Everybody Has Everything (11 page)

The credits of the television show moved across the screen.

“Mommy, more TV. TV on,” said Finn, not taking his eyes from the screen.

“Sure, tomorrow,” said Sarah. “Can you press the Off button now?”

Finn stood up and pressed the button.

“Good job, Finny! Good job!” said Sarah, clapping. His jeans had little loops on the side, like he might be doing carpentry later. They were about an inch too short.

“I can’t seem to get the sizes right,” said Sarah as Ana glanced at the pants. She opened her arms for her son to run into. “Everything he owns is either way too big or way too small.” The boy took a kiss on the head, then disentangled himself and ran toward a pile of blocks in the center of the room, beginning to stack only the blue ones. Ana wondered if Finn learned these things at daycare—stacking and sorting. She couldn’t imagine him at daycare three mornings a week, away from Sarah, though apparently he went. She had never seen them apart.

“Did you notice how I didn’t say n-o to him when he asked about the TV?” said Sarah in a low voice. Ana nodded. “I’ve been reading up. You say: Yes, later, or yes, tomorrow, instead of n-o-t now. It’s a tactic. It confuses them, offsets the meltdown.”

Ana felt a little sorry for Finn, unwitting citizen of a country of deferred pleasure. The block tower teetered.

“I think James might be depressed,” said Ana. “He reminds me of my mother these days.”

“What, is he drinking?”

“No, it’s something else. He’s just not”—Ana struggled—“alive to the world like he used to be. Does that make sense? James has never had any bad luck.”

“Do you think it’s only bad luck?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, don’t take this the wrong way, but James has a kind of … certainty that might be hard to work with,” said Sarah carefully. “You know what I mean. I mean, we love James because we know him, but I wonder, in a workplace, if that could be …”

Ana felt a touch defensive on James’s behalf, but she knew that Sarah was right, and the certainty she referred to was, in fact, arrogance. James had left the university when he became a hot young pundit, in high demand after a seminar he designed on the decline of masculinity made him an expert on men. He had a national newspaper column and a radio show by thirty, and then ten years on TV, hosting this and that, called upon to air his views on any subject. James always had an opinion: the return of debauchery, the need for a new waterfront, why hockey matters. Somewhere in there was the book about cultural identity. Oh, James had been so proud at that book launch, but there had only been two trays of cheese. The lack of cheese was the first sign that, as an author, James had arrived late to the party. Store shelves were already heaving with books on cultural identity. No one bought James’s. He went back to television, a little stiffer, a little meaner.

“I worry about him,” said Ana, but the reason went unsaid because, suddenly, Finn burst into tears. Sarah was on him instantly. Ana watched: Sarah identified the problem—the collapsed tower—and talked to him quietly through his screams, asking him questions: “What can you do to make this better? You don’t like it when things you build break, do you?”

Out of habit, Ana imagined herself with a child that age. She stored away Sarah’s wisdom and words, trying to picture
herself applying them later. But the picture was fainter now than it had ever been. Any child to come would not be hers, in all likelihood. This hypothetical child might even be out there right now, floating in a woman’s belly in a faraway country, being carried through a rice field, out of the hot sun. The image didn’t excite Ana, or sadden her. It seemed absurd; the stuff of science fiction, of a future she hadn’t arrived at yet.

She looked again at Finn being stroked in Sarah’s arms and tried to envy it. She knew how James felt when Finn was nearby: She had seen his face, for once entirely drained of rage. After dinner with Sarah and Marcus, she watched her husband on the porch as Finn was wheeled away, sadly waving good-bye at the stroller. Ana rooted around for some feeling to match James’s but came up with only a casual affection for this boy, for all boys, a mild curiosity that didn’t demand investigation. Hadn’t there been a time when the sight of a pregnant woman had caused her to look away, yearning? Hadn’t she hidden in that hotel room after the final miscarriage and wept? A chill crept over her body: She needed to find that person again, or James would be lost to her.

When Finn calmed, scurrying toward a basket of clean laundry on the edge of the room, Sarah returned to the couch, rolled her eyes at Ana, and looked expectant, waiting for her to start the conversation where it had stopped. Ana admired Sarah’s silences; they had a kind of presence, like rooms she was inviting Ana into.

“I feel like …” said Ana, groping for it. “I feel like I miss him. I miss something we were.” She was remembering the previous night, how she had returned home and James was gone, as usual. He had made some kind of silent commitment to not being home when she got home, as if to sustain the
scaffolding of the life before he got fired. Ana did not ask him where he went.

In the immediate wake of the firing, there had been meetings, interviews, and then a long late-night conversation about James taking “a break.” Perhaps they could live off her salary while he tried his hand at fiction, maybe wrote a script on spec for a hard-hitting cop show about the politics of downtown living. Ana trod delicately while they spoke, knowing James did not want to hear anything but yes, yes, yes, that he saw everyone but her huddled together against him in a giant no. They could afford for James not to work, after all, because Ana had always made more money, and because, most of all, they didn’t have children. Neither of them said this, but it was there, breathing between the lines of the conversation.

James had come in after Ana had changed from her dress into blue jeans and a T-shirt, was pouring herself a glass of white wine and standing at the back French doors, looking out at the churned-up garden, still unfinished. The landscapers had vanished around the time James lost his job.

James slammed the door, dropped his jacket on the floor, kicked off his shoes so they blocked the doorway. Ana was watching all of this from far away in the kitchen, across the first floor, seeing through the walls that used to be there. James had a drink in his hand within seconds. He had not said a word.

“Nice day, dear?” she asked in a June Cleaver voice.

“Not really,” he said. “Do you know the only thing worse than having someone say to you: ‘Do you work in television?’ ”

Ana didn’t answer, recognizing a setup.

“It’s: ‘Didn’t you
used to
work in television?’ ”

Something had happened at Starbucks.

James told this story while lightly pulling at his beard, like he might be trying to hurt himself. Then he said: “Good night,” and went to bed without supper.

Ana didn’t want to tell Sarah these details. They were humiliating and could be used against her. Ana was still selective with her new friend, still wondering if she was like the other girls Ana had known in her life, with their dizzying switches from kindness to spite. James had told Ana she would always have a problem with other women because she lacked sentimentality, and because she was beautiful. But Ana hated this idea of her sex and refuted it, looking always for that woman friend who would hold her fire and prove James wrong.

And so Ana kept coming here to Sarah’s, watching Finn grow, carving something into the space when the men weren’t around, listening to her friend talk about her own long days, her fears for her son, her hopes for her future. Ana genuinely liked this woman, this chaotic person who left a huge bag of cat food in her hall for weeks and weeks, just walked around it instead of moving it to the pantry. The house was filled with unfinished gestures, doors off their hinges propped against half-painted walls.

Her own home was a study in paucity. In the past couple of years, Ana had gotten rid of every little tchotchke: a pink velvet bobbleheaded rabbit she bought in Chinatown on a whim; a virgin pencil case, useless because it was too short for pens; an empty picture frame; little half pads of stickies. Over the course of one week, she moved from room to room, drawer to drawer, putting items in liquor store bags. Days later, when she heard the rattle of the garbage truck in the alley, Ana watched from the window, wondering if she should cry out: “Wait!” and save the bobblehead, or even the pencil case, save them not
because they were attractive or useful but just because they were hers, and in that way, valuable, maybe.

And yet, Ana felt calmed at Sarah’s. She didn’t require her white space when Sarah was around.

She helped her clear the coffee dishes. Finn circled their feet like a shark.

“Sarah …” Ana began, moving the dishes around on the counter.

Sarah turned to her, open-faced.

“How did you know?”

“Know what?”

“Know you wanted a kid.”

Sarah raised her brows a little. “Oh,” she said. She puzzled a moment. “Well, I guess it’s kind of like when you ask gay people, ‘When did you know?’ and they say, ‘I always knew.’ ” Then she added: “What about you? When did you know?”

Ana moved the dishes side to side.

“I’m not sure,” she said. Then she looked up. “Same, I guess.”

Finn moved in, and Sarah leaned over to pick him up, distracted by his murmurs.

At the door, Ana kissed Sarah on the cheek, and Sarah tilted her head. “Everything okay?” It sounded so much like a statement that Ana could only nod her assent.

When she’d arrived home that night, James had dinner on the table, a glass of red wine poured and breathing for her. It was as if he had felt her pulling away, betraying him just a little over coffee, as if her lack of faith were casual and passing.

He was funny and light. Even the beard looked trimmer. They ate dinner in the breakfast nook, with the French doors open, looking at a huge hole in the yard. After months of delays,
the contractors had showed up with shovels and begun digging again. James had simply found them there, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. He did not ask what they did with all the dirt they removed.

After dinner, as Ana cleared the dishes, James rubbed up against her, and to his surprise, she responded, pushing back, putting her hand down his pants. He had developed a nut brown tan from the sun where his face was unbearded. Ana wondered if he’d had a good day writing, and felt, maybe, that a corner had been turned.

James pulled the blinds in the living room and the kitchen, sealing the house from one end to the other. Ana appeared behind him naked. She unfolded a clean kitchen towel, carefully placing it over the sofa cushions before lying down, spreading herself open, and he stood above her, looking down, breathing heavily. It was the first time in a long time that they had been together without the presence of this third, shadow person, nudging them forward, giving them reason. The absence flickered as sadness in James, and then it snuffed itself out. He buried his face in his wife’s neck, moving his tongue between her breasts. For Ana, she felt as if she had been fucking while swathed in a gauze for two years, trying to feel through the thing between her and her husband. But now, with her hands on his hips, her body was greedy, ferocious for him. They closed in on something like joy.

Only when she had tied the last garbage bag and closed the windows and drawn the curtains and folded the laundry and put it away—only then did Ana stop and take a different kind of tour of the house, touching surfaces with her fingers. In part, she was checking the thoroughness of her work, but also,
she fingered Marcus’s shirts hanging in the closet, ran her nails through a mound of necklaces in Sarah’s jewelry box. She touched the walls of photos in their mismatched frames. The family was so young; no old or sepia shots of ancient relatives, nothing from a life before. It was as if when Finn arrived, he brought with him the present and erased everything behind him. The city was filled with these urban orphans. Ana had seen cases of erasure often in her Legal Aid work as a student; poverty and aloneness arrived together often. A few circumstances and they were in the system: an only child; a refugee claim; a parental estrangement; an accident.

But there were different kinds of connection now. Why hadn’t she considered this?

Sarah and Marcus had one desktop computer, in a room that was part den, part office. A small spotted blanket with a stuffed cow’s head curled on the office chair. Ana suddenly remembered Finn dragging it around by the head, holding it up to his mother, saying, “Moo.”
That’s something
, she thought, putting the cow blanket in the basket of things to take home.
I know something
.

The computer flickered and hummed, and Ana imagined the many Facebook friends who must be curious or devastated, saw the static hands stretching out from the screen—Password.

She tried a few: “Finn.” “Finneas.” “12345.” Then she froze herself out; too many failed efforts. She was helpless against the electronic locks, truly disconnected.

Ana added to her mental list: password retrieval. She knew the law: There would have to be a death certificate. But Sarah wasn’t dead. It could take weeks or months, then.

She turned off the computer.

Ana removed three frames from the wall: one of Finn as a baby in a bathtub; Finn as he looked now, but with shorter hair, wearing blue overalls, his chin covered in whipped cream, grinning. The third showed the three of them together, heads touching, Sarah’s eyes squinting with laughter. The camera was close to their faces, as if held at arm’s length, taken by Sarah or Marcus. The background was blue, unrecognizable. Ana studied the picture for clues and then placed it with the others in her briefcase.

Ana changed back into her skirt and blouse, folding Sarah’s clothes into the suitcase. She would wash and return them before … what?
Where is this going?
Ana had never done well without a deadline. She still looked at every completed report at work as a potential A. She sometimes accidentally said: “Can I get an extension?”—the vernacular of a model student. This, in the end, was why she had chosen law. The organization, the binding of the fat books, the long, determined answers, and passes and fails. And to be paid! Ana still couldn’t quite believe how well compensated she was simply for making sense out of chaos, which she would do for no money at all.