Соавторы: Katrina Onstad
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When James was with Finn, he felt useful again, which he hadn’t in the months since he’d been fired. He got a different response from people when he entered a store or rode the streetcar with Finn than he did when he was alone and suspiciously present during the city’s working hours. But with Finn, the world was a gigantic welcome mat. People hummed a low, inviting note that only parents could hear, that James had never known existed. It reminded him of when he would walk with his black friend, Kyle, and Kyle would exchange a little nod with every other black person who went by. James had considered researching this phenomenon for the show, but when he took a pretty black intern to lunch to covertly test his theory, she just looked straight ahead and never glanced at anyone.
“Finny, do you want to get a croissant?” asked James.
“Oh yes please I do!” cried Finn, and he began to run toward Queen Street, a two-and-a-half-year-old who knew the way to the city’s best croissants. James wondered if he could work that into his unwritten novel.
While they sat on the bench eating croissants, James asked Finn questions.
“What did you do at daycare yesterday?”
“Panda suit.”
“How’s it going with the panda suit, then?”
“I like croissant.” James pulled out his ears and made a silly face at Finn, and Finn laughed and laughed, little pieces of croissant stuck to his chin, a strange bearded panda.
Marcus was waiting on the porch when they arrived back at Finn’s house. His feet rested on a broken tricycle, and his laptop was open on his knees. His briefcase balanced on a scabby paint tin.
“There he is,” he shouted. Finn dropped James’s hand and ran up the walk toward his father. Finn curled into Marcus’s body. Marcus pushed back the head of the panda suit and kissed the boy’s hair, smiling. James shuffled back and forth, halfway up the walk, feeling found out.
“Thanks for taking him, James,” said Marcus.
“You’re home early,” said James, and the wifeliness of the comment immediately struck him.
“Such a beautiful day. I wanted to take him to the park.”
“Yeah! Park!” said Finn, as if they hadn’t just come from there.
The two men nodded at each other, caught in the silence of a meeting without women.
“Definitely a day for the park,” said James. “I’ve got to get going, so …” He began to back away.
“Do you want to come in? Grab a beer?”
“No, no,” said James, who suddenly remembered where he’d had this feeling of barging in on intimacy before: walking into his old apartment to find his roommates clothed but disheveled in the kitchen, gazing awkwardly at each other, mouths swollen. “I’ve got—stuff—I should—but thanks. See you soon, Finny, okay?”
“Bye, James!”
“Hey, man,” said Marcus, rising with Finn still barnacled to his chest. “Really: Thanks for helping out. It’s hard for Sarah, being home all the time. You’re saving her sanity.”
Those were the last words James had heard him say.
Finally, a moan swelled from behind a nearby door. Mrs. Bailey rose, opened the door, and shut it immediately behind her. Ann Silvan talked on while James stared at the closed door. This was the moment, the shedding of all that came before, and he was alert to it, waiting.
When the door opened, Finn walked out slowly, one arm around Mrs. Bailey’s wide leg.
Ana watched as he let go and ran immediately to James. She saw Ann Silvan writing again, probably describing how Finn had bypassed her. She shouldn’t be hurt. She believed that at some point, she couldn’t recall when, she and Finn had agreed to shared indifference. Sarah always had to prod him into acknowledging her: “Say hi to Ana, Finny.” And politely, in that cartoon voice: “Hi, Ana.”
James murmured: “How are you, Finny? How’s it going?”
“Good.” He looked around the room, at all the women and James.
Ann Silvan said: “The most important thing is structure, routine. Try not to disrupt his life too much.”
“Should we take him to visit”—Ana stopped, leaned in—“the hospital? Does he know about the hospital?”
“He knows his mommy is very sick, and his daddy isn’t coming back.”
James frowned. “You guys told him that? You don’t think that might have been better coming from someone who knows him?” he said. He was slumped in the chair. Ana noticed that he was often draped across furniture lately, boneless and large.
Finn had gravitated toward the books and sat with his legs like a swami, opening and closing a pop-up book. Up rose the bus; down. Up, down.
Ann Silvan’s face tightened. “He had questions. We’re trained in these matters.” She reached into her briefcase and handed Ana a sheaf of photocopies.
“There’s a wait list for counseling, but Finn’s on it,” she said. “You should get a call in four to six months.”
“Efficient,” muttered James.
Ana skimmed the pages: Toddler can sense when a significant person is missing … Presence of new people … No understanding of death … Absorbs emotions of others around her/him … May show signs of irritability … May exhibit changes in eating, crying, and in bowel and bladder movements …
James, looking over her shoulder, whispered in Ana’s ear: “That could be a description of me.” She didn’t smile, caught on the last line: Bowel movements. Ana wondered where they would put all the used diapers, the wads of wipes, if they would need to buy one of those pneumatic tube garbage cans. One time at Sarah’s there had been a perfect ball of a dirty diaper in the center of the living room for the entire duration of Ana’s visit, distracting her, crying out for disposal. Finally, when Sarah left the room for a moment, Ana grabbed it. She had stuffed the slick mass in the kitchen garbage, then scrubbed her hands at the sink like a surgeon.
“We need to stop at the store,” said Ana, suddenly, to no one.
James was putting shiny black running shoes on Finn’s feet. They looked new and cheap. Finn opened and closed the bus pop-up book, happy to let James Velcro him in.
“Finn take book home?” he asked. Mrs. Bailey crouched down and enveloped him in her arms, his body sinking into her endless chest. The word “home” rippled through every person in the room.
“Yes, sweetie. You take it.”
She stood, handing Ana a shopping bag. “A few clothes I had lying around.”
James and Ana backed out the door, murmuring thank-yous. Finn slipped between their bodies and ran down the hall quickly. Then, at the far end of the corridor where the light was dimmest, he stopped and looked back. His eyes scanned Ana, then James, taking in their nervous smiles. He looked, for a moment, as if he might back away, but he waited, puzzled and patient, until they caught up to him.
James put the car seat in the back while Finn walked around Ana’s legs, ducking through them from time to time, not laughing but with a great sense of purpose. She looked around uneasily. A group of black teenage boys leaned on the hood of a Honda sedan, talking loudly, laughing. One tossed a basketball back and forth in his hands. A woman in a hijab with a plastic grocery bag lightly banged against Ana and mumbled, eyes on the ground.
Suddenly, Finn sprinted into the parking lot, toward the group of boys. That car is coming too fast, thought Ana. She looked first for James, who was bent over the backseat. James, solve it, she thought, but there was no time to say it before she was running, and as she ran, the tallest of the teenagers looked up, saw two things: a blond boy running toward him, and the car aloft, somehow silent and soundless, Finn too small to be seen by the driver, the exact tiny size to fit between two wheels. The teenager, the stranger, stepped out into the path of the car, put his fingers in his mouth, and whistled like a train. Others were shouting: “Stop! Man! Slow the fuck down! Fucking slow down!” And it did, the car slowed down, the sun too bright to see the eyes of the driver, just as Ana was upon Finn, had him by the shoulders, shaking him.
“Don’t do that! You can’t run away!” She was shouting. Finn looked up at her, his lips vibrating.
“Lady, you okay?” called one of the boys. She had Finn in front of her, her arms straight out, gripping his shoulders.
“Basketball,” he said, and started crying.
“Thank you,” called Ana, nodding to the boys, hoisting Finn to her hip. The boys watched her. One bounced the ball.
“I think it’s in,” announced James, uncoiling from the car, his forehead shining.
He rose to a puzzling image, Ana with the child clinging to her neck, crossing the parking lot, shadowed by a slow-moving silver car.
“What happened?” asked James. Ana shook her head, passed him Finn, who relaxed instantly into James’s arms, ceased his sobbing, shifting into a low purr.
Ana’s hands fluttered as she buckled herself in. In the back, James was cursing, trying to connect straps.
“Do you know how this works, Finny?” he asked. “What do you say? Can you help me?”
Ana gripped the dashboard.
“Can we go, please? Can we just go?”
James clicked the final latch and patted Finn’s head.
They drove out of the parking lot, under the collective glance of the teenage boys, Ana hating herself for her judgment, her fear. She blamed her own parents, their willful ignorance about adulthood, how they chose anything else over it whenever they could. “I love you, kiddo,” said her father once when she returned from the park, eager to show him a dirty dollar bill she’d dug out of the sand. “But man, I wish I could go to India.” And so he had gone, without Ana or her mother, and he’d never really come back.
In the car, James looked at Ana, coiled in silence. He wondered how long her absence would last.
Finn yammered in the backseat, incomprehensible words that James attempted to interpret, responding in a range of theatrical voices. He could make Finn laugh easily, a sound that rang the bells of James’s own pride and moved along the knots of Ana’s spine with a tentacled, creeping dread.
At the north end of the street stood a house that Ana felt certain was a brothel. Its thin, yellow-brown curtains were always shut, even though it was still light at night, and the front yard was dotted with cigarette butts and smeared, discarded plastic bags.
One by one, over their seven years on the street, Ana and James had watched the old Portuguese and Italian couples die off. Sometimes their children moved in, plumbers and contractors who got up before the sun rose, slammed truck doors, and sped off to rebuild houses belonging to people like Ana and James, houses like the rest of the houses on the block. But most of the time, the houses were sold and the Dumpsters arrived. Then came the couples and their children, and the mother eager to meet Ana and James, until the discovery, so soon, that no, they didn’t have kids. Yes, the schools around here were supposed to be good. Yes, it was a big house for two.
The Victorian facades remained, though often painted witty crayon box colors. But inside, walls were coming down.
Ana could see the lack of walls as they drove through the neighborhood. Through large front windows, the uniformity of these renovations revealed itself: the broad loft-like space imposed on the skinny Victorian bones, the pot lights, the marble kitchens at the back looking out onto tiny gardens kept by gardeners. The tacit, unspoken agreement about what was beautiful.
Then there was the brothel, a squatter house than the others, shutterless and plain; the only other detached house on the block besides James and Ana’s.
Last winter, when the city was sunk in snow, she had seen a young woman walk out of the house late at night wearing a gossamer T-shirt and leggings, arms wrapped around her torso, her feet hanging over the heels of her slippers. Her hair was blond and thin, a wild aureole about her head. She had spied Ana, coming home late from work with her attaché case in her hand, the remnants of coffee in a thermos mug in the other. The girl’s eyes were scooped out, set as far back in her head as a blind person’s. She had scowled at Ana and scurried away, out of the streetlight shadow.
This was almost a year ago, in the dead cold, and Ana had seen no other sign of activity from the place.
“We’re home,” said James. “A parking space!”
Ana turned to look at Finn, who was staring out the window, nodding lightly.
James did the unstrapping, and when he pulled Finn out of the back door, holding him to his chest, he saw that Ana had already gone up the street and into the house.
Inside, James placed Finn high up on a barstool at the island in the kitchen. He swung his feet, smiling. Ana’s back was to them both as she flipped the cheese sandwich grilling on the stove.
“Maybe we should sit in the dining room. It seems like he might fall off,” said James.
“But the rug in the—” said Ana, then withdrew. “Whatever you think.”
“Finn stay up!” he cried when James went to lift him. “No! Want to stay here!”
James set him back on the stool, where he wobbled in all directions. Finn picked up the grilled cheese sandwich Ana had cooked for him, taking mouse bites around the edges. Ana and James stood side by side, staring across the island at the boy as if he were a hostage, and any minute the authorities might bang down the door.
Ana began to unpack the groceries. Animal crackers; organic macaroni and cheese; miniature applesauces. All things she had seen at Sarah’s, empty boxes and sticky half-filled containers for Ana to step around. Where should they go? She pulled open drawers and cupboards, finally stuffing the boxes next to the white balsamic, moving aside the olive oil from a trip last spring to Umbria.
“Finish,” said Finn, dropping his sandwich and pulling himself to standing. Within a second, he had his arms high, a diver preparing for his descent. Ana let out a yelping sound, and James rushed toward the boy. Ana breathed quickly; the danger Finn brought with him felt all-encompassing, like the three of them had been submerged together in a water tank of sharks.
She glanced at the hole in the backyard, abandoned again by the workers. The winter before last, old clay pipes had cracked in the depths beneath the back lawn, and the repairs had dragged on and on. Workmen came for a few days and then vanished. Piles of limestone wrapped in cellophane crushed the plants on the perimeter.
“Can you call the guys about the yard?” said Ana.
Finn wandered through the kitchen, opening every cupboard at his eye level.
“What’s in there?” he asked each time. Ana answered: “Oh, I don’t know. Pots …”
“What’s in there?”
“Umm … pipes, from the sink.” She found it difficult to focus on unpacking the groceries with the noise, each question punctuated by a slammed cupboard.
“What’s in there?”
She didn’t answer, macaroni in hand, trying to unravel the question in her head: Should the macaroni and cheese box go by the oil? Really?
“What’s in there?” asked Finn, loudly. “What’s in there?”
Ana turned quickly and snapped: “Just look, Finn. Figure it out.”
“Ana—” said James, but when he saw her face, flashing fury and then trembling into fear, he didn’t say what he’d been about to. “I think it’s probably his bedtime.”
Ana placed the macaroni in the cupboard and closed her eyes. When she opened them, the clock by the garden door said 8:34.
“Is it? Is this when he goes to bed?”
James shrugged. “Aucune idée,” he said.
James walked Finn upstairs, holding his hand. He drew the bath, his finger under the tap, trying to determine the right temperature. Finn sat on the white-tiled ground, removing his small T-shirt, then his sweatpants. Standing only in his diaper, he did a small jump.
“Ana! Is this too hot?” called James, but she couldn’t hear him over her own scrubbing and the sound of the water. “How hot should it be?” James called downstairs. Still no answer. James turned on the cold.
Finn’s plump hands gripped the edge of the tub, his toes lifting off the ground.
“Wait, wait!” The diaper looked like it was barely hanging on, sagging like a smile along his backside. James tore the fasteners and the diaper fell free, relieved, into his hand. It was full of dark shit, round and heavy as a miniature medicine ball. James was embarrassed: Why didn’t I notice? Why did we have him for hours and never think about the diaper?
“Ana!” This time, she appeared, eyes immediately upon the diaper in his hand.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “Don’t move!” She could see Finn, his bum smeared with feces, giggling and moving like an inmate in a Victorian asylum toward the white walls and white towels. “Don’t let him move!”
Ana raced down the stairs, while James held Finn by the hands, but far away from him. She rooted in the cloth grocery bags for wipes, the kind Sarah always had—hypoallergenic, biodegradable, chlorine-free, unscented. Ana grabbed the diapers, too, number 5s, as Mrs. Bailey had told them, and a garbage bag. She sprinted upstairs, a medic attending to the injured, dropping all the gear on the white bathroom floor. Finn and James were still locked in their strange dance, far from the walls. Finn’s toddler penis hung (uncircumcised, noted Ana; quite large, noted James, who thought, then, of Marcus and wondered), a strangely mannish thing out of place on his child’s body.
“We have a shituation here,” said James, as Ana pulled out wipe after wipe. She managed a small laugh, passing the packet to James. James wiped and cleaned, folding each used cloth into the next, then stuffing the ball into the dirty diaper, expertly. He enjoyed a moment of satisfaction, held back his shoulders at his accomplishment, and then looked at his wife, hovering in the doorframe.
“I’m not sure what to do now,” she said.
“Why don’t you get his bed ready while I give him the bath?”
Ana nodded, and James turned to the boy, lifting him gently into the tub. “Let’s get clean, right? Let’s get clean.” James wiped the washcloth with Ana’s French milled soap, then rubbed it up and down his back.
“Where toys?” asked Finn.
James looked around the bathroom. Stainless steel soap pump. A small vase with a white daisy in it. The uselessness of the room struck him: Two years ago, they had knocked out walls and installed a sitting area in the bathroom. It contained a large black cane chair and a table holding magazines that had never been touched. James sat in the chair only once, the day it arrived, declaring it not uncomfortable.
Under the sink, James discovered an old blue plastic water cup—something of his from a long-ago apartment. With the cup, Finn began to bail the tub back into the tub; dip and pour, dip and pour, while James sang a Jonathan Richman song that had lingered, waiting for use, in the back of his head for twenty-some years: “ ’What do I now hear, hark, hark? Is it really leprechauns, and have they come back to rock ‘n’ roll?” Finn was oblivious to the song—dip and pour—but James kept going, pleased with himself, repeating the chorus: “Ba-doom ba da da da da, da da …” James reached for Ana’s shampoo, also French, with the price tag still on it.
He said to Finn: “Twenty-two dollars? Who pays twenty-two dollars for shampoo?” He made Finn’s foamy hair into a gigantic spike, still chanting. At the end of the song, Finn splashed a gentle sprinkle on James’s face and looked at him expectantly. James reached into the tub and flicked a bit at Finn, and for a moment, it looked like the boy was going to cry; his face gathered, as if preparing to come apart—oh God no, thought James. Oh no. But it suddenly ceased, and Finn laughed, picking up the blue cup, dipping and pouring.
Ana returned with a green fluffy towel that she sniffed before handing it over—verbena. James lifted Finn out, and as he held his gleaming wet body up in the air, Ana saw in her mind’s eye James’s hands slipping, and Finn, falling fast, cracking his head on the bathtub, leaving the white tile veined with blood.
But then Finn was on the bath mat, grinning. Both of them scanned his body for cuts and bruises, markers of what had befallen his family. He was perfectly clear, just as the doctor at the hospital had said. Not a freckle, not a mole. No evidence.
James wrapped him in the towel.
“I’m a burrito!” cried Finn. “Tighter! Like Mama make it!” The words knocked James. He looked into the boy’s face, his little teeth far apart, all of him without mourning. James tightened the towel until Finn resembled a long green onion, blond hair spiking through the top. Finn giggled at his immobility, trying to walk and falling on his back, laughing and laughing.
James scooped him up, carried him to the guest room. Ana had made up the bed with honey-colored linens. It isn’t a child’s room, thought James, dropping the towel on the leather love seat. There was no whimsy anywhere in the house. They didn’t speak of this guest room as a future nursery anymore, though a nursery with a view of the garden had been a selling point, hadn’t it? He was sure it had.
“Help me,” said Ana. James looked at her and realized she meant the bed. Together, they moved it to the wall.
“Watch TV!” cried Finn, jumping on the bed, while James tried to pull a pajama top over his head. Blue, with a monster’s face: “Veddy scary!” The fabric was nubby and worn, another item from Mrs. Bailey’s. James tried not to imagine what horrors had been witnessed by all the foster children who had worn these pajamas.
“No TV. We’ll do a book,” said James, then looked at Ana, who hovered again in the doorframe. “Wait, do we have any books?”
“We left the bus book in the car,” said Ana, watching James expertly stick the diaper, pull on the monster pants.
About the absence of books, James said: “Shit.”
Finn went still. “You say shit,” he whispered.
Ana, roused to James’s defense, said: “You said it, too.”
“I know. You’re right. It’s a bad word,” said James. He turned to Ana: “Can you see if there’s anything for him to read? Maybe a graphic novel or something.”
“I don’t know if Robert Crumb is appropriate,” said Ana, but she headed toward their bedroom and the basket of magazines next to her bedside table.
Finn folded into James’s lap, letting James brush his hair, his face turning sleepy.
“Maybe the cartoons in here?” Ana asked, returning with an old New Yorker that Sarah had lent her months ago. James laughed. Ana sat down on the bed next to James, as if she, too, was awaiting story time. He flipped through the magazine, James asking Finn what animals were in the cartoons, what sounds they made; James telling him stories about vultures and dogs. Both Ana and James were acutely aware of what this looked like from a distance. James pulled up the quilt to Finn’s chin.
Ana placed throw cushions on the floor at the side of the bed, a circumference, like a ring of lye outside a village hut used to keep away the witches. James leaned down, and small hands circled his neck. Ana patted Finn’s leg, his body a tiny bump, lost on the big bed.
“Sing light,” said Finn.
“Leave the light on?” asked James.
“No! Sing it! Sing it!”
Ana raised a single finger to her temple and began to rub, as if it would help her to draw understanding out of her skull.
“Light? A song about light?” she said, feeling like she had walked into a game of charades.
“Yes! Sing it!”
“Can you sing it, Finn?”
“No, Mama sing it,” he said. James and Ana went still, wondering what would happen next. Finn looked at them, waiting.
James said, “I’m sorry, Finn, we don’t know it. Do you want to hear the leprechaun song again?”
Finn considered this, let out a very adult sigh, as if he had expected no less incompetence from these so-called caregivers.
“Okay.”
James sang it again, and Ana looked away. But James wasn’t self-conscious, almost never was he self-conscious, and especially not now, having seen how his song rescued the boy from the edge, pulled him back from the churning waters of sadness. He smiled again, laughed even as James sang the last line: “ ‘They come back to rock ‘n’ roll.’ ”
“Good night,” said Ana, leaving James to do the final kiss and tuck. She found herself in the hallway, with her hand on the wall, closing her eyes.
“Good night,” she heard her husband say.
James was in bed first, looking from his laptop to Ana as she moved through the room in her long white nightgown. She straightened an angled jewelry box, then carefully hooked her belt on a belt rack, her blazer in the section of the closet reserved for blazers.
“I didn’t put my shoes away,” he said, as she picked up his sneakers from the middle of the floor and placed them, toes out, in the closet.
“How about: Sorry, I didn’t put my shoes away.” She moved like a machete hacking the reeds, clearing, clearing, clearing.
“Okay, sorry,” said James, just a touch of sarcasm. “It says here the ideal bedtime for a two-year-old is seven p.m.”
“Mmm,” said Ana.
“It also says we should get baby soap. He could get eczema.”
Ana was lost in her movements, saying nothing. James used to joke about the tidying. When they left her apartment to go out, James would help, putting the clean dishes in the cupboards and emptying the food trap in the sink. Then he’d stand at the door waiting and announce: “All locked down, Cappy!” In those days, Ana had smiled and laughed and, in doing so, admitted this need as eccentricity. There’s no shame in it anymore, thought James. And God knows, no comedy.
She finally climbed into bed next to him, propped up by pillows. James threw several to the ground. He placed his computer on the table and leaned to face Ana, but she was up much higher than he was, and he could see only fragments of her, smell the crook of her arm. The pillows made them silly.
“We didn’t brush his teeth,” said James.
Ana answered with a question. “What do we do tomorrow?”
“Daycare, I guess. They said to keep the routine, and it’s Monday.”
“God, is today Sunday?” Ana felt stuffed with questions, as if they would tumble out and fill the room if she dared open her mouth, a fisherman’s net releasing question marks. What she wanted was an explanation, but for what? She could sense James getting sentimental next to her, curling closer, trying to hold her hand, which lay limp above the covers.
She was waiting for the softness, the cool white space. Ana had invented this state of being when she was a child, lying in bed during the loudest parties, the doors slamming and the accelerated roar of her mother’s nightlife. Or even on a quiet night, alone with her mother, watching her shape shift over the course of the evening, the ice cubes clattering in the tray, and the bottles ringing in the garbage against the other bottles—then, poof. Ana could vanish. She thought of the white space as a destination, a place she had to get to in order to block the noise. Now the noise came from the social worker: “And Ana, what kind of hours do you work?” The voice hungry for judgment.
And then the social worker was silenced by Sarah’s light laughter, ringing gently. Ana squeezed her eyes shut.
“Where were they going?” Ana asked. “Were they going to get groceries? What was the point?”
“I don’t know,” said James. Ana opened her eyes and frowned.
“It’s going to be okay,” said James. Abruptly, Ana reached for the light, sliding down past the pillows onto her back, so that not even her head was elevated. Now James was too high, looking down at her.
Ana pictured Sarah alone in her own bed, suspended from tubes, that yellow sunflower bruise across her eye, the black stitches slicing her face. A goalie’s mask glowing in a dark hospital room.
James had his own vision: Marcus in the drawer. A life-size doll of Marcus.
“What’s happening?” she asked, strangled, and James went down to her so they were face to face. He stroked her hair, murmuring. She let him. She gave that to him until, somewhere in the middle, it felt like something she wanted, too.
* * *
Two years before, on a spring morning, side by side in narrow chairs, Ana and James had received the third opinion, which was the same as the first two.
The specialist was young and well known in certain parts of the city. As he delivered the news, his features puckered and aged with a sadness that struck Ana as suspect.
“Okay, then,” said Ana, gathering to go, wanting to escape the sensation that she should comfort this celebrity doctor.
After, across from the subway station on the gravel path that cut through an orderly church lawn, Ana held James. He did not weep exactly, but pulsed evenly on her shoulder—in and out—his face buried in her wool coat. A mechanical sound. Ana pictured a bright silver electronic heart held aloft by a surgeon and then—plunk—dropped into James’s open chest.
Above him, she raised her head and looked up at the flat blue sky.
What to make of this sudden calmness that wiped her down, erasing the faint, pulling panic she had lived with for two years? It was the relief of shutting the hotel room door after a day in a New York mob. It was the feeling she used to get when she was totally alone at the end of a long, loud evening out, sitting on her couch in the old apartment that only she lived in.
“Then we can look into adoption,” James said, pulling apart, wiping his face on his sleeve.
Ana nodded.
“Or surrogacy,” he said.
Ana nodded again, then turned back to the sky.
“They have great weather,” she said.
A streetcar slid by, noisily, and Ana couldn’t hear, but saw James’s mouth move: “What?”
“Great weather for the wedding.”
James looked at her, and she could see him thinking: This is how she copes. It was likely that he had read an article or written a segment for his show on how to comfort her in the event of this confirmation that they were indeed in that select statistical sliver for whom treatments were useless.
