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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 do esn't keep me from hoping that Nathaniel is going to respond. Can tonsils become so swollen they impede speech? Can strep come on like li ghtning? Doesn't meningitis affect the neck first?
    Nathaniel parts his lips-here, he's going to tell me now-but his mouth is a ho llow, 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. N athaniel sits near the Brio train set, pushing it in circles. I'm glaring dag gers at the receptionist, who doesn't seem to understand that this is an emer gency, that my son is not acting like my son, that this isn't a goddamned com mon 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?” 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 implicati ons of this-the sad truth that my son's illness isn't chicken pox or bronchiti s 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 t hat turns out to be a brain tumor. “I'm not even sure if he's hearing what I s ay 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 hi m 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 ca n 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 goin g 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 shi ft and grind every time he tries to make a sound. Nathaniel lies on the examin ation 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 not hing 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. Or tiz says, “can you try to speak for me?” His mother and father are looking a t him so hard. It reminds him of one time at the zoo, when Nathaniel had sto od in front of a reptile cage for twenty whole minutes thinking that if he w aited long enough, the snake would come out of its hiding place. At that mom ent 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 ther e at all. Now, he purses his mouth. He feels