“But you were trying to help her,” said Marcus.
“But I only drew attention to her. I didn’t help.”
No one said anything, and in that silence, Finn grew frustrated, unable to walk more than a few steps along the coffee table without falling. He sputtered: “Bababa! Ba!”
“Oh no!” said James, grabbing Finn under the armpits. James held him out for the pass, and both Sarah and Marcus stood up quickly, extending their arms.
“Oh!” said James, holding Finn under the armpits, jokingly waving the baby back and forth between his parents. “Who loves me more? Who loves me more?”
“Here,” said Sarah, stepping forward, blocking Marcus with her body. Ana tried to find Marcus’s face, offer a small smile to diffuse the puff of humiliation in the air, but he was looking to the side, and Ana was stuck with it, this unreceived grin.
A stuffed bear and several blankets were gathered, the baby placed inside his jacket, all with great efficiency. Ana offered a Tupperware container of leftovers, which Sarah at first resisted, and then slipped into the bottom of the stroller.
At the foot of Ana and James’s walk, a group of young people appeared out of the darkness, the girls with bare legs and metallic purses. Cell phones bulged from the boys’ hip pockets. Their loud directionless voices crisscrossed one another.
The two couples watched them from the porch.
“It’s nice that there are still students around here,” said Sarah.
“Except they don’t know when to take out the garbage,” said Ana.
“And they play their shit music all night,” said James.
“If it was better music, would you mind?” asked Marcus, laughing.
“It doesn’t even have words,” said James.
“Jazz doesn’t have words,” said Ana.
Marcus lifted the stroller with Finn tucked inside, moving down the path toward the sidewalk. Sarah followed him. The students remained, their talking elevated to yelling. They did not move to make way.
“Right on!” shouted a boy into his phone. It was a signal to go; plans had been made. They passed through Sarah and Marcus and the baby like ghosts walking through walls.
Marcus put his hands up to his shoulders, palms out, and shrugged.
Sarah and Marcus waved as they walked away, pushing the stroller, calling thank-yous behind them as Ana and James stood on the porch, James’s arm protectively around his wife, wondering if anyone else had noticed that Ana had never once held the baby.
September
ANA STARED OUT the window at another tower just like hers. She looked at her watch: Finn would be at daycare, still. But James would be picking him up soon, and they would leave together, hand in hand, she was certain. She let that feeling push itself across her chest.
For a while, there had been a blond woman about Ana’s age in the office across the way. One day they were wearing the same navy polka-dotted blouse—an unusual blouse, expensive—and Ana laughed at the mirror image. The next time it happened, Ana spontaneously waved at the woman, gesturing to their matching shirts. But the woman didn’t respond, kept typing, her head bowed in a willful manner. When Ana returned from the bathroom, the woman had drawn her blinds. Embarrassed, Ana did the same.
Now the office was occupied by a man who sat with his back to the window, his curly hair somehow childlike over the collar of his shirt. That choice, to turn one’s back to the window, seemed obscene to Ana.
“Ana?”
She started, spinning her chair toward the door.
“Having a moment to yourself?” asked Christian. Everything he said came off like he wasn’t so much talking to her as gathering information for a dossier he was preparing about her faults.
“What do you need?” she asked.
“An opinion,” he said. “We need it fast, but I don’t think it’s complicated.”
Ana wanted to say: Now, why would I do that for you? Instead, she said: “I’m quite busy right now.”
“Looks like it,” said Christian with a barking laugh. He behaved like a businessman from a movie, without one sincere gesture in his repertoire.
But, in fact, he had found her with an open space in her schedule, now that the servers trial had begun. She had been wondering what would come next. The impermanence was what she loved about being a research lawyer: the presentation of a problem, its resolution, and then a new problem. Litigation hadn’t worked for her—all that noise and bluster—but up here, on the fifteenth floor, her inwardness was a virtue. She billed high and long; her bonuses arrived twice a year. But that wasn’t why she loved it: She was vicious in her determination to make the law understood. She hacked problems into tiny pieces and spent hours on the computer, trawling databases until she had solved each question, wrapped it in understanding from every direction. Then she presented the finished product, the opinion, to the lawyers, who crowed and hollered. She was a costumier, arming them for battle.
But she preferred not to work with Christian. His officiousness, his white teeth. There were other research lawyers he could use, but he always came to her.
“What is it?”
“Biotech. That old chestnut …” He adopted the booming voice of a news anchor. “Should higher life-forms be patentable?” She knew the law, had mined it several times for several different cases: Humans couldn’t be patented, but seeds could.
“For Emcor?”
“They’re suing that farmer.”
Ana had anticipated this. It had been in the news that Emcor, one of the firm’s multimillion-dollar clients, had been knocking on the doors of farmers when their trademarked seeds, genetically modified to perfection, began to turn into crops on the fields of farmers who hadn’t bought them. The farmers said they didn’t know how it happened, blaming the wind. Intellectual property theft, the Emcor representatives called it. Ana pictured men in suits handing subpoenas over white picket fences to men in overalls.
“Soybeans,” she said.
“Right. Those naughty farmers are infringing.”
She couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not.
“Really, Ana,” he said, leaning in. “I need your wisdom. I’m in over my head, I think.” He said it like it could never be true.
Ruth appeared in the doorway, looking tidier today, her hair pulled back, her skin clear. Ruth the Temp, but could she still be temporary? She had become a fixture, a shadow of slouch in the halls.
“Sorryinterrupt …”
“Leave the file,” Ana said, and Christian gushed his thanks, blew her a kiss on his way out.
“What can I do for you, Ruth?” asked Ana.
Ruth sat down, pulling her skirt over her knees.
“I just wanted to see if, you know, you’d had a chance to talk to your husband.” Ana cocked her head, blank. “Do you remember? When you said that about me maybe talking to him?”
Ana winced. The invitation. For a year, the girl had been silently waiting for Ana to set her up with James, to discuss her career path.
“I’m so sorry,” Ana said. “James isn’t even working in TV these days.”
Ruth’s mouth closed, and her face, which seemed as if it could fall no further, did so, reddening.
“We’ve had an intense few days,” said Ana. Then she tried it on, saying it out loud for the first time, slowly: “A friend of ours died, and we’re looking after his little boy.” Where was Sarah in this version? She couldn’t bring herself to say it; the mawkishness was overkill, the story unconvincing.
“What do you mean?”
It was not a response Ana had expected.
“Just what I said. So I’m unusually tired.”
Ruth nodded. “My sister has two kids.” Ana saw a flash of silver in mouth: a stud through her tongue. “Someone’s always puking or throwing a shitfit or something.…”