Соавторы: Katrina Onstad
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Mike and Jennifer sat on the couch, and Jennifer stretched her legs into Mike’s lap. Ana, James noticed, was far from him, the only one who had not taken a seat on the wide curved couch. She sat across from them in a stiff-backed brocade-covered chair, each arm at right angles on the armrests, her fingers curled over the edges.
“How’s work, Jennifer?” asked Ana. “How are the cutbacks?”
She continued that way, pulling information from the two of them with her concise questions, murmuring support. It looked like warmth, or inquisitiveness, but James recognized it as a sort of vacancy, too, a way of passing the substance of the interaction to someone else.
Ana was feeling massive, as if the chair could barely contain her. Jennifer had this effect on her. She was trying not to glance at her sister-in-law’s tiny feet in their childlike gray-striped socks, now being massaged casually by Mike’s hands. He pushed and pulled as he told them about their Christmas plans in Mexico, a beach house that they should come visit. These kinds of holiday invitations were always extended only once, and never accepted nor rejected nor brought up again by anyone.
“And you, Jimmy, how’s the book?” asked Mike. Whenever he called him Jimmy, James was reminded that he was the younger brother and always would be. James had wanted a brother who would put him in headlocks and throw him to the floor and kick his ass, someone with badness to worship. But Mike shrugged at James’s schemes of revenge against the asshole down the street; he was too old to join a united front, and he preferred the computer. He sat. In James’s recollection of their youth, his brother is always seated in his desk chair, in front of the computer. Only the changed color of his T-shirt indicates that he does, in fact, rise on occasion and mark the passing of the days.
James was beginning to regret the way he had framed his firing. He had done too good a job of blocking the horror by inserting this distracting fantasy of a book. There was not enough sympathy for him, he felt, not enough commiseration over the shortness of his stick.
“It’s okay. Tough times in publishing, with the economy. Not a lot of new contracts,” he said.
“You don’t have a contract?” Mike raised his thick eyebrows. “I didn’t know that.” He looked then at Ana, as if seeing her as something new: imperative to his brother’s survival.
“Let’s not talk about work!” said Jennifer. “How is parenthood? At long last! Do you absolutely love it?” She lowered her voice: “Come on, can I ask that?”
“Jenn—” said Mike, flicking her toe with his finger.
“What? Come on. We know you guys were trying. The circumstances aren’t ideal, of course, but now you get to be a mom and dad! You get to parent!” Ana noted the verb: “to parent.” Something to do, not to be.
“I know this is going to sound weird, but Ana, he really looks like you! It’s crazy! You have exactly the same eyes.”
“Really?” said Ana. “Well, they’re brown, I guess—”
A chorus of screams burst forth into the living room, followed by three bodies.
“Finn’s a fairy! He’s a fairy, Mommy! And we’re the queens who are taking him to our kingdom to do our bidding!” Sophie, at six, was the eldest. On her head she wore a crown of toilet paper. In her hand, she waved an elaborate wand dangling beads and stuffed hearts. She was followed by Olivia, age four, who also wore a toilet paper crown, wielding a Barbie in each hand.
“These are the elves!” she cried. Finn looked pleased, toddling to James and leaning on his legs.
A look passed between the two girls—as if a switch had been hit—and Sophie began chasing Olivia, who responded by screaming happily, which made Finn scream, too, joining the chase. “Attack! The fairy is attacking!” bellowed Sophie as the three raced in figure eights around the couch. Then James noticed that Finn had a juice box in his hand; he reached to grab it just as Finn slipped out of the line and wrapped himself in the curtains. The curtains were so shining and sumptuous that Ana imagined tearing them from the wall and lying down in their silky arms.
“Get the fairy! Get the fairy!” screamed Olivia.
“Girls! Girls!” cried Jennifer.
“Finn! Don’t pull the curtains!” cried James, alarmed at the sausage shape in the golden fabric, straining at the top of the rod. He jumped up to try and undo him, to rescue the juice box before the inevitable stain.
“My elf!” wailed Olivia, stopping suddenly, holding in her hand the head of one Barbie, grasping its naked torso around the stomach. The adults breathed in, anticipating. Olivia screwed up her eyebrows, her jaw dropped to her chest, and a sound escaped, like a pig with an ax at its neck. Rivulets of snot and tears sprayed through the air. Ana leaned backward.
Jennifer and James went into the fray, untangled and soothed, calmed and hugged. Ana took a drink of her wine. Midsip, she recognized that her isolation might appear unsavory, and she reached for a coffee table book on an “Edvard Munch and the Uncanny” exhibit, as if to appear preoccupied.
“We saw that show in Vienna,” said Mike, leaning across, shouting over the diminishing din. “A bit dark for me. I bet James would like it.” Ana flipped to the back of the book, stopping on an etching by a German artist she had never heard of named Max Klinger. She recognized one of the German words in the title, Kind, and her body stiffened. A woman in a full garden, carpeted with grass and rimmed with furry bushes and tall trees, lay resting on a bench, her eyes closed. Beside her, a hooded baby carriage. But the carriage was empty, the blankets had tumbled onto the ground. A path from the blankets, trampled by feet, revealed a figure in the distance, walking away from the mother. In his arms was an unfurling bundle, too small to be deciphered, white and unseen. Ana put her finger on the path, traced its line. She felt, again, that strange flutter, a feeling of ascension.
James and Jennifer had been successful. When the screams had slowed to whimpers, and the whimpers to whines, the two girls curled up on either side of their mother like cats. Jennifer stroked the head of each: “There, there. Silly queens.”
Ana put the book down on the table. She wondered if the girls had seen it. It seemed to her now as inappropriate as pornography. She drank her wine quickly.
“Uncle James, how come we never see you on TV anymore?” said Sophie.
James pulled Finn a little closer.
“I got fired,” said James.
“On fire?” asked Finn, and everybody except James laughed.
“Why?” asked Sophie.
“That’s a complicated question.…” interjected Jennifer, but Mike tilted his head, as if equally curious. Ana felt her body reassembling into something normal, the effect of the picture beginning to cease.
“It’s okay, Jennifer,” said James. Addressing Sophie, he said: “I’m too old for TV. It’s a job for young people. You should be on TV.” He leaned over and tickled her. She laughed. Ana had never seen him so engaged with his nieces.
“I know. I could be on TV,” said Sophie.
“Sophie was amazing in the Thanksgiving play. I know all parents think their kids are great on stage, but it was really striking. The teacher said she has a natural aptitude for theater,” said Jennifer.
“Now we’re adding acting lessons to the roster,” said Mike, in the part of exasperated father.
“I played an aboriginal person,” said Sophie. Ana laughed.
Sophie snatched a remote control from the coffee table. She hit a button and a large, wood-framed abstract painting—red and blue swirls on red and blue swirls—moved to the side with a gentle whoosh. A large flat panel TV appeared.
“Jesus, Mike, how James Bond,” said James.
“I know. It’s extravagant. But now or never, right?”
“Sophie, we don’t need the TV on,” said Jennifer. “You can watch upstairs if you want.”
But Sophie clicked, and the TV came to life. There, across the screen, was James’s former colleague, Ariel, each strand of her long straight hair clearly outlined with the perfectionist brush of high-definition television.
“I worked with her—” said James.
“What? Is this your show?” asked Jennifer.
Mike said, “Sophie—turn it off—”
“No! Let’s see Uncle James!”
Ariel was sitting in a hotel room across from a famous singer, a block-headed young man with one raised eyebrow.
“Who’s that?” asked Ana.
“The new Frank Sinatra,” said James.
“Really?”
“He thinks he is,” snapped James.
Ariel was breathless. “Just tell me, seriously—is this song about any particular girl? Or is it about girls in general?”
“This is news?” James shouted. “This is documentary?”
The singer chortled, winking and shifting in his seat, his nonanswer running atop the video clip: the singer in the rain, embracing a tall blonde. “What can I say? When love hits you, it hits you!”
“This is a fucking national news program,” said James.
“James, watch the language—” James turned from Mike’s pious face.
“Soph, turn it off—” said Jennifer.
Ana placed her wine carefully on the table. On the screen, Ariel threw back her head and giggled. Jennifer grabbed the remote out of Sophie’s hand and clicked the TV to silence.
“You can’t be surprised, James. TV’s always been this way. You were just this unusual little exception,” said Ana. She gestured to the blank screen. “This is what people want.”
“People don’t know what they want. Give them shit and they’ll eat it,” said James. Olivia giggled into her hands.
“Jimmy! Language!” said Mike. The painting moved slowly and smoothly, until finally it had covered the entire TV with red blur.
At the door, Finn kicked at the stoop outside. As Ana buttoned her jacket, Jennifer appeared with a paper Whole Foods bag.
“Olivia’s too old for these,” she said. The bag rattled with puzzle pieces and Legos. Something made a few electronic grunts, then silenced.
This was how people did it, then—an ongoing exchange.
Mike appeared, put his arm around Jennifer’s shoulder. The girls had joined Finn on the porch. They, too, kicked at the leaves and squealed.
“Not in your socks,” said Jennifer, then rolled her eyes at the adults.
“Hey, Jimmy,” said Mike, clearing his throat, alerting James to the fact that a speech had been prepared. “Listen, if you need any—you know. If we can do anything for you guys. With Finn, I mean. It’s a big change. We have a little experience with this stuff.” Jennifer laughed loudly, nodding.
“Thank you,” said James. “It’s going all right, but thank you.” His brother was never good with tenderness. It didn’t suit him. James wanted to point out that they lived only a half hour from each other but got together maybe three times a year, so how much, really, could they help? But alongside that first thought, James found himself moved by his brother’s awkward gesture. He tried to picture a future of commonality, devoid of the decades-long strangeness.
He rode on this idea as they gathered and moved toward the car at the top of the circular driveway. James knew that Mike and Jennifer’s three-car garage was filled. A fourth vehicle—a Lexus SUV—sat outside. The surfeit of parking spaces seemed like mockery. It was the first puncture in James’s warm mood, but he refrained from commenting.
Jennifer called something from the stoop. All three were buckled in. Ana rolled down her window, cupped her hand to her ear.
“I’ll resend you the video card!” called Jennifer.
“Great!” Ana called back.
Finn repeatedly pressed buttons on the electronic toy, a counting game, with red and blue lights, and a robot voice: 1! 2! 3! They moved through the empty, wide streets, past the sylvan glade gardens, under the ancient trees. When they hit Bloor, the traffic thickened. Cranes and bulldozers sat unmoving by construction sites cordoned off with plastic, warning of disaster. Cars blew their horns at a taxi doing a U-turn.
“Did you get that video?” asked James.
“Yeah, I did,” said Ana.
“Me, too.”
Now was the time where they would usually dismember the evening for a solid hour or two. James would go first, noting how Jennifer referred to the girls as “Princess Sophie” and “Diva Olivia.” Then Ana would talk about the marble countertops, Mike’s crippling boringness. James might revel, once again, in the way that Jennifer had very specific opinions about very small things—the right temperature for drinking water; why Jay Leno is hilarious—but at the mere mention of politics, she left the room to fuss about in the kitchen. The kitchen. The excess.
But not that night. The venting had been neutered by the unavoidable, continuous kindness the family had shown them, by the way Jennifer had crouched down and whispered in Finn’s ear, ending the night with him in an embrace. Had that always been there? Had they just never seen it, never needed to call upon it until that moment?
“Did you have fun tonight, Finny?” James asked.
“Go see Mama,” said Finn. The beeping of the toys stopped.
Ana straightened; it was Jennifer, with her abundance of maternal warmth, who had triggered this yearning in Finn. It was seeing a real family in its chaos that made him miss Sarah.
“Go see Daddy,” said Finn.
“We can’t see them right now, honey,” said James. “I’m sorry.”
Ana looked behind her, expecting Finn to erupt, and why not? He must know he was at the center of a terrible injustice. He must be furious.
But he was simply staring out the window.
“Should we put on some music, Finny?” asked James, turning on the radio.
The three were quiet for the rest of the ride. James found a parking space right in front of their house but didn’t comment on it.
He carried Finn upstairs, leaving Ana to her work. She took the laptop to the breakfast nook. The sound of Finn in the bath moved through the floor above Ana’s head. Squealing and thumping, laughter.
Dim light from the inside of the house caught the yard, and something looked different to Ana’s glance. She leaned closer to the French doors. The men had been coming. James had not mentioned it, and with her late nights, she had been returning in the darkness and had not noticed. Day after day, while she worked in her tower, they had been transforming the yard. The limestone was laid, a gray skating rink in the center of the garden. A large red Japanese maple stood in a bucket, waiting to be planted. The perimeter was empty of plants but covered with rich, churned soil. These invisible men were determined to bring life into the place, even though winter was coming. They had been so late that James had negotiated a discount. No one used landscapers in this infertile season.
Something in the limestone unsettled Ana. She felt a tug of certainty that the hole was still beneath it, that a toe on a stone could break through the surface, pull her down into a muddy pit. This reminded her of Sarah, in her hospital bed, perched on the edge of the depths. The last visit had been the same: no change. Decisions were waiting for them, Ana knew. Decisions about Sarah, who had decided everything for them.
She pulled her face from the glass and turned to her e-mails.
Soon, there would be plants in the ground, or at least seeds. She should think about that instead. She reminded herself to look again tomorrow.
Ana didn’t want her personal life stuffed into files at her firm, so years ago, James had found a lawyer downtown whose two-room office was over a fish shop.
He went there first, to sign papers delivered from Sarah’s lawyer, whom he had visited the day before. That office had been fancier, in an office building, with a receptionist. Despite Sarah’s pigpen cloud of mess, and Marcus’s Zen-like quiet, it turned out they were affairs-in-order types. And now he, James, whose affairs had never been in order, had power of attorney over their family. He could see their bank account, which was healthy, and their credit card bills (Sarah charged $3.76 at Starbucks four or five times a week, which made James laugh). One day, he would be able to access that money. The insurance company moved along at its arthritic pace, but there had been a decent policy. If Sarah died, Finn would be rich, or richer than James.
All of these revelations were intimate and unwanted (Marcus was a careful, clever investor; their portfolio was almost as impressive as the one Ana had put together). As he met with each official and signed each document, James remembered the feeling of having sex with someone he didn’t love; a little part of him kept repeating: “I can’t bear this. I can’t do it. I’m the wrong guy.”
But as he was informed many times, Sarah was not dead. So this was just the preliminary hacking of the weeds of Sarah and Marcus’s life. The deep digging would come later, if and when. For now: temporary guardians. Although the will clearly stated that Finn was to go to Ana and James, James couldn’t find an argument against the lawyer’s suggestion that they place notices in newspapers in major cities, and online, just in case there were complications later. He pictured Marcus’s father sitting at the table with his morning paper to find an ad: “Seeking grandparents for orphan child.” James tried to imagine the most monstrous things parents could do, and then he imagined those things happening to Marcus, calm and gentle Marcus. What was it? Prodded in basements, cigarettes burned out on his forearms. Something caused that little scar on Marcus’s face. He thought of Finn, all softness, and was struck by a future in which an older Finn would have questions. He would have to anticipate those questions and be ready. He would have to work, gather the stories of Finn’s life and have them waiting.
Unless Sarah woke up, of course. If Sarah woke up, then what? He tried to want this, because it was the right thing to want, and because of Finn, looking out the car window for his parents. But when he thought of Finn leaving, and the room becoming a guest room once again, he ached.
On the streetcar, watching the city take shape in the cooling gray light, he knew Ana would be anxious for him to return, still uncomfortable alone with Finn. This was how he saw her these days: waiting for him, hovering around windows and doorframes, needing him, something he always thought he wanted. That aloofness he had tried for years to break through had been replaced by some kind of anxiety he couldn’t placate. She was angry, too, at the mess in the house, the toys, the overflowing Diaper Genie. But he left the mess to her because only she could calm herself. He fucked things up, stacked the dishwasher wrong, didn’t put the laundry in the bureau quickly enough. That was the conversation. He was tired of it. He was speaking less.
James stepped from the streetcar, moving with the crowd toward the hospital. At the second door, a security guard pointed at a dispenser of antibacterial soap. James’s first instinct was to refuse, as was his wont in the presence of a direct order, but the security guard issuing the order was bull-bodied and redheaded with a slack jaw and the bored arrogance of a bouncer. Then James spotted a withered old woman sitting on a bench, coughing into her curled waxed hand, sport socks pulled up to her green-veined knees. Eagerly, James hit the soap dispenser, slathered, and rubbed.
Up the elevator, along the painted footsteps on the floor. But he was following the wrong painted feet and suddenly they ran out. James found himself up against a pair of doors with ship’s portholes at the top; half of one of the painted feet was lost on the other side of the door. Only the heel remained. James pushed at the doors. They were locked.
He turned around and kept walking, following green feet this time and trying to make sense of the signs overheads. GR4–T76. The numbers and letters seemed random, something Finn would produce banging away on the computer.
Then he found the door, but inside, the bed was empty. He shut the door quickly. A machine on wheels, knobs and buttons, came crashing through the opposite doorway, and attached to it, a woman in scrubs.
“My friend was in here last week—”
“We’re repairing this part of the hospital.” She moved around him, pushing the cart. “Check at the nurses’ station.”
It seemed strange to him that certain ventricles in a hospital could be closed when all he ever heard about was overcrowding and waiting rooms leaking unattended illnesses. He decided to take that as a good sign, then; some kind of lessening of the amount of suffering as a whole contained in the city. Of course, the other reading, he realized as he walked, was that there was the same amount of suffering, but nowhere to put it.
A nurse confirmed that Sarah had been moved to a ward. She no longer needed a private room because there was no private self, nothing that could be infringed upon, thought James.
Outside the correct door at last, he stopped a moment, took a breath, and then regretted it, the cold black coating of hospital chemicals settling over his lungs.
The curtain around Sarah’s bed was undrawn, and she lay on her back. Of the three other beds in the room, only one contained a person he could see, a middle-aged woman with dark hair, sitting up and watching television with headphones on. Another had the curtain drawn, but a murmur came from the slit, and feet passed below. An orderly gathered food trays. Because of this normal pulse of movement, Sarah looked a little out of place, entirely still in a room of movement, the last little house on a city street of skyscrapers.
Flowers sat on her bedside table. James picked up the card, both sides of the interior covered in the signatures of her colleagues in neat, teacher handwriting: “We are thinking of you.” “We’ll see you soon, Sarah!” The water in the vase was murky gray, the stems covered in slime.
James had been to visit three times, and each time, he left his coat on. He stood above Sarah, careful not to bump into the churning machines. The bruising had cleared, and she looked more like herself, except for the long black lines of stitches crisscrossing her face. Today, her head was flung back, mouth open, crusted with white. She might have been a woman talking, frozen in midsentence. The tracheal tube running from the moist, gauze-covered hole in her throat was held in place by a white plastic collar (Like something worn by a priest, or a cat, thought James). Her hair was slightly matted, the roots grown out. James had never thought about Sarah’s hair, about the number of small decisions she made that led her to dye it so black. What was coming in, forming a slab along the side part, was gray, wiry.
“Finn’s doing great,” James said quietly, glancing back at the woman watching television. He crouched down and spoke directly into her ear. “We’re taking care of him. I don’t want you to worry.” He saw her hand, bonded to tubes and tape, and placed his own hand on it. Her fingers were warm, soft. It had been years since he had held another woman’s hand. He had become used to Ana’s poor circulation, her corpse fingers yellow-tipped from November to April.
“What would you like to know?” he said. On his last visit, the nurse had told him to talk to her, that it might fire up her brain, shake her to life. Online he had read of a teenage boy who woke up after months in a coma and said: “I hate that doctor. He called me a vegetable.”
“Finn’s funny. I bought him Pull-Ups, and we’re working on that. He has this dance he’s doing, pretty hilarious. He’s all—” James waved his free arm. The breathing machine whirred. “Bruce at the daycare says he’s doing really well. They went on a neighborhood walk and picked up fall leaves. They made these elaborate collages. You should see Finn’s. It’s clearly the best one. He’s a master gluer.”
James straightened the card on the bedside table.
“The Leafs suck, as usual. The economy—it’s not good. You picked a good time to check out,” he said, laughed, then cleared his throat. “Sorry.”
He thought a moment. “We took Finn to my brother’s. He seemed to really like it there. They have an entire floor devoted to toys, so you can guess why he likes it. They also have four cars. Four!” James shook his head. “The parking downtown is still bullshit. There’s a systemic bias on Sundays, when the church people take up all the spaces on the block and the cops never ticket them. So last week I parked across the street, which is always no parking, right? And the parking guy was coming along and was about to write me a ticket. I couldn’t believe it. I ran outside—and hey, don’t worry, Ana was with Finn in the house, we wouldn’t leave him alone in the house—and I said: ‘Look, those church people don’t have permits, they park here for hours on Sunday, taking up all the permit spaces. Why don’t you ticket them?’ And you know what he said?” James dropped Sarah’s hand, which landed hard. He was pointing and poking the air. “He said: ‘We make exceptions for religious observation.’ What the fuck? Is this Iran or something? Aren’t we a secular state? I wanted to kill the guy, just smash him—” The woman with the headphones cleared her throat loudly. James turned and saw that she’d taken off her headphones and was exaggeratedly flipping through a magazine.
He lowered his voice. “Anyway, that’s not so interesting.” He glanced at the woman’s bedside table, which looked as if it might buckle under the weight of photographs: two little girls dressed up like Easter bunnies; two little girls in matching red dresses. James realized there was no photo of Finn by Sarah’s bed. He would have to bring one in.
“I saw your lawyer today, and he said you guys had very clear directives around guardianship. You were protecting him from Marcus’s parents, I guess. I wish I knew more about that. I wish I could …” Could what? As the possibility burst at the seams of this sentence, James croaked a little, then silenced himself.
“You’re a good mother, Sarah,” he said, again touching her hand. “You and Marcus were such good parents. You have this beautiful child.…” He didn’t continue, embarrassed that he’d immediately transformed a thought about her to one about himself, and all he hadn’t made.
James stopped talking and stood again in his coat, looking at Sarah’s affectless face, listening to the machines.
“Are you family?” asked a nurse, one he hadn’t met before, a small black woman in cornrows punctuated with glass beads. Her hair clicked as she checked numbers on a screen by Sarah’s bed, jotting them down on a chart.
“We’re guardians to her son. We have power of attorney.” James used “we” even when Ana wasn’t with him.
“Have you spoken to the doctor lately?”
“No. Why?”
“She’s stable, and we’re continuing with therapy. But you need to talk to Dr. Nasir about your plans for her.”
James heard a different kind of question. How could there be plans when she hadn’t come back yet? Or died? James couldn’t imagine any movement between those two possibilities. “What do you mean? Plans for what?” And as he spoke, it came to him: He worked on a documentary about this once, a woman who had been in a coma for a decade; her husband’s wish to divorce her; her family’s outrage. Would they move Sarah into their home, would James wash her body with a sea sponge, change feeding tubes, bedpans? Would Ana pluck stray hairs from Sarah’s chin? He remembered the mother of this woman, her mouth tight from worry, insisting that the strapping young brother wheel her bed into the living room for Christmas. And there she was, year after year, a wedge of person growing older at the side of the room while the tree lights twinkled and grandchildren scattered the trash of their opened gifts.
“Long-term care is one option,” said the nurse, her pen scratching: kstch, kstch, kstch. Such music in this woman, thought James, listening to her hair clicking, her pen. “You have to talk to the doctor about a DNR. Emergency measures. We have counselors here—”
The size of his circumstances came upon James suddenly, an encyclopedia dropped from a top bunk.
“This is fucked,” he said out loud, rubbing his hands through his hair until it stood in a forest of tufts at different furious angles. The woman reading her magazine froze. “We didn’t even know them that well.”
The nurse ceased her scratching and looked at him firmly. “Well, this must be very difficult for you, then.”
James deflated a little. It wasn’t compassion, really; there was a tinge of mockery in it, as if this nurse had seen much worse than James ever could. He nodded.
“I’ll see you soon, Sarah,” he said. He leaned down and gave her a kiss on the top of her head. In her ear, he whispered: “He asks about you.”
Then he stood and, at the door, turned and waved at Sarah.
In the hallway, the nurse appeared again by James’s side.
“It’s not that uncommon,” she said. James looked at her for the first time. She was about his age.
“These days, not everyone has a family. If something happens to me, my kids are going to my doorman. He’s the best person I know.”
James smiled at this. “Did you give him any warning?”
“No need for that,” said the nurse, handing James a photocopied list of phone numbers, counselors’ names. “People rise to the occasion.”
