Everybody Has Everything (33 page)

“Yes,” he said.

James lifted him and put him on the stool. He looked down at Sarah. The marks of the stitches of her face had faded to pale shadows. Her hair was covered with a kerchief, pink and black, a gesture for Finn, James noted to himself; someone tried to cover her trauma so Finn wouldn’t be frightened.

Finn was silent, staring down.

“Say something, Finny,” said James quietly.

After a long pause, in his small voice, Finn said: “Mommy, hello.”

Sarah remained unmoving.

“Lean right over her,” instructed the doctor.

James tried to show the boy how to lean over the bar’s edge, and in helping him, James was close to Sarah, too, with Finn at her face and James at her torso, when the flicker happened. Sarah turned her head slightly, and the mother and son saw each other. It was palpable, this act of seeing. The moment of recognition consumed the room like a back draft of fire bursting through a doorway.

She opened her mouth, and the voice was rough and wooden: “Hi, love,” she said.

“Mommy,” said Finn, and he dropped his head onto her chest. Sarah’s eyes filled with tears.

James began laughing. Even as he pulled back and leaned against the wall, watching the two of them hold on to each other in disbelief, he could not stop laughing.

A
NA STOOD BY
the open door of Charlie’s office. She could see him, bent over his computer, his dress shirt untucked. She knocked lightly.

Charlie looked up and, at the moment of recognition, beamed.

“Ana,” he said. They went toward each other, extending hands, then fell into an awkward hug. Ana let herself be enfolded, breathing in the scent of Charlie’s neck.

“How are you?” she asked, pulling back. They stood close together in the small room.

“I’m okay.” He smiled. “Are you back for good?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“James has been in to see Lise a few times,” said Charlie. In their e-mail exchanges, Ana had given no details about why she had left. But it was clear that Charlie knew. She realized he was telling her about James’s visits for a reason; he was counseling her like a chaplain, nudging her toward her husband. “He brought Finn.”

Ana raised her eyebrows. “I didn’t know that.”

Looking at Charlie, hands in his pockets, grinning and blushing before her, Ana realized that whatever live current had been between them was snuffed out now. Ana saw Charlie’s youth, which had seemed at that last meeting in the bedroom such a thrilling unknown, as a liability. Her age was the same. The simple fact of time apart had broken their pull.
He was the smart young man taking care of her mother, ushering her through these last years, to the upcoming. That was all, and comforting in itself. She was another daughter of a patient, shackled by duty and love.

“How is she?” Ana asked, but the answer didn’t really matter. It was always the same: a little worse.

Ana asked after Charlie’s lethargic roommate and was pleased to hear he’d found work and had been separated at last from his couch. Charlie was going home soon, he said, to be with his parents for a week, out west. Ana described Montreal, the mountain in the middle of it, and the spring changing the trees.

She hugged him again quickly and turned to leave. She was almost out the door when he said her name.

Charlie went to his desk and pulled a CD from a drawer.

“I’ve been hanging on to this for you. It has the original of that song you liked, from that night at the bar.” Ana looked at the cover:
Lone Justice
. Lots of eyeliner on a pretty face framed by tendrils of blond hair.

“I got it used. No one’s really buying CDs anymore. You can get anything,” said Charlie. “It’s the last song.”

“Thank you. That’s very sweet,” said Ana, slipping the disc in her purse. She was grateful for the reminder of that beautiful song, and that evening she had needed so much, during the autumn of Finn.

In her room, Lise sat in a chair. Someone had placed plastic flowers on the dresser, of no determinate type, which had accumulated a thin layer of dust. Ana wiped the leaves with a Kleenex.

Lise’s recognition seemed to be moving in and out today, like a kaleidoscope brought to full length, then collapsed,
then back again, over and over. “How is James?” said Lise, pushing her hair (slightly dirty, Ana observed) behind her ears.

“He’s all right,” said Ana, sitting on the edge of the bed. “We’re not together right now.”

Lise nodded. Ana tried to interpret the nod: Maybe James had told her mother of their breakup, or perhaps she was remembering Ana’s explanation in the fall, or at Christmas. She wondered what James’s version of events would sound like, but her mother would never be able to recount that conversation to her, if it had happened at all.

“How’s your father? What’s his name?”

Ana laughed. “Mom, I haven’t heard from him in years.”

“Yes, I know. But what’s his name?”

“Conrad.”

“Yes, Conrad,” said her mother. “Conrad.” A wide look of pleasure came over Lise’s face, and she grinned. “Oh, Ana. We were at the beach. It was a very white beach, so hot that when I came out of the water, I couldn’t walk on the sand because it burned my feet.” Ana didn’t know where her mother was in this memory. Perhaps somewhere in Greece or Italy, years before Ana was born, when her parents were skimming the globe together.

“Did Dad carry you across the sand?”

Lise laughed. “Oh, no. I waited in the shallow part of the sea until the sun set. We both did. We sat down on our bums in the water and waited for the sand to cool.”

Ana squeezed her mother’s hand. Lise looked at her, and Ana could see the memory vanishing.

“I’m having a good day,” said Lise.

“Yes, I think you are.”

“Who are you?” The question would never cease to take away Ana’s breath.

“I’m your daughter. I’m Ana. You’re my mother.”

“I know that,” said Lise, snappishly. Then she sighed: “But not a very good mother.”

“You did the best you could.”

Lise looked over Ana’s head, toward the window, which was open, letting a warm breeze move across them both.

“I loved Conrad,” said Lise.

She looked back at Ana. “Oh my,” she said, as if startled by what she saw. Ana knew that she was always being seen anew by her mother, which might have been liberating, but somehow felt exactly the opposite.

Lise searched her daughter’s face and said, finally: “What are you so afraid of?”

Ana didn’t know how much meaning to ascribe to this question and suppressed the sensation that she was being had, searching for profundity where there was none. Any revelations were just the brain seizing and releasing, and not her mother at all. She tried to believe this.

“Do I seem afraid, Mom?”

“I loved being your mother,” said Lise. Ana nodded, bracing herself.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Lise, loosening her grip on her daughter’s hand. “Don’t be so afraid.”

James finished with the sunscreen and stood back to admire his handiwork. It was one of the first days hot enough to require lotion. James was now learning about Finn in spring, and what he needed: hats and sunscreen, water bottles and sandals.

Finn smiled up at him. James reached out and rubbed a white splotch from the boy’s nose.

“Ready, Freddy,” said Finn.

Sarah was sleeping upstairs in her bedroom. The day she came home from the hospital, six weeks earlier, James sat in the back of the medical van with her while Mike and Jennifer looked after Finn. Under the rim of her baseball hat, Sarah frowned at the fuss, but when they hit a speed bump and her wheelchair shifted lightly in its locks on the floor, she looked terrified. James moved into the house that day, without any discussion.

He had a few things in the spare room. During the day, he took Sarah to her appointments and Finn to daycare. Then he met with Doug at his offices, polishing a script for a new documentary about the politics of traffic.

The cat, returned from the house next door, lay on the pillow beside him while he slept. James was constantly rubbing fur from his mouth. When Finn and Sarah were asleep, James stayed up late with his laptop and the cat, fiddling with footage of Finn on the new editing software he’d bought.

His own house, his house with Ana, sat empty several blocks away. He was glad not to be there. For the first weeks that Ana was gone, friends had come by, not knowing what to say about the split. James fielded many calls, and a lasagna. People were sympathetic, but no one really knew what he had lost. He was now carrying sadness, the man who had never tasted of it, whose parents were alive, whose mother had survived carnage and spared him its description, refusing to burden him with even a single image. He knew now why she would die with that war inside her. He knew what it was to pretend anything for a child.

Sarah was like a dimmer switch slowly being turned to maximum, getting brighter every day. But there were ugly moments, too, bursts of anger followed by tears, and collapse. James took over then, cleaning the kitchen and bathing Finn, putting him to bed. But most nights, Sarah tucked him in alone, and James could hear her, singing: “ ‘You are the light in my dark world …’ ” The great mystery of the light song was solved—it turned out to be a song by an obscure eighties cow-punk band that even James had never heard of.

James brought his guitar over from the house and learned the song in a few minutes from the Internet. But Finn was indifferent to James’s performance. It turned out he cared about the singer, not the song.

When she was recovered, James would have to go. He couldn’t imagine returning to the house. Maybe Ana would come back from Montreal and want to live there. She had revealed no plans. The e-mails between them were polite; unadorned information traveling between machines.

“Ready, Freddy,” said James, picking up the bag containing a Mexican blanket and plastic containers of snacks. Finn put his hat on without a fight.

James was anxious to get Finn to the park and catch the good early afternoon light for his filming. The night before, Sarah had invited some former colleagues over for dinner. James had done the cooking so Sarah could rest and be ready. It was a gentle evening (everyone was afraid to be raucous, afraid of Sarah’s new softness), but after Finn went to sleep, James, Sarah, and the two high school teachers drank a glass of wine in the living room, and Sarah told the story of Finn’s birth.

James was determined to take this story back to Finn.

James locked the door behind him, and they headed down the street.

“You lead the way to the park,” said James, and Finn ran ahead. He was three now and had a good sense of direction.

In the distance, James saw a woman clutching a large bouquet of pink flowers. Finn stopped in front of her, and she crouched down, pulling him toward her. James picked up speed, his heart pounding. Since Halloween, he was prepared at any moment for rescue—and then he saw the woman rise. Finn turned and came running back toward him.

“Ana! James! It’s Ana!”

James felt short of breath. She got closer. Her blond hair was longer and her face a little rounder.
My Ana
, he thought.
My wife of a different substance. My vapor wife
. But she was really there, watching him. He ran his fingers rapidly across the raised scar on his knuckles.

She stopped, across from him but still far away. “Hi,” she said.

“You’re here,” said James.

“I’m sorry. I should have called. It was spontaneous. I wanted to see Sarah, but I didn’t know—”

“Let’s go to the park now!” said Finn, tugging on James’s sleeve. “Come! James! Come to the park! Ana!”

Ana stared at James. Bats flapped inside her torso.

Ana gestured at Finn, running ahead again. “You’re going out.”

“I promised him. We’re working on this movie and …” James rubbed his face, fumbling in Ana’s presence.

“Should I go to the house? Is Sarah there?” asked Ana.

“She is, but she’s sleeping. She won’t get up for another couple of hours.”

“Oh,” said Ana, looking down at the flowers in her hand. They seemed suddenly ridiculous.

“Do you—you could come to the park with us, and then, you know—come back after …” James had wondered how he would feel at such a meeting, and now he knew: He was famished for her. He didn’t want her to go yet. He needed to show her that he was not the bleeding mess she’d left in November, and that even then, he hadn’t been the mess she’d presumed. He wanted a chance.

Ana smiled. “I’ll come,” she said.

Finn reappeared and chatted as the three walked to the park. He and James had banter: “Tell Ana about the goose at the farm.” “It had a bad foot!” said Finn. “Tell Ana about your favorite color.” “Green!” “What things are green?”

Ana was impressed. He had found his gift. For the first time, she didn’t feel excluded. It wasn’t her failure; it was their victory.

She thought suddenly how in all their time together, there must have been a moment where that other life would have been possible. If they had been able to have a child easily, or accidentally, then maybe the propulsion would have kept them aloft. They would have been like everybody else, never looking down because they wouldn’t have had to. But without either of them noticing, that moment had passed. Motherhood had passed. They got this instead.

Ana felt the sun on her face and heard the sounds of other people’s children, and she didn’t want to mourn anymore.

She stood back, holding the pink flowers and James’s bag as he pushed Finn in the swing. Then his phone rang, and he called to her: “Can you take over?”

“Sure, sure,” she said, putting the bag on a bench.

“Higher, Ana!” cried Finn as Ana pushed him, glancing at James, pacing under the tree with his phone. She startled at the sight of James’s arm in his T-shirt, the twist of muscle and lean forearm. She knew every inch of that arm and felt like she was seeing a part of her own body that had been hidden away under a cast for months.

“It was Doug,” said James, putting his BlackBerry in his pocket, returning to take over. But Finn had found a daycare friend and was immersed in sandcastle building. Ana and James sat on a bench, side by side.