Perfect Match (4 page)

“Okay. My best guess? The car's been reconditioned. Your defendant bought it used, never knowing that the previous owner drove to a secluded rest stop a nd blew his brains out in the front seat. It got cleaned up well enough for resale value . . . but not for the indomitable Maine State Lab.” Nina stirs her coffee, then reaches across to Patrick's plate to take a French f ry. “That's not impossible,” she admits. “I'll have to trace the car.”

“I can get you the name of a guy we used as an informant once-he ran a reco nditioning business before he started dealing.”

“Get me the whole file. Leave it in my mailbox at home.” Patrick shakes his head. “I can't. That's a federal offense.”

“You're kidding,” Nina laughs. “It's not like you're leaving a bomb.” But Pat rick doesn't even smile; for him the world is a place of rules. “Fine, then. Leave it outside the front door.” She glances down as her beeper sounds, pull s it from the waistband of her skirt. “Oh, damn.”

“Problem?”

“Nathaniel's preschool.” She takes her cell phone from her black bag and dial s a number. “Hi, it's Nina Frost. Yes. Of course. No, I understand.” She hang s up, then dials again. “Peter, it's me. Listen, I just got a call from Natha niel's school. I have to go pick him up, and Caleb's at a job site. I've got two motions to suppress on DUIs; can you cover for me? Plead the cases, I don 't care, I just want to get rid of them. Yeah. Thanks.”

“What's the matter with Nathaniel?” Patrick asks as she slips the phone back into her bag. “Is he sick?”

Nina looks away from him; she almost seems embarrassed. “No, they specifica lly said he wasn't. We got off to a rocky start today; I'm betting he just needs to sit on the porch with me and regroup.”

Patrick has spent plenty of hours on the porch with Nathaniel and Nina. Their favorite game in the fall is to bet Hershey's kisses on which leaf will drop from a given tree first. Nina plays to win, just like she does with everything else in her life, but then she claims she is too stuffed to r eap the bounty and she donates all her chocolate to Nathaniel. When Nina is w ith her son, she seems-well, brighter, more colorful-and softer. When they ar e laughing with their heads bent close, Patrick sometimes sees her not as the attorney she is now but as the little girl who was once his partner in crime .

“I could go get him for you,” Patrick suggests.

“Yeah, you just can't leave him in my mailbox.” Nina grins and grabs the oth er half of Patrick's sandwich from his plate. “Thanks, but Miss Lydia made a personal request to see me, and believe me, you don't want to get on that w oman's bad side.” Nina takes a bite, then hands the rest to Patrick. “I'll c all you later.” She hurries out of the bar before Patrick can say good-bye. He watches her go. Sometimes he wonders if she ever slows down, if she's movi ng so fast through her own life that she cannot even realize the physics of t he trajectory she's taken: Bend the curve of time, and even yesterday looks u nfamiliar. The truth is, Nina will forget to call him. And Patrick will phone her instead and ask if Nathaniel is all right. She'll apologize and say she meant to get back to him all along. And Patrick . . . well, Patrick will forg ive her, just like he always does.

“Acting out,” I repeat, looking Miss Lydia in the eye. “Did Nathaniel tell Dan ny again that I'd put him in jail if he didn't share the dinosaurs?”

“No, this time it's aggressive behavior. Nathaniel's been ruining other child ren's work-knocking down block structures, and at one point he scribbled over a little girl's drawing.”

I offer my most winning smile. “Nathaniel wasn't quite himself this morning . Maybe it's some kind of virus.”

Miss Lydia frowned. “I don't think so, Mrs. Frost. There are other incidents ... he was climbing the swing set today, and jumping off the top-”

“Kids do that kind of thing all the time!”

“Nina,” Miss Lydia says gently, Miss Lydia who in four years has never us ed my first name, “was Nathaniel speaking before he came to school this m orning?”

“Well, of course he-” I begin, and then I stop. The bed-wetting, the rushed breakfast, the black mood-there is much I remember about Nathaniel that morning, but the only voice I hear in my mind is my own. I would know my son's voice anywhere. Pitched and bubbled; I used to wish I could bottle it, like the Sea Witch who stole from the Little Mermaid. His mistakes-hossipal and phghetti and apple spider-were speed bumps that migh t keep him from growing up too soon; correct them and he'd reach that desti nation long before I was ready. As it is, things are already changing too q uickly. Nathaniel no longer mixes up his pronouns; he has mastered dipthong s-although I sorely miss hearing him say brudder like a Bowery cop. Just ab out the only hiccup in speech I can still lay claim to is Nathaniel's absol ute inability to pronounce the letters L and R.

In my memory, we are sitting at the kitchen table. Pancakes-shaped like ghos ts, with chocolate chip eyes-are stacked high in front of us, along with bac on and orange juice. A big breakfast is the way we bribe Nathaniel on the Su ndays that Caleb and I feel guilty enough to go to Mass. The sun hits the li p of my glass and a rainbow spills onto my plate. “What's the opposite of le ft,” I ask.

Without missing a beat, Nathaniel says, “White.”

Caleb flips a pancake. As a kid, he lisped. Listening to Nathaniel brings ab ject pain, and the belief that his son will be teased mercilessly, too. He t hinks we should correct Nathaniel, and asked Miss Lydia if Nathaniel's pronu nciations could be fixed by a speech pathologist. He thinks a child going in to kindergarten next year should have the eloquence of Laurence Olivier. “Th en what's the opposite of white?” Caleb asks.

“Bwack.”

“Rrrrigbt,” Caleb stresses. “Try it. Rrrrright.”

“Wivwwhite.”

“Just leave it, Caleb,” I say.

But he can't. “Nathaniel,” he presses, “the opposite of left is right. And the op posite of right is ... ?”

Nathaniel thinks about this for a moment. “Ewase,” he answers.

“God help him,” Caleb mutters, turning back to the stove. Me, I just wink at Nathaniel. “Maybe He will,” I say. In the parking lot of the nursery school, I kneel down so that Nathaniel and I are face-to-face. “Honey, tell me what's wrong.”

Nathaniel's collar is twisted; his hands are stained red with finger-paint. He stares at me with wide, dark eyes and doesn't say a thing.

All the words he isn't speaking rise in my throat, thick as bile. “Honey,” I r epeat. “Nathaniel?”

We just think he needs to be at home, Miss Lydia had said. Maybe you can sp end this afternoon with him. “Is that what you need?” I ask out loud, my ha nds sliding from his shoulders to the soft moon of his face. “Some quality time?” Smiling hard, I fold him into a hug. He is heavy and warm and fits i nto my arms seamlessly, although at several other points in Nathaniel's lif e-his infancy, his toddlerhood-I have been certain that we matched equally as well.

“Does your throat hurt?” Shake.

“Does anything hurt?” Another shake.

“Did something upset you at school? Did someone say something that hurt your feelings? Can you tell me what happened?”

Three questions, too many for him to process, much less answer. But that do esn't keep me from hoping that Nathaniel is going to respond. Can tonsils become so swollen they impede speech? Can strep come on like li ghtning? Doesn't meningitis affect the neck first?

Nathaniel parts his lips-here, he's going to tell me now-but his mouth is a ho llow, silent cavern.

“That's okay,” I say, although it isn't, not by a long shot. Caleb arrives at the pediatrician's office while we are waiting to be seen. N athaniel sits near the Brio train set, pushing it in circles. I'm glaring dag gers at the receptionist, who doesn't seem to understand that this is an emer gency, that my son is not acting like my son, that this isn't a goddamned com mon cold, and that we should have been seen a half hour ago.

Caleb immediately goes to Nathaniel, curling his big body into a play space meant for children. “Hey, Buddy. You're not feeling so great, huh?” Nathaniel shrugs, but doesn't speak. He hasn't spoken now in God knows how many hours?

“Does something hurt, Nathaniel?” Caleb says, and that's about all I can take .

“Don't you think I've already asked him?” I explode.

“I don't know, Nina. I haven't been here.”

“Well, he isn't talking, Caleb. He isn't responding to me.” The full implicati ons of this-the sad truth that my son's illness isn't chicken pox or bronchiti s or any of a thousand other things I could understand-make it hard to stand upright. It's the strange things, like this, that always turn out to be awful: a wart that won't go away, which metasta-sizes into cancer; a dull headache t hat turns out to be a brain tumor. “I'm not even sure if he's hearing what I s ay to him, now. For all I know it's some . . . some virus that's attacking his vocal cords.”

“Virus.” There is a pause. “He was feeling sick yesterday and you shoved hi m off to school this morning, regardless-”

“This is my fault?”

Caleb just looks at me, hard. “You've been awfully busy lately, that's all I'm saying.”

“So I'm supposed to apologize for the fact that my job isn't something I ca n do on my own clock, like yours? Well, excuse me. I'll ask if the victims would be kind enough to get raped and beaten at a more convenient time.”

“No, you'll just hope that your own son has the good sense to get sick when you're not scheduled in court.”

It takes me a moment to respond, I'm that angry. “That is so-”

“It's true, Nina. How can everyone else's kid be a priority over your own?”

“Nathaniel?”

The soft voice of the pediatric nurse practitioner lands like an ax between us. She has a look on her face I cannot quite read, and I'm not sure if she's goin g to ask about Nathaniel's silence, or his parents' lack of it. It feels like he's swallowed stones, like his neck is full of pebbles that shi ft and grind every time he tries to make a sound. Nathaniel lies on the examin ation table while Dr. Ortiz gently rubs jelly under his chin, then rolls over his throat a fat wand that tickles. On the computer screen she's wheeled into the room, salt and pepper blotches rise to the surface, pictures that look not hing like him at all.

When he crooks his pinky finger, he can reach a crack in the leather on the table. Inside it's foam, a cloud that can be torn apart. “Nathaniel,” Dr. Or tiz says, “can you try to speak for me?” His mother and father are looking a t him so hard. It reminds him of one time at the zoo, when Nathaniel had sto od in front of a reptile cage for twenty whole minutes thinking that if he w aited long enough, the snake would come out of its hiding place. At that mom ent he'd wanted to see the rattlesnake more than he'd ever wanted anything, but it had stayed hidden. Nathaniel sometimes wonders if it was even in ther e at all. Now, he purses his mouth. He feels the back of his throat open lik e a rose. The sound rises from his belly, tumbling over the stones that chok e him. Nothing makes its way to his lips.

Dr. Ortiz leans closer. “You can do it, Nathaniel,” she urges. “Just try.” But he is trying. He is trying so hard it's splitting him in two. There is a word caught like driftwood behind his tongue, and he wants so badly to say it to h is parents: Stop.

“There's nothing extraordinary on the ultrasound,” Dr. Ortiz says. “No poly ps or swelling of the vocal cords, nothing physical that might be keeping N athaniel from speaking.“ She looks at us with her clear gray eyes. ”Has Nat haniel had any other medical problems lately?”

Caleb looks at me, and I turn away. So I gave Nathaniel Tylenol, so I'd pray ed for him to be all right because I had such a busy morning coming. So what ? Ask nine out of ten mothers; they all would have done what I did . . . and that last one would have thought hard about it before discounting the idea.

“He came home from church yesterday with a stomachache,” Caleb says. “And he's still having accidents at night.”

But that's not a medical problem. That's about monsters hiding under the be d, and bogeymen peering in the windows. It has nothing to do with a sudden loss of speech. In the corner, where he is playing with blocks, I watch Nat haniel blush-and suddenly I'm angry with Caleb for even bringing it up. Dr. Ortiz takes off her glasses and rubs them on her shirt. “Sometimes what l ooks like a physical illness isn't,” she says slowly. “Sometimes these things can be about getting attention.”

She doesn't know my son, not nearly as well as I do. As if a five-year-old m ight even be capable of such Machiavellian plotting.

“He may not even be consciously aware of the behavior,” the doctor contin ues, reading my mind.

“What can we do?” Caleb asks, at the same moment I say, “Maybe we should t alk to a specialist.”

The doctor responds to me, first. “That's exactly what I was going to sugges t. Let me make a call and see if Dr. Robichaud can see you this afternoon.” Yes, this is what we need: an ENT who is trained in this sort of illness; an ENT who will be able to lay hands on Nathaniel and feel an impossibly small something that can be fixed. “Which hospital is Dr. Robichaud affiliated wi th?” I ask.

“He's up in Portland,” the pediatrician says. “He's a psychiatrist.” July. The town pool. A hundred and two degrees in Maine, a record.

“What if I sink?” Nathaniel asked me. I stood in the shallow end, watching h im stare at the water like it was quicksand.

“Do you really think I'd let you get hurt?”

He seemed to consider this. “No.”

“All right then.” I held out my arms.

“Mom? What if this was a pit of lava?”

“I wouldn't be wearing a bathing suit, for one.”

“What if I get in there and my arms and legs forget what to do?”

“They won't.”

“They could.”

“Not likely.”

“One time is all it takes,” Nathaniel said gravely, and I realized he'd been l istening to me practice my closings in the shower.

An idea. I rounded my mouth, raised my arms, and sank to the bottom of the pool. The water hummed in my ears, the world went slow. I counted to five and then the blue shimmied, an explosion just in front of me. Suddenly Na thaniel was underwater and swimming, his eyes full of stars and his mouth and nose blowing bubbles. I caught him tight and broke the surface. “You s aved me,” I said.