Everybody Has Everything

DECEMBER



Ana hadn’t had much to unpack. The movers had brought a few more suitcases and boxes. She had taken a junior suite, not because it was cheaper, but because she imagined something spare, monastic (as opposed to the Grand Suite option). Instead, the rooms were opulent in ambition, but cheap in materials, with yellow throw cushions in the tones of a fast food restaurant occupying all the extra space on the couch and the wing chair. A miniature Christmas tree sat in a bucket next to the kitchen table.

On a Saturday afternoon a month after her arrival, Ana sat on the edge of the couch, looking at the tree, decorated in gold balls. She felt tired and light, but not sad.

She had done it in such a way as to never have to see them. She had left the car. Everything else could be dealt with later, in six months, when she would decide whether or not to return. She didn’t miss any of her things. She felt that she was readying for something, and wondered if this was how James had felt all those years, waiting for their baby; the great, exhilarated anticipation.

She put on her scarf and jacket, took her bag. The door was hollow and caught on the rug behind her.

“Good night, Madame,” said the doorman, as she passed through the lobby.

“Bon soir,” she replied.

Ana went to the gym, and ran farther than usual on the treadmill. Her body was getting stronger. She had put on a little weight, and with it came a sensation of being rooted, heavier in her feet. She liked the new curve in her hips.

After her workout, Ana sat in the steam room, something she had only started to do in Montreal. There was one woman in the room with her, concealed by puffs of steam. At one point, she shifted to reveal a long, vertical scar along her chest plate, and then vanished in the heat again.

After showering, Ana applied her makeup carefully. Half the guests would be francophone, and though her French was rusty, it was passable, and she had found herself enjoying speaking it, even when she struggled for the right word. She felt as though she were leaving everything, even her tongue.

The party turned out to be dull. By dessert, Ana had stopped listening to the conversations around her, gazing instead out the large paned windows at the frosted streetlamps, wondering why there was no music playing.

A man in an elegant suit switched seats with a colleague in order to sit next to her. He spoke English, and asked her the same questions she was always asked: What did she think of the city? Was she cold? Was she following the government corruption scandal? His name was Richard, and he had a practiced intensity, locking her gaze. As he filled her glass, Ana assessed the grey hair, the weathered but moisturized face and tidy nails. He was a type. At the end of the evening, she gave him her number when he asked.

The first date, Richard picked her up in his car. He took her to dinner at a restaurant in Outremont, ordering in his perfect French, complimenting Ana on her own efforts. Afterwards, she went back to his apartment in Old Montreal, a prewar loft now walled with glass, with views out to the skyline.

The sex was another foreign experience. She hadn’t slept with that many people, really. She was suddenly acutely aware of how her body had changed; only James knew what she really looked like, who she had been when she had been her physical best. As Richards pulled down her tights, Ana imagined the pale blue veins in her legs. He kissed her neck and shoulders and she saw the skin on her elbows thinning, puckered. But Richard murmured worship about her body: “You’re gorgeous,” he said, gripping and smoothing her hips and thighs, and she let herself fall into him. He was forceful, too, and the staged roughness turned her on. She came with stuttered breath, but then he glanced at her with a triumphant gaze that made her look away.

Ana went through the courtship with the fascination of an archaeologist at a dig. This was here, all this time, and I didn’t know! She thought of him as her first adult boyfriend.

Richard sent flowers, and took her to the opera, where the heels pinching her feet didn’t stop her from luxuriating in the music. He would vanish for days into his work, and that was fine. She could do the same, and he said nothing. Once he went away to Florida for a weekend of golf with old friends. There was no talk of fidelity, or future. A 53-year-old man without any children spoke to long ago decisions, not to be reopened. He never asked her why she had no children, and at first, this silence was emancipating.

And there was much silence between them, which Ana had thought she needed.

One night, Richard cooked her dinner, and they had sex, furiously, on his bed. It was only 10 o’clock, but Richard lay sleeping, shirtless with a chest of grey hair, arms like a starfish. He slept in this odd way, totally untroubled. She felt a pull of longing for James, an urge to share her strange new reality with him. She knew James would find Richard outrageous; corporate and trivial. This comforted Ana somehow, for part of her agreed.

She had awoken that morning feeling that she had left a piece of herself somewhere, the way she imagined a heroin addict might feel joining the sober and straight life. This, she realized now, was how it felt to be bound to James. Their past, known only to them, could rear itself anywhere, even here, in the bedroom of another man.

Ana pulled on her underpants and went to the window. Below, on the cobblestone streets, snow lay shining, inviting in the streetlamps. She put on her skirt and her boots, washed her face in the bathroom. In a week, she would see her mother for Christmas. She had booked a hotel. She wouldn’t call James, not yet.

She left Richard sleeping.

The cold was still shocking to her. It had begun to snow, large, fat flakes that melted on Ana’s face.

She walked quickly, crunching in her boots past Christmas lights in trees. Illuminated wreaths hung from the streetlamps on Sherbrooke.

She heard the choir before she reached the church, which was modest, its stained glass clouded with dirt. They were having a rehearsal, starting and stopping, with laughter in between. Ana stood and listened until the singers fell into each other and the music rose, draping her body.

She stood for a long time in the snow that made equal the sidewalks and the shrubs, shrouding the skyscrapers. She listened to the strangers’ voices calling glory, glory through the trees of the city where she now lived.


Finn had a candy cane in one hand. A crowd of people waited outside Sarah’s door. Suspense bounced back and forth between all of them.

Finn stood on James’s feet, clutching James’ pant leg with his free hand, looking up at him.

“Let’s dance!” said Finn.

“Shh,” said James, reaching down to rub Finn’s head.

The young doctor with her hair tightly pulled back was speaking. The content of her speech mattered less than the way she was saying it, which was hot and breathless. She had not learned to mask that yet. She was thrilled.

“—MRI indicates complete brain function,” she said.

“Complete?” asked James.

“Extensive therapy will be required. Hers is a serious brain injury, but she’s extraordinarily lucky.” James tried not to roll his eyes at the word “lucky.”

“James! Dance!” said Finn, hopping up and down on James’s feet. James put Finn’s candy cane in his coat pocket so they could hold hands.

“Has he been in to see her yet?” asked the doctor.

James shook his head. “We were waiting. I was waiting to talk to you guys—”

With both of Finn’s feet on his, and their hands clasped, James began to waltz Finn around the corridor, singing: “Dance me to the end of love. La la, la la, la la …“ Finn laughed. The doctors watched and waited. Finally, the routine was done, and they went inside.

Sarah looked as she had looked for the past fifteen weeks, but her eyes were open. It startled James, as though the glass eyeballs of an animal in a museum diorama had moistened. A patch of white gauze on her neck covered the hole where the tube had been. She had been liberated from the machines and brought back to a private room, which was suddenly quiet. She didn’t move her head to look at anyone in the crowd that had gathered.

His hand in James’s, Finn walked slowly toward his mother. A doctor moved a chair to the bed’s edge. Halfway there, Finn stopped, looking up at James with an expression of great concern.

“It’s okay, Finny,” he said. “She’s sick, but she’s going to get better. Do you want to say hello?”

“Yes,” he said.

James lifted him and put him on the stool. He looked down at Sarah. The marks of the stitches on her face had faded to pale shadows. Her hair was covered with a kerchief, pink and black, a gesture for Finn, James noted to himself; someone tried to cover her trauma so Finn wouldn’t be frightened.

Finn was silent, staring down.

“Say something, Finny,” said James, quietly.

After a long pause, in his small voice, Finn said: “Mommy, hello.”

Sarah remained unmoving.

“Lean right over her,” instructed the doctor.

James tried to show the boy how to lean over the bar’s edge, and in helping him, James was close to Sarah, too, with Finn at her face and James at her torso, when the flicker happened. Sarah turned her head slightly, and the mother and son saw each other. It was palpable, this act of seeing. The moment of recognition consumed the room like a backdraft of fire bursting through a doorway.

She opened her mouth, and the voice was rough and wooden: “Hi, love,” she said.

“Mommy,” said Finn, and he dropped his head onto her chest. Sarah’s eyes filled with tears.

James began laughing. Even as he pulled back and leaned against the wall, watching the two of them hold onto each other in disbelief, he could not stop laughing.





LATE SPRING



Ana stood by the open door of Charlie’s office. She could see him, bent over his computer, his dress shirt untucked. She knocked lightly.

Charlie looked up and at the moment of recognition, beamed.

“Ana,” he said. They went toward one another, extending hands, then fell into an awkward hug. Ana let herself be enfolded, breathing in the scent of Charlie’s neck.

“How are you?” she asked, pulling back. They stood close together in the small room.

“I’m okay,” he smiled. “Are you back for good?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“James has been in to see Lise a few times,” said Charlie. In their e-mail exchanges, Ana had given no details about why she had left. But it was clear that Charlie knew. She realized he was telling her about James’s visits for a reason; he was counselling her like a chaplain, nudging her toward her husband. “He brought Finn.”

Ana raised her eyebrows. “I didn’t know that.”

Looking at Charlie, hands in his pockets, grinning and blushing before her, Ana realized that whatever live current had been between them was snuffed out now. Ana saw Charlie’s youth, which had seemed at that last meeting in the bedroom such a thrilling unknown, as a liability. Her age was the same. The simple fact of time apart had broken their pull. He was the smart young man taking care of her mother, ushering her through these last years, to the upcoming. That was all, and comforting in itself. She was another daughter of a patient, shackled by duty and love.

“How is she?” Ana asked, but the answer didn’t really matter. It was always the same: a little worse.

Ana asked after Charlie’s lethargic roommate, and was pleased to hear he’d found work and had been separated at last from his couch. Charlie was going home soon, he said, to be with his parents for a week, out west. Ana described Montreal, the mountain in the middle of it, and the spring changing the trees.

She hugged him again, quickly, and turned to leave. She was almost out the door when he said her name.

Charlie went to his desk and pulled a CD from a drawer.

“I’ve been hanging on to this for you. It has the original of that song you liked, from that night at the bar.” Ana looked at the cover: Lone Justice. Lots of eyeliner on a pretty face framed by tendrils of blonde hair.

“I got it used. No one’s really buying CDs anymore. You can get anything,” said Charlie. “It’s the last song.”

“Thank you. That’s very sweet,” said Ana, slipping the disc in her purse. She was grateful for the reminder of that beautiful song, and that evening she had needed so much, during the autumn of Finn.

In her room, Lise sat in a chair. Someone had placed plastic flowers on the dresser, of no determinate type, which had accumulated a thin layer of dust. Ana wiped the leaves with a Kleenex.

Lise’s recognition seemed to be moving in and out today, like a kaleidoscope brought to full length, then collapsed, then back again, over and over. “How is James?” said Lise, pushing her hair (slightly dirty, Ana observed) behind her ears.

“He’s all right,” said Ana, sitting on the edge of the bed. “We’re not together right now.”

Lise nodded. Ana tried to interpret the nod: maybe James had told her mother of their breakup, or perhaps she was remembering Ana’s explanation in the fall, or at Christmas. She wondered what James’s version of events would sound like, but her mother would never be able to recount that conversation to her, if it had happened at all.

“How’s your father? What’s his name?”

Ana laughed. “Mom, I haven’t heard from him in years.”

“Yes, I know. But what’s his name?”

“Conrad.”

“Yes, Conrad,” said her mother. “Conrad.” A wide look of pleasure came over Lise’s face and she grinned. “Oh, Ana. We were at the beach. It was a very white beach, so hot that when I came out of the water, I couldn’t walk on the sand because it burned my feet.” Ana didn’t know where her mother was in this memory. Perhaps somewhere in Greece or Italy, years before Ana was born, when her parents were skimming the globe together.

“Did dad carry you across the sand?”

Lise laughed. “Oh, no. I waited in the shallow part of the sea until the sun set. We both did. We sat down on our bums in the water and waited for the sand to cool.”

Ana squeezed her mother’s hand. Lise looked at her, and Ana could see the memory vanishing.

“I’m having a good day,” said Lise.

“Yes, I think you are.”

“Who are you?” The question would never cease to take away Ana’s breath.

“I’m your daughter. I’m Ana. You’re my mother.”

“I know that,” said Lise, snappishly. Then she sighed: “But not a very good mother.”

“You did the best you could.”

Lise looked over Ana’s head, toward the window, which was open, letting a warm breeze move across them both.

“I loved Conrad,” said Lise.

She looked back at Ana. “Oh my,” she said, as if startled by what she saw. Ana knew that she was always being seen anew by her mother, which might have been liberating, but somehow felt exactly the opposite.

Lise searched her daughter’s face, and said, finally: “What are you so afraid of?”

Ana didn’t know how much meaning to ascribe to this question, and suppressed the sensation that she was being had, searching for profundity where there was none. Any revelations were just the brain seizing and releasing, and not her mother at all. She tried to believe this.

“Do I seem afraid, Mom?”

“I loved being your mother,” said Lise. Ana nodded, bracing herself.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Lise, loosening her grip on her daughter’s hand. “Don’t be so afraid.”



James finished with the sunscreen and stood back to admire his handiwork. It was one of the first days hot enough to require lotion. James was now learning about Finn in spring, and what he needed: hats and sunscreen, water bottles and sandals.

Finn smiled up at him. James reached out and rubbed a white splotch from the boy’s nose.

“Ready, Freddy,” said Finn.

Sarah was sleeping upstairs in her bedroom. The day she came home from the hospital, six weeks earlier, James sat in the back of the medical van with her while Mike and Jennifer looked after Finn. Under the rim of her baseball hat, Sarah frowned at the fuss, but when they hit a speed bump and her wheelchair shifted lightly from its locks on the floor, she looked terrified. James moved in to the house that day, without any discussion.

He had a few things in the spare room. During the day, he took Sarah to her appointments, and Finn to daycare. Then he met with Doug at his offices, polishing a script for a new documentary about the politics of traffic.

The cat, returned from the neighbours’ house, lay on the pillow next to him while he slept. James was constantly rubbing fur from his mouth. When Finn and Sarah were asleep, James stayed up late with his laptop and the cat, fiddling with footage of Finn on the new editing software he’d bought.

His own house, his house with Ana, sat empty several blocks away. He was glad not to be there. For the first weeks that Ana was gone, friends had come by, not knowing what to say about the split. James fielded many calls, and a lasagna. People were sympathetic, but no one really knew what he had lost. He was now carrying sadness, the man who had never tasted of it, whose parents were alive, whose mother had survived carnage and spared him its description, refusing to burden him with even a single image. He knew now why she would die with that war inside of her. He knew what it was to pretend anything for a child.

Sarah was like a dimmer switch slowly being turned to maximum, getting brighter every day. But there were ugly moments, too, bursts of anger followed by tears, and collapse. James took over then, cleaning the kitchen and bathing Finn, putting him to bed. But most nights, Sarah tucked him in alone, and James could hear her, singing: “You are the light, in my dark world …” The great mystery of the light song turned out to be an obscure eighties cowpunk band.

James brought his guitar over from the house and learned the song in a few minutes from the Internet. But Finn was indifferent to James’s performance. It turned out he cared about the singer, not the song.

When she was recovered, James would have to go. He couldn’t imagine returning to the house. Maybe Ana would come back from Montreal, and want to live there. She had revealed no plans. The e-mails between them were polite; unadorned information travelling between machines.

“Ready, Freddy,” said James, picking up the bag containing a Mexican blanket and plastic containers of snacks. Finn put his hat on without a fight.

James was anxious to get Finn to the park and catch the good early afternoon light for his filming. The night before, Sarah had invited some former colleagues over for dinner. James had done the cooking so Sarah could rest and be ready. It was a gentle evening (everyone was afraid to be raucous, afraid of Sarah’s new softness), but after Finn went to sleep, James, Sarah and the two high school teachers drank a glass of wine in the living room, and Sarah told the story of Finn’s birth.

James was determined to take this story back to Finn.

James locked the door behind him and they headed down the street.

“You lead the way to the park,” said James, and Finn ran ahead. He was three now and had a good sense of direction.

In the distance, James saw a woman clutching a large bouquet of pink flowers. Finn stopped in front of her, and she crouched down, pulling him toward her. James picked up speed, his heart pounding. Since Halloween, he was prepared at any moment for rescue – and then he saw the woman rise. Finn turned and came running back toward him.

“Ana! James! It’s Ana!”

James felt short of breath. She got closer. Her blonde hair was longer, and her face a little rounder. My Ana, he thought. My wife of a different substance. My vapour wife. But she was really there, watching him. He ran his fingers rapidly across the raised scar on his knuckles rapidly.

She stopped, across from him but still far away. “Hi,” she said.

“You’re here,” said James.

“I’m sorry. I should have called. It was spontaneous. I wanted to see Sarah, but I didn’t know—”

“Let’s go to the park now!” said Finn, tugging on James’s sleeve. “Come! James! Come to the park! Ana!”

Ana stared at James. Bats flapped inside her torso.

Ana gestured at Finn, running ahead again. “You’re going out.”

“I promised him. We’re working on this movie and—” James rubbed his face, fumbling in Ana’s presence.

“Should I go to the house? Is Sarah there?” asked Ana.

“She is, but she’s sleeping. She won’t get up for another couple of hours.”

“Oh,” said Ana, looking down at the flowers in her hand. They seemed suddenly ridiculous.

“Do you – you could come to the park with us, and then, you know – come back after—” James had wondered how he would feel at such a meeting, and now he knew: He was famished for her. He didn’t want her to go yet. He needed to show her that he was not the bleeding mess she’d left in November, and that even then, he hadn’t been the mess she’d presumed. He wanted a chance.

Ana smiled. “I’ll come,” she said.

Finn reappeared and chatted as the three walked to the park. He and James had banter: “Tell Ana about the goose at the farm.” “It had a bad foot!” said Finn. “Tell Ana about your favourite colour.” “Green!” “What things are green?”

Ana was impressed. He had found his gift. For the first time, she didn’t feel excluded. It wasn’t her failure, it was their victory.

She thought suddenly how in all their time together, there must have been a moment where that other life would have been possible. If they had been able to have a child easily, or accidentally, then maybe the propulsion would have kept them aloft. They would have been like everybody else, never looking down because they wouldn’t have had to. But without either of them noticing, that moment had passed. Motherhood had passed. They got this instead.

Ana felt the sun on her face, and heard the sounds of other people’s children, and she didn’t want to mourn anymore.

She stood back, holding the pink flowers and James’s bag as he pushed Finn in the swing. Then his phone rang, and he called to her: “Can you take over?”

“Sure, sure,” she said, putting the bag on a bench.

“Higher, Ana!” cried Finn, as Ana pushed him, glancing at James, pacing under the tree with his phone. She startled at the sight of James’s arm in his T-shirt, the twist of muscle and lean forearm. She knew every inch of that arm, and felt like she was seeing a part of her own body that had been hidden away under a cast for months.

“It was Doug,” said James, putting his BlackBerry in his pocket, returning to take over. But Finn had found a daycare friend and was immersed in sandcastle building. Ana and James sat on a bench, side by side.

“You look good,” said James.

“So do you. No more beard.”

James touched his chin. “Do I look younger?”

Ana laughed. “Not really. Sorry.”

“Dammit.”

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

“How’s Sarah?”

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

Ana nodded. “I do.”

“Why?” asked James.

“She needed to get back to Finn.”

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

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

He wanted her, wanted her under his fingernails, in his mouth. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

“I am, too. James, I—”

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

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

James said: “I know.”

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

James nodded vigorously. “I know.”

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

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

Their bodies leaned toward touching.

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

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

“Do you want to stay for this?” he asked Ana, praying she would say yes.

“Yes,” said Ana.

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

“Ana, you come, too,” said Finn.

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

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

Finn pointed at birds in the sky, singing nonsense.

“Ana, can you press record?” asked James. Ana did so, then sat down, crossing her legs.

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

“Story time,” said Finn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finn looked up at James, telling his story.

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





ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS



Robyn Sarah’s “Riveted” can be found in full in A Day’s Grace: Poems 1997-2002. The snatches of lyrics about rockin’ leprechauns are slightly misquoted by James from Jonathan Richman’s Rockin’ Rockin’ Leprechauns (from Rock n’ Roll with the Modern Lovers, 1977); the phrase “Dance me to the end of love” is from Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to End of Love (from Various Positions, 1984). The line “A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare,” is from Frederick Seidel’s poem Climbing Everest (2006). The book James reads the lines “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have,” and “Make the Now the primary focus of your life” from is Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now (1999). And Marvin Etzioni generously agreed to allow us to quote some lyrics from Finn’s beloved song You are the Light (1985).


I want to sincerely thank the Canada Council for the Arts for giving me the time to sit in a room of my own. My editor, Lara Hinchberger, is really my collaborator, and the smartest, gentlest half of our duo (a special thanks for lending Ana some most personal details about plastic flowers and loss). I’m indebted to Jackie Kaiser, who is part agent, part editor, all kindness.


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


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


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


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


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