Соавторы: Katrina Onstad
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He spent the next days trying to revive Ana. Her eyes flattened, and she would go for hours without talking, even as they continued their routine as if nothing had happened. From the moment they awoke, James talked. He talked through her silence at breakfast, her quiet sips of wine at the pub after work. “You picked the wrong guy if you think I’m going to run out of things to say,” said James, folding laundry and talking about baseball, C. S. Lewis, Rodney King. He thought she was weighing whether or not her “Okay” was sincere, and that was when he knew that he could not have a life without her, that such a future would be entirely without purpose. So he talked, hoping some of his words would hook and reel her in.
Ana had arrived to him, at age twenty-six, exhausted by the needs of those who claimed to love her. She no longer wanted to be tired out by the folly of others. James knew how her father had vanished literally, and her mother vanished nightly into the drink. He knew her teenage days stopped at 10 p.m., when she shut her door and put on headphones to drown out the rattle and rant of her mother on the telephone or cackling in the living room with a new friend. And in the morning, when the sunlight hit the African violets, Ana felt optimistic again and was eager to bring her mother back to the world, carrying her a tray of Tylenol and tea.
Later, Ana tended to boys who loved her only part of the time, too. She might stitch a torn sleeve, or show up on the doorstep with the right album, but even a fuck in some vacationing parents’ bedroom was never enough to keep the full attention of these sleepy-eyed lovers. They left.
But James would be present. James wouldn’t take advantage. James promised to fill this vacant building from which all the people who had promised to love Ana had fled. He knew that she couldn’t sustain any more betrayal. And three weeks after he had sex in the bar bathroom, he awoke to Ana’s eyes on him. They were her real eyes at last. “Never again,” she said, and James held her so tight he left a faint yellow bruise on the back of her left shoulder.
This was their covenant, then. It seemed to James that there were things he needed to keep from her, and that she had asked him to do so, in fact. And now, driving to his parents’ house, he tried to convince himself that not telling her about his weakness and terrible mistakes was a gesture akin to love. He told himself this while attempting to ignore the rotten stench floating up from his guts.
“Where doggy?” asked Finn.
“He didn’t come with us, Finny,” said James. Ana opened her eyes, saw a mall before her, closed them again, her headache rotating.
And then it began. Finn started to snarl, and the snarl begat a kind of bark that was actually a cry, a sob, a wracking of body, a flailing of legs, small, strong feet pounding into James’s back as he drove.
“Dogggyyyyy!” he wailed through a wall of sobs and screams.
“Finn, don’t kick me! I’m driving!”
A huge truck went by James’s window, too fast, too close. He swerved, and bodies thrust forward and back.
“James!” said Ana, clutching her side.
“Doggyyyy! Want him! Want him! Want him!”
Ana’s stomach bounced up and down. She put one hand over her belly, one on the top of her head, holding both in place.
“Doggyyyy!”
“Make him stop,” whispered Ana.
“What?”
“Make him stop!”
“Doggyyyy!”
“What can I do?” shouted James.
“Just do your thing! Just do it!” Bile rose in her throat; she choked it back.
“Finny—just stop it. We’ll get the dog later,” shouted James.
Finn seemed to regard the words as a challenge, ramping up the volume, the kicking. James felt Finn’s snot and spit flying in droplets through the car.
James took the next exit, following the signs to Tim Horton’s.
“Are you coming?” he asked Ana from the backseat, unstrapping the flailing body. She nodded, trying to unlock the door.
“Drugstore,” she said, feeling her throat, parched and burning.
“Maybe you could fucking help me,” he said, but Ana didn’t hear him.
They split off from each other, then, Ana retreating to the relative calm of the small pharmacy in the strip mall. She bought a box of cold medicine, throat lozenges, a large bottle of water.
While she thumbed through a magazine, the pictures shifting and sliding in front of her eyes, James guided Finn into the handicapped stall at Tim Horton’s. There was no hook for Sarah’s diaper bag, a pink-and-blue-striped tote with a small, tasteful label on the pocket: YUMMY MUMMY. James placed it far from the sticky floor surrounding the toilet.
Finn was calmer. He stood, puffy and shellacked with snot, pulling at the toilet paper roll, pointing at random, vaguely disgusting objects that James had never noticed existed in a bathroom stall. “What’s that?”
“A wad of toilet paper someone stuffed in the lock.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s called graffiti.”
“What’s that?”
“It says: ‘Blow me.’ ”
“Ha!” Finn laughed.
Without a changing table, James was reduced to pulling off Finn’s Pull-Up as he stood, which meant shoes had to come off, which in turn meant he was standing in his stocking feet in the sticky circle. James located the wipes, which had been left open, and had become dry and useless.
“Wait here.” At the sink, James tried to dampen a wipe with water. It began to disintegrate in his hand, forming small globules.
A man entered the bathroom and nodded, began peeing in the urinal.
“What’s that?” cried Finn from the bathroom at the sound of the urine rushing with the force of a shaken beer can being dumped down a sink.
“It’s someone …” James hesitated. The man’s girth had not escaped him, nor the fact that he was wearing a sleeveless jean jacket with no shirt underneath. The word “peeing,” which sat on the edge of James’s tongue, didn’t seem adequate to the task, suddenly.
“Going”—he considered the word—“urinating.”
“Tinkle?” shouted Finn, who had flung open the door of the stall and stood naked below the waist, his pants around his ankles, Spider-Man socks pulled up around his calves. He glanced at the man. “Giant go tinkle?”
“Yes,” said James, entering the stall quickly and shutting the door. He wiped the boy with a paper towel.
“Do you want to try to pee in the toilet? We should get moving on this issue.”
Finn looked alarmed.
“Toilet?”
“Don’t the big kids at daycare use the potty? Big kids go peepee in the toilet?”
James was speaking in a tiny voice, trying not to be heard by the giant, who washed his hands at the sink, though James realized the giant could easily peer over the stall if he were so inclined.
James whispered again: “Let’s go pee in the toilet. Maybe later we can buy you some underwear.”
“Spider-Man underwear?” Finn had seen this in the mall with James only a few days before. James marveled at his powers of recollection.
“Sure, sure,” said James. “Want to pee in the toilet? You can sit.”
Finn looked at the toilet, frowning. He shook his head.
“Another time,” said James, strapping the Velcro on Finn’s sneakers that matched his own.
The urinator left the bathroom, and James hoisted Finn to the sink to wash his hands. James took small pleasure in depositing the wet diaper in the garbage and wiping Finn’s face clean with a paper towel. He exited like a victor, pink diaper bag slung over his shoulder, the giant glancing his way with a manly nod as they left the restaurant.
When he got to the car, Ana was in the front seat, staring at the row of garbage and recycling cans in front of the car.
“Thanks for your help back there,” said James, strapping Finn into place.
Ana said nothing.
“I can’t do everything,” he said, backing out of the space quickly.
Ana reached down between her legs and into her purse. The dog in her hand was small, brown, not unlike the one James had bought Finn. She turned and held it out for Finn, who grabbed it, as if starving.
James looked at his wife. Her head was turned so he couldn’t read her expression. He had a strange thought: Now the dog James had bought was second rate, older and lesser. James had been elbowed aside.
“Now he’s going to think if he cries, he gets what he wants,” said James.
Facing the window, Ana said: “God forbid.”
James took the beer, because he was offered the beer, and because it was his father doing the offering. His parents had switched roles in old age: His father fussed and hovered while his mother sat with Ana and talked to her about budget cutbacks at the library. James’s father looked like a peer of Finn’s, in a canary yellow polo shirt so silly it must have been purchased by his wife. He passed drinks around the room with the gentility of a maid.
“Two hands,” said James offhandedly to Finn, who drank his juice from a real actual glass, slowly, wondering at the adult item in his hands.
“I should have looked for one of those—you know. What are they called, Diana? With the lids?” asked James’s father.
“Sippy cups,” said James’s mom, who then turned to continue her real talk with Ana.
“That’s right. Mike’s girls always leave a few behind, but I don’t know where they went.”
“He’s happy to use a cup, Dad,” said James. Finn looked at James.
“Where Dad?” he asked. James braced himself.
“He’s not here, Finny,” he said. This sufficed somehow. Finn put down the juice on the coffee table and began to move about the room, scrutinizing each piece of furniture, the wall, as if he were in a museum. James’s father passed his son a look of sheer sadness.
“He’s not used to such a big house,” said Diana, directing the conversation back into a foursome.
Finn ran his hands along the couch, which was glistening black leather and made James think of a bear’s gleaming fur, a hunter’s prize. The scale of the entire house left James woozy. Even the double garage had rounded arches above the electronic swing doors. The living room with the airplane hangar vaulted ceilings was punctuated, precariously, by a fan that appeared to be dangling down from a thin string. It was never turned on, because it was never hot between these walls; the air was entirely still and perfect. Warm in winter, cool in summer. From the living room, James looked up at the wraparound second-floor balconies. All the doors were shut. The house contained rooms that James had never set foot in. His parents had purchased the place when James and his brother were in university; bizarre timing, as both boys pointed out. James was at his poorest then, taking the train to the new house on the weekends with his laundry. At dinner, he complained of the price of utilities and the gouging landlords in the city. His mother was sanguine: You wanted to live in the city, you live in the city! His father, though he had worked downtown for thirty years, retained a deep fear of the unknown pockets that existed in between his train stop and the office tower, four blocks away. He had once seen a man casually walking along, carrying a package close to his chest. When he got closer, Wesley saw blood escaping through the cracks between the man’s fingers. Bleeding, the man had swooned, smiling a little, as if he’d seen a pretty girl. He fell to his knees not a foot from Wes Ridgemore. When the police officer arrived, he told Wesley: “Stabbing. Happens all the time.” And this was where his son wanted to live.
On his way out the front door at the end of those university weekends, James’s father would take his son aside, place a bundle of twenties in his hand, rolled up to look smaller than they were.
“Diana, don’t we have those puzzles? Didn’t Jenny leave a couple?”
“In the basement, I think,” she said. Wesley pushed himself up from the couch, struggling a little against the bursitis, the sciatica, all the rest. He froze for a beat halfway up and steadied himself, like a diver on a board. James averted his eyes. There were disk issues, James recalled. He had not asked after these issues in a while and now felt too ashamed to draw attention to what he didn’t know.
Diana’s eye makeup was blue and a little thick, like crayon filler in a few creases. But otherwise, she was perfectly contained, upright in her kitten-heeled shoes and flesh-colored stockings over her slightly rounded ankles. “Elegant” was the word she was going for. It was how she’d described Ana when she first met her: “A smart dresser. Elegant.” This was possibly the only judgment she had ever voiced around James’s biggest choice. Diana was fundamentally, agonizingly private. What had happened in Belgrade that brought her here was never discussed. James had tried, question upon question, and the answers were always the same: “It was a long time ago. It doesn’t concern you. It’s over.” But James could piece together something, a shape. He knew that she was five in 1941 and so must possess some memory of the Luftwaffe bombs raining down. But how, exactly, had her parents managed to get her out, through fascist Italy and Switzerland to the new world? Was there a priest? Were there false documents, illicit favors? Did money change hands?
He looked at her. She was talking. He remembered her saying to him, at thirteen: “I came because my family died.” Died. Not killed. As if old age had gently carried them away.
She met Wesley while working in the sock department of a clothing store. She had become a librarian late in life, through hard, private work, but why this pull toward books? James wondered. She was a woman entirely uninterested in stories. Sitting on the edge of his bed, upright in the darkening room, she would shut Narnia and say to her sons: “You must know this is only fantasy. Enjoy it as such.” She dragged James away from gulches crossed by children in the night and lions waiting and closets that led to forests, dragged him away and back to his bedroom with its glow-in-the-dark globe, his window overlooking the pebbled driveway.
“So,” said Diana. “You are playing at parenthood.”
Ana filled her mouth with water, thereby volleying the non-question to James. Her body was grateful not to be in the car anymore but had retreated to a hum of discomfort centered in the back of her head.
Ana could see James flushing, reverting to guttural teenage responses. “Not really. Maybe. I guess so,” said James. Diana stared at him, her eyelids vanishing.
“It’s very strange, isn’t it, a child with no relatives? In this day and age, it’s possible to trace anyone. I’ve never heard of such a thing,” she said, something faintly foreign in the phrasing if not the accent.
Wesley placed three wooden puzzles on the floor. James recognized them from the toy stores in his neighborhood: new but designed to look old-fashioned, with Depression-era line drawings of little children (Dick and Jane?) running and fishing and becoming obsolete, their socks drooping around their ankles. His parents must have kept them around for Mike’s children. Finn dumped them out, one by one, the pieces scattering on the carpet.
“Do you think about hiring a detective, to see if there’s anyone else?”
“We were stipulated in the will. They didn’t want him to go to anyone else,” said James. He tried to sound certain, but the questions brought more questions: What if, right now, the grandparents were packing their bags? What if there was a knock at the door, a phone call, a letter? Family wins in these situations. Blood wins.
James looked at Finn, and then at Ana, who was not looking at anyone. He suppressed a sudden swell of tears.
Wesley nodded, saying, “Yes, of course,” at the same moment that Diana cried out: “But it’s absurd. You must know this.” Ana nibbled from a glass bowl of mixed nuts, as if by keeping her mouth full, she was excused. They tasted stale. Ana felt James next to her giving off heat, like a planet imploding.
“They were optimists, your friends,” said Wesley. “They saw something in you.”
“But can you imagine it, entrusting your child to two people who have never changed a diaper? Am I right, Ana?” Diana turned to Ana, who put down the peanuts slowly. “Do you have any experience with children? I had the impression you two did not even want children.”
Ana was surprised by the question. The holidays and evenings they had passed in one another’s company had run on the momentum of the quotidian: the mortgage rates, the garden, the traffic problems.
“It wasn’t about want,” she said. Then, to James: “You never told them?”
James rubbed his hand across his forehead.
“We can’t have children,” said Ana.
Wesley reached a hand down to the floor, as if searching for something in the carpet. Diana didn’t blink.
“You waited too long,” she declared. “It is not your fault, of course. This is how it is here.”
Ana could feel each one of her particles circling, trying to remember where to land.
“Jesus, Mom. It’s nobody’s fault,” said James.
“In a cosmic sense, certainly, but medically, the doctors must have given you reasons. There were tests, am I correct?”
“It’s personal, Mom,” said James tightly.
Finn tired of the puzzles and began circling the room like a shark, pulling at a coffee table book, pointing at a vase of hydrangeas.
“Don’t touch!” called James. “Gentle!”
“Diana, tell them about the cottage,” said Wesley, nervously redirecting the room. “Ah, yes. We might go to a new cottage this year with Michael and Jennifer,” said Diana. “In Quebec, while workers renovate the other one.”
“You hate cottages, Mom,” said James.
“Michael said there was a high-quality washer and a dryer.”
Ana watched Finn carefully and tried to make sense of her anger toward James, the sensation that she might just pick up the table lamp beside her in one hand and crack it down on James’s head, watching pieces fly across the room, hair and blood clinging to the ceramic edges. What was the thing she wanted him to say to this woman?
He was not going to rescue her, so she tried: “I …” said Ana above Finn’s babble and Wesley’s murmuring to him. Heads turned.
“It was a difficult time for me,” said Ana. “But I don’t think about it anymore.”
“Because you have the boy now,” said Wesley conclusively. “It makes perfect sense.”
Ana shook her head. “No, no, it’s not that—”
“We don’t really have him,” interrupted James. “It’s probably temporary. It depends on Sarah—”
The ramble was halted by Finn’s squealing car sounds as he raced two coasters along the floor.
Diana stood, clearing James’s empty glass and drifting on her stockinged legs to the kitchen. Her heels left half-moon indentations in the carpet as she walked.
Ana needed for Finn to stop his wailing so she could make sense of the chaos, locate exactly the source of the slight. She knew that a moment had passed, and they had all survived it somehow. But then she glanced at her husband, who looked wild. He was red-faced, his hair strangely mussed.
Ana stood and turned to the kitchen, feigning an offer of help, though there was never anything to do.
“This is nice,” said Ana, picking up a small glass from the window ledge. It was a little bigger than the lid of a shampoo bottle, and covered in tiny painted flowers.
Diana wrung a sponge at the sink. She placed it in its dish and looked at Ana. “Oh, yes, that’s Wesley’s. A tea glass from Tunisia.”
“Tunisia? What was he doing there?” Ana had only one image of Wesley spanning the years, courtesy of James: in a windowless office, with a giant ledger open in front of him, like Bob Cratchit.
“There was a business opportunity,” said Diana. “We actually considered moving there at one point. Can you imagine? James and Michael with their blue eyes.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
“I don’t think I would have been functional there,” she said. “Water?”
Ana nodded, and she drew them each a glass of water from the tap. They stood, sipping.
“Did you see there will be a new development? Condominium tower. Right by the train tracks,” said Diana.
“We came the other way.”
“I hope it means we can get more funding for the library,” said Diana.
They finished their water and smoothed their skirts, but as they were walking toward the door, Ana stopped: “What did you mean, functional? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Ana,” she said, a quick, deep-voiced response that suggested Ana was right to press further. “It’s difficult to be a mother.” She paused. “Don’t tell James I said that.”
Ana shook her head.
“It is more than just giving up your freedom, or your marriage, in many ways. It’s a loss of an idea of who you are. And they will tell you: ‘Oh, you get an abundance in return, you get it back, it’s simply different.’ But that’s not quite true. What is true is that you are altered, and I suppose it depends who you were to begin with, if you have the kind of genetic structure that can withstand such change. Does it make sense?”
“I don’t know. Maybe,” said Ana, caught in Diana’s unyielding gaze. “Did you feel like you’d been changed enough already before you had kids? By the war?”
Diana flinched and looked away, and Ana recognized a misstep on her part. They would remain in the realm of abstractions.
“Perhaps in some way,” said Diana. “I sympathize with you. I can’t say I regret my children. Of course I care for them. But I do sometimes wonder what was lost to me.”
Footsteps outside the door passed, and Ana felt as if she was about to be caught in something illicit. James would never believe this; he always said that his mother had locked away the sentient part of life. She had once cut her hand on a can opener and strode into the living room where the boys were playing, a newspaper wrapped to her wrist, blood speckling the ground behind her. “There has been an accident,” she announced like a town crier, before dialing a cab with her other hand. Wesley loved to tell this story, but James didn’t see it as valor, the way his father did. He saw it as a way of defying her family, announcing that they were, for her, not a source of comfort. There was nothing she could possibly need them for.
And now this confession and warning by the kitchen door. What was Ana to do with it? The illness in her head bloomed.
The door swung open, and Finn stood at their knees.
“Hungry,” he said. Diana moved to meet his hunger. Cupboards opened and drawers rattled and food came forth for the boy, pieces of cheese cut in tiny squares, which he placed in his mouth with chipmunk propulsions, humming cheerfully, oblivious to the eyes of the women. Ana watched her mother-in-law, imagining that she was seeing in Finn her own son in a different kitchen, and she, a young wife forever new in a foreign country where the cheese had the consistency of soap.
Ana looked upon the boy and rooted around for some kind of feeling. It was there, but not the texture or the size she sensed was required. Still, she could feed him if he was hungry. Not all women could do this. The apartments of Ana’s youth had empty refrigerators, still slimy from the previous tenants, burned-out bulbs. As a teenager, she was often a dinner guest in the homes of her friends. Ana loved these evenings, reveling in the overflowing plates of chicken and bowls of vegetables, quietly taking in the large families with their regular seats at the table, the mother and father like dollhouse figures that had been placed at either end. (Who were those friends? What were their names? Ana had lost all of them, like a bough shedding ripened fruit, as she moved from school to school.) And then, out of fairness, she remembered sitting next to her mother in their favorite restaurant, against the banquette, while the waiter flirted with them both. And Ana drinking her Coke, nestled against her mother’s arm, and the two of them content in their quiet.
There had always been food. A bagel wrapped in a paper towel stuffed in her backpack. The remains from the doughnut store, or later, the catering company where she had worked as a teenager. Sitting on the couch late at night, eating pasta salad from take-out containers with plastic forks, her mother telling her about her Ph.D. that she would never finish. Poetry.
“I’m not feeling too well,” said Ana, and Diana nodded, as if it were a given.
“Come, Finneas,” said Diana, extending a hand. Finn got up from the table and walked past her hand, toward Ana. A small strand of snot joined his ear to his nose, like a purse handle. Diana reached out with a Kleenex and wiped it away.
“Up,” said Finn, his arms extended to Ana, his face tired.
Ana nodded at him. Diana said softly: “Ana, he wants you to pick him up.”
“Oh, of course,” said Ana. She bent and pulled him up, his legs tightening around her waist like a spider trapping a fly, but his hands on her neck were loose and soft. Ana rubbed his back, felt the warmth of him bending into her, his sweetness drowned out by her sadness, her humming knowledge that hers was not the body he needed, that they were caught together in this web of compromise. A smell of orange cheese in her throat.
Ana lay in bed with the lights out, trying to still her head, which seemed to keep pushing away from her, as if trying to unscrew itself. The fever came quick and angry, leaving her drenched and shaking under the duvet.
James came in with aspirin in one hand and a tall glass of iced juice in the other.
“Turn out the light,” she said, but there was no light on.
Finn stood in the frame of the door, staring. James wondered if he could yet recognize other people’s pain. His friends at daycare broke skin and bled and it interested him. He informed James of these accidents, the stickiness, the hidden possibility that a body could just leak itself dry.
James tried to imagine what played over in Finn’s head from the twisted wreck of the car: the empty face of his father, with a small scar by his lower lip. Finn had woken up screaming only that one time. His nights were deep and long. He was not yet haunted, James thought, but it would come.
Ana moaned slightly in the dark and James straightened the duvet at her shoulders. He looked over to see Finn reaching out a hand in front of him, as if trying to touch something. His hand extended into space made James think of Sarah, reaching for the boy as he toddled across the room, the two of them laughing, and Finn reaching her to place his own small palm between his mother’s clapping hands, which would still and hold him.
James took Finn gently by the shoulder, moving him out of the doorway, shutting the door behind them. Finn resisted.
“Ana,” he said. “Want Ana.” He slipped behind James, knocked on the door, loudly.
“Finn, she needs to sleep. She’s sick,” said James.
Finn banged on the door. “Ana! Ana! Come play!”
James picked him up, and he went soft in his arms, put his fingers in his mouth and began sucking.
James carried Finn downstairs and settled him on the couch. He sat beside him, stroking Finn’s forehead, the boy’s furrowed brow.
James was used to being a study in contrast to Ana: He didn’t mind mess, could sleep in knotted bed sheets until Ana, annoyed at the lumps, roused him in the dark, smoothing and tucking. But he was struck now by the sensation that he had turned into his wife, and knots were digging into his skin. Marcus. His lost job. And upcoming losses were queuing for him, too: Finn, who might be taken back or away, and his wife, who was always leaving, and now had good reason to do so. Soon his mother and father would corrode with illness and then he would be alone, a childless middle-aged man, bald and suspect.
Oh, he missed them all, even Emma, young Emma and that fleeting moment of debauchery that might be his last. In a few years, she would lose her glimmer, and her love of risk, and become a mother to somebody. Getting older was infuriating. He needed the steady footing of his youth, the certainty of opinion, and it was gone. James took a deep, quivering breath.
On this note of self-pity, James turned to the window and saw Chuckles pulling in with his other car, not the SUV but a white van, planks of wood sticking out the back, dangerously untethered. He was taking up two spaces again, leaving a huge gap on either side. His silver SUV was parked up the street.
James placed a throw pillow under Finn’s sleeping head and stood up. He strode toward the door.
Chuckles had not moved from his van. He sat shuffling papers and smoking when James appeared at the window. In his anger, James had failed to put on shoes and stood now on the road in a pair of dark blue cashmere argyle socks. He rapped on the glass with his knuckles. As Chuckles rolled down the window, he seemed to take in James from the top of his head—the thinning hair slightly shining with wax, the ironic beard, the expensive untucked button-down shirt in a grayish pink—and then stopped at his feet. James, too, looked down then at the dumb, dog-snouted, shoeless appendages and thought: Disadvantage.
