He laughs. "Nina, I think you'd actually choke if you had to say the word thanks."
We walk side by side upstairs, toward the lobby. Fisher, a gentleman to the last, pushes open the heavy fire door of the stairwell and holds it while I step through.
The immediate burst of light as the cameras explode renders me blind, and it takes a moment for the world to come back to me. When it does, I realize that in addition to the reporters, Patrick and Caleb and Monica are waiting. And then, emerging from a spot behind his father's big body, I see my son.
She is wearing funny orange pajamas and her hair looks like a swallow's nest Nathaniel once found behind the soda bottles in the garage, but her face is his mother's and her voice, when it says his name, is his mother's too. Her smile is a hook in him; he can feel the catch in his throat as he swallows it and lets himself be reeled across the space between them. Mommy. Nathaniel's arms rise up from his sides.
He stumbles over a wire, and someone's foot, and then he is running.
She falls to her knees and that only makes the tug stronger. Nathaniel's so close that he can see she is crying, and this isn't even very clear because he is crying too. He feels the hook coming free, drawing out the silence that has swelled in his belly for a week now, and the moment before he reaches her embrace it bursts from his lips in a rusty, trebled joy. "Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!" Nathaniel shouts, so loud that it drowns out everything but the drum of his mother's heart beneath his ear.
He's gotten bigger in a week. I heft Nathaniel into my arms, smiling like a fool, as the cameras capture every move. Fisher has corralled the reporters, is even now preaching to them. I bury my face in Nathaniel's sweet neck, matching my memory with what is real.
Suddenly Caleb stands beside us. His face is as inscrutable as it was the last time we were alone, on opposite sides of a glass visitation booth at jail. Although his testimony helped free me, I know my husband. He did what was expected, but it was not necessarily something he wanted to do. "Caleb," I begin, flustered. "I ... I don't know what to say."
To my surprise, he offers an olive branch: a crooked smile. "Well, that's a first. No wonder so many reporters are around." Caleb's grin slides more firmly into place; and at the same time, he anchors his arm around my shoulders, guides me one step closer to home.
These are the jokes I know. What's in the middle of a jellyfish? A jellybutton.
Why didn't the skeleton cross the road? It didn't have the guts.
Why did the cookie go to the hospital? It felt crumby.
What do lizards put on their kitchen floors? Reptiles.
What do you call a blind dinosaur? An l-don't-think-he-saurus.
There is one more:
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Sadie.
Sadie who?
Sadie magic word, Nathaniel and then you'll be allowed to go.
When he told it to me, I didn't laugh.
202
SIX
And just like that, I have fallen back into my former life. The three of us sit around the breakfast table, like any other family. With his finger, Nathaniel traces the letters in the headline of the morning paper.
"M," he says quietly. "0, M . . ." Over my coffee cup, I look at the photograph. There I am, holding Nathaniel, Caleb at my side. Fisher, somehow, has managed to get his face in the picture too. In the distance, a few steps behind, is Patrick; I recognize him only by his shoes. Across the top, in screaming black letters: mommy.
Caleb takes Nathaniel's empty cereal bowl away as he runs off into the playroom, where he has set up two armies of plastic dinosaurs for a Jurassic war. I glance at the paper. "I'm the poster child for bad parenting," I say.
"Beats being the local Maine murderess." He nods to the table. "What's in the envelope?"
The manila mailer is the interoffice kind, tied shut with red floss. I found it stuffed between the Local and Sports sections of the paper. I flip it over, but there is no return address, no marking of any kind.
Inside is a report from the state lab, the kind of chart I have seen before. A table with results in eight columns, each a different location on human DNA. And two rows of numbers that are identical at every single spot.
Conclusions: The DNA profile detected on the underpants is consistent with the DNA profile of Szyszynski. As a result, he cannot be eliminated as a possible contributor of the genetic material detected in this stain. The chances of randomly
