"Greg," Marcus said. "I need you to hear me. My son is not allowed to be a kid in the same way yours are. Not with that. I don’t like it either. I hate it. But that’s the world, and I can’t change it standing on your porch, and neither can you. What you can do is keep that thing inside your house."
Greg looked at him. Marcus watched several things move across his neighbor’s face, one after another—discomfort, defensiveness, the reflexive beginning of an argument—and then something else, slower, which might have been the beginning of understanding, or might only have been embarrassment. It was hard to tell. It usually was.
"Yeah," Greg said finally. "Yeah. Okay. You got it, man. I’m sorry."
Tyler’s airsoft rifle went into a locked case in the Halvorsens’ garage, and Marcus never saw it again.
In October they found a child therapist, a soft-spoken woman named Theresa Lin with an office above a dentist in Peachtree City and a room full of sand trays and shelves of tiny figures—animals, soldiers, houses, trees, fences, a little plastic grandmother in a rocking chair. Caleb went every Wednesday. For the first three weeks, Theresa told them, he built the same thing in the sand: a small house, and around it a wall of fences, and outside the wall, facing it, every single figure on the shelf that had a weapon. Then in the fourth week he built the house and the fences and put a single figure inside the wall with the house, a big plastic gorilla, and stood it at the gate.
"Who’s that?" Theresa had asked him.
"That’s the dad," Caleb had said.
Marcus went to the parent sessions. At the third one, Theresa asked him, gently, in her soft voice, whether he had been physically disciplined as a child, and he started to tell her about Avenue J, and found that he could not do the voice. He tried. He opened his mouth to do his mother’s voice, Do. You. Want. Them, the way he had done it in the dorm room, the way that always got a laugh, and nothing came out. He sat in Theresa Lin’s quiet office with Danielle beside him on the loveseat and told the story straight for the first time in his life, without a joke, without best thing that ever happened to me, and when he got to the part about his father standing in the hallway he had to stop for a long time.