The day after his son goes mute for reasons that Caleb does not want to believe, he walks outside the front door and realizes his home is falling apart. Not in the literal sense, of course-he's too careful for that. But if you look closely, you notice that the things which should have been taken care of ages ago-the stone path in front of the house, the crest at the top of the chimney, the brick kneewall meant to circle the perimeter of their land-all of these projects had been abandoned for another commissioned by a paying customer. He puts his coffee mug down on the edge of the porch and walks down the steps, trying to look objectively at each site.
The front path, well, it would take an expert to realize how uneven the stones are; that's not a priority.
The chimney is a pure embarrassment; it's chipped along the whole left side. But getting to the roof this late in the afternoon doesn't make any sense, plus, it helps to have an assistant when you're working that high up. Which means that Caleb turns first to the kneewall, a foot-wide hollow brick embellishment at the perimeter of the road.
The bricks are stacked at the spot where he'd left off nearly a year ago. He got them from commercial contractors who knew he'd been looking for used bricks, and they come from all over New England-demolished factories and wrecked hospital wards, crumbling colonial homes and abandoned schoolhouses. Caleb likes their marks and scars. He fancies that maybe in the porous red clay there might be some old ghosts or angels; he'd be all right with either walking the edge of his land.
Thank goodness, he's already dug below the frost line. Crushed stone rests six inches deep. Caleb hauls a bag of Redi-Mix into his arms and pours it into the wheelbarrow he uses for mixing. Chop and drag, set a rhythm as the water blends with the sand and concrete. He can feel it taking over as soon as he lays the first course of bricks, wiggles them into the cement until they seat-when he puts his whole body into his work like this, his mind goes wide and white.
It is his art, and it is his addiction. He moves along the edge of the footing, placing with grace. This wall will not be solid; there will be two smooth facings, crowned with a decorative concrete cap. You'll never know that on the inside, the mortar is rough and ugly, smeared. Caleb doesn't have to be careful on the spots that no one sees.
He reaches for a brick and his fingers brush over something smaller, smoother. A plastic soldier-the green army man variety. The last time he'd been working on this, Nathaniel had come with him. While Caleb dug the trench and filled it with stone, his son had hidden a battalion in the fort made of tumbled bricks.
Nathaniel was three. "I'm gonna take you down," he had said, pointing the soldier at Mason, the golden retriever.
"Where did you hear that?" Caleb asked, laughing.
"I hearded it," Nathaniel said sagely, "way back when I was a baby."
That long ago, Caleb had thought.
Now, he holds the plastic soldier in his hand. A flashlight trips along the driveway, and for the first time Caleb realizes that it is past sunset; that somehow, in his work, he's missed the end of the day.
"What are you doing?" Nina asks.
"What does it look like I'm doing?"
"Now?"
He turns, hiding the toy soldier in his fist. "Why not?"
"But it's . . . it's . . ." She shakes her head. "I'm putting Nathaniel to bed."
"Do you need my help?"
He realizes after the words escape that she will take it the wrong way. Do you want help, he should have said. Predictably, Nina bristles. "I think after five years I can probably figure it out all by myself,"
she says, and heads back toward the house, her flashlight leaping like a cricket.
Caleb hesitates, unsure whether he should follow her. In the end, he chooses not to. Instead he squints beneath the pinpricks of stars and puts the green soldier into the hollow made by the two sides of the wall. He sets bricks on either side, following the course. When this wall is finished, no one will know that this army man sleeps inside. No one but Caleb, that is, who will look at it a thousand times a day and know that at least one flawless memory of his son was saved.
Nathaniel lies in bed thinking about the time he took a baby chick home from school. Well, it wasn't a chick exactly ... it was an egg that Miss Lydia had put in the trash, as if they were all too dumb to count that there were now three eggs instead of four in the incubator. The other eggs, though, had turned into little yellow cotton balls that cheeped. So that day before his father picked him up, Nathaniel went into Miss Lydia's office and slipped the egg out of the garbage can, into the sleeve of his shirt.
He'd slept with it under his pillow, sure if it had a little more time it would turn into a chick like the others had. But all it had come to were nightmares-of his father making an omelet in the morning, cracking the shell, and a live baby chick falling into the sizzling pan. His father had found the egg beside his bed three days later; it had tumbled to the floor. He hadn't cleaned the mess up in time: Nathaniel could still remember the silvered dead eye, the knotted gray body, the thing that might have been a wing.
Nathaniel used to think the Creature he'd seen that morning-it wasn't a chick, that was for sure-was the scariest something that could ever exist. Even now, from time to time when he blinks, it is there on the backs of his eyelids. He has stopped eating eggs, because he is afraid of what might be inside. An item that looks perfectly normal on the surface might only be disguised.
Nathaniel stares up at his ceiling. There are even scarier things; he knows that now.
The door to his bedroom opens wider, and someone steps in. Nathaniel is still thinking of the Creature, and the Other, and he can't see around the bright hall light. He feels something sink onto the bed, curl around him, as if Nathaniel is the dead thing now and needs to grow a shell to hide inside.
"It's okay," his father's voice says at his ear. "It's only me." His arms come around tight, keep him from trembling. Nathaniel closes his eyes, and for the first time since he's gone to bed that night, he doesn't see the chick at all.
The moment before we step into Dr. Robichaud's office the next day, I have a sudden surge of hope.
What if she looks at Nathaniel and decides she has misinterpreted his behavior? What if she apologizes, stamps our son's record with red letters, MISTAKEN? But when we walk inside, there's a new person joining us, and it is all I need to blow my fairy-tale ending sky high. In a place as small as York County, I couldn't prosecute child molestation cases and not know Monica LaFlamme. I don't have anything against her, specifically, just her agency. In our office we change the acronym of BCYF to suit us: TGDSW-Those God Damn Social Workers; or RTSM-Red Tape Society of Maine. The last case I'd worked with Monica had involved a boy diagnosed with oppositional defiance disorder-a condition, ultimately, that prevented us from prosecuting his abuser.
She gets up, her hands extended, as if she is my best friend. "Nina ... I am so, so sorry to hear about this."
