Everybody Has Everything (26 page)

Facing the window, Ana said: “God forbid.”

James took the beer, because he was offered the beer, and because it was his father doing the offering. His parents had switched roles in old age: His father fussed and hovered while his mother sat with Ana and talked to her about budget cutbacks at the library. James’s father looked like a peer of Finn’s, in a canary yellow polo shirt so silly it must have been purchased by his wife. He passed drinks around the room with the gentility of a maid.

“Two hands,” said James offhandedly to Finn, who drank his juice from a real actual glass, slowly, wondering at the adult item in his hands.

“I should have looked for one of those—you know. What are they called, Diana? With the lids?” asked James’s father.

“Sippy cups,” said James’s mom, who then turned to continue her real talk with Ana.

“That’s right. Mike’s girls always leave a few behind, but I don’t know where they went.”

“He’s happy to use a cup, Dad,” said James. Finn looked at James.

“Where Dad?” he asked. James braced himself.

“He’s not here, Finny,” he said. This sufficed somehow. Finn put down the juice on the coffee table and began to move about the room, scrutinizing each piece of furniture, the wall, as if he were in a museum. James’s father passed his son a look of sheer sadness.

“He’s not used to such a big house,” said Diana, directing the conversation back into a foursome.

Finn ran his hands along the couch, which was glistening black leather and made James think of a bear’s gleaming fur, a hunter’s prize. The scale of the entire house left James woozy. Even the double garage had rounded arches above the electronic swing doors. The living room with the airplane hangar vaulted ceilings was punctuated, precariously, by a fan that appeared to be dangling down from a thin string. It was never turned on, because it was never hot between these walls; the air was entirely still and perfect. Warm in winter, cool in summer. From the living room, James looked up at the wraparound second-floor balconies. All the doors were shut. The house contained rooms that James had never set foot in. His parents had purchased the place when James and his brother were in university; bizarre timing, as both boys pointed out. James was at his poorest then, taking the train to the new house on the weekends with his laundry. At dinner, he complained of the price of utilities and the gouging landlords in the city. His mother was sanguine:
You wanted to live in the city, you live in the city!
His father, though he had worked downtown for thirty years, retained a deep fear of the unknown pockets that existed in between his train stop and the office tower, four blocks away. He had once seen a man casually walking along, carrying a package close to his chest. When he got closer, Wesley saw blood escaping through the cracks between the man’s fingers. Bleeding, the man had swooned, smiling a little, as if he’d seen a pretty girl. He fell to his knees not a foot from Wes Ridgemore. When the police officer arrived, he told Wesley: “Stabbing. Happens all the time.” And this was where his son wanted to live.

On his way out the front door at the end of those university weekends, James’s father would take his son aside, place a bundle of twenties in his hand, rolled up to look smaller than they were.

“Diana, don’t we have those puzzles? Didn’t Jenny leave a couple?”

“In the basement, I think,” she said. Wesley pushed himself up from the couch, struggling a little against the bursitis, the sciatica, all the rest. He froze for a beat halfway up and steadied himself, like a diver on a board. James averted his eyes. There were disk issues, James recalled. He had not asked after these issues in a while and now felt too ashamed to draw attention to what he didn’t know.

Diana’s eye makeup was blue and a little thick, like crayon filler in a few creases. But otherwise, she was perfectly contained, upright in her kitten-heeled shoes and flesh-colored stockings over her slightly rounded ankles. “Elegant” was the word she was going for. It was how she’d described Ana when she first met her: “A smart dresser. Elegant.” This was possibly the only judgment she had ever voiced around James’s biggest choice. Diana was fundamentally, agonizingly private. What had happened in Belgrade that brought her here was never discussed. James had tried, question upon question, and the answers were always the same: “It was a long time ago. It doesn’t concern you. It’s over.” But James could piece together something, a shape. He knew that she was five in 1941 and so must possess some memory of the Luftwaffe bombs raining down. But how, exactly, had her parents managed to get her out, through fascist Italy and Switzerland to the new world? Was there a priest? Were there false documents, illicit favors? Did money change hands?

He looked at her. She was talking. He remembered her saying to him, at thirteen: “I came because my family died.” Died. Not killed. As if old age had gently carried them away.

She met Wesley while working in the sock department of a clothing store. She had become a librarian late in life, through hard, private work, but why this pull toward books? James wondered. She was a woman entirely uninterested in stories. Sitting on the edge of his bed, upright in the darkening room, she would shut
Narnia
and say to her sons: “You must know this is only fantasy. Enjoy it as such.” She dragged James away from gulches crossed by children in the night and lions waiting and closets that led to forests, dragged him away and back to his bedroom with its glow-in-the-dark globe, his window overlooking the pebbled driveway.

“So,” said Diana. “You are playing at parenthood.”

Ana filled her mouth with water, thereby volleying the non-question to James. Her body was grateful not to be in the car anymore but had retreated to a hum of discomfort centered in the back of her head.

Ana could see James flushing, reverting to guttural teenage responses. “Not really. Maybe. I guess so,” said James. Diana stared at him, her eyelids vanishing.

“It’s very strange, isn’t it, a child with no relatives? In this day and age, it’s possible to trace anyone. I’ve never heard of such a thing,” she said, something faintly foreign in the phrasing if not the accent.

Wesley placed three wooden puzzles on the floor. James recognized them from the toy stores in his neighborhood: new but designed to look old-fashioned, with Depression-era line drawings of little children (Dick and Jane?) running and fishing and becoming obsolete, their socks drooping around their
ankles. His parents must have kept them around for Mike’s children. Finn dumped them out, one by one, the pieces scattering on the carpet.

“Do you think about hiring a detective, to see if there’s anyone else?”

“We were stipulated in the will. They didn’t want him to go to anyone else,” said James. He tried to sound certain, but the questions brought more questions: What if, right now, the grandparents were packing their bags? What if there was a knock at the door, a phone call, a letter? Family wins in these situations. Blood wins.

James looked at Finn, and then at Ana, who was not looking at anyone. He suppressed a sudden swell of tears.

Wesley nodded, saying, “Yes, of course,” at the same moment that Diana cried out: “But it’s absurd. You must know this.” Ana nibbled from a glass bowl of mixed nuts, as if by keeping her mouth full, she was excused. They tasted stale. Ana felt James next to her giving off heat, like a planet imploding.

“They were optimists, your friends,” said Wesley. “They saw something in you.”

“But can you imagine it, entrusting your child to two people who have never changed a diaper? Am I right, Ana?” Diana turned to Ana, who put down the peanuts slowly. “Do you have any experience with children? I had the impression you two did not even want children.”

Ana was surprised by the question. The holidays and evenings they had passed in one another’s company had run on the momentum of the quotidian: the mortgage rates, the garden, the traffic problems.

“It wasn’t about want,” she said. Then, to James: “You never told them?”

James rubbed his hand across his forehead.

“We can’t have children,” said Ana.

Wesley reached a hand down to the floor, as if searching for something in the carpet. Diana didn’t blink.

“You waited too long,” she declared. “It is not your fault, of course. This is how it is here.”

Ana could feel each one of her particles circling, trying to remember where to land.

“Jesus, Mom. It’s nobody’s fault,” said James.

“In a cosmic sense, certainly, but medically, the doctors must have given you reasons. There were tests, am I correct?”

“It’s personal, Mom,” said James tightly.

Finn tired of the puzzles and began circling the room like a shark, pulling at a coffee table book, pointing at a vase of hydrangeas.

“Don’t touch!” called James. “Gentle!”

“Diana, tell them about the cottage,” said Wesley, nervously redirecting the room. “Ah, yes. We might go to a new cottage this year with Michael and Jennifer,” said Diana. “In Quebec, while workers renovate the other one.”

“You hate cottages, Mom,” said James.

“Michael said there was a high-quality washer and a dryer.”

Ana watched Finn carefully and tried to make sense of her anger toward James, the sensation that she might just pick up the table lamp beside her in one hand and crack it down on James’s head, watching pieces fly across the room, hair and blood clinging to the ceramic edges. What was the thing she wanted him to say to this woman?

He was not going to rescue her, so she tried: “I …” said Ana
above Finn’s babble and Wesley’s murmuring to him. Heads turned.

“It was a difficult time for me,” said Ana. “But I don’t think about it anymore.”

“Because you have the boy now,” said Wesley conclusively. “It makes perfect sense.”

Ana shook her head. “No, no, it’s not that—”

“We don’t really have him,” interrupted James. “It’s probably temporary. It depends on Sarah—”

The ramble was halted by Finn’s squealing car sounds as he raced two coasters along the floor.

Diana stood, clearing James’s empty glass and drifting on her stockinged legs to the kitchen. Her heels left half-moon indentations in the carpet as she walked.

Ana needed for Finn to stop his wailing so she could make sense of the chaos, locate exactly the source of the slight. She knew that a moment had passed, and they had all survived it somehow. But then she glanced at her husband, who looked wild. He was red-faced, his hair strangely mussed.

Ana stood and turned to the kitchen, feigning an offer of help, though there was never anything to do.

“This is nice,” said Ana, picking up a small glass from the window ledge. It was a little bigger than the lid of a shampoo bottle, and covered in tiny painted flowers.

Diana wrung a sponge at the sink. She placed it in its dish and looked at Ana. “Oh, yes, that’s Wesley’s. A tea glass from Tunisia.”

“Tunisia? What was he doing there?” Ana had only one image of Wesley spanning the years, courtesy of James: in a windowless office, with a giant ledger open in front of him, like Bob Cratchit.

“There was a business opportunity,” said Diana. “We actually considered moving there at one point. Can you imagine? James and Michael with their blue eyes.”

“Why didn’t you go?”

“I don’t think I would have been functional there,” she said. “Water?”

Ana nodded, and she drew them each a glass of water from the tap. They stood, sipping.

“Did you see there will be a new development? Condominium tower. Right by the train tracks,” said Diana.

“We came the other way.”

“I hope it means we can get more funding for the library,” said Diana.

They finished their water and smoothed their skirts, but as they were walking toward the door, Ana stopped: “What did you mean, functional? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Ana,” she said, a quick, deep-voiced response that suggested Ana was right to press further. “It’s difficult to be a mother.” She paused. “Don’t tell James I said that.”

Ana shook her head.

“It is more than just giving up your freedom, or your marriage, in many ways. It’s a loss of an idea of who you are. And they will tell you: ‘Oh, you get an abundance in return, you get it back, it’s simply different.’ But that’s not quite true. What is true is that you are altered, and I suppose it depends who you were to begin with, if you have the kind of genetic structure that can withstand such change. Does it make sense?”

“I don’t know. Maybe,” said Ana, caught in Diana’s unyielding gaze. “Did you feel like you’d been changed enough already before you had kids? By the war?”

Diana flinched and looked away, and Ana recognized a misstep on her part. They would remain in the realm of abstractions.

“Perhaps in some way,” said Diana. “I sympathize with you. I can’t say I regret my children. Of course I care for them. But I do sometimes wonder what was lost to me.”

Footsteps outside the door passed, and Ana felt as if she was about to be caught in something illicit. James would never believe this; he always said that his mother had locked away the sentient part of life. She had once cut her hand on a can opener and strode into the living room where the boys were playing, a newspaper wrapped to her wrist, blood speckling the ground behind her. “There has been an accident,” she announced like a town crier, before dialing a cab with her other hand. Wesley loved to tell this story, but James didn’t see it as valor, the way his father did. He saw it as a way of defying her family, announcing that they were, for her, not a source of comfort. There was nothing she could possibly need them for.

And now this confession and warning by the kitchen door. What was Ana to do with it? The illness in her head bloomed.

The door swung open, and Finn stood at their knees.

“Hungry,” he said. Diana moved to meet his hunger. Cupboards opened and drawers rattled and food came forth for the boy, pieces of cheese cut in tiny squares, which he placed in his mouth with chipmunk propulsions, humming cheerfully, oblivious to the eyes of the women. Ana watched her mother-in-law, imagining that she was seeing in Finn her own son in a different kitchen, and she, a young wife forever new in a foreign country where the cheese had the consistency of soap.