Nathaniel shrugs, but doesn't speak. He hasn't spoken now in God knows how many hours?
"Does something hurt, Nathaniel?" Caleb says, and that's about all I can take.
"Don't you think I've already asked him?" I explode.
"I don't know, Nina. I haven't been here."
"Well, he isn't talking, Caleb. He isn't responding to me." The full implications of this-the sad truth that my son's illness isn't chicken pox or bronchitis or any of a thousand other things I could understand-make it hard to stand upright. It's the strange things, like this, that always turn out to be awful: a wart that won't go away, which metasta-sizes into cancer; a dull headache that turns out to be a brain tumor.
"I'm not even sure if he's hearing what I say to him, now. For all I know it's some . . . some virus that's attacking his vocal cords."
"Virus." There is a pause. "He was feeling sick yesterday and you shoved him off to school this morning, regardless-"
"This is my fault?"
Caleb just looks at me, hard. "You've been awfully busy lately, that's all I'm saying."
"So I'm supposed to apologize for the fact that my job isn't something I can do on my own clock, like yours? Well, excuse me. I'll ask if the victims would be kind enough to get raped and beaten at a more convenient time."
"No, you'll just hope that your own son has the good sense to get sick when you're not scheduled in court."
It takes me a moment to respond, I'm that angry. "That is so-"
"It's true, Nina. How can everyone else's kid be a priority over your own?"
"Nathaniel?"
The soft voice of the pediatric nurse practitioner lands like an ax between us. She has a look on her face I cannot quite read, and I'm not sure if she's going to ask about Nathaniel's silence, or his parents' lack of it.
It feels like he's swallowed stones, like his neck is full of pebbles that shift and grind every time he tries to make a sound. Nathaniel lies on the examination table while Dr. Ortiz gently rubs jelly under his chin, then rolls over his throat a fat wand that tickles. On the computer screen she's wheeled into the room, salt and pepper blotches rise to the surface, pictures that look nothing like him at all.
When he crooks his pinky finger, he can reach a crack in the leather on the table. Inside it's foam, a cloud that can be torn apart. "Nathaniel," Dr. Ortiz says, "can you try to speak for me?" His mother and father are looking at him so hard. It reminds him of one time at the zoo, when Nathaniel had stood in front of a reptile cage for twenty whole minutes thinking that if he waited long enough, the snake would come out of its hiding place. At that moment he'd wanted to see the rattlesnake more than he'd ever wanted anything, but it had stayed hidden. Nathaniel sometimes wonders if it was even in there at all. Now, he purses his mouth. He feels the back of his throat open like a rose. The sound rises from his belly, tumbling over the stones that choke him. Nothing makes its way to his lips.
Dr. Ortiz leans closer. "You can do it, Nathaniel," she urges. "Just try." But he is trying. He is trying so hard it's splitting him in two. There is a word caught like driftwood behind his tongue, and he wants so badly to say it to his parents: Stop.
"There's nothing extraordinary on the ultrasound," Dr. Ortiz says. "No polyps or swelling of the vocal cords, nothing physical that might be keeping Nathaniel from speaking." She looks at us with her clear gray eyes. "Has Nathaniel had any other medical problems lately?"
Caleb looks at me, and I turn away. So I gave Nathaniel Tylenol, so I'd prayed for him to be all right because I had such a busy morning coming. So what? Ask nine out of ten mothers; they all would have done what I did . . . and that last one would have thought hard about it before discounting the idea.
"He came home from church yesterday with a stomachache," Caleb says. "And he's still having accidents at night."
But that's not a medical problem. That's about monsters hiding under the bed, and bogeymen peering in the windows. It has nothing to do with a sudden loss of speech. In the corner, where he is playing with blocks, I watch Nathaniel blush-and suddenly I'm angry with Caleb for even bringing it up.
Dr. Ortiz takes off her glasses and rubs them on her shirt. "Sometimes what looks like a physical illness isn't," she says slowly. "Sometimes these things can be about getting attention."
She doesn't know my son, not nearly as well as I do. As if a five-year-old might even be capable of such Machiavellian plotting.
"He may not even be consciously aware of the behavior," the doctor continues, reading my mind.
"What can we do?" Caleb asks, at the same moment I say, "Maybe we should talk to a specialist."
The doctor responds to me, first. "That's exactly what I was going to suggest. Let me make a call and see if Dr. Robichaud can see you this afternoon."
Yes, this is what we need: an ENT who is trained in this sort of illness; an ENT who will be able to lay hands on Nathaniel and feel an impossibly small something that can be fixed. "Which hospital is Dr.
Robichaud affiliated with?" I ask.
"He's up in Portland," the pediatrician says. "He's a psychiatrist."
