Соавторы: Katrina Onstad
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Sarah was like a dimmer switch slowly being turned to maximum, getting brighter every day. But there were ugly moments, too, bursts of anger followed by tears, and collapse. James took over then, cleaning the kitchen and bathing Finn, putting him to bed. But most nights, Sarah tucked him in alone, and James could hear her, singing: “ ‘You are the light in my dark world …’ ” The great mystery of the light song was solved—it turned out to be a song by an obscure eighties cow-punk band that even James had never heard of.
James brought his guitar over from the house and learned the song in a few minutes from the Internet. But Finn was indifferent to James’s performance. It turned out he cared about the singer, not the song.
When she was recovered, James would have to go. He couldn’t imagine returning to the house. Maybe Ana would come back from Montreal and want to live there. She had revealed no plans. The e-mails between them were polite; unadorned information traveling between machines.
“Ready, Freddy,” said James, picking up the bag containing a Mexican blanket and plastic containers of snacks. Finn put his hat on without a fight.
James was anxious to get Finn to the park and catch the good early afternoon light for his filming. The night before, Sarah had invited some former colleagues over for dinner. James had done the cooking so Sarah could rest and be ready. It was a gentle evening (everyone was afraid to be raucous, afraid of Sarah’s new softness), but after Finn went to sleep, James, Sarah, and the two high school teachers drank a glass of wine in the living room, and Sarah told the story of Finn’s birth.
James was determined to take this story back to Finn.
James locked the door behind him, and they headed down the street.
“You lead the way to the park,” said James, and Finn ran ahead. He was three now and had a good sense of direction.
In the distance, James saw a woman clutching a large bouquet of pink flowers. Finn stopped in front of her, and she crouched down, pulling him toward her. James picked up speed, his heart pounding. Since Halloween, he was prepared at any moment for rescue—and then he saw the woman rise. Finn turned and came running back toward him.
“Ana! James! It’s Ana!”
James felt short of breath. She got closer. Her blond hair was longer and her face a little rounder. My Ana, he thought. My wife of a different substance. My vapor wife. But she was really there, watching him. He ran his fingers rapidly across the raised scar on his knuckles.
She stopped, across from him but still far away. “Hi,” she said.
“You’re here,” said James.
“I’m sorry. I should have called. It was spontaneous. I wanted to see Sarah, but I didn’t know—”
“Let’s go to the park now!” said Finn, tugging on James’s sleeve. “Come! James! Come to the park! Ana!”
Ana stared at James. Bats flapped inside her torso.
Ana gestured at Finn, running ahead again. “You’re going out.”
“I promised him. We’re working on this movie and …” James rubbed his face, fumbling in Ana’s presence.
“Should I go to the house? Is Sarah there?” asked Ana.
“She is, but she’s sleeping. She won’t get up for another couple of hours.”
“Oh,” said Ana, looking down at the flowers in her hand. They seemed suddenly ridiculous.
“Do you—you could come to the park with us, and then, you know—come back after …” James had wondered how he would feel at such a meeting, and now he knew: He was famished for her. He didn’t want her to go yet. He needed to show her that he was not the bleeding mess she’d left in November, and that even then, he hadn’t been the mess she’d presumed. He wanted a chance.
Ana smiled. “I’ll come,” she said.
Finn reappeared and chatted as the three walked to the park. He and James had banter: “Tell Ana about the goose at the farm.” “It had a bad foot!” said Finn. “Tell Ana about your favorite color.” “Green!” “What things are green?”
Ana was impressed. He had found his gift. For the first time, she didn’t feel excluded. It wasn’t her failure; it was their victory.
She thought suddenly how in all their time together, there must have been a moment where that other life would have been possible. If they had been able to have a child easily, or accidentally, then maybe the propulsion would have kept them aloft. They would have been like everybody else, never looking down because they wouldn’t have had to. But without either of them noticing, that moment had passed. Motherhood had passed. They got this instead.
Ana felt the sun on her face and heard the sounds of other people’s children, and she didn’t want to mourn anymore.
She stood back, holding the pink flowers and James’s bag as he pushed Finn in the swing. Then his phone rang, and he called to her: “Can you take over?”
“Sure, sure,” she said, putting the bag on a bench.
“Higher, Ana!” cried Finn as Ana pushed him, glancing at James, pacing under the tree with his phone. She startled at the sight of James’s arm in his T-shirt, the twist of muscle and lean forearm. She knew every inch of that arm and felt like she was seeing a part of her own body that had been hidden away under a cast for months.
“It was Doug,” said James, putting his BlackBerry in his pocket, returning to take over. But Finn had found a daycare friend and was immersed in sandcastle building. Ana and James sat on a bench, side by side.
“You look good,” said James.
“So do you. No more beard.” James touched his chin.
“Do I look younger?”
Ana laughed. “Not really. Sorry.”
“Dammit.”
Finn was placing twigs in the castle, making arms or antennae.
“How’s Sarah?”
“She’s a miracle patient. The brain just kicked in. Where the connections were damaged from the accident, her brain made new connections. No one really knows why.”
Ana nodded. “I do.”
“Why?” asked James.
“She needed to get back to Finn.”
They watched him frowning while he built, as if everything depended on the height of this castle. He worked so earnestly that Ana felt like applauding. Maybe he would be an engineer, she thought, like his father.
James looked at her looking at Finn. She was smiling at first, and then she tilted her head, and it was as if she was looking through Finn, and through all the children in the playground, and through the parents, too, spectral along the park’s edges. She was looking ahead of them all, into old age and after, as if she had set her eyes on what was waiting there and made peace with it. And James wanted to be with her while she went, weakening and old, to where they would all end up, the parents and the children. He wanted her, wanted her under his fingernails, in his mouth.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
“I am, too. James, I—”
“Watch!” Finn shouted. He lifted his fists and pounded his castle, over and over. Then he looked at them and grinned.
“We had a marriage,” said Ana, eyes on Finn.
James said: “I know.”
“Don’t forget. It wasn’t just accumulation. It was sacred.”
James nodded vigorously. “I know.”
“I miss that the most,” she said, moving her foot back and forth in a straight line in the grass. “That’s what it is to be married: You offer up your life, and the other person takes it. I miss that offering.”
James sat very still. “I miss it, too.”
Their bodies leaned toward touching.
Then there was Finn, jumping in front of them. “Up! Up! Let’s make a movie!”
Ana and James stood, following Finn to his favorite tree. When they got there, James laid out the Mexican blanket.
“Do you want to stay for this?” he asked Ana, breathing in, waiting for the answer.
Finally, she nodded. “If you don’t mind.”
“Of course not,” said James.
He set up the camera on a tripod. Finn knew what to do, lying down on the blanket, perfectly framed by the camera. Then James lay down next to him, and Finn put his head on James’s chest.
“Ana, you come, too,” said Finn.
Ana stood to the side, next to the camera, another eye on the scene.
“No, no. You do your thing. I’ll just watch for today.” She sat down on the grass.
Finn pointed at birds in the sky, singing nonsense.
“Ana, can you press Record?” asked James. Ana did so, then sat down out of the frame, crossing her legs.
James could see himself and Finn in the camera’s display square, against the red blanket.
“Story time,” said Finn.
“Are you ready for it? This one’s about you,” said James.
“Meeeee!” squealed Finn. James wanted Finn to know that he was keeping the information that Finn would require. And for this, at least, Ana might be proud of him.
He began: “You took so long to come out that your mother nearly went mad. In the fifteenth hour, she was on her hands and knees, and she kept saying: ‘Tell me what to do. Tell me what to do.’ And your dad laughed about that later because, you know, she never wanted anyone to tell her anything.
“ ‘I’m done,’ she kept saying. ‘I can’t do it.’ She was thinking: ‘Women do this? My mother did this? My grandmother? It’s impossible that women should have to do this!’ ”
Finn curled closer to James, his head rising and falling with James’s breathing.
“She turned onto her back, and the midwife put the long plastic arm of a machine on her belly. She was ten basketballs huge, because you were in there. I knew her during this time, and this part is definitely true: She couldn’t even see over the top of her belly to her feet. And the machine beeped, and the midwife said, in this really strange voice: ‘Now, Sarah. Now we have to push. There’s something wrong with the baby’s heartbeat.’ Your mom had been feeling so weak, so tired, but she heard that sentence and everything changed. There was just a second then where she glanced out the window, and you guys were so high up in the hospital, she could see the towers of the city, blinking in the darkness, all lit up like it was any other night. And she thought: ‘Okay now. Okay.’ ”
Ana watched them, Finn protected by James’s arm.
She could remember all of it, the great love they had once. It streamed past her, the limbs and the warm pockets of it, even the brutality, the smell of it. She could see it all, from every angle, like she was turning over an artifact in her hand. She did not know yet if something new was growing in its place, if the stone was going to warm and reshape itself. She closed her eyes, tried to see the earth giving way, but she saw only whiteness, so well cultivated, so pointless. She opened her eyes.
Finn looked up at James, telling his story.
“And she screamed, and she pushed. She screamed like she wanted to wake the city. And your dad said that no human had ever screamed like that before. It made his ears ache, he said. It shattered windows. People cowered and hid, and other people came out of their houses, onto their porches and sidewalks, trying to make sense of what was happening. But it worked. You pushed yourself out of her body. She called you, and you came to her sound.”
Acknowledgments
The epigraph is from the poem “Filling Station” by Elizabeth Bishop, in The Complete Poems, 1927–1929, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The snatches of lyrics about rockin’ leprechauns are slightly misquoted by James from Jonathan Richman’s “Rockin’ Rockin’ Leprechauns” (from Rock ‘n’ Roll with the Modern Lovers, 1977); the phrase “Dance me to the end of love” is from Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love” (from Various Positions, 1984). The line “A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare” is from Frederick Seidel’s poem “Climbing Everest” (2006). The book from which James reads the lines “The world can only change from within” and “When you are present in this moment, you break the continuity of your story, of past and future” is Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now (1999). And Marvin Etzioni generously agreed to allow us to quote some lyrics from Finn’s beloved song “You Are the Light” (1985).
I am indebted to my gifted U.S. editor Emily Griffin, for her patience and needle-in-the-haystack attention to detail. I am very lucky that the first draft of this book was shaped by Lara Hinchberger at McClelland and Stewart (a special thanks for lending Ana some most personal details about plastic flowers and loss). I’m especially grateful to Jackie Kaiser, who is part agent, part editor, all kindness.
I want to sincerely thank the Canada Council for the Arts for giving me the time to sit in a room of my own.
I wrote much of this book trying not to stare out the window at the Carso that surrounds the United World College of the Adriatic in Duino, Italy. Thanks to the people we met in this otherworldly place, especially Annemarie Oomes and Filippo Scalandi.
Thanks to Maryam Sanati, Stephanie Hodnett, Kate Robson, and Andrea Curtis for editorial guidance and emotional endurance. True friend Celia Moore put me in touch with Dr. Asrar Rashid, who provided medical insight. Alisa Apostle, Alison McLean, and Mercedeh Sanati all submitted to my brain picking on law and finance when they had much better things to do.
Writing is a family pastime, whether the rest of the family likes it or not. My parents, Gary and Cindy Onstad, have always been supportive, but they also understand that a writer’s favorite phrase is: “We’ll take the kids.” Thank you both.
Those particular kids, Jude and Mimi, are the source of this story and all that’s meaningful. Thank you for your patience with the closed door.
And I thank my husband, Julian Bauld, who gave me the title, and the reason, and lives closer to art than anyone I know.
KATRINA ONSTAD’s first novel, How Happy to Be, was published to great acclaim. Her journalism has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, as well as in The Guardian and Elle. She is a Canadian National Magazine Award winner, and has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and an American National Magazine Award. She is a culture columnist for the Globe and Mail and lives in Toronto with her family.
Visit her at www.katrinaonstad.com.
