Perfect Match Read online

  I pick up the phone to call Fisher. But then I hang it up. He needs to hear this; he could very well find out by himself. But I don't know how it will play in my trial, yet. It could make the prosecution more sympathetic, since their victim is a true victim. Then again, an insanity defense is an insanity defense. It doesn't matter if I killed Father Szyszynski or the judge or every spectator in that courtroom--if I were insane at the time, I still wouldn't be guilty.

  In fact, this might make me look crazier.

  I sit down at the kitchen table and bury my face in my hands. The doorbell rings and suddenly Patrick is in the kitchen, too big for it, frantic from the message I've left on his beeper. "What?" he demands, absorbing in a single glance my position, and the quiet of the household. "Did something happen to Nathaniel?"

  It is such a loaded question, that I can't help it--I start to laugh. I laugh until my stomach cramps, until I cannot catch my breath, until tears stream from my eyes and I realize I am sobbing. Patrick's hands are on my shoulders, my forearms, my waist, as if the thing that has broken inside me might be as simple as a bone. I wipe my nose on the back of my sleeve and force myself to meet his gaze. "Patrick," I whisper, "I screwed up. Father Szyszynski ... he didn't ... he wasn't--"

  He calms me down and makes me tell him everything. When I finish, he stares at me for a full thirty seconds before he speaks. "You're kidding," Patrick says. "You shot the wrong guy?"

  He doesn't wait for an answer, just gets up and starts to pace. "Nina, wait a second. Things get screwed up in labs; it's happened before."

  I grab onto this lifeline. "Maybe that's it. Some medical mistake."

  "But we had an ID before we ever had the semen evidence." Patrick shakes his head. "Why would Nathaniel have said his name?"

  Time can stop, I know that now. It is possible to feel one's heart cease beating, to sense the blood hover in one's veins. And to have the awful, overwhelming sense that one is trapped in this moment, and there is just no way out of it. "Tell me again." My words spill like stones. "Tell me what he told you."

  Patrick turns to me. "Father Glen," he replies. "Right?"

  Nathaniel remembers feeling dirty, so dirty that he thought he could take a thousand showers and still need to clean himself again. And the thing of it was, the dirty part of him was under his skin; he would have to rub himself raw before it was gone.

  It burned down there, and even Esme wouldn't come near him. She purred and then hopped onto the big wooden desk, staring. This is your fault, she was saying. Nathaniel tried to get his pants, but his hands were like clubs, unable to pick up anything. His underwear, when he finally managed to grab it, was all wet, which made no sense because Nathaniel hadn't had an accident, he just knew it. But the priest had been looking at his underpants, holding them. He'd liked the baseball mitts.

  Nathaniel didn't want to wear them again, ever.

  "We can fix that," the priest said, in a voice soft as a pillow, and he disappeared for a moment. Nathaniel counted to thirty-five, and then did it again, because that was as high as he could go. He wanted to leave. He wanted to hide under the desk or in the file cabinet. But he needed underpants. He couldn't get dressed without them, they came first. That was what his mom said when he forgot sometimes, and she made him go upstairs to put them on.

  The priest came back with a baby pair, not like his dad's, which looked like shorts. He'd gotten these, Nathaniel was sure, from the big box that held all the greasy coats and smelly sneakers people had left behind in the church. How could you leave without your sneakers, and never notice? Nathaniel always had wanted to know. For that matter, how could you forget your underpants?

  These were clean and had Spiderman on them. They were too tight, but Nathaniel didn't care. "Let me take the other pair," the priest said. "I'll wash them and give them back."

  Nathaniel shook his head. He pulled on his sweatpants and tucked the boxers into the kangaroo part of his sweatshirt, turning the icky side so that he didn't have to touch it. He felt the priest pet his hair and he went perfectly still, like granite, with the same thick, straight feelings inside.

  "Do you need me to walk you back?"

  Nathaniel didn't answer. He waited until the priest had picked up Esme and left; then he walked down the hall to the boiler room. It was creepy inside--no light switch, and cobwebs, and once even the skeleton of a mouse that had died. No one ever went in there, which is why Nathaniel did, and stuffed the bad underwear way behind the big machine that hummed and belched heat.

  When Nathaniel went back to his class, Father Glen was still reading the Bible story. Nathaniel sat down, tried to listen. He paid careful attention, even when he felt someone's eyes on him. When he looked up, the other priest was standing in the hallway, holding Esme and smiling. With his free hand he raised a finger to his lips. Shh. Don't tell.

  That was the moment Nathaniel lost all his words.

  The day my son stopped speaking, we had gone to church. Afterward, there was a fellowship coffee--what Caleb liked to call Bible Bribery, a promise of doughnuts in return for your presence at Mass. Nathaniel moved around me as if I were a maypole, turning this way and that as he waited for Father Szyszynski to call the children together to read.

  This coffee was a celebration, of sorts--two priests who had come to study at St. Anne's for some sort of Catholic edification were going back to their own congregations. A banner blew from the base of the scarred table, wishing them well. Since we were not regular churchgoers, I had not really noticed the priests doing whatever it was they were supposed to be doing. Once or twice I'd seen one from behind and made the assumption it was Father Szyszynski, only to have the man turn around and prove me wrong.

  My son was angry because they had run out of powdered sugar doughnuts. "Nathaniel," I said, "stop pulling on me."

  I'd tugged him off my waist, smiling apologetically at the couple that Caleb was speaking to; acquaintances we had not seen in months. They had no children, although they were our ages, and I imagine that Caleb liked talking to them for the same reason I did--there was that amazing What if permeating the conversation, as if Todd and Margaret were a funhouse mirror in which Caleb and I could see who else we might have become, had I never conceived. Todd was talking about their upcoming trip to Greece; how they were chartering a boat to take them from island to island.

  Nathaniel, for reasons I could not fathom, sank his teeth into my hand.

  I jumped, more shocked than hurt, and grabbed Nathaniel by the wrist. I was caught in that awful limbo of public discipline--a moment when a child has done something truly punishable but escapes without penalty because it isn't politically correct to give him the quick smack on his behind that he deserves. "Don't you ever do that again," I said through my teeth, trying for a smile. "Do you hear me?"

  Then I noticed all the other kids hurrying down the stairs after Father Szyszynski, a Pied Piper. "Go," I urged. "You don't want to miss the story."

  Nathaniel buried his face underneath my sweater, his head swelling my belly again, a mock pregnancy. "Come on. All your friends are going."

  I had to peel his arms from around me, push him in the right direction. Twice he looked back, and twice I had to nod, encouraging him to get a move on. "I'm sorry," I said to Margaret, smiling. "You were talking about Corsica?"

  Until now, I did not remember that one of the other priests, the taller one who carried a cat as if it were part of his clerical attire, hurried down the steps after the children. That he caught up to Nathaniel and put his hand on his shoulder with the comfort of someone who had done it before.

  Nathaniel said his name.

  A memory bursts and stings my eyes: What's the opposite of left?

  White.

  What's the opposite of white?

  Bwack.

  I remember the priest at Father Szyszynsk's funeral who had stared through my veil as he handed me the Host, as if my features were familiar. And I remember the sentences printed carefully on a banner beneath th