I offer my most winning smile. "Nathaniel wasn't quite himself this morning. Maybe it's some kind of virus."
Miss Lydia frowned. "I don't think so, Mrs. Frost. There are other incidents ... he was climbing the swing set today, and jumping off the top-"
"Kids do that kind of thing all the time!"
"Nina," Miss Lydia says gently, Miss Lydia who in four years has never used my first name, "was Nathaniel speaking before he came to school this morning?"
"Well, of course he-" I begin, and then I stop. The bed-wetting, the rushed breakfast, the black mood-there is much I remember about Nathaniel that morning, but the only voice I hear in my mind is my own.
I would know my son's voice anywhere. Pitched and bubbled; I used to wish I could bottle it, like the Sea Witch who stole from the Little Mermaid. His mistakes-hossipal and phghetti and apple spider-were speed bumps that might keep him from growing up too soon; correct them and he'd reach that destination long before I was ready. As it is, things are already changing too quickly. Nathaniel no longer mixes up his pronouns; he has mastered dipthongs-although I sorely miss hearing him say brudder like a Bowery cop. Just about the only hiccup in speech I can still lay claim to is Nathaniel's absolute inability to pronounce the letters L and R.
In my memory, we are sitting at the kitchen table. Pancakes-shaped like ghosts, with chocolate chip eyes-are stacked high in front of us, along with bacon and orange juice. A big breakfast is the way we bribe Nathaniel on the Sundays that Caleb and I feel guilty enough to go to Mass. The sun hits the lip of my glass and a rainbow spills onto my plate. "What's the opposite of left," I ask.
Without missing a beat, Nathaniel says, "White."
Caleb flips a pancake. As a kid, he lisped. Listening to Nathaniel brings abject pain, and the belief that his son will be teased mercilessly, too. He thinks we should correct Nathaniel, and asked Miss Lydia if Nathaniel's pronunciations could be fixed by a speech pathologist. He thinks a child going into kindergarten next year should have the eloquence of Laurence Olivier. "Then what's the opposite of white?" Caleb asks.
"Bwack."
"Rrrrigbt," Caleb stresses. "Try it. Rrrrright."
"Wivwwhite."
"Just leave it, Caleb," I say.
But he can't. "Nathaniel," he presses, "the opposite of left is right. And the opposite of right is ... ?"
Nathaniel thinks about this for a moment. "Ewase," he answers.
"God help him," Caleb mutters, turning back to the stove.
Me, I just wink at Nathaniel. "Maybe He will," I say.
In the parking lot of the nursery school, I kneel down so that Nathaniel and I are face-to-face. "Honey, tell me what's wrong."
Nathaniel's collar is twisted; his hands are stained red with finger-paint. He stares at me with wide, dark eyes and doesn't say a thing.
All the words he isn't speaking rise in my throat, thick as bile. "Honey," I repeat. "Nathaniel?"
We just think he needs to be at home, Miss Lydia had said. Maybe you can spend this afternoon with him. "Is that what you need?" I ask out loud, my hands sliding from his shoulders to the soft moon of his face. "Some quality time?" Smiling hard, I fold him into a hug. He is heavy and warm and fits into my arms seamlessly, although at several other points in Nathaniel's life-his infancy, his toddlerhood-I have been certain that we matched equally as well.
"Does your throat hurt?" Shake.
"Does anything hurt?" Another shake.
"Did something upset you at school? Did someone say something that hurt your feelings? Can you tell me what happened?"
Three questions, too many for him to process, much less answer. But that doesn't keep me from hoping that Nathaniel is going to respond.
Can tonsils become so swollen they impede speech? Can strep come on like lightning? Doesn't meningitis affect the neck first?
Nathaniel parts his lips-here, he's going to tell me now-but his mouth is a hollow, silent cavern.
"That's okay," I say, although it isn't, not by a long shot.
Caleb arrives at the pediatrician's office while we are waiting to be seen. Nathaniel sits near the Brio train set, pushing it in circles. I'm glaring daggers at the receptionist, who doesn't seem to understand that this is an emergency, that my son is not acting like my son, that this isn't a goddamned common cold, and that we should have been seen a half hour ago.
Caleb immediately goes to Nathaniel, curling his big body into a play space meant for children. "Hey, Buddy. You're not feeling so great, huh?"
