Соавторы: Katrina Onstad
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 17 страниц)
Out of habit, Ana imagined herself with a child that age. She stored away Sarah’s wisdom and words, trying to picture herself applying them later. But the picture was fainter now than it had ever been. Any child to come would not be hers, in all likelihood. This hypothetical child might even be out there right now, floating in a woman’s belly in a faraway country, being carried through a rice field, out of the hot sun. The image didn’t excite Ana, or sadden her. It seemed absurd; the stuff of science fiction, of a future she hadn’t arrived at yet.
She looked again at Finn being stroked in Sarah’s arms and tried to envy it. She knew how James felt when Finn was nearby: She had seen his face, for once entirely drained of rage. After dinner with Sarah and Marcus, she watched her husband on the porch as Finn was wheeled away, sadly waving good-bye at the stroller. Ana rooted around for some feeling to match James’s but came up with only a casual affection for this boy, for all boys, a mild curiosity that didn’t demand investigation. Hadn’t there been a time when the sight of a pregnant woman had caused her to look away, yearning? Hadn’t she hidden in that hotel room after the final miscarriage and wept? A chill crept over her body: She needed to find that person again, or James would be lost to her.
When Finn calmed, scurrying toward a basket of clean laundry on the edge of the room, Sarah returned to the couch, rolled her eyes at Ana, and looked expectant, waiting for her to start the conversation where it had stopped. Ana admired Sarah’s silences; they had a kind of presence, like rooms she was inviting Ana into.
“I feel like …” said Ana, groping for it. “I feel like I miss him. I miss something we were.” She was remembering the previous night, how she had returned home and James was gone, as usual. He had made some kind of silent commitment to not being home when she got home, as if to sustain the scaffolding of the life before he got fired. Ana did not ask him where he went.
In the immediate wake of the firing, there had been meetings, interviews, and then a long late-night conversation about James taking “a break.” Perhaps they could live off her salary while he tried his hand at fiction, maybe wrote a script on spec for a hard-hitting cop show about the politics of downtown living. Ana trod delicately while they spoke, knowing James did not want to hear anything but yes, yes, yes, that he saw everyone but her huddled together against him in a giant no. They could afford for James not to work, after all, because Ana had always made more money, and because, most of all, they didn’t have children. Neither of them said this, but it was there, breathing between the lines of the conversation.
James had come in after Ana had changed from her dress into blue jeans and a T-shirt, was pouring herself a glass of white wine and standing at the back French doors, looking out at the churned-up garden, still unfinished. The landscapers had vanished around the time James lost his job.
James slammed the door, dropped his jacket on the floor, kicked off his shoes so they blocked the doorway. Ana was watching all of this from far away in the kitchen, across the first floor, seeing through the walls that used to be there. James had a drink in his hand within seconds. He had not said a word.
“Nice day, dear?” she asked in a June Cleaver voice.
“Not really,” he said. “Do you know the only thing worse than having someone say to you: ‘Do you work in television?’ ”
Ana didn’t answer, recognizing a setup.
“It’s: ‘Didn’t you used to work in television?’ ”
Something had happened at Starbucks.
James told this story while lightly pulling at his beard, like he might be trying to hurt himself. Then he said: “Good night,” and went to bed without supper.
Ana didn’t want to tell Sarah these details. They were humiliating and could be used against her. Ana was still selective with her new friend, still wondering if she was like the other girls Ana had known in her life, with their dizzying switches from kindness to spite. James had told Ana she would always have a problem with other women because she lacked sentimentality, and because she was beautiful. But Ana hated this idea of her sex and refuted it, looking always for that woman friend who would hold her fire and prove James wrong.
And so Ana kept coming here to Sarah’s, watching Finn grow, carving something into the space when the men weren’t around, listening to her friend talk about her own long days, her fears for her son, her hopes for her future. Ana genuinely liked this woman, this chaotic person who left a huge bag of cat food in her hall for weeks and weeks, just walked around it instead of moving it to the pantry. The house was filled with unfinished gestures, doors off their hinges propped against half-painted walls.
Her own home was a study in paucity. In the past couple of years, Ana had gotten rid of every little tchotchke: a pink velvet bobbleheaded rabbit she bought in Chinatown on a whim; a virgin pencil case, useless because it was too short for pens; an empty picture frame; little half pads of stickies. Over the course of one week, she moved from room to room, drawer to drawer, putting items in liquor store bags. Days later, when she heard the rattle of the garbage truck in the alley, Ana watched from the window, wondering if she should cry out: “Wait!” and save the bobblehead, or even the pencil case, save them not because they were attractive or useful but just because they were hers, and in that way, valuable, maybe.
And yet, Ana felt calmed at Sarah’s. She didn’t require her white space when Sarah was around.
She helped her clear the coffee dishes. Finn circled their feet like a shark.
“Sarah …” Ana began, moving the dishes around on the counter.
Sarah turned to her, open-faced.
“How did you know?”
“Know what?”
“Know you wanted a kid.”
Sarah raised her brows a little. “Oh,” she said. She puzzled a moment. “Well, I guess it’s kind of like when you ask gay people, ‘When did you know?’ and they say, ‘I always knew.’ ” Then she added: “What about you? When did you know?”
Ana moved the dishes side to side.
“I’m not sure,” she said. Then she looked up. “Same, I guess.”
Finn moved in, and Sarah leaned over to pick him up, distracted by his murmurs.
At the door, Ana kissed Sarah on the cheek, and Sarah tilted her head. “Everything okay?” It sounded so much like a statement that Ana could only nod her assent.
When she’d arrived home that night, James had dinner on the table, a glass of red wine poured and breathing for her. It was as if he had felt her pulling away, betraying him just a little over coffee, as if her lack of faith were casual and passing.
He was funny and light. Even the beard looked trimmer. They ate dinner in the breakfast nook, with the French doors open, looking at a huge hole in the yard. After months of delays, the contractors had showed up with shovels and begun digging again. James had simply found them there, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. He did not ask what they did with all the dirt they removed.
After dinner, as Ana cleared the dishes, James rubbed up against her, and to his surprise, she responded, pushing back, putting her hand down his pants. He had developed a nut brown tan from the sun where his face was unbearded. Ana wondered if he’d had a good day writing, and felt, maybe, that a corner had been turned.
James pulled the blinds in the living room and the kitchen, sealing the house from one end to the other. Ana appeared behind him naked. She unfolded a clean kitchen towel, carefully placing it over the sofa cushions before lying down, spreading herself open, and he stood above her, looking down, breathing heavily. It was the first time in a long time that they had been together without the presence of this third, shadow person, nudging them forward, giving them reason. The absence flickered as sadness in James, and then it snuffed itself out. He buried his face in his wife’s neck, moving his tongue between her breasts. For Ana, she felt as if she had been fucking while swathed in a gauze for two years, trying to feel through the thing between her and her husband. But now, with her hands on his hips, her body was greedy, ferocious for him. They closed in on something like joy.
Only when she had tied the last garbage bag and closed the windows and drawn the curtains and folded the laundry and put it away—only then did Ana stop and take a different kind of tour of the house, touching surfaces with her fingers. In part, she was checking the thoroughness of her work, but also, she fingered Marcus’s shirts hanging in the closet, ran her nails through a mound of necklaces in Sarah’s jewelry box. She touched the walls of photos in their mismatched frames. The family was so young; no old or sepia shots of ancient relatives, nothing from a life before. It was as if when Finn arrived, he brought with him the present and erased everything behind him. The city was filled with these urban orphans. Ana had seen cases of erasure often in her Legal Aid work as a student; poverty and aloneness arrived together often. A few circumstances and they were in the system: an only child; a refugee claim; a parental estrangement; an accident.
But there were different kinds of connection now. Why hadn’t she considered this?
Sarah and Marcus had one desktop computer, in a room that was part den, part office. A small spotted blanket with a stuffed cow’s head curled on the office chair. Ana suddenly remembered Finn dragging it around by the head, holding it up to his mother, saying, “Moo.” That’s something, she thought, putting the cow blanket in the basket of things to take home. I know something.
The computer flickered and hummed, and Ana imagined the many Facebook friends who must be curious or devastated, saw the static hands stretching out from the screen—Password.
She tried a few: “Finn.” “Finneas.” “12345.” Then she froze herself out; too many failed efforts. She was helpless against the electronic locks, truly disconnected.
Ana added to her mental list: password retrieval. She knew the law: There would have to be a death certificate. But Sarah wasn’t dead. It could take weeks or months, then.
She turned off the computer.
Ana removed three frames from the wall: one of Finn as a baby in a bathtub; Finn as he looked now, but with shorter hair, wearing blue overalls, his chin covered in whipped cream, grinning. The third showed the three of them together, heads touching, Sarah’s eyes squinting with laughter. The camera was close to their faces, as if held at arm’s length, taken by Sarah or Marcus. The background was blue, unrecognizable. Ana studied the picture for clues and then placed it with the others in her briefcase.
Ana changed back into her skirt and blouse, folding Sarah’s clothes into the suitcase. She would wash and return them before … what? Where is this going? Ana had never done well without a deadline. She still looked at every completed report at work as a potential A. She sometimes accidentally said: “Can I get an extension?”—the vernacular of a model student. This, in the end, was why she had chosen law. The organization, the binding of the fat books, the long, determined answers, and passes and fails. And to be paid! Ana still couldn’t quite believe how well compensated she was simply for making sense out of chaos, which she would do for no money at all.
Ana pulled the duffel bag onto the front porch, placed the garbage in the bins at the side of the house. She put a laundry basket of toys in the trunk. A small brown rabbit smiled up at her. She turned it on its side.
When she was safely in the car, with all the doors locked, she let out a long, soft whimper, a sound she was getting used to hearing.
On the way home from daycare, Finn had stories to tell, about bananas and a soccer ball that went missing and Elijah and Kai and Ella B. and Ella P. They walked side by side, Finn stopping every few steps to pick up a broken straw or a leaf, past the eyes of the old Portuguese men on their porches, their compressed bodies upright, hands on knees.
James pulled a narrative out of the streaming chatter, repeated it back to Finn: “You told Ella B. not to take your Jingo block?” Finn nodded, continuing the story.
They stopped in the park. Finn climbed the jungle gym while James stood below him like a human mattress.
It was dark already by the time they reached the sandwich store on the corner surrounded by houses with wrought iron fences and birdbaths.
“Should we get some sandwiches for dinner?” asked James.
“For Ana?” James was surprised. Had Finn said her name out loud before? He nodded.
The boy ran ahead, pulling the heavy door of the sandwich store open with determination. He instantly homed in on a dusty jellybean machine in the corner and stood twisting the dial.
“Do you want a sandwich?” James asked Finn.
“Girl cheese.”
“We can get that at our house. These are veal sandwiches.”
A girl a little older than Finn came in with her mother and installed herself at the jellybean machine, too, hitting the top of it with her fist. Her mother glanced at James, smiled distantly.
“I called …,” she said to the man behind the counter. He went to retrieve her food, leaving the woman and James side by side, each regarding a child.
“Lilly, no banging. Don’t bang. That little boy was here first.” The girl scampered to the pinball machine and began hitting the glass instead. Finn followed, staring at her.
“Lilly, don’t bang!”
“Give me a quarter!” yelled Lilly.
“No, not now. Dinnertime,” said the mother, tucking her bag of sandwiches under her arm.
“No! I want to play pinball!” screamed the girl.
The mother glanced at James woefully.
“He looks like you,” she said.
James wanted specifics on this comment. “Really? You think so? How do you see that?”
But there was a flurry of activity at the counter, paper bags crumpling and a loud cash register churning, and when James had finished paying, the woman and the girl were gone. Finn stood at the pinball machine, tapping it lightly.
James felt smug that they had made it through the ordering, the waiting, and the paying, without incident. He followed Finn, the bag of sandwiches in his hand, the little boy running ahead then turning back to check on James every few moments, just in case.
The sun was setting, and the fall light stained the rooftops of the houses caramel. At the top of James’s street, the curtains in the brothel house fluttered as they walked past, as if someone had just backed away from the window. James knew Ana’s theories but had never seen anyone come or go from there. He glanced at the recycling bin on the curb, bottles of vodka and Diet Coke. Nothing edible.
Finn ran from the sidewalk into the brothel’s muddy front yard, pocked with cigarette butts.
“Come on, Finn. You can’t be up there,” James said, trying to sound casual. Finn kept going, up the stairs, as if he lived there, as if he might reach up and turn the knob, step inside to some other life awaiting him there.
From the sidewalk, James yelled: “Finn, get down! That’s not your house!” Finn ignored him, focused on his repetitious ascent and descent of the stone staircase. Again, the flutter and shadow in the front window. James stormed the walk.
“Finn! I’m talking to you!” He grabbed the boy’s wrist—So light! A wishbone!—and pulled him. Finn’s body buckled. He yelped, making himself liquid. James was forced to drop the sandwiches and grab Finn, who kept slipping from his hands. He finally located two solid parts and hauled his smallness over his shoulder, trying to squat down and grab the sandwiches, all the while half running away from the brothel house.
Finn squawked like an injured bird. James glanced back to see the door to the brothel open and a woman’s shape appear. She was transparent, the tops of her bare legs covered by a long T-shirt. She held a cigarette by her hip. James moved quickly away.
They approached their house like this, with Finn wailing, a slab of snot and tears across James’s body, his legs kicking. Ana opened the door to them.
“I heard you coming,” she said, glancing up the street toward the other houses, their insides lit up in the dusk. Noise traveled between the houses and got trapped, like a tunnel.
James dropped Finn on the couch. The boy lay on his back, still screaming and kicking. Electrocution. Drowning. Ana hovered in the doorway.
“Is this normal?” She had to shout to be heard.
“I don’t fucking know!” screamed James.
“What are you going to do?”
He glanced at her. She was shivering; she looked barely born.
James went to Finn, squatting down, trying to pin him like a wrestler.
“It’s okay! Finny! It’s okay!”
Finn’s arms flailed, and his small right fist jutted upward, clocking James in the eye. James reeled back; Ana screamed, and at that sound, Finn went still and silent at last, shocked to hear Ana scream, shocked to see James, his hand over his eye, staggering backward in a stream of fuckfuckfuck.
Finn sat, bewildered, his face streaked.
Ana was upon James, pulling back his hand, looking at his eye, a small trickle of blood.
“Oh my God,” she said.
“His fingernails are too long,” said James.
“His fingernails!” gasped Ana, reaching for the blood. Finn watched from wide eyes as Ana quickly stroked James’s hair, then hurried to the bathroom for supplies.
James watched her leave the room and felt the familiarity of Ana in charge. Something fluttered nearby, in the corner of his bloodied eye. Finn, terrified on the couch, quivering.
“Hey,” said James, opening his arms. “It’s okay. It was an accident.”
“Sorry,” said Finn, flinging himself into James’s embrace. James wondered if he could hear the man’s heart up against his child’s ear.
“Me, too.”
Ana came upon them like this, a tube of medicine in her hand. Her first impulse was to turn around and give them the privacy they looked like they deserved.
James knew how to reclaim Finn. He whispered to him until he began laughing, rocked him gently.
“Kleenex,” said James with his hand out. She frowned, but found him a Kleenex in her purse.
“Blow,” said James, and Finn did.
Finn’s breathing slowed to something human. James sang quietly: “ ‘Rockin’ rockin’ leprechauns …’ ” Finn smiled.
Ana blurted out: “Look, Finn, I picked up some of your things.”
James glanced at her.
“I left work early,” she said. Finn was off James’s lap, toward a stack of books on the dining room table. Ana had lined up his toys as if they were for sale: a puzzle, a small Thomas the Tank Engine, a flashlight.
“Scaredy Squirrel!” he crowed, flipping pages.
In this way, the evening was rescued.
There was a pattern now, after only a week. The script was foreign to Ana, but James recognized in it shades of his own childhood. In James’s earliest memories, he was older than Finn, in kindergarten. James and his brother walked home from school together past rows of identical stucco houses differentiated only by the garages: single or double, left or right. Lawns were square. Trees were thin and young. James’s mother waited in the kitchen with a tray of Yugoslavian cookies. James and Michael sat cross-legged in front of the television. James licked the frosting off the cookies, leaving the soggy wet breadstick. No one else had these cookies in the unmarked plastic bags from the market downtown.
With his mother’s nudging and prodding, the family moved from wake-up to breakfast, from breakfast to school, school to sports, and on through the steps until bedtime, when James leaned between her knees as she combed his wet hair. The entire day’s effort designed to push the clock toward sleep beneath Star Wars sheets.
If James’s father ever brushed James’s hair, he tugged and pulled. He had a job like Ana’s that bored James to the point of cruelty. He came home late and got up early, always catching the train into the city or back from the city. Where is he? “He’s on the train,” said his mom. So when James pictured his father, he was astride a train: a superhero with legs dangling past the tiny windows, hurtling down the tracks, briefcase under his arm.
The year James entered high school, his mother got her own job, at the library. It turned out that she had been going to school, too, while he was in school. Where was the evidence of this? The studying, the exams? In the house, her talk was only expended on two boys and a man. Their mother vacuumed, shooing them from the room. And they would go, the three of them moving into the next empty space, still talking baseball and hockey statistics, a triangle that kept relocating as she approached with her machine.
James was the handsome one and got a little leeway for it, space to grow his hair and start smoking pot. He hung out with older kids who were into Bauhaus and New Order. When he didn’t sign up for any sports teams in eleventh grade, he and his father had nothing left to talk about. (Years later, James started playing hockey again and following the NHL like he had as a kid, memorizing statistics over the evening paper. Hockey returned as the animating force of holiday conversations with his father.)
With his mother at work, his father stayed in the city later, and the house was empty more and more, so James kept out of it. He began taking the train himself, hopping off downtown for concerts, hovering until closing in record stores and bookstores, absorbing Aldous Huxley and Tom Wolfe and Bob Dylan. Meanwhile, Mike got his hands on a computer and began programming. Tapes gave way to floppy discs until finally, at twenty-six, he built a software company and designed a font called Tamarind. Then, a decade later, he sold both for an amount that was never made clear. Millions. Mike was still around, living in a northeast pocket of the city where people had driveways and no sidewalks.
James hadn’t called his parents in weeks. When he spoke to them last, he hadn’t told them he’d lost his job. That they hadn’t called to ask him why he was no longer on TV was confirmation of what he’d suspected for years: They weren’t watching. It’s not that they disapproved of what he did, but it had never occurred to them that it mattered.
James went over this story. He didn’t think about it often, but it had been rising up in him lately, especially as he held Finn between his knees after the bath, combing his hair. What had happened between Marcus and his parents? How did Sarah’s parents die? Only vaguely, James remembered a tale of a car crash. Maybe.
Though James had a gift for the narratives of strangers, he had never been good at keeping straight the most dramatic events of his friends’ lives. He’d had a girlfriend for two years in university who told him in the first week of their relationship about having childhood cancer, and it left his mind almost before she’d finished speaking. Then, a decade later, James had run into her on a crowded street, thin and wasted, a toque pulled down over her forehead. “It’s back,” she said hoarsely, and for days, he had no idea what she was talking about until the memory slithered up, its head poking through the potholes in his memory while he was alone on the southbound University line: leukemia.
If Sarah’s parents had been killed in a car accident, she probably felt inured to that particular disaster; she had been struck once, it could not happen again. What are the odds? He once interviewed a woman who gave birth to a child the size of a pop can, a preemie born at twenty-six weeks. She told him: “As soon as you’re on the wrong side of statistics, statistics don’t mean anything.”
James saw Finn before the boy noticed him in the doorway. Finn sat in the middle of James and Ana’s bed, surrounded by stuffed animals. Past him, through an open bathroom door, Ana’s back was bent, yellow gloves pushing, scrubbing out the tub.
James snuck up behind him, then leaned down and kissed Finn’s warm neck. Finn squealed a little, as if he’d been tickled. As he clipped Finn’s fingernails with his large nail clippers—he could fit two of Finn’s fingers between the blades—James was filled with a sensation of pure joy. He had escaped so much. Loss was all around, but it had never really landed on him. This realization gripped him and shook him into something like dizziness. He looked at the small pile of fingernail clippings on the tissue, and thought: Oh, happiness, happiness, happiness.
James read Finn the book about the squirrel and tucked him under his new sheets, beneath a swirling mobile of a bald eagle. “Sing light,” said Finn.
“Can you sing it?”
Finn shook his head. “You.”
“ ‘You light up my life’?” sang James in a silly voice. Finn laughed and was distracted enough to let James lead him away from this unmet wish. He turned out the lamp.
“Door open,” said Finn. James opened it a crack. “More.” And that was fine.
James had one leg in his sweatpants when Ana appeared in the bedroom doorway.
“Where are you going?”
“Wednesday. Hockey,” he said, pulling his Maple Leafs jersey over his shirt.
“You’re leaving me alone with him?”
“Yes, but I snuck a pound of horse tranquilizers into his sippy cup so I don’t think you’ll have any problems.” He gave Ana his cute face.
“Seriously, James. Do you really think it’s good for him? He’s attached to you. If he wakes up …”
Fully dressed now, James moved past Ana in the doorway and into the hall. She followed him downstairs.
“It could it be traumatic for him,” she continued. “More traumatic?”
“Wait a second,” said James, again brushing by Ana to the basement. She waited in the hall, chewing the meat from her thumbnail. James returned with his hockey bag.
“Are you listening to me?” asked Ana. James squatted at her feet, tying his running shoe.
“Yes, but you’re being crazy. He’s not going to wake up, and if he does, so what? He knows you. Give him a hug, change his diaper.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot,” Ana snapped. “That’s not what I mean.”
James let out a long, slow sigh, eyes raised to the ceiling. “What do you mean, then, Ana?”
“Don’t talk to me in your TV voice.”
“Come on—”
“You know what I’m trying to say.” She sounded panicked, invoking a tone that should be reserved for fires and accidents. “I think it might be bad to leave him so soon. How important is hockey tonight? Is it an important game?” Ana’s understanding of sports was so limited that she believed James was working toward something, a cup or a pennant.
“If I don’t play, the numbers aren’t even.” His bag began to pull uncomfortably on his shoulder. James opened the door. A gust of cool air came upon them, but Ana was still hot with anger.
“I hate it when you tell me I’m crazy,” she said, and James recognized his mistake.
“I didn’t say you were crazy. I said you were being crazy.” He leaned in and kissed the top of her head. “You’ll be fine. He never wakes up. And he likes you, Ana.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she said, pulling away. But even as she watched James walk down the street toward the rink, his stick bobbing above his shoulder, she could not exactly figure out what she meant. She was trying to get him to recognize some new kind of failure that was waiting for them. She closed the door.
She wanted him to feel it the way she did, the certainty that every interaction with Finn was changing the boy, altering his being in ways that could not be undone. She wanted her husband to recognize the impossible weight of that and return to shield her.
She felt that James was leaving her there as a test, that she was forever under scrutiny now, since Finn’s arrival. The expectations were smothering. For so many years, she had tried to join James in his unspoken resolution that a child would be the release of something in her. She knew that he believed she needed saving, from her drifting parents and sharp-edged youth. He was the first part of that rescue plan; the baby would be the second part. He had said it in the beginning of their life together, often stroking her hair: “My poor girl,” he said. “Let me take care of you.” That was the great unspoken switch of their relationship: Everyone thought she saved James from his slovenliness, his intellectual chaos, but in fact, up close, it was Ana who was in need of salvation. The birth of a baby, then, the small hand that would pull her over to grace.
But up rose the black and wild doubt: What if I can’t do it? She had felt uneven since Finn’s arrival, staring at walls and windows, barely able to put on her boots that morning, staring at the zipper pull in her fingers.
How is motherhood supposed to feel? Because she wasn’t sure that it should feel like this, so much like terror. And her husband was leaving her alone with that feeling, while he went to play hockey.
That was what she had meant to say.
The game was particularly cruel, and James wasn’t up for it. Doug, especially, had his elbows out and some kind of rabies bubbling up in him. James couldn’t get the puck, and after one ferocious futile burst down the ice, he lost his breath and had to stop, leaning over with his hands on his knees.
There were two women playing: Alice Mitchell, who ran a small catering company, and a tall woman James hadn’t seen before. Her blond hair sprayed like a skirt from the bottom of her helmet.
Alice skated up to him and gave him a gentle whap on the butt with her stick.
“Doug’s an asshole tonight,” she shouted.
James nodded, touched and embarrassed by the sympathy. He skated away fast but only got to the puck a few times, once on a generous pass from Alice. Doug plucked it from him within moments.
