Соавторы: Katrina Onstad
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 17 страниц)
“I don’t? What do I get to say, then?” Ana turned from the window and locked James’s eyes. “How about: Who are you sleeping with? Or who did you fuck? Was it in the bathroom at the club, like last time? Was it that classy? Or is it something real? Is it love, James? Are you in love with Ruth the Temp?” The word “love” was twisted and wretched.
Then she turned back to the window.
“Never mind, actually.” Ana continued, in the same blank voice: “I’m not sure what I’m looking at. I recognize this house. I think I do.”
“Ana …” said James. “Ana, it was nothing. And it wasn’t Ruth. This girl—this woman I used to work with—not even sex, I swear—”
She waved her hand. “I don’t want to know,” she said.
James stammered, “What do you want me to say?”
“You never asked me what I wanted. We just kept moving somehow. We were grabbing at things as we moved along, and it seemed like the right moment, so we grabbed at a baby. But what if I never wanted that?”
“Don’t conflate this. You’re angry—”
“Yes, I’m angry,” said Ana. A blackness rustled in the yard.
“You did want a baby, you did. We both wanted it—”
“No,” said Ana. “I was relieved. I was so relieved. I went up to Lake Superior and I stayed in that hotel—”
“When you lost the baby—”
“But it didn’t feel like a loss. It felt like a reprieve.”
James shook his head. “Don’t say it—”
Ana continued: “And a woman—if you’re a woman—you can’t say that out loud. Did you know that? You cannot say it—” Ana began to weep. Her body rippled, her face went liquid. James stared at her. He had not seen her cry in years. “Because it makes you monstrous. To not want to be a mother is a monstrous thing for a woman. It’s grotesque.”
“Don’t cry, Ana, please,” said James. He leaned across the table toward her, reaching for her hands. She kept them at her sides, hidden.
“Being with you was good for me because it was like being alone. You—you were your own planet. I could just watch you from down here. But now—you’re something different. You’re so small now,” said Ana.
James bent his head. He knew this was true; something had broken off from him, some potency that they had both pretended was not required. But what it had been replaced with was better, he thought, what it was replaced with was Finn. He, James, had in him the possibility of something hallowed.
And then—the alley—the girl—
He expected the explanation to come up in him, to tumble from his lips, but there was nothing. He struggled: “I’m not good at being old, Ana. I don’t feel old, but I’m old, and I hate it,” said James. “I don’t know why I do the things I do. Nothing is wrong in my life. Nothing is wrong. We have everything. We even have a kid now.”
Ana shook her head. “You have a kid. You’re the father,” she said, rising to her feet.
He grabbed for her, knocking the glass of wine. It fell from the table, shattering on the tile.
“I wanted it. Ana, I wanted to be a father. I need it—”
“What do you think it’s giving you, James? Wisdom? It doesn’t change who you are.”
“It does, Ana.”
Ana shook her wrist free of James’s hand. “It was a great gift they gave us, really, these people we didn’t really know. The ultimate audition.”
She began pacing the room. She was still wearing her work clothes, and her black stockings made no sound as she moved back and forth, never glancing at him. She stepped through the wine, leaving footprints.
“Watch the glass,” said James.
The wine spread across the floor, and suddenly, as if emerging from the dark puddle, James saw a future without Ana in it. He could call Doug about a job. He could sacrifice something. For the first time, he could see himself with Finn, two guys in a crowded apartment. Elsewhere.
It was ruthless in this way, the shift. It started only with this image, this ability to see a life even if it did not exist, like one of Finn’s picture books, like a segment for his TV show. It gathered momentum.
“Do you love me?” asked Ana.
She could not mean this, thought James, she could not be serious that, in the end, he had to choose. When he considered the question, he knew the answer, he knew it by its weight, the scales of history upon it. The entire past of them, the creation of them, the idea of them, bore down upon him. But he could not answer.
Ana had her own picture in her head: the whiteness of a bed.
“You love him more,” she said. James crumpled against the wall and slid to the floor, his feet out in front of him. His head slumped. Now he was crying, and Ana remembered: James is a crier. Ana knew that this was the kind of useless detail she would carry with her forever, long after they ended.
“It’s okay,” said Ana. “I don’t know if I love you anymore, either.”
James shook his head. “I hadn’t answered yet,” he said.
“Oh, James,” said Ana. “You did. You answer it all the time. And it’s okay. We’re not enough. It’s too weak, this life we made. It can’t carry what we’re asking it to carry.” She crouched, ran her fingers over his slumped head: “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
“Ana …”
She began to pick up the broken glass. She made a stack of it on the counter. She took a piece of newspaper from the recycling bin and wrapped the glass in it.
“You are so careful,” he said.
She nodded, her hand on the newspaper, pressing down, feeling a slow searing pain in her palm.
As she did this, James came behind her with a cloth and began wiping up the wine, all of Ana’s dark footprints vanishing.
By the time Ann Silvan arrived, Ana had showered. They sat on the couch, side by side, Ana’s hair dripping down her neck, onto the collar of her sweatshirt. They answered more questions. Ann smelled of dinner. She apologized for not coming faster; her own daughter was ill from Halloween candy. Her demeanor had changed. She was warmer, less wary. Something had been proven in the handling of the averted disaster. They were publicly competent at last, but privately ruined.
James took her upstairs to look in on Finn. Ann Silvan went to the edge of the bed and leaned over his gently sleeping form. She didn’t wake him. She said she would return in the morning. She told them the police were not concerned, that everything was routine. She told them not to worry.
Ana took almost nothing from the house. A large suitcase stood in front of James’s desk, where their printer sat. James leaned in the doorway as she ran off her ticket.
Down the hall, Finn napped.
“What about your books?”
“Don’t need them.”
It was the first time she had entered the house in a week, but she’d been in his dreams so much lately that her actual presence made James feel like he was asleep. He was exhausted; sleep came in quick furious bursts, electric with Ana, and then he’d wake and stay that way until the sun came up, looking at his empty room, his empty house.
She had been living in a downtown suite that the firm owned and working until one or two in the morning and then collapsing into bed. Only when James asked her about the hotel did she realize she couldn’t describe a single physical detail of where she’d been sleeping. Maybe wallpaper?
And now she was going to live in another hotel suite in another city.
“You’ll need your winter jacket,” said James.
“I shipped it.”
Seeing him made her angrier than she had expected. She didn’t flick aside her anger, either, but kept it close, her eyes down, pushing past him with her suitcase jostling his body.
“I’ll take it,” said James.
“Don’t,” she said. They collided a little, disentangled, and made it downstairs with Ana carrying the bag.
“Ana …” said James.
He shadowed her as she did one final sweep of the house, picking up a few letters and a reusable coffee mug. She considered the mug, then put it back down on the edge of a bookshelf where it had left a brown ring. She called a taxi on her cell phone, giving the address with the prickly awareness that she might never say it again.
In the living room, James moved in front of her. “Ana, I’m sorry. I said this in my e-mail: It was nothing, a drunken grope—I was going to tell you—I was even writing it that day.…”
Finally, she looked at him, scanning his face angrily. James was relieved to have her eyes; it seemed like progress somehow. “So you get to shed your story and I get to carry around forever a picture of my husband getting blown by a twenty-year-old or whatever it was?” said Ana. “I don’t want your confession. That’s your burden.”
Ana walked past him, kicking at the mess on the floor, the toys and dirty clothes. The entire house smelled like blackened banana. She opened the door. Leaves spun on the pathway outside.
James suddenly moved in front of her, slamming the door.
“Let me go,” said Ana.
“Ana, I’ve—been thinking.…” He moved to grab her arms, then thought better of it and clasped his hands together. “Here’s the thing: We don’t have to live here, right? We could move to one of those small towns outside the city, with a big yard. People are doing that now. We could scale down. Maybe I could do something totally different, get into my music—you can take the train into the city. I’ll look after Finn—just simplify, right? Just get back to the land—”
“We were never on the land, James.” Ana tried to get past him.
“But we could try it. We could leave and really try being a family—”
Ana threw her hands in front of her face and yelled: “I don’t want it! I don’t want to be raising everybody!” Her jaw clenched. “What if I had gotten pregnant? I’d be here, at home, glued to a baby, and where would you be? Off with some intern?”
“I would never do that to you.”
“But you did it.” She wiped her nose with her sleeve. “For one night, you did what you wanted. You’re always the one who gets to be free.”
“Okay then, let’s go back. Let’s go backward. We’ll be like we were before, but with Finn—”
“And have more brunches? And go on more holidays? And all the time, you’ll be thinking: My empty wife. My poor empty wife. The one thing you need, the one thing that will make you grow up, I can’t give you. Do you forget that? Do you forget that I don’t make babies?”
“Neither do I! I can’t make babies either, you fucking idiot!” James yelled. Ana went for the door, opening it. Again, James slammed it shut, blocking it with his body.
“Don’t go—I’m sorry—don’t go—”
“Let me go.”
“Don’t go—” Ana opened the door, and James slammed it again, louder. Ana breathed heavily.
“Ana, look at me.” She wouldn’t, her eyes fixed on floating space. “Don’t leave. You’re always leaving—”
The sound of fist on wood was a dull whack that left no mark, but James pulled his hand away and swore. Shreds of skin flapped from his knuckles, tiny white sheets. Blood seeped onto his wrist. They both looked down at the useless hand.
“What are you doing? What are you doing?” Tears were streaming down Ana’s face. “I can’t help you.”
She opened the door at last, and he followed her, the blood from his hand seeping down his arm now. “Ana!”
The taxi idled outside.
Ana managed to carry the suitcase, and the driver met her halfway up the walk, grabbing one of them, glancing at James with suspicion.
At the same time, Ana and James heard it: Finn crying, distantly, through the open door.
“Ana—” said James, straightening, clutching his ragged fist.
“Go get him,” she said, and she meant it.
But James stood on the walk as the driver loaded her bags, and Ana climbed in. He stayed there as she shut her door, and the car pulled away. Only when he couldn’t see it anymore did he turn and stagger back to the house and the boy waiting for him.
December
ANA HADN’T HAD much to unpack. The movers had brought a few more suitcases and boxes. She had taken a junior suite, not because it was cheaper, but because she imagined something sparser and more monastic than the Grand Suite option. Instead, rooms were opulent in ambition, but cheap in materials, with yellow throw cushions in the tones of a fast-food restaurant occupying all the extra space on the couch and the wing chair. A miniature Christmas tree sat in a bucket next to the kitchen table.
On a Saturday afternoon a month after her arrival, Ana sat on the edge of the couch, looking at the tree, decorated in gold balls. She felt tired and light, but not sad.
She had done it in such a way as to never have to see them. She had left the car. Everything else could be dealt with later, in six months, when she would decide whether or not to return. She didn’t miss any of her things. She felt that she was readying for something and wondered if this was how James had felt all those years, waiting for their baby—the great, exhilarated anticipation.
She put on her scarf and jacket, took her bag. The door was hollow and caught on the rug behind her.
“Good night, madame,” said the doorman as she passed through the lobby.
“Bonne soirée,” she replied.
Ana went to the gym and ran farther than usual on the treadmill. Her body was getting stronger. She had put on a little weight, and with it came a sensation of being rooted, heavier in her feet. She liked the new curve of her hips.
After her workout, Ana sat in the steam room, something she had only started to do in Montreal. There was one woman in the room with her, concealed by puffs of steam. At one point, she shifted to reveal a long, vertical scar along her chest plate, and then vanished in the heat again.
After showering, Ana applied her makeup carefully. Half the guests would be francophone, and though her French was rusty, it was passable, and she had found herself enjoying speaking it, even when she struggled for the right word. She felt as though she were leaving everything, even her tongue.
The party turned out to be dull. By dessert, Ana had stopped listening to the conversations around her, gazing instead out the large paned windows at the frosted streetlamps, wondering why there was no music playing.
A man in an elegant suit switched seats with a colleague in order to sit next to her. He spoke English and asked her the same questions she was always asked: What did she think of the city? Was she cold? Was she following the government corruption scandal? His name was Richard, and he had a practiced intensity, locking her gaze. As he filled her glass, Ana assessed the gray hair, the weathered but moisturized face and tidy nails. He was a type. At the end of the evening, she gave him her number when he asked for it.
The first date, Richard picked her up in his car. He took her to dinner at a restaurant in Outremont, ordering in his perfect French, complimenting Ana on her own efforts. Afterward, she went back to his apartment in Old Montreal, a prewar loft now walled with glass, with views out to the skyline.
The sex was another foreign experience. She hadn’t slept with that many people, really. She was suddenly acutely aware of how her body had changed; only James knew what she really looked like, who she had been when she had been her physical best. As Richard pulled down her tights, Ana imagined the pale blue veins in her legs. He kissed her neck and shoulders, and she saw the skin on her elbows thinning, puckered. But Richard murmured worship about her body: “You’re gorgeous,” he said, gripping and smoothing, and she let herself fall into him. He was forceful, too, and the staged roughness turned her on. She came with stuttered breath, but then he glanced at her with a triumphant gaze that made her look away.
Ana went through the courtship with the fascination of an archaeologist at a dig. This was here, all this time, and I didn’t know! She thought of him as her first adult boyfriend.
Richard sent flowers and took her to the opera, where the heels pinching her feet didn’t stop her from luxuriating in the music. He would vanish for days into his work, and that was fine. She could do the same, and he said nothing. Once, he went away to Florida for a weekend of golf with old friends. There was no talk of fidelity or future. A fifty-three-year-old man without any children spoke to long-ago decisions, not to be reopened. He never asked her why she had no children, and at first, this silence was emancipating.
And there was much silence between them, which Ana had thought she needed.
One night, Richard cooked her dinner, and they had sex, furiously, on his bed. It was only ten o’clock, but Richard lay sleeping, shirtless with a chest of gray hair, arms like a starfish. He slept in this odd way, totally untroubled. She felt a pull of longing for James, an urge to share her strange new reality with him. She knew James would find Richard outrageous; corporate and trivial. This comforted Ana somehow, for part of her agreed.
She had awoken that morning feeling that she had left a piece of herself somewhere, the way she imagined a heroin addict might feel joining the sober and straight life. This, she realized now, was how it felt to be bound to James. Their past, known only to them, could rear itself anywhere, even here, in the bedroom of another man.
Ana pulled on her underpants and went to the window. Below, on the cobblestone streets, snow lay shining, inviting in the streetlamps. She put on her skirt and her boots, washed her face in the bathroom. In a week, she would see her mother for Christmas. She had booked a hotel. She wouldn’t call James, not yet.
She left Richard sleeping.
The cold was still shocking to her. It had begun to snow, large, fat flakes that melted on Ana’s face.
She walked quickly, crunching in her boots past Christmas lights in trees. Illuminated wreaths hung from the streetlamps on Sherbrooke.
She heard the choir before she reached the church, which was modest, its stained glass clouded with dirt. They were having a rehearsal, starting and stopping, with laughter in between. Ana stood and listened until the singers fell into one another and the music rose, draping her body.
She stood for a long time in the snow that made equal the sidewalks and the shrubs, shrouding the skyscrapers. She listened to the strangers’ voices calling glory, glory through the trees of the city where she now lived.
* * *
Finn had a candy cane in one hand. A crowd of people waited outside Sarah’s door. Suspense bounced back and forth between all of them.
Finn stood on James’s feet, clutching James’s pant leg with his free hand, looking up at him.
“Let’s dance!” said Finn.
“Shh,” said James, reaching down to rub Finn’s head.
The young doctor with her hair tightly pulled back was speaking. The content of her speech mattered less than the way she was saying it, which was hot and breathless. She had not learned to mask that yet. She was thrilled.
“MRI indicates complete brain function,” she said.
“Complete?” asked James.
“Extensive therapy will be required. Hers is a serious brain injury, but she’s extraordinarily lucky.” James tried not to roll his eyes at the word “lucky.”
“James! Dance!” said Finn, hopping up and down on James’s feet. James put Finn’s candy cane in his coat pocket so they could hold hands.
“Has he been in to see her yet?” asked the doctor.
James shook his head. “We were waiting. I was waiting to talk to you guys.…”
With both of Finn’s feet on his, and their hands clasped, James began to waltz Finn around the corridor, singing: “Dance me to the end of love. La la, la la, la la …” Finn laughed. The doctors watched and waited. Finally, the routine was done, and they went inside.
Sarah looked as she had looked for the past fifteen weeks, but her eyes were open. It startled James, as though the glass eyeballs of an animal in a museum diorama had moistened. A patch of white gauze on her neck covered the hole where the tube had been. She had been liberated from the machines and brought back to a private room, which was suddenly quiet. She didn’t move her head to look at anyone in the crowd that had gathered.
His hand in James’s, Finn walked slowly toward his mother. A doctor moved a chair to the bed’s edge. Halfway there, Finn stopped, looking up at James with an expression of great concern.
“It’s okay, Finny,” he said. “She’s sick, but she’s going to get better. Do you want to say hello?”
“Yes,” he said.
James lifted him and put him on the stool. He looked down at Sarah. The marks of the stitches of her face had faded to pale shadows. Her hair was covered with a kerchief, pink and black, a gesture for Finn, James noted to himself; someone tried to cover her trauma so Finn wouldn’t be frightened.
Finn was silent, staring down.
“Say something, Finny,” said James quietly.
After a long pause, in his small voice, Finn said: “Mommy, hello.”
Sarah remained unmoving.
“Lean right over her,” instructed the doctor.
James tried to show the boy how to lean over the bar’s edge, and in helping him, James was close to Sarah, too, with Finn at her face and James at her torso, when the flicker happened. Sarah turned her head slightly, and the mother and son saw each other. It was palpable, this act of seeing. The moment of recognition consumed the room like a back draft of fire bursting through a doorway.
She opened her mouth, and the voice was rough and wooden: “Hi, love,” she said.
“Mommy,” said Finn, and he dropped his head onto her chest. Sarah’s eyes filled with tears.
James began laughing. Even as he pulled back and leaned against the wall, watching the two of them hold on to each other in disbelief, he could not stop laughing.
Late Spring
ANA STOOD BY the open door of Charlie’s office. She could see him, bent over his computer, his dress shirt untucked. She knocked lightly.
Charlie looked up and, at the moment of recognition, beamed.
“Ana,” he said. They went toward each other, extending hands, then fell into an awkward hug. Ana let herself be enfolded, breathing in the scent of Charlie’s neck.
“How are you?” she asked, pulling back. They stood close together in the small room.
“I’m okay.” He smiled. “Are you back for good?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“James has been in to see Lise a few times,” said Charlie. In their e-mail exchanges, Ana had given no details about why she had left. But it was clear that Charlie knew. She realized he was telling her about James’s visits for a reason; he was counseling her like a chaplain, nudging her toward her husband. “He brought Finn.”
Ana raised her eyebrows. “I didn’t know that.”
Looking at Charlie, hands in his pockets, grinning and blushing before her, Ana realized that whatever live current had been between them was snuffed out now. Ana saw Charlie’s youth, which had seemed at that last meeting in the bedroom such a thrilling unknown, as a liability. Her age was the same. The simple fact of time apart had broken their pull. He was the smart young man taking care of her mother, ushering her through these last years, to the upcoming. That was all, and comforting in itself. She was another daughter of a patient, shackled by duty and love.
“How is she?” Ana asked, but the answer didn’t really matter. It was always the same: a little worse.
Ana asked after Charlie’s lethargic roommate and was pleased to hear he’d found work and had been separated at last from his couch. Charlie was going home soon, he said, to be with his parents for a week, out west. Ana described Montreal, the mountain in the middle of it, and the spring changing the trees.
She hugged him again quickly and turned to leave. She was almost out the door when he said her name.
Charlie went to his desk and pulled a CD from a drawer.
“I’ve been hanging on to this for you. It has the original of that song you liked, from that night at the bar.” Ana looked at the cover: Lone Justice. Lots of eyeliner on a pretty face framed by tendrils of blond hair.
“I got it used. No one’s really buying CDs anymore. You can get anything,” said Charlie. “It’s the last song.”
“Thank you. That’s very sweet,” said Ana, slipping the disc in her purse. She was grateful for the reminder of that beautiful song, and that evening she had needed so much, during the autumn of Finn.
In her room, Lise sat in a chair. Someone had placed plastic flowers on the dresser, of no determinate type, which had accumulated a thin layer of dust. Ana wiped the leaves with a Kleenex.
Lise’s recognition seemed to be moving in and out today, like a kaleidoscope brought to full length, then collapsed, then back again, over and over. “How is James?” said Lise, pushing her hair (slightly dirty, Ana observed) behind her ears.
“He’s all right,” said Ana, sitting on the edge of the bed. “We’re not together right now.”
Lise nodded. Ana tried to interpret the nod: Maybe James had told her mother of their breakup, or perhaps she was remembering Ana’s explanation in the fall, or at Christmas. She wondered what James’s version of events would sound like, but her mother would never be able to recount that conversation to her, if it had happened at all.
“How’s your father? What’s his name?”
Ana laughed. “Mom, I haven’t heard from him in years.”
“Yes, I know. But what’s his name?”
“Conrad.”
“Yes, Conrad,” said her mother. “Conrad.” A wide look of pleasure came over Lise’s face, and she grinned. “Oh, Ana. We were at the beach. It was a very white beach, so hot that when I came out of the water, I couldn’t walk on the sand because it burned my feet.” Ana didn’t know where her mother was in this memory. Perhaps somewhere in Greece or Italy, years before Ana was born, when her parents were skimming the globe together.
“Did Dad carry you across the sand?”
Lise laughed. “Oh, no. I waited in the shallow part of the sea until the sun set. We both did. We sat down on our bums in the water and waited for the sand to cool.”
Ana squeezed her mother’s hand. Lise looked at her, and Ana could see the memory vanishing.
“I’m having a good day,” said Lise.
“Yes, I think you are.”
“Who are you?” The question would never cease to take away Ana’s breath.
“I’m your daughter. I’m Ana. You’re my mother.”
“I know that,” said Lise, snappishly. Then she sighed: “But not a very good mother.”
“You did the best you could.”
Lise looked over Ana’s head, toward the window, which was open, letting a warm breeze move across them both.
“I loved Conrad,” said Lise.
She looked back at Ana. “Oh my,” she said, as if startled by what she saw. Ana knew that she was always being seen anew by her mother, which might have been liberating, but somehow felt exactly the opposite.
Lise searched her daughter’s face and said, finally: “What are you so afraid of?”
Ana didn’t know how much meaning to ascribe to this question and suppressed the sensation that she was being had, searching for profundity where there was none. Any revelations were just the brain seizing and releasing, and not her mother at all. She tried to believe this.
“Do I seem afraid, Mom?”
“I loved being your mother,” said Lise. Ana nodded, bracing herself.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Lise, loosening her grip on her daughter’s hand. “Don’t be so afraid.”
James finished with the sunscreen and stood back to admire his handiwork. It was one of the first days hot enough to require lotion. James was now learning about Finn in spring, and what he needed: hats and sunscreen, water bottles and sandals.
Finn smiled up at him. James reached out and rubbed a white splotch from the boy’s nose.
“Ready, Freddy,” said Finn.
Sarah was sleeping upstairs in her bedroom. The day she came home from the hospital, six weeks earlier, James sat in the back of the medical van with her while Mike and Jennifer looked after Finn. Under the rim of her baseball hat, Sarah frowned at the fuss, but when they hit a speed bump and her wheelchair shifted lightly in its locks on the floor, she looked terrified. James moved into the house that day, without any discussion.
He had a few things in the spare room. During the day, he took Sarah to her appointments and Finn to daycare. Then he met with Doug at his offices, polishing a script for a new documentary about the politics of traffic.
The cat, returned from the house next door, lay on the pillow beside him while he slept. James was constantly rubbing fur from his mouth. When Finn and Sarah were asleep, James stayed up late with his laptop and the cat, fiddling with footage of Finn on the new editing software he’d bought.
His own house, his house with Ana, sat empty several blocks away. He was glad not to be there. For the first weeks that Ana was gone, friends had come by, not knowing what to say about the split. James fielded many calls, and a lasagna. People were sympathetic, but no one really knew what he had lost. He was now carrying sadness, the man who had never tasted of it, whose parents were alive, whose mother had survived carnage and spared him its description, refusing to burden him with even a single image. He knew now why she would die with that war inside her. He knew what it was to pretend anything for a child.
