Everybody Has Everything

EARLY SEPTEMBER



The morning they went to fetch Finn, Marcus’s lawyer called about something called “direct cremation.” This request was in the will, and even as James gave the lawyer his Visa number to cover the $1600 cost, and scribbled instructions about recovering the money through Marcus’s insurance policy, he marvelled at Marcus’s foresight. He couldn’t even plan lunch.

It had been days of meetings at Children’s Aid, the hospital, the offices of lawyers. After waiting and clarifying and unknotting directives and advice, they arrived at an unadorned apartment building, the address written on a plain piece of paper handed to them somewhere down the line. It was the rectangular shape of proletariat Russia, one of several jutting out of the cement, circled by parking lots.

James negotiated the buzzer and doors of greasy glass. Ana held his hand, gripping him in a way she almost never did.

“Did you eat anything?” he asked her, as they walked up the stairs to the third floor, obeying the Out of Service sign on the elevator.

“No,” said Ana.

“Me neither. Maybe we can take him for some food after.” Ana nodded.

The hall had a smell like burnt wax, which Ana identified as sesame oil. In places, the carpet curled up at the edges, as if trying not to touch the walls. On the door to the apartment, someone had hung a little straw heart with a stuffed red bird dangling in the centre.

The door opened to reveal a short, heavy-set black woman. Her breasts were half her body, it seemed to Ana. “Hello,” said the woman matter-of-factly, as if they were there to sell her something she might or might not want to buy. “Come in.”

But the apartment was sunny and clean – Ana felt relief – with bright white walls and a worn black leather couch. A stack of children’s books sat by the sliding door that led to a tiny balcony, just big enough for a child to fall off of, thought James.

There was no fireplace, but there was some kind of mantle, a shelf right above where a fireplace might go, and a row of thumb-sized glass animals. Above that, along the wall in matching gold frames, dozens of photographs of children, babies, brothers and sisters smiling.

A tall, stoop-shouldered woman stood up and offered her hand. “I’m Ann Silvan, Finn’s new case worker, and this is Mrs. Bailey,” she said.

James turned around and around, searching.

“Where is he?”

“The boy needs to nap,” said Mrs. Bailey, revealing a thick Jamaican accent.

“I’m Ana,” said Ana, extending a hand first to Mrs. Bailey, then to Ann Silvan.

“We have the same name,” said Ann Silvan. Ana didn’t object, even though she had never felt like an Ann, letting her mother correct every bureaucrat and school teacher: “It’s On-na,” she’d say, “as in: ‘On a moon’.”

“Mrs. Bailey is one of our best foster parents,” said Ann Silvan, smoothing her skirt, which had a prominent wrinkle down the front, Ana noted. “She’s been with us for sixteen years and worked with over eighty children. Is that number about right, Mrs. Bailey?”

Mrs. Bailey nodded. James wondered about the use of the honorific, if the foster mother had requested it, a grasp at authority of some kind. They were sitting now, Ana and James in oversized armchairs, Mrs. Bailey and Ann Silvan on the couch. James had a strange urge to lean back and kick out the footrest he knew would appear at his ankles.

“I have three of my own, but they’re gone now.” Mrs. Bailey gestured to a triptych of photos, three afroed teen-agers, each in their graduation caps. “Each one has gone on to university.” Finally, she smiled.

“So there’s much to discuss,” said Ann Silvan. “How are you feeling?”

Ana felt like spitting, all of a sudden.

“Our lawyer told us the will wasn’t being contested,” said James.

“It’s not, but there are checks and balances.” A strange phrase, thought Ana, a phrase to connote democracy, as if there were choice in this room. Ann Silvan continued to talk about Children’s Aid and home visits, leafing through papers.

“You’re not working right now, Mr. Ridgemore?”

“I’m writing a book.”

“What’s it about?” asked Mrs. Bailey, raising a pencilled eyebrow. Ana was curious too; she hadn’t been able to ask about this herself. All three women tilted toward him.

“It’s non-fiction. It’s about terrorism,” said James, his voice thinning. It was a little bit true that, if anything had been written, it might have been on terrorism.

Ann Silvan wrote something on her pad of paper.

“So you’ll be at home with Finn, then? Or will you be taking time off, Ana?”

Ana shook her head. “Maybe a couple of days. I – my work is quite unforgiving.” She felt this statement take hold in the room. It stuck like neglect.

“It will be something of a transition,” Ann Silvan continued to talk, and Ana piped in from time to time, working from a list of questions that she had researched. There was money to be released. There was a court date pending. There was suddenly a fleet of people in their home, in their bank accounts, her office. Ana had begun to feel like a criminal, as if she were trying to steal this boy who had, in fact, been given to her, shockingly, without her request, even her knowledge. Between a lunch and a dinner, Ana and James had become stewards of a human being.


“Did you know we were the guardians?” Ana had asked, her head in her hands in their living room. “I thought we were just executors. I don’t remember agreeing to guardianship.”

“I think we did,” said James. “I don’t know.” He felt guilty somehow, as if those afternoon visits with Finn had meant more than he’d realized, had secured their status as guardians. He could never tell Ana about those visits now, though he had been waiting to tell her about them, searching for the right moment. But now, suddenly, his relationship with Finn had taken on new significance, and he couldn’t explain it to Ana, just as he knew that with Sarah in that bed, there was no one to expose him to her.


Finally, a moan swelled from behind a nearby door. Mrs. Bailey rose, opened the door and shut it immediately behind her. Ann Silvan continued to talk while James stared at the closed door. This was the moment, the shedding of all that came before, and he was alert to it, waiting.

When the door opened, Finn walked out slowly, one arm around Mrs. Bailey’s wide leg.

Ana watched as he let go and ran immediately to James. She saw Ann Silvan writing, probably describing how Finn had bypassed her. She shouldn’t be hurt. She believed that at some point, she couldn’t recall when, she and Finn had agreed to shared indifference. Sarah always had to prod him into acknowledging her: “Say hi to Ana, Finny.” And politely, in that cartoon voice: “Hi, Ana.”

James murmured: “How are you, Finny? How’s it going?”

“Good,” he looked around the room, at all the women and James.

Ann Silvan said: “The most important thing is structure, routine. Try not to disrupt his life too much.”

“Should we take him to visit …” Ana stopped, leaned in, “… the hospital? Does he know about the hospital?”

“He knows his mommy is very sick, and his daddy isn’t coming back.”

James frowned. He was slumped in the chair. Ana noticed that he was often draped across furniture lately, boneless and large. “You guys told him that? You don’t think that might have been better coming from someone who knows him?” Finn had gravitated toward the books, and sat with his legs like a swami, opening and closing a pop-up book. Up rose the bus; down. Up, down.

Ann Silvan’s face tightened. “He had questions. We’re trained in these matters.” She reached into her briefcase and handed Ana a sheaf of photocopies.

“There’s a waitlist for counselling, but Finn’s on it,” she said. “You should get a call in four to six months.”

“Efficient,” muttered James.

Ana skimmed the pages: Toddler can sense when a significant person is missing … Presence of new people … No understanding of death … Absorbs emotions of others around her/him … May show signs of irritability … May exhibit changes in eating, crying, and in bowel and bladder movements …

James, looking over her shoulder, whispered in Ana’s ear: “That could be a description of me.” She didn’t smile, caught on the last line: Bowel movements. Ana wondered where they would put all the used diapers, the wads of wipes, if they would need to buy one of those pneumatic tube garbage cans. One time at Sarah’s there had been a perfect ball of a dirty diaper in the centre of the living room for the entire duration of Ana’s visit, distracting her, crying out for disposal. Finally, when Sarah left the room for a moment, Ana grabbed it. She had stuffed the slick mass in the kitchen garbage, then scrubbed her hands at the sink like a surgeon.

“We need to stop at the store,” said Ana, suddenly, to no one.

James was putting running shoes on Finn’s feet. They looked new, shiny black and cheap. Finn opened and closed the bus pop-up book, happy to let James Velcro him in.

“Finn take book home?” he asked. Mrs. Bailey crouched down and enveloped him in her arms, his body sinking into her endless chest. The word “home” rippled through every person in the room.

“Yes, sweetie. You take it.”

She stood, handing Ana a shopping bag. “A few clothes I had lying around.”

James and Ana backed out the door, murmuring thank-yous. Finn slipped between their bodies and ran down the hall quickly. Then, at the far end of the corridor where the light was dimmest, he stopped and looked back. His eyes scanned Ana, then James, taking in their nervous smiles. He looked, for a moment, as if he might back away, but he waited, puzzled and patient, until they caught up to him.


James put the car seat in the back while Finn walked around Ana’s legs, ducking through them from time to time, not laughing but with a great sense of purpose. She looked around uneasily. A group of black teen-aged boys leaned on the spoiler of a Honda sedan, talking loudly, laughing. One tossed a basketball back and forth in his hands. A woman in a hijab with a plastic grocery bag lightly banged against Ana and mumbled, eyes on the ground.

Suddenly, Finn sprinted into the parking lot, toward the group of men. That car is coming too fast, thought Ana. She looked first for James, who was bent over the back seat. “James, solve it,” she thought, but there was no time to say it before she was running, and as she ran, the tallest of the teen-agers looked up, saw two things: a blond boy running toward him, and the car aloft, somehow silent and soundless, Finn too small to be seen by the driver, the exact tiny size to fit between two wheels. The teenager, the stranger, stepped out into the path of the car, put his fingers in his mouth and whistled like a train. Others were shouting: “Stop! Man! Slow the f*ck down! F*cking slow down!” And it did, the car slowed down, the sun too bright to see the eyes of the driver, just as Ana was upon Finn, had him by the shoulders, shaking him.

“Don’t do that! You can’t run away!” She was shouting. Finn looked up at her, his lips vibrating.

“Lady, you okay?” called one of the boys. She had Finn in front of her, her arms straight out, gripping his shoulders.

“Basketball,” he said, and started crying.

“Thank you,” called Ana, nodding to the boys, hoisting Finn to her hip. The boys watched her. One bounced the ball.

“I think it’s in,” announced James, uncoiling from the car, his forehead shining.

He rose to a puzzling image, Ana with the child clinging to her neck, crossing the parking lot, shadowed by a slow-moving silver car.

“What happened?” asked James. Ana shook her head, passed him Finn, who relaxed instantly into James’s arms, ceased his sobbing, shifting into a low purr.

Ana’s hands fluttered as she buckled herself in. In the back, James was cursing, trying to connect straps and buckles.

“Do you know how this works, Finny?” he asked. “What do you say? Can you help me?”

Ana gripped the dashboard.

“Can we go, please? Can we just go?”

James clicked the final latch and patted Finn’s head.



They drove out of the parking lot, under the collective glance of the teen-age boys, Ana hating herself for her judgment, her fear. She blamed her own parents, their wilful ignorance about adulthood, how they chose anything else over it whenever they could. “I love you, kiddo,” said her father once when she returned from the park, eager to show him a dirty dollar bill she’d dug out of the sand. “But man, I wish I could go to India.”

Ana considered India every night, tucked away in her room where the window looked at a brick wall. She thought about cows and cinnamon and swarms of silk-swathed bodies in crayon colours, a National Geographic spread. She thought about India when they moved, lying in her room with the window that looked at another window, or the next time, when there was no bedroom for her at all but a bed in the hallway. By then, her father had his wish. He went away, transforming from flesh and blood into a series of Christmas cards and occasional phone calls. Examining the stamp (Nepal) and opening the worn, translucent envelope one year, a photograph of a young woman (blonde, like Ana’s mum had been) clutching a baby fell out: “You have a sibling!” he wrote. It took another year before Ana found out the sibling was a boy.

Her father moved to Costa Rica, and the letters never again mentioned this boy, or his mother. Ana got older and stopped opening them. And as if her father knew the audience had left the theatre, they stopped coming. Silence, now, for eight years.

So Ana and her mother became a pair. Ana went with her mother to the courthouse and, in front of the judge, erased her father’s name, took her mother’s. There was love, but also the bottle. Once her father left, Ana’s mother navigated them toward the smallest apartments in “better neighbourhoods,” a phrase peeled from the walls of her own childhood in a riverside university town. Her mother had been a child in a house that could properly be called a mansion, with a small circular swimming pool and a brainless Doberman pincer that barked at the bushes. Ana spent weeks there in the summer heat. She saw her grandmother’s long, teenage fingernails on her curved hand, shot through with purple veins; her grandfather’s high-waisted pants, his box of war medals.

They wept when Ana waved good-bye in the driveway, days before September. Her mother sat sober and stared straight ahead, shaking hands clenching the wheel.

“You don’t know what they’re really like,” she said, when Ana began to echo their wails, dramatically reaching a hand through the open window as her mother revved and reversed. “You’ll never know, thank God.”


In her own car, James looked at Ana, coiled in silence. He wondered how long her absence would last.

In the back seat, Finn yammered, incomprehensible words that James attempted to interpret, responding in a range of theatrical voices. He could make Finn laugh easily, a sound which rang the bells of James’s own pride, and moved along the knots of Ana’s spine with a tentacled, creeping dread.


Finn sat high up on a barstool at the island in the kitchen, swinging his feet, smiling.

“Maybe we should sit in the dining room. It seems like he might fall off,” said James.

“But the rug in the—” said Ana, then withdrew. “Whatever you think.”

“Finn stay up!” he cried when James went to lift him. “No! Want to stay here!”

James set him back on the stool, where he wobbled in all directions. Finn picked up the grilled cheese sandwich Ana had cooked for him, taking mouse bites around the edges. Ana and James stood side by side, staring across the island at the boy like he was a hostage, and any minute the authorities might bang the door down.

Ana began to unpack the groceries. Animal crackers; organic macaroni ‘n’ cheese; miniature apple sauces. All things she had seen at Sarah’s, empty boxes and sticky half-filled containers for Ana to step around. Where should it go? She pulled open drawers and cupboards, finally stuffing the boxes next to the white balsamic, moving aside the olive oil from a trip last spring to Umbria.

“Finish,” said Finn, dropping his sandwich and pulling himself to standing. Within a second, he had his arms high, a diver preparing for his descent. Ana let out a yelping sound and James rushed toward the boy. Ana breathed quickly; the danger Finn brought with him felt all-encompassing, like they had all been submerged together in a water tank of sharks.

She glanced at the hole in the back yard, abandoned again by the workers for weeks. Piles of limestone wrapped in cellophane crushed the plants on the perimeter.

“Can you call the guys about the yard?” said Ana.

Finn wandered through the kitchen, opening every cupboard at his eye level.

“What’s in there?” he asked each time. Ana answered: “Oh, I don’t know. Pots …”

“What’s in there?”

“Umm … pipes, from the sink.” She found it difficult to focus on unpacking the groceries with the noise, each question punctuated by a slammed cupboard.

“What’s in there?”

She didn’t answer, macaroni in hand, trying to unravel the question in her head: By the oil? Really?

“What’s in there?” asked Finn, loudly. “What’s in there?”

Ana turned quickly and snapped: “Just look, Finn. Figure it out.”

“Ana—” said James, but when he saw her face, flashing fury and then trembling into fear, he didn’t say what he’d intended to. “I think it’s probably his bed time.”

Ana placed the macaroni in the cupboard and closed her eyes. When she opened them, the clock by the garden door said 8:34.

“Is it? Is this when he goes to bed?”

James shrugged. “Aucune idée,” he said.

James walked Finn upstairs, holding his hand. He drew the bath, his finger under the tap, trying to determine the right temperature. Finn sat on the white tiled ground, removing his small T-shirt, then his sweatpants. Standing only in his diaper, he did a small jump.

“Ana! Is this too hot?” called James, but she couldn’t hear him over her own scrubbing and the sound of the water. “How hot should it be?” James called downstairs. Still no answer. James turned on the cold.

Finn’s plump hands gripped the edge of the tub, his toes lifting off the ground.

“Wait, wait!” The diaper looked like it was barely hanging on, sagging like a smile along his backside. James tore the fasteners and the diaper fell free, relieved, into his hand. It was full of dark shit, round and heavy as a miniature medicine ball. James was embarrassed: Why didn’t I notice? Why did we have him for hours and never think about the diaper?

“Ana!” This time, she appeared, eyes immediately upon the diaper in his hand.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “Don’t move!” She could see Finn, his bum smeared with feces, giggling and moving like an inmate in a Victorian asylum toward the white walls and white towels. “Don’t let him move!”

Ana raced down the stairs, while James held Finn by the hands, but far away from him. Ana rooted in the cloth grocery bags for wipes, the kind Sarah always had – hypoallergenic, biodegradable, chlorine-free, unscented. Ana grabbed the diapers, too, number 5s, as Mrs. Bailey had told them, and a garbage bag. She sprinted upstairs, a medic attending to the injured, dropping all the gear on the white bathroom floor. Finn and James were still locked in their strange dance, far from the walls. Finn’s small penis hung (uncircumcised, noted Ana; quite large, noted James, who thought, then, of Marcus, and wondered), a strangely mannish thing out of place on his child’s body.

“We have a shituation here,” said James, as Ana pulled out wipe upon wipe. She managed a small laugh, passing the packet to James. James wiped and cleaned, folding each used cloth into the next, then stuffing the ball into the dirty diaper, expertly. He enjoyed a moment of satisfaction, held his shoulders back at his accomplishment, and then looked at his wife, hovering in the doorframe.

“I’m not sure what to do now,” she said.

“Why don’t you get his bed ready while I give him the bath?”

Ana nodded, and James turned to the boy, lifting him gently into the tub. “Let’s get clean, right? Let’s get clean.” James wiped the washcloth with Ana’s French milled soap, then rubbed it up and down his back.

“Where toys?” asked Finn.

James looked around the bathroom. Stainless steel soap pump. A small vase with a white daisy in it. The uselessness of the room struck him: Two years ago, they had knocked out walls and installed a sitting area in the bathroom. It contained a large black cane chair and a table holding magazines that had never been touched. James sat in the chair only once, the day it arrived, declaring it comfortable.

Under the sink, James discovered an old blue plastic water cup – something of his, from a long ago apartment. With the cup, Finn began to bail the tub back into the tub; dip and pour, dip and pour, while James sang a Jonathan Richman song that had lingered, waiting for use, in the back of his head for twenty-some years: “In the park, in the dark, what do I now hear, hark, hark? Is it really leprechauns and have they come back to rock ‘n’ roll?” Finn was oblivious to the song – dip and pour – but James kept going, pleased with himself, repeating the chorus: “Ba-doom ba da da da da, da da …” James reached for Ana’s shampoo, also French, with the price tag still on it.

He said to Finn: “Twenty-two dollars? Who pays twenty-two dollars for shampoo?” He made Finn’s foamy hair into a gigantic spike, still chanting. At the end of the song, Finn splashed a gentle sprinkle on James’s face, and looked at him expectantly. James reached into the tub and flicked a bit at Finn, and for a moment, it looked like the boy was going to cry; his face gathered, as if preparing to come apart – oh God no, thought James. Oh no. But it suddenly ceased, and Finn laughed, picking up the blue cup, dipping and pouring.

Ana returned with a green fluffy towel that she sniffed before handing it over; lilac. James lifted him out (in Ana’s mind’s eye: drops him, cracks his head on the bathtub, the white tile veined with red blood). Both of them scanned his body for cuts and bruises, markers of what had befallen his family. He was perfectly clear, just as the doctor at the hospital had said. Not a freckle, not a mole. No evidence.

James wrapped him in the towel.

“I’m a burrito!” cried Finn. “Tighter! Like mama make it!” The words knocked James. He looked into the little-boy face, his little teeth far apart, all of him without mourning. James tightened the towel until Finn resembled a long green onion, blond hair spiking through the top. Finn giggled at his immobility, trying to walk and falling on his back, laughing and laughing.

James scooped him up, carried him to the guest room. Ana had made up the bed with honey coloured linens. It isn’t a child’s room, thought James, dropping the towel on the leather love seat. There was no whimsy anywhere in the house. They didn’t speak of this guest room as a future nursery anymore, though a nursery with a view of the garden had been a selling point, hadn’t it? He was sure it had.

“Help me,” said Ana. James looked at her, and realized she meant the bed. Together, they moved it to the wall.

“Watch TV!” cried Finn, jumping on the bed, while James tried to pull a pyjama top over his head. Blue, with a monster’s face: “Veddy Scary!” The fabric was nubby and worn, another item from Mrs. Bailey’s. James tried not to imagine what horrors had been witnessed by all the foster children who had worn these pyjamas.

“No TV. We’ll do a book,” said James, then looked at Ana, who hovered again in the doorframe. “Wait, do we have any books?”

“We left the bus book in the car,” said Ana, watching James expertly stick the diaper, pull on the monster pants.

About the absence of books, James said: “Shit.”

Finn went still. “You say shit,” he whispered.

Ana, roused to James’ defence, said: “You said it, too.”

“I know. You’re right. It’s a bad word,” said James. He turned to Ana: “Can you see if there’s anything for him to read? Maybe a graphic novel or something.”

“I don’t know if Robert Crumb is appropriate,” said Ana, but she headed toward their bedroom and the basket of magazines next to her bedside table.

Finn folded into James’s lap, letting James brush his hair, his face turning sleepy.

“Maybe the cartoons in here?” Ana asked, returning with Sarah’s old New Yorker in her hand. James laughed. Ana sat down on the bed next to James, as if she, too, was awaiting story time. He flipped through the magazine, James asking Finn what animals were in the cartoons, what sounds they made; James telling him stories about vultures and dogs. Both Ana and James were acutely aware of what this looked like from a distance. James pulled the quilt up to Finn’s chin.

Ana placed throw cushions on the floor at the side of the bed, a circumference, like a ring of lye outside a village hut used to keep away the witches. James leaned down and small hands circled his neck. Ana patted Finn’s leg, his body a tiny bump, lost on the big bed.

“Sing light,” said Finn.

“Leave the light on?” asked James.

“No! Sing it! Sing it!”

Ana raised a single finger to her temple and began to rub, as if it would help her to draw understanding out of her skull.

“Light? A song about light?” she said, feeling like she had walked into a game of charades.

“Yes! Sing it!”

“Can you sing it, Finn?”

“No, mama sing it,” he said. James and Ana went still, wondering what would happen next. Finn looked at them, waiting.

James said, “I’m sorry, Finn, we don’t know it. Do you want to hear the leprechaun song again?”

Finn considered this, let out a very adult sigh, as if he had expected no less incompetence from these so-called caregivers.

“Okay.”

James sang it again, and Ana looked away. But James wasn’t self-conscious, almost never was he self-conscious, and especially not now, having seen how his song rescued the boy from the edge, pulled him back from the churning waters of sadness. He smiled again, laughed even as James sang the last line: “They’ve come back to rock ‘n’ roll.”

“Good night,” said Ana, leaving James to do the final kiss and tuck. She found herself in the hallway, with her hand on the wall, closing her eyes.

“Good night,” she heard her husband say.

James was in bed first, looking from his laptop to Ana as she moved through the room in her long white nightgown. She straightened an angled jewellery box, then carefully hooked her belt on a belt rack, her blazer in the section of the closet reserved for blazers.

“I didn’t put my shoes away,” he said, as she picked up his runners from the middle of the floor and placed them, toes out, in the closet.

“How about: Sorry, I didn’t put my shoes away.” She moved like a machete hacking the reeds, clearing, clearing, clearing.

“Okay, sorry,” said James, just a touch of sarcasm. “It says here the ideal bedtime for a two-year-old is seven p.m.”

“Mmm,” said Ana.

“It also says we should get baby soap. He could get eczema.”

Ana was lost in her movements, saying nothing. James used to joke about the tidying. When they left her apartment to go out, James would help, putting the clean dishes in the cupboards and emptying the food trap in the sink. Then he’d stand at the door waiting, and announce: “All locked down, Cappy!” In those days, Ana had smiled and laughed, and in doing so, admitted this need as eccentricity. There’s no shame in it anymore, thought James. And God knows, no comedy.

She finally climbed into bed next to him, propped up by pillows. James threw several to the ground. He placed his computer on the table and leaned to face Ana, but she was up much higher than he was and he could only see fragments of her, smell the crook of her arm. The pillows made them silly.

“We didn’t brush his teeth,” said James.

Ana answered with a question. “What do we do tomorrow?”

“Daycare, I guess. They said to keep the routine, and it’s Monday.”

“God, is today Sunday?” Ana felt stuffed with questions, as if they would tumble out and fill the room if she dared open her mouth, a fisherman’s net releasing question marks. What she wanted was an explanation, but for what? She could sense James getting sentimental next to her, curling closer, trying to hold her hand, which lay limp above the covers.

“Where were they going?” she asked. “Were they going to get groceries? What was the point?”

“I don’t know,” said James. Ana frowned.

“It’s going to be okay,” said James. Abruptly, Ana reached for the light, sliding down past the pillows onto her back, so that not even her head was elevated. Now James was too high, looking down at her.

Ana pictured Sarah alone in her own bed, suspended by tubes, that yellow sunflower bruise across her eye, the black stitches slicing her face. A goalie’s mask glowing in a dark hospital room.

James had his own vision: Marcus in the drawer. A life-sized doll of Marcus.

“What’s happening?” she asked, strangled, and James went down to her so they were face to face. He stroked her hair, murmuring. She let him. She gave that to him until, somewhere in the middle, it felt like something she wanted, too.


2:47 on the clock. A sound, deep and dark. A moan, gathering strength as it awoke, fattening into a full scream.

James got up first, running down the hall in his boxer shorts, turning on lights, trying to flood it out. Ana was behind, walking quickly, arms around her torso.

“Finny, Finny,” said James. He could hear him but not see him, his eyes scanning the room, the empty bed, the quilt on the ground. And then he saw the boy, limp and piled in a corner on the floor, his head next to a bookshelf. The sound had returned to a moan by then, then gained momentum, like a police car getting closer.

“Finny,” said James. He gathered him up off the floor. His body softened in James’s arms.

The moan became a whimper and then the whimper silenced.

Ana put the quilt on the bed and turned back the top in a triangle.

Slowly, James placed Finn on the bed. Instantly, the boy flopped toward him, hands up, the moan returned. James sat on the bed, rubbed his hand along Finn’s back, feeling his spine through the thin material of the borrowed pyjamas. The boy quieted again, his breathing slowed.

James felt like he knew exactly what Finn was seeing, because he was seeing it, too: the wall coming toward him, the stupid thump of bodies on a dashboard, the shattered glass. Or maybe it was just a kid’s monster, a purple one with bony knees. Finn had no language. There was no way in.

“I’m going to stay here for a while,” James whispered.

Ana nodded, useless again. She straightened the cushions on the floor surrounding the bed, then left them.

For three nights, it happened exactly like this. And then Finn never woke at night again.



Finn ran up ahead of James, then stopped at the fence enclosing the playground.

“James open it?” Finn called. The cheap black runners from the social worker looked gigantic, theoretical, an idea of runners sketched in a factory by someone who had never seen them.

Finn led James inside the building by the hand, toward a hook marked with the name FINN in a laminate square. Finn had already removed his red hoodie and dropped it on the floor, then his baseball hat, a breadcrumb trail behind him as he ran down the hallway in a race with a smaller black-haired girl. James was a beat behind, picking up after Finn, putting the coat and hat on the hook, walking quickly to keep up.

A woman did the same, collecting her daughter’s droppings. James glanced at her hair; it must have been a style at one point, but now it was just a shape, a rectangle. Her eyes were padded with exhaustion. James turned on a smile and tried to catch her eye, hoping to share a moment of parental chaos. But she looked straight ahead and strode away, putting distance between them.

The classroom was a whorl of sound, high-pitched. One wall was covered in paper plates painted different colours; some splattered, some entirely solid, one or two with just a brushstroke. James moved closer, scanning for Finn’s name like he would at a gallery opening.

“You must be with Finn,” said a voice next to him, a man with two gold hoops in his ears and a glowing bald head. He held out his hand: “I’m Bruce, one of the educators in the pre-school room.”

“I’m James,” he said, surprised by the man’s strong grip. “Finn’s—” They looked at each other, waiting. “Guardian, I suppose.”

Bruce nodded knowingly, and ushered James to the sink, out of range of the children.

“We heard what happened from the social worker, and we’re all so unbelievably, unbelievably sorry,” he said.

“Oh, I believe you’re sorry,” said James with an awkward laugh. He became glib when nervous. But Bruce was not the kind of person to be hindered by other people’s responses. He continued.

“I want you to know that I personally have taken a training seminar in children’s grief, and everyone is on alert,” said Bruce. “Sad to say, but it’s not the first time we’ve had a child lose a parent.” James glanced at the circle of kids sitting cross-legged on a blue carpet, eyes upon a young woman reading a book out loud: “Olivia likes to try on everything!” Their size was incompatible with Bruce’s admission; how could these children possibly contain such sadness? Where would it go?

“Where do you take that kind of seminar?” asked James. At the five-minute mark, he had learned that Bruce had a B.A. in social work, and an Early Childhood Education Certificate. He hated the caseload as a social worker and always wanted to run a daycare, but it’s unusual for men to work with children in this day and age with all the suspicion, and on and on and on.

Oh, how much people will share. James saw Bruce naked in animal form, snarling and crouched in waiting, praying to be asked to spring upright and grunt out a story.

“How is Sarah doing, anyway?” asked Bruce, laying a hand on James’s forearm.

James was struck by guilt: he had not been thinking of Sarah. He had considered the situation decided.

“We have to wait. The prognosis is still vague.”

Bruce nodded. “Just keep us informed.”

“Same here,” he said, gesturing toward Finn, who had separated himself from the circle of readers and was stacking plastic animals: a bear riding a tiger; a hippopotamus astride a dinosaur.

“I’d like to live in that world,” said James.

“Pardon me?”

“A world where a tiger gives a ride to a bear. You know, everyone helping each other out.” He was joking, but Bruce lit up.

“If only!” he said.

James turned to find Finn, anticipating his first public send-off. But the boy was captivated by the stacking animals, frowning as each pair toppled.

Suddenly, Bruce let out a chirp: “You know, James, I remember you from TV, right? Aren’t you on TV?”

“I used to be.”

Bruce clapped his hands together.

“Ha! I knew it! You know, we have a lot of famous people at this daycare. Ruby’s mom wrote that cookbook, the one about organic baby food? And in the kindergarten room, there’s a little boy named Luke whose mom was in that miniseries, the one about the hockey wives?”

James clucked his interest but he did not appreciate being in this particular line-up.

James leaned into Finn’s line of vision, tried to catch his attention. He felt Bruce watching as he blew him a kiss that went uncaught.



James walked past a bleak stretch of tile stores and boarded-up façades. Then, the changes. Two coffee shops side by side: A chain with Coffee written in a yellow-and-maroon font on a grimy awning. A few dry doughnuts on a shelf were enough to draw the old men, thought James. They all sat alone. One worked the belly of a doughnut with his fingers, gazing into space.

And then, a new place – James felt instantly slighted that he had not seen it before, considering that since he’d been fired, he was on these streets all day, every day – filled with people who looked like younger versions of him, men with beards and laptops, women in black sweaters. These patrons sipped from garage sale mismatched coffee cups, caught in the glow of computer screens. Their feet rested on thick pine planks meant to remind urban people of barns, of something purposeful and only accidentally beautiful.

James caught a glimpse of himself in the large mirror over the bar. The angle caught its own reflection in another mirror across the room, so that James could exactly see the back of his head, right there, floating like a balloon above the gleaming Italian espresso machine. This always ruined James’s day. His hand rose to the spot, and then dropped quickly, embarrassed by the possibility of being caught. He’s not this kind of guy, is he? The kind of guy who cares about losing his hair? It would have been different, he thought, if he hadn’t looked the way he had when he was young. He had always considered himself exempt, and now – this thickening of everything below the neck, this thinning of everything above.

His concern was the most revolting part. What was he, a woman? He knew better. He’d interviewed a blind woman who climbed Mt. Everest! He’d been to the Gaza Strip (or on a helicopter that flew above it, at least)! He had perspective! And yet, and yet – oh, how it used to be: those girls in university, the plain ones who unbuttoned their pastel polo shirts to reveal the bodies of strippers. All that, just for him, because he was kind, or kind enough, and asked one or two questions, and paid for a beer – and then all that body, all the consent to enter and be risen – oh, it was easy.

Until Ana, who was tightly buttoned at first, the friend of a friend of a friend, connections all lost to him now.

Then James set to work: James in the hallway of the law school. James on the doorstep of her apartment. James finally cast as listener, and meeting her mother – her mother for Chrissake; he had never met a girl’s mother before. Ana’s was drunk. On the subway ride home, Ana burned with anger and James wanted to put his hand down her pants and push through her, bring her moaning back to him, but he put a protective arm around her shoulder instead.

But what he liked most, maybe, was that once he had Ana, once he could lean close to her and watch other men’s eyes flutter in defeat – what he liked most was that he meant it. That he did actually love her. She was strong, but she could be very still, and he craved that. She was never desperate for anyone’s approval, and casually comfortable in the demimonde she’d grown up in. They attended parties with her mother’s friends, artists and poets, in the kinds of book-lined downtown houses that James had dreamed about from the distance of his suburban childhood. Ana’s mother could make her daughter laugh just like James could, teasing her for being the sell-out daughter, beloved and feared for her efficiency.

And when he wasn’t with her, he still got the glances, still pushed at the edges of his manner to see if he could get the woman to bend her head back, a throaty laugh, the slight spreading of the fingers around a glass, or the knees in a skirt. James knew: If I wanted it … He fed on that If, even now that the women he saw most often were the wives of his friends, or the aging producers at his old office. A line from a poet he’d interviewed: “A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare.”

The women he considered his peers were changing; he had noticed a shift in silhouette, a meatiness between the ass and the knee that didn’t exist before, the shape of a traffic cone. Soon they would revert to their ethnic stereotypes, these once exotic Italian and Portuguese women. In a decade or so, they would look like snow-women, circles on circles. His mother, once petite, now sported the body of an old Yugoslavian woman in the hills. But not Ana, with her hollows. Not Ana.

It didn’t matter how gorgeous his wife was, because he needed, still, the collective giggle of the young women whose lives were just beginning, and who let him in under the mistaken assumption that he had some grown-up wisdom to impart about what came next. He needed it through the wedding, and the rise and fall of Ana’s attachment to him, the wane of their sex life, the renovations of the house. He needed that small, cooing possibility.

So how had he missed the moment when it stopped? He couldn’t pinpoint precisely when his presence in a room began to generate boredom, or when the women got even younger, and the Jessicas became Emmas. At the staff party last Christmas, the handful of pretty young girls were text messaging the whole time, heads bowed. They couldn’t keep eye contact. In the months before he was let go, one of them, Ariel, had begun doing segments for his show. She pitched gauzy academic takes on lowbrow subjects: Is Hip-Hop Dead? Teens and Sexting. Why We Need Cute Animals on the Internet. She had a blog, Sly told him. She “repurposed content.”

During interviews, she seemed to be always laughing, or on the cusp of laughing. She was furiously short and wore an array of coloured scarves, shooting her own work on a handheld camera, writing and producing herself. James remembered when he was surrounded by a cadre of writers and producers and directors and cameramen, a different person for every job. They were all expected to be one-man-bands now. What had happened to those guys? Technology had shrunk the world. He made a mental list of all the things that had vanished because of the Internet: newspaper boys; breathless first meetings; the slips of paper he used as a teenager to withdraw money from the bank. These were all things Finn would never know, and that these girls had already forgotten.

At the party, the young women’s eyes had skimmed his body with tolerance, stopping on Sly – those ties! those tasselled loafers – with flat-out revulsion. They all had long straight hair, as if there had been a conference to decide, a hairstyle colloquium. James, wearing an Arcade Fire T-shirt under his blazer, had caught a glimpse of himself in a window and found he had no idea what he had been trying to achieve. He’d left the party early to watch the Leafs on TV.

James drank his second Americano of the day. He filled in a sheaf of forms Bruce had given him at the daycare: phone numbers and emergency contacts. Parent/Guardian. He circled the latter. Below his and Ana’s numbers, he put his mother’s.

“Is there any information that would help us get to know your child better?” James considered writing: “Mother in a coma; father in a drawer.” He didn’t, but smiled at the possibility, then accepted the sorrow on the other side of the smile.

The door of the café opened and a red stroller appeared. It stuck in the door, then jiggled this way and that until, finally, a seated young man clicked shut his laptop, pulled out his earbuds and loped over to pull it through. A flushed woman on the other end thanked him, and then immediately behind her, another red stroller stuck in the doorway. The young guy pulled that one through, too, and accepted the thanks. And then, finally, a third one appeared, this time green. The women laughed loudly. Chairs scraped and tables banged. James relinquished an extra chair. The young man packed up his laptop and left. When finally this swell of bodies settled, the room’s tininess had lost its charm. James was now wedged close to the cappuccino machine, which stopped and started with a go-cart revving in his ear. He attempted to finish his papers while the women talked. There was such panic in their voices, such urgency, as if they had just had duct tape stripped from their mouths. It seemed to James that there was nothing linear in this talking, no distinguishing one voice from the other, no call and response, just call.

“The thing is, if you don’t want me in your store, then fine, I won’t go in your store—”

“Right, right—”

“But then, you don’t get my business—”

“Right, right—”

“And what is this contempt, then? Right? What’s the expectation? What are we supposed to do, stay in the goddamn house all day and watch the tampon channel? Like, sorry, I’m not—”

“Giving up everything—”

“Right. You’re the same person. You have a right to—”

“Theo says: ‘Just stay home.’ But what the hell does he know? I mean, he comes in at eight—”

“And he never gave up anything. He doesn’t know what it’s like. No one tells you what—”

Then, atop the symphony of exigency, a baby began to moan. Then another set free a wail. Soon, all three had shaken off their flannel blankets and uncoiled from their baskets to lie across their mothers’ bodies. The sounds of soothing were as loud as the babies’ cries. Plastic toys were shaken. Songs and murmurs. Breasts appeared from sweaters.

All those years that James had been in his office, women had been having this conversation. It came to him as a major revelation that the city was lived in all the hours of the day, and often not by him. He felt strangely left out, as if the city had been duplicitous, a disloyal friend. Borrowed. He had never really known it after all.

James put on his jacket, and stepped into the day. The sidewalks were clean, crowded with sunlight.

James tried to imagine what Finn was doing at that moment. He knew there would be a nap at some point and he liked that idea: all the little cots laid out on the floor, a shuttered room, dark and silent, in the middle of work day. The permission in it appealed to James.



Ana stared out the window at another tower just like hers. For a while, there had been a blonde woman about Ana’s age in the office across the way. One day they were wearing the same navy spotted blouse – an unusual blouse, expensive – and Ana laughed at the mirror image. The next time it happened, Ana spontaneously waved at the woman, gesturing to their matching shirts. But the woman didn’t respond, kept typing, her head bowed in a wilful manner. When Ana returned from the washroom, the woman had drawn her blinds. Embarrassed, Ana did the same.

Now the office was occupied by a man who sat with his back to the window, his curly hair somehow childlike over the collar of his shirt. That choice, to turn one’s back to the window, seemed obscene to Ana.

“Ana?”

She started, spinning her chair toward the door.

“Having a moment to yourself?” asked Christian. Everything he said came off like he wasn’t so much talking to her as gathering information for a dossier he was preparing about her faults.

“What do you need?” she asked.

“An opinion,” he said. “We need it fast, but I don’t think it’s complicated.”

Ana wanted to say: Now why would I do that for you? Instead, she said: “I’m quite busy right now.”

“Looks like it,” said Christian with a barking laugh. He behaved like a businessman from a movie, with not one sincere gesture in his repertoire.

But, in fact, he had found her with a space in her schedule, now that the servers trial had begun. She had been wondering what would come next. The impermanence was what she loved about being a research lawyer: the presentation of a problem, its resolution, and then a new problem. Litigation hadn’t worked for her – all that noise and bluster – but up here, on the fifteenth floor, her inwardness was a virtue. She billed high and long; her bonuses arrived twice a year. But that wasn’t why she loved it: She was vicious in her determination to make the law understood. She hacked problems into tiny pieces, and spent hours on the computer, trawling databases until she had solved each piece, wrapped it in understanding from every direction. Then she presented the finished product, the opinion, to the lawyers, who crowed and hollered. She was a costumier, arming them for battle.

But she preferred not to work with Christian. His officiousness, his white teeth. There were other research lawyers he could use, but he always came to her.

“What is it?”

“Biotech. That old chestnut—” He put on the booming voice of a news anchor. “Should higher life forms be patentable?” She knew the law, had mined it several times for several different cases: humans couldn’t be patented, but seeds could.

“For Emcor?”

“They’re suing that farmer.”

Ana had read about this: Emcor, a multi-million-dollar client, had begun to knock on the doors of farmers when their trademarked seeds, genetically modified to perfection, began to turn into crops on the fields of farmers who hadn’t bought them. The farmers said they didn’t know how it happened, blaming the wind. Intellectual property theft, the Emcor representatives called it. Ana pictured men in suits handing subpoenas over white picket fences to men in overalls.

“Soybeans,” she said.

“Right. Those naughty farmers are infringing.”

She couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not.

“Really, Ana,” he said, leaning in. “I need your wisdom. I’m in over my head, I think.” He said it like it could never be true.

Ruth appeared in the doorway, looking tidier today, her hair pulled back, her skin clear. Ruth the Temp, but could she still be temporary? She had become a fixture, a shadow of slouch in the halls: “Sorryinterrupt …”

“Leave the file,” Ana said, and Christian gushed his thanks, blew her a kiss on the way out.

“What can I do for you, Ruth?” she asked.

Ruth sat down, pulling her skirt over her knees.

“I just wanted to see if, you know, you’d had a chance to talk to your husband.”

Ana cocked her head, blank

“Do you remember? When you said that about maybe me talking to him?”

Ana winced. The invitation. For a year, the girl had been silently waiting, and she had forgotten.

“I’m so sorry,” Ana said. “James isn’t even working in TV these days.”

Ruth’s face, which seemed as if it could fall no further, did so, reddening.

“We’ve had an intense few days,” said Ana. Then she tried it on, saying it out loud: “A friend of ours died, and we’re looking after his little boy.” Where was Sarah in this version? She couldn’t bring herself to say it; the mawkishness was overkill, the story unconvincing.

“What do you mean?”

It was not a response Ana had expected.

“Just what I said. So I’m unusually tired.”

Ruth nodded. “My sister has two kids.” Ana saw a flash of silver in mouth: a stud through her tongue. “Someone’s always puking or throwing a shitfit or something …”

Who gave this girl a position? Ana tried to picture her at a job interview. No one here possessed a sense of humour, so what was it that got her hired?

“Mmm,” said Ana. Ruth rose, mumbling, and something in that incomprehensible sound prompted Ana to say: “I’ll talk to him, though. Maybe next month you can come by. When we’re more settled.”

Ruth nodded, walked out, leaving Ana to her window. Then suddenly she reappeared: “I could, like, babysit for you or something if you needed it. You know, if you need any help or anything.”

Ana smiled, surprised.

“Thanks, Ruth,” she said. “That’s very sweet.” Ruth shuffled out into the hum of the office, sliding between two people walking past, oblivious to the fact that she had interrupted their conversation.


James kept walking. He walked until he was in the mall, which he had covered on the show once, gleefully, as a kind of Ellis Island of shopping. Turbans, saris, burkas, baseball caps backwards on the heads of brown boys, their underwear waistbands exposed. A celebration of the interstice of commerce and immigration. Or something like that.

James headed toward the most expensive corner of the mall, a children’s store with fall displays: kids in rainboots with animal snouts on the toes; umbrellas resembling frogs. He grabbed a basket. After staring at the labels for several minutes, he realized that the child’s age determined the size. Finn was two and a half, so he piled size threes in the basket. James thought, Wouldn’t it be great if the size were still the age? I’m forty-two, give me the forty-twos please.

He selected carefully: nothing with slogans, nothing overly sporty. But it was difficult to find anything without baseballs or soccer balls or team numbers emblazoned across the chest. He thought of Sarah, and her pride over second-hand bargains. What would she make of this? James found a pair of runners hipper than the ones Finn had been given by the social worker. Blue Adidas with a seventies retro stripe, but tiny.

The clerk ringing through his purchases was blowsy, overly effusive.

“These are sooooo cute,” she said, folding a pair of jeans. “Totally popular for fall.”

The credit card had his name on it, but it was Ana’s account; would this piece of information have made the saleswoman less solicitous?

Only when she dropped Finn’s new shoes into the bag did James realize that if you swapped his laces for Velcro straps, he was wearing exactly the same pair.


The door opened quickly, lightly, which surprised Ana. She had expected the creaking of Al Capone’s vaults to match her sense of invasion. She drew the scattering of mail and flyers to her body.

Straightening, a grim old lady smell washed over her, spiked by something sour, foul. Ana put down her briefcase and an empty suitcase on wheels. She made two tidy stacks of mail – urgent and not – and took off her heels. She moved quickly, glancing at the clutter of toys in the living room, the clothes and shoes strewn. That giant bag of cat food was still there, resting against the wall. A neighbour had apparently taken the cat, informing James when he came by that the cat basically lived at her house anyway. Ana barely remembered it: black, maybe, and fat. Looking at the cat food, she regretted that she had never bothered to learn its name. She would take the bag to the neighbour later.

The kitchen was Pompeii: plates of half-eaten food, a booster chair covered in Cheerios and chunks of browned banana. She tracked down the smell to old milk gone solid in a blue plastic cup covered in cartoon bees, sitting on a counter.

Ana was filled by a rush of conquering energy. She marched into Sarah and Marcus’s room, pulling open drawers until she found jeans, a T-shirt, both too big, but clean and folded tidily, which surprised her. Ana placed her skirt and blouse on hangers that she put over the doorknob, careful not to let her clothes touch the ground, which was covered in a thin layer of dust. Grey balls of fluff made space for her as Ana moved around the room in Sarah’s clothes.

She rolled on a pair of Marcus’s sweat socks. In this uniform, she set to it, opening windows, gathering dirty laundry and tossing toys into wicker baskets.

And she worked, yellow gloves filling garbage bags, scrubbing soldered food from plates, keeping the kitchen sink filled to the rim with soapy bubbles. Draining the fat swirls and food chunks and refilling, over and over.

After a couple of hours, Ana noticed the silence, the noise of her breathing. She hit play on the stereo (and dusted it, too). A familiar CD, a lament; spare guitar, the kind of music James used to play for Ana, tears in his eyes: “Hear this part? It really starts here …”

The music carried up to Finn’s little room, which was like wandering into Sarah’s force field, like hearing her calling: This is how much I love him. The white curtains were covered with tiny embroidered trains. Red bunnies repeated on his bedspread, and the throw rug was a scurry of cuddly bugs. All these crowds of miniatures, thought Ana, stripping the bed, throwing scattered toys into a toy box. She should take some toys home, too.

She looked through a stack of books: Tell the Time With Pooh, Olivia Saves the Circus, Scaredy Squirrel. Which ones were right for Finn? Which were his favourites? All the information was locked away, irretrievable. Most of Finn’s preferences resided elsewhere, with his parents, in the shadow world.

She pulled open Finn’s dresser drawers. The underwear was folded into little boxes; Ana felt strange packing the suitcase, wondering how it would look if she got caught, a grown woman with a suitcase of boys’ underwear. She buried the pairs (Curious George; dinosaurs) under sweaters and socks. Then suddenly, she thought: Does Finn wear underwear? Why were they using diapers? She would have to ask James.

Ana looked around for a stuffed animal, anything she might remember Finn loving, but there were only block puzzles and flashlights, nothing huggable. As she turned out the light, Ana thought: I’ll buy him a teddy bear, something that James will approve of.

She continued.

In the basement, Ana moved the laundry to the dryer, stepping over the detritus that ends up in basements, the remnants of Finn’s babyhood: pieces of a crib, a highchair. Skates. Did Marcus play hockey? He’d never mentioned it.

When Ana emerged from the basement, darkness had pulled up to the windows. She went to the empty fridge that she had already wiped clean and pulled out its one occupant, a half-drunk bottle of vodka. She poured a glass and drank it whole, a snake with a mouse, then turned up the music to hear it above the vacuum.

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 jewellery 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; being alone was a piece of poverty. 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? Why hadn’t she considered the word they loved in her office: “interface”?

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, 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 the computer off.

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 paid she was simply for making sense out of chaos, which she would do for no money at all.

Ana pulled the duffel bag onto the front porch, placed the garbage in the bins at the side of the house. She put a laundry basket of toys in the trunk. A small brown rabbit smiled up at her. She turned it on its side.

When she was safely in the car, with all the doors locked, she let out a long, soft whimper, a sound she was getting used to hearing.


Finn had stories to tell, about bananas and a soccer ball that went missing and Elijah and Kai and Ella B. and Ella P. They walked side by side, Finn stopping every few steps to pick up a broken straw or a leaf, past the eyes of the old Portuguese men on their porches, their compressed bodies upright, hands on knees.

James pulled a narrative out of the streaming chatter, repeated it back to Finn: “You told Ella B. not to take your Jingo block?” Finn nodded, continuing the story.

The sandwich store was on the corner of a neighbourhood street, surrounded by houses with wrought iron fences and birdbaths.

“Should we get some sandwiches for dinner?” asked James

“For Ana?” James was surprised. Had Finn said her name out loud before? He nodded.

The boy ran ahead, pulling the heavy door of the sandwich store open with determination. He instantly homed in on a dusty jellybean machine in the corner and stood twisting the dial.

“Do you want a sandwich?” James asked Finn.

“Girl cheese.”

“We can get that at our house. These are veal sandwiches.”

A girl a little older than Finn came in with her mother and installed herself at the jellybean machine too, hitting the top of it with her fist. Her mother glanced at James, smiled distantly.

“I called—” she said to the man behind the counter. He went to retrieve her food, leaving the woman and James next to each other, each regarding a child.

“Lilly, no banging. Don’t bang. That little boy was here first.” The girl scampered to the pinball machine and began hitting the glass instead. Finn followed at a distance, staring at her.

“Lilly, don’t bang!”

“Give me a quarter!” yelled Lilly.

“No, not now. Dinner time,” said the mother, tucking her bag of sandwiches under her arm.

“No! I want to play pinball!” screamed the girl.

The mother glanced at James woefully.

“He looks like you,” she said.

James was startled. He wanted specifics on this comment. “Really? You think so? How do you see that?”

But there was a flurry of activity at the counter, paper bags crumpling and a loud cash register churning, and when James had finished paying, the woman and the girl were gone. Finn stood at the pinball machine, tapping it lightly.

James felt smug that they had made it through the ordering, the waiting, and the paying, without incident. He followed Finn, the bag of sandwiches in his hand, the little boy running ahead then turning back to check on James every few moments, just in case.

The sun was setting, and the fall light stained the rooftops of the houses caramel. At the top of James’s street, the curtains in the brothel house fluttered as they walked past, as if someone had just backed away from the window. James knew Ana’s theories, but had never seen anyone come or go from there. He glanced at the recycling bin on the curb, bottles of vodka and Diet Coke. Nothing edible.

Finn ran from the sidewalk into the brothel’s muddy front yard, pocked with cigarette butts.

“Come on, Finn. You can’t be up there,” James said, trying to sound casual. Finn kept going, up the stairs, as if he lived there, as if he might reach up and turn the knob, step inside to some other life awaiting him there.

From the sidewalk, James yelled: “Finn, get down! That’s not your house!” Finn ignored him, focused on his repetitious ascent and descent of the stone staircase. Again, the flutter and shadow in the front window. James stormed the walk.

“Finn! I’m talking to you!” He grabbed the boy’s wrist – so light! A wishbone! – and pulled him. Finn’s body buckled. He yelped, making himself liquid. James was forced to drop the sandwiches and grab Finn, who kept slipping from his hands. He finally located two solid parts and hauled his smallness over his shoulder, trying to squat down and grab the sandwiches, all the while half-running away from the brothel house.

Finn screamed like an injured bird, high and squawking. James glanced back to see the door to the brothel open and a woman’s shape appear. She was transparent, the tops of her bare legs covered by a long T-shirt. She held a cigarette by her hip. James moved quickly away.

They approached their house like this, with Finn wailing, a slab of snot and tears across James’s body, his legs kicking. Ana opened the door to them.

“I heard you coming,” she said, glancing up the street toward the other houses, their insides lit up in the dusk. Noise travelled between the houses and got trapped, like a tunnel.

James dropped Finn on the couch. The boy lay on his back, still screaming and kicking. Electrocution. Drowning. Ana hovered in the doorway.

“Is this normal?” she had to shout to be heard.

“I don’t f*cking know!” screamed James.

“What are you going to do?”

He glanced at her. She was shivering; she looked barely born.

James went to Finn, squatting down, trying to pin him like a wrestler.

“It’s okay! Finny! It’s okay!”

Finn’s arms flailed and his small right fist jutted upwards, clocking James in the eye. James reeled back; Ana screamed, and at that sound, Finn went still and silent at last, shocked to hear Ana scream, shocked to see James, his hand over his eye, staggering backward in a stream of f*ckf*ckf*ck.

Finn sat, bewildered, his face streaked.

Ana was upon James, pulling back his hand, looking at his eye, a small trickle of blood.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“His fingernails are too long,” said James.

“His fingernails!” gasped Ana, reaching for the blood. Finn watched from wide eyes as Ana quickly stroked James’s hair, then hurried to the bathroom for supplies.

James watched her leave the room and felt the familiarity of Ana in charge. Something fluttered nearby, in the corner of his bloodied eye. Finn, terrified on the couch, quivering.

“Hey,” said James, opening his arms. “It’s okay. It was an accident.”

“Sorry,” said Finn, flinging himself into James’s embrace. James wondered if he could hear the man’s heart up against his child’s ear.

“Me, too.”

Ana came upon them like this, a tube of medicine in her hand. She had the strange impulse to turn around and give them the privacy they looked like they deserved.

James knew how to reclaim Finn. He whispered to him until he began laughing, rocked him gently.

“Kleenex,” said James, with his hand out. She frowned, but found him a Kleenex in her purse.

“Blow,” said James, and Finn did.

Finn’s breathing slowed to something human. James sang quietly: “Rockin’ rockin’ leprechauns, they’ve come back to rock ‘n’ roll …” Finn smiled.

Ana blurted: “Look, Finn, I picked up some of your things.”

James glanced at her.

“I left work early,” she said. Finn was off James’s lap, toward a stack of books on the coffee table. Ana had lined up his toys as if they were for sale: a puzzle, a small Thomas the Tank Engine, a flashlight.

“Scaredy Squirrel!” he crowed, flipping pages.

In this way, the evening was rescued.

There was a pattern now, after only a week. The script was foreign to Ana but James recognized in it shades of his own childhood. In James’s earliest memories, he was only a little older than Finn, in kindergarten. James and his brother walked home from school together past rows of identical stucco houses differentiated only by the garages: single or double, left or right. Lawns were square. Trees were thin and young. James’s mother waited in the kitchen with a tray of Yugoslavian cookies. James and Michael sat cross-legged in front of the television. James licked the frosting off the cookies, leaving the soggy wet breadstick. No one else had these cookies in the unmarked plastic bags from the market downtown.

With his mother’s nudging and prodding, the family moved from wake-up to breakfast, from breakfast to school, school to sports, and on through the steps until bedtime, when James leaned between her knees as she combed his wet hair. The entire day’s effort designed to push the clock toward sleep beneath Star Wars sheets.

If James’s father ever brushed James’s hair, he tugged and pulled with bear hands. He had a job like Ana’s that bored James to the point of cruelty. He came home late and got up early, always catching the train into the city or back from the city. Where is he? “He’s on the train,” said his mom. So when James pictured his father, he was astride a train: a superhero with legs dangling past the tiny windows, hurtling down the tracks, briefcase under his arm.

The year James entered high school, his mother got her own job, at the library. It turned out that she had been going to school, too, while he was in school. Where was the evidence of this? The studying, the exams? In the house, her talk was only expended on two boys and a man. Their mother vacuumed, shooing them from the room. And they would go, the three of them moving into the next empty space, still talking baseball and hockey statistics, a triangle that kept relocating as she approached with her machine.

James was the handsome one, and got a little leeway for it, space to grow his hair and start smoking pot. He hung out with older kids who were into Bauhaus and New Order. When he didn’t sign up for any sports teams in grade eleven, he and his father had nothing left to talk about. It wasn’t a collision exactly, just a change in routine. With his mother at work, his father stayed in the city later, and the house was empty more and more, so James kept out of it. He began taking the train himself, hopping off downtown for concerts, hovering until closing in record stores and book stores, absorbing Aldous Huxley and Tom Wolfe and Bob Dylan. Meanwhile, Mike got his hands on a computer and began programming. Tapes gave way to floppy discs until finally, at 26, he built a software company and designed a font called Tamarind. Then, a decade later, he sold both for an amount that was never made clear. Millions. Mike was still around, living in a northeast pocket of the city where people had driveways and no sidewalks.

James hadn’t called his parents in weeks. When he spoke to them last, he hadn’t told them he’d lost his job. That they hadn’t called to ask him why he was no longer on TV was confirmation of what he’d suspected for years: they weren’t watching. It’s not that they disapproved of what he did, but it had never occurred to them that it mattered.

James went over this story. He didn’t think about it often, but it had been rising up in him lately, especially as he held Finn between his knees after the bath, combing his hair. What had happened between Marcus and his parents? How did Sarah’s parents die? Only vaguely, James remembered a tale of a car crash. Maybe.

Though James had a gift for the narratives of strangers, he had never been good at keeping straight the most dramatic events of his friends’ lives. He’d had a girlfriend for two years in university who told him in the first week of their relationship about having childhood cancer, and it left his mind almost before she’d finished speaking. Then, a decade later, James had run into her on a crowded street, thin and wasted, a toque pulled down over her forehead. “It’s back,” she said hoarsely, and for days, he had no idea what she was talking about until the memory slithered up, its head poking through the potholes in his memory while he was alone on the southbound University line: leukemia.

If Sarah’s parents had been killed in a car accident, she probably felt inured from that particular disaster; she had been struck once, it could not happen again. What are the odds? He once interviewed a woman who gave birth to a child the size of a pop can, a preemie born at twenty-six weeks. She told him: “As soon as you’re on the wrong side of statistics, statistics don’t mean anything.”


James saw Finn first, in the middle of James and Ana’s bed, surrounded by stuffed animals. Past him, through an open bathroom door, Ana’s back was bent, yellow gloves pushing, scrubbing out the tub.

James leaned down and kissed Finn’s warm neck. Finn squealed a little, as if he’d been tickled. As he clipped Finn’s fingernails with his large nail clippers – he could fit two of Finn’s fingers between the blades – James was filled with a sensation of pure joy. He had escaped so much. Loss was all around, but it had never really landed on him. This realization gripped him and shook him into something like dizziness. He looked at the small pile of fingernail clippings on the tissue, and thought: Oh, happiness, happiness, happiness.

James read Finn the book about the squirrel, and tucked him under his new sheets, beneath a swirling mobile of a bald eagle. “Sing light,” said Finn.

“Can you sing it?”

Finn shook his head. “You.”

“You light up my life?” sang James in a silly voice. Finn laughed, and was distracted enough to let James lead him away from this unmet wish. He turned out the lamp.

“Door open,” said Finn. James opened it a crack. “More.” And that was fine.


James had one leg in his sweatpants when Ana appeared in the bedroom doorway.

“Where are you going?”

“Wednesday. Hockey,” he said, pulling his Maple Leafs jersey over his shirt.

“You’re leaving me alone with him?”

“Yes, but I snuck a pound of horse tranquillizers into his sippy cup so I don’t think you’ll have any problems.” He gave Ana his cute face.

“Seriously, James. Do you really think it’s good for him? He’s attached to you. If he wakes up—”

Fully dressed now, James moved past Ana in the doorway and into the hall. She followed him downstairs.

“—could it be traumatic for him? More traumatic?”

“Wait a second,” said James, again brushing by Ana to the basement. She waited in the hall, chewing the meat from her thumbnail. James returned with his hockey bag.

“Are you listening to me?” asked Ana. James squatted at her feet, tying his running shoe.

“Yes, but you’re being crazy. He’s not going to wake up, and if he does, so what? He knows you. Give him a hug, change his diaper.”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot,” Ana snapped. “That’s not what I mean.”

James let out a long, slow sigh, eyes raised to the ceiling. “What do you mean then, Ana?”

“Don’t talk to me in your TV voice.”

“Come on—”

“You know what I’m trying to say—” She sounded panicked, invoking a tone that should be reserved for fires and accidents. “I think it might be bad to leave him so soon. How important is hockey tonight? Is it an important game?” Ana’s understanding of sports was so limited that she believed James was working toward something, a cup or a pennant.

“It’s shinny, but if I don’t play, the numbers aren’t even.” His bag began to pull uncomfortably on his shoulder. James opened the door. A gust of cool air came upon them, but Ana was still hot with anger.

“I hate it when you tell me I’m crazy,” she said, and James recognized his mistake.

“I didn’t say you were crazy. I said you were being crazy,” he leaned in and kissed the top of her head. “You’ll be fine. He never wakes up. And he likes you, Ana.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she said, pulling away. But even as she watched James walk down the street toward the rink, his stick bobbing above his shoulder, she could not exactly figure out what she meant. She was trying to get him to recognize some new kind of failure that was waiting for them. She closed the door.

She wanted him to feel it the way she did, the certainty that every interaction with Finn was changing the boy, altering his being in ways that could not be undone. She wanted her husband to recognize the impossible weight of that, and return to shield her.

She felt that James was leaving her here as a test, that she was forever under scrutiny now, since Finn’s arrival. The expectations were smothering. For so many years, she had tried to join James in his unspoken resolution that a child would be the release of something in her. She knew that he believed she needed saving, from her drifting parents and sharp-edged youth. He was the first part of that rescue plan; the baby would be the second part. He had said it in the beginning of their life together, often, stroking her hair: “My poor girl,” he said. “Let me take care of you.” That was the great unspoken switch of their relationship: everyone thought she saved James from his slovenliness, his intellectual chaos, but in fact, up close, it was Ana who was in need of salvation. The birth of a baby, then, the small hand to pull her over to grace.

But up rose the black and wild doubt: What if I can’t do it? She had felt uneven since Finn’s arrival, staring at walls and windows, barely able to put on her boots that morning, staring at the zipper pull in her fingers.

How is motherhood supposed to feel? Because she wasn’t sure that it should feel like this, so much like terror. And her husband was leaving her alone with that feeling, while he went to play hockey.

That was what she had meant to say.


The game was particularly cruel, and James wasn’t up for it. Doug, especially, had his elbows out, and some kind of rabies bubbling up in him. James couldn’t get the puck, and after one ferocious futile burst down the ice, he lost his breath and had to stop, leaning over with his hands on his knees.

There were two women playing, Alice Mitchell, who ran a small catering company, and a tall woman James hadn’t seen before. Her blonde hair sprayed like a skirt from the bottom of her helmet.

Alice skated up to him and gave him a gentle whap on the butt with her stick.

“Doug’s an a*shole tonight,” she shouted.

James nodded, touched and embarrassed by the sympathy. He skated away fast but only got to the puck a few times, once on a generous pass from Alice. Doug plucked it from him within moments.

After, they went for beer. James checked his cell phone for messages from Ana, but there were none. Six of them sat in the small bar, a converted diner with permanent white Christmas lights in the window and Dixie music on Sunday mornings. James had been going there for years, but this time he was acutely aware that Ana could not be with him. Someone had to be at home. He felt her out there, tethered to their house, to Finn’s sleeping body.

Doug leaned in, separating himself and James from the rest of the group.

“Where the hell have you been? Lee’s all: Where’s Ana? We never see you guys,” he said. Doug was an old friend, but possibly not a good one. They had worked together years ago. When Doug left for a private network, that might have been it. But somehow Doug had kept up the momentum, phone calls and birthdays and hockey. In the moments when Doug was at his most crass, James suspected he kept in touch only on the off chance that James would prove useful to him at some point. For all his hard drinking, and cultivated blue collar vulgarity, he was a ruthless independent producer with a rotating staff, constantly quitting because of his tantrums. In the burning desert in Jordan, working on a documentary, Doug had stayed in a broken, overheated truck while an unpaid assistant pushed. This incident had made him famous in TV circles. His name caused fear in the twenty-somethings who did his grunt work. He won an International Emmy for the Jordan documentary, which was about relics.

“I’ve been busy. The book’s coming along,” said James, quickly burying his face in the pint of beer.

“Who’s your publisher?” asked Doug.

“It’s early stages. Not sure yet.” James raised the glass again.

Doug recognized that pause and changed direction.

“We’re having a small dinner thing. You know Rachel Garland, right? She did that figure skating miniseries?” James knew them all and all of their accomplishments and failures, those who made weekly commutes to Los Angeles, taking meetings, selling themselves. James had been excused from that particular footrace. He had designed his life to be above it, in fact, by staying at the public broadcaster for fifteen years. But it gnawed at him, the mystery of the commercial world. He tried to imagine being inserted into a life where he had to buff and box and sell himself like Doug did every day. Making pitches at boardroom tables in Los Angeles; throwing out a hundred ideas and having one stick. James recoiled from such odds.

He couldn’t bear what he knew was coming, a litany of other people’s successes. Doug did this under the guise of catching up.

Off Doug went. Rachel was running a big international co-production cop show. Lee had a new gig adapting a children’s series involving turtles. Rachel’s second husband, Bill Waters, would be at the dinner. He was back from being director of photography on a feature in New York. Many of these people had passed through James’s show at one time or another, and then moved on. James had the sensation of being a high school teacher watching his most promising students in cap and gown turn around year after year, waving good-bye or giving him the finger. And now he wasn’t even the teacher. He was the janitor.

Did any of them have children? He looked around the table, which was filling up fast with empty beer bottles. Alice did, from a first marriage. There was a period when all the women they knew were pregnant, and then, at parties, babies appeared early and disappeared later. But these babies lacked specificity; James hadn’t connected with any of them. Now those babies had become children, large and staring. James found them at the same parties when he was looking for the bathroom. They sprawled on couches in rooms with the television on, or were tucked into beds, sleeping. Suddenly he felt acutely aware of all he had not been privy to; the conversations he had been excused from in his life, just by being male, and having a barren wife.

“We’d have to get a sitter,” he said.

“What? Are you joking? Did you guys adopt or something?” Doug laughed then, as if such a thing were entirely improbable. “Did you get a dog?”

“We’re looking after a little boy. His parents died,” said James. “Well, his father died. We don’t know if the mother’s going to be okay or not.”

James didn’t mention that the daily call to the hospital was always the same: “Stable.” Ana had visited twice, while James looked after Finn. With her coat still on, she reported: “Stable,” pouring a glass of wine so quickly it splashed.

“What the f*ck? Who? Are you serious?”

“You don’t know them.”

“Maybe I do.”

“Marcus Lamb and Sarah Weiss.”

“Don’t know them.” Doug’s voice contained a hint of disappointment about that fact, as if he’d been unfairly excluded from a party.

“How old’s the kid?”

“Two. A boy. Finn.”

“Todd Banks and his wife, you know them? They’ve been trying to adopt from China, but it’s totally f*cking impossible right now.”

“I guess we’re lucky,” said James, and Doug didn’t notice the sarcasm in his voice, or let it be. (But a gnawing thought now: What about China? What about the baby in China, separated from them by only a few signatures and uncut cheques?)

“That is f*cking crazy, man. How’s Ana?”

“She’s okay. Good.”

Mark Pullen, sitting on James’s other side, leaned in. “Did you hear that? Alice sold her screenplay.”

James turned.

“I didn’t even know you wrote,” he said, trying to add a smile to the observation.

“I don’t really. It’s a comedy about catering for the rich and famous. I wrote it in three weeks.” She beamed. Mark, her husband, put an arm around her. He directed commercials and in all the years that James had known him, he’d never heard him aspire to anything else.

Alice Mitchell had only ever been kind to James, and her peanut brittle was a phenomenon. But he hated her a little in that moment.

“She’s being modest. She’s a great writer,” said Mark. “We just got back from L.A. and the producer said she had a voice like Nora Ephron.”

“ ‘Like Nora Ephron before she got boring.’ It was more of an insult to Nora Ephron than a compliment to me.” Alice kept smiling, so wide and bright that James could hardly look upon it.

He stood up suddenly, searching his pockets for cash.

“Alice, I’m thrilled for you,” said James, leaning down and giving her a kiss on the cheek.

“See you Friday?” shouted Doug as James walked off, waving over his shoulder. James didn’t answer.

At home, he dropped his gear in the hall and walked quickly up the stairs to Finn’s room. He went in and put his hand on Finn’s chest, which rose and fell confidently. This touch drained James of his anger.

After he’d showered and crawled into bed next to Ana, sleeping soundly, James had a thought: This might be temporary. Finn might be only a houseguest. Marcus’s parents could appear, with their blood ties ready to tighten around the boy. Or Sarah – Sarah could wake up. She could wake up and Finn would be reabsorbed into her, never to be seen again.

James turned over these scenarios in the dark, still feeling Finn’s chest under his hand. These futures burned behind his open eyes, waiting for an answer.


“Should we wait out here?” James always looked for a reason not to go in to the nursing home. Usually he would arrive after Ana, with coffees purchased in slow-motion, or drop her off to circle the block several times under the guise of looking for parking. This time, of course, with Finn in the car, he had a good reason to be absent. Still, Ana was irritated; he had begun to throw Finn in front of her to block motion – conversations and fights ceased because the boy was there, indicated by James with a flick of his head, a finger to the lips.

But he was right, of course, that no child would want to come into this place, especially when there was a playground across the street. A few patients had been wheeled there, and they sat with their wheelchairs pointed toward the jungle gym like it was a television. Knit blankets sausaged their legs. Their faces ranged from glazed to sleeping. A nurse, jacket over her green uniform, huddled and smoked, ashing behind her back.

“Come in and say hi. She’d like it,” said Ana. James nodded.

It had taken forty-five minutes to reach the home. Ana had carefully chosen this old age home, in a quiet, unvisited patch of the city. It had a good reputation, but that wasn’t why Ana chose it: placing her mother in a home closer to their house was unthinkable. Ana couldn’t imagine being out on one of her night jogs and running past a building that contained her mother, or turning a corner to see it on her way home from an evening out. Her mother being groomed and fed in the daylight was an image of some comfort, but to think of her locked in at night, her favourite time of the day, forced into her room like a cat in a cage – this wasn’t something she could bear to stumble upon accidentally.

There was the unbuckling and the gathering of gear that had spread across the car during the drive – water bottle, diaper bag, book, octopus toy. Finn himself came last, the final object.

Finn ran whooping up the wheelchair ramp, then hopped in and out of the electric sliding doors. James did the same, leaning his body outside: “In!” he called when the doors began to shut and then opened again as he kicked a leg over the invisible line. “Check it out, Finny! Out! In! Out! In!”

Ana signed her name in the reception book. “Hi, Lana,” she said.

“Hi, Ms. Laframboise,” said the nurse loudly. Lana spoke to the patients the way she, Ana, spoke to Finn: masking her discomfort with volume. It was Lana who put up the flimsy photographs of pumpkins and elves around the holidays, cut from women’s magazines. Now, in early fall, with nothing to celebrate, little circles of cellophane tape peeled off the walls.

Ana scanned the offices behind Lana for her favourite person in this place, the young man that James jokingly called Charlie the Chaplain. Charlie had been a tree-planter in B.C. in his early twenties, and that was only a few years ago. Now he crouched and spoke kindly to the men and women who punctuated the corridors and dining area. Ana had seen him walking from room to room turning off televisions where patients had fallen asleep. Ana could talk to him about neural pathways and reasons, and he always had an unsentimental, interesting bit of science on hand to soothe her. There was nothing evangelical in him; no condescension, no appetite for cuteness in a space abundant with both. Ana wondered if she could talk to him about Finn, and the uncertainty that was swelling in her. But she felt too shy to ask for him, picturing his lean body, his alert eyes.

“Harry Glick died. Do you remember him?” said Lana.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“He and your mother used to eat together quite often. You might want to speak to her about the loss.”

Ana tried to imagine that conversation and suppressed a laugh.


In his knit hat with frog eyes on the top, Finn was a rock star in the nursing home. The halls cleared for him. Spotting the boy, an old woman with a walker, spine like a C, stopped and, with the exertion of a body builder, raised one fist in a small cheer. Wheelchairs ceased their slow crawl and murmured. Ana had never seen so many smiling faces. They erased the smell of antiseptic and dish soap.

What a horror movie for Finn, thought James. The half-living inmates roused from their coffins. He kept the boy close, their hands locked together. James glanced at him and was surprised to find that he did not look frightened. He looked curious, which was his most common look; a mouth like an O.

James watched Ana gain her rigidity; she could not know how angry she looked, how frightened. It was an expression she wore only in this place, breaking it slightly to smile at the occasional patient as if cued to do so.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Wainwright,” said Ana. Mr. Wainwright, a former civic politician of some prominence (he developed the city’s waterfront in the fifties – a factoid that popped into James’s head as if in a cartoon bubble), sat in front of the television. He waved, smiled slowly, like his mouth was breaking through an icy surface.

Her mother’s door was closed. “Lise Laframboise” in calligraphy, a French name that haunted her in government offices and line-ups, two generations out of Quebec, and not a word of French in her.

Ana knocked. “Mom, it’s Ana, mom.” No response. She opened the door a little, wondering what she might see. Only once had the fear been fully realized: that day, her mother had been naked, pinballing between the walls, looking for her money. The panic, when it came, was often about money or jewellery she had hidden, or that had been stolen, things lost or taken from her.

This time, her mother was in bed with the lights out, covered up to her chin, her short gray hair a puff atop her head. Who knits all these wool afghans? Ana imagined a sweatshop somewhere.

Ana was followed by James and Finn, who stood at the foot of the bed. Ana opened the curtains and her mother winced in a finger of dusty light. She was not actually asleep, then.

“Mom, do you want to sleep some more?” asked Ana, praying for a “no” so she wouldn’t have to return later.

Lise shifted and rumbled, rubbing her eyes. She smiled.

“Ana,” she said, a relief for Ana that they could start from this point – her name, Ana – that she didn’t have to go back to the beginning today: You’re my mother. I’m your daughter.

“Hi, Lise, how are you feeling?” asked James, leaning in to kiss her cheek. She brightened falsely.

“Hello,” she sang. “I’m fine. It’s so lovely today. Warm, isn’t it?”

Lise had adored James, his rowdiness, his good looks. She had never said it, but Ana knew she thought her daughter wasn’t quite enough of a spitfire for this man; not enough like Lise herself.

Finn was batting at the bar on the bed, trying to hoist himself up.

“Mom, I want you to meet someone,” said Ana, lifting her mother’s hand and offering it to Finn. He looked at her, surprised, and James skipped a breath, wondering what Finn would do. He took the old woman’s hand, its dead weight, and looked at it against his own small fleshy hand, curious. James realized something: Finn was optimistic.

Ana lifted him up, placed him on the bed, his legs dangling. He turned at an awkward angle to see Lise’s face.

“Hello. It’s so lovely to meet you,” said Lise. Ana almost laughed: her mother, to whom sobriety was a special occasion, used to swear like a sailor and had never used the word “lovely” in her life. But these days, she sounded regal when she spoke. In her dying, she was becoming the daughter her own parents had prayed she would become. She had recited a psalm the other day, something Ana had no idea was inside her.

“He’s staying with us. There was an accident, and some friends of ours, uh, bequeathed him to us,” said Ana.

“Bequeathed?” James laughed.

“Well, how do you explain it?”

“We’re looking after him until his mother gets better,” said James, feeling an anxious twinge over the possible truth in that sentence.

Lise wasn’t going to make sense of the scenario. She stared out the window, frowning.

“Before you leave, can you ask the lady, the tall lady, if she’s finished with my camisoles? I give her my camisoles, and only the white ones come back, but I know there’s a black one.”

Ana pulled open the top drawer of the bureau to find the white camisoles, and several pairs of underpants, in a gigantic ball, as if her mother had been searching. “Mom, if you can’t find something, you have to ask for help.”

“I’m quite cold. I’d like my black camisole.”

“Well, let’s find it.” Ana dug down.

“God, maybe she’s right. That expensive one I bought her, the silk one, isn’t in here. Do you think someone would steal it?” Ana asked James.

“I doubt it. It’s probably just in the wash.” He hoped Ana wouldn’t find it and need to dress Lise. He dreaded his mother-in-law unclothed, her sunken chest and lazy belly, and Ana’s rough daughterly care.

“I think I have to ask.”

“Don’t. You’ll seem crazy and then, you know, that could make it hard for your mom.”

“What? You think they’ll punish her? Is that how this place works?”

Finn slid off the bed and stood between Ana’s legs, opening and closing drawers himself, imitating her slamming.

“Lise, would you like me to read to you?” asked James. It was the one task he enjoyed. It gave him something to do and broke the tension of Ana’s hovering. He used to bring Lise the kind of literature he believed women liked: The Age of Innocence, Beloved, The Color Purple. But his voice always sounded strange around women’s words, and soon he turned to Lise’s own stack of books, mostly self-help. They circulated on a library cart every couple of weeks.

“Do you have a preference? Eckhart Tolle? The Secret?”

“You can read her a banana sticker, it doesn’t really matter,” murmured Ana, opening the closet, stepping around Finn, who stayed close to her.

“Oh, I like that one,” said her mother.

James settled in to the lounge chair. The print was enormous. “ ‘Make the Now the primary focus of your life,’ ” read James.

Ana didn’t bother to stifle a laugh. Finn had found Lise’s purple hairbrush and was brushing his hair slowly, in the centre of the room.

Lana walked by the open door, quickly, as if hoping not to be caught.

“Excuse me,” said Ana, rushing toward the door. “Is it possible that my mother is missing some clothing? I bought her a very nice camisole and I can’t find it.”

Lana stood opposite Ana, eye to eye. “We do ask our clients’ families to label everything very carefully,” she said loudly. “But I can check. What colour is it?”

“Black, and her name is sewn inside, just like you said.” As Lana walked away, Ana shouted after her: “It’s an Elle Macpherson!”

She turned to James. “Was that hostile? Am I imagining things?”

“Definitely hostile,” said James, turning back to the book: “ ‘Realize deeply that the present is all you ever have.’ ”

“James, are you even hearing what you’re saying?” Ana interrupted. “Really, do you think someone with dementia needs to be reminded to live in the present? The present isn’t the problem.”

Ana spread a throw over her mother’s upper half, and in return, Lise smiled a new, grotesque parody of a smile that she’d been trying out lately.

Ana leaned in to straighten her mother’s cardigan and saw, poking out of the back, the Elle McPherson tag.

“Mom, you’re wearing the camisole,” said Ana, snapping the blanket in place.

“Ana, you can’t get mad at her,” said James.

Finn had dumped Ana’s purse into the middle of the room – keys, Kleenex, her phone, beeping with texts. He raised his arm in the air, a tube of lipstick northward, its red tip poking through the black casing.

Ana moved toward the lipstick. “Finn, no!” she snapped.

“Ana – don’t yell—”said James as Finn opened his mouth and smeared red over his lips.

“Jesus, Finn, that’s mine!” said Ana, grabbing the lipstick from his hands, trying to corral her objects of vanity, grasping for a rolling bottle of foundation.

“Oh,” said Ana’s mother. “What a pretty little girl!”

“Am I interrupting?” Charlie stood at the door, one hand on either side of the frame leaning in, as if stretching after a basketball game. James always thought of basketball when he saw Charlie. He always made sure not to stand too close to him.

“You’ve got a suit on today, huh?” said James, putting down the book.

Charlie pulled his tie up sideways, sticking his tongue out and bugging his eyes. Then he blushed a little. Ana was always surprised by his boyishness; the shaggy, rock star hair, the West Coast drawl. She had always thought of the church as a kind of elaborate hiding place, tunnels and spaces dug under ground, with priests like little black ants moving and scheming far below the real world.

“How are you today, Lise?” he asked, moving into the room, standing near her, without raising his voice.

“Oh, I’m wonderful. My family’s here. My camisole is here!” she laughed.

“This is Finn. He’s staying with us for a while,” said James. Finn hid behind Ana’s legs.

“Ah. He has great taste in lipstick, I see. Nice to meet you, Finn.” Charlie turned: “Ana, I wonder if I could have a word with you in my office before you leave? Do you have time? Is that cool?”

“Go, go,” said James. Charlie’s use of the word “cool” irritated James. If some guy under thirty was saying “cool,” then clearly James shouldn’t be. “We’ll meet you in the lobby.”

Ana leaned over and kissed her mother on the cheek while the men looked away. Finn returned to Lise’s drawers, pulling out pantyhose and twisting them up around his arms.

As they walked down the hall together, Ana noticed the top of a small notebook jutting from Charlie’s back pocket.

“Sit down. But don’t look around too closely,” he said. The room was small and windowless, a desk and a bookshelf filled with stacks of science and philosophy, some spines in Hebrew. A guitar case leaned against the shelf. The desk was a puddle of papers ringed by a pair of mugs and a stack of cardboard coffee cuffs.

Charlie saw her looking at the cuffs and said: “I know. I keep thinking I’ll reuse them but I never have. Not once.” He suddenly picked up the entire stack, opened a drawer and with a dramatic flourish, dropped them in. Ana smiled.

“I can’t throw them out,” said Charlie. He shut the drawer.

“Is everything okay with my mom?” asked Ana.

“Oh, yeah, yeah. She’s doing fine.” He rifled through papers, searching. “The reason I wanted to talk to you – I’ve been writing these songs, and I’m actually going to be performing.”

“Oh, I didn’t know you did that,” said Ana, surprised. “I know you sometimes sing with the patients …”

“I used to be in a band, a long time ago. This is just an open mic night, it’s not a big deal.”

Ana remembered all the songs that James had played for her over the years, the ecstasy in him, her own feeble efforts to match it. “I wish I were more musical. My mother was. She was always singing under her breath.”

“She still does,” said Charlie.

“Really?” Ana said, surprised. “I never hear that.” She looked at Charlie: “It’s primal, isn’t it? Some need to express oneself, to be heard.”

“Researchers have actually found that listening to music activates empathy in the brain. It gets you out of yourself,” said Charlie. “It’s almost the only way of communicating with some of the people here.” Ana knew those women, the advanced cases, who had lost language entirely. It had begun that way with her mother, searching for a word, an image, a name.

“It must be difficult to work here,” said Ana.

Charlie shook his head. “No, it’s not,” he said. “The managers can be a*sholes, but the people who live here – that part of it is easy.”

Finally, he found the paper he’d been seeking, and handed it to Ana. A flyer for his show. “Anyway, I have these songs. I think they’re pretty good, some of them. Trying to spread the word.”

Ana tried to imagine Charlie’s songs. She pictured holy rollers and heard hymns. “Are they – Christian songs?”

Charlie laughed. “Not in any way that’s creepy.”

“No, no,” said Ana. “When you say songs, I think of love songs, and it’s interesting to me, you know, a priest—”

“I’m not a Catholic priest. I’m a chaplain,” he leaned in faux-conspiratorially: “I have girlfriends. I don’t right now, but you know, I hope to again. At some point.” The tops of his cheeks grew pink, reminding Ana of a time when handsome men became unstuck in her presence.

She glanced at the flyer. “I’ll try to make it. Thanks, Charlie.”

“Tell James, too,” he said. Ana stood to leave, and Charlie did the same. “I wondered—” he said. “Have you thought about what we were talking about last time I saw you?”

Ana cast around in her memory.

“Wait – what was it?”

“About your mother, about coming to terms with death.”

Now Ana remembered. The conversation had taken place in the lounge, during tea time. Lise had fallen asleep suddenly and Ana was leaving when she ran into Charlie in the hall. They had sat for an hour or so among the old women in their wheelchairs, against the hot glass windows in the last days of summer. They talked as the kitchen staff cleared plates until only one woman was left, playing solitaire on her tray.

“Oh, yes. Epicurus, right? You were reading him—”

Charlie spoke in a comic, booming voice, as if auditioning: “Where death is, I am no longer,” he said, “and where I am, death is not.” The hamminess didn’t suit him, and quickly, the humour dropped from his face. He spoke quietly. “Did you want to borrow the book? Maybe you’d find it useful.”

Ana was ashamed to admit that she had left the conversation with a list of errands at the foreground of her mind. By the time she had made it through the organic market, her cloth bags overflowing with basil and farmer’s milk, Epicurus had evaporated. Even now, though Charlie had just spoken, Ana could feel the words’ meaning entering her and then immediately exiting. It angered her, this sensation that she could not contain anything of substance anymore. It explained, perhaps, this floating, this inability to come down, for what was there to land on? What did she really know?

“After I saw you, only a few days after, my friend died in a car accident. Finn’s father,” said Ana.

“Oh, Ana,” said Charlie. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s strange. Until you brought it up right now, I had completely forgotten our conversation. Why were we talking about death?”

Charlie raised an eyebrow, pointed out the open door of his office. A woman in a wheelchair inched past with an electronic whir.

Ana smiled. “Yes, but something specific. What was it?”

“Your mother. We had talked about her degeneration, and you said you were afraid for her.”

Ana started. “I did? I said that?” She closed her eyes for a moment. “I’ve been so tired lately.” With her eyes shut, she could sense that Charlie was looking at her face fully, maybe mapping the lines around her eyes, the groove of worry between her brows.

Ana opened her eyes. Charlie glanced away. She remembered the conversation. “And you talked about heaven.”

“I couldn’t sell you on it, so I tried Epicurus.”

“Tell the line to me again.”

Without irony this time, Charlie said: “Where death is, I am no longer, and where I am, death is not.”

“Right,” said Ana, hearing it. “The ending of life can’t be feared, because there’s no there there. The cessation of suffering,” she paused. “But you – you think of bliss. Angels.”

Charlie laughed. “Not really. I think more about grace, being finally in God’s grace.”

Ana considered this, and then said: “You have to die for that?”

They looked at each other, for a brief, held moment.

“I should – James is—”

“Of course,” said Charlie.

She placed the flyer in her purse, then clicked the information into her BlackBerry.

“I keep meaning to get one of those,” said Charlie. He pulled the small, spiral pad of paper out of his back pocket and waved it in the air like a flag.


The visit with her mother had drained Ana, which meant she curled up inside herself like one of those red paper Japanese fortune fish that fold into a tube from the heat of your hand. James saw it, her insides recoiling while the skin of her continued on from task to task.

This faded Ana was next to him and Finn as they walked through the grocery store, as she stood inside the gas station at the till waiting for him to fill the car, staring straight ahead, a British beefeater in a cashmere coat. There she was again, barely speaking in Ikea, picking a quilt for Finn, standing back behind the other parents (other parents? he stopped here: real parents?).

Finn ran in the children’s area, sat himself inside a shell-shaped chair and pulled a vinyl top down so that only his feet stuck out. James tickled his feet, threw him onto a beanbag hedgehog, tied a stuffed snake around his neck. Ana, Ana, Ana, a faint outline wavering in the hot desert horizon – where have you gone? Come back to me.

Ana, staring at the quilt covers blurring together, was thinking: If you act like a mother, you will feel like a mother. She chose one that felt soft in her hand.


Then she finds herself back in the basement apartment, her bedroom just large enough for a twin bed and a dresser, the window an air slot up high. She is eleven or twelve, blowing between groups of girls at school, back and forth, following the dictates of the girl who rules them all, Tracy with the large breasts and pink sweaters and thick lips like a wrung-out tea towel.

Ana has consented to bring home Tracy and another girl, named Siobhan. Siobhan is dark – black Irish, she liked to say, an image that conjured up African-American leprechauns to other children – and bewildered, except that there is a clot of meanness at the centre. She will forever be known as the girl who didn’t mind putting her hands on the dead pigeon and flinging it furiously into the bushes.

For this, Siobhan has become Tracy’s second. How did they get here? Ana can’t imagine she invited them, but there they are, they who only tolerate Ana because when she arrived at the school in the middle of the year, near Christmas – her fourth transfer in seven years – a boy named Matthew, a boy who mattered, told another boy that “the new girl is cute.” Cute is the most desired currency, and Ana was allowed in. But maybe she is too cute, or not cruel enough or funny enough, because there is no small amount of irritation circling her presence in the group. Still, the girls persist in pursuing her for now, overlooking her oddness in favour of the cute, and she does what is required to keep the scales tipped her way. She fulfils their tasks.

Tracy tells her to walk up to another girl, a girl with a sweaty forehead and sweaters that cradle the fat rolls on her back, and say: “You should tell Jason Cowie you want to kiss him. He really likes you.” Ana does this thing, with a grim stomach, but for a few days, she does not have to worry. She is tolerated again.

And then, on a bright spring day, Tracy and Siobhan are behind Ana, two steps below ground at the front of the house, at the door of the basement apartment. She has never taken anyone here before, has not even unpacked her second suitcase. But she has succeeded in humiliating the fat girl, and this visit is her reward. A wave of worry washes over her as she takes the rainbow-striped shoelace around her neck and puts the key in the lock. The door gives, unlocked after all.

Inside, an empty ashtray on the coffee table sits next to two glasses, wet streaked with melting ice. Everything else is sparse. It’s not that they haven’t unpacked yet, it’s that they don’t have much to unpack. There’s a television on a wheeled stand and a beige corduroy couch, both belonging to the landlord. Empty walls. But her mother’s African violets line the windowsill. Any new apartment must have one sunny window where they can sit, rotated a quarter turn every other day. Her mother plucks the dead outer leaves, and uses a toothbrush to remove grains of soil from the fresh foliage. Once a week, Ana and her mother carry the pots into the bathroom where the hot shower is running, and the mirror lined from steam. “How are my babies?” murmurs her mother, and now Ana does this, too, as soon as she comes home, when her mother is off teaching her ESL night classes, and she hears the feet of the landlord’s family overhead: “How are my babies?” Ana murmurs.

“Who lives upstairs?” demands Tracy.

“I don’t know,” says Ana, high pitched. She is looking at her mother’s closed door, wondering if she’s awake, if she’ll come out and see her. The place is so small that if Ana turns her body here in the living room, she can see all of the little kitchen, and the time on the stove: 3:45.

“I gotta whiz,” says Siobhan.

“I’ll show you my room,” says Ana, but they only have to walk a few steps from the living room to the bedroom, banging into each other.

“Nice poster,” says Tracy, and Ana combs the comment for sarcasm. She looks at the poster with Tracy’s eyes: a pink satin toe shoe balancing on an egg. Ana has never taken ballet in her life. Her mother had a boyfriend last year who gave it to her for Christmas. He was a dancer once.

They are in her room long enough to complete this exchange before Ana notices the bundle under the blankets on her bed. She sees it heaving, face covered. Ana breathes quickly, spins on her axis, tries to lead Tracy out of the room. At that moment, a scream from down the hall, and Siobhan appears, jumping up and down, her arms flapping, a yell that sets off a yell in Tracy, and there they are, the three of them in the tiny hallway, two screaming and one frozen in anticipation.

“Your dad’s in the bathroom! He’s in the tub! He’s totally naked!” Siobhan’s eyes like planets.

Her dad? It can’t be; he’s gone, gone away. But a small part of Ana thinks Siobhan knows something she doesn’t, thinks: Maybe today, maybe – and shoves the girls to get past in the dollhouse dimensions of the basement apartment.

“Watch it!” shouts Siobhan, and Ana, for once, ignores a command, flinging her body through the open door to the bathroom. There is a man in the bathtub, but the bathtub is empty of water, and the man is not her father. He is older, with a thatch of grey pubic hair, a flaccid penis hanging to the side, an afterthought. His hand flops over the edge of the tub. He’s dead, thinks Ana, matter-of-factly, and she wonders if she should draw the shower curtain, like in police procedurals on TV.

“He’s dead,” she says out loud.

Behind her, their bodies against hers in the little room, Tracy has her hand over her mouth, moaning softly. Siobhan is alert, electrified.

“Don’t be stupid. He’s breathing,” says Siobhan, and she is right: the spilling stomach, lined with hair, rises and falls. The natural order of things.

It is this, the breathing, that infuriates Ana, that shifts her mood from terror to rage.

“Go outside. I’ll meet you,” she says – growls, really, and the girls halt their flapping, surprised to hear Ana, pretty Ana, issue a feral order. They obey, stumbling over one another, and Ana hears their footsteps running, the slamming of the door.

The man’s legs are folded, his feet under the taps. Ana gags as she reaches past his toenails and fast turns on the water, cold, pulls the lever so it comes pouring out of the shower. She pulls the curtain shut, a sound like a train whistling past that covers just a little the scream of the man, the “FUUUUUUCK” that shakes the thin walls of the bathroom. Ana slams the door behind her.

In her room, she pulls back the quilt on her bed. Her mother has pink underwear on, a thin white T-shirt. Bruises are spaced up and down her legs like piano keys. Her helplessness repulses Ana; the incongruity of her mother’s size in her little bed.

Ana leans over her. Quietly, she said: “Mom, mommy, mom,” and her mother murmurs, rolls, and goes still again. Down the hall, she hears the man stumbling, falling against the little corridor, cursing to himself. Ana imagines the girls outside constructing their story, waiting to pass it along the corridors of the school, to use it to manoeuvre Ana into a corner where she has nothing, where she will grovel not to be lonely.

And in this moment, Ana – who has wept for dead caterpillars in jars, who has nodded and agreed and packed and unpacked and arrived in new classrooms again and again, genial, amicable, okay with it, the most remarkable, adaptable, malleable daughter – that Ana exits her body, and a new one settles in. This new one arrives in the split second where she lifts up her open palm and brings it down, down, a cartoon anvil from the sky dropped upon her mother’s face, a cheek that jiggles pathetically beneath the weight of Ana’s fury. Good. She wants it red, wants it bleeding, down to the bone.

Her mother’s eyes flash open, confused. “What—?” she stares at Ana with the blankness that will define her later, in her dementia, right up until her death. “Ana—” But Ana can’t look at her, and she is moving down the hall, past the naked hulk of a man in the living room searching on his hands and knees, a glimpsed shadow that Ana refuses to focus on. She grabs her backpack off the kitchen chair and the rainbow shoelace that holds her key. She opens the door to the bright day, the smell of lavender and gasoline.

Tracy and Siobhan are still there, staring at her, wondering how far this transition will go. The new Ana, coarse and livid, stays with them the entire afternoon, as the three girls walk the neighbourhood, buying fried chicken and potato salad and Coke at a fast food place. They carry all of this to the park, eating atop the jungle gym, scaring away the little kids.

When they are finished, Ana says: “I’m staying up here. Show me something funny.” She is trying it on. The girls glance at each other; they are unnerved enough that they are willing to obey, for a while longer anyway.

They climb down, and from the top of the jungle gym, Ana watches as Tracy throws her legs over a bar on the swing set and turns upside down, hanging from her knees, back and forth, her arms folded across her chest. Siobhan finds a patch of grass, juts one leg in front of her, throws her hands to the ground and begins flipping her body up into the sky, then back down again; a perfect handspring. One into the next, as if she could go all the way home like this, as if she could start a new human race where everyone walked on their hands, spun with joy from moment to moment.

When she stops, finally, she makes an exaggerated Y shape with her body, like an Olympian, facing Ana in the role of judge. Ana gives her nothing, nods, knowing that boredom is the only right response with these girls.

But she is reeling. The heat of her sore hand spreads through her whole body, up the top of her head where it pours down over her forehead, into her eyes. The heat combines with the sensation that she has become totally disconnected, as if she is dangling with one hand from the sun. She wants Siobhan to keep flipping, out into traffic, hands first into a car. She realizes suddenly that she has been bracing herself, living her whole life in anticipation of the bloodiest, most gruesome disaster. Maybe it has happened today.

The sun sets, and the two girls go off, walking west, backpacks bobbing. Ana walks in the dark, past shops that are closing, through the courtyard of a small church. Cars are parking; fathers emerging; teenagers with hockey bags over their shoulders and ballet slippers in their hands. This is when Ana sees the woman get out of her Audi, high heels over black stockings, a grey pencil skirt. This is a businesswoman.

Ana stops, and sees herself in the woman’s eyes: a girl in a pink ski jacket, blonde hair and bangs. She knows already that if she didn’t look like this, it is unlikely that she could stop and stare without being chased away. If she had grey teeth; if she was ugly – then what?

The woman gives her a small, puzzled smile and opens the back seat door. She leans in and backs up with a baby in her hands. Over her other shoulder, the woman has an overstuffed purse, and she balances these two things in the smeared beige early evening, striding toward her home with its porch light on. Its plain red brick façade is almost identical to the house that Ana and her mother have just moved into. She imagines it might have an identical basement apartment. Who might be down there?


James was circling their house in search of a place to park. “Look at that bastard,” he said. “He’s taking up two spaces! It’s so contemptuous! Where’s his humanity?”

Ana nodded, not certain to what he was referring.

“Car!” cried Finn.

“You guys get out here, and I’ll circle around,” said James.

Ana did what she was told, unclipping Finn and letting him go ahead of her up the walkway. James, glancing from the car, thought: Take his hand, Ana, take his hand.

Inside the house, Finn lobbed himself onto the living room couch and sat, legs straight out in front of him. Ana dropped the shopping bags of Finn things: the plastic-wrapped blue sheets; the owl printed quilt cover. She sat opposite Finn on a white club chair, divided from him by a glass coffee table. Suddenly, Ana was exhausted. She gave in to that pulling, that dark, stuffed feeling in her gut. Sarah, she thought, Sarah. She felt without gravity.

Finn was picking at the beads on a throw pillow, puzzling over Ana’s expression across from him. This was how James found them when he entered. He stopped at the strange configuration of Finn’s concerned expression and Ana, head in her hands.