Perfect Match Read online

  The sound wakes me. Unmistakable, a celebration of clangs and clatter in ringing tin. Raccoons, but in January?

  In my flannel pajamas I tiptoe downstairs. Stuff my bare feet into boots, my arms into a parka. Just in case, I grab the fireplace poker, and then I slip outside.

  The cover of snow masks my footsteps as I walk the few feet to the garage. As I get closer, the huddled black shape is too large to be a raccoon. The head is bent into the trash. It isn't until I smack the poker against the can like a gong that the man even lifts his head, dizzy and ringing.

  He is dressed like a cat burglar, and my first, too-charitable thought is that he must be freezing. His hands, covered in rubber gloves, are slick with the contents of my refuse. Like condoms, I think--he does not want to catch any dread disease, and who knows what you can contract by looking at the detritus of someone's life?

  "What the hell are you doing?" I ask.

  A war plays across his face. Then he takes a tape recorder out of his pocket. "Would you be willing to give me a statement?"

  "You're a reporter? You're going through my trash, and you're a reporter?" I advance on him. "What did you think you would find? What else could you possibly need to say about my life?"

  Now I notice how young he is: Nathaniel, give or take fifteen years. He is shaking, and I don't know if it is the temperature out here, or the fact that he has come face-to-face with someone as evil as me. "Do your readers want to know that I had my period last week? That I finished a box of Honey Nut Cheerios? That I get too much junk mail?"

  I grab the tape recorder and punch the record button. "You want a statement? I'll give you a statement. You ask your readers if they can account for every minute of their lives, every thought in their heads, and be proud of it. You ask them if they've never jaywalked ... never gone thirty-one miles per hour in a thirty-mile zone ... if they've never sped up when they saw that yellow light. And when you find that single, sorry person who hasn't taken a misstep, that one person with the right to judge me, you tell him he's just as human as I am. That tomorrow, his world could turn upside down and he might find himself capable of actions he'd never believed possible." I turn away, my voice breaking. "You tell him ... he could have been me."

  Then I take the tape recorder and throw it as hard and far as I can, into a high drift of snow. I walk inside and lock the door behind me, lean against it, and catch my breath.

  Nothing I do will bring back Father Szyszynski. But nothing I do will ever wipe from my mind the error I've made. No jail sentence can punish me more than I will punish myself, or turn back time, or keep me from thinking that Arthur Gwynne deserved to die as much as his half-brother didn't.

  I have been moving in slow motion, waiting for an inevitable ax to fall, listening to testimony as if these witnesses are discussing the destiny of a stranger. But now, I feel myself waking. The future may unfold in indelible strokes, but it doesn't mean we have to read the same line over and over. That's exactly the fate I didn't want for Nathaniel ... so why should I want it for me?

  Snow starts to fall, like a blessing.

  I want my life back.

  The bird looked like a tiny dinosaur, too small to have feathers or know how to open its eyes. It was on the ground next to a stick shaped like a V, and a yellow-hatted acorn. Its mouth folded back, a hinge, and one stub of a wing flopped. I could see the outline of its heart.

  "It's okay." I got down on the ground so I wouldn't be so scary. But it just lay there on its side, its belly swelled like a balloon.

  When I looked up, I could see its brothers and sisters in the nest.

  With one finger I pushed it onto my hand. "Mom!"

  "What's the matter? Oh, Nathaniel!" She made that click with her tongue and grabbed my wrist, pushing it back to the ground. "Don't pick it up!"

  "But ... but ..." Anyone could see how sick it was. You were supposed to help people who were too sick or sad to take care of themselves; Father Glen said so all the time. So why not birds, too?

  "Once a human touches the baby, its mother doesn't want it anymore." And just like she said, the big robin came out of the sky and hopped right past the baby. "Now you know better," she said.

  I kept staring at the bird. I wondered if it would stay there next to the V stick and the acorn until it died. I covered it with a big leaf, so that it would stay warm.. "If I was a bird and someone touched me, would I die?"

  "If you were a bird," she said, "I never would have let you fall out of the nest."

  EIGHT

  These are the things he takes: his Yomega Brain yo-yo; the starfish arm he found on a beach. His Bravest Boy ribbon, a flashlight, a Batman trading card. Seventy-six pennies, two dimes, and a Canadian quarter. A granola bar and a bag of jellybeans left over from Easter. They are treasures he brought with him when he moved to the motel with his father; he cannot leave them behind now. Everything fits in the white pillowcase and thumps lightly against Nathaniel's stomach when he zips it up inside his coat.

  "You all set?" his father asks, the words lobbed like a stick into a field and forgotten. Nathaniel wonders why he's even bothered to try to keep this a secret, when his dad is too busy to notice him anyway. He climbs into the passenger seat of the truck and fastens the seat belt--then on second thought, unlatches it.

  If he's going to be really bad, he might as well start now.

  Once, the man at the cleaner's offered to take Nathaniel to see where the big moving millipede of pressed clothes began. His dad had lifted him over the counter and he'd followed Mr. Sarni into the way back, where the clothes were being cleaned. The air was so heavy and wet that Nathaniel wheezed as he pushed the big red button; started the conveyor of hangers chugging in its loop again. The air in the courthouse, it reminds Nathaniel of that. Maybe it's not as hot here, or as sticky, but it is hard to breathe all the same.

  When his dad brings him to the playroom downstairs with Monica, they speak in marshmallow bites of words that they think Nathaniel cannot hear. He does not know what a hostile witness is, or juror bias. But when his father talks the lines on his face appear on Monica's, like it is a mirror.

  "Nathaniel," she says, fake-bright, as soon as his dad goes upstairs. "Let's take off that coat."

  "I'm cold," he lies, and he hugs his pack against his middle.

  She is careful to never touch Nathaniel, and he wonders if that's because Monica has the X-ray vision to see how dirty he is on the inside. She looks at him when she thinks he doesn't see, and her eyes are as deep as a pond. His mom stares at him with the same expression. It is all because of Father Gwynne; Nathaniel wishes just once someone would come up to him and think of him as some kid, instead of The One This Happened To.

  What Father Gwynne did was wrong--Nathaniel knew it then, from the way his skin shivered; and he knows it now, from talking to Dr. Robichaud and Monica. They have said over and over that it isn't Nathaniel's fault. But that doesn't keep him from turning around sometimes, really fast, sure that he's felt someone's breath on his neck. And it doesn't keep him from wondering if he cut himself open at the belly, like his father does when he catches a trout, would he find that black knot that hurts all the time?

  "So, how are we doing this morning?" Fisher asks, as soon as I sit down beside him.

  "Shouldn't you know that?" I watch the clerk set a stack of files on the judge's bench. The jury box, without its members, looks cavernous.

  Fisher pats my shoulder. "It's our turn," he assures me. "I'm going to spend the whole day making the jurors forget what Brown told them."

  I turn to him. "The witnesses--"

  "--will do a good job. Trust me, Nina. By lunchtime, everyone in this court is going to think you were crazy."

  As the side door opens and the jury files in, I look away and wonder how to tell Fisher that's not what I want, after all.

  *

  "I have to pee," Nathaniel announces.

  "Okay." Monica puts down the book she has been reading to him and stands up, waiting