The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

But now I’m the parent, and it is my child, and that changes everything.

  • • •

  One Saturday I took Nathaniel to my office, so that I could finish up some work. It was a ghost town—the Xerox machines sleeping like beasts, the computers blinking blind, the telephones quiet. Nathaniel occupied himself with the paper shredder while I reviewed files. “How come you named me Nathaniel?” he asked, out of the blue.

  I checked off the name of a witness on a pad. “It means ‘Gift from God.’”

  The jaws of the paper shredder ground together. Nathaniel turned to me. “Did I come wrapped and everything?”

  “You weren’t quite that kind of a gift.” As I watched, he turned off the shredder and began to play with the collection of toys I kept in the corner for children who had the misfortune of being brought to my office. “What name would you rather have?”

  When I was pregnant, Caleb would end each day by saying good night to his baby with a different name: Vladimir, Grizelda, Cuthbert. Keep this up, I had told him, and this baby’s going to arrive with an identity crisis.

  Nathaniel shrugged. “Maybe I could be Batman.”

  “Batman Frost,” I repeated, completely serious. “It’s got a nice ring to it.”

  “There are four Dylans in my school—Dylan S. and Dylan M. and Dylan D. and Dylan T.—but there isn’t another Batman.”

  “Which is an important consideration.” All of a sudden I felt Nathaniel crawling under the hollow of my desk, a warm weight on my feet. “What are you doing?”

  “Batman needs a cave, Mom, duh.”

  “Ah. Right.” I folded my legs underneath me to give Nathaniel more room, and scrutinized a police report. Nathaniel’s hand stretched up to grab a stapler, an impromptu walkie-talkie.

  The case was a rape, and the victim had been found comatose in the bathtub. Unfortunately, the perp had been smart enough to run the water, thereby obliterating nearly any forensic evidence we might have gotten. I turned the page in the file and stared at gruesome police photos of the crime scene, the sunken eggplant face of the woman who had been assaulted.

  “Mom?”

  Immediately I whipped the photo facedown. This was precisely why I did not mix my work life and my home life. “Hmm?”

  “Do you always catch the bad guys?”

  I thought of the victim’s mother, who could not stop crying long enough to give a statement to the police. “Not always,” I answered.

  “Most of the time?”

  “Well,” I said. “At least half.”

  Nathaniel considered this for a moment. “I guess that’s good enough to be a superhero,” he said, and that was when I realized this had been an interview for the position of Robin. But I didn’t have time to be a cartoon sidekick.

  “Nathaniel,” I sighed. “You know why I came in here.” Specifically, to get ready for Monday’s opening arguments. To go over my strategy and my witness list.

  I looked at Nathaniel’s waiting face. Then again, maybe justice was best served from a Batcave. An oxymoron chased through my mind: I am going to get nothing done today. I am doing everything I want to. “Holy Guacamole, Batman,” I said, kicking off my shoes and crawling underneath my desk. Had I ever known that the interior wall was made of cheap pine, and not mahogany? “Robin reporting for duty, but only if I get to drive the Batmobile.”

  “You can’t be Robin for real.”

  “I thought that was the point.”

  Nathaniel stared at me with great pity, as if someone like me really ought to have learned the rules of the game this far along in life. Our shoulders bumped in the confines of my desk. “We can work together and everything, but your name has to be Mom.”

  “Why?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Because,” Nathaniel told me. “It’s who you are.”

  • • •

  “Nathaniel!” I call out, blushing a little. It’s not a sin, is it, to have no control over one’s child? “I’m sorry, Father,” I say, holding the door wide to let him inside. “He’s been . . . shy lately with visitors. Yesterday, when the UPS man came, it took me an hour to find where he was hiding.”

  Father Szyszynski smiles at me. “I told myself I should have called first, instead of dropping in unannounced.”

  “Oh, no. No. It’s wonderful that you came.” This is a lie. I have no idea what to do with a priest in my house. Do I serve cookies? Beer? Do I apologize for all the Sundays I don’t make it to Mass? Do I confess to lying in the first place?

  “Well, it’s part of the job,” Father Szyszynski says, tapping his collar. “The only thing I have to do on Friday afternoons is eavesdrop on the ladies’ auxiliary meeting.”

  “Is that considered a perk?”

  “More like a cross to bear,” the priest says, and smiles. He sits down on the couch in the living room. Father Szyszynski is wearing high-tech running sneakers. He does local half-marathons; his times are posted on the News and Notes boards, next to the index cards that request prayers for the needy. There is even a photo of him there, lean and fit, without his collar, crossing a finish line—in it, he looks nothing like a priest; just a man. He’s in his fifties, but he appears to be ten years younger. Once, I heard him say that he’d tried to make a pact with Satan for eternal youth, but he couldn’t find the devil’s extension in the diocese phone book.

  I wonder which nosy gossip in the church rumor mill told the priest about us. “The Sunday school class misses Nathaniel,” he tells me. He’s being politically correct. If he wanted to be more accurate, he’d say that the Sunday school class misses Nathaniel more than half the Sundays of the year, since we don’t make it regularly to Mass. Still, I know that Nathaniel likes coloring pictures in the basement during the service. And he especially likes afterward, when Father Szyszynski reads to the kids from a great, old illustrated children’s Bible while the rest of the congregation is upstairs having coffee. He gets right down onto the floor in their circle, and according to Nathaniel, acts out floods and plagues and prophecies.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Father Szyszynski says.

  “Do you.”

  He nods. “That in the year 2001 it’s archaic to assume the Church is such a large part of your life it could offer you comfort at a time like this. But it can, Nina. God wants you to turn to Him.”

  I stare right at the priest. “These days I’m not too high on God,” I say bluntly.

  “I know. It doesn’t make much sense, sometimes, God’s will.” Father Szyszynski shrugs. “There have been times I’ve doubted Him myself.”

  “You’ve obviously gotten over it.” I wipe the corner of my eyes; why am I crying? “I’m not even really a Catholic.”

  “Sure you are. You keep coming back, don’t you?”

  But that’s guilt, not faith.

  “Things happen for a reason, Nina.”

  “Oh, yeah? Then do me a favor and ask God what reason there could possibly be for letting a child get hurt like this.”

  “You ask Him,” the priest says. “And when you’re talking, you might want to remember you have something in common—He watched His son suffer, too.”

  He hands me a picture book—David and Goliath, watered down for a five-year-old. “If Nathaniel ever comes out,” he pitches his voice extra loud, “you tell him that Father Glen left a present.” That’s what they call him, all the kids at St. Anne’s, since they can’t pronounce his last name. Heck, the priest has said, after a few tall ones, I can’t pronounce it myself. “Nathaniel particularly enjoyed this story when I read it last year. He wanted to know if we could all make slingshots.” Father Szyszynski stands up, leads the way to the door. “If you want to talk, Nina, you know where to find me. You take care.”

  He starts down the path, the stone steps that Caleb placed with his own hands. As I watch him go I clutch the book to my chest. I think of the weak defeating giants.

  • • •

  Nathaniel is playing with a boat, sinking it, then watching it bob to