We took Caleb to my place. My wife Linda had set up the spare room. She had pajamas. She had soup. She had a stuffed bear on the pillow that had belonged to our son before he grew up.
Caleb stood in the doorway of that room and stared.
“Whose room is this?” he whispered.
“It’s yours, baby,” Linda said. “For as long as you want it to be.”
He didn’t believe her. You could see it in his eyes. He kept waiting for the trick. The catch. The thing he’d done wrong that would make her change her mind.
He slept that first night with his shoes on. With the grocery bag in his arms. He didn’t take off his coat.
Linda sat in the rocking chair across from his bed and didn’t sleep at all.
The next morning he was still alive in that room and still allowed to be there. And I think that was the first morning of his real life.
Sarah called the cops on the bikers like we planned. The story held. The cops asked her to describe us. She said we had bandanas over our faces. She said she didn’t see plates. She said one of them had a gray beard.
That last part was true and she gave it on purpose. Pike laughed when I told him. “Smart girl,” he said.
Travis was furious. He drove around for three days looking for Caleb. He yelled at the cops. He called every hospital. He posted on Facebook about his “stolen son” and how the bikers would pay.
He didn’t know yet that his wife was already gone.
