Perfect Match (23 page)

“Nathaniel isn't speaking. You need to get me out of here, because he's fallin g apart.”

“He isn't speaking? 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. D o 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 disco nnected.

Adrienne and I are given a half hour together outside in the exercise court yard. We walk the perimeter, and then when we get cold, we stand with our b acks to the wind beneath the high brick wall. When the CO goes inside, Adri enne smokes cigarettes that she makes by burning down orange peels she coll ects 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, h er hands in my hair. When she gets out, she wants to be a cosmetologist. He r 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, s moked down to within an inch, sails over my shoulder and lands on the basket ball 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-spir ited, 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-Wi lliams could walk into a cage full of beasts and make them think they were h ouse 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 ang ling for Vegas showgirl.”

“Ah.” I draw up my knees, wrap my arms around them. “What does your da ddy 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 Vomi t.” 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 moustach e. 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 mom ent.

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 n ot 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 xy lophone of her spine. The coccyx. He'd spread his fingers over the curve of h er hip. This is the part of you I like best, he said. Her head had fallen bac k, her eyes drifting shut as he bared the skin and kissed her there. Ilium, s he'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 t hen 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 Q uentin 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 t he paper,” Tanya says. “They got you down here for that priest's murder.” Quentin shrugs. “Pretty simple case, actually.”

JODl PlCOULT “Well, sure, if you look at the news.” But Tanya shakes her head, all the sam e.

“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 hesi tates, 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 s till 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 t he 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 t he heat off you. You know, if making everyone else walk the straight and n arrow makes you righteous by association.” She fishes in her purse and sla ps 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 yo ur 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 h im 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 Nat haniel 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, t o get Nathaniel to speak again.

It is a ballet, really-a story they are crafting without words, but comprehen sible 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 yourse lf up in the wrong ones. And if Nathaniel isn't talking, at least he isn't cr ying 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 da y 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 hims elf 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 scrap book. Here is the explanation for everything else that sits in a stack at my s ide. Next, I read the statements of all the people who were in the courtroom t he 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 ey es I can still see the ragged edge where the priest's face was simply gone no w. 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 t he 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.”

Lumen. I repeat this word, and the others that are all that are left of this m onster: no evidence of thrombus; the gallbladder serosa is smooth and glisteni ng; the bladder is slightly trabeculated.

The stomach contains partly digested bacon and a cinnamon roll. Powder burns from the gun form a corona around the small hole in the rear of his head, where the bullet entered. There is a zone of necrosis around the bullet tract. Only 816 grams of his brain were left intact. There were contusions of the cerebellar tonsils bilaterally. Cause of death: Guns hot wound to head. Manner of death: Homicide.

This language is foreign, and I am suddenly, miraculously fluent. I touch my fingers to the autopsy report. Then I remember the twisted face of his moth er, at the funeral.

Attached to this file is another one, with the name of a local physician's of fice stamped on its side. This must be Father Szyszynski's medical history. I t is a thick file, far more than fifty years of routine checkups, but I don't bother to crack it open. Why should I? I have done what all those ordinary f lus and hacking coughs and aches and cramps could not.

I killed him.

“This is for you,” the paralegal says, handing Quentin a fax. He looks up, ta kes the pages, and then stares down at them, confused. The lab report has Szy szynski's name on it; but has nothing to do with his case. Then he realizes: It is from the previous case, the closed case-the one involving the defendant 's son. He glances at it, shrugging at the results, which are no great surpri se. “It's not mine,” Quentin says.

The paralegal blinks at him. “So what am I supposed to do with it?” He starts to hand it back to the woman, then puts it on the edge of his desk instead. “I 'll take care of it,” he answers, and buries himself in his work again until s he leaves his office.

There are a thousand places Caleb would rather be-in a prisoner-of-war's hove l, for example; or standing in an open field during a tornado. But he had to be present today, the subpoena said so. He stands in the courtroom cafeteria in his one jacket and threadbare tie, holding a cup of coffee so hot it is bu rning his palm, and tries to pretend that his hands aren't shaking with nerve s.

Fisher Carrington is not such a bad guy, he thinks. At least, he's not nearl y the demon that Nina has made him out to be. “Relax, Caleb,” the attorney s ays. “This will be over before you know it.” They make their way to the exit . Court will convene in five minutes; even now, they might be bringing Nina in.

“All you have to do is answer the questions we've already gone over, and th en Mr. Brown will ask a few of his own. No one's expecting you to do anythi ng but tell the truth. Okay?”

Caleb nods, tries to take a sip of the fire that is his coffee. He doesn't ev en like coffee. He wonders what Nathaniel is doing with Monica, downstairs in the playroom. He tries to distract himself by picturing an intricate brick p attern he created for a former insurance CEO's patio. But reality crouches li ke a tiger in the corner of his mind: In minutes, he is going to be a witness . In minutes, dozens of reporters and curious citizens and a judge will be ha nging on the words of a man who much prefers silence. “Fisher,” he begins, th en takes a deep breath. “They can't ask me anything, you know, that she told me . . . can they?”

“Anything Nina told you?”

“About . . . about what she did.”

Fisher stares at Caleb. “She talked to you about it?”

“Yeah. Before she--”

“Caleb,” the lawyer interrupts smoothly, “don't tell me, and I'll make sure yo u don't have to tell anyone else.”

He disappears through a doorway before Caleb can even measure the strength of his relief.

As Peter takes the stand for Quentin Brown at my bail revocation hearing, he shoots me a look of apology. He can't lie, but he doesn't want to be the on e responsible for landing me in jail. To make this easier on him, I try not to catch his eye. I concentrate instead on Patrick, sitting somewhere behind me, so close I can smell the soap he uses. And on Brown, who seems too big to be pacing this tiny courtroom.