The Newman Resident by Charles Swift

trying to see him at the playground.”
    “I don’t get it,” Richard said. “They can’t keep him against your will, not if you both want to take him out.”
    “You have no idea how connected the school is to everyone in power, do you?” the coarse voice said. “Get a clue, Richard.”
    Richard stared at the corner, trying to see the face that belonged to the voice, wishing he’d just keep quiet.
    The shadows covered Rebecca’s face as she leaned back.
    “We called every day,” Rebecca said. “We contacted the city. We had our lawyer contact the school. One day, while Harold was at work and I was home alone with Sarah, someone from the school came to our apartment with a social worker. They had papers. Psychiatrists had examined Joshua and concluded we had done some sort of damage to him during his visits. They had a video of him talking about how we mistreated him.”
    “They left us a copy and we watched it over and over” Harold said. “Can you imagine what it’s like to hear your little boy say such things about you, like you’re monsters? We weren’t fit to be parents, they said, and the social worker was going to visit our home repeatedly, unannounced, to make certain we changed. Otherwise, the state would take our daughter away from us.”
    “They can’t do that—” Richard said.
    “They can do whatever they want, man,” the voice rasped.
    Everyone was quiet.
    “It was like
Sophie’s Choice
,” Rebecca said. “Try to win our son, we lose our daughter.”
    “We fight in ways we can,” Harold whispered. “That is part of what these meetings are about. We meet. We talk. We read. We watch. We have Sarah with us, and someday we’ll have what we need to get Joshua back. I don’t know how yet, but someday we’ll get all our children back.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
    O ne by one, each parent talked about how they were connected to the Solomons and to Newman. The grandmother, Joan, said she had placed her granddaughter in the school when her daughter and son-in-law had lost their lives in an auto accident. She soon regretted enrolling the girl, but when she mentioned her concerns to Harold, her accountant, she realized she’d better not try to take her out—at least for now.
    Sandra, an attractive woman in her late twenties with short blonde hair, said she and her husband had enrolled their little girl in Newman because of how enthusiastic their neighbors, the Solomons, had been when they were considering the school. But after seeing what had happened with Joshua, Sandra wanted to take their daughter out. Her husband, though, said there were two sides to every story and that the Solomons may have exaggerated their situation.
    The next people to speak were a couple, Paul and Lauren. Paul’s was the coarse, sarcastic voice, but now Lauren did most of the talking. When Paul did speak, he was quiet, almost reverent. They were both Ph.D. students at Columbia; he was studying philosophy, and she was studying biochemistry. The group wasmeeting in their apartment. The two had a daughter and had made arrangements with a friend, whose husband was also attending Columbia, to babysit her while they were in their classes. After just a couple of months, though, the babysitter’s husband dropped out of school and they moved away. Paul and Lauren tried a series of other arrangements for taking care of their daughter, but none worked out. Finally, Lauren’s parents offered to pay the costs of Newman for their granddaughter.
    “That was three years ago,” Lauren said. “But like the Solomons’ boy, our daughter just seemed to be losing her spirit. I guess we didn’t really notice it at first—maybe we were too busy. Anyway, we decided to un-enroll her, you know, talked to some friends, started figuring out how we could trade off working on our dissertations. But about a month ago, we met Rebecca in the park with her little girl. She told us what had happened with their son, and we started attending