Page 130 of Soft Erasure

“I can’t have children,” she said. “They gave him to me for that. Eleven years married, and I still don’t know whether it makes him more mine or less.”

Her attorney set his pen down. She didn’t look at him.

“I won’t make you ask for him. Not in a room with a stenographer in it.”

The mediator wrote it out and read it back to us.

Interim, pending final determination. Three hours. Four days a week. A court-appointed observer present for the first sixty days, reviewed after.

I sat in a conference room downtown and listened to a stranger hand me, in a neutral voice, off a form, the exact arithmetic this family had held over my head for thirteen months.

Three hours. Four days.

Nobody in that room was doing it to me. That was the entire difference and it was the only one.

The family had used those numbers as a leash. The court used them because three hours is what an interim order gives a woman whose file says what mine says. My file said what it said because the family wrote it. I had ended the Institute. The arrangement was still the arrangement.

“Do you understand the terms as read?”

“Yes.”

“Do you accept them?”

I thought about a high chair, and a spoon held in one fist, and a boy turned toward somebody the frame had left out.

“Yes.”

There was one more line and he read it in the same neutral voice. The household would restore its prior childcare arrangement inside the week.

Cora. Back at one o’clock in a house she had been out of since a Wednesday in another life. Marissa had put it in the filing herself, ahead of anything a court would have known to ask for.

It took me most of a minute to work out what it did. My three hours were Cora’s three hours. The window this family had spent a year pricing me with was the window a woman I trusted would be walking my son through, starting inside the week.

I didn’t say thank you.

Final determination would come in the spring, said the way you hand over a date far enough out to be somebody else’s problem. My son would be a different size by then. So would the file.

I came out onto the street at eleven with a folded copy of the order in my coat, and nothing checked anything on the way.

I didn’t go back to Crownhill.

The address was forty minutes east on a line I had never had a reason to take. Row houses, a laundromat, a man watering a strip of dirt beside his steps.

Six buzzers and no doorman. His name was on the third, in his own hand.

I stood with my finger on the button a while.

In thirteen months I had never had to decide to see him. He arrived, through a door he had specified, at an hour the building gave him, into a room with something in the ceiling to keep him honest.

Not one time had the distance between us been mine to cross.

There was no lens here. No band. No family holding a boy out in portions. Nothing standing behind this that would explain me to myself afterward.

I pressed it.

He came down himself. The door opened onto a hall with a bicycle in it. He stood there in gray with the sleeves down, which I had never seen on him, and he looked at me for a full second before anything moved in his face.

“You found the log,” he said.