In the Ancient Playground across the street from Marymount, half-naked children disappeared in the tunnels beneath brick pyramids. I followed William, crouching in the darkness and then emerging again into the dappled brilliance of sun streaking through the trees. I slipped my shoes off to feel the coolness of the sprinkler water on my feet, to feel the littered sand from the sandbox, dribbled out of heaping plastic buckets, strewn along the cement. The mineral smell of the tap water, the taste of it on a sunscreen-smeared finger.

William knelt at a crack in the ground, poked a finger into the dirt and weeds peeking through. He ran his hand over the cement, testing the roughness, and scraped himself, a bright streak of blood on his knuckle, a visceral cry. To watch a baby is to think about the feel, the taste, the texture of things.

To watch a baby is also to learn what to do with monotony. The playground—the playground over and over again. The same routes, the same tests of balance and skill, always trying to climb the same diagonal wall of bricks. The back and forth of the baby swing. The back and forth. What do you do with your mind during the back and forth?

One afternoon there were two teenagers at the playground, probably thirteen years old—not far off from Carlow’s girl in France—and at first I thought one was on a mission to get a babysitting gig. She was trying to make friends with a two-year-old in the sandbox—talking to her in a silly high-pitched voice, dragging her toy cars through the sand next to her—but then I noticed the real reason. The two-year-old was with her father, her young father. The girl was talking to the baby but I could tell she was conscious of the father’s eyes on her. She didn’t say anything to him but looked sideways every once in a while to make sure he was still there, still watching. She was wearing neon pink leggings and you could see the workings of her sinewy thighs through the thin stretched fabric.

He wasn’t reacting to her, but she was clever, she was really too clever, because he couldn’t look away if he wanted. He couldn’t leave his daughter unsupervised. The girl’s friend, the gawky type of teenager that reminded me more of myself at that age—frizzy haired, hiding her stick-thin body beneath baggy jeans and a hoodie though it was far too warm for the sweatshirt—stood a little behind, watching the man watch her friend, watching her friend pretend not to notice the man.