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change. I’m using myself, not because I’m exemplary,
     but rather because I’m the case I know best.”
    While Caro was in high school and college, her mother had written half a dozen papers
     on quirky subjects, such as secret-keepers, gossip, arrogance as an expression of
     sadomasochism, papers that without fanfare gathered an audience. The teleology is
     her mother’s first long project. The idea, her mother has told her, was inspired by
     a conversation they once had over dinner at an outdoor café in Riverside Park. They’d
     fallen into one of their familiar riffs, remarking on the dichotomies among the four
     of them. Her father, a doer, a fixer of clogged hearts, screened doors, horse bits.
     A fact junkie—a filing cabinet of information on diplomatic and military history,
     pharmaceutical and surgical cardiac interventions, medical practice economics, the
     care and breeding of horses. Adam, his opposite, a thinker and imaginer, a translator
     of stories into images—and yet also a collector of arcane knowledge. Her mother, an
     intellectual from the era before specialization and technology and career pigeonholing
     trumped the ambition of a thinking person to be sufficiently broadly informed so as
     to reflect on current affairs, history, the full spectrum of human experience.
    “In a way,” Caro said, “my work with preschoolers is the applied version of yours
     with your patients. I try to engineer for my children the outcomes—self-esteem, self-control,
     a love of learning—that when missing send adults running to you.”
    A few tables away, a man and a woman were trying to coax a toddler into a high chair.
     The child squirmed, landing an impressive punch to the man’s jaw before she was forcibly
     strapped into the seat.
    “Ten seconds,” Caro said, “until that kid flings her plate onto the ground.”
    Her mother glanced at the embarrassed and exasperated parents. “I had Adam and you
     before the bring-your-kids-with-you-everywhere ethos. When your father was in medical
     school, the fifties’ imperative of maintaining a baby’s schedule still ruled. He would
     never have allowed either of you to go out to dinner with us at that age.”
    The plate crashed to the ground.
    “I don’t think of you as an engineer,” her mother continued. “That’s a bit Orwellian
     for my taste.”
    “I’m exaggerating. But don’t we need a vision of what we think would be optimal, me
     for my three- and four-year-olds, you for your patients?”
    Her mother leaned back in her chair and inhaled slowly, a sign, Caro has learned,
     that she is mulling something over. “I hope I do better with my patients than I did
     with you and Adam.” She glanced sideways, as though gathering her thoughts. “That
     sounds terrible. I mean that I failed both of you in so many ways, not through lack
     of love, but because I stifled you. Like all parents, I suppose, it was impossible
     not to want for my children things I could not achieve. Because I don’t love my patients
     in the same way, I can see them more clearly, let them unfold with less imposition.”
    Caro walked her mother home. When they reached the brownstone, her mother took her
     hand. “Coming back to your idea that you are the engineer, do you really think we
     can do anything more than respond, encourage, discourage, what is already unfolding?
     As I look back on my life, it seems like this series of tectonic plates, one layer
     shifting into another, so that what I wanted at twenty hardly touches what I want
     now. It makes me wonder if there’s some inevitability to it, something greater than
     my own personal history.”
    Her mother kissed her cheek. The kiss rested like dew. Two months passed before her
     mother said anything about her project, which by then, with a little self-deprecating
     smile, she described as the study of desire from conception to death.
    11
    At seven, Caro walks to her mother’s garage. Waiting for the attendant to