Everybody Has Everything

Everybody Has Everything - By Katrina Onstad


THE TUESDAY AFTER LABOUR DAY



In the end it took Ana and James only an hour to become parents.

James arrived first, stumbling toward a police officer sitting on a chair by a door marked Morgue. He felt his eyes ballooning, growing too big for his face. He tried, but could not blink. You are awake, he thought. This is happening.

“My name is James Ridgemore,” he said to the policeman, who stood up quickly, as if caught in the act. James noticed he was short, or shorter than James. “My name is James Ridgemore.”

“Just a moment,” and the policeman went into the room, leaving James in an empty hallway, sniffing at alcohol and something he couldn’t identify: fire? Burning hair? It was freezing down here, devoid of heat. The second finger on his left hand turned white at the tip.

The policeman reappeared, holding open the door. When James entered, the contents of the room dropped away. All that was left was a body covered with a sheet hovering in bottomless space. But in fact, the tray jutted out of the wall. A matchbox sleeve. James could not tell if the thing upon it was male or female. Other people were there (he would remember that: the chatter, the grocery store dullness of all crowds), uttering words from television shows about coroners and death reports. No voices were lowered.

A woman pulled back the sheet. She wore clear rubber gloves that left her wedding band visible.

James looked down and recognized Marcus, the check-mark scar beneath his bottom lip. His black hair was matted with tar. Why would that be? Why tar on his face? Who closed his eyes? James ran rapid-fire through questions, but silently, his mouth too dry to speak. Why does he look so different? Can it be only the difference between the living and the dead?

Then he realized that the difference, the strangeness, came down to something simple: Marcus was almost always smiling. James had never seen his lips so straight. There was no peace about him, no angel in repose, no release, no calm. He looked agitated, unsettled, as if he’d just been annoyed by a telemarketer.

“Yes, it’s him,” said James, though no one had asked a question. His legs felt hollow, swirling with smoke. But he did not feel ill. He was not repulsed, or disgusted. He did not find it hard to look upon the body. Then the tray slid back into its cabinet, and was sealed with a heavy handle.

The woman in the rubber gloves smiled at him ruefully. Well-worn, this smile, thought James.

On his way upstairs in the elevator, she stayed with him. She had removed her gloves, stared straight ahead. She was tiny. Everyone seemed small that day.

“You have a strange job,” James told her. She pecked a nod. “You’re so little. How do you lift the bodies? Is it hard?”

Then there was a roaring in his ears, the sound of steel twisting, a train exploding off its rails. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, heard a stream of sound pour forth from the tiny woman’s mouth, but he was unable to distinguish one word from the next.

The elevator stopped and the woman put her hand under his elbow. She guided him out on his empty legs, past green walls, his feet on different-coloured footprints stencilled on the floor. She appeared to be following the line of purple footprints, and so James did too, pulled along as if riding a skateboard, past elevators, around corners. At first there were a few patients walking here and there. Someone with his papery ass hanging out in the open air, pushing an IV. But as the other coloured footprints disappeared, the corridors grew quieter, more deserted. Though he knew it already, James was reminded that what was coming next was serious; not as serious as the basement, as Marcus frozen in a drawer, but serious.

At Room 5117, they stopped before a closed door. The woman propped James up against the wall and entered the room alone, a bellhop doing one last pass before opening the door to a guest. When the door opened for him at last, James saw a body on the bed; it was cleaner than Marcus, its face bloated, the head held to the body by a large collar. Tubes snaked from the fingers and white bandages soaked with deep brown circles covered the head. A plastic hose hung from the open mouth like something being expelled. Her eyes were closed, but the sound of the machines clapping and whirring was like a language, the body announcing itself to this room, singing its name: Sarah.

This room. James glanced around at all the people who emerged then, slowly, in full relief. Unfamiliar faces and, in the middle, a male nurse cradling a bundle of sheets in his arms. Out of the sheets, dangling in the air, was a foot encased in a small white running shoe. James moved then, fast toward the sheets, which were not sheets at all, but a boy, and not a boy, but Finn. Marcus and Sarah’s Finn. It was the longest walk James had ever taken, those six steps through a room of strangers, his arms out, his body trembling.

“Give him to me,” he whispered hoarsely, angry at the time between the now and the boy he needed to put to his chest, angry that no one had given him over sooner. He grabbed the bundle, and My God, it was still warm, which meant he was alive – didn’t it? And then something happened that was not of this earth, that was transporting, undenied. The bundle shook to life, let loose a howl never heard before, a howl from a place in the boy of all knowing, of the mines beneath the beneath, a sound of despair that rolled like a boulder over James. He held the boy closer, the boy who would soon be too big for this kind of holding, his legs dangling from James’s torso, a sneaker on one foot, a dirty sock on the other, as if he had been running. The sticky black tar was not tar, James recognized finally, but blood. Blood in Finn’s blonde hair that James was weeping into, keening along with him but holding on, holding him, the unbreakable, undroppable boy.


Ana became a mother during a conference call.

Staring out the window, she had just finished leaning into her desk phone, explaining the history of solid-state drives over the speaker, an opinion based on two weeks’ worth of research delivered that morning in bound copies and via e-mail. The air outside was bluest blue and a surprise burst of early autumn warmth wrapped gold around the city. Her cell phone shook on her desk. She ignored it.

“Mark? Any thoughts?” Rick Saliman’s voice always sounded clearest. He had a more expensive conferencing phone in his office, three floors up.

She listened as the men turned over the information, searching its crevices for a way to save their client, a multi-million dollar tech company that had behaved like a shoplifting teenager tucking a piece of cutting edge technology in his pants and scurrying out of the office the day before a merger.

A text message appeared: COME HOME URGENT ACCIDENT J. Instantly, lightly, Ana stood up, dropping a pen from her hand and leaving it to roll off her desk.

“If you’re done with me, I have to take another call,” she said, and hit the button to disconnect.

She must have grabbed her coat, her bag, but only in the elevator did she notice where she was. She tried to call James, but he didn’t answer. Then, with a boneless finger, she hit the number of her mother’s nursing home.

“I’m looking for Lise Laframbroise,” she said. “I’m her daughter.”

“She’s at lunch. Do you want me to page her?”

Ana hung up, put her hand, that same empty hand, up in the air until a cab pulled over. She instructed the driver to take her home, and he began ploughing through thick traffic.

“I’ll take University,” he said, and Ana noted the dots of sweat lined up like a smile at the base of his bald head.

Even as it was happening, she was aware that she would remember that ride forever: the rising heat outside; the traffic on University; the cyclist in her skirt, hiked up a little too far so that a dangerous flash of white underwear revealed itself with each push of the leg.

The third number she dialled was Sarah’s. No answer.

She texted James: I’m coming.

And a response, instantaneous beeping: UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL, which was approaching in the distance, an odd, jarring coincidence. The wide boulevard the driver had chosen held several hospitals. Patients wandered the sidewalks slowly, in hospital gowns. A man smoked, leaning on an IV drip.

“I’m sorry, can you take me to University Hospital instead, please?”

The taxi swung across three lanes, setting off honking. The driver stuck his fist out the window.

Ana felt that if she were in a movie, she would grab a twenty and fling it at him for the eleven-dollar ride. But that kind of drama wasn’t in her, and she paid the thirteen dollars exactly and waited for the receipt.

She rushed, sincerely, up the stairs, stopping for another stolen moment to use the hand sanitizer.

The man at reception acted as if he had been waiting for her: “Yes, yes,” he said. “Third bank of elevators, north side.”

Ana continued rubbing her hands after the sanitizer had evaporated. Up she rode in the elevator until her ears gently popped.

She saw James immediately, or the back of him, through the glass window of a cordoned-off waiting room. He faced a panel of three white coats, as if taking an oral exam. The three doctors weren’t talking but nodding and listening to James. Though the glass prevented her from hearing his words, from the stabbing and flapping of his hands, Ana knew that James was holding court.

She opened the door.

“They want information,” James said to her once the tides of introduction had receded and they’d all sat down.

“We are trying to establish a medical history,” said the young doctor, an Asian woman rescued from her adolescent looks by painfully thin eyebrows. Next to her sat a stout Indian doctor, bored and fuller-browed. “Your husband thought you might know if Ms. Weiss had any history of high blood pressure? Diabetes mellitus? Kidney problems?”

Ana stared.

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, Christ,” said James, who had been bobbing up high in his shock, caught in its currents. “You don’t know what happened.”

“How would I know? I was on a call and I got a message—” The stout doctor looked at her watch.

“There was a car accident. On the Lakeshore. Some kind of debris in the road, and Marcus swerved—” James spoke without any emphasis, a witness giving a police report. “No other cars were involved, but Marcus’s car went head first into a retaining wall. Finn’s okay, but Marcus – he died.” The last two words sounded like a book clapping shut.

Ana put her hands together and they rose to her mouth, touched her lips, then moved to the bridge of her nose and stayed there. She closed her eyes, bowed her head and tasted the information. She felt James’s hand on her back and shrugged it off quickly, her whole body in thrall to a sensation of bugs crawling and burrowing. Then she realized what she had done, the quick and urgent rejection of her husband’s kindness, and felt upon her that pettiness, and on top of that the awful loneliness of what had happened. She saw, bright and burning in her head, a red station wagon crumpled like a rolled toothpaste tube up against a concrete wall. She felt the hopelessness of flesh between car and cement. And she dizzied, and reached quickly for James, for his arm, his shoulder, clasping his left hand, finally, to her right.

As all of this was happening, the doctor explained that Sarah had hit her head. “We stopped the bleeding,” she said, and the other doctor perked up with pride.

“Where is the bleeding?” asked Ana.

“A good question. In the frontal lobe, so focal processes are affected.”

“Wait – her brain?” The phrase “hit her head” had tripped Ana up. She hadn’t considered the brain, somehow picturing an external cut to the scalp, like a nick from shaving.

“Most people wake up from a coma within a few days or weeks, but hers is a severe trauma.”

“Coma!” Ana said.

The doctor ignored her incredulousness. “We’re waiting to hear from her GP, but it would help us to know her medical history. James said she has no living relatives.”

“No parents. She’s an only child,” said Ana, scanning her memory for cousins, aunts, uncles. “She’s – she was – very healthy. I don’t know. There’s a lot I didn’t know. Don’t know.” James squeezed her hand.

“Neither of us have heard her talk about taking medications,” he said suddenly. Ana wondered, just for a moment, how he could speak with such authority.

“Wait—” Ana shook her head. “Why did you call us?”

“We’re the emergency contact, remember?”

“We are?”

“I’m the executor.”

“The executioner?”

James stared at her. “What?”

Ana rubbed her forehead. The conversation had occurred a few months ago, in a wine haze. It came to her now, lightly, faded. “We’re in such an unusual situation – would you guys consider – if something happened to us—“ Flattery and consent.

“Do you know if she’s allergic to penicillin?”

Everyone looked at Ana, as if women shared all such intimacies, pedicures and pap smears.

“No,” she said. And then James remembered when he had last set foot in this hospital. It was the day after Finn’s birth.

“She had her son here,” said James. “There must be records—”

The silent, bored doctor suddenly stood up and left without a word. Was this a big “teachable moment” for her? James wondered, brought to a twinge of anger by the idea of his friends’ private tragedy reduced to a career boost for this sullen junior straight-A suck-up.

The remaining doctor said they now had to wait. Sarah was too swollen for an accurate reading of the depths of her sleep. To James, waiting seemed like a euphemism for hopelessness, but then the doctor went on, painting a picture of a future in which Sarah could be better, where she might move a little, then a lot, and one day, snap to. But then that happy picture was snatched back by the phrase “potential persistent vegetative state.”

“We have her on a cocktail, if you’re wondering about the IV.”

“Cocktail?” said Ana, and she glanced at James, whose mouth began to twitch.

“Vitamins, and glucose and—”

From her husband’s mouth, a small laugh, which Ana caught and returned.

“I need a cocktail, too,” said James, wishing it didn’t bother him that the doctor didn’t crack a smile.





SPRING TWO YEARS EARLIER



Two things happened on one spring day: a doctor’s appointment and a wedding.

In the morning, side by side in narrow chairs, Ana and James received the third opinion, which was the same as the first two.

The specialist was young and well-known in certain parts of the city. As he delivered the news, his features puckered and aged with a sadness that struck Ana as suspect.

“Okay, then,” said Ana, gathering to go, wanting to escape the sensation that she should comfort this celebrity doctor.

After, across from the subway station on the gravel path that cut through an orderly church lawn, Ana held James. He did not weep, exactly, but pulsed evenly on her shoulder – in and out – his face buried in her wool coat. A mechanical sound. Ana pictured a bright silver electronic heart held aloft by a surgeon and then – plunk – dropped into James’s open chest.

Above him, she raised her head and looked up at the flat blue sky.

What to make of this sudden calmness that wiped her down, erasing the faint, pulling panic she had lived with for two years? It was the relief of shutting the hotel room door after a day in a New York mob. It was the feeling she used to get when she was totally alone at the end of a long, loud evening out, sitting on her couch in the old apartment that only she lived in.

“Then we can look into adoption,” James said, pulling apart, wiping his face on his sleeve.

Ana nodded.

“Or surrogacy,” he said.

Ana nodded again, then turned back to the sky. “They have great weather,” she said.

A streetcar slid by, noisily, and Ana couldn’t hear, but saw James’s mouth move: “What?”

“Great weather for the wedding.”

James looked at her, and she could see him thinking: This is how she copes. It was likely that he had read an article or written a segment for his show on how to comfort her in the event of this confirmation that they were indeed in that select statistical sliver for whom treatments were useless.

“Do they care about the weather? It’s indoors, isn’t it?” He touched her hair. She reached up and took his hand.

“We should get ready.”

“Whatever you need.”

Ana dropped his hand, deciding that not holding his hand was what she needed.

James followed her through the church gardens. She stooped to pick up a half-empty McDonald’s cup of Coke. James watched her: her foot popping ever so slightly out of the arch of those black shoes that looked like ballet slippers. He didn’t think about her beauty, but her lightness, the sense of upward motion in her body at all times, the ever-present possibility that she might bend her knees, push off and float up and away from him.

“Just leave it.”

“It’s too pretty here for all this garbage.”

This wasn’t true. Ana had projected a month into the future, when the famous gardens would be in bloom. At the time she received the referral, she had been pleased that the doctor’s office was so close to the church, picturing bougainvillea and tulips bracketing each visit. But her timing had been off. All the waiting had happened in winter when snow blanketed the grounds. The gardens were still just dirt beds, thawing, and the grass was patchy, defeated.

Ana carried the cup in front of her, arm straight, thumb and pointer finger just skimming the rim, the other fingers curled into her palm with revulsion like a TV dad confronting his first dirty diaper.

Ana deposited the cup in a garbage bin. Following in her footsteps, James glanced over the bin’s edge. Pop everywhere, soaking old newspapers and fried chicken bones and dog shit and a single needle. He was resigned to this habit of Ana’s, this rage for clean.

He walked behind her to the parking lot. He knew that he cried too easily, and the crying acted like a defenceman’s shoulder check, sent her flying. But still he hoped, just a little, that she might break. Then he could be wonderful.

“Give me a second,” he said.

Ana sat in the car while James lit a cigarette, leaning on the hood, frowning. In the sky, a flag appeared. Wind must have loosed it from a pole and now it flapped above James’s head, moving closer, as if preparing to drop and cover him. And then the flag revealed itself to be, in fact, a flock of birds, diving down in a solid, waving page.

He flicked his cigarette butt into the garden.

In the car, Ana had a small white mint in her hand. As she held it out to him, James remembered all the women who had held out a hand to him over the years, uncurling a palm to reveal a joint, an ecstasy tab, a condom, a file folder.

“Let’s go,” said Ana.


The bride was eight months pregnant, and could not stop laughing. James had a few and he started laughing, too, until everyone between the rose walls of the hotel ballroom was laughing so hard that the Justice of the Peace, a tent of a woman, held up her hands.

“People! Come on, now! We have work to do! It’s supposed to be serious when you straight people get married!”

James and Ana were surprised to find that they had been seated at a table with the bride and groom. They had only known the couple a few months, though technically, James had known Sarah years ago, in university, years before Ana.


He’d made the first mention of her in the winter.

“This woman I sort of remember invited us to dinner.” Ana was emptying the dishwasher. “I forgot to tell you.”

“Who is it?” Ana ran through a mental list of all the women James had known before her.

James frowned. “Odd. I don’t remember her name.”

Ana held a clean mixing bowl in her hand. She rubbed its glass belly with a dishtowel.

James typed on his BlackBerry, bent thumbs clicking. He didn’t even keep it in a pocket anymore; it had become an extension of his hand, a beeping carbuncle. “It’s here. Sarah. Her name’s Sarah.”

“Can you help me put these away?”

He said: “Why are you drying dishes that are already dry?”


Ana told Sarah that she looked beautiful, and she meant it. Sarah’s dress was a dive-able sea green, and this fishy aspect continued with her cropped, glossy black hair.

“Are you appalled by the wedding-ness of this wedding? I think I am.” Sarah pointed at a string of white Christmas lights winding around the windows overhead. They were in a basement ballroom; the small rectangular windows sat up high, near the ceiling, peeking out into bushes. Their shape and secret location near the ground – windows she would only notice if she stopped to tie her shoe – made Ana think of an old-fashioned prison on a main street in a small town. She expected to see ankles and feet pass by outside, through the shrubbery.

Sarah patted Ana’s knee and grinned. Of all the people here, Sarah had chosen her to lean in to. Ana felt cozy.

“Something comes over you when you plan a wedding,” Sarah used a conspiratorial voice. “You start giving a shit about things you absolutely should not give a shit about.”

Ana laughed, and told Sarah about the night before her own wedding, when she stayed up until three a.m. tying bags of tea with white ribbon because the parting gift CD that James had made seemed suddenly inadequate.

“Okay, that’s pretty bad. You’ve made me feel better,” said Sarah, rubbing her hand over her stomach, which jutted out in front of her in a perfect circle, like a prosthetic. Ana did not flinch. She decided that she liked this loud, pregnant woman, a conclusion she hadn’t quite reached over the prior few weeks. Ana needed a new friend.

Across the table, James was head to head with Marcus, the groom. James did most of the talking, arms and hands punching. He sensed Ana watching him and looked over, gave her a quick smile mid-sentence, then turned back to it.

“Did you think it was strange that no one walked me down the aisle?”

“Oh,” said Ana. “I didn’t—”

“We’re orphans, Marcus and I. My parents are dead, and his are f*ckwits.” Sarah chewed ice out of a water glass. “Usually, it’s totally fine, but today, I did mind. I feel like I can say that to you.” Ana nodded.

“Most of these people are work friends. Nice people. We haven’t lived here that long, really, when I think about it. It’s all pretty new.”

Now Ana recognized what was strange about the small crowd: Barely anyone in the room looked over fifty. Ana remembered the old schoolhouse where she had been married, and James’s great-aunts and -uncles in their wheelchairs in locked position tucked away in the corners like umbrellas.

On the edges of the empty dance floor, a small child swayed by himself, wearing a rock ‘n’ roll T-shirt – ABCD split by a lightning bolt, like the logo for the band AC/DC – with a blazer over top, hair hanging in his eyes. How old? Ana had no idea.

She had seen the boy earlier, in the bathroom. As Ana dried her hands on the automatic dryer, his little hands had suddenly brushed against hers, his body up against her skirt.

“Don’t be rude!” The boy’s had mother appeared, pulling him away. Ana shrugged. “I’m so sorry,” said the mother, unfolding a soft towel from the stack by the sink. She rubbed furiously at the boy’s hands. He looked at Ana quizzically, silent. “Did you do the smart thing and leave yours at home?”

Ana sighed internally, knowing what she’d find at the next step of this conversation. “I don’t have kids.”

And so it came: the heavy pause, the sadness, the recovery. “Right, I get that, absolutely,” and the exaggerated eye roll at the small, wet child. It surprised Ana how often mothers played up their misery, as if she would find it comforting to pretend they would switch places with her.


Eighties pop rock blasted from the speakers. In the daytime, this room had probably been used for a conference, a PowerPoint presentation to bored executives trying to keep their tortoise necks from snapping down to sleep. Ana attended these kinds of meetings, and had occasionally led them. She knew the closed air of this kind of room, the scent of boredom, the water glasses and pens lined up next to blank tablets of paper. She didn’t like to think of Sarah’s wedding shadowed by the ordinary in this way.

“You forget all about the wedding when you realize you’re in a marriage,” said Ana, her eyes now on James, still talking.

“I know. We’ve been together so long, I’m not sure why it mattered at all to Marcus. This strange traditional side emerged as soon as I showed him the pee stick.”

Then the sound of knives clinking on glasses, and a small cheer. Sarah rolled her eyes at Ana with a smile that discredited the eye roll. Marcus leaned across the table and gave his bride a kiss, so deep and certain that Ana looked away. James did not. He let out a whoop.

When Ana turned back, Sarah was beaming and cackling, her big sound bouncing below the DJ’s music like an extra track. The cake appeared, carried by two sweating women in manly black vests and white dress shirts. Three tiers of white butter cream icing, ribbons of chocolate down the side. A round of applause. There were no figurines on top. Ana remembered picking her bride and groom: James thought it would be funny to use two black people, or a pair of women. In the end, he let her pick, and she panicked and chose two that were so small her mother drunkenly asked if they were children.

The women placed the cake directly in front of Ana, which set off fireworks of flashing cameras.

“Oh, no, no. I’m not—” said Ana, sliding her chair closer to James, out of the way of Sarah and Marcus and all the years that this photo would exist in computer inboxes and desk drawers.

The sound in the room was beginning to bother her. A thrumming filled her skull, and her body craved the cool of the sheets waiting for her at home. The edges of her eyes blurred.

James saw Ana cringe a little and knew what was happening. He put his arm around her, and she leaned into it. She tried to stem his worry.

They were equal now. All that work to clear the tubes of their nests of cysts, and it didn’t matter: according to the celebrity doctor, Ana had an “inhospitable” uterus – no visitors allowed. Its walls were thin as onionskin; they couldn’t support anything. And James’s sperm had low motility. They were too lethargic to broach those walls anyway.

Now they had the information, the perfectly balanced failure. A year ago, they had agreed upon the circumstances under which the long, gruesome trail of appointments and injections would end, and today they had kept their covenant. No more stirrups and pills. No more bloody syringes and bruised thighs. No more electronic wands.

James had a new plan now. Even as he was explaining to the table why vegetarianism was an untenable ethical position, the other corner of his brain had him sweeping into Rwanda. He had been there once, during the rebuilding. He opened the door to a church and children came tumbling out like jelly beans from a machine. He imagined himself on an airplane back from Africa. Finally he’d be one of those dads he always got seated behind. But he would be bouncing and expertly soothing the new baby, a baby with no one but them. Ana was in the seat next to him, holding a baby bottle. They could do that. It would be good for everyone.

But then, there were risks: trauma; fetal alcohol syndrome; inter-racial outsider status … He glanced at Sarah’s swollen stomach. Maybe they could borrow a healthy uterus for a while and grow their own.

Ana did not know what thoughts were racing through James, or why his eyes on her smiled sadly. She wanted to show him that she was all right, to let him know that it was possible to be happy for someone else. She gave him a small kiss on the neck. She was trying to remind him of something that she herself was working hard to remember.