The question for Josh had always been: how much blindness does a happy life require?  Josh had grown up watching the Mr. Magoo show, in which a wealthy man took on the challenge of failed eyesight by sallying into the world as if everything were fine: he walked off the edge of a girder (the hardhats pointing, yelling, panicking); but just as he stepped off into space, some crane swung an I-beam up under his shoes. Or he would saunter into an animal pen, mistaking it for a doctor's office, and caress a tiger in the belief that he was petting a kitten-and the jungle beast would purr and nuzzle. If Josh could mosey through his days like Magoo through a room, narrowly avoiding the furniture of human faults, wasn't there a chance the world might be flattered, and agree with him, and transform itself into a series of blessings?  But if that worked, it led to another question he hadn't thought about before: what sort of life did that become?

However.

A greater sin than emotional blindness is to play at love without purpose, to be caught just visiting the highpoints of your own existence. Josh loved Dori honestly, faithfully, and blindly. And that was the reason he failed to avoid this strange shipwreck of his family life.

Josh considered May 27th the first truly horrific day he'd known.

Afterward, certain noises would act like fuses, setting off exquisitely painful fireworks of memory. And Josh couldn't stop remembering: the sound of a police cruiser crunching and spitting over driveway gravel; the doorbell-it's three notes, down-up-down, which led him to a sight he couldn't place: police in uniform, wearing somberly rigid expressions; his own stupidly merry: "Who is it?" Car doors now made him anxious, as did his own last name, pronounced by an unfamiliar voice.  And the most evocative, most horrific:  the swishing sound of that squad car pulling away, as it left his driveway and life empty. This police car, these strangers, had taken his son.

Mr. Plates had found, on his third visit, a butterfly needle in Mrs. Goldin's possession.

The police had arrived at 7:30am on a Monday.  Josh'd had his dress shirt open, a tie flapping, unknotted, like a scarf.  (Coffee made Josh sweat through his shirt.) The doorbell rang; Zack started clapping and laughing. Josh said, "Shh-hey, cool it, buddy," which in hindsight felt like the most excruciatingly mean thing he'd ever say to anyone.

In the doorway stood a policeman, a policewoman, and a different, terse woman from CPS. Somehow Josh would remember that string-puller Dr. Stokes as having been there, too, as if she were part of the group that shouldered into his house and asked, "Mr. Goldin, where's your son?"  (Josh still conflated "that bitch" and faceless CPS. He had, without realizing it, found religion-a bitter and imprecise personal religion of avoidance. Like all religions, Josh's condensed individuals to symbols and types, to devils and martyrs and angels, and offered the possibility of redemption).

What can you do when some female cop gets in your face with her arrogant nose? What can you do when the police have legal authority to kidnap your son?

I could've done more, Josh thought again and again. I could have.

Dori-walking from the kitchen-had a more immediate grasp of the situation.  Her eyes narrowed and she sucked in a breath; and then, as the CPS woman handed Josh a legal document, Dori ran full-speed into the kitchen.

Breathing hamster-quick, blinking like mad, Josh was trying to make sense of the blue sheet of paper (it said "Retrieval"; it said "suspicious evidence…") when he looked up toward a banging sound.  The policewoman was already inside, knocking at the bathroom door.  "Mrs. Goldin? Mrs. Goldin? This isn't going to help anything, Mrs. Goldin."

The male cop approached.  "Mr. Goldin, do you have a key for this door?  We've got the right to ask." 

The policeman was tall, with a mid-career softness at his middle; his features were a collection of pale and carefully shaved ridges. The face of this cop-the noticing-half of Josh's brain recorded-was managing a tricky job.  Determined, sympathetic, superciliously without remorse: This is an unpleasant duty, I understand, he seemed to say. But let's be frank, it's a situation that couldn't happen to me; it was the expression of an undertaker who would never die.

And then Josh found himself at the door-he had no idea where its key was; the house was Dori's world, it functioned invisibly for him; he remembered his affronted hand knocking on it.  He didn't like to (and couldn't) remember what he said; he was mortified to think of his own sturdily affable voice asking his wife to come out and hand over their baby. 

Josh did remember something else, too; looking over his shoulder-helpless, powerless in his own house-while the male cop nodded and mouthed: "Thanks." Somehow that was one of the worst things to remember, the policeman's embarrassed thanks. Dori opened the door looking furious and dignified, her face pinked by crying.  She evened her hostile blue stare on Josh, a little slow resentment, before she turned to the police. 

This made him feel like ice; it was the strangest sensation. Really, he felt built of ice: cold but also brittle, all fractured inside-as if shatterable, as if see-through.

The Goldins nodded their heads in disbelief, they asked what right these people had to take Zack, they offered up outrageous threats, they asked what had CPS actually claimed, all in the space of a minute; but in the end the parents were left just to blink and blink, numbly. No one had needed to tell them why.

The policewoman, her hair up, carried their son to the police car. Zack's thin friendly face rested on the woman's blue shoulder. Josh gnashed his teeth watching this. As a father he was so unfit for this moment it disturbed his balance like vertigo, like lightheadedness. The serenity of the baby's uncomprehending, impassive face looked as it had that first night in the hospital, with the merciless tubes connected to his body-So these are the things that I can expect will happen to me, as your son.  That calm felt more horrifying than tears would have been. In the coming weeks, Josh kept seeing this, kept picturing Zack as he bounced along with the policewoman's stride, his noodle-arm around her collar and shoulder. The back of her neck had a patrol tan and showed its perpendicular cords; Zack's arm looked very pale in comparison.
Dori stood next to Josh and a little behind him in the doorway. Up on frenzied tiptoes, she tried grinning at her receding son, waving as if at a cruise ship's goodbye rail.

"Bye, honey!" In a sickening, sham-cheery voice. "We'll see you soon, okay? Bye! Bye! Bye…" 

The male cop appeared at Josh's side. "Thank you for not making this, you know, any worse than it needed to."

Josh thought what to say.  "Fuck you," he managed, without force.

The other man nodded, as if truly sorry.

"You seem like good people. Do what you can to get him back. That's the only advice I can give you is do what you can."

The policewoman handed Zack to the CPS representative, who carried him into the intricate rigging of the big police car. And then Josh couldn't see his son anymore.  The sky was beginning to whiten on this bright sunless morning. The police car's engine started; the mini gray rocks under the tires popped and ticked. Josh found himself running after the car, sidewalk and lawns and a streetlight bouncing in his vision as if he were watching someone's frenzied video footage: he hardly even realized that he was huffing down the street alone, on exhausted knees, waving bye to his son. That was another sound that, later, he couldn't stand:  the tapping, shushing sound of dress shoes on pavement.