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the back of his throat open lik e a rose. The sound rises from his belly, tumbling over the stones that chok e 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 h is parents: Stop.
    “There's nothing extraordinary on the ultrasound,” Dr. Ortiz says. “No poly ps or swelling of the vocal cords, nothing physical that might be keeping N athaniel from speaking.“ She looks at us with her clear gray eyes. ”Has Nat haniel had any other medical problems lately?”
    Caleb looks at me, and I turn away. So I gave Nathaniel Tylenol, so I'd pray ed 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 be d, 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 Nat haniel 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 l ooks 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 m ight even be capable of such Machiavellian plotting.
    “He may not even be consciously aware of the behavior,” the doctor contin ues, reading my mind.
    “What can we do?” Caleb asks, at the same moment I say, “Maybe we should t alk to a specialist.”
    The doctor responds to me, first. “That's exactly what I was going to sugges t. 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 wi th?” I ask.
    “He's up in Portland,” the pediatrician says. “He's a psychiatrist.” 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 h im 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 l istening 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 Na thaniel 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 s aved 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 th en wonders if someone is going to yell at him.
    No one does.
    Dr. Robichaud told him he could do anything he wanted, while everyone