Perfect Match

by Jodi Picoult

  "Sometimes when I hold his hand," I answer slowly, finally, "it's like it doesn't fit anymore. I mean, he's only five, you know? But I can feel what's coming. Sometimes his palm's just a little too wide, or his fingers are too strong." Glancing at Adrienne, I shrug. "Each time I do it, I think this may be the last time I hold his hand. That next time, he may be holding mine."

  She smiles softly at me. "Honey, he ain't coming today."

  It is 12:46 P.M., and I have to turn away, because Adrienne is right.

  The CO wakes me up in the late afternoon. "Come on," he mutters, and slides open the door of my cell. I scramble upright, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. He leads me down a hallway to a part of the jail I have not yet visited. A row of small rooms, mini-prisons, are on my left. The guard opens one and guides me inside.

  It is no bigger than a broom closet. Inside, a stool faces a Plexiglas window. A telephone receiver is mounted to the wall at its side. And on the other side of the glass, in a twin of a room, sits Caleb.

  "Oh!" The word comes on a cry, and I lurch for the telephone, picking it up and holding it to my ear. "Caleb," I say, knowing he can see my face, read my words. "Please, please, pick up the phone." I pantomime over and over. But his face is chiseled and hard; his arms crossed tight on his chest. He will not give me this one thing.

  Defeated, I sink onto the stool and rest my forehead against the Plexiglas. Caleb bends down to pick something up, and I realize that Nathaniel has been there all along, beneath the counter where I could not see him. He kneels on the stool, eyes wide and wary. He hesitantly touches the glass, as if he needs to know that I am not a trick of the light.

  At the beach once, we found a hermit crab. I turned it over so that Nathaniel could see its jointed legs scrambling. Put him on your palm, I said, and he'll crawl. Nathaniel had held out his hand, but every time I went to set the crab on it, he jerked away. He wanted to touch it, and he was terrified to touch it, in equal proportions.

  So I wave. I smile. I fill my little cubicle with the sound of his name.

  As I did with Caleb, I pick up the telephone receiver. "You too," I mouth, and I do it again, so Nathaniel can see how. But he shakes his head, and instead raises his hand to his chin. Mommy, he signs.

  The receiver falls out of my hand, a snake that strikes the wall beside it. I do not even need to look at Caleb for verification; just like that, I know.

  So with tears running down my face, I hold up my right hand, the I-L-Y combination that means I love you. I catch my breath as Nathaniel raises one small fist, unfurls the fingers like signal flags to match mine. Then, a peace sign, the number two handshape. I love you too.

  By now, Nathaniel is crying. Caleb says something to him that I cannot hear, and he shakes his head. Behind them, the guard opens the door.

  Oh, God, I am losing him.

  I rap on the glass to get his attention. Push my face up against it, then point to Nathaniel and nod. He does what I've asked, turning his cheek so that it touches the transparent wall.

  I lean close, kiss the barrier between us, and pretend it isn't there. Even after Caleb's carried him from the visiting room, I sit with my temple pressed to the glass, convincing myself I can still feel Nathaniel on the other side.

  It didn't happen just that once. Two Sundays afterward, when Nathaniel's family went to Mass, the priest came into the little room where Miss Fiore was reading everyone a story about a guy with a slingshot who took down a giant. "I need a volunteer," he said, and even though all the hands went up, he looked right at Nathaniel.

  "You know," he said in the office, "Esme missed you."

  "She did?"

  "Oh, absolutely. She's been saying your name for days now."

  Nathaniel laughed. "She has not."

  "Listen." He cupped his ear, leaned in to the cat on the couch. "There you go."

  Nathaniel listened, but only heard a faint mew.

  "Maybe you have to get closer," the priest said. "Climb up here."

  For just a moment, Nathaniel hesitated, remembered. His mother had told him about going off alone with strangers. But this wasn't really a stranger, was it? He sat down in the priest's lap, and pressed his ear right against the belly of the cat. "That's a good boy."

  The man shifted his legs, the way Nathaniel's father sometimes did when he was sitting on his knee and his foot fell asleep. "I could move," Nathaniel suggested.

  "No, no." The priest's hand slipped down Nathaniel's back, over his bottom, to rest in his own lap. "This is fine."

  But then Nathaniel felt his shirt being untucked. Felt the long fingers of the priest, hot and damp, against his spine. Nathaniel did not know how to tell him no. His head was filled with a memory: a fly caught in the car one day when they were driving, which kept slamming itself into the windows in a desperate effort to get out. "Father?" Nathaniel whispered.

  "I'm just blessing you," he replied. "A special helper deserves that. I want God to know that every time He sees you." His fingers stilled. "You do want that, don't you?"

  A blessing was a good thing, and for God to keep an extra eye on him--well, it was what his mother and father would want, Nathaniel was sure of it. He turned his attention back to the lazy cat, and that was when he heard it--just a puff of breath--Esme, or maybe not Esme, sighing his name.

  The second time I am called out by a correctional officer is Sunday afternoon. He takes me upstairs to the conference rooms, where inmates meet privately with their attorneys. Maybe Fisher has come to see how I am holding up. Maybe he wants to discuss tomorrow's hearing.

  But to my surprise, when the door is unlocked, Patrick is waiting inside. Spread out on the conference table are six containers of take-out Chinese food. "I got everything you like," he says. "General Cho's chicken, vegetable lo mein, beef with broccoli, Lake Tung Ting shrimp, and steamed dumplings. Oh, and that crap that tastes like rubber."

  "Bean curd." I lift my chin a notch, challenging him. "I thought you didn't want to talk to me."

  "I don't. I want to eat with you."

  "Are you sure? Think of all the things I could say while your mouth is full, before you have a chance to--"

  "Nina." Patrick's blue eyes seem faded, weary. "Shut up."

  But even as he scolds me, he holds out his hand. It rests on the table, extended, an offering more tantalizing than anything else before me.

  I sit across from him and grab on. Immediately, Patrick squeezes, and that's my undoing. I lay my cheek on the cold, scarred table, and Patrick strokes my hair. "I rigged your fortune cookie," he confesses. "It says you'll be acquitted."

  "What does yours say?"

  "That you'll be acquitted." Patrick smiles. "I didn't know which one you'd pick."

  My eyes drift shut as I let down my guard. "It's okay," Patrick tells me, and I believe him. I place his palm against my burning face, as if shame is something he might carry in the cup of his hand, fling someplace far away.

  When you call someone on the prison pay phone, they know it. Every thirty seconds a voice gets on the line, informing the person on the other end that this transmission is taking place from the Alfred County Jail. I use the fifty cents Patrick gave me that afternoon, and make the call on my way to the shower. "Listen," I say, the minute I reach Fisher at his home number. "You wanted me to tell you what to say on Monday morning."

  "Nina?" In the background I hear the laughter of a woman. The sound of glasses, or china, in a sink.

  "I need to talk to you."

  "You've caught us in the middle of dinner."

  "Well, for God's sake, Fisher." I turn my back as a line of men straggles in from the outside courtyard. "Why don't I just call back then when it's more convenient for you, because I'm sure I'll have another opportunity, in, oh, three or four days."

  I hear the distant noise growing more faint; the click of a door. "All right. What is it?"

  "Nathaniel isn't speaking. You need to get me out of here, because he's falling apart."

  "He isn't speaki
ng? Again?"

  "Caleb brought him yesterday. And ... he's signing."

  Fisher considers this. "If we get Caleb down here to testify, and Nathaniel's psychiatrist--"

  "You'll have to subpoena him."

  "The psychiatrist?"

  "Caleb."

  If this surprises him, he doesn't admit it. "Nina, the fact is, you messed up. I'm going to try to get you out. I still think it's unlikely. But if you want me to give it a shot, you're going to have to sit tight for a week."

  "A week?" My voice rises. "Fisher, this is my son we're talking about. Do you know how much worse Nathaniel might get in a week?"

  "I'm counting on it."

  A voice cuts in. This call is being made from the Alfred County Jail. If you wish to continue, please deposit another twenty-five cents.

  By the time I tell Fisher to go screw himself, the line has already been disconnected.

  Adrienne and I are given a half hour together outside in the exercise courtyard. We walk the perimeter, and then when we get cold, we stand with our backs to the wind beneath the high brick wall. When the CO goes inside, Adrienne smokes cigarettes that she makes by burning down orange peels she collects from the cafeteria trash, and rolling the ash in onion-skin pages torn from Jane Eyre, a book her Aunt Lu sent for her birthday. She has already ripped through page 298. I told her to ask for Vanity Fair next year.

  I sit cross-legged on the dead grass. Adrienne kneels behind me, smoking, her hands in my hair. When she gets out, she wants to be a cosmetologist. Her nail makes a part from my temple to the nape of my neck. "No pigtails," I instruct.

  "Don't insult me." She makes another part, parallel to the first, and begins to braid in tight rows. "You've got fine hair."

  "Thank you."

  "It wasn't a compliment, honey. Look at this ... slips right out of my fingers."

  She pulls and tugs, and several times I have to wince. If only it were that easy to tighten up the tangles inside my head, too. Her glowing cigarette, smoked down to within an inch, sails over my shoulder and lands on the basketball court. "There," Adrienne says. "Ain't you the bomb."

  Of course, I can't see. I touch my hands to the knobs and ridges the braids have made on my scalp, and then, just because I am feeling mean-spirited, begin to unravel all Adrienne's hard work. She shrugs, then sits down next to me. "Did you always want to be a lawyer?"

  "No." Who does, after all? What kid considers being an attorney a glamorous vocation? "I wanted to be the man at the circus who tames the lions."

  "Oh, don't I know it. Those sequined costumes were something."

  For me, it hadn't been about the outfits. I'd loved the way Gunther Gebel-Williams could walk into a cage full of beasts and make them think they were house cats. In this, I realize, my actual profession has not fallen that far off the mark. "How about you?"

  "My daddy wanted me to be the center for the Chicago Bulls. Me, I was angling for Vegas showgirl."

  "Ah." I draw up my knees, wrap my arms around them. "What does your daddy think now?"

  "He ain't doing much thinking, I imagine, six feet under."

  "I'm sorry."

  Adrienne glances up. "Don't be."

  But she has retreated somewhere else, and to my surprise, I find I want her back. The game that Peter Eberhardt and I used to play swims into my mind, and I turn to Adrienne. "Best soap opera," I challenge.

  "What?"

  "Just play along with me. Give your opinion."

  "The Young and the Restless," Adrienne replies. "Which, by the way, those fool boys in Minimum don't even have the good sense to listen to on their TV at one P.M."

  "Worst crayon color?"

  "Burnt sienna. What is up with that, anyway? They might as well call it Vomit." Adrienne grins, a flash of white in her face. "Best jeans?"

  "Levi's 501s. Ugliest CO?"

  "Oh, the one who comes on after midnight that needs to bleach her moustache. You ever see the size of her ass? Hello, honey, let me introduce you to Miss Jenny Craig."

  Then we are both laughing, lying back on the cold ground and feeling winter seep into us by osmosis. When we finally catch our breath, there is a hollow in my chest, a sinking feeling that here, of all places, I should not be capable of joy. "Best place to be?" Adrienne asks after a moment.

  On the other side of this wall. In my bed, at home. Anywhere with Nathaniel.

  "Before," I answer, because I know she'll understand.

  In one of Biddeford's coffee shops, Quentin sits on a stool too small for a gnome. One sip from his mug, and hot chocolate burns the roof of his mouth. "Holy shit," he mutters, holding a napkin to his mouth, just as Tanya walks in the door in her nurse's outfit--scrubs, printed with tiny teddy bears.

  "Just shut up, Quentin," she says, sliding onto the stool beside him. "I'm not in the mood to hear you make fun of my uniform."

  "I wasn't." He gestures to the mug, then just gives up the battle. "What can I get you?"

  He orders Tanya a decaf mochaccino. "You like it, then?" he asks.

  "Coffee?"

  "Nursing."

  He had met Tanya at the University of Maine when she was a student, too. What's this, he'd asked at the end of their first date, trailing his fingers over her collarbone. A clavicle, she said. And this? His hand had run down the xylophone of her spine. The coccyx. He'd spread his fingers over the curve of her hip. This is the part of you I like best, he said. Her head had fallen back, her eyes drifting shut as he bared the skin and kissed her there. Ilium, she'd whispered.

  Nine months later, there had been Gideon. They were married, a mistake, six days before he was born. They stayed married for less than a year. Since then Quentin had supported his son financially, if not emotionally.

  "I must hate it, if I've stuck with it that long," Tanya says, and it takes Quentin a moment to realize that she is only answering his question. Something must have crossed his face, because she touches her hand to his. "I'm sorry, that was rude. And here you were just being polite."

  Her coffee arrives. She blows on it before taking a sip. "Saw your name in the paper," Tanya says. "They got you down here for that priest's murder."

  Quentin shrugs. "Pretty simple case, actually."

  "Well, sure, if you look at the news." But Tanya shakes her head, all the same.

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "That the world isn't black and white, but you never did learn that."

  He raises his brows. "I didn't learn it? Who threw whom out?"

  "Who found whom screwing that girl who looked like a mouse?"

  "There were mitigating circumstances," Quentin says. "I was drunk." He hesitates, then adds, "And she looked more like a rabbit, really."

  Tanya rolls her eyes. "Quentin, it's been sixteen and a half years and you're still being a lawyer about it."

  "Well, what do you expect?"

  "For you to be a man," Tanya replies simply. "For you to admit that even the Great and Powerful Brown is capable of making a mistake once or twice a century." She pushes away her mug, although she isn't even half-finished. "I've always wondered if you're so good at what you do because it takes the heat off you. You know, if making everyone else walk the straight and narrow makes you righteous by association." She fishes in her purse and slaps five dollars on the counter. "Think about that when you're prosecuting that poor woman."

  "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

  "Can you even imagine what she was feeling, Quentin?" Tanya asks, her head tipped to the side. "Or is that kind of connection to a child beyond you?"

  He stands when she does. "Gideon wants nothing to do with me."

  Tanya buttons her coat, already halfway to the door. "I always said he got your intelligence," she says, and then, once again, she slips right through his grasp.

  By Thursday, Caleb has established a routine. He gets Nathaniel up, feeds him breakfast, and takes him for a walk with the dog. They drive to whatever site Caleb might be working at that morning, and while he
builds walls Nathaniel sits in the bed of the truck and plays with a shoe-box full of Legos. They eat lunch together, peanut butter and banana sandwiches or Thermoses of chicken soup, and soda that he's packed in the cooler. And then they go to Dr. Robichaud's office, where the psychiatrist tries, unsuccessfully, to get Nathaniel to speak again.

  It is a ballet, really--a story they are crafting without words, but comprehensible to anyone who sees Caleb and his silent son moving slowly through their days. To his surprise, this is even beginning to feel like normal. He likes the quiet, because when there are no words to be had, you can't tangle yourself up in the wrong ones. And if Nathaniel isn't talking, at least he isn't crying anymore.

  Caleb keeps blinders on, moving from one task to the next, getting Nathaniel fed and clothed and tucked in, and therefore only has a few moments each day to let his mind wander. Usually, this is when he is lying in bed, with the space beside him where Nina used to be. And even when he tries to keep himself from thinking it, the truth fills his mouth, bitter as a lemon: Life is easier, without her here.

  On Thursday, Fisher brings me the discovery to read. This consists of 124 eyewitness accounts that describe my murder of Father Szyszynski, Patrick's report on the molestation, my own incoherent statement to Evan Chao, and the autopsy report.

  I read Patrick's file first, feeling like a beauty queen poring over her scrapbook. Here is the explanation for everything else that sits in a stack at my side. Next, I read the statements of all the people who were in the courtroom the day of the murder. Of course, I save the best for last--the autopsy report, which I hold as reverently as if it were the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  First I look at the pictures. I stare at them so hard that when I close my eyes I can still see the ragged edge where the priest's face was simply gone now. I can envision the creamy color of his brain. His heart weighed 350 grams, or so says Dr. Vern Potter, coroner.

  "Dissection of the coronary arteries," I read aloud, "reveals narrowing of the lumen by atherosclerotic plaque. The most significant narrowing is in the left anterior descending coronary, where the lumen is narrowed by about 80 percent of the cross-sectional area."