Perfect Match Read online

  "Well, of course he--" I begin, and then I stop. The bedwetting, 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 pisghetti and apple spider--were speed bumps that might keep him from growing up too soon; correct them and he'd reach that destination long before I was ready. As it is, things are already changing too quickly. Nathaniel no longer mixes up his pronouns; he has mastered dipthongs--although I sorely miss hearing him say brudder like a Bowery cop. Just about the only hiccup in speech I can still lay claim to is Nathaniel's absolute inability to pronounce the letters L and R.

  In my memory, we are sitting at the kitchen table. Pancakes--shaped like ghosts, with chocolate chip eyes--are stacked high in front of us, along with bacon and orange juice. A big breakfast is the way we bribe Nathaniel on the Sundays that Caleb and I feel guilty enough to go to Mass. The sun hits the lip of my glass and a rainbow spills onto my plate. "What's the opposite of left," I ask.

  Without missing a beat, Nathaniel says, "White."

  Caleb flips a pancake. As a kid, he lisped. Listening to Nathaniel brings abject pain, and the belief that his son will be teased mercilessly, too. He thinks we should correct Nathaniel, and asked Miss Lydia if Nathaniel's pronunciations could be fixed by a speech pathologist. He thinks a child going into kindergarten next year should have the eloquence of Laurence Olivier. "Then what's the opposite of white?" Caleb asks.

  "Bwack."

  "Rrrright," Caleb stresses. "Try it. Rrrrright."

  "Wwwwhite."

  "Just leave it, Caleb," I say.

  But he can't. "Nathaniel," he presses, "the opposite of left is right. And the opposite 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 repeat. "Nathaniel?"

  We just think he needs to be at home, Miss Lydia had said. Maybe you can spend this afternoon with him. "Is that what you need?" I ask out loud, my hands 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 into my arms seamlessly, although at several other points in Nathaniel's life--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 doesn't keep me from hoping that Nathaniel is going to respond.

  Can tonsils become so swollen they impede speech? Can strep come on like lightning? Doesn't meningitis affect the neck first?

  Nathaniel parts his lips--here, he's going to tell me now--but his mouth is a hollow, 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. Nathaniel sits near the Brio train set, pushing it in circles. I'm glaring daggers at the receptionist, who doesn't seem to understand that this is an emergency, that my son is not acting like my son, that this isn't a goddamned common 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 implications of this--the sad truth that my son's illness isn't chicken pox or bronchitis 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 metastasizes into cancer; a dull headache that turns out to be a brain tumor. "I'm not even sure if he's hearing what I say 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 him 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 can 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 going 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 shift and grind every time he tries to make a sound. Nathaniel lies on the examination 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 nothing 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. Ortiz says, "can you try to speak for me?"

  His mother and father are looking at him so hard. It reminds him of one time at the zoo, when Nathaniel had stood in front of a reptile cage for twenty whole minutes thinking that if he waited long enough, the snake would come out of its hiding place. At that moment 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 there at all.

  Now, he purses his mouth. He feels the back of his throat open like a rose. The sound rises from his belly, tumbling over the stones that choke 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 his parents: Stop.

  "There's nothing extraordinary on the ultrasound," Dr. Ortiz says. "No polyps or swelling of the vocal cords, nothing physical that might be keeping Nathaniel from speaking." She looks at us with her clear gray eyes. "Has Nathaniel had any other medical problems lately?"

  Caleb looks at me, and I turn away. So I gave Nathaniel Tylenol, so I'd prayed 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