Perfect Match (6 page)

Monica LaFlamme has worked in the Child Abuse Action Network of the BCYF fo r three years now, and she is tired of coming in during the second act. She looks out the window of her office, a squat gray cube like every other gov ernment office in the complex, to a deserted playground. It is a metal swin g set resting on a concrete slab. Leave it to the BCYF to have the one play structure left in the region that doesn't meet updated safety standards. She yawns, pinches her finger and thumb to the bridge of her nose. Monica is exhausted. Not just from staying up for Letterman last night, but in genera l, as if the gray walls and commercial carpet in her office have somehow see ped into her through osmosis. She is tired of filling out reports on cases t hat go nowhere. She is tired of seeing forty-year-old eyes in the faces of t en-year-old children. What she needs is a vacation to the Caribbean, where t here is so much color exploding-blue surf, white sand, scarlet flowers-that it renders her blind to her daily work.

When the phone rings, Monica jumps in her chair. “This is Monica LaFlamme,” she says, crisply opening the manila folder on her desk, as if the person on the other end of the line has seen her daydreaming.

“Yes, hello. This is Dr. Christine Robichaud. I'm a psychiatrist up at Maine Medical Center.” A hesitation, and that is all Monica needed to know what i s coming next. “I need to report a possible case of sexual abuse against a f ive-year-old male.”

She takes notes as Dr. Robichaud describes behaviors she's seen over and ove r. She scrawls the name of the patient, the names of his parents. Something nicks the corner of her mind, but she pushes it aside to concentrate on what the psychiatrist is saying.

“Are there any police reports you can fax me?” Monica asks. “The police hav en't been involved. The boy hasn't identified the abuser yet.” At that, Monica puts down her pen. “Doctor, you know I can't open an investi gation until there's someone to investigate.”

“It's only a matter of time. Nathaniel is experiencing a somatoform disorde r, which basically renders him mute without any physical cause. It's my belief that within a few weeks or so, he'll be able to tell us who did t his to him.”

“What are the parents saying?”

The psychiatrist pauses. “This is all new behavior.” Monica taps her pen on her desk. In her experience, when the parents claim t o be completely surprised by the speech or actions of a child who has been a bused, it often ends up that one parent or both is the abuser. Dr. Robichaud is well aware of this, too. “I thought that you might want to g et in at the ground level, Ms. LaFlamme. I referred the Frosts to a pediatric ian trained in child sexual abuse cases, for a detailed medical examination o f their son. He should be faxing you a report.”

Monica takes down the information; hangs up the phone. Then she looks over w hat she's written, in preparation for beginning yet another case that will m ost likely fizzle before a conviction is secured.

Frost, she thinks, rewriting the name. Surely it must be someone else. We lay in the dark, not touching, a foot of space between us.

“Miss Lydia?” I whisper, and feel Caleb shake his head. “Who, then? Who's alone with him, other than the two of us?”

Caleb is so quiet I think he's fallen asleep. “Patrick watched him for a wh ole weekend when we went to your cousin's wedding last month.” I come up on an elbow. “You've got to be kidding. Patrick's a police office r. And I've known him since he was six.”

“He doesn't have a girlfriend-”

“He's only been divorced for six months!”

“All I'm saying,” Caleb rolls over, “is you may not know him as well as you think.”

I shake my head. “Patrick loves Nathaniel.”

Caleb just looks at me. His response is clear, although he never speaks it a loud: Maybe too much.

The next morning Caleb leaves while the moon is still hanging crooked on its peg in the sky. We have discussed this plan, trading our time like chips in a poker game: Caleb will finish his wall, then be home by midday. The impli cation is that I can go to the office when he returns, but I won't. My work, it will have to wait. This all happened to Nathaniel when I wasn't present to bear witness; I cannot risk letting him out of my sig ht again.

It's a noble cause to champion-protecting my child. But this morning I am hav ing trouble understanding lionesses that guard their cubs, and relating more to the hamster that devours her offspring. For one thing, my son hasn't seeme d to notice that I want to be his hero. For another, I'm not so sure I want t o be one, either. Not if it means sticking up for a boy who fights me at ever y turn.

God, he has every right to hate me for being so selfish now.

Yet patience has never been my strong point. I solve problems; I seek repris al. And even though I know it is not a matter of will for Nathaniel, I am an gry that his silence is protecting the person who should be held accountable. Today Nathaniel is falling apart at the seams. He insists on wearing his Supe rman pajamas, although it is nearly noon. Worse, he had an accident in his be d last night, so he stinks of urine. It took Caleb over an hour to get him ou t of his wet clothes yesterday; it took me two hours to realize I don't have the emotional or physical strength to fight him this morning. Instead, I've m oved on to another battle.

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 br eakfast 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 bac k again. “Nathaniel.” I let a lemon roll off the counter. “Do you want spagh etti? 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 q uestion 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, “becau se 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 do wn, moving with the same care he'd use to enter a crime scene. “Nina,” he a sks evenly, “are you all right?”

Everything Caleb said about Patrick last night hits me, and I burst into tear s. 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 a ren't supposed to exist? As a prosecutor, I have buffeted myself with legal ese-penetration, molestation, victimization-yet not a single one of these t erms 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 tha t 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 m om, 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 rolli ng 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 rind 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. “Som eone, 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 list ened to the stories of women who've lived through rape. The only way to get th rough it is to step back, to pretend you are not part of this civilization, wh ose 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 t o hear. I could walk back through that door, he thinks, and start over. I coul d 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 t alk 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 oppo site shore.

The day after his son goes mute for reasons that Caleb does not want to beli eve, 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 l ook 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 cu stomer. 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 stone s 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 whe n you're working that high up. Which means that Caleb turns first to the knee wall, 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 use d bricks, and they come from all over New England-demolished factories an d wrecked hospital wards, crumbling colonial homes and abandoned schoolhou ses. Caleb likes their marks and scars. He fancies that maybe in the porou s red clay there might be some old ghosts or angels; he'd be all right wit h either walking the edge of his land.

Thank goodness, he's already dug below the frost line. Crushed stone rests s ix inches deep. Caleb hauls a bag of Redi-Mix into his arms and pours it int o the wheelbarrow he uses for mixing. Chop and drag, set a rhythm as the wat er 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 footin g, 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 th e inside, the mortar is rough and ugly, smeared. Caleb doesn't have to be car eful on the spots that no one sees.

He reaches for a brick and his fingers brush over something smaller, smooth er. A plastic soldier-the green army man variety. The last time he'd been w orking 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 t umbled bricks.

Nathaniel was three. “I'm gonna take you down,” he had said, pointing the so ldier 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; t hat 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?”

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 fi ve 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 gree n 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 wil l 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 memor y of his son was saved.