Everybody Has Everything (20 page)

This was how people did it, then—an ongoing exchange.

Mike appeared, put his arm around Jennifer’s shoulder. The girls had joined Finn on the porch. They, too, kicked at the leaves and squealed.

“Not in your socks,” said Jennifer, then rolled her eyes at the adults.

“Hey, Jimmy,” said Mike, clearing his throat, alerting James
to the fact that a speech had been prepared. “Listen, if you need any—you know. If we can do anything for you guys. With Finn, I mean. It’s a big change. We have a little experience with this stuff.” Jennifer laughed loudly, nodding.

“Thank you,” said James. “It’s going all right, but thank you.” His brother was never good with tenderness. It didn’t suit him. James wanted to point out that they lived only a half hour from each other but got together maybe three times a year, so how much, really, could they help? But alongside that first thought, James found himself moved by his brother’s awkward gesture. He tried to picture a future of commonality, devoid of the decades-long strangeness.

He rode on this idea as they gathered and moved toward the car at the top of the circular driveway. James knew that Mike and Jennifer’s three-car garage was filled. A fourth vehicle—a Lexus SUV—sat outside. The surfeit of parking spaces seemed like mockery. It was the first puncture in James’s warm mood, but he refrained from commenting.

Jennifer called something from the stoop. All three were buckled in. Ana rolled down her window, cupped her hand to her ear.

“I’ll resend you the video card!” called Jennifer.

“Great!” Ana called back.

Finn repeatedly pressed buttons on the electronic toy, a counting game, with red and blue lights, and a robot voice:
1! 2! 3!
They moved through the empty, wide streets, past the sylvan glade gardens, under the ancient trees. When they hit Bloor, the traffic thickened. Cranes and bulldozers sat unmoving by construction sites cordoned off with plastic, warning of disaster. Cars blew their horns at a taxi doing a U-turn.

“Did you get that video?” asked James.

“Yeah, I did,” said Ana.

“Me, too.”

Now was the time where they would usually dismember the evening for a solid hour or two. James would go first, noting how Jennifer referred to the girls as “Princess Sophie” and “Diva Olivia.” Then Ana would talk about the marble countertops, Mike’s crippling boringness. James might revel, once again, in the way that Jennifer had very specific opinions about very small things—the right temperature for drinking water; why Jay Leno is hilarious—but at the mere mention of politics, she left the room to fuss about in the kitchen. The kitchen. The excess.

But not that night. The venting had been neutered by the unavoidable, continuous kindness the family had shown them, by the way Jennifer had crouched down and whispered in Finn’s ear, ending the night with him in an embrace. Had that always been there? Had they just never seen it, never needed to call upon it until that moment?

“Did you have fun tonight, Finny?” James asked.

“Go see Mama,” said Finn. The beeping of the toys stopped.

Ana straightened; it was Jennifer, with her abundance of maternal warmth, who had triggered this yearning in Finn. It was seeing a real family in its chaos that made him miss Sarah.

“Go see Daddy,” said Finn.

“We can’t see them right now, honey,” said James. “I’m sorry.”

Ana looked behind her, expecting Finn to erupt, and why not? He must know he was at the center of a terrible injustice. He must be furious.

But he was simply staring out the window.

“Should we put on some music, Finny?” asked James, turning on the radio.

The three were quiet for the rest of the ride. James found a parking space right in front of their house but didn’t comment on it.

He carried Finn upstairs, leaving Ana to her work. She took the laptop to the breakfast nook. The sound of Finn in the bath moved through the floor above Ana’s head. Squealing and thumping, laughter.

Dim light from the inside of the house caught the yard, and something looked different to Ana’s glance. She leaned closer to the French doors. The men had been coming. James had not mentioned it, and with her late nights, she had been returning in the darkness and had not noticed. Day after day, while she worked in her tower, they had been transforming the yard. The limestone was laid, a gray skating rink in the center of the garden. A large red Japanese maple stood in a bucket, waiting to be planted. The perimeter was empty of plants but covered with rich, churned soil. These invisible men were determined to bring life into the place, even though winter was coming. They had been so late that James had negotiated a discount. No one used landscapers in this infertile season.

Something in the limestone unsettled Ana. She felt a tug of certainty that the hole was still beneath it, that a toe on a stone could break through the surface, pull her down into a muddy pit. This reminded her of Sarah, in her hospital bed, perched on the edge of the depths. The last visit had been the same: no change. Decisions were waiting for them, Ana knew. Decisions about Sarah, who had decided everything for them.

She pulled her face from the glass and turned to her e-mails.

Soon, there would be plants in the ground, or at least seeds. She should think about that instead. She reminded herself to look again tomorrow.

Ana didn’t want her personal life stuffed into files at her firm, so years ago, James had found a lawyer downtown whose two-room office was over a fish shop.

He went there first, to sign papers delivered from Sarah’s lawyer, whom he had visited the day before. That office had been fancier, in an office building, with a receptionist. Despite Sarah’s pigpen cloud of mess, and Marcus’s Zen-like quiet, it turned out they were affairs-in-order types. And now he, James, whose affairs had never been in order, had power of attorney over their family. He could see their bank account, which was healthy, and their credit card bills (Sarah charged $3.76 at Starbucks four or five times a week, which made James laugh). One day, he would be able to access that money. The insurance company moved along at its arthritic pace, but there had been a decent policy. If Sarah died, Finn would be rich, or richer than James.

All of these revelations were intimate and unwanted (Marcus was a careful, clever investor; their portfolio was almost as impressive as the one Ana had put together). As he met with each official and signed each document, James remembered the feeling of having sex with someone he didn’t love; a little part of him kept repeating: “I can’t bear this. I can’t do it. I’m the wrong guy.”

But as he was informed many times, Sarah was not dead. So this was just the preliminary hacking of the weeds of Sarah and Marcus’s life. The deep digging would come later,
if and when. For now: temporary guardians. Although the will clearly stated that Finn was to go to Ana and James, James couldn’t find an argument against the lawyer’s suggestion that they place notices in newspapers in major cities, and online, just in case there were complications later. He pictured Marcus’s father sitting at the table with his morning paper to find an ad: “Seeking grandparents for orphan child.” James tried to imagine the most monstrous things parents could do, and then he imagined those things happening to Marcus, calm and gentle Marcus. What was it? Prodded in basements, cigarettes burned out on his forearms. Something caused that little scar on Marcus’s face. He thought of Finn, all softness, and was struck by a future in which an older Finn would have questions. He would have to anticipate those questions and be ready. He would have to work, gather the stories of Finn’s life and have them waiting.

Unless Sarah woke up, of course. If Sarah woke up, then what? He tried to want this, because it was the right thing to want, and because of Finn, looking out the car window for his parents. But when he thought of Finn leaving, and the room becoming a guest room once again, he ached.

On the streetcar, watching the city take shape in the cooling gray light, he knew Ana would be anxious for him to return, still uncomfortable alone with Finn. This was how he saw her these days: waiting for him, hovering around windows and doorframes, needing him, something he always thought he wanted. That aloofness he had tried for years to break through had been replaced by some kind of anxiety he couldn’t placate. She was angry, too, at the mess in the house, the toys, the overflowing Diaper Genie. But he left the mess to her because only she could calm herself. He fucked things up, stacked
the dishwasher wrong, didn’t put the laundry in the bureau quickly enough. That was the conversation. He was tired of it. He was speaking less.

James stepped from the streetcar, moving with the crowd toward the hospital. At the second door, a security guard pointed at a dispenser of antibacterial soap. James’s first instinct was to refuse, as was his wont in the presence of a direct order, but the security guard issuing the order was bull-bodied and redheaded with a slack jaw and the bored arrogance of a bouncer. Then James spotted a withered old woman sitting on a bench, coughing into her curled waxed hand, sport socks pulled up to her green-veined knees. Eagerly, James hit the soap dispenser, slathered, and rubbed.

Up the elevator, along the painted footsteps on the floor. But he was following the wrong painted feet and suddenly they ran out. James found himself up against a pair of doors with ship’s portholes at the top; half of one of the painted feet was lost on the other side of the door. Only the heel remained. James pushed at the doors. They were locked.

He turned around and kept walking, following green feet this time and trying to make sense of the signs overheads. GR4–T76. The numbers and letters seemed random, something Finn would produce banging away on the computer.

Then he found the door, but inside, the bed was empty. He shut the door quickly. A machine on wheels, knobs and buttons, came crashing through the opposite doorway, and attached to it, a woman in scrubs.

“My friend was in here last week—”

“We’re repairing this part of the hospital.” She moved around him, pushing the cart. “Check at the nurses’ station.”

It seemed strange to him that certain ventricles in a hospital
could be closed when all he ever heard about was overcrowding and waiting rooms leaking unattended illnesses. He decided to take that as a good sign, then; some kind of lessening of the amount of suffering as a whole contained in the city. Of course, the other reading, he realized as he walked, was that there was the same amount of suffering, but nowhere to put it.

A nurse confirmed that Sarah had been moved to a ward. She no longer needed a private room because there was no private self, nothing that could be infringed upon, thought James.

Outside the correct door at last, he stopped a moment, took a breath, and then regretted it, the cold black coating of hospital chemicals settling over his lungs.

The curtain around Sarah’s bed was undrawn, and she lay on her back. Of the three other beds in the room, only one contained a person he could see, a middle-aged woman with dark hair, sitting up and watching television with headphones on. Another had the curtain drawn, but a murmur came from the slit, and feet passed below. An orderly gathered food trays. Because of this normal pulse of movement, Sarah looked a little out of place, entirely still in a room of movement, the last little house on a city street of skyscrapers.

Flowers sat on her bedside table. James picked up the card, both sides of the interior covered in the signatures of her colleagues in neat, teacher handwriting: “We are thinking of you.” “We’ll see you soon, Sarah!” The water in the vase was murky gray, the stems covered in slime.

James had been to visit three times, and each time, he left his coat on. He stood above Sarah, careful not to bump into the churning machines. The bruising had cleared, and she looked more like herself, except for the long black lines of stitches crisscrossing her face. Today, her head was flung back, mouth
open, crusted with white. She might have been a woman talking, frozen in midsentence. The tracheal tube running from the moist, gauze-covered hole in her throat was held in place by a white plastic collar (
Like something worn by a priest, or a cat
, thought James). Her hair was slightly matted, the roots grown out. James had never thought about Sarah’s hair, about the number of small decisions she made that led her to dye it so black. What was coming in, forming a slab along the side part, was gray, wiry.

“Finn’s doing great,” James said quietly, glancing back at the woman watching television. He crouched down and spoke directly into her ear. “We’re taking care of him. I don’t want you to worry.” He saw her hand, bonded to tubes and tape, and placed his own hand on it. Her fingers were warm, soft. It had been years since he had held another woman’s hand. He had become used to Ana’s poor circulation, her corpse fingers yellow-tipped from November to April.

“What would you like to know?” he said. On his last visit, the nurse had told him to talk to her, that it might fire up her brain, shake her to life. Online he had read of a teenage boy who woke up after months in a coma and said: “I hate that doctor. He called me a vegetable.”

“Finn’s funny. I bought him Pull-Ups, and we’re working on that. He has this dance he’s doing, pretty hilarious. He’s all—” James waved his free arm. The breathing machine whirred. “Bruce at the daycare says he’s doing really well. They went on a neighborhood walk and picked up fall leaves. They made these elaborate collages. You should see Finn’s. It’s clearly the best one. He’s a master gluer.”

James straightened the card on the bedside table.

“The Leafs suck, as usual. The economy—it’s not good. You
picked a good time to check out,” he said, laughed, then cleared his throat. “Sorry.”

He thought a moment. “We took Finn to my brother’s. He seemed to really like it there. They have an entire floor devoted to toys, so you can guess why he likes it. They also have four cars. Four!” James shook his head. “The parking downtown is still bullshit. There’s a systemic bias on Sundays, when the church people take up all the spaces on the block and the cops never ticket them. So last week I parked across the street, which is always no parking, right? And the parking guy was coming along and was about to write me a ticket. I couldn’t believe it. I ran outside—and hey, don’t worry, Ana was with Finn in the house, we wouldn’t leave him alone in the house—and I said: ‘Look, those church people don’t have permits, they park here for hours on Sunday, taking up all the permit spaces. Why don’t you ticket
them
?’ And you know what he said?” James dropped Sarah’s hand, which landed hard. He was pointing and poking the air. “He said: ‘We make exceptions for religious observation.’ What the fuck? Is this Iran or something? Aren’t we a secular state? I wanted to kill the guy, just smash him—” The woman with the headphones cleared her throat loudly. James turned and saw that she’d taken off her headphones and was exaggeratedly flipping through a magazine.