Everybody Has Everything (34 page)

“You look good,” said James.

“So do you. No more beard.” James touched his chin.

“Do I look younger?”

Ana laughed. “Not really. Sorry.”

“Dammit.”

Finn was placing twigs in the castle, making arms or antennae.

“How’s Sarah?”

“She’s a miracle patient. The brain just kicked in. Where the connections were damaged from the accident, her brain made new connections. No one really knows why.”

Ana nodded. “I do.”

“Why?” asked James.

“She needed to get back to Finn.”

They watched him frowning while he built, as if everything depended on the height of this castle. He worked so earnestly that Ana felt like applauding. Maybe he would be an engineer, she thought, like his father.

James looked at her looking at Finn. She was smiling at first, and then she tilted her head, and it was as if she was looking through Finn, and through all the children in the playground,
and through the parents, too, spectral along the park’s edges. She was looking ahead of them all, into old age and after, as if she had set her eyes on what was waiting there and made peace with it. And James wanted to be with her while she went, weakening and old, to where they would all end up, the parents and the children. He wanted her, wanted her under his fingernails, in his mouth.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“I am, too. James, I—”

“Watch!” Finn shouted. He lifted his fists and pounded his castle, over and over. Then he looked at them and grinned.

“We had a marriage,” said Ana, eyes on Finn.

James said: “I know.”

“Don’t forget. It wasn’t just accumulation. It was sacred.”

James nodded vigorously. “I know.”

“I miss that the most,” she said, moving her foot back and forth in a straight line in the grass. “That’s what it is to be married: You offer up your life, and the other person takes it. I miss that offering.”

James sat very still. “I miss it, too.”

Their bodies leaned toward touching.

Then there was Finn, jumping in front of them. “Up! Up! Let’s make a movie!”

Ana and James stood, following Finn to his favorite tree. When they got there, James laid out the Mexican blanket.

“Do you want to stay for this?” he asked Ana, breathing in, waiting for the answer.

Finally, she nodded. “If you don’t mind.”

“Of course not,” said James.

He set up the camera on a tripod. Finn knew what to do, lying down on the blanket, perfectly framed by the camera. Then
James lay down next to him, and Finn put his head on James’s chest.

“Ana, you come, too,” said Finn.

Ana stood to the side, next to the camera, another eye on the scene.

“No, no. You do your thing. I’ll just watch for today.” She sat down on the grass.

Finn pointed at birds in the sky, singing nonsense.

“Ana, can you press Record?” asked James. Ana did so, then sat down out of the frame, crossing her legs.

James could see himself and Finn in the camera’s display square, against the red blanket.

“Story time,” said Finn.

“Are you ready for it? This one’s about you,” said James.

“Meeeee!” squealed Finn. James wanted Finn to know that he was keeping the information that Finn would require. And for this, at least, Ana might be proud of him.

He began: “You took so long to come out that your mother nearly went mad. In the fifteenth hour, she was on her hands and knees, and she kept saying: ‘Tell me what to do. Tell me what to do.’ And your dad laughed about that later because, you know, she never wanted anyone to tell her anything.

“ ‘I’m done,’ she kept saying. ‘I can’t do it.’ She was thinking: ‘Women do this? My mother did this? My grandmother? It’s impossible that women should have to do this!’ ”

Finn curled closer to James, his head rising and falling with James’s breathing.

“She turned onto her back, and the midwife put the long plastic arm of a machine on her belly. She was ten basketballs huge, because you were in there. I knew her during this time, and this part is definitely true: She couldn’t even see over the
top of her belly to her feet. And the machine beeped, and the midwife said, in this really strange voice: ‘Now, Sarah. Now we have to push. There’s something wrong with the baby’s heartbeat.’ Your mom had been feeling so weak, so tired, but she heard that sentence and everything changed. There was just a second then where she glanced out the window, and you guys were so high up in the hospital, she could see the towers of the city, blinking in the darkness, all lit up like it was any other night. And she thought: ‘Okay now. Okay.’ ”

Ana watched them, Finn protected by James’s arm.

She could remember all of it, the great love they had once. It streamed past her, the limbs and the warm pockets of it, even the brutality, the smell of it. She could see it all, from every angle, like she was turning over an artifact in her hand. She did not know yet if something new was growing in its place, if the stone was going to warm and reshape itself. She closed her eyes, tried to see the earth giving way, but she saw only whiteness, so well cultivated, so pointless. She opened her eyes.

Finn looked up at James, telling his story.

“And she screamed, and she pushed. She screamed like she wanted to wake the city. And your dad said that no human had ever screamed like that before. It made his ears ache, he said. It shattered windows. People cowered and hid, and other people came out of their houses, onto their porches and sidewalks, trying to make sense of what was happening. But it worked. You pushed yourself out of her body. She called you, and you came to her sound.”

The epigraph is from the poem “Filling Station” by Elizabeth Bishop, in
The Complete Poems, 1927–1929
, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The snatches of lyrics about rockin’ leprechauns are slightly misquoted by James from Jonathan Richman’s “Rockin’ Rockin’ Leprechauns” (from
Rock ‘n’ Roll with the Modern Lovers
, 1977); the phrase “Dance me to the end of love” is from Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love” (from
Various Positions
, 1984). The line “A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare” is from Frederick Seidel’s poem “Climbing Everest” (2006). The book from which James reads the lines “The world can only change from within” and “When you are present in this moment, you break the continuity of your story, of past and future” is Eckhart Tolle’s
The Power of Now
(1999). And Marvin Etzioni generously agreed to allow us to quote some lyrics from Finn’s beloved song “You Are the Light” (1985).

I am indebted to my gifted U.S. editor Emily Griffin, for her patience and needle-in-the-haystack attention to detail. I am very lucky that the first draft of this book was shaped by Lara Hinchberger at McClelland and Stewart (a special thanks for lending Ana some most personal details about plastic flowers and loss). I’m especially grateful to Jackie Kaiser, who is part agent, part editor, all kindness.

I want to sincerely thank the Canada Council for the Arts for giving me the time to sit in a room of my own.

I wrote much of this book trying not to stare out the window at the Carso that surrounds the United World College of the Adriatic in Duino, Italy. Thanks to the people we met in this otherworldly place, especially Annemarie Oomes and Filippo Scalandi.

Thanks to Maryam Sanati, Stephanie Hodnett, Kate Robson, and Andrea Curtis for editorial guidance and emotional endurance. True friend Celia Moore put me in touch with Dr. Asrar Rashid, who provided medical insight. Alisa Apostle, Alison McLean, and Mercedeh Sanati all submitted to my brain picking on law and finance when they had much better things to do.

Writing is a family pastime, whether the rest of the family likes it or not. My parents, Gary and Cindy Onstad, have always been supportive, but they also understand that a writer’s favorite phrase is: “We’ll take the kids.” Thank you both.

Those particular kids, Jude and Mimi, are the source of this story and all that’s meaningful. Thank you for your patience with the closed door.

And I thank my husband, Julian Bauld, who gave me the title, and the reason, and lives closer to art than anyone I know.