The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  • • •

  I find him at the third job site, making a stone wall. Caleb’s face lights up as he recognizes my car. He watches me get out, and then he waits, expecting Nathaniel. It’s enough to propel me forward, so that by the time I reach him I am nearly at a dead run, and I slap him as hard as I can across the face.

  “Nina!” Caleb catches my wrists and holds me away from him. “What the hell!”

  “You bastard. How could you, Caleb? How could you?”

  He pushes me away, rubbing his fingers against his cheek. My hand rises on it, a bright print. Good. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Caleb says. “Slow down.”

  “Slow down?” I spit out. “I’ll make it really simple: Nathaniel told us. He told us what you did to him.”

  “I didn’t do anything to him.”

  For a long moment, I don’t say a word, just stare. “Nathaniel said I . . . I . . .,” Caleb falters. “That’s ridiculous.”

  It is what they all say, the guilty ones, and it makes me unravel. “Don’t you dare tell me that you love him.”

  “Of course I do!” Caleb shakes his head, as if to clear it. “I don’t know what he said. I don’t know why he said it. But Nina, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.”

  When I don’t respond, every year we’ve spent together unspools, until we are both standing knee deep in a litter of memories that don’t matter. Caleb’s eyes are wide and wet. “Nina, please. Think about what you’re saying.”

  I look down at my hands, one fist gripping the other tightly. It is the sign for in. In trouble. In love. In case. “What I think is that kids don’t make this up. That Nathaniel didn’t make this up.” I raise my gaze to his. “Don’t come home tonight,” I say, and I walk back to my car with great precision, as if my heart has not gone to pieces inside me.

  • • •

  Caleb watches the taillights of Nina’s car disappear down the road. The dust that’s kicked up in her wake settles, and the scene still looks like it did a minute ago. But Caleb knows things are completely different now; that there is no going back.

  He will do anything for his son. Always has, always will.

  Caleb looks down at the wall he’s been crafting. Three feet, and it took him the better part of the day. While his son was in a psychiatrist’s office, turning the world inside out, Caleb has been lifting stone, fitting it side by side. Once when he’d been dating Nina he’d shown her how to set together rocks with proportions that did not seem to meet. All you need is one edge in common, he’d told her.

  Case in point, this jagged piece of quartz, kitty-corner to a fat, low block of sandstone. Now, he lifts the piece of sandstone and hurls it into the road, where it breaks into pieces. He raises the quartz and sends it spinning into the woods behind him. He demolishes the wall, all this work, piece by careful piece. Then he sinks into the pile of rubble and presses his dusty hands to his eyes, crying for what cannot be put back together.

  • • •

  I have one more place to go. In the clerk’s office of the East District Court, I move like an automaton. Tears keep coming, no matter how I try to will them away. This is not a professional demeanor, but I couldn’t care less. This is not a professional matter, it’s a personal one.

  “Where do you keep the protective order forms for juveniles?” I ask the clerk, a woman who is new to the court, and whose name I have forgotten.

  She looks at me as if she’s afraid to answer. Then she points to a bin. She fills it out for me, as I feed her the answers in a voice that I can’t place.

  Judge Bartlett receives me in chambers. “Nina.” He knows me, they all do. “What can I do for you?”

  I hold the form out for him and lift my chin. Breathe, speak, focus. “I am filing this on behalf of my son, Your Honor. I’d prefer not to do it in open court.”

  The judge’s eyes hold mine for a long second, then he takes the paper from my hands. “Tell me,” he says gently.

  “There is physical evidence of sexual abuse.” I am careful not to say Nathaniel’s name. That, I cannot bear yet. “And today, he identified the abuser as his father.” His father, not my husband.

  “And you?” Judge Bartlett asks. “Are you all right?”

  I shake my head, my lips pressed tight together. I grasp my hands so tightly that I lose feeling in the fingers. But I don’t say a word.

  “If there’s anything I can do,” the judge murmurs. But there is nothing he can do, or anyone else, no matter how many times the offer is extended. Everything has already been done. And that is the problem.

  The judge scrawls the craggy landscape of his signature across the bottom of the form. “You know this is only temporary. We’ll have to have a hearing in twenty days.”

  “That’s twenty days I have to figure this out.”

  He nods. “I’m sorry, Nina.”

  So am I. For not seeing what was under my nose. For not knowing how to protect a child in the world, but only in the legal system. For every choice I’ve made that has brought me to this moment. And, yes, for the restraining order that burns a hole in my pocket the entire drive back to my son.

  These are the rules at home:

  Make your bed in the morning. Brush your teeth twice a day. Don’t pull the dog’s ears. Finish your vegetables, even if they’re not as good as the spaghetti.

  These are the rules at school:

  Don’t climb up the outside of the slide. Don’t walk in front of the swings while a friend is swinging. Raise your hand in Circle if you have something to say. Everybody gets to play a game, if they want to. Put on a smock if you’re going to paint.

  I know other rules, too:

  Buckle your seat belt.

  Never speak to a stranger.

  Don’t tell, or you’ll burn in Hell.

  THREE

  Life, it turns out, goes on. There is no cosmic rule that grants you immunity from the details just because you have come face-to-face with a catastrophe. The garbage cans still overflow, the bills arrive in the mail, telemarketers interrupt dinner.

  Nathaniel comes into the bathroom just as I put the cap back on the tube of Preparation H. I read once that rubbing it into the skin around the eyes makes the swelling go down, the red fade. I turn to him with a smile so bright he backs away. “Hey, sweetie. Did you brush your teeth?” He nods, and I take his hand. “Let’s read a book, then.”

  Nathaniel scrambles onto his bed like any other five-year-old—it is a jungle, and he is a monkey. Dr. Robichaud has said that the children bounce back fast, faster even than their parents do. I hold onto this excuse as I open the book—one about a pirate blind in one eye who cannot see that the parrot on his shoulder is actually a poodle. I make it through the first three pages, and then Nathaniel stops me, his hand splayed across the bright painted pictures. His index finger waggles, and then he holds that hand up to his forehead again, making a sign I wish I could never see again.

  Where’s Daddy?

  I take the book and set it on the nightstand. “Nathaniel, he’s not coming home tonight.” He’s not coming home any night, I think.

  He frowns at me. He doesn’t know how to ask why yet, but that is what’s caught in his head. Is he thinking that he’s responsible for Caleb’s exile? Has he been told there will be some kind of retribution, for confessing?

  Holding his hands between mine—to keep him from interrupting—I try to make this as easy as I can. “Right now, Daddy can’t be here.”

  Nathaniel tugs his arms free, curls his fingers up and in. I want.

  God, I want, too. Nathaniel, angry, turns away from me. “What Daddy did,” I say brokenly, “was wrong.”

  At that, Nathaniel bolts upright. He shakes his head vehemently.

  This, I’ve seen before. If a parent is the one sexually abusing a child, the child is often told that it’s a measure of love. But Nathaniel keeps shaking his head, so hard that his hair flies from side to side. “Stop. Nathaniel, please stop.” When he does, he looks at m