God, and to you here present, that I have sinned through my own fault.

  The sweet smoke of candles and flowers make my head swim. The last funeral Mass I attended was my father's, one with far less pageantry than this, although the service bled by in the same stream of disbelief. I can remember the priest who had put his hands over mine and offered me the greatest condolence he could: "He's with God, now."

  As the Gospel is read, I look around the congregation. Some of the older women are sobbing; most are staring at the archbishop with the solemnity he commands. If Szyszynski's body belongs to Christ, then who controlled his mind? Who placed in that brain the seed to hurt a child? What made him pick mine?

  Words jump out at me: commend his soul; with his Maker; Hosanna in the highest.

  The organ's notes throb, and then the archbishop stands to deliver the eulogy. "Father Glen Szyszynski," he begins, "was well loved by his congregation."

  I cannot say why I came here; why I knew that I would swim an ocean, break through fetters, run cross-country if need be to witness Szyszynksi's burial. Maybe it is closure for me; maybe it is the proof I still need.

  This is my Body.

  I picture his face in profile, the minute before I pulled the trigger.

  This is the cup of my Blood.

  His skull, shattered.

  Into the silence I gasp, and the people sitting on either side of me turn, curious.

  When we stand like automatons and file into the aisle to take Communion, I find my feet moving before I can remember to stop them. I open my mouth for the priest holding the Host. "Body of Christ," he says, and he looks me in the eye.

  "Amen," I answer.

  When I turn my gaze falls on the front left pew, where a woman in black is bent over at the waist, sobbing so hard she cannot catch her breath.
Her iron-gray curls wilt beneath her black cloche hat; her hands are knotted so tightly around the edge of the pew I think she may splinter the wood. The priest who has given me Communion whispers to another clergyman, who takes over as he goes to comfort her. And that is when it hits me:

  Father Szyszynski was someone's son, too.

  My chest fills with lead and my legs melt beneath me. I can tell myself that I have gotten retribution for Nathaniel; I can say that I was morally right--but I cannot take away the truth that another mother has lost her child because of me.

  Is it right to close one cycle of pain if it only opens up another one?

  The church starts to spin, and the flowers are reaching for my ankles. A face as wide as the moon looms in front of me, speaking words that I cannot hear. If I faint, they will know who I am. They will crucify me. I summon all the strength I have left to shove aside the people in my way, to lurch down the aisle, to push open the double doors of St. Anne's and break free.

  Mason, the golden retriever, has been called Nathaniel's dog for as long as Nathaniel can remember, although he was part of the family for ten months before Nathaniel was even born. And the strange thing is, if it had been the other way around--if Nathaniel had gotten here first--he would have told his parents that he really wanted a cat. He likes the way you can drape a kitten over your arm, the same way you'd carry a coat if you got too hot. He likes the sound they make against his ear, how it makes his skin hum, too. He likes the way they don't take baths; he likes the fact that they can fall from a great height, but land on their feet.

  He asked for a kitten one Christmas, and although Santa had brought him everything else, the cat didn't happen. It was Mason, he knew. The dog had a habit of bringing in gifts--the skull of a mouse he'd chewed clean, the body of a thrashed snake found at the end of the drive, a toad caught in the bowl of his mouth. God knows, Nathaniel's mother said, what he'd do to a kitten.

  So that day when he wandered in the basement of the church, the day he'd been looking at the dragon painting in Father Glen's office, the first thing Nathaniel noticed was the cat. She was black, with three white paws, as if she'd stepped into paint and realized, partway through, that it wasn't such a good idea. Her tail twitched like a snake charmer's cobra. Her face was no bigger than Nathaniel's palm.