Everybody Has Everything (12 page)

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?”