The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  “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?”

  He realizes after the words escape that she will take it the wrong way. Do you want help, he should have said. Predictably, Nina bristles. “I think after five years I can probably figure it out all by myself,” she says, and heads back toward the house, her flashlight leaping like a cricket.

  Caleb hesitates, unsure whether he should follow her. In the end, he chooses not to. Instead he squints beneath the pinpricks of stars and puts the green soldier into the hollow made by the two sides of the wall. He sets bricks on either side, following the course. When this wall is finished, no one will know that this army man sleeps inside. No one but Caleb, that is, who will look at it a thousand times a day and know that at least one flawless memory of his son was saved.

  • • •

  Nathaniel lies in bed thinking about the time he took a baby chick home from school. Well, it wasn’t a chick exactly . . . it was an egg that Miss Lydia had put in the trash, as if they were all too dumb to count that there were now three eggs instead of four in the incubator. The other eggs, though, had turned into little yellow cotton balls that cheeped. So that day before his father picked him up, Nathaniel went into Miss Lydia’s office and slipped the egg out of the garbage can, into the sleeve of his shirt.

  He’d slept with it under his pillow, sure if it had a little more time it would turn into a chick like the others had. But all it had come to were nightmares—of his father making an omelet in the morning, cracking the shell, and a live baby chick falling into the sizzling pan. His father had found the egg beside his bed three days later; it had tumbled to the floor. He hadn’t cleaned the mess up in time: Nathaniel could still remember the silvered dead eye, the knotted gray body, the thing that might have been a wing.

  Nathaniel used to think the Creature he’d seen that morning—it wasn’t a chick, that was for sure—was the scariest something that could ever exist. Even now, from time to time when he blinks, it is there on the backs of his eyelids. He has stopped eating eggs, because he is afraid of what might be inside. An item that looks perfectly normal on the surface might only be disguised.

  Nathaniel stares up at his ceiling. There are even scarier things; he knows that now.

  The door to his bedroom opens wider, and someone steps in. Nathaniel is still thinking of the Creature, and the Other, and he can’t see around the bright hall light. He feels something sink onto the bed, curl around him, as if Nathaniel is the dead thing now and needs to grow a shell to hide inside.

  “It’s okay,” his father’s voice says at his ear. “It’s only me.” His arms come around tight, keep him from trembling. Nathaniel closes his eyes, and for the first time since he’s gone to bed that night, he doesn’t see the chick at all.

  • • •

  The moment before we step into Dr. Robichaud’s office the next day, I have a sudden surge of hope. What if she looks at Nathaniel and decides she has misinterpreted his behavior? What if she apologizes, stamps our son’s record with red letters, MISTAKEN? But when we walk inside, there’s a new person joining us, and it is all I need to blow my fairy-tale ending sky high. In a place as small as York County, I couldn’t prosecute child molestation cases and not know Monica LaFlamme. I don’t have anything against her, specifically, just her agency. In our office we change the acronym of BCYF to suit us: TGDSW—Those God Damn Social Workers; or RTSM—Red Tape Society of Maine. The last case I’d worked with Monica had involved a boy diagnosed with oppositional defiance disorder—a condition, ultimately, that prevented us from prosecuting his abuser.

  She gets up, her hands extended, as if she is my best friend. “Nina . . . I am so, so sorry to hear about this.”

  My eyes are flint; my heart is hard as a diamond. I do not fall for this touchy-feely bullshit in my profession; I’m sure as hell not going to fall for it in my personal life. “What can you do for me, Monica?” I ask bluntly.

  The psychiatrist, I can tell, is shocked. Probably she’s never heard anyone talk back to the BCYF before. Probably she thinks she ought to put me on Prozac.

  “Oh, Nina. I wish I could do more.”

  “You always do,” I say, and that’s the point when Caleb interrupts.

  “I’m sorry, we haven’t been introduced,” he mumbles, squeezing my arm in warning. He shakes hands with Monica and says hello to Dr. Robichaud, ushering Nathaniel inside to play.

  “Ms. LaFlamme is the caseworker assigned to Nathaniel,” the psychiatrist explains. “I thought it might be helpful for you to meet her; have her answer some of your questions.”

  “Here’s one,” I start. “How do I go about getting BCYF uninvolved?”

  Dr. Robichaud looks nervously at Caleb, then at me. “Legally—”

  “Thank you, but legally, I pretty much know the routine. See, that was a trick question. The answer is that the BCYF is already uninvolved. They never get involved.” I’m babbling, I can’t help it. Seeing Monica here is too strange, like work and home have tunneled through the same wormhole in time. “I give you a name and tell you what he did . . . and then you can go do your job?”

  “Well,” Monica says, her voice as smooth as caramel. I have always hated caramel. “It’s true, Nina, that a victim has to give an ID before we—”

  A victim. She has reduced Nathaniel to any of a hundred cases I have prosecuted over the years. To any of a hundred lousy outcomes. That is why, I realize, seeing Monica LaFlamme in Dr. Robichaud’s office has turned me inside out. It means Nathaniel has already been given a number and a file in a system that I know is bound to fail him.

  “This is my son,” I say through clenched teeth. “I don’t care what procedure calls for. I don’t care if you don’t have an ID; if you don’t get one for months or years. Take the whole population of Maine, then, and rule them out one by one. But start, Monica. Jesus Christ. Start.”

  By the time I finish speaking, the others are staring at me as if I’ve grown another head. I glance at Nathaniel—playing with blocks, although none of these good people convened on his behalf are watching, for God’s sake—and walk out the door.

  Dr. Robichaud catches up to me in the parking lot. Her heels click on the pavement, and I smell a cigarette being lit. “Want one?”

  “Don’t smoke. But thanks.”

  We are leaning against a car that isn’t mine. A black Camaro festooned with fuzzy dice. The door is unlocked. If I get in and drive away, can I steal that person’s life, too?

  “You sound a little . . . frazzled,” Dr. Robichaud says.

  I have to laugh at that. “Is Understatement 101 a course in med school?”

  “Of course. It’s the prereq for Lying Through One’s Teeth.” Dr. Robichaud takes a final drag and crushes out her cigarette beneath her pump. “I know it’s the last thing you want to hear, but in Nathaniel’s case, time isn’t your enemy.”

  She doesn’t know that. She hadn’t even met Nathaniel a week ago. She doesn’t look at him every morning and remember, in sharp counterpoint, the little boy who used to ask so many questions—why birds on electrical wires don’t get electrocuted, why fire is blue in the center, who invented dental floss—that I once, stupidly, wished for peace and quiet.

  “He’ll come back to you, Nina,” Dr. Robichaud says quietly.

  I squint into the sun. “At what price?”

  She doesn’t have an answer for that. “Nathaniel’s mind is protecting him now. He isn’t in pain. He isn’t thinking about what happened nearly as much as you are.” Hesitating, she extends an olive branch. “I could refer you to an adult psychiatrist, who might be able to prescribe something.”

  “I don’t want any drugs.”

  “Maybe you’d like someone to talk to, then.”

  “Yes,” I say, turning to face her. “My son.”

&nbs