Small memories prick at my mind. Caleb, suggesting that Patrick might be the one to blame. Why bring up his name, if not to take the heat off himself? Or Caleb telling Nathaniel he didn't have to learn sign language if he didn't want to. Anything, to keep the child from confessing the truth.
I have met convicted child molesters before. They don't wear badges or brands or tattoos announcing their vice. It's hidden under a soft, grandfatherly smile; it's tucked in the pocket of a button-down shirt.
They look like the rest of us, and that's what makes it so frightening-to know that these beasts move among us, and we are none the wiser.
They have girlfriends and wives who have loved them, unaware.
I used to wonder how mothers wouldn't have some inkling that this was going on in their homes. There had to have been a moment where they made a conscious decision to turn away before they saw something they didn't want to. No wife, I used to think, could sleep next to a man and not know what was playing through the loop of his mind.
"Nina." Monica LaFlamme touches my shoulder. When did she even arrive? I feel like I'm coming awake from a coma; I shake myself into consciousness and look for Nathaniel right away. He's playing in the psychiatrist's office, still, with a Brio train set.
When the social worker looks at me, I know that this is what she's suspected all along. And I cannot blame her. In her shoes, I would have thought the same thing. In fact, in the past, I have.
My voice is old, stripped. "Have the police been called?"
Monica nods. "If there's anything I can do for you . . ."
There is somewhere I need to go, and I cannot have Nathaniel with me. It hurts to have to ask, but I have lost my barometer for trust. "Yes," I ask. "Will you watch my son?"
I find him at the third job site, making a stone wall. Caleb's face lights up as he recognizes my car. He watches me get out, and then he waits, expecting Nathaniel. It's enough to propel me forward, so that by the time I reach him I am nearly at a dead run, and I slap him as hard as I can across the face.
"Nina!" Caleb catches my wrists and holds me away from him. "What the hell!"
"You bastard. How could you, Caleb? How could you?"
He pushes me away, rubbing his fingers against his cheek. My hand rises on it, a bright print. Good. "I don't know what you're talking about," Caleb says. "Slow down."
"Slow down?" I spit out. "I'll make it really simple: Nathaniel told us. He told us what you did to him."
"I didn't do anything to him."
For a long moment, I don't say a word, just stare. "Nathaniel said I. . . I . . ." Caleb falters. "That's ridiculous."
It is what they all say, the guilty ones, and it makes me unravel. "Don't you dare tell me that you love him."
"Of course I do!" Caleb shakes his head, as if to clear it. "I don't know what he said. I don't know why he said it. But Nina, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ."
When I don't respond, every year we've spent together unspools, until we are both standing knee deep in a litter of memories that don't matter. Caleb's eyes are wide and wet. "Nina, please. Think about what you're saying."
I look down at my hands, one fist gripping the other tightly. It is the sign for in. In trouble. In love. In case. "What I think is that kids don't make this up. That Nathaniel didn't make this up." I raise my gaze to his. "Don't come home tonight," I say, and I walk back to my car with great precision, as if my heart has not gone to pieces inside me.
Caleb watches the taillights of Nina's car disappear down the road. The dust that's kicked up in her wake settles, and the scene still looks like it did a minute ago. But Caleb knows things are completely different now; that there is no going back.
He will do anything for his son. Always has, always will.
Caleb looks down at the wall he's been crafting. Three feet, and it took him the better part of the day.
While his son was in a psychiatrist's office, turning the world inside out, Caleb has been lifting stone, fitting it side by side. Once when he'd been dating Nina he'd shown her how to set together rocks with proportions that did not seem to meet. All you need is one edge in common, he'd told her.
Case in point, this jagged piece of quartz, kitty-corner to a fat, low block of sandstone. Now, he lifts the piece of sandstone and hurls it into the road, where it breaks into pieces. He raises the quartz and sends it spinning into the woods behind him. He demolishes the wall, all this work, piece by careful piece.
Then he sinks into the pile of rubble and presses his dusty hands to his eyes, crying for what cannot be put back together.
I have one more place to go. In the clerk's office of the East District Court, I move like an automaton.
Tears keep coming, no matter how I try to will them away. This is not a professional demeanor, but I couldn't care less. This is not a professional matter, it's a personal one.
"Where do you keep the protective order forms for juveniles?" I ask the clerk, a woman who is new to the court, and whose name I have forgotten.
