Соавторы: Katrina Onstad
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“We’ll be downstairs, Finny. Ann’s going to play with you for a little bit,” said James. Ana was already on the stairs.
“Did you hear that dig about my job?” whispered Ana.
“At least you have a job,” said James.
They sat on the couch. The coffee Ana had prepared grew cold on the table in front of them. Ann Silvan had left a tiny bite mark in a Leibniz cookie.
“I really hope she’s not sexually abusing him up there,” whispered James.
“Don’t. I’ll start laughing,” said Ana.
“She could be nasty. What do we know about her? We should go to her house with a little pad of paper and fucking—”
The door upstairs opened, and Finn came hopping down the stairs, both feet on each step. James leaped up to monitor his descent. Ann Silvan followed.
“Everything seems good,” she said, moving toward the coatrack in the hall. Ana rose from the couch, surprised.
“I’ll write up my report. I know you’re seeing the lawyer in a couple of days, correct?” Her black coat had a massive fur collar. Ana looked for eyes in it as Ann and James exchanged information and schedules. Finn sat on the bottom stair folding a plastic robot, trying to turn it back into a truck.
“Can I ask you a question?” said Ann, with her hand on the door.
“Of course,” said James, fear rising up to his shoulders. This is when they take him.
“Are prices dropping in this neighborhood, since the crash? Where we are, things have really fallen.” James exhaled.
“Where are you?”
“Out in the east end. Downtown was the way to go, wasn’t it? We should have stayed downtown.”
James felt embarrassed now. His home suddenly seemed designed solely to humiliate this social worker.
“Well, Ana’s the one in charge of the money. She knew it was a good investment. We’re, you know, lucky,” said James.
“Yes, you are,” said Ann Silvan. Ana searched the comment for a sneer, to no avail. Ann crouched down to Finn’s level. “I’ll see you soon, Finn. Be happy.”
James had the telephone tucked under his chin.
Ana, on the other end of the line, spun around slowly in her office chair, picturing the house where James stood. She knew that the housekeeper had left two hours ago and that by the time she got home, one basket of folded laundry and shiny floors would be the only signs of her efforts. It was constant, the garbage bags and diaper bins full, then empty, then full. What went into the body came out of the body, into Finn’s pants, onto towels and cloths. The small, environmentally friendly washing machine for two, tucked behind a door in the corner of the kitchen, was suddenly ridiculous, barely able to contain all the secretions he generated. Then they migrated to James, handprints on his T-shirts and stained-cheek imprints on his sweaters.
“I have to go to the lawyer’s,” said James, crunching Cheerios under his stocking feet. Finn was picking up the ones that didn’t get crunched and stacking them, placing the occasional Cheerio in his mouth. “You need to take Finn in the afternoon—”
“James, I’m working. I need to get my hours up this week. I took the afternoon off last week. Can’t he go to daycare?”
“It’s not his day. You can’t just drop them when you want. It’s not a kennel.”
“Can we get a babysitter? I can’t miss any more work—”
“It’s one afternoon. Tell them you have another doctor’s—”
“I’ve missed drinks twice—”
“Jesus, really? Drinks?”
“It’s marketing. It’s part of the job.”
James pictured Ana in that chair in front of her computer, spinning and spinning.
“You have to be back here by two.”
Ana paused. “I have another call.”
In the afternoon, James waited for her, circling near the living room window, checking his watch. Finn babbled and hummed, pulling books off shelves and flipping through them, then chucking each opened book over his shoulder.
At 1:45 in her office, Ana tried to look like she was going to be returning later. She put her jacket over her arm in a casual way, as if she might be picking up a coffee. On the elevator, she thought of the women who had come back from maternity leaves and requested flexible schedules, part-time. It was a vocabulary Ana didn’t exercise, though theoretically, she sided with that litigator who had brought up on-site child care (but thought the gym they ultimately put in was better). That litigator was long gone now.
When Ana’s cab pulled up, James was waiting at the door. He shot her an angry look: “I’m going to be late,” he said.
Ana shut the door, removed her coat. Then she noticed Finn, leaning against the credenza, looking up at her.
“Oh, hi,” said Ana.
“Park?” he asked.
“Sure. That sounds fine. Let me just check my e-mail.”
Finn said again: “Park?” His request seemed utterly democratic, as if it would go out to anyone he met. Ana nodded.
She clicked her BlackBerry as they walked.
What Ana noticed first at the playground was that the parents outnumbered the children. She had brought along an ethics committee report on soybean seeds, picturing herself getting a little reading in while Finn played. If Emcor had patented these seeds, which were living things, what did it mean for other kinds of seeds? “Higher life-forms”—she had been investigating this phrase for days. There were issues of cloning and sperm banks. Could people be manufactured and trademarked, too? Ana was sure that one day the law would kick a hole in the government’s feeble protections. She was sure that if she assembled the information correctly, Emcor could do whatever it liked.
It immediately became clear, as Ana and Finn opened the park’s iron gate and set forth, that reading did not happen here. The mothers shadowed their children, digging bigger ditches in the sand next to the children’s smaller ditches, boosting them onto the slides, scooping them up from the bottom of the slides. Where the kids went, the mothers were already there, their invisible sensors beeping, rushing ahead to intervene.
The first blow of winter was upon them, and a few kids had on hats. One Chinese girl wore a scarf, winter boots, gloves. Ana looked at Finn, who walked a little ahead of her. He wore a fleece jacket, sneakers. Ana wondered if he was cold, but what if? What could she do about it? She decided not to ask him.
“Want to go swing,” said Finn in his caveman dialect. Ana nodded, feeling a knot of anxiety as they approached the swings. They were all filled, but a mother was extracting a child—a baby, really; a baby on a swing! thought Ana—from one little bucket seat. Ana walked toward it quickly, with Finn in tow. She was lifting him up, always surprised by his weight, when a frizzy-haired woman appeared beside her.
“Excuse me, we were waiting for that,” she said. “There’s a line, actually.” She punctuated this sentence with a smile as insincere as a mime’s. Ana looked around, and sure enough, there were two other mothers lined up a few feet away, gazing into the distance, pretending not to notice the confrontation.
“Sorry, I really didn’t know,” said Ana, lifting out Finn. He started to scream. “Swing! Swing!” She held him in space, and his running shoes kicked at Ana’s thighs. “My turn! My turn!” Snot. Tears.
“Finn, no, I’m sorry. I didn’t know, I didn’t know,” said Ana, trying to put him on the ground. He threw his arms around her neck and his legs around her torso, refusing to let go, his wet face gumming to her neck.
Where Finn had tried to sit, the other kid swung cheerfully, pushed by her blank-faced mother.
Ana found a bench, sitting them down, lightly patting Finn’s heaving back as he whimpered.
A woman next to her lit up a cigarette. She was a little heavier than the other moms, and older, with a battered quality in the ridges of her face. There was no makeup on her eyes, but they were bright.
“I know Finn,” she said. “He goes to daycare with Etta.” She gestured at the Chinese girl in the hat, digging in the sand with her mittens.
Finn heard this, peeked out from Ana’s chest, his breathing slowing.
“Where Etta?” He spied the girl sitting in the sandbox and slid off, ambling toward her. Because Etta’s mother was sitting, Ana decided it would be okay to sit, too, wiping Finn’s wet marks from her neck with a Kleenex.
“How’s he doing?” asked the woman. Ana appreciated the directness of the question.
“He’s good, I think,” said Ana.
A father appeared, bracketed on either side by toddler boys. The littler one licked sand from his palm like sugar.
“You’re not allowed to smoke here,” he said. “And is that your dog?” A dog tied to the fence near the gate offered a bark for emphasis. The woman squinted up at him.
“First of all, I’m hardly blowing smoke in your kid’s face, and secondly, the dog’s tied up,” she said with that same matter-of-fact voice. “Call the fucking parks board if you have a problem.”
The man paled. “You’re very rude,” he said.
“Your kid’s eating sand.” She took a long, dramatic drag on her cigarette and blew the smoke straight out in front of her like a finger.
The man gathered his children, and they tottered away. Etta’s mother butted the cigarette with her foot, then picked it up and peeled off the paper. She sprinkled the last tobacco into the garden behind her, and placed the filter and paper in her pocket. “And how are you doing? Are you his aunt?” she asked.
“No, no, we’re just … friends of Sarah’s,” said Ana.
“Kids of your own?”
“No,” said Ana, wondering when this question would stop making her feel as if someone had just torn off the shower curtain while she was midscrub.
“Well, then, you’re probably really enjoying the park,” said Etta’s mother, with a grim smile.
“It definitely feels like a scene,” said Ana.
“Don’t talk to anyone about vaccinations or breastfeeding.”
“Good to know. Thank you.”
Ana noticed that Etta had made her way to the jungle gym, where she stood banging her head against a post over and over, laughing.
“We don’t know what it was like for her before …” said the woman, standing up.
“Before?”
The girl stopped her banging and returned to digging next to Finn.
“In China. They showed us the orphanage, and it was pretty nice, but now we’re hearing that’s not where they lived at all. They really kept them in a shed or something,” she said, and then looked at Ana and smiled darkly, shrugging.
“That must be—” said Ana. “You must worry.”
“What can you do?” she said, lighting another cigarette, offering one to Ana, who shook her head no.
“There are these cases now, where it turns out the kids weren’t actually given up in the first place. You know that whole ‘foundling by the side of the road’ idea?”
Ana nodded.
“Seems that might be a little exaggerated. Maybe some guy drives up on a moped, while the mother’s cooking or cleaning, and he just snatches the baby off the porch, sells her to an orphanage for a thousand bucks, which is a lot of money over there.”
“Jesus,” said Ana. “How do you know?” She pictured the adoption forms, unsigned, waiting in her desk at their house. Then she saw James in a long winding line marked RETURNS AND EXCHANGES, the last of hundreds of white people clutching Chinese babies, taking them back like defective sweaters.
Finn and Etta were pulling each other’s hair now. Ana didn’t know if the squeals meant pain or delight. She was about to say something—but what?—when the mother yelled: “Etta! No!”
Ana tried again: “So how do you know? What will people do?”
“Eh,” said the woman. “We love her. There’s very little to do but that.”
She picked up a courier bag from the bench. At this gesture toward leaving, Ana was filled with desperation.
“My name’s Ana,” she said suddenly, surprising herself. It was the kind of awkward introduction she suspected little children were enacting every few minutes on this exact playground—a proclamation, mired in need. But this woman had loosened a stream of loneliness that Ana hadn’t realized was hidden beneath all the events of the past few weeks. What she felt now, in this park, as Finn dug in the sand, was that she missed Sarah. She was aware of how selfish it was, but she missed Sarah’s friendship for herself. She missed her kindness. And if Sarah were back, if Sarah woke up, then Finn would be secure again, and Ana would be released. Sarah.
“Nice to meet you,” said the woman. “I’m sure we’ll see you here again.” She began to walk off, and Ana, stung by rejection, looked away, up at the trees, considering all the hurt feelings circling a playground. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the woman stop after a few steps, perhaps confronted by her own embarrassment, wondering how much sympathy to give, what shape she should lend to this tragedy. Ana saw her waver and root around for her better instincts. She left Etta to the sand a moment longer and returned to Ana’s side.
“I’m Jane,” she said. “I don’t think I said that. And, uh, you know—good luck with this. I’m sure it’s tough.”
Ana nodded, blinking back her gratitude.
With his friend gone, Finn came to Ana and stood close to her legs, fingers in his mouth. He seemed to be scanning the playground for the next distraction.
“What should we do, Finn?” asked Ana.
He pointed outside the iron fence, in the general direction of the open park, toward trees and far-off tennis courts. As they walked, he held out his hand, and Ana took it. She gripped the warm palm tightly.
Finn led her to a large tree and pointed up at the squirrels. There were two chasing each other around the trunk, first the brown one after the black one, then, with no warning, an unspoken shift, and the black one began chasing the brown one, furiously fast, their tails bobbing, ducking, and weaving. Finn was laughing and pointing, and Ana laughed, too, brought up by his lightness.
“Silly!” cried Finn.
“They are silly,” said Ana. “Ridiculous.”
Finn was laughing so hard he dropped her hand and placed his palms on his stomach like a small Santa Claus, shaking with giggles. Suddenly, Ana leaned down and hugged him. The gesture was a surprise to her but not to Finn, who separated from her embrace and then came in for another hug immediately, as if love was entirely expected.
October
ANA ROSE AT 6 A.M. in the darkness. She changed into her running gear in the bathroom so the light wouldn’t wake James. But also, she was hiding her body a little bit, not out of shame but fatigue, knowing that if he saw her naked leg, her toe extended en route to a sweat sock, he would rise sleepily and grab her, try to knead her flesh until it gave way to his. She would acquiesce, usually, and then the order of the morning would be flung apart, the pieces falling in the wrong place. This was James unemployed, always grabbing at her, rubbing up against her in the kitchen, in the foyer, winking when Finn appeared to quell things. Ana found it distasteful, drawing the child into some adult fantasy, the turn-on of the forbidden. If she indulged James so early in the morning, she would live with a tilted feeling all day.
The door to Finn’s room was open. Ana peered in at him, so small on the double bed. In the light from the hall, she saw that he had kicked off the quilt and lay sprawled on his stomach like a starfish, his back rising and falling. Ana shut the door, but after walking down the staircase, she questioned this gesture, wondered what fears he might have in him that only light could slay. She returned, opened it slightly. The boy had flipped onto his back, his arms still sprawled.
Outside, Ana felt the crack of the day opening wide as she ran. The streets were cold; she should have worn gloves, a hat warmer than the baseball cap on her head. She ran north, up the slight hill, past the houses that were beginning to rattle and stir. A light on here, a light there. She saw an old gray woman at a window, sipping from a mug. This woman lived only three houses from Ana, but Ana had never seen her on the street, did not know her name. She ran a little faster.
By the brothel house, a bag of garbage sat inside a recycling bin. It was always the dirtiest house on the block, the darkest. She could imagine, though, that when it went up for sale, it would go for near a million, just for the property itself, which had a huge parking pad at the side and a long elegant oak. The house would be razed. Something new would rise in its place, probably a modern echo of the houses around here, a gray concrete and glass structure with a winking Victorian sloped roof. A yard surrounded by imported grasses, sustainable and expensive. Ana could see in her mind’s eye exactly this oncoming glass house and thought: Fingerprints. All those fingerprints.
As she crossed Harbord, she saw the lights flicker on in a coffee shop. Her heart was beating fast now, and her fingers weren’t cold anymore. She never ran with music because she wanted to hear the city, really hear it, and she did. A dog barking, the whir of the streetcar. She thought of her work, of all the patent violations waiting for her. She passed an older couple, their arms linked cautiously, galoshes on their feet in anticipation of some weather Ana did not know was coming. They walked slowly. Ana tried to imagine herself and James as old as this, as entwined and frail.
What she had not imagined when she married was that love would turn out to be in constant movement, that it crept alongside most of the time but sometimes dove down, down into depths that Ana did not fear, but found repulsive, black, unwelcome. She knew that what they had was substantial, that it would rise again, break the surface to the light, but she was still angered by how often it left her. She had not known that she would have this in common with her own parents, who finally missed it too much, who could not bear its absence, and so split apart. But Ana did not want that. She did not want to be too weak to keep up with love. She needed to be stronger, to call it back to her. But she was so afraid, afraid of what it had become while it was away from her, afraid of what had gathered along its spine in the murk below, afraid she would not recognize its shape when it returned.
She thought of Finn, sleeping, and was relieved not to be there when he awoke. What was it in her? She wanted Finn safe, she wanted him clean, she wanted him fed, happy. She wanted all the things you want for any other person, known or unknown, simply because you are both human, and alive together at this shared moment. But that was not the same as mothering. She knew it was not. She thought of Sarah with him, and she could not match her. She could not match her sonar, the way her eye was always on him even as she spoke, that every gesture was infused with Finn, for Finn, about Finn, in spite of Finn. Then she realized that James was like this now, too. James had developed the same animal instinct. Yesterday, James had handed the boy his sippy cup before Finn asked for it. He changed him fast and exactly when it needed to be done. Finn stood in front of James in the morning, waiting for James to zip his jacket. Why could she not feel his needs in the same way? When would it come?
Ana sprinted around the park, passing the same homeless woman in her sleeping bag twice. Another runner overtook her, striding on great long legs like a spider. Ana didn’t want to trail him and turned away from the park, taking an eastern street, past houses more expensive and older than her own, with beveled glass windows and huge stoops. The streetlights were old-fashioned, fake gas lamps. The sun was high now, the frost melted. Everything around her caught in an autumn gleam.
And then she had an image of her mother with her reading glasses on. The two of them, mother and daughter, toe to toe on the couch in the rental apartment with books on their laps. The images came at her like a deck of cards being shuffled: Her mother stroking her hair when her father left, whispering—but what? What did she say? Ana remembered only the stroking and the dimming of the roar when she was resting against her mother, looking up at the African violets.
And then: Her mother taking her to a party where she met Mordecai Richler, and in the cab home, her mother said, “Something to tell your children about.”
She had been loved. She had known a mother’s love, its touch and glance. And so, then, she could now recognize its absence.
What had she expected, exactly? Why had she endured all those gynecological appointments at 7:30 in the morning, on her way to her work, day after day? James would talk about what would come after, when the appointments bore out: pee-wee baseball games, and summers out of the city, and the kind of idyllic childhood his brother could never pull off for his own kids even with all that money. And Ana had thought: Yes, if I do it, if I build it, then I will live in it, and it will become a home, a life. It will. It will. She ran. But now they had Finn and she thought: It is possible to fail at this. It is possible to fail at loving a child. Why doesn’t anyone tell you that?
At the house, James was cooing into Finn’s ear, then leading his sleepy body to the bathroom, changing his wet Pull-Up, wiping him down. James had decided to move him from diapers to Pull-Ups. He had been accumulating information on toilet training from the Internet and had bought a potty. He felt ready to usher Finn to the next stage. For now, the potty sat unused in the corner of the bathroom with a rubber duck on it.
It was a good morning: no fussing, no anger. They hummed along, eating cereal together at the kitchen island, Finn’s legs swinging. Ana barreled into this, covered in sweat, panting.
“Ana!” said Finn. James could sense something fierce in her this morning. She let off a hum of agitation. She waved before heading upstairs. When Ana returned, quickly, she was dressed and made up. James and Finn were now on the ground surrounded by plastic dinosaurs. Finn wore pajamas, and James his equivalent: boxers and a thin, shapeless Nick Cave T-shirt.
“He goes, yeah, kill! Kill! He goes nooooo!” said Finn.
Ana ate her yogurt.
“We have to go to Mike’s tonight,” said James, grunting as he rolled onto his back.
“Oh, God. What time?”
Ana picked up the empty cereal dishes from the counter, wondering what would happen if she didn’t. Would they be sitting there at the end of the day when she returned from work? How much would get done if she didn’t do it? She could never bring herself to attempt this experiment, knowing her own fury when James failed her.
After putting away the dishes and wiping the counter, Ana moved through the room, putting drawings in a drawer, making a stack out of the loose books. A broken crayon stopped her; she got a broom, a dustbin.
“I’ll do it,” James murmured, lying on his back. “Go to work.”
Ana rattled the garbage can loudly.
“Have a good day,” she said. Finn looked up as the door slammed shut.
“You never replied to our Thanksgiving video!” Jennifer spoke with her back to James and Ana. As she rooted in the refrigerator, her behind, round and denim-clad, appeared like a separate comic act: the talking behind. She emerged upright, a little flushed, holding an armload of juice boxes. James leaned in and shut the refrigerator door, which was covered in the same white recessed paneling as the cabinets. The kitchen held two refrigerators—one for cans of soda and beer, the other for food; wine was in its own separate climate-controlled refrigerator—but stealthily. All the appliances were hidden away. The kitchen had reached a point where mess was self-eviscerating.
“There,” said Jennifer, and just the slightest hint of Newfoundland leaked out: “Dhere.” The children gathered around, the two girls and Finn, who was wearing fairy wings. The three heads bobbed and sucked the juice, then scattered. “We made it on this website. I can’t remember what it’s called. Didn’t you get it? Sophie’s head was on the turkey? Olivia’s this big tree …” James and Ana shook their heads, murmuring shared obliviousness. “Oh, darn it. I’ll see if Mike can find it before you go. It was hilarious. I really thought I put you on the list …”
As if summoned, Mike appeared beside his wife. Ana was always struck by their physical similarity, except in opposite sizes. Both had a kind of ruddy plainness, with wide unblinking eyes and a smattering of freckles across the bridges of their noses. Mike was taller than James, though years at the computer had caused him to fold at the neck, collapsing his upper half. Jennifer was the kind of small that made Ana feel gargantuan; she had a little-boy body except for her large breasts, breasts that had been feeding babies for years, it seemed. Their eldest, Jake, was sleeping at a friend’s house, a reward for completing a tournament of some kind.
It had been silently agreed, years ago, that James was a bad uncle, not only for lack of trying, but because he couldn’t stay on top of the volume of accomplishment that rushed out of the large brick house. Everyone was gifted. Everyone was a genius. What happened to such people in adulthood? No one ever said: Meet my friend, Dave. He won an award for Best Handwriting. The future pointlessness of all these accolades made it hard for James to respond in the present. Driving home from evenings at Mike and Jennifer’s, fuming, he delivered the same anecdote: “Studies have proven it’s the B students who run the world.” But that morning, when he saw Finn scribble on a piece of cardboard and hold it up for offer, he understood, just a little, the full force of parental pride, the greed for a child’s future. He understood, for the first time, why his brother and his wife bored others so relentlessly.
“Can we help?” Ana asked, nodding toward the woman at the sink, her apron tied tight around her waist, dividing her body like the twisted end of a wrapped candy. The plates from dinner formed a tall pile, tilted at an angle from all the uneaten food between them. The carcass of a large chicken spilled its bones greasily over the edge of a white serving plate.
“Oh God no. That’s what we pay her for. Right, Julie?” said Jennifer. The young, dark-skinned woman looked over and smiled, holding up her yellow washing gloves as evidence.
The four began to walk out of the kitchen, which took a while, passing the large marble island, the rack of gleaming pots and pans raining down from the ceiling.
“Did you get a new countertop? Something’s different,” said Ana, stopping in her tracks.
“You notice everything, Ana,” said Mike, leading her back to the island. “We couldn’t take the granite anymore. It seemed really dated. Maybe it was an indulgence, but we thought, Let’s go marble. Now or never.”
“Now or never” was one of Mike’s favorite expressions. James could never figure out what the hurry was. Mike’s life seemed entirely ungoverned by clocks. He had worked at home for the past few years, since the sale of his company. Once, after an occasionless bottle of four-hundred-dollar wine, James had asked his brother to describe, in detail, a week in his life. It was worse than James had imagined, involving early-morning online trades, sailing lessons, an Italian tutor, a trainer. The children were shuttled to and fro by a squadron of nannies and housekeepers. A couple of times a week, Mike did this job himself, to stay “connected.” James thought of him in his luxury minivan with the TV screens blaring, idling as the girls jumped out and ran up the steps to the private French school. He pictured Jake wending his way across the grassy concourse of his Eton-like campus while Mike waved at him at the end of the day, cranking up his $10,000 sound system, listening to music he’d downloaded not because he liked it, but because it appeared on lists as Most Downloaded. Beyoncé. Jack Johnson. Mike had always been without taste, and in James’s eyes, this made him wispy and unsubstantial, despite his height. James was held together by his preferences, his books and movies, his loud opinions on politics and art.
Jennifer existed to provide shape, to ground this dangling way of living. She had always worked, and always would, she said, even when there was no need. The need, as she saw it, was on the other side, from the severely handicapped adults to whom she administered physical therapy at a rehab center. James had never asked her to describe her week. Rarely did anyone inquire about those men and women (swollen tongued, pants wet—James turned away from the image), but they loomed somehow, shadowy in the vastness of the house. The knowledge of Jennifer’s hands on their gnarled bodies every day, morning to night, was a relief to all who visited there, pleased to know that some sense of purpose still propelled this couple through their days.
Right after the accident, Jennifer had sent James links to papers on the importance of physical rehabilitation during “coma vigil,” a new phrase for Sarah’s unroused sleep. James had been grateful and was reassured by a nurse that yes, every day, they were moving Sarah’s limp arms and legs as often as they should be. But it was “coma vigil” that stayed with him. His vigil was for Finn. James was keeping watch over Finn while Sarah lay in her darkness, enduring other women’s hands rearranging her scarecrow limbs, while her son was someone else’s devotional object.
