Chapter 24: The Wall

Six weeks later, on the first Sunday in June, Caleb stood on a kitchen stool with a screwdriver as long as his forearm.

"It's my room," he said. "So they're my letters."

"They've always been yours," I said.

I stood beside him on the second floor of the Chestnut Street house with our daughter asleep in the sling against my chest.

She weighed seven pounds now, and she had learned to fist her hand around my collar.

Harrison held the stool steady and kept his mouth shut, which was the hardest thing I had seen him do all spring.

The two brass letters were still screwed into the wall above the little wooden bed.

They had been up since the day I walked into this room smiling.

I had read them wrong for a whole week of my life.

"Turn it left," I told Caleb. "Left is loose."

"I know left."

"Of course you do."

The first letter came off in his hand with a small squeak, and he held it up for us to see.

The second one followed.

Caleb Huntington was four years and seven months old, with Harrison's eyebrows and no trace of fear in his face.

Celia had signed Harrison's three papers in April, in a lawyer's office, without looking up.

She sent Caleb a postcard from Maine every Friday, and he kept them in a shoebox with his plastic rex.

Caleb had never mentioned the room again.

"Now where?" Harrison asked.

"There," Caleb said, and pointed above the door.

His door, the one he had run through every weekend since December.

Harrison had drilled two small starter holes the night before.

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