Соавторы: Katrina Onstad
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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 17 страниц)
When James opened the door to the house, the scent of cold and streetcar on his jacket, Finn was alone in front of the television watching a small animated hamster singing about summer. He didn’t so much watch TV as sit prostrate before it, concentrating entirely, as if he were a medical student observing an operation. The Moo blanket that Ana had brought from his house was clasped between his fingers. He rubbed and rubbed, frowning. The joylessness around TV concerned James. Ana was letting him watch too much.
“Hey, Finny,” said James. “How was daycare today?”
Finn broke his concentration and grinned upward. “Hi, James! Hamster!” Then he turned back to the TV and vanished again.
Ana was in the kitchen. A small pink plastic plate of spaghetti sat on the island. Ana placed a blue plastic fork beside it.
“How did it go?” she asked.
“It’s done. We’re in charge. It’s official,” said James, and he beat his chest for emphasis. In one hand, he had a Ziploc bag that he placed before Ana. Plastic parts of a cell phone, the silver of a broken chip.
“This is all they found?”
“The police have a few other things. They’ll be released when the investigation is settled.”
Ana put her hand on the bag of phone parts. “Was it awful today?”
James considered this. “Neutral. It was like opening a bank account. Lawyers.” He was trying for a joke, but Ana didn’t respond.
“The body’s been cremated,” said James. “I guess I arranged that.” It occurred to James that Marcus’s dying was becoming his new job.
“Oh—will we get the ashes?” asked Ana. “What will we do with them?”
“Save the box for Finn, I guess. When he’s older.”
Ana pictured a grown man with Finn’s little boy face tossing ashes into a roiling sea.
“I know you don’t want to talk about it, but the funeral …” said James.
“I think we should wait.”
“What about closure?”
Ana raised her eyebrows. “You don’t actually believe that exists, do you?”
James sighed. “You’re right. It’s bullshit.”
“It’s her husband’s funeral. Sarah should be the one to—” said Ana. “She could still wake up.”
“I don’t think she’s waking up.”
He moved a glass of water over an inch on the table. They were quiet for a moment.
“We should still wait,” said Ana. She took James’s glass of water, dumped it in the sink, and put it in the dishwasher.
“I have to go to work,” she said.
“Now? It’s five o’clock.”
“Yes. I missed the afternoon, and we’re busy. I told you. It’s Emcor. Discovery is coming up”
The legal profession’s use of the word “discovery” had always struck James as abuse. “Discovery” was a magic word, one that should only refer to new planets or sexual pleasures. But in law, it meant a bunch of suits interviewing another bunch of suits to drag out enough information to ballast their theories in court.
Finn appeared. “ ’Getti!” he cried, climbing onto the stool. James steadied him, snapping a bib around his neck.
Ana put her laptop in her briefcase, which was filled with days of notes from combing over the definition of “life”: If soybeans could be patented, then what next? What other living things would they see bought and sold in their lifetime? She wanted to tell James about how the case made her heart race. The possibilities were terrifying, exhilarating. But Finn was singing as he ate, filling the room.
James had an urge to tell Ana about visiting Sarah, but something stopped him. Before the accident, his afternoons with Finn had seemed like a judgment on Ana, and he hadn’t told her. Now, these visits to Sarah had come to feel the same. It would be humiliating for Ana to know that her husband was at the bed of another woman over and over while she stayed in her office tower, only blocks away. He told himself this anxiety was ridiculous, and Ana would be happy to have Sarah looked after. But still, he didn’t want to speak until he knew what he needed to say.
Ana leaned in and pecked a kiss on his cheek. From afar, she called: “Good-bye, Finn!” before shutting the door.
At ten o’clock, Ana was not the last to leave the office. The law students stayed, surrounded by their empty Styrofoam food containers. They circled the boardroom table, clicking on their computers. Ana was not sure why they didn’t separate and use their cubicles, but something compelled them to come together at night. She suspected part of the evening was spent updating their Facebook profiles or texting people they sat across from all day. On these late nights, laughter sometimes came out of the room.
When Ana said good night, the comic mood broke. “Good night,” they chorused, soberly.
The night was warm. Ana decided to walk home. When she arrived in front of the bar, she didn’t bother to feign surprise at herself. She had known all along, then, where she was going.
It was a place she had first gone to when she was still a kid. Her mother had dragged her to poetry readings there. Ana had been too short to see through the crowds. She’d sipped ginger ale and kept her head below the adult currents, eyes watering from the smoke. Her mother had looked so happy, cigarette in one hand, white wine in the other, her uncut hair moving in all directions as she laughed. Men watched her and listened to her. She talked and talked and cheered at the dirty words. Ana leaned against her, warm and smiling. It was, Ana decided, a happy memory. She cut it off at the drunken edges.
Inside, the room was half full. A young woman in cowboy boots and a dress stood on stage with a guitar, tuning it. When she turned to the side, fiddling with an amplifier, Ana saw that her guitar was resting on a pregnant stomach.
A clatter of glasses and low conversation filled the space. One table was flanked by beer-drinking guys in plaid shirts, murmuring to one another through their facial hair, art students assuming the look of lumberjacks. Another table held an older couple: a man with electrocuted thin gray hair; a woman in granny glasses.
Ana found a small table near the back. She kept her jacket on until her beer arrived. She sipped and warmed herself. She no longer felt nervous alone in public; it was an advantage of reaching forty-one and becoming less visible. She reveled in the peace, anticipating the singer.
The singer leaned into her microphone and tapped away a blast of feedback. She adjusted it to the right height and strummed. “This one’s about what’s going to happen to me in about three months,” she said, pointing at her stomach. A few laughs.
The song was silly to Ana’s ears, filled with wishes and half-lullabies. But the woman had a strong voice. It climbed around the words with confidence, put them in their place. Ana stared at her. Her eyes closed, then closed harder, as if she were squinting her way to the high notes. One leg buckled and straightened at the knee.
“Hey,” said a voice. Charlie crouched down next to her. Ana was startled, she had almost forgotten about him.
“You came,” he said. “Can I sit?”
He did, pulling the chair close to Ana, speaking in a low voice, something James always did in bars, too, out of respect for the musician.
“Guess what?” he said. “You missed me. I already went on.” She saw now that his black T-shirt was wet with sweat around the collar. Part of her was relieved; she did not feel like playing the fan tonight.
“I’m sorry to hear that. How did it go?”
Charlie grinned, put his hands together in prayer, and looked up at the ceiling. “Terrible,” he said, laughing. “But it doesn’t matter. I lived through it.”
A beer arrived. Charlie thanked the waitress with familiarity. She squeezed his shoulder as she left. Ana was surprised to see him drinking, the foam caught on his upper lip. She could not associate religion and pleasure; they were back to back in her mind, walking away from each other, like dueling gunfighters.
Why had she come here? The smell of the place, years of watery beer and old smoke, seemed to be rising up from between the spaces in the wood floors, seeping out of the old, cracked chairs.
“This is a cover,” said the woman on stage. She strummed a few chords, and Charlie exclaimed: “Oh, this is a great song. She does this—yeah, it’s—she does this beautifully.”
The woman on stage closed her eyes and began:
“You are the light in my dark world. You are the fire that will always burn.…”
Ana watched her. The woman strummed, her voice swelling: “When I can’t stand on my own …”
Ana wanted to turn away from the woman, the guitar on her absurd belly. She was rocking, her eyes closed, in what could only be described as rapture. But Ana felt a kind of heat, and sadness, too. She glanced at Charlie. If he was moved, he didn’t show it.
The singer repeated the line, and dove down inside it: “You are the light”—until she came back around the other side quietly—“in my dark world.” And then she opened her eyes. Shook her hair. Exhaled. It struck Ana as obscene all of a sudden, that they should be all together for this moment. It would be better to experience it alone, with the blinds drawn. People clapped. Ana felt her cheeks redden.
“I should go,” said Ana.
“Really?” said Charlie. But Ana had her coat on already.
“Okay, I’ll walk you.”
“No, no. You don’t have to—”
“I know.”
They walked past the bars, the restaurants, through the bodies going in all directions. Charlie was carrying his guitar in a padded case on his back, turning at an angle to avoid hitting people with it. Ana was aware of how tall he was next to her compared to James.
When they turned south, onto a residential street, Charlie said: “I always liked these windows.” He pointed to an old mansion, a huge house with colored glass leaves curling in a vine around the doors. It had been divided into apartments; a row of ugly silver mailboxes, things found in a skyscraper, stacked up by the doorframe.
Ana tried to imagine going home right now, tried to picture herself in the living room, surrounded by toys and sippy cups. “Where do you live?” she asked.
“Not far,” said Charlie.
“Can I see it?” He glanced at her quickly, flickering, and nodded.
They had to turn around, retrace their steps.
“I like those windows, too,” said Ana as they went past the house again.
Charlie’s house was only two doors down from College. The noise of the street spilled over onto his lawn. Two front seats of a car were on his porch in the place where a nice café set should go.
Seeing Ana’s glance lingering upon the seats, he said: “That’s not mine.” Charlie unlocked the door. “Those guys have the front apartment. We have the top.”
“We”? thought Ana.
Half of the hallway, large and smelling of rotten food, was taken up by a pile of men’s sneakers and boots.
Ana walked up the creaky stairs. The banister wobbled.
As soon as the apartment door opened, Ana saw the “we.” A man played a video game on a couch, connected by a long wire to a console in the center of the room. The TV blared gunshots and “Incoming! Incoming!”
“Hey, dude,” he said, his voice coated in gumminess.
When Ana could separate the hallway and the sticky little gamer from the space, she saw that the apartment was actually warm and clean. The furniture was cheap but minimalist, and shelves of books tidily arranged lined the walls. Art books. Philosophy. Several different editions of the Bible.
“Ana, this is Russell. Russell, Ana,” said Charlie.
Russell nodded. “I’d get up. I’m not usually this bad, but I’m killing here …,”he said.
“Don’t bother, really,” said Ana. “Nice to meet you.”
Charlie led her into the kitchen. He shut the door behind them, muffling the sound of missiles.
“Ambush!” screamed Russell. “Die! Die!”
Charlie said loudly: “Tea? Wine?”
Ana found a place for herself at the kitchen table. It was white and empty but for a stack of newspapers and a bowl of oranges.
“Wine, if you have it,” she said.
“Russell lost his job,” said Charlie in a low voice, uncorking a bottle of red. Suddenly, he looked at the label: “I don’t know too much about wine. Does this seem okay?” Ana glanced at it. It was from a winery in Prince Edward County that she had visited once with James, years ago.
“It’s fine. What was his job?”
“He worked at the university bookstore.” Charlie passed her the glass. “Cheers,” he said. “Wait—it sounds like we’re celebrating the fact that Russell lost his job. Let’s think of something better.”
“Okay. To music,” said Ana. She felt like James, like she was doing an impression of James, his impulsiveness, his ability to be touched by things.
“To music.” They clinked. The wine was good.
“Do you worry he won’t be able to handle the rent?” asked Ana.
Charlie shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “He’s an old friend. I’ll carry him. He’ll be back on his feet.”
“That’s a nice idea, but you probably make very little money, if you don’t mind my saying that,” said Ana.
Charlie laughed. “This is true. My father points out this fact to me from time to time.”
The word “father” peeled ten years from his face.
“Charlie, how old are you?”
“Wow, first my salary, now my age!” Ana was struck by how much he laughed. It filled his spaces like breathing.
“I’m twenty-eight,” he said. “I’ll be twenty-nine next month. Then thirty. Aah!” He raised his hands like he was going down a roller coaster. “It’s weird to think my mom had three kids by thirty.”
“My mom had me at thirty,” said Ana. She finished her glass of wine.
“How much did she drink, your mom?”
Ana paused. “You know about that?” Files. Everything in files.
“She’s pretty young, and alcohol-related dementia is common. And when she first came, I don’t think she ever told me a story that didn’t take place at a party.” Now Ana laughed.
“God, is that true? She’s declined a lot in two years, hasn’t she? I haven’t heard her tell a story in a long time.”
Charlie nodded. “What are you thinking these days? How are you doing?”
“Oh, well, you know, mostly I’m not thinking at all,” said Ana.
“What do you mean?” His head was turned, close to hers.
“I don’t know. I think I have dementia, too. There are things I can’t remember.…”
“What kind of things?”
“About my life. About what I was trying to achieve.”
“Wow,” said Charlie, and he laughed. “That sounds awful.”
Ana laughed, too. “It does, doesn’t it? I don’t know what I’m talking about, really. I guess you’re around that all day, nobody making sense.”
“Well, sometimes. Mostly they make sense to me, though.” Ana noticed that he drank slowly. “When I started doing this work, I thought I was prepared for it. But I had times when I would see things—I’d see this, you know, decay—and I’d think: What’s the value in this? What’s left here? But you see them every day and …” He stopped.
“And what?”
“You don’t feel so scared. You think you stop living because you fragment, because the mind gets less reliable, but you don’t. There is something primal in there. There’s something that eclipses the damage. There’s this instinct for life. It’s, you know …” He paused again.
“Holy,” said Ana.
“Yeah, that’s better. I was going to say ‘awesome,’ ” said Charlie, laughing.
The conversation moved to small details, films recently seen, Ana’s work and how Charlie had arrived in the city (on a bus from Victoria, with a scholarship in his pocket). These ordinary things seemed intimate now, because of that one true moment that had come before. They finished the bottle and looked at each other.
“Well,” she said. She saw that Charlie was blushing. “I should go.”
He nodded.
They made their way through the war zone in the living room.
“Private Miller, noooooo! Charlie—the Emperor is totally giving the signal!”
Charlie didn’t answer.
At the door, Ana wondered if she should lean in and give him the two-cheek kiss that had become fashionable among her friends. But she wasn’t sure she could put her face so close to his without wanting to add her body, so she moved fast, waving as she went down the rattling staircase.
Ana walked light-headed, uncertain. She headed back along College. The bar where she’d seen the woman sing was now closed.
When she got home, the lights were off. She flicked them on and saw the living room strewn with toys, plastic bits and Lego and animals. She began to move through the room, tossing objects into Sarah’s wicker basket, which sat now in the hearth. Occasionally, things beeped and whirred. But halfway through her tidying, Ana felt exhausted, weighted. Without finishing, she turned out the lights. Upstairs, she passed the door to Finn’s room, slightly ajar. She glanced inside at him. He had kicked off the cover and was lying on his side, his legs scissored. He was covered from neck to toe in new fleece footie pajamas that James had bought for the cooler weather. His chest rose and fell.
Ana undressed in the bathroom and slipped into bed next to James, who was half snoring on his back. She nudged him to roll onto his side and he mistook it for sex, coming at her hips with his hands, throwing a leg her way.
She pushed him away gently, rolling him like an overturned car until he was facing the wall, away from her.
The next day James made lunch for himself and Finn. Hot dogs. A tin of beans. Finn played on the floor, moving a wooden train through a forest of pots while James cleaned the dishes.
The doorbell rang. Finn ran ahead.
“Wait!” called James, wanting to stop Finn from discovering if the person on the other side would be wielding an ax or a clipboard.
Finn scurried around James’s ankles as the door opened.
“Sign here, sir.” The invoice read: Kingston Engineering. Though young, the man had a military demeanor, chest puffed. Maybe it was just the courier uniform.
“Box!” cried Finn. James signed, and the courier nodded, turned on one toe, and marched away.
James tore off the tape strip: CD-ROMs, memory sticks, file folders labeled with various projects: ROBERTSON CREEK, GARRISON PARK.
“Look,” said Finn. He had removed a piece of white paper covered in a crayon scrawl. At the bottom, in an adult’s handwriting: The Windy Day by Finn Lamb. Along the top, holes from a pushpin, as if the picture had been moved around a lot.
James pulled out a stack of business cards: Marcus Lamb, Civil Engineer, Trenchless Technology Specialist. There were so many of them, the box was brick heavy.
“Put the picture back in, Finny,” said James. Finn shook his head.
What was he preserving it for? For Sarah’s great awakening? What movie did he think this was?
“You want it?”
Finn nodded.
James pressed the curled tape back along the box’s spine and carried it to the basement, Finn trailing behind. The walls were cement, stacked with boxes and bicycles. Ana had imposed order even down here, in what was little more than a cave.
One of them, in black marker, read: THE BOOK. James stopped and pulled it down. Finn immediately tore at the tape, and James let him, watching as he worked open the flaps.
“What this?” Finn asked, pulling out the hardcover book. Identity Crisis, and James on the back, with a short-lived goatee and a blazer. James picked up a copy, too; there were at least a dozen in there, both the hardcover and the softcover. Every year his agent sent him the statement of earnings, and it was always negative. It seemed there were so many books out there unsold that they’d be flooding back forever, salmon spawning in reverse. He flipped its pages, realizing that if he ever wrote anything again, people would probably read it on their telephones. The edges of the paper were yellowing. Cheap. Disposable. The shame of it was overwhelming. He took the book from Finn’s hand, threw it in, and was sealing the box when the doorbell rang again.
Finn charged up the stairs first, skidding down the hall in his socks. On his tiptoes, he opened the door.
“Wait for me, Finn! Did you forget something?” said James, confronted again with the young man in the yellow courier suit.
“No,” he said quickly, reddening. “I have another package, that’s all.”
As James signed, the courier muttered: “Our computers were down. I just got flagged.”
He handed James another box, smaller, the size of a paint tin.
BASIC CREMATION SERVICES, said the invoice.
James shut the door.
“I see box?” asked Finn.
“Not now,” said James. He tried to walk past Finn.
“Box?”
James thought of the $1,600 charge on his credit card and reminded himself to invoice Marcus’s insurer quickly.
James knew that he was focusing on his credit card because he could not think about what would befall this little boy were he to learn that the box contained the answer to every question he would ever have, and that the box would never speak of these things, and the box was filled with dust, and the dust was the father he would never know. This is his childhood. It’s happening right now, thought James. And he has no father to take him through.
Finn looked up at James, holding the drawing. He had his mouth in the O shape, puzzling over the world again.
James rubbed at his eyes and managed a smile. He walked back down to the basement, to the shelf containing Marcus’s business detritus. He put the box on top of the larger one so it resembled the world’s brownest, most depressing wedding cake. He gave the small box a gentle pat.
Finn, who had crushed the picture to the size of a walnut, was now kicking it across the basement floor.
“Hey, wait a second,” said James, rescuing the balled-up picture. He smoothed it out against the wall. “Now, this is a really good picture. I think it should have a place of honor, don’t you agree, Sir Finn?”
In the kitchen, James put it on the fridge. It was a blank stainless steel canvas. They didn’t even have a magnet, and James had to root around for tape.
“Fantastico,” he told Finn, who pointed at the picture. “Mine,” he said cheerfully.
Hours later, James put Finn down for a late afternoon nap. Finn crawled in like it was his duty, holding his cow blanket and squeezing his eyes shut. James kissed his soft hair.
The door to James’s office was closed. He hesitated, then went inside.
He hadn’t been in there since Finn had arrived a month ago.
James felt instantly soothed by the chaos of the room, the papers and teetering books. He removed the hockey helmet from his guitar and plugged in the amp. He turned it high and began to play. How long had it been? His fingers on the strings were too silky, uncallused, but the pain felt good. He went back and forth through the chords, closing his eyes, trying not to see Marcus when he did. He breathed hard, letting the sound get bigger and bigger.
When he opened his eyes, Ana and Finn were in front of him.
“Finn try!” cried Finn, jumping up and down.
“You smell good,” said James. Ana was wearing a fitted black dress, her breasts flattened in a way that was incongruously boyish and sexy at once. Her eyes were painted gray, her lips red.
“Where are you going?”
“Me? We. We’re going out, remember? This is the great sitter experiment.”
James had forgotten. He could see instantly in his mind’s eye the firm party, the new restaurant at the top of an office building overlooking the harbor, the grim black lighting and reflective surfaces that ensured you could never escape anyone’s face. The room would be filled with Ana’s colleagues, men growing fatter and louder in their pressed suits; the women thinner and meaner, denying themselves hors d’oeuvres.
“Let me shower,” he said.
“Finn try!”
“We need to get going,” said Ana.
“I can’t not let him try it.” James squatted and held the guitar across his knees. Finn made a few swipes and laughed.
“Don’t be Paul McCartney,” said James. “Be Mick Jagger. People will tell you to be Paul McCartney, but don’t.”
In the shower, James looked at his hands and his buttery belly. He had put on weight; he was becoming immovable.
James’s dress shirts hung in a dry-cleaned bundle, twist-tied at the neck of the hangers, bagged in plastic. Ana must have taken them in for him. He had not worn one in months, not since his final meeting with HR.
As he slid his torso into a blue shirt, the crease along his elbow like a margin, he remembered a party a decade ago in a different bar in a different tower. Ana was a new associate, and James showed up wearing a concert T-shirt—Jesus Lizard—under a black blazer. He was lighter then. He walked fast and everywhere, never taking buses or taxis or driving, held to the ground only by army boots under his black jeans. It was only when he set foot in the bar, glanced around at the feet of the guests, all high heels and dad shoes, buffed and barely worn, that he realized how badly he had misjudged. It was one of the first times his youth had been revealed to him as crass, rather than a badge of honor. In the cool, crisp spaces between people, placed in elegant groups of two and three, James recognized new worlds that required other currencies, worlds in which his father moved back and forth with ease. He thought of his father, standing outside James’s bedroom door, his diagonally striped, navy blue tie in a full Windsor, his overcoat on, glancing bewildered at the posters on the wall, the guitar amp humming. And James in his white underwear on the carpet, having fallen asleep, deeply stoned and sixteen.
Finn appeared, holding Moo.
“Where you go?” he asked.
James scooped him up, pulled him close on the bed, breathing in his limbs, his small pumping chest, the worn comfort of the blanket.
“We’re going to a party. There’s a babysitter coming. She’s really nice. You guys will play and you’ll go to sleep, and when you’re asleep, we’ll come home and kiss you on the cheek,” said James. Finn looked unconvinced.
“Ana!” called James. She appeared quickly, as though she had been lingering in the hall.
“We better get going. Ethel’s here,” she said.
“Ethel?” said James, incredulous, and then, to Finn: “The babysitter’s name is Ethel.”
“She’s from the Philippines.”
“Oh, God. This is someone’s nanny?” He spoke in a hushed voice.
“Elspeth, from work. I told you that,” said Ana. “She’s her night nanny.”
“Her night nanny? How many are there? Is there a dusk nanny? A dawn nanny? A midafternoon snack nanny?”
It was quite likely true that Ana did tell him about the evening, and he couldn’t remember or hadn’t found it worth noting. But now, suddenly, the thought of this Ethel alone with Finn—
“What do we know about her? Did you check her references?” Again, his career backed up on him: He recalled interviews with police officers, macho men of the law who appeared before him red-eyed and destroyed, choking out stories about child slavery rings; pedophiles masquerading as caregivers. All the experts he had sat across from, dumbly and humbled, and now all James could remember from those conversations was: Don’t trust anyone.
“I just told you. She lives with Elspeth and her family. She’s been here for almost two years. She has a whole family back there. It’s quite sad.”
James took Finn by the hand and walked toward the living room. Unexpectedly, Ethel turned out to be a boyish young woman with short hair. James wondered if the hair was a nod to her new modern life, if such a cut would fly back home.
Sensing a nervousness in her—she seemed to be shaking giggles out of her mouth like a swimmer shaking off water—James began to be James, spilling over with curiosity. Within a moment, she had a glass of juice in her hand, and Finn was sitting next to her playing with the clasp on her purse, and James had learned that she had two daughters in the Philippines, in a town he had never heard of. Still, he nodded with an insider’s understanding when she said the name: “Oh, yes, of course.” And Ana, putting on her coat in the hallway, heard her husband and recognized in his response the smallest lie.
At the door, waving good-bye, both Ana and James were flung backward into their childhoods, each separately watching a marching band of babysitters who had walked through their parents’ doors over the years: the gum chewer, the sour old woman, the preadolescent with the babysitter course card. For James, the doorways were always the same, and his parents’ assurances the same, and his excitement the same. For Ana, the memories arrived in an aureole of confusion. Everyone was faceless, and the doors led to apartments and houses she’d lived in for only months at a time, some of which she wouldn’t recognize if she walked by them today.
“We’ll see you soon, buddy,” said James, preening a little for Ethel. He crouched down to give Finn a hug.
Ana made rustling noises, noting that James had never called Finn “buddy” in his life. Finn laid out Ethel’s makeup kit on the coffee table. Ethel seemed unfazed.
“Good-bye,” said Ana, who bent down and delivered an awkward kiss atop Finn’s head. She felt a million eyeballs rolling over her as she did it.
