July. The town pool. A hundred and two degrees in Maine, a record.
"What if I sink?" Nathaniel asked me. I stood in the shallow end, watching him stare at the water like it was quicksand.
"Do you really think I'd let you get hurt?"
He seemed to consider this. "No."
"All right then." I held out my arms.
"Mom? What if this was a pit of lava?"
"I wouldn't be wearing a bathing suit, for one."
"What if I get in there and my arms and legs forget what to do?"
"They won't."
"They could."
"Not likely."
"One time is all it takes," Nathaniel said gravely, and I realized he'd been listening to me practice my closings in the shower.
An idea. I rounded my mouth, raised my arms, and sank to the bottom of the pool. The water hummed in my ears, the world went slow. I counted to five and then the blue shimmied, an explosion just in front of me. Suddenly Nathaniel was underwater and swimming, his eyes full of stars and his mouth and nose blowing bubbles. I caught him tight and broke the surface. "You saved me," I said.
Nathaniel put his hands on either side of my face. "I had to," he said. "So you could save me back."
The first thing he does is draw a picture of a frog that is eating the moon. Dr. Robichaud doesn't have a black crayon, though, so Nathaniel has to make the night sky blue. He colors so hard the crayon breaks in his hand, and then wonders if someone is going to yell at him.
No one does.
Dr. Robichaud told him he could do anything he wanted, while everyone sat around and watched him play. Everyone: his mom and dad, and this new doctor, who has hair so white-yellow that he can see her scalp underneath, beating like a heart. The room has a gingerbread-style dollhouse, a rocking horse for kids younger than Nathaniel, a beanbag chair shaped like a baseball mitt. There are crayons and paints and puppets and dolls. When Nathaniel moves from one activity to another, he notices Dr.
Robichaud writing on a clipboard, and he wonders if she is drawing too; if she has the missing black crayon.
Every now and then she asks him questions, which he couldn't answer even if he wanted to. Do you like frogs, Nathaniel? And: That chair is comfortable, don't you think? Most of the questions are stupid ones that grown-ups ask, even though they don't really want to listen to the answers. Only once has Dr.
Robichaud said something that Nathaniel wishes he could respond to. He pushed the button on a chunky plastic tape recorder and the sound that came out was familiar: Halloween and tears all rolled together. "Those are whales singing," Dr. Robichaud said. "Have you ever heard them before?"
Yes, Nathaniel wanted to say, but I thought it was just me, crying on the inside.
The doctor starts to talk to his parents, big words that slide in his ear and then turn tail and run away like rabbits. Bored, Nathaniel looks under the table again for the black crayon. He smoothes the corners of his picture. Then he notices the doll in the corner.
It's a boy doll, he sees that the minute he turns it over. Nathaniel doesn't like dolls; he doesn't play with them. But he is tugged toward this toy, lying twisted on the floor. He picks it up and fixes the arms and the legs, so that it doesn't look like it's hurt anymore.
Then he glances down and sees the blue crayon, broken, still curled in his hand.
How cliched is this: The psychiatrist brings up Freud. Somatoform disorder is the DSM-IV term for what Sigmund called hysteria-young women whose reaction to trauma manifested itself into valid physical ailments without any etiological physical cause. Basically, Dr. Robichaud says, the mind can make the body ill. It doesn't happen as often as it did in Freud's day, because there are so many more acceptable outlets for emotional trauma. But every now and then it still happens, most often in children who don't possess the right vocabulary to explain what's upsetting them.
I glance over at Caleb, wondering if he's buying any of this. The truth is, I just want to get Nathaniel home. I want to call an expert witness I once used, an ENT in New York City, and ask him for a referral to a specialist in the Boston area who can look at my son.
Nathaniel was fine yesterday. I am not a psychiatrist, but even I know that a nervous breakdown doesn't happen overnight.
"Emotional trauma," Caleb says softly. "Like what?"
Dr. Robichaud says something, but the sound is drowned out. My gaze has gone to Nathaniel, who is sitting in the corner of the playroom. In his lap, he holds a doll facedown. With his other hand, he is grinding a crayon between the cheeks of its buttocks. And his face, oh his face-it's as blank as a sheet.
I have seen this a thousand times. I have been in the offices of a hundred psychiatrists. I have sat in the corner like a fly on the wall as a child shows what he cannot tell, as a child gives me the proof I need to go prosecute a case.
