Perfect Match (11 page)

Patrick holds out his hand to me. “Then let's just see what he can tell us toda y.”

Nathaniel is on the top bunk, sorting his daddy's old collection of baseball c ards into piles. He likes the feel of their frayed edges, and the way they sme ll gray. His dad says to be careful, that one day these could pay for college, but Nathaniel couldn't care less. Right now he likes touching them, staring a t all the funny faces, and thinking that his dad used to do the same thing. There's a knock, and his mom comes in with Patrick. Without hesitation, Pat rick climbs up the ladder-all six-feet-two inches of him squashing into the small space between ceiling and mattress. It makes Nathaniel smile a littl e. “Hey, Weed.” Patrick thumps the bed with a fist. “This is comfy. Gotta g et me one of these.” He sits up, pretends to crack his head on the ceiling.

“What do you think? Should I ask your mom to buy me a bed like this too?” Nathaniel shakes his head and hands Patrick a card. “Is this for me?” Patric k asks, then reads the name and smiles broadly. “Mike Schmidt, rookie. I'm s ure your dad will be thrilled you've been so generous.” He tucks it into his pocket and takes out a pad and pen at the same time. “Nathaniel, you think it would be all right if I asked you some questions?”

Well. He is tired of questions. He is tired, period. But Patrick climbed all t he way up here. Nathaniel jerks his head, yes.

Patrick touches the boy's knee, slowly, so slowly that it doesn't even make Nathaniel jump, although these days everything does. “Will you tell me the truth, Weed?” he asks softly.

Slower this time, Nathaniel nods.

“Did your daddy hurt you?”

Nathaniel looks at Patrick, then at his mother, and emphatically shakes his h ead. He feels something open up in his chest, making it easier to breathe.

“Did somebody else hurt you?”

Yes.

“Do you know who it was?”

Yes.

Patrick's gaze is locked with Nathaniel's. He won't let him turn away, no ma tter how badly Nathaniel wants to. “Was it a boy or a girl?” Nathaniel is trying to remember-how is it said again? He looks at his mother, but Patrick shakes his head, and he knows that, now, it is all up to him. Te ntatively, his hand comes up to his head. He touches his brow, as if there is a baseball cap there. “Boy,” he hears his mother translate.

“Was it a grown-up, or a kid?”

Nathaniel blinks at him. He cannot sign those words.

“Well, was he big like me, or little like you?”

Nathaniel's hand hovers between his own body, and Patrick's. Then falls, del iberately, in the middle.

That makes Patrick grin. “Okay, it was a medium guy, and it was someone you know?”

Yes.

“Can you tell me who?”

Nathaniel feels his whole face tighten, muscles bunching. He squeezes his ey es shut. Please please please, he thinks. Let me. “Patrick,” his mother says , and she takes a step forward, but Patrick holds out a hand and she stops.

“Nathaniel, if I brought you a bunch of pictures”-he points to the baseball cards-“like these ... do you think you could show me who this person was?” Nathaniel's hands flutter over the piles, bumblebees choosing a place to li ght. He looks from one card to the other. He cannot read, he cannot speak, but he knows that Rollie Fingers had a handlebar moustache, Al Hrabosky looked like a grizzly bear. Once something sticks in his head, it stay s there; it's just a matter of getting it back out again.

Nathaniel looks up at Patrick; and he nods. This, this he can do. Monica has been in accommodations far worse than the efficiency suite where she finds Caleb Frost, but this is almost more jarring, and she thinks it is because she has seen the sort of home where he is supposed to be. The mi nute Caleb recognizes her face through the keyhole of the door, he throws i t open. "What's the matter with Nathaniel?' he asks, true fear washing over his features.

“Nothing. Nothing at all. He's made another disclosure. A new ID.”

“I don't understand.”

“It means you're no longer a suspect, Mr. Frost,” Monica says quietly. Questions rise in him like a bonfire. “Who,” Caleb manages, the word tasting of ash.

“I think you should go home and speak to your wife about it,” she answers, then turns briskly and walks away, her purse tucked primly beneath her arm.

“Wait,” Caleb calls out. He takes a deep breath. “Is ... is Nina okay with that ?”

Monica smiles, lets the light reach her eyes. “Who do you think asked me t o come?”

Peter agrees to meet me at the district court, where I'm going to have the r estraining order vacated. The process takes all of ten minutes, a rubber sta mp, with the judge asking only one question: How is Nathaniel?

By the time I come into the lobby, Peter is racing through the front door. He immediately comes toward me, concern drawing down the corners of his mou th. “I got here as soon as I could,” he says breathlessly. His eyes dart to Nathaniel, holding my hand.

He thinks I need him to twist the letter of the law for me, squeeze blood fr om the stone heart of a judge, do something to stack the scales of justice i n my favor. Suddenly I am embarrassed by the reason I called him.

“What is it?” Peter demands. “Anything, Nina.” I slip my hands in my coat pockets. “I really just wanted to get a cup of coffee,” I admit. “I wanted to feel, for five minutes, like everything was back the way it used to be.”

Peter's gaze is a spotlight; it sees down to my soul. “I can do that too,” he says, and loops his arm through mine.

Although there are no seats left at the bar at Tequila Mockingbird by the ti me Patrick arrives, the bartender takes one look at him and hints strongly t o a visiting businessman that he take his drink to a booth in the back. Patr ick wraps his black mood around him like a parka, hops onto the vacant stool , and signals to Stuyvesant. The bartender comes over pouring his usual, Gle nfiddich. But he hands Patrick the bottle, and keeps the glass of scotch beh ind the bar. “Just in case someone else here wants a shot,” Stuyv explains. Patrick looks at the bottle, at the bartender. He tosses his car keys on the cou nter, a fair trade, and takes a long swig of the liquor.

By now, Nina has been to the court and back. Maybe Caleb has made it home in time for dinner. Maybe they've gotten Nathaniel to bed early, and are e ven now lying in the dark next to each other.

Patrick picks up his bottle again. He has been in their bedroom before. Big k ing-size bed. If he was married to her, they'd sleep on a narrow cot, that's how close to her he would be.

He'd been married himself for three years, because he believed that if you wan ted to get rid of a hole, you filled it. He had not realized at the time that there were all sorts of fillers that took up space, but had no substance. That made you feel just as empty.

Patrick pitches forward as a blond woman hits him hard on the shoulder. “Y ou pervert!”

“What the hell?”

She narrows her eyes. They are green, and caked with too much mascara. “D id you just touch my ass?”

“No.”

Suddenly, she grins, insinuating herself between Patrick and the elderly m an on his right. “Well, damn. How many times will I have to walk by before you do?”

Sliding her drink beside Patrick's bottle, she holds out her hand. Manicure d. He hates manicured hands. “I'm Xenia. And you are?”

“Really not interested.” Patrick smiles tightly, turns back to the bar.

“My mom didn't raise a quitter,” Xenia says. “What do you do for a living?”

“I'm a funeral director.”

“No, really.”

Patrick sighs. “I'm on the vice squad.”

“No, really.”

He faces her again. “Really. I'm a police officer.” Her eyes widen. “Does that mean I'm busted?”

“Depends. Did you break any laws?”

Xenia's gaze travels the length of his body. “Not yet.” Dipping a finger in her drink-something pink and frothy-she touches her shirt, and then his. “Wa nna go to my place and get out of these wet clothes?”

He blushes, then tries to pretend it didn't happen. “Don't think so.” She props her chin on her fist. “Guess you better just buy me a drink.” He starts to turn her down again, then hesitates. “All right. What are you ha ving?”

“An Orgasm.”

“Of course,” Patrick says, hiding a smile. It would be so easy-to go home wi th this girl, waste a condom and a few hours' sleep, get the itch out of his blood. Chances are, he could fuck her without ever telling her his name. An d in return, for just a few hours, he would feel like someone wanted him. He would be, for a night, someone's first choice.

Except this particular someone would not be his first choice. Xenia trails her nails along the nape of Patrick's neck. “I'm just going to ca rve our initials in the door of the ladies' room,” she murmurs, backing away.

“You don't know my initials.”

“I'll make them up.” She gives a little wave, then disappears into the crowd. Patrick calls over Stuyvesant and pays for Xenia's second drink. He leaves i t sweating on a cocktail napkin for her. Then he walks out of Tequila Mockin gbird stone sober, facing the fact that Nina has ruined him for anyone else. Nathaniel lies on the lower bunk while I read him a book before bedtime. Sud denly, he jackknifes upright and fairly flies across the room, to the doorwa y where Caleb stands. “You're home,” I say, the obvious, but he doesn't hear . He is lost in this moment.

Seeing them together, I want to kick myself again. How could I ever have be lieved that Caleb was at fault?

The room is suddenly too small to hold all three of us. I back out of it, clo sing the door behind me. Downstairs, I wash the silverware that sits on the d rying rack, already clean. I pick Nathaniel's toys up from the floor. I sit d own on the living room couch; then, restless, stand up and arrange the cushio ns.

“He's asleep.”

Caleb's voice cuts to the quick. I turn, my arms crossed over my chest. Does t hat look too defensive? I settle them at my sides, instead. “I'm . . . I'm gla d you're home.”

“Are you?”

His face gives nothing away. Coming out of the shadows, Caleb walks towar d me. He stops two feet away, but there might as well be a universe betwe en us.

I know every line of his face. The one that was carved the first year of our marriage, by laughing so often. The one that was born of worries the year he left the contracting company to go into business for himself. The one that de veloped from focusing hard on Nathaniel as he took his first steps, said his first word. My throat closes tight as a vise, and all the apologies sit bitte r in my stomach. We had been naive enough to believe that we were invincible; that we could run blind through the hairpin turns of life at treacherous spe eds and never crash. “Oh, Caleb,” I say finally, through the tears, “these th ings, they weren't supposed to happen to us.”

Then he is crying too, and we cling to each other, fitting our pain into each other's hollows and breaks. “He did this. He did this to our baby.” Caleb holds my face in his hands. “We're going to get through it. We're going to make Nathaniel get better.” But his sentences turn up at the ends, like s mall animals begging. “There are three of us in this, Nina,” he whispers. “An d we're all in it together.”

“Together,” I repeat, and press my open mouth against his neck. “Caleb, I'm so sorry.”

“Shh.”

“I am, no, I am-”

He cuts me off with a kiss. The action arrests me; it is not what I have been expecting. But then I grab him by the collar of his shirt and kiss him back. I kiss him from the bottom of my soul, I kiss him until he can taste the cop per edge of sorrow. Together.

We undress each other with brutality, ripping fabric and popping buttons that roll under the couch like secrets. This is the anger overflowing: anger that this has happened to our son, that we cannot turn back time. For the first t ime in days I can get rid of the rage; I pour it into Caleb, only to realize that he is doing the same to me. We scratch, we bite, but then Caleb lays me down with the softest touch. Our eyes lock when he moves inside me; neither o ne of us would dare to blink. My body remembers: This is what it is to be fil led by love, instead of despair.

The last case I worked on with Monica LaFlamme had not been a success. She sent me a report, stating that a Mrs. Grady had called her. Apparently, w hile drying her seven-year-old off after a bath, Eli grabbed the Mickey Mo use towel and began to simulate sexual thrusting, then named his stepfathe r as the perp. The child was taken to Maine Medical Center, but there were no physical findings. Oh, and Eli suffered from something called oppositi onal defiance disorder.

We met at my office, in the room we use to assess children for competency ex ams. On the other side of a one-way mirror was a small table, tiny chairs, a few toys, and a rainbow painted on the wall. Monica and I watched Eli run a round like a hellion, literally climbing the curtains. “Well,” I said. “This should be fun.”

In the adjoining room, Mrs. Grady ordered her son to stop. “You need to ca lm down, Eli,” she said. But that just made him scream more, run more. I turned to Monica. “What's oppositional defiance disorder, anyway?” The social worker shrugged. “My guess?” she said, gesturing toward Eli. “T hat. He does the opposite of what you ask him to do.”

I gaped at her. “It's a real psychiatric diagnosis? I mean, it's not just the de finition of being seven years old?”

“Go figure.”

“What about forensic evidence?” I unrolled a grocery bag, and pulled out a n eatly folded towel. Mickey's face leered up at me. The big ears, the sideway s grin-it was creepy on its own merits, I thought.

“The mother washed it after the bath that night.”

“Of course she did.”

Monica sighed as I handed the towel to her. “Mrs. Grady's intent on going to trial.”

“It's not her decision.” But I smiled as Eli's mother took a spot beside me and the police officer who was investigating the case. I gave her my spiel, about seeing what information Ms. LaFlamme could get out of Eli, for the rec ord.

We watched through the mirror as Monica asked Eli to sit down.

“No,” he said, and started running laps.

“I need you to come sit down in this chair. Can you do that, please?” Eli picked up the chair and threw it in the corner. With supreme patience, Mo nica retrieved it and set it down beside her own. “Eli, I need you to come si t in this chair for a little while, and then we'll go get Mommy.”