3
“Mom?”
Immediately I whipped the photo facedown. This was precisely why I did not mix my work life and my home life. “Hmm?”
“Do you always catch the bad guys?”
I thought of the victim’s mother, who could not stop crying long enough to give a statement to the police. “Not always,” I answered.
“Most of the time?”
“Well,” I said. “At least half.”
Nathaniel considered this for a moment. “I guess that’s good enough to be a superhero,” he said, and that was when I realized this had been an interview for the position of Robin. But I didn’t have time to be a cartoon sidekick.
“Nathaniel,” I sighed. “You know why I came in here.” Specifically, to get ready for Monday’s opening arguments. To go over my strategy and my witness list.
I looked at Nathaniel’s waiting face. Then again, maybe justice was best served from a Batcave. An oxymoron chased through my mind: I am going to get nothing done today. I am doing everything I want to. “Holy Guacamole, Batman,” I said, kicking off my shoes and crawling underneath my desk. Had I ever known that the interior wall was made of cheap pine, and not mahogany? “Robin reporting for duty, but only if I get to drive the Batmobile.”
“You can’t be Robin for real.”
“I thought that was the point.”
Nathaniel stared at me with great pity, as if someone like me really ought to have learned the rules of the game this far along in life. Our shoulders bumped in the confines of my desk. “We can work together and everything, but your name has to be Mom.”
“Why?”
He rolled his eyes. “Because,” Nathaniel told me. “It’s who you are.”
“Nathaniel!” I call out, blushing a little. It’s not a sin, is it, to have no control over one’s child? “I’m sorry, Father,” I say, holding the door wide to let him inside. “He’s been … shy lately with visitors. Yesterday, when the UPS man came, it took me an hour to find where he was hiding.”
Father Szyszynski smiles at me. “I told myself I should have called first, instead of dropping in unannounced.”
“Oh, no. No. It’s wonderful that you came.” This is a lie. I have no idea what to do with a priest in my house. Do I serve cookies? Beer? Do I apologize for all the Sundays I don’t make it to Mass? Do I confess to lying in the first place?
“Well, it’s part of the job,” Father Szyszynski says, tapping his collar. “The only thing I have to do on Friday afternoons is eavesdrop on the ladies’ auxiliary meeting.”
“Is that considered a perk?”
“More like a cross to bear,” the priest says, and smiles. He sits down on the couch in the living room. Father Szyszynski is wearing high-tech running sneakers. He does local half-marathons; his times are posted on the News and Notes boards, next to the index cards that request prayers for the needy. There is even a photo of him there, lean and fit, without his collar, crossing a finish line—in it, he looks nothing like a priest; just a man. He’s in his fifties, but he appears to be ten years younger. Once, I heard him say that he’d tried to make a pact with Satan for eternal youth, but he couldn’t find the devil’s extension in the diocese phone book.
I wonder which nosy gossip in the church rumor mill told the priest about us. “The Sunday school class misses Nathaniel,” he tells me. He’s being politically correct. If he wanted to be more accurate, he’d say that the Sunday school class misses Nathaniel more than half the Sundays of the year, since we don’t make it regularly to Mass. Still, I know that Nathaniel likes coloring pictures in the basement during the service. And he especially likes afterward, when Father Szyszynski reads to the kids from a great, old illustrated children’s Bible while the rest of the congregation is upstairs having coffee. He gets right down onto the floor in their circle, and according to Nathaniel, acts out floods and plagues and prophecies.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Father Szyszynski says.
“Do you.”
He nods. “That in the year 2001 it’s archaic to assume the Church is such a large part of your life it could offer you comfort at a time like this. But it can, Nina. God wants you to turn to Him.”
I stare right at the priest. “These days I’m not too high on God,” I say bluntly.
“I know. It doesn’t make much sense, sometimes, God’s will.” Father Szyszynski shrugs. “There have been times I’ve doubted Him myself.”
“You’ve obviously gotten over it.” I wipe the corner of my eyes; why am I crying? “I’m not even really a Catholic.”
“Sure you are. You keep coming back, don’t you?”
But that’s guilt, not faith.
“Things happen for a reason, Nina.”
“Oh, yeah? Then do me a favor and ask God what reason there could possibly be for letting a child get hurt like this.”
“You ask him,” the priest says. “And when you’re talking, you might want to remember you have something in common—He watched His son suffer, too.”
He hands me a picture book— David and Goliath, watered down for a five-year-old. “If Nathaniel ever comes out,” he pitches his voice extra loud, “you tell him that Father Glen left a present.” That’s what they call him, all the kids at St. Anne’s, since they can’t pronounce his last name. Heck, the priest has said, after a few tall ones, I can’t pronounce it myself. “Nathaniel particularly enjoyed this story when I read it last year. He wanted to know if we could all make slingshots.” Father Szyszynski stands up, leads the way to the door. “If you want to talk, Nina, you know where to find me. You take care.”
He starts down the path, the stone steps that Caleb placed with his own hands. As I watch him go I clutch the book to my chest. I think of the weak defeating giants.
· · ·
Nathaniel is playing with a boat, sinking it, then watching it bob to the surface again. I suppose I should be grateful that he’s in this tub at all. But he has been better, today. He has been talking with his hands. And he agreed to this bath, on the condition that he take off his own clothes. Of course I let him, struggling not to run to his aid when he couldn’t work a button through a hole. I try to remember what Dr. Robichaud told us about power: Nathaniel was made helpless; he needs to feel like he’s gaining control of himself again.
I sit on the lip of the tub, watching his back rise and fall with his breathing. The soap shimmers like a fish near the drain. “Need help?” I ask, lifting one hand up with the other, a sign. Nathaniel shakes his head vigorously. He picks up the bar of Ivory and runs it over his shoulder, his chest, his belly. He hesitates, then plunges between his legs.
A thin white film covers him, making him otherworldly, an angel. Nathaniel lifts his face to mine, hands me the soap to put back. For a moment, our fingers touch—in our new language, these are our lips … does that make this a kiss?
I let the soap drop with a splash, then circle my pursed mouth with a finger. I move my index fingers back and forth, touching and retreating. I point to Nathaniel.
Who hurt you?
But my son doesn’t know these signs. Instead, he flings his hands out to the sides, proud to show off his new word. Done. He rises like a sea nymph, water sluicing down the sides of his beautiful body. As I towel off each limb and pull pajamas over Nathaniel, I silently ask myself if I am the only person who has touched him at this place, at that one, until every inch of him is covered again.
In the middle of the night Caleb hears a hitch in his wife’s breathing. “Nina?” he whispers, but she doesn’t answer. He rolls onto his side, curls her closer. She’s awake, he can feel it coming from her pores. “Are you all right?” he asks.
She turns to him, her eyes flat in the dark. “Are you?”
He pulls her into his arms and buries his face in the side of her neck. Breathing her calms Caleb; she is his own oxygen. His lips trace her skin, hold over her collarbone. He tilts his head so that he can hear her heart.
He is looking for a place to lose himself.
So his hand moves from the valley of her waist to the rise of a hip, slips beneath the thin strip of her panty. Nina draws in her breath. She is feeling it too, then. She needs to get away from here, from this.
Caleb slides lower and rocks his palm against her. Nina grabs tighter at his hair, almost to the point of pain. “Caleb.”
He is hard now, heavy and pressed into the mattress. “I know,” he murmurs, and he goes to slide a finger inside.
She is dry as a bone.
Nina yanks at his hair, and this time he rolls off her, which is what she’s wanted all along. “What is the matter with you!” she cries. “I don’t want to do this. I can’t, now.” She throws back the covers and pads out of the bedroom into the dark.
Caleb looks down, sees the small drop of semen he’s left on the sheets. He gets out of bed and covers it up, so that he will not have to look at it. Then he follows Nina, searching her out by sheer instinct. For long moments, he stands in the doorway of his son’s bedroom, watching her watch Nathaniel.
Caleb does not accompany us to the psychiatrist’s office for our next appointment. He says he has a meeting he cannot reschedule, but I think this is only an excuse. After last night, we have been dancing around each other. Plus, Dr. Robichaud is working on signing now, until Nathaniel gets his voice back, and Caleb disagrees with that tactic. He thinks that when Nathaniel is ready to tell us who hurt him, he will, and until then, we are only pushing.
I wish I had his patience, but I cannot sit here and watch Nathaniel struggle. I can’t stop thinking that for every single moment Nathaniel is silent, there is someone else in this world who should have been rendered speechless, stopped in his tracks.
Today, we have worked our way through practical signs for food—cereal, milk, pizza, ice cream, breakfast. The terms in the ASL book are grouped like that—in units that go together. There is a picture of the word, the written letters, and then a sketch of a person making the sign. Nathaniel gets to pick what we study. He has jumped from the seasons, to things to eat, and is now flipping the pages again.
“Where he’ll stop nobody knows …” Dr. Robichaud jokes.
The book falls open to a page with a family on it. “Oh, that’s a good one,” I say, trying the sign at the top—the F handshapes making a circle away from oneself.
Nathaniel points to the child. “Like this, Nathaniel,” Dr. Robichaud says. “Boy.” She mimics touching the bill of a baseball cap. Like many of the signs I’ve learned, this one is a perfect match to the real thing.
“Mother,” the psychiatrist continues, helping Nathaniel hold out his hand, touch the thumb to the side of his chin, and wiggle the fingers.
“Father.” The same sign, but the thumb touches the side of the forehead. “You do it,” Dr. Robichaud says.
Do it.
All those thin black lines on the page have tangled together, a fat snake that’s coming toward him, grabbing him by the neck. Nathaniel can’t breathe. He can’t see. He hears Dr. Robichaud’s voice all around him, father father father.
Nathaniel lifts his hand, puts a thumb to his forehead. He wiggles the fingers of his hand. This sign looks like he’s making fun of someone.
Except it isn’t funny at all.
“Look at that,” the psychiatrist says, “he’s better than we are, already.” She moves on to the next sign, baby. “That’s good, Nathaniel,” Dr. Robichaud says after a moment. “Try this one.”
But Nathaniel doesn’t. His hand is jammed tight to the side of his head, his thumb digging into his temple. “Honey, you’re going to hurt yourself,” I tell him. I reach for his hand and he jumps back. He will not stop signing this word.
Dr. Robichaud gently closes the ASL book. “Nathaniel, do you have something you want to say?”
He nods, his hand still fanning out from the side of his head. All the air leaves my body. “He wants Caleb—”
Dr. Robichaud interrupts. “Don’t speak for him, Nina.”
“You can’t think that he—”
“Nathaniel, has your daddy ever taken you somewhere, just the two of you?” the psychiatrist asks.
Nathaniel seems confused by the question. He nods slowly.
“Has he ever helped you get dressed?” Another nod. “Has he ever hugged you, in your bed?”
I am frozen in my seat. My lips feel stiff when I speak. “It’s not what you’re thinking. He just wants to know why Caleb isn’t here. He misses his father. He wouldn’t have needed a sign if it was … if it was …” I can’t even say it. “He could have pointed, a thousand times over,” I whisper.
“He might have been afraid of the consequences of such a direct identification,” Dr. Robichaud explains. “A label like this gives him an extra layer of psychological protection. Nathaniel,” she continues gently. “Do you know who hurt you?”
He points to the ASL book. And signs father again.
Be careful what you wish for. After all these days, Nathaniel has given a name, and it is the one I would never have expected to hear. It is the one that renders me as immobile as a stone, the very material Caleb prefers to work with.
I listen to Dr. Robichaud make the call to BCYF; I hear her tell Monica there is a suspect, but I am a hundred miles away. I’m watching with the objectivity of someone who knows what will happen next. A detective will be put on the case; Caleb will be called in for questioning. Wally Moffett will contact the Portland DA’s office. Caleb will either confess and be convicted on the strength of that statement; or else Nathaniel will have to accuse him in open court.
This nightmare is only just beginning.
He could not have done it. I know this as well as I know anything about Caleb after so many years. I can still see him walking the halls at midnight, holding an infant Nathaniel by his feet, the only position in which our colicky baby would stop screaming. I can see him sitting next to me at Nathaniel’s graduation from the two-day class in preschool, how he’d cried without shame. He is a good, strong, solid man; the kind of man you would trust with your life, or your child’s.
But if I believe that Caleb is innocent, it means I don’t believe Nathaniel.
Small memories prick at my mind. Caleb, suggesting that Patrick might be the one to blame. Why bring up his name, if not to take the heat off himself? Or Caleb telling Nathaniel he didn’t have to learn sign language if he didn’t want to. Anything, to keep the child from confessing the truth.
I have met convicted child molesters before. They don’t wear badges or brands or tattoos announcing their vice. It’s hidden under a soft, grandfatherly smile; it’s tucked in the pocket of a button-down shirt. They look like the rest of us, and that’s what makes it so frightening—to know that these beasts move among us, and we are none the wiser.
They have girlfriends and wives who have loved them, unaware.
I used to wonder how mothers wouldn’t have some inkling that this was going on in their homes. There had to have been a moment where they made a conscious decision to turn away before they saw something they didn’t want to. No wife, I used to think, could sleep next to a man and not know what was playing through the loop of his mind.
“Nina.” Monica LaFlamme touches my shoulder. When did she even arrive? I feel like I’m coming awake from a coma; I shake myself into consciousness and look for Nathaniel right away. He’s playing in the psychiatrist’s office, still, with a Brio train set.
When the social worker looks at me, I know that this is what she’s suspected all along. And I cannot blame her. In her shoes, I would have thought the same thing. In fact, in the past, I have.
My voice is old, stripped. “Have the police been called?”
Monica nods. “If there’s anything I can do for you …”
There is somewhere I need to go, and I cannot have Nathaniel with me. It hurts to have to ask, but I have lost my barometer for trust. “Yes,” I ask. “Will you watch my son?”
I find him at the third job site, making a stone wall. Caleb’s face lights up as he recognizes my car. He watches me get out, and then he waits, expecting Nathaniel. It’s enough to propel me forward, so that by the time I reach him I am nearly at a dead run, and I slap him as hard as I can across the face.
“Nina!” Caleb catches my wrists and holds me away from him. “What the hell!”
“You bastard. How could you, Caleb? How could you?”
He pushes me away, rubbing his fingers against his cheek. My hand rises on it, a bright print. Good. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Caleb says. “Slow down.”
“Slow down?” I spit out. “I’ll make it really simple: Nathaniel told us. He told us what you did to him.”
“I didn’t do anything to him.”
For a long moment, I don’t say a word, just stare. “Nathaniel said I … I …,” Caleb falters. “That’s ridiculous.”
It is what they all say, the guilty ones, and it makes me unravel. “Don’t you dare tell me that you love him.”
“Of course I do!” Caleb shakes his head, as if to clear it. “I don’t know what he said. I don’t know why he said it. But Nina, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.”
When I don’t respond, every year we’ve spent together unspools, until we are both standing knee deep in a litter of memories that don’t matter. Caleb’s eyes are wide and wet. “Nina, please. Think about what you’re saying.”
I look down at my hands, one fist gripping the other tightly. It is the sign for in. In trouble. In love. In case. “What I think is that kids don’t make this up. That Nathaniel didn’t make this up.” I raise my gaze to his. “Don’t come home tonight,” I say, and I walk back to my car with great precision, as if my heart has not gone to pieces inside me.
Caleb watches the taillights of Nina’s car disappear down the road. The dust that’s kicked up in her wake settles, and the scene still looks like it did a minute ago. But Caleb knows things are completely different now; that there is no going back.
He will do anything for his son. Always has, always will.
Caleb looks down at the wall he’s been crafting. Three feet, and it took him the better part of the day. While his son was in a psychiatrist’s office, turning the world inside out, Caleb has been lifting stone, fitting it side by side. Once when he’d been dating Nina he’d shown her how to set together rocks with proportions that did not seem to meet. All you need is one edge in common, he’d told her.
Case in point, this jagged piece of quartz, kitty-corner to a fat, low block of sandstone. Now, he lifts the piece of sandstone and hurls it into the road, where it breaks into pieces. He raises the quartz and sends it spinning into the woods behind him. He demolishes the wall, all this work, piece by careful piece. Then he sinks into the pile of rubble and presses his dusty hands to his eyes, crying for what cannot be put back together.
I have one more place to go. In the clerk’s office of the East District Court, I move like an automaton. Tears keep coming, no matter how I try to will them away. This is not a professional demeanor, but I couldn’t care less. This is not a professional matter, it’s a personal one.
“Where do you keep the protective order forms for juveniles?” I ask the clerk, a woman who is new to the court, and whose name I have forgotten.
She looks at me as if she’s afraid to answer. Then she points to a bin. She fills it out for me, as I feed her the answers in a voice that I can’t place.
Judge Bartlett receives me in chambers. “Nina.” He knows me, they all do. “What can I do for you?”
I hold the form out for him and lift my chin. Breathe, speak, focus. “I am filing this on behalf of my son, Your Honor. I’d prefer not to do it in open court.”
The judge’s eyes hold mine for a long second, then he takes the paper from my hands. “Tell me,” he says gently.
“There is physical evidence of sexual abuse.” I am careful not to say Nathaniel’s name. That, I cannot bear yet. “And today, he identified the abuser as his father.” His father, not my husband.
“And you?” Judge Bartlett asks. “Are you all right?”
I shake my head, my lips pressed tight together. I grasp my hands so tightly that I lose feeling in the fingers. But I don’t say a word.
“If there’s anything I can do,” the judge murmurs. But there is nothing he can do, or anyone else, no matter how many times the offer is extended. Everything has already been done. And that is the problem.
The judge scrawls the craggy landscape of his signature across the bottom of the form. “You know this is only temporary. We’ll have to have a hearing in twenty days.”
“That’s twenty days I have to figure this out.”
He nods. “I’m sorry, Nina.”
So am I. For not seeing what was under my nose. For not knowing how to protect a child in the world, but only in the legal system. For every choice I’ve made that has brought me to this moment. And, yes, for the restraining order that burns a hole in my pocket the entire drive back to my son.
These are the rules at home:
Make your bed in the morning. Brush your teeth twice a day. Don’t pull the dog’s ears. Finish your vegetables, even if they’re not as good as the spaghetti.
These are the rules at school:
Don’t climb up the outside of the slide. Don’t walk in front of the swings while a friend is swinging. Raise your hand in Circle if you have something to say. Everybody gets to play a game, if they want to. Put on a smock if you’re going to paint.
I know other rules, too:
Buckle your seat belt.
Never speak to a stranger.
Don’t tell, or you’ll burn in Hell.