The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  “What makes you think you can?”

  “Because I know what it takes to be declared legally insane. I watch these defendants come in and I can tell you right away who’s going to get convicted and who’s going to walk. I know what you have to say, what you have to do.” I look Caleb right in the eye. “I am an attorney. But I shot a man in front of a judge, in front of a whole court. Why would I do that, if I weren’t crazy?”

  Caleb is quiet for a moment, turning the truth over in his hands. “Why are you telling me this?” he asks softly.

  “Because you’re my husband. You can’t testify against me during my trial. You’re the only one I can tell.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell me what you were going to do?”

  “Because,” I reply, “you would have stopped me.”

  When Caleb gets up and walks to the window, I follow him. I place my hand gently on his back, in the hollow that seems so vulnerable, even in a man full-grown. “Nathaniel deserves this,” I whisper.

  Caleb shakes his head. “No one deserves this.”

  • • •

  As it turns out, you can function while your heart is being torn to shreds. Blood pumps, breath flows, neurons fire. What goes missing is the affect; a curious flatness to voice and actions that, if noted, speak of a hole so deep inside there’s no visible end to it. Caleb stares at this woman who just yesterday was his wife and sees a stranger in her place. He listens to her explanations and wonders when she took up this foreign language, this tongue that makes no sense.

  Of course, it is what any parent would want to do to the devil who preys upon a child. But 99.9 percent of those parents don’t act on it. Maybe Nina thinks she was avenging Nathaniel, but it was at the reckless expense of her own life. If Szyszynski had gone to jail, they would be patchwork and piecemeal, but they would still be a family. If Nina goes to jail, Caleb loses a wife. Nathaniel loses his mother.

  Caleb feels fire pooling like acid in the muscles of his shoulders. He is furious and stunned and maybe a little bit awed. He has traveled every inch of this woman, he understands what makes her cry and what brings her to rapture; he recognizes every cut and curve of her body; but he doesn’t know her at all.

  Nina stands expectantly beside him, waiting for him to tell her she did the right thing. Funny, that she would flout the law, but still need his approval. For this reason, and all the others, the words she wants to hear from him will not come.

  When Nathaniel walks into the room with the dining room tablecloth wrapped around his shoulders, Caleb latches onto him. In this storm of strangeness, Nathaniel is the one thing he can recognize. “Hey!” Caleb cries with too much enthusiasm, and he tosses the boy into the air. “That’s some cape!”

  Nina turns too, a smile placed on her face where the earnestness was a moment before. She reaches for Nathaniel, too, and out of pure spite, Caleb hefts the child high on his shoulders where she cannot reach.

  “It’s getting dark,” Nathaniel says. “Can we go?”

  “Go where?”

  In answer, Nathaniel points out the window. On the street below is a battalion of tiny goblins, miniature monsters, fairy princesses. Caleb notices, for the first time, that the leaves have all fallen; that grinning pumpkins roost like lazy hens on the stone walls of his neighbor’s home. How could he have missed the signs of Halloween?

  He looks at Nina, but she has been just as preoccupied. As if on cue, the doorbell rings. Nathaniel wriggles on Caleb’s shoulders. “Get it! Get it!”

  “We’ll have to get it later.” Nina tosses him a helpless look; there is no candy in this house. There is nothing left that’s sweet.

  Worse, yet, there is no costume. Caleb and Nina realize this at the same moment, and it sews them close. They both recall Nathaniel’s previous Halloweens in descending order: knight in shining armor, astronaut, pumpkin, crocodile, and, as an infant, caterpillar. “What would you like to be?” Nina asks.

  Nathaniel tosses his magical tablecloth over his shoulder. “A superhero,” he says. “A new one.”

  Caleb is fairly sure they could muster up Superman on short notice. “What’s wrong with the old ones?”

  Everything, it turns out. Nathaniel doesn’t like Superman because he can be felled by Kryptonite. Green Lantern’s ring doesn’t work on anything yellow. The Incredible Hulk is too stupid. Even Captain Marvel runs the risk of being tricked into saying the word Shazam! and turning himself back into young Billy Batson.

  “How about Ironman?” Caleb suggests.

  Nathaniel shakes his head. “He could rust.”

  “Aquaman?”

  “Needs water.”

  “Nathaniel,” Nina says gently, “nobody’s perfect.”

  “But they’re supposed to be,” Nathaniel explains, and Caleb understands. Tonight, Nathaniel needs to be invincible. He needs to know that what happened to him could never, ever happen again.

  “What we need,” Nina muses, “is a superhero with no Achilles’ heel.”

  “A what?” Nathaniel says.

  She takes his hand. “Let’s see.” From his closet, she extracts a pirate’s bandanna, and wraps this rakishly around Nathaniel’s head. She crisscrosses a spool of yellow crime-scene tape Patrick once brought around Nathaniel’s chest. She gives him swimming goggles, tinted blue, for X-ray vision, and pulls a pair of red shorts over his sweatpants because this is Maine, after all, and she is not about to let him go out half-dressed in the cold. Then she surreptitiously motions to Caleb, so that he pulls off his red thermal shirt and hands it to her. This she ties around Nathaniel’s neck, a second cape. “Oh, my gosh, do you see who he looks like?”

  Caleb has no idea, but he plays along. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Who? Who!” Nathaniel is fairly dancing with excitement.

  “Well, IncrediBoy, of course,” Nina answers. “Didn’t you ever see his comic book?”

  “No . . .”

  “Oh, he’s the most super superhero. He’s got these two capes, see, which allow him to fly farther and faster.”

  “Cool!”

  “And he can pull people’s thoughts right out of their heads, before they even speak them. In fact, you look so much like him, I bet you’ve got that superpower already. Go ahead.” Nina squinches her eyes shut. “Guess what I’m thinking.”

  Nathaniel frowns, concentrating. “Um . . . that I’m as good at this as IncrediBoy?”

  She slaps her forehead. “Oh my gosh! Nathaniel, how’d you do that!”

  “I think I got his X-ray vision, too,” Nathaniel crows. “I can see through houses and know what candy people are giving out!” He dashes forward, heading for the stairs. “Hurry up, okay?”

  With the buffer of their son gone, Caleb and Nina smile uncomfortably at each other again. “What are you going to do when he can’t see through doors?” Caleb asks.

  “Tell him it’s a glitch in his optical sensor that needs to be checked out.”

  Nina walks out of the room, but Caleb stays upstairs a moment longer. From the window, he watches his ragtag son leap off the porch in a single bound—grace born of confidence. Even from up here, Caleb can see Nathaniel’s smile, can hear the sharp start of his laugh. And he wonders if maybe Nina is right; if a superhero is nothing but an ordinary person who believes that she cannot fail.

  She is holding the gun that’s a blow-dryer up to her head, when I ask. “What’s the next thing after love?”

  “What?”

  The stuff I need to say is all tangled. “You love Mason, right?”

  The dog hears his name and smiles. “Well, sure,” she says.

  “And you love Daddy more than that?”

  She looks down at me. “Yes.”

  “And you love me even higher?”

  Her eyebrows fly. “True.”

  “So what comes after that?”

  She lifts me and puts me on the edge of the sink. The countertop is warm where the blow-dryer has been sitting; it just might be alive. For a minut