Соавторы: Katrina Onstad
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After, they went for beer. James checked his cell phone for messages from Ana, but there were none. Six of them sat in the small bar, a converted diner with Dixie music on Sunday mornings. James had been going there for years, but this time he was acutely aware that Ana could not be with him. Someone had to be at home. He felt her out there, tethered to their house, to Finn’s sleeping body.
Doug leaned in, separating him and James from the rest of the group.
“Where the hell have you been? Lee’s all: ‘Where’s Ana? We never see you guys,’ ” he said. Doug was an old friend, but possibly not a good one. They had worked together years ago. When Doug left for a cable station, that might have been it. But somehow Doug had kept up the momentum, phone calls and birthdays and hockey. In the moments when Doug was at his crassest, James suspected he kept in touch only on the off chance that James would prove useful to him at some point. For all his hard drinking and cultivated blue-collar vulgarity, he was a ruthless independent producer with a constantly rotating staff, usually quitting because of his tantrums. In the burning desert in Jordan, working on a documentary, Doug had stayed in a broken, overheated truck while an unpaid assistant pushed it. This incident had made him famous in TV circles. His name caused fear in the twentysomethings who did his grunt work. He won an International Emmy for the Jordan documentary, which was about relics.
“I’ve been busy. The book’s coming along,” said James, quickly burying his face in the pint of beer.
“Who’s your publisher?” asked Doug.
“It’s early stages. Not sure yet.” James raised the glass again.
Doug recognized that pause and changed direction.
“We’re having a small dinner thing. You know Rachel Garland, right? She did that figure skating miniseries?” James knew them all and all of their accomplishments and failures, those who made weekly commutes to Los Angeles, taking meetings, selling themselves. James had been excused from that particular footrace. He had designed his life to be above it, in fact, by staying at the public station for fifteen years. But it gnawed at him, the mystery of the commercial world. He tried to imagine being inserted into a life where he had to buff and box and sell himself like Doug did every day. Making pitches at boardroom tables in Los Angeles; throwing out a hundred ideas and having one stick. James recoiled from such odds.
He couldn’t bear what he knew was coming: a litany of other people’s successes. Doug did this under the guise of catching up.
Off Doug went. Rachel was running a big international coproduction cop show. Lee had a new gig adapting a children’s series involving turtles. Rachel’s second husband, Bill Waters, would be at the dinner. He was back from being director of photography on a feature in New York. Many of these people had passed through James’s show at one time or another, and then moved on. James had the sensation of being a high school teacher watching his most promising students in cap and gown turn around year after year, waving good-bye or giving him the finger. And now he wasn’t even the teacher. He was the janitor.
Did any of them have children? He looked around the table, which had filled up with empty beer bottles. Alice had kids, from a first marriage. There was a period when all the women they knew were pregnant, and then, at parties, babies appeared early and disappeared later. But these babies lacked specificity; James hadn’t connected with any of them. Now those babies had become children, large and staring. James found them at the same parties when he was looking for the bathroom. They sprawled on couches in rooms with the television on, or were tucked far away, sleeping. Suddenly he felt acutely aware of all he had not been privy to; the conversations he had been excused from in his life, just by being male and having a barren wife.
“We’d have to get a sitter,” he said.
“What? Are you joking? Did you guys adopt or something?” Doug laughed then, as if such a thing were entirely improbable. “Did you get a dog?”
“We’re looking after a little boy. His parents died,” said James. “Well, his father died. We don’t know if the mother’s going to be okay or not.” (James didn’t mention that the daily call to the hospital was always the same: “Stable.” Ana had visited twice, while James looked after Finn. With her coat on, she reported: “Stable,” pouring a glass of wine so quickly that it splashed.)
“What the fuck? Who? Are you serious?” said Doug.
“You don’t know them.”
“Maybe I do.”
“Marcus Lamb and Sarah Weiss.”
“Don’t know them.” Doug’s voice contained a hint of disappointment, as if he’d been unfairly excluded from a party.
“How old’s the kid?”
“Two. A boy. Finn.”
“Todd Banks and his wife, you know them? They’ve been trying to adopt from China, but it’s totally fucking impossible right now.”
“I guess we’re lucky,” said James, and Doug didn’t notice the sarcasm in his voice, or let it be. (But a gnawing thought now: What about China? What about the baby in China, separated from them by only a few signatures and uncut checks?)
“That is fucking crazy, man. How’s Ana?”
“She’s okay. Good.”
Mark Pullen, sitting on James’s other side, leaned in. “Did you hear that? Alice sold her screenplay.”
James turned to her.
“I didn’t even know you wrote,” he said, trying to add a smile to the observation.
“I don’t really. It’s a comedy about catering for the rich and famous. I wrote it in three weeks.” She beamed. Mark, her husband, put an arm around her. He directed commercials, and in all the years that James had known him, he’d never heard him aspire to anything else.
Alice Mitchell had only ever been kind to James, and her peanut brittle was a phenomenon. But he hated her a little in that moment.
“She’s being modest. She’s a great writer,” said Mark. “We just got back from L.A., and the producer said she had a voice like Nora Ephron.”
“ ‘Like Nora Ephron before she got boring.’ It was more of an insult to Nora Ephron than a compliment to me.” Alice kept smiling, so wide and bright that James could hardly look upon it.
He stood up suddenly, searching his pockets for cash.
“Alice, I’m thrilled for you,” said James, leaning down and giving her a kiss on the cheek.
“See you Friday?” shouted Doug as James walked off, waving over his shoulder. James didn’t answer.
At home, he dropped his gear in the hall and walked quickly up the stairs to Finn’s room. He went in and put his hand on Finn’s chest, which rose and fell confidently. This touch drained him of his anger.
After he’d showered and crawled into bed next to Ana, sleeping soundly, James had a thought: This might be temporary. Finn might be only a houseguest. Marcus’s parents could appear, with their blood ties ready to tighten around the boy. Or Sarah—Sarah could wake up. She could wake up and Finn would be reabsorbed into her, never to be seen again.
James turned over these scenarios in the dark, still feeling Finn’s chest under his hand. These futures burned behind his open eyes, waiting for an answer.
“Should we wait out here?” James always looked for a reason not to go into the nursing home. Usually he would arrive after Ana, with coffees purchased in slow motion, or drop her off to circle the block several times under the guise of looking for parking. This time, of course, with Finn in the car, he had a good reason to be absent. Still, Ana was irritated; he had begun to throw Finn in front of her to block motion—conversations and fights ceased because the boy was there, indicated by James with a flick of his head, a finger to the lips.
But he was right, of course, that no child would want to come into this place, especially when there was a playground across the street. A few patients had been wheeled there, and they sat with their wheelchairs pointed toward the jungle gym like it was a television. Knit blankets sausaged their legs. Their faces ranged from glazed to sleeping. A nurse, jacket over her green uniform, huddled and smoked, ashing behind her back.
“Come in and say hi. She’d like it,” said Ana. James nodded.
It had taken forty-five minutes to reach the home. Ana had carefully chosen this old age home, in a quiet, unvisited patch of the city. It had a good reputation, but that wasn’t why Ana selected it: Placing her mother in a home closer to their house was unthinkable. Ana couldn’t imagine being out on one of her night jogs and running past a building that contained her mother or turning a corner to see it on her way home from an evening out. Her mother being groomed and fed in the daylight was an image of some comfort, but to think of her locked in at night, her favorite time of the day, forced into her room like a cat in a cage—this wasn’t something she could bear to stumble upon accidentally.
She had been feeling responsible for her mother most of her life. That responsibility trailed faintly after her, a tissue on her heel, slightly shameful. Even as a child tucked away in her room where the window looked at a brick wall, and on that wall she could see India, where her father always talked about going. She pictured cows and cinnamon and swarms of silk-swathed bodies in crayon colors, a National Geographic spread. She thought about India when they moved again, lying in her room with the window that looked at another window, or the next time, when there was no bedroom for her at all but a bed in the hallway. By then, her father had his wish. He went away, transforming from flesh and blood into a series of Christmas cards and occasional phone calls. Examining the stamp (Nepal) and opening the worn, translucent envelope one year, a photograph fell out—a young woman clutching a baby. “You have a sibling!” he wrote. It took another year before Ana found out the sibling was a boy.
Her father moved to Costa Rica, and the letters never again mentioned this boy, or his mother. Ana got older and stopped opening them. And as if her father knew the audience had left the theater, they stopped coming. Silence, now, for eight years.
So Ana and her mother became a pair. Ana went with her mother to the courthouse and, in front of the judge, erased her father’s name, took her mother’s. There was love, but also the bottle. Once her father left, Ana’s mother navigated them toward the smallest apartments in “better neighborhoods,” a phrase peeled from the walls of her own childhood in a riverside university town. Her mother had been a child in a house that could properly be called a mansion, with a small circular swimming pool and a brainless Doberman pinscher that barked at the bushes. Ana spent weeks there in the summer heat. She saw her grandmother’s long, teenage fingernails on her curved hand, shot through with purple veins; her grandfather’s highwaisted pants, his box of war medals.
They wept when Ana waved good-bye in the driveway, days before September. Her mother sat sober and stared straight ahead, shaking hands clenching the wheel.
“You don’t know what they’re really like,” she said, when Ana began to echo their wails, dramatically reaching a hand through the open window as her mother revved and reversed. “You’ll never know, thank God.”
Before entering the nursing home, there was the unbuckling and the gathering of gear that had spread across the car during the drive—water bottle, diaper bag, book, octopus toy. Finn himself came last, the final object.
Finn ran whooping up the wheelchair ramp, then hopped in and out of the electric sliding doors. James did the same, leaning his body outside: “In!” he called when the doors began to shut and then opened again as he kicked a leg over the invisible line. “Check it out, Finny! Out! In! Out! In!”
Ana signed her name in the reception book. “Hi, Lana,” she said.
“Hi, Ms. Laframboise,” said the nurse loudly. Lana spoke to the patients the way she, Ana, spoke to Finn: masking her discomfort with volume. It was Lana who put up the flimsy photographs of pumpkins and elves around the holidays, cut from women’s magazines. Now, in September, with nothing to celebrate, little circles of cellophane tape peeled off the walls.
Ana scanned the offices behind Lana for her favorite person in this place, the young man who James jokingly called Charlie the Chaplain. Charlie had been a tree planter in British Columbia in his early twenties, which was only a few years ago. Now he crouched and spoke kindly to the men and women who punctuated the corridors and dining area. Ana had seen him walking from room to room, turning off televisions where patients had fallen asleep. Ana could talk to him about neural pathways and reasons, and he always had an unsentimental, interesting bit of science on hand to soothe her with. There was nothing evangelical in him—no condescension, no appetite for cuteness in a space abundant with both. Ana wondered if she could talk to him about Finn, and the uncertainty that was swelling in her. But she felt too shy to ask for him, picturing his lean body, his alert eyes.
“Harry Glick died. Do you remember him?” said Lana.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“He and your mother used to eat together quite often. You might want to speak to her about the loss.”
Ana tried to imagine that conversation and suppressed a laugh.
In his knit hat with frog eyes on the top, Finn was a rock star in the nursing home. The halls cleared for him. Spotting the boy, an old woman with a walker, spine like a C, stopped and, with the exertion of a bodybuilder, raised one fist in a small cheer. Wheelchairs ceased their slow crawl and murmured. Ana had never seen so many smiling faces. They erased the smell of antiseptic and dish soap.
What a horror movie for Finn, thought James. The half-living inmates roused from their coffins. He kept the boy close, their hands locked together. James glanced at him and was surprised to find that he did not look frightened. He looked curious, which was his most common look: a mouth like an O.
James watched Ana gain her rigidity; she could not know how angry she looked, how frightened. It was an expression she wore only in this place, breaking it slightly to smile at the occasional patient as if cued to do so.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Wainwright,” said Ana. Mr. Wainwright, a former civic politician of some prominence (he developed the city’s waterfront in the fifties—a factoid that popped into James’s head as if in a cartoon bubble) sat in front of the television. He waved, smiled slowly, like his mouth was breaking through an icy surface.
Her mother’s door was closed. Lise Laframboise in calligraphy, a French name that haunted her in government offices and lineups, two generations out of Quebec, and not knowing a word of French.
Ana knocked. “Mom, it’s Ana, Mom.” No response. She opened the door a little, wondering what she might see. Only once had the fear been fully realized: That day, her mother had been naked, pinballing between the walls, looking for her money. The panic, when it came, was often about money or jewelry she had hidden, or that had been stolen, things lost or taken from her.
This time, her mother was in bed with the lights out, covered up to her chin, her short gray hair a puff atop her head. Who knits all these wool afghans? Ana imagined a sweatshop somewhere.
Ana was followed by James and Finn, who stood at the foot of the bed. Ana opened the curtains, and her mother winced in a finger of dusty light. She was not actually asleep, then.
“Mom, do you want to sleep some more?” asked Ana, praying for a “no” so she wouldn’t have to return later.
Lise shifted and rumbled, rubbing her eyes. She smiled.
“Ana,” she said, a relief for Ana that they could start from this point—her name, Ana—that she didn’t have to go back to the beginning today: You’re my mother. I’m your daughter.
“Hi, Lise, how are you feeling?” asked James, leaning in to kiss her cheek. She brightened falsely.
“Hello,” she sang. “I’m fine. It’s so lovely today. Warm, isn’t it?”
Lise had adored James, his rowdiness, his good looks. She had never said it, but Ana knew she thought her daughter wasn’t quite enough of a spitfire for this man; not enough like Lise herself.
Finn was batting at the bar on the bed, trying to hoist himself up.
“Mom, I want you to meet someone,” said Ana, lifting her mother’s hand and offering it to Finn. He looked at her, surprised, and James skipped a breath, wondering what Finn would do. He took the old woman’s hand, its dead weight, and looked at it against his own small fleshy hand, curious. James realized something: Finn was optimistic.
Ana lifted him up, placed him on the bed, his legs dangling. He turned at an awkward angle to see Lise’s face.
“Hello. It’s so lovely to meet you,” said Lise. Ana almost laughed: Her mother, to whom sobriety was once a special occasion, used to swear like a sailor and had never used the word “lovely” in her life. But these days, she sounded regal when she spoke. In her old age, she was becoming the daughter her own parents had prayed she would become. She had recited a psalm the other day, something Ana had no idea was inside her.
“He’s staying with us. There was an accident, and some friends of ours, uh, bequeathed him to us,” said Ana.
“Bequeathed?” James laughed.
“Well, how do you explain it?”
“We’re looking after him until his mother gets better,” said James, feeling an anxious twinge over the possible truth in that sentence.
Lise wasn’t going to make sense of the scenario. She stared out the window, frowning.
“Before you leave, can you ask the lady, the tall lady, if she’s finished with my camisoles? I give her my camisoles, and only the white ones come back, but I know there’s a black one.”
Ana pulled open the top drawer of the bureau to find the white camisoles, and several pairs of underpants, in a gigantic ball, as if her mother had been searching. “Mom, if you can’t find something, you have to ask for help.”
“I’m quite cold. I’d like my black camisole.”
“Well, let’s find it.” Ana dug down.
“God, maybe she’s right. That expensive one I bought her, the silk one, isn’t in here. Do you think someone would steal it?” Ana asked James.
“I doubt it. It’s probably just in the wash.” He hoped Ana wouldn’t find it and need to dress Lise. He dreaded his mother-in-law unclothed, her sunken chest and lazy belly, and Ana’s rough daughterly care.
“I think I have to ask.”
“Don’t. You’ll seem crazy and then, you know, that could make it hard for your mom.”
“What? You think they’ll punish her? Is that how this place works?”
Finn slid off the bed and stood between Ana’s legs, opening and closing drawers himself, imitating her slamming.
“Lise, would you like me to read to you?” asked James. It was the one task he enjoyed. It gave him something to do and broke the tension of Ana’s hovering. He used to bring Lise the kind of literature he believed women liked: The Age of Innocence, Beloved, The Color Purple. But his voice always sounded strange around women’s words, and soon he turned to Lise’s own stack of books, mostly self-help. They circulated on a library cart every couple of weeks.
“Do you have a preference? Eckhart Tolle? The Secret?”
“You can read her a banana sticker, it doesn’t really matter,” murmured Ana, opening the closet, stepping around Finn, who stayed close to her.
“Oh, I like that one,” said her mother.
James settled into the lounge chair. The print was enormous. “ ‘The world can only change from within,’ ” read James.
Ana didn’t bother to stifle a laugh. Finn had found Lise’s purple hairbrush and was brushing his hair slowly, in the center of the room.
Lana walked by the open door, quickly, as if hoping not to be caught.
“Excuse me,” said Ana, rushing toward the door. “Is it possible that my mother is missing some clothing? I bought her a very nice camisole and I can’t find it.”
Lana stood opposite Ana, eye to eye. “We do ask our clients’ families to label everything very carefully,” she said loudly. “But I can check. What color is it?”
“Black, and her name is sewn inside, just like you said.” As Lana walked away, Ana shouted after her: “It’s an Elle Macpherson!”
She turned to James. “Was that hostile? Am I imagining things?”
“Definitely hostile,” said James, turning back to the book: “ ‘When you are present in this moment, you break the continuity of your story, of past and future.’ ”
“James, are you even hearing what you’re saying?” Ana interrupted. “Really, do you think someone with dementia needs to be reminded to live in the present? The present isn’t the problem.”
Ana spread a throw over her mother’s upper half, and in return, Lise smiled a new, grotesque parody of a smile that she’d been trying out lately.
Ana leaned in to straighten her mother’s cardigan and saw, poking out of the back, the Elle Macpherson tag.
“Mom, you’re wearing the camisole,” said Ana, snapping the blanket in place.
“Ana, you can’t get mad at her,” said James.
Finn had dumped Ana’s purse into the middle of the room—keys, Kleenex, her phone, beeping with texts. He raised his arm in the air, a tube of lipstick northward, its red tip poking through the black casing.
Ana moved toward the lipstick. “Finn, no!” she snapped.
“Ana—don’t yell—” said James as Finn opened his mouth and smeared red over his lips.
“Jesus, Finn, that’s mine!” said Ana, grabbing the lipstick from his hands, trying to corral her objects of vanity, grasping for a rolling bottle of foundation.
“Oh,” said Ana’s mother. “What a pretty little girl!”
“Am I interrupting?” Charlie stood at the door, one hand on either side of the frame leaning in, as if stretching after a basketball game. James always thought of basketball when he saw Charlie. He always made sure not to stand too close to him.
“You’ve got a suit on today, huh?” said James, putting down the book.
Charlie pulled his tie up sideways, sticking his tongue out and bugging his eyes. Then he blushed a little. Ana was always surprised by his boyishness—the shaggy, rock star hair, the West Coast drawl. She had always thought of the church as a kind of elaborate hiding place, tunnels and spaces dug underground, with priests like little black ants moving and scheming far below the real world.
“How are you today, Lise?” he asked, moving into the room, standing near her, without raising his voice.
“Oh, I’m wonderful. My family’s here. My camisole is here!” she laughed.
“This is Finn. He’s staying with us for a while,” said James. Finn hid behind Ana’s legs.
“Ah. He has great taste in lipstick, I see. Nice to meet you, Finn.” Charlie turned: “Ana, I wonder if I could have a word with you in my office before you leave? Do you have time? Is that cool?”
“Go, go,” said James. Charlie’s use of the word “cool” irritated James. If some guy under thirty was saying “cool,” then clearly James shouldn’t be. “We’ll meet you in the lobby.”
Ana leaned over and kissed her mother on the cheek while the men looked away. Finn returned to Lise’s drawers, pulling out pantyhose and twisting them up around his arms.
As they walked down the hall together, Ana noticed the top of a small notebook jutting from Charlie’s back pocket.
“Sit down. But don’t look around too closely,” he said. The room was small and windowless, a desk and a bookshelf filled with stacks of science and philosophy, some spines in Hebrew. A guitar case leaned against the shelf. The desk was a puddle of papers ringed by a pair of mugs and a stack of cardboard coffee cuffs.
Charlie saw her looking at the cuffs and said: “I know. I keep thinking I’ll reuse them, but I never have. Not once.” He suddenly picked up the entire stack, opened a drawer, and with a dramatic flourish, dropped them in. Ana smiled.
“I can’t throw them out,” said Charlie. He shut the drawer.
“Is everything okay with my mom?” asked Ana.
“Oh, yeah, yeah. She’s doing fine.” He riffled through papers, searching. “The reason I wanted to talk to you—I’ve been writing these songs, and I’m actually going to be performing.”
“Oh, I didn’t know you did that,” said Ana, surprised. “I know you sometimes sing with the patients.…”
“I used to be in a band, a long time ago. This is just an open mic night, it’s not a big deal.”
Ana remembered all the songs that James had played for her over the years, the ecstasy in him, her own feeble efforts to match it. “I wish I were more musical. My mother was. She was always singing under her breath.”
“She still does,” said Charlie.
“Really?” Ana said, surprised. “I never hear that.” She looked at Charlie. “It’s primal, isn’t it? Some need to express oneself, to be heard.”
“Researchers have actually found that listening to music activates empathy in the brain. It gets you out of yourself,” said Charlie. “It’s almost the only way of communicating with some of the people here.” Ana knew those women, the advanced cases, who had lost language entirely. It had begun that way with her mother, searching for a word, an image, a name.
“It must be difficult to work here,” said Ana.
Charlie shook his head. “No, it’s not,” he said. “The managers can be assholes, but the people who live here—that part of it is easy.”
Finally, he found the paper he’d been seeking and handed it to Ana. A flyer for his show. “Anyway, I have these songs. I think they’re pretty good, some of them. Trying to spread the word.”
Ana attempted to imagine Charlie’s songs. She pictured holy rollers and heard hymns. “Are they—Christian songs?”
Charlie laughed. “Not in any way that’s creepy.”
“No, no,” said Ana. “When you say ‘songs,’ I think of love songs, and it’s interesting to me, you know, a priest—”
“I’m not a Catholic priest. I’m a chaplain.” He leaned in faux-conspiratorially: “I have girlfriends. I don’t right now, but you know, I hope to again. At some point.” The tops of his cheeks grew pink, reminding Ana of a time when handsome men became unstuck in her presence.
She glanced at the flyer. “I’ll try to make it. Thanks, Charlie.”
“Tell James, too,” he said. Ana stood to leave, and Charlie did the same. “I wondered …” he said. “Have you thought about what we were talking about last time I saw you?”
Ana cast around in her memory.
“Wait—what was it?”
“About your mother, about coming to terms with death.”
Now Ana remembered. The conversation had taken place in the lounge, during teatime. Lise had fallen asleep suddenly, and Ana was leaving when she ran into Charlie in the hall. They had sat for an hour or so among the old women in their wheelchairs, against the hot glass windows in the last days of summer. They talked as the kitchen staff cleared plates until only one woman was left, playing solitaire on her tray.
“Oh, yes. Epicurus, right? You were reading him—”
Charlie spoke in a comic, booming voice, as if auditioning: “ ‘Where death is, I am no longer,’ ” he said, “ ‘and where I am, death is not.’ ” The hamminess didn’t suit him, and quickly, the humor dropped from his face. He spoke quietly. “Did you want to borrow the book? Maybe you’d find it useful.”
Ana was ashamed to admit that she had left the conversation with a list of errands at the foreground of her mind. By the time she had made it through the organic market, her cloth bags overflowing with basil and farmer’s milk, Epicurus had evaporated. Even now, though Charlie had just spoken, Ana could feel the words’ meaning entering her and then immediately exiting. It angered her, this sensation that she could not contain anything of substance anymore. It explained, perhaps, this floating, this inability to come down, for what was there to land on? What did she really know?
“After I saw you, only a few days after, my friend died in a car accident. Finn’s father,” said Ana.
“Oh, Ana,” said Charlie. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s strange. Until you brought it up right now, I had completely forgotten our conversation. Why were we talking about death?”
Charlie raised an eyebrow, pointed out the open door of his office. A woman in a wheelchair inched past with an electronic whir.
Ana smiled. “Yes, but something specific. What was it?”
“Your mother. We had talked about her degeneration, and you said you were afraid for her.”
Ana started. “I did? I said that?” She closed her eyes for a moment. “I’ve been so tired lately.” With her eyes shut, she could sense that Charlie was looking at her face fully, maybe mapping the lines around her eyes, the groove of worry between her brows.
Ana opened her eyes. Charlie glanced away. She remembered the conversation. “And you talked about heaven.”
“I couldn’t sell you on it, so I tried Epicurus.”
“Tell the line to me again.”
Without irony this time, Charlie said: “ ‘Where death is, I am no longer, and where I am, death is not.’ ”
“Right,” said Ana, hearing it. “The ending of life can’t be feared, because there’s no there there. The cessation of suffering.” She paused. “But you—you think of bliss. Angels.”
Charlie laughed. “Not really. I think more about grace, being finally in God’s grace.”
