The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  He seemed to consider this. “No.”

  “All right then.” I held out my arms.

  “Mom? What if this was a pit of lava?”

  “I wouldn’t be wearing a bathing suit, for one.”

  “What if I get in there and my arms and legs forget what to do?”

  “They won’t.”

  “They could.”

  “Not likely.”

  “One time is all it takes,” Nathaniel said gravely, and I realized he’d been listening to me practice my closings in the shower.

  An idea. I rounded my mouth, raised my arms, and sank to the bottom of the pool. The water hummed in my ears, the world went slow. I counted to five and then the blue shimmied, an explosion just in front of me. Suddenly Nathaniel was underwater and swimming, his eyes full of stars and his mouth and nose blowing bubbles. I caught him tight and broke the surface. “You saved me,” I said.

  Nathaniel put his hands on either side of my face. “I had to,” he said. “So you could save me back.”

  • • •

  The first thing he does is draw a picture of a frog that is eating the moon. Dr. Robichaud doesn’t have a black crayon, though, so Nathaniel has to make the night sky blue. He colors so hard the crayon breaks in his hand, and then wonders if someone is going to yell at him.

  No one does.

  Dr. Robichaud told him he could do anything he wanted, while everyone sat around and watched him play. Everyone: his mom and dad, and this new doctor, who has hair so white-yellow that he can see her scalp underneath, beating like a heart. The room has a gingerbread-style dollhouse, a rocking horse for kids younger than Nathaniel, a beanbag chair shaped like a baseball mitt. There are crayons and paints and puppets and dolls. When Nathaniel moves from one activity to another, he notices Dr. Robichaud writing on a clipboard, and he wonders if she is drawing too; if she has the missing black crayon.

  Every now and then she asks him questions, which he couldn’t answer even if he wanted to. Do you like frogs, Nathaniel? And: That chair is comfortable, don’t you think? Most of the questions are stupid ones that grown-ups ask, even though they don’t really want to listen to the answers. Only once has Dr. Robichaud said something that Nathaniel wishes he could respond to. He pushed the button on a chunky plastic tape recorder and the sound that came out was familiar: Halloween and tears all rolled together. “Those are whales singing,” Dr. Robichaud said. “Have you ever heard them before?”

  Yes, Nathaniel wanted to say, but I thought it was just me, crying on the inside.

  The doctor starts to talk to his parents, big words that slide in his ear and then turn tail and run away like rabbits. Bored, Nathaniel looks under the table again for the black crayon. He smoothes the corners of his picture. Then he notices the doll in the corner.

  It’s a boy doll, he sees that the minute he turns it over. Nathaniel doesn’t like dolls; he doesn’t play with them. But he is tugged toward this toy, lying twisted on the floor. He picks it up and fixes the arms and the legs, so that it doesn’t look like it’s hurt anymore.

  Then he glances down and sees the blue crayon, broken, still curled in his hand.

  • • •

  How clichéd is this: The psychiatrist brings up Freud. Somatoform disorder is the DSM-IV term for what Sigmund called hysteria—young women whose reaction to trauma manifested itself into valid physical ailments without any etiological physical cause. Basically, Dr. Robichaud says, the mind can make the body ill. It doesn’t happen as often as it did in Freud’s day, because there are so many more acceptable outlets for emotional trauma. But every now and then it still happens, most often in children who don’t possess the right vocabulary to explain what’s upsetting them.

  I glance over at Caleb, wondering if he’s buying any of this. The truth is, I just want to get Nathaniel home. I want to call an expert witness I once used, an ENT in New York City, and ask him for a referral to a specialist in the Boston area who can look at my son.

  Nathaniel was fine yesterday. I am not a psychiatrist, but even I know that a nervous breakdown doesn’t happen overnight.

  “Emotional trauma,” Caleb says softly. “Like what?”

  Dr. Robichaud says something, but the sound is drowned out. My gaze has gone to Nathaniel, who is sitting in the corner of the playroom. In his lap, he holds a doll facedown. With his other hand, he is grinding a crayon between the cheeks of its buttocks. And his face, oh his face—it’s as blank as a sheet.

  I have seen this a thousand times. I have been in the offices of a hundred psychiatrists. I have sat in the corner like a fly on the wall as a child shows what he cannot tell, as a child gives me the proof I need to go prosecute a case.

  Suddenly I am on the floor beside Nathaniel, my hands on his shoulders, my eyes locked with his. A moment later, he is in my arms. We rock back and forth in a vacuum, neither of us able to find words to say what we know is true.

  Past the school playground, on the other side of the hill, in the forest—that’s where the witch lives.

  We all know about her. We believe. We haven’t seen her, but that’s a good thing, because the ones who see her are the ones who get taken away.

  Ashleigh says the feeling you get when the wind climbs the back of your neck and you can’t stop shivering; that’s the witch coming too close. She wears a flannel jacket that turns her invisible. She sounds like leaves falling down.

  Willie was in our class. He had eyes sunk so far in his head they sometimes disappeared, and he smelled like oranges. He was allowed to wear his Teva sandals even after it got cold out, and his feet would get muddy and blue, and my mother would shake her head and say, “See?” and I did—I saw, and I wished I could do it too. The thing was, one day Willie was sitting next to me at snack, dunking his graham crackers into his milk until they all became a slushy mountain at the bottom . . . and the next day, he was gone. He was gone, and he never came back.

  At the hiding spot under the slide, Ashleigh tells us that the witch has taken him. “She says your name, and after that, you can’t help it, you’ll do anything she says. You’ll go anywhere she wants.”

  Lettie starts to cry. “She’ll eat him. She’ll eat Willie.”

  “Too late,” Ashleigh says, and in her hand is a white, white bone.

  It looks too small to come from Willie. It looks too small to come from anything that ever walked. But I know better than anyone what it is: I found it, digging under the dandelions near the fence. I was the one who gave it to Ashleigh.

  “She’s got Danny right now,” Ashleigh says.

  Miss Lydia told us during circle time that Danny was sick. We’d put his face up on the Who’s Here board, flipped over to the sad side. After recess, we were all going to make him a card. “Danny’s sick,” I tell Ashleigh, but she just looks at me like I’m the dumbest person ever. “Did you think they would tell us the truth?” she says.

  So when Miss Lydia isn’t watching, we slip under the fence where the dogs and the rabbits sometimes get in—Ashleigh and Peter and Brianna and me, the bravest. We will save Danny. We will get him before the witch does.

  But Miss Lydia finds us first. She makes us go inside and sit in Time Out and says we should never, never, ever leave the playground. Don’t we know we could get hurt?

  Brianna looks at me. Of course we know; it’s why we left in the first place.

  Peter starts to cry, and tells her about the witch, and what Ashleigh said. Miss Lydia’s eyebrows come together like a fat black caterpillar. “Is this true?”

  “Peter’s a liar. He made the whole thing up,” Ashleigh says, and she doesn’t even blink.

  That’s how I know that the witch has already gotten to her.

  TWO

  Just so you know: if this ever happens to you, you will not be ready. You will walk down a street and wonder how people can behave as if the whole world has not been tipped on its axis. You will comb your mind for signs and signals, certain that one moment—aha!—will trip you like a t