They took him to the pediatrician on the Monday after. Danielle insisted, and Marcus did not argue. Dr. Amadi had been Caleb’s doctor since he was three weeks old, a brisk, warm woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she examined the marks on the backs of his legs and his forearm in silence while Caleb lay on his stomach on the crinkling paper and told her about Pluto. Then she sent him out to the waiting room with the nurse and a sticker and took off her glasses and looked at both of them.
"I’m going to have to file a report," she said. "I want you to hear that from me, in this room, not from a stranger on your doorstep. It’s not a choice I get to make. And I want you to know that what I’m going to write is that the parents brought the child in, disclosed the injury, identified the person responsible, and have already removed that person from the home. All right? That’s what I’m going to write, because it’s true."
Marcus nodded. He could not speak. He had known, in some part of him, that this would happen. He had known when Danielle made the appointment. But he had not known it would feel like this, like a hand on the back of his neck.
The caseworker came eight days later, on a Tuesday afternoon. Her name was Renita Dorsey and she was a Black woman in her middle forties with a county lanyard and a canvas tote bag and sensible shoes, and she sat at their kitchen table and drank a glass of water and asked them questions in a voice so calm and level and unhurried that Marcus found himself, absurdly, wanting to impress her. Then she asked to speak to Caleb alone, and Marcus and Danielle sat on the back deck in the heat for twenty-two minutes, not talking, while their son sat upstairs in his room with a stranger and told her whatever he told her. Marcus never asked him what. He found he did not want to know, and that he did not have the right.
When Ms. Dorsey came down she stood in the kitchen and looked at the two of them for a long moment.
"He’s a good kid," she said. "He told me all about the hamster." She put her notebook in her tote bag. "I’ll need to go out and see your mother, Mr. Reed. At your aunt’s. I’ll be honest with you, I don’t expect this to stay open long. But I’ll need to see her."
She saw Loretta the following week. Marcus was not there. He heard about it afterward, on the telephone, from his mother, at nine o’clock at night.
"A child," his mother said. Her voice was shaking with something he had never heard in it before, and it took him a moment to recognize it as humiliation. "A child with a clipboard sat in my sister’s front room and asked me did I understand that what I did was reportable. Asked me had I ever been investigated. Me. Thirty-one years a nurse. Asked me to sign a paper saying I wouldn’t be alone with my own grandson. In my sister’s house. With Bernice in the kitchen listening to every word."