Perfect Match Read online

  Nathaniel sits like a stone gargoyle on his stool, his lips pressed together, resisting my attempts to get some food into him. He has not eaten since breakfast the previous day. I have held up everything from maraschino cherries to a gingerroot, the whole contents of the refrigerator from A to Z and back again. "Nathaniel." I let a lemon roll off the counter. "Do you want spaghetti? Chicken fingers? I'll make you whatever you want. Just pick."

  But he only shakes his head.

  If he does not eat, it isn't the end of the world. No, that was yesterday. But there is a part of me that believes if I can do this--fill my son--it will keep him from hurting inside. There's a part of me that remembers the first job of a mother is to feed her child; and if I can succeed at this one small thing, maybe it will mean I have not completely failed him.

  "Tuna? Ice cream? Pizza?"

  He begins to turn slowly on the stool. At first it is a mistake--a slip of his foot that sets him spinning. Then he does it deliberately. He hears me ask a question and he very purposefully ignores me.

  "Nathaniel."

  Twirl.

  Something snaps. I am angry at myself, at the world, but because it is easier, I lash out at him. "Nathaniel! I am speaking to you!"

  He meets my gaze. Then lazily pivots away from me.

  "You will listen to me, now!"

  Into this charming domestic scene walks Patrick. I hear his voice before he finds us in the kitchen. "Armageddon must be coming," he calls out, "because I can't think of any other reason that would keep you away from work two days straight, when--" As he turns the corner, he sees my face and slows down, moving with the same care he'd use to enter a crime scene. "Nina," he asks evenly, "are you all right?"

  Everything Caleb said about Patrick last night hits me, and I burst into tears. Not Patrick, too; I couldn't stand for more than one pillar of my world to crumble. I just cannot believe that Patrick might have done this to my son. Here's proof: Nathaniel hasn't run screaming from him.

  Patrick's arms come around me and I swear, if not for that, I would sink onto the floor. I hear my voice; it's uncontrollable, a verbal twitch. "I'm fine. I'm a hundred percent," I say, but my conviction shakes like an aspen leaf.

  How do you find the words to explain that the life you woke up in yesterday is not the one you woke up in today? How do you describe atrocities that aren't supposed to exist? As a prosecutor, I have buffeted myself with legalese--penetration, molestation, victimization--yet not a single one of these terms is as raw and as true as the sentence Someone raped my son.

  Patrick's eyes go from Nathaniel to me and back again. Is he thinking that I've had a breakdown? That stress has snapped me in half? "Hey, Weed," he says, his old nickname for Nathaniel, who grew by leaps and bounds as an infant. "You wanna come upstairs with me and get dressed, while your mom, um, wipes down the counter?"

  "No," I say, at the same moment that Nathaniel bolts from the room.

  "Nina," Patrick tries again. "Did something happen at Nathaniel's school?"

  "Did something happen at Nathaniel's school," Nina repeats, the words rolling like marbles on her tongue. "Did something happen. Well, that's the $64,000 question, now, isn't it?"

  He stares at her. If he looks hard enough, he will find the truth; he always has been able to. At age eleven, he knew that Nina had kissed her first boy, although she had been too embarrassed to tell Patrick; he knew that she'd been accepted to an out-of-state college long before she'd gotten the nerve worked up to confess that she was leaving Biddeford.

  "Someone hurt him, Patrick," Nina whispers, breaking before his eyes. "Someone, and I ... I don't know who."

  A shiver rumbles through his chest. "Nathaniel?"

  Patrick has told parents that their teens have died in a drunken car crash. He has supported widows at the graveside of their suicidal husbands. He has listened to the stories of women who've lived through rape. The only way to get through it is to step back, to pretend you are not part of this civilization, whose members cause such grief to each other. But this ... oh, with this ... there is no distance.

  Patrick feels his heart grow too large in his chest. He sits with Nina on the floor of her kitchen as she tells him the details of a story he never wanted to hear. I could walk back through that door, he thinks, and start over. I could turn back time.

  "He can't speak," Nina says. "And I don't know how to make him."

  Patrick pulls her back at arm's length. "You do know how. You make people talk to you all the time."

  When she raises her face, he sees what he's given her. You cannot be doomed, after all, as long as you can still see the faint outline of hope on the opposite shore.

  The day after his son goes mute for reasons that Caleb does not want to believe, he walks outside the front door and realizes his home is falling apart. Not in the literal sense, of course--he's too careful for that. But if you look closely, you notice that the things which should have been taken care of ages ago--the stone path in front of the house, the crest at the top of the chimney, the brick kneewall meant to circle the perimeter of their land--all of these projects had been abandoned for another commissioned by a paying customer. He puts his coffee mug down on the edge of the porch and walks down the steps, trying to look objectively at each site.

  The front path, well, it would take an expert to realize how uneven the stones are; that's not a priority. The chimney is a pure embarrassment; it's chipped along the whole left side. But getting to the roof this late in the afternoon doesn't make any sense, plus, it helps to have an assistant when you're working that high up. Which means that Caleb turns first to the kneewall, a foot-wide hollow brick embellishment at the perimeter of the road.

  The bricks are stacked at the spot where he'd left off nearly a year ago. He got them from commercial contractors who knew he'd been looking for used bricks, and they come from all over New England--demolished factories and wrecked hospital wards, crumbling colonial homes and abandoned schoolhouses. Caleb likes their marks and scars. He fancies that maybe in the porous red clay there might be some old ghosts or angels; he'd be all right with either walking the edge of his land.

  Thank goodness, he's already dug below the frost line. Crushed stone rests six inches deep. Caleb hauls a bag of Redi-Mix into his arms and pours it into the wheelbarrow he uses for mixing. Chop and drag, set a rhythm as the water blends with the sand and concrete. He can feel it taking over as soon as he lays the first course of bricks, wiggles them into the cement until they seat--when he puts his whole body into his work like this, his mind goes wide and white.

  It is his art, and it is his addiction. He moves along the edge of the footing, placing with grace. This wall will not be solid; there will be two smooth facings, crowned with a decorative concrete cap. You'll never know that on the inside, the mortar is rough and ugly, smeared. Caleb doesn't have to be careful on the spots that no one sees.

  He reaches for a brick and his fingers brush over something smaller, smoother. A plastic soldier--the green army man variety. The last time he'd been working on this, Nathaniel had come with him. While Caleb dug the trench and filled it with stone, his son had hidden a battalion in the fort made of tumbled bricks.

  Nathaniel was three. "I'm gonna take you down," he had said, pointing the soldier at Mason, the golden retriever.

  "Where did you hear that?" Caleb asked, laughing.

  "I hearded it," Nathaniel said sagely, "way back when I was a baby."

  That long ago, Caleb had thought.

  Now, he holds the plastic soldier in his hand. A flashlight trips along the driveway, and for the first time Caleb realizes that it is past sunset; that somehow, in his work, he's missed the end of the day. "What are you doing?" Nina asks.

  "What does it look like I'm doing?"

  "Now?"

  He turns, hiding the toy soldier in his fist. "Why not?"

  "But it's ... it's ..." She shakes her head. "I'm putting Nathaniel to bed."

  "Do you need my help?"

&n