“I’m here, though. I’m with him all the time,” said James.
“When he’s not at daycare,” Ann Silvan corrected him. Then she smiled. “May I spend a little time with Finn alone? Just a few minutes.”
Ana and James nodded.
“We’ll be downstairs, Finny. Ann’s going to play with you for a little bit,” said James. Ana was already on the stairs.
“Did you hear that dig about my job?” whispered Ana.
“At least you have a job,” said James.
They sat on the couch. The coffee Ana had prepared grew cold on the table in front of them. Ann Silvan had left a tiny bite mark in a Leibniz cookie.
“I really hope she’s not sexually abusing him up there,” whispered James.
“Don’t. I’ll start laughing,” said Ana.
“She could be nasty. What do we know about her? We should go to her house with a little pad of paper and fucking—”
The door upstairs opened, and Finn came hopping down the stairs, both feet on each step. James leaped up to monitor his descent. Ann Silvan followed.
“Everything seems good,” she said, moving toward the coatrack in the hall. Ana rose from the couch, surprised.
“I’ll write up my report. I know you’re seeing the lawyer in a couple of days, correct?” Her black coat had a massive fur collar. Ana looked for eyes in it as Ann and James exchanged information and schedules. Finn sat on the bottom stair folding a plastic robot, trying to turn it back into a truck.
“Can I ask you a question?” said Ann, with her hand on the door.
“Of course,” said James, fear rising up to his shoulders. This is when they take him.
“Are prices dropping in this neighborhood, since the crash? Where we are, things have really fallen.” James exhaled.
“Where are you?”
“Out in the east end. Downtown was the way to go, wasn’t it? We should have stayed downtown.”
James felt embarrassed now. His home suddenly seemed designed solely to humiliate this social worker.
“Well, Ana’s the one in charge of the money. She knew it was a good investment. We’re, you know, lucky,” said James.
“Yes, you are,” said Ann Silvan. Ana searched the comment for a sneer, to no avail. Ann crouched down to Finn’s level. “I’ll see you soon, Finn. Be happy.”
James had the telephone tucked under his chin.
Ana, on the other end of the line, spun around slowly in her office chair, picturing the house where James stood. She knew that the housekeeper had left two hours ago and that by the time she got home, one basket of folded laundry and shiny floors would be the only signs of her efforts. It was constant, the garbage bags and diaper bins full, then empty, then full. What went into the body came out of the body, into Finn’s pants, onto towels and cloths. The small, environmentally friendly washing machine for two, tucked behind a door in the corner of the kitchen, was suddenly ridiculous, barely able to contain all the secretions he generated. Then they migrated to James, handprints on his T-shirts and stained-cheek imprints on his sweaters.
“I have to go to the lawyer’s,” said James, crunching Cheerios under his stocking feet. Finn was picking up the ones that didn’t get crunched and stacking them, placing the occasional Cheerio in his mouth. “You need to take Finn in the afternoon—”
“James, I’m working. I need to get my hours up this week. I took the afternoon off last week. Can’t he go to daycare?”
“It’s not his day. You can’t just drop them when you want. It’s not a kennel.”
“Can we get a babysitter? I can’t miss any more work—”
“It’s one afternoon. Tell them you have another doctor’s—”
“I’ve missed drinks twice—”
“Jesus, really? Drinks?”
“It’s marketing. It’s part of the job.”
James pictured Ana in that chair in front of her computer, spinning and spinning.
“You have to be back here by two.”
Ana paused. “I have another call.”
In the afternoon, James waited for her, circling near the living room window, checking his watch. Finn babbled and hummed, pulling books off shelves and flipping through them, then chucking each opened book over his shoulder.
At 1:45 in her office, Ana tried to look like she was going to be returning later. She put her jacket over her arm in a casual way, as if she might be picking up a coffee. On the elevator, she thought of the women who had come back from maternity leaves and requested flexible schedules, part-time. It was a vocabulary Ana didn’t exercise, though theoretically, she sided with that litigator who had brought up on-site child care (but thought the gym they ultimately put in was better). That litigator was long gone now.
When Ana’s cab pulled up, James was waiting at the door. He shot her an angry look: “I’m going to be late,” he said.
Ana shut the door, removed her coat. Then she noticed Finn, leaning against the credenza, looking up at her.
“Oh, hi,” said Ana.
“Park?” he asked.
“Sure. That sounds fine. Let me just check my e-mail.”
Finn said again: “Park?” His request seemed utterly democratic, as if it would go out to anyone he met. Ana nodded.
She clicked her BlackBerry as they walked.
What Ana noticed first at the playground was that the parents outnumbered the children. She had brought along an ethics committee report on soybean seeds, picturing herself getting a little reading in while Finn played. If Emcor had patented these seeds, which were living things, what did it mean for other kinds of seeds? “Higher life-forms”—she had been investigating this phrase for days. There were issues of cloning and sperm banks. Could people be manufactured and trademarked, too? Ana was sure that one day the law would kick a hole in the government’s feeble protections. She was sure that if she assembled the information correctly, Emcor could do whatever it liked.
It immediately became clear, as Ana and Finn opened the park’s iron gate and set forth, that reading did not happen here. The mothers shadowed their children, digging bigger ditches in the sand next to the children’s smaller ditches, boosting them onto the slides, scooping them up from the bottom of the slides. Where the kids went, the mothers were already there, their invisible sensors beeping, rushing ahead to intervene.
The first blow of winter was upon them, and a few kids had on hats. One Chinese girl wore a scarf, winter boots, gloves. Ana looked at Finn, who walked a little ahead of her. He wore a fleece jacket, sneakers. Ana wondered if he was cold, but what if? What could she do about it? She decided not to ask him.
“Want to go swing,” said Finn in his caveman dialect. Ana nodded, feeling a knot of anxiety as they approached the swings. They were all filled, but a mother was extracting a child—a baby, really; a baby on a swing! thought Ana—from one little bucket seat. Ana walked toward it quickly, with Finn in tow. She was lifting him up, always surprised by his weight, when a frizzy-haired woman appeared beside her.
“Excuse me, we were waiting for that,” she said. “There’s a line, actually.” She punctuated this sentence with a smile as insincere as a mime’s. Ana looked around, and sure enough, there were two other mothers lined up a few feet away, gazing into the distance, pretending not to notice the confrontation.
“Sorry, I really didn’t know,” said Ana, lifting out Finn. He started to scream. “Swing! Swing!” She held him in space, and his running shoes kicked at Ana’s thighs. “My turn! My turn!” Snot. Tears.
“Finn, no, I’m sorry. I didn’t know, I didn’t know,” said Ana, trying to put him on the ground. He threw his arms around her neck and his legs around her torso, refusing to let go, his wet face gumming to her neck.