Everybody Has Everything

OCTOBER



Ana rose at six a.m. in the darkness. She changed into her running gear in the bathroom so the light wouldn’t wake James. But also, she was hiding her body a little bit, not out of shame but from fatigue, knowing that if he saw her naked leg, her toe extended en route to a sweat sock, he would rise sleepily and grab her, try and knead her flesh until it gave way to his. She would acquiesce, usually, and then the order of the morning would be flung apart, the pieces falling in the wrong place. This was James unemployed, always grabbing at her, rubbing up against her in the kitchen, in the foyer, winking when Finn appeared to quell things. Ana found it distasteful, drawing the child in to some adult fantasy, the turn-on of the forbidden. If she indulged James so early in the morning, she would live with a tilted feeling all day.

The door to Finn’s room was open. Ana peered in at him, so small on the double bed. In the light from the hall, she saw that he had kicked off the quilt and lay sprawled on his stomach like a starfish, his back rising and falling. Ana shut the door, but after walking down the staircase she questioned this gesture, wondered what fears he might have in him that only light could slay. She returned, opened it slightly. The boy had flipped onto his back, his arms still sprawled.

Outside, Ana felt the crack of the day opening wide as she ran. The streets were cold; she should have worn gloves, a hat warmer than the baseball cap on her head. She ran north, up the slight hill, past the houses that were beginning to rattle and stir. A light on here, a light there. She saw an old grey woman at a window, sipping from a mug. This woman lived only three houses from Ana, but Ana had never seen her on the street, did not know her name. She ran a little faster.

By the brothel house, a bag of garbage sat inside a recycling bin. It was always the dirtiest house on the block, the darkest. She could imagine, though, that when it went up for sale, it would go for near a million, just for the property itself, which had a huge parking pad at the side and a long elegant oak. The house would be razed. Something new would rise in its place, probably a modern echo of the houses around here, a grey concrete and glass structure with a winking Victorian sloped roof. A yard surrounded by imported grasses, sustainable and expensive. Ana could see in her mind’s eye exactly this oncoming glass house and thought: fingerprints. All those fingerprints.

As she crossed Harbord, she saw the lights flicker on in a coffee shop. Her heart was beating fast now, and her fingers weren’t cold anymore. She never ran with music because she wanted to hear the city, really hear it, and she did. A dog barking, the whir of the streetcar. She thought of her work, of all the patent violations waiting for her. She passed an older couple, their arms linked cautiously, galoshes on their feet in anticipation of some weather Ana did not know was coming. They walked slowly. Ana tried to imagine herself and James as old as this, as entwined and frail.

What she had not imagined when she married was that love would turn out to be in constant movement, that it crept alongside most of the time but sometimes dove down, down into depths that Ana did not fear, but found repulsive, black, unwelcome. She knew that what they had was substantial, that it would rise again, break the surface to the light, but she was still angered by how often it left her. She had not known that she would have this in common with her own parents, who finally missed it too much, who could not bear its absence, and so split apart. But Ana did not want that. She did not want to be too weak to keep up with love. She needed to be stronger, to call it back to her. But she was so afraid, afraid of what it had become while it was away from her, afraid of what had gathered along its spine in the murk below, afraid she would not recognize its shape when it returned.

She thought of Finn, sleeping, and was relieved not to be there when he woke. What was it in her? She wanted Finn safe, she wanted him clean, she wanted him fed, happy. She wanted all the things you want for any other person, known or unknown, simply because you are both human, and alive together at this shared moment. But that was not the same as mothering. She knew it was not. She thought of Sarah with him, and she could not match her. She could not match her sonar, the way her eye was always on him even as she spoke, that every gesture was infused with Finn, for Finn, about Finn, in spite of Finn. Then she realized that James was like this now, too. James had developed the same animal instinct. Yesterday, James had handed the boy his sippy cup without asking. He changed him fast and exactly when it needed to be done. Finn stood in front of James in the morning, waiting for James to zip his jacket. Why could she not feel his presence in the same way? When would it come?

Ana sprinted around the park, passing the same homeless woman in her sleeping bag twice. Another runner overtook her, striding on great long legs like a spider. Ana didn’t want to trail him and turned away from the park, taking an eastern street, past houses more expensive and older than her own, with bevelled glass windows and huge stoops. The streetlights were old-fashioned, fake gaslamps. The sun was high now, the frost melted. Everything around her caught in an autumn gleam.

And then she had an image of her mother with her reading glasses on. The two of them, mother and daughter, toe to toe on the couch in the rental apartment with books on their laps. The images came at her like a deck of cards being shuffled: Her mother stroking her hair when her father left, whispering – but what? What did she say? Ana remembered only the stroking, and the dimming of the roar when she was resting against her mother, looking up at the African violets.

And then: her mother taking her to a party where she met Mordecai Richler, and in the cab home, her mother said: “Something to tell your children about.”

She had been loved. She had known a mother’s love, its touch and glance. And so, then, she could now recognize its absence.

What had she expected, exactly? Why had she endured all those gynecological appointments at 7:30 in the morning, on her way to her work, day after day? James would talk about what would come after, when the appointments bore out: peewee baseball games, and summers out of the city, and the kind of idyllic childhood his brother could never pull off for his own kids even with all that money. And Ana had thought: Yes, if I do it, if I build it, then I will live in it, and it will become a home, a life. It will. It will. She ran. But now they had Finn and she thought: It is possible to fail at this. It is possible to fail at loving a child. Why doesn’t anyone tell you that?

At the house, James was cooing into Finn’s ear, then leading his sleepy body to the bathroom, changing his wet Pull-Up, wiping him down. James had decided to move him from diapers to Pull-Ups. He had been accumulating information on toilet training from the Internet, and had bought a potty. He felt ready to usher Finn to the next stage. For now, the potty sat unused in the corner of the bathroom with a rubber duck on it.

It was a good morning: no fussing, no anger. They hummed along, eating cereal together at the kitchen island, Finn’s legs swinging. Ana barrelled into this, covered in sweat, panting.

“Ana!” said Finn. James could sense something fierce in her this morning. She let off a hum of agitation. She waved before heading upstairs. When Ana returned, quickly, she was dressed and made up. James and Finn were now on the ground surrounded by plastic dinosaurs. Finn wore pyjamas, and James his equivalent: boxers and a thin, shapeless Nick Cave T-shirt.

“He goes, yeah, kill! Kill! He goes nooooo!” said Finn.

Ana ate her yogurt.

“We have to go to Mike’s tonight,” said James, grunting as he rolled onto his back.

“Oh, God. What time?”

Ana picked up the empty cereal dishes from the counter, wondering what would happen if she didn’t. Would they be sitting there at the end of the day when she returned from work? How much would get done if she didn’t do it? She could never bring herself to attempt this experiment, knowing her own fury when James failed her.

After putting the dishes away and wiping the counter, Ana moved through the room, putting drawings in a drawer, making a stack out of the loose books. A broken crayon stopped her; she got a broom, a dustbin.

“I’ll do it,” James murmured, lying on his back. “Go to work.”

Ana rattled the garbage can loudly.

“Have a good day,” she said. Finn looked up as the door slammed shut.


“You never replied to our Thanksgiving video!” Jennifer spoke with her back to James and Ana. As she rooted in the refrigerator, her behind, round and denim-clad, appeared like a separate comic act: the talking behind. She emerged upright, a little flushed, holding an armload of juice boxes. James leaned in and shut the refrigerator door, which was covered in the same white recessed panelling as the cabinets. The kitchen held two refrigerators, but stealthily: one for cans of pop and beer, the other for food; wine was in its own separate climate-controlled refrigerator. All the appliances were hidden away. The kitchen had reached a point where mess was self-eviscerating.

“There,” said Jennifer, and just the slightest hint of Newfoundland leaked out: “Thar.” The children gathered around, the two girls and Finn, who was wearing fairy wings. The three heads bobbed and sucked the juice, then scattered.

“We made it on this website. I can’t remember what it’s called. Didn’t you get it? Sophie’s head was on the turkey? Olivia’s this big tree—” James and Ana shook their heads, murmuring shared obliviousness. “Oh, darn it. I’ll see if Mike can find it before you go. It was hilarious. I really thought I put you on the list …”

As if summoned, Mike appeared beside his wife. Ana was always struck by their physical similarity, except in opposite sizes. Both had a kind of ruddy plainness, with wide unblinking eyes and a smattering of freckles across the bridge of their noses. Mike was taller than James, though years at the computer had caused him to fold at the neck, collapsing his upper half. Jennifer was the kind of small that made Ana feel gargantuan; she had a little boy body except for her large breasts, breasts that had been feeding babies for years, it seemed. Their eldest, Jake, was sleeping at a friend’s house, a reward for completing a tournament of some kind.

It had been silently agreed, years ago, that James was a bad uncle, not only for lack of trying, but because he couldn’t stay on top of the volume of accomplishment that rushed out of the large brick house. Everyone was gifted. Everyone was a genius. What happened to such people in adulthood? No one ever said: Meet my friend, Dave. He won an award for Best Handwriting. The future pointlessness of all these accolades made it hard for James to respond in the present. Driving home from evenings at Mike and Jennifer’s, fuming, he delivered the same anecdote: “Studies have proven it’s the B students who run the world.” But that morning, when he saw Finn scribble on a piece of cardboard and hold it up for offer, he understood, just a little, the full force of parental pride, the greed for a child’s future. He understood, for the first time, why his brother and his wife bored others so relentlessly.

“Can we help?” Ana asked, nodding toward the woman at the sink, her apron tied tight around her waist, dividing her body like the twisted end of a wrapped candy. The plates from dinner formed a tall pile, tilted at an angle from all the uneaten food between them. The carcass of a large chicken spilled its bones greasily over the edge of a white serving plate.

“Oh God no. That’s what we pay her for. Right, Julie?” said Jennifer. The young, dark-skinned woman looked over and smiled, holding up her yellow washing gloves as evidence.

The four began to walk out of the kitchen, which took a while, passing the large marble island, the rack of gleaming pots and pans raining down from the ceiling.

“Did you get a new countertop? Something’s different,” said Ana, stopping in her tracks.

“You notice everything, Ana,” said Mike, leading her back to the island. “We couldn’t take the granite anymore. It seemed really dated. Maybe it was an indulgence, but we thought, Let’s go marble. Now or never.”

“Now or never” was one of Mike’s favourite expressions. James could never figure out what the hurry was. Mike’s life seemed entirely ungoverned by clocks. He had worked at home for the past few years, since the sale of his company. Once, after an occasion-less bottle of four-hundred-dollar wine, James had asked his brother to describe, in detail, a week in his life. It was worse than James had imagined, involving early morning on-line trades, sailing lessons, an Italian tutor, a trainer. The children were shuttled to and fro by a squadron of nannies and housekeepers. A couple of times a week, Mike did this job himself, to stay “connected.” James thought of him in his luxury minivan with the TV screens blaring, idling as the girls jumped out and ran up the steps to the private French school. He pictured Jake wending his way across the grassy concourse of his Eton-like campus while Mike waved at him at the end of the day, cranking up his $10,000 sound system, listening to music he’d downloaded not because he liked it, but because it appeared on lists as Most Downloaded. Beyoncé. Jack Johnson. Mike had always been without taste, and in James’s eyes, this made him wispy and unsubstantial, despite his height. James was held together by his preferences, his books and movies, his loud opinions on politics and art.

Jennifer existed to provide shape, to ground this dangling way of living. She had always worked, and always would, she said, even when there was no need. The need, as she saw it, was on the other side, from the severely handicapped adults to whom she administered physical therapy at a rehab centre. James had never asked her to describe her week. Rarely did anyone inquire about those men and women (slippery tongued, pants wet – James turned away from the image), but they loomed somehow, shadowy in the vastness of the house. The knowledge of Jennifer’s hands on their gnarled bodies every day, morning to night, was a relief to all who visited there, pleased to know that some sense of purpose still propelled this couple through their days.

Right after the accident, Jennifer had sent James links to papers on the importance of physical rehabilitation during “coma vigil,” a new phrase for Sarah’s unroused sleep. James had been grateful, and was reassured by a nurse that yes, every day, they were moving Sarah’s limp arms and legs as often as they should be. But it was “coma vigil” that stayed with him. His vigil was for Finn. James was keeping watch over Finn while Sarah lay in her darkness, enduring other women’s hands rearranging her scarecrow limbs, while her son was someone else’s devotional object.

Mike and Jennifer sat on the couch, and Jennifer stretched her legs into Mike’s lap. Ana, James noticed, was far from him, the only one who had not taken a seat on the wide curved couch. She sat across from them in a stiff-backed brocade covered chair, each arm at right angles on the armrests, her fingers curled over the edges

“How’s work, Jennifer?” asked Ana. “How are the cutbacks?”

She continued that way, pulling information from the two of them with her concise questions, murmuring support. It looked like warmth, or inquisitiveness, but James recognized it as a sort of vacancy, too, a way of passing the substance of the interaction to someone else.

Ana was feeling massive, as if the chair could barely contain her. Jennifer had this effect on her. She was trying not to glance at her sister-in-law’s tiny feet in their childlike grey striped socks, now being massaged casually by Mike’s hands. He pushed and pulled as he told them about their Christmas plans in Mexico, a beach house that they should come visit. These kinds of holiday invitations were always extended only once, and never accepted nor rejected nor brought up again by anyone.

“And you, Jimmy, how’s the book?” asked Mike. James had wanted a brother who would put him in headlocks and throw him to the floor and kick his ass, someone with badness to worship. But Mike shrugged at James’s schemes of revenge against the a*shole down the street; he was too old to join a united front, and he preferred the computer. He sat. In James’s recollection of their youth, his brother is always seated in his desk chair, in front of the computer. Only the changed colour of his T-shirt indicates that he does, in fact, rise on occasion, and mark the passing of the days.

James was beginning to regret the way he had framed his firing. He had done too good a job of blocking the horror by inserting this distracting fantasy of a book. There was not enough sympathy for him, he felt, not enough commiseration over the shortness of his stick.

“It’s okay. Tough times in publishing, with the economy. Not a lot of new contracts,” he said.

“You don’t have a contract?” Mike raised his thick eyebrows. “I didn’t know that.” He looked then at Ana, as if seeing her as something new: imperative to his brother’s survival.

“Let’s not talk about work!” said Jennifer. “How is parenthood? At long last! Do you absolutely love it?” She lowered her voice: “Come on, can I ask that?”

“Jenn—” said Mike, flicking her toe with his finger.

“What? Come on. We know you guys were trying. The circumstances aren’t ideal, of course, but now you get to be a mom and dad! You get to parent!” Ana noted the verb: “to parent.” Something to do, not to be.

“I know this is going to sound weird, but Ana, he really looks like you! It’s crazy! You have exactly the same eyes.”

“Really?” said Ana. “Well, they’re brown, I guess—”

A chorus of screams burst forth into the living room, followed by three bodies.

“Finn’s a fairy! He’s a fairy, mommy! And we’re the queens who are taking him to our kingdom to do our bidding!” Sophia, at six, was the eldest. On her head she wore a crown of toilet paper. In her hand, she waved an elaborate wand dangling beads and stuffed hearts. She was followed by Olivia, age four, who also wore a toilet paper crown, wielding a Barbie in each hand.

“These are the elves!” she cried. Finn looked pleased, toddling to James and leaning on his legs.

A look passed between the two girls – as if a switch was hit – and Sophie began chasing Olivia, who responded by screaming happily, which made Finn scream too, joining the chase. “Attack! The fairy is attacking!” bellowed Sophie, as the three raced in figure eights around the couch. Then James noticed that Finn had a juice box in his hand; he reached to grab it just as Finn slipped out of the line and wrapped himself in the curtains. The curtains were so shining and sumptuous that Ana imagined tearing them from the wall and lying down in their silky arms.

“Get the fairy! Get the fairy!” screamed Olivia.

“Girls! Girls!” cried Jennifer.

“Finn! Don’t pull the curtains!” cried James, alarmed at the sausage shape in the golden fabric, straining at the top of the rod. He jumped up to try and undo him, to rescue the juice box before the inevitable stain.

“My elf!” wailed Olivia, stopping suddenly, holding in her hand the head of one Barbie, grasping its naked torso around the stomach. The adults breathed in, anticipating. Olivia screwed up her eyebrows, her jaw dropped to her chest, and a sound escaped, like a pig with an axe at its neck. Rivulets of snot and tears sprayed through the air. Ana leaned backwards.

Jennifer and James went in to the fray, untangled and soothed, calmed and hugged. Ana took a drink of her wine. Mid-sip, she recognized that her isolation might appear un-savoury, and she reached for a coffee table book on Munch and the Uncanny, as if to appear preoccupied.

“We saw that show in Vienna,” said Mike, leaning across, shouting over the diminishing din. “A bit dark for me. I bet James would like it.” Ana flipped to the back of the book, stopping on an etching by a German artist she had never heard of named Max Klinger. She recognized one of the German words in the title, “Kind,” and her body stiffened. A woman in a full garden, carpeted with grass and rimmed with furry bushes and tall trees, lay resting on a bench, her eyes closed. Beside her, a hooded pram. But the pram was empty, the blankets had tumbled onto the ground. A path from the blankets, trampled by feet, revealed a figure in the distance, walking away from the mother. In his arms was an unfurling bundle, too small to be deciphered, white and unseen. Ana put her finger on the path, traced its line. She felt, again, that strange flutter, a feeling of ascension.

James and Jennifer had been successful. When the screams had slowed to whimpers, and the whimpers to whines, the two girls curled up on either side of their mother like cats. Jennifer stroked the head of each: “There, there. Silly queens.”

Ana put the book down on the table. She wondered if the girls had seen it. It seemed to her now as inappropriate as pornography. She drank her wine quickly.

“Uncle James, how come we never see you on TV anymore?” said Sophie.

James pulled Finn a little closer.

“I got fired,” said James.

“On fire?” asked Finn, and everybody except James laughed.

“Why?” asked Sophie.

“That’s a complicated question—” interjected Jennifer, but Mike tilted his head, as if equally curious. Ana felt her body reassembling into something normal, the effect of the picture beginning to cease.

“It’s okay, Jennifer,” said James. Addressing Sophie, he said: “I’m too old for TV. It’s a job for young people. You should be on TV.” He leaned over and tickled her. She laughed. Ana had never seen him so engaged with his nieces.

“I know. I could be on TV,” said Sophie.

“Sophie was amazing in the Thanksgiving play. I know all parents think their kids are great on stage, but it was really striking. The teacher said she has a natural aptitude for theatre,” said Jennifer.

“Now we’re adding acting lessons to the roster,” said Mike, in the part of exasperated father.

“I played an aboriginal person,” said Sophie. Ana laughed.

Sophie snatched a remote control from the coffee table. She hit a button and a large, wood-framed abstract painting – red and blue swirls on red and blue swirls – moved to the side with a gentle whoosh. A large flat panel TV appeared.

“Jesus, Mike, how James Bond,” said James.

“I know. It’s extravagant. But now or never, right?”

“Sophie we don’t need the TV on—” said Jennifer. “You can watch upstairs if you want.”

But Sophie clicked, and the TV came to life. There, across the screen, was James’s former colleague, Ariel, each strand of her long straight hair clearly outlined with the perfectionist brush of high definition television.

“I worked with her—” said James.

“What? Is this your show?” asked Jennifer.

Mike said, “Sophie, turn it off—”

“No! Let’s see Uncle James!”

Ariel was sitting in a hotel room across from a famous singer, a block-headed young man with one raised eyebrow.

“Who’s that?” asked Ana.

“The new Frank Sinatra,” said James.

“Really?”

“He thinks he is,” snapped James.

Ariel was breathless. “Just tell me, seriously – is this song about any particular girl? Or is it about girls in general?”

“This is news?” James shouted. “This is documentary?”

The singer chortled, winking and shifting in his seat, his non-answer running atop the video clip: the singer in the rain, embracing a tall blonde. “What can I say? When love hits you, it hits you!”

“This is a f*cking national news program,” said James.

“James, watch the language—” James turned from Mike’s pious face.

“Soph, turn it off—”said Jennifer.

Ana placed her wine carefully on the table. On the screen, Ariel threw back her head and giggled. Jennifer grabbed the remote out of Sophie’s hand and clicked the TV to silence.

“You can’t be surprised, James. TV’s always been this way. You were just this unusual little exception,” said Ana. She gestured to the blank screen. “This is what people want.”

“People don’t know what they want. Give them shit and they’ll eat it,” said James. Olivia giggled into her hands.

“Jimmy! Language!” said Mike. The painting moved slowly and smoothly, until finally it had covered the entire TV with red blur.



At the door, Finn kicked at the stoop outside. As Ana buttoned her jacket, Jennifer appeared with a paper Whole Foods bag.

“Olivia’s too old for these,” she said. The bag rattled with puzzle pieces and Lego. Something made a few electronic grunts, then silenced.

This was how people did it, then; an ongoing exchange.

Mike appeared, put his arm around Jennifer’s shoulder. The girls had joined Finn on the porch. They, too, kicked at the leaves and squealed.

“Not in your socks,” said Jennifer, then rolled her eyes at the adults.

“Hey, Jimmy,” said Mike, clearing his throat, alerting James to the fact that a speech had been prepared. “Listen, if you need any – you know. If we can do anything for you guys. With Finn, I mean. It’s a big change. We have a little experience with this stuff.” Jennifer laughed loudly, nodding.

“Thank you,” said James. “It’s going all right, but thank you.” His brother was never good with tenderness. It didn’t suit him. James wanted to point out that they lived only a half hour from each other, but got together maybe three times a year, so how much, really, could they help? But alongside that first thought, James found himself moved by his brother’s awkward gesture. He tried to picture a future of commonality, devoid of the decades-long strangeness.

He rode on this idea as they gathered and moved toward the car at the top of the circular driveway. James knew that Mike and Jennifer’s three-car garage was filled. A fourth vehicle, a Lexus SUV, was parked outside. The surfeit of parking spaces seemed like mockery. It was the first puncture in James’s warm mood, but he refrained from commenting.

Jennifer called something from the stoop. All three were buckled in. Ana rolled down her window, cupped her hand to her ear.

“I’ll resend you the video card!” called Jennifer.

“Great!” Ana called back.

Finn repeatedly pressed buttons on the electronic toy, a counting game, with red and blue lights, and a robot voice: 1! 2! 3! They moved through the empty, wide streets, past the sylvan glade gardens, under the ancient trees. When they hit Bloor, the traffic thickened. Cranes and bulldozers sat unmoving by construction sites cordoned off with plastic, warning of disaster. Cars blew their horns at a taxi doing a U-turn.

“Did you get that video?” asked James.

“Yeah, I did,” said Ana.

“Me too.”

Now was the time where they would usually dismember the evening for a solid hour or two. James would go first, noting how Jennifer referred to the girls as “Princess Sophie” and “Diva Olivia.” Then Ana would talk about the marble countertops, Mike’s crippling boringness. James might revel, once again, in the way that Jennifer had very specific opinions about very small things – the right temperature for drinking water; why Jay Leno is hilarious – but at the mere mention of politics, she left the room to fuss about in the kitchen. The kitchen. The excess.

But not that night. The venting had been neutered by the unavoidable, continuous kindness the family had shown them, by the way Jennifer had crouched down and whispered in Finn’s ear, ending the night with him in an embrace. Had that always been there? Had they just never seen it, never needed to call upon it until that moment?

“Did you have fun tonight, Finny?” James asked.

“Go see mama,” said Finn. The beeping of the toys stopped.

Ana straightened; it was Jennifer, with her abundance of maternal warmth, who had triggered this yearning in Finn. It was seeing a real family in its chaos that made him miss Sarah.

“Go see daddy,” said Finn.

“We can’t see them right now, honey,” said James. “I’m so sorry.”

Ana looked behind her, expecting Finn to erupt, and why not? He must know he was at the centre of a terrible injustice. He must be furious.

But he was simply staring out the window.

“Should we put on some music, Finny?” asked James, turning on the radio.

The three were quiet for the rest of the ride. James found a parking space right in front of their house, but didn’t comment on it.

He carried Finn upstairs, leaving Ana to her work. She took the laptop to the breakfast nook. The sound of Finn in the bath moved through the floor above Ana’s head. Squealing and thumping, laughter.

Dim light from the inside of the house caught the yard, and something looked different to Ana’s glance. She leaned closer to the French doors. The men had been coming. James had not mentioned it, and with her late nights, she had been returning in the darkness, and had not noticed. Day after day, while she worked in her tower, they had been transforming the yard. The limestone was laid, a grey skating rink in the centre of the garden. A large red Japanese maple stood in a bucket, waiting to be planted. The perimeter was empty of plants, but covered with rich, churned soil. These invisible men were determined to bring life into the place, even though winter was coming. They had been so late that James had negotiated a discount. No one used landscapers in this infertile season.

Something in the limestone unsettled Ana. She felt a tug of certainty that the hole was still beneath it, that a toe on a stone could break through the surface, pull her down into a muddy pit. She put the thought out of her mind, pulled her face from the glass and turned to her e-mails.

Soon, there would be plants in the ground, or at least seeds. She should think about that instead. Ana reminded herself to look again tomorrow.


Ana didn’t want her personal life in the system at her firm, so years ago, James had found a lawyer downtown whose two-room office was over a fish shop.

He went there first, to sign papers delivered from Sarah’s lawyer, whom he had visited the day before. That office had been fancier, in a highrise, with a receptionist. Despite Sarah’s Pig Pen cloud of mess, and Marcus’s Zen-like quiet, it turned out they were affairs-in-order types. And now he, James, whose affairs had never been in order, had power of attorney over their family. He could see their bank account, which was healthy, and their credit card bills (Sarah charged $3.76 at Starbucks four or five times a week, which made James laugh). One day, he would be able to access that money. The insurance company moved along at its arthritic pace, but there had been a decent policy. If Sarah died, Finn would be rich, or richer than James.

All of these revelations (Marcus had stocks! Stocks!) were intimate, and unwanted. As he met with each official, and signed each document, James remembered the feeling of having sex with someone he didn’t love; a little part of him kept repeating: “I can’t bear this. I can’t do it. I’m the wrong guy.”

But, as he was informed many times, Sarah was not dead. So this was just the preliminary hacking of the weeds of Sarah and Marcus’s life. The deep digging would come later, if and when. For now: temporary guardians. Although the will clearly stated that Finn was to go to Ana and James, James couldn’t find an argument against the lawyer’s suggestion that they place notices in newspapers in major cities, and online, just in case there were complications later. He pictured Marcus’s father sitting at the table with his morning paper to find an ad: “Seeking grandparents for orphan child.” James tried to imagine the most monstrous things parents could do, and then he imagined those things happening to Marcus, calm and gentle Marcus. What was it? Prodded in basements, cigarettes burnt out on his forearms. Something caused that little scar on Marcus’s face. He thought of Finn, all softness, and was struck by a future in which an older Finn would have questions. He would have to anticipate those questions, and be ready. He would have to work, gather the stories of Finn’s life and have them waiting.

Unless Sarah woke up, of course. If Sarah woke up, then what? He tried to want this, because it was the right thing to want, and because of Finn, looking out the car window for his parents. But when he thought of Finn leaving, and the room becoming a guest room once again, he ached.

On the streetcar, watching the city take shape in the cooling grey light, he knew Ana would be anxious for him to return, still uncomfortable alone with Finn. This was how he saw her these days: waiting for him, hovering around windows and doorframes, needing him, something he always thought he wanted. That aloofness he had tried for years to break through had been replaced by some kind of anxiety he couldn’t placate. She was angry, too, at the mess in the house, the toys, the overflowing diaper genie. But he left the mess to her because only she could calm herself. He f*cked things up; stacked the dishwasher wrong, didn’t put the laundry in the bureau quickly enough. That was the conversation. He was tired of it. He was speaking less.

James unloaded from the streetcar, moving with the crowd toward the hospital. At the second door, a security guard pointed at a dispenser of hand sanitizer. James’s first instinct was to refuse, as was his wont in the presence of a direct order, but the security guard issuing the order was bull-bodied and redheaded with a slack jaw and the bored arrogance of a bouncer. Then James spotted a withered old woman sitting on a bench, hacking into her curled waxed hand, sport socks pulled up to her green veined knees. Eagerly, James hit the dispenser, slathered and rubbed.

Up the elevator, along the painted footsteps on the floor. But he was following the wrong painted feet and suddenly they ran out. James found himself up against a pair of doors with ship’s portholes at the top; half of one of the painted feet was lost on the other side of the door. Only the heel remained. James pushed at the doors. They were locked.

He turned around and kept walking, following green feet this time, and trying to make sense of the signs overheads. GR4—T76. The numbers and letters seemed random, something Finn would produce banging away on the computer.

Then he found the door, but inside, the bed was empty. He shut the door quickly. A machine on wheels, knobs and buttons, came crashing through the opposite doorway, and attached to that, a woman in scrubs.

“My friend was in here last week—”

“We’re repairing this part of the hospital,” she moved around him, pushing the cart. “Check at the nurse’s station.”

It seemed strange to him that certain ventricles in a hospital could be closed when all he ever heard about was overcrowding and waiting rooms leaking unattended illnesses. He decided to take that as a good sign, then; some kind of lessening of the amount of suffering as a whole contained in the city. Of course, the other reading, he realized as he walked, was that there was the same amount of suffering, but nowhere to put it.

A nurse confirmed that Sarah had been moved to a ward. She no longer needed a private room because there was no private self, nothing that could be infringed upon, thought James.

Outside the correct door at last, he stopped a moment, took a breath and then regretted it, the cold black coating of hospital chemicals settling over his lungs.

The curtain around Sarah’s bed was undrawn and she lay on her back. Of the three other beds in the room, only one contained a person he could see, another middle-aged woman with dark hair, sitting up and watching television with headphones on. Another had the curtain drawn, but a murmur came from the slit, and feet passed below. An orderly gathered food trays. Because of this normal pulse of movement, Sarah looked a little out of place, entirely still in a room of movement; the last little house on a city street of skyscrapers.

Flowers sat on her bedside table. James picked up the card: “We are thinking of you. Love from all of us at Harbord Collegiate.” The water in the vase was murky grey, the stems covered in slime.

James had been to visit three times, and each time, he left his coat on. He stood above Sarah, careful not to knock the churning machines. The bruising had cleared and she looked more like herself, except for the long black lines of stitches criss-crossing her face. Today, her head was flung back, mouth open, crusted with white. She might have been a woman talking, frozen in mid-sentence. The tracheal tube running from the moist, gauze-covered hole in her throat was held in place by a white plastic collar (Like something worn by a priest, or a cat, thought James). Her hair was slightly matted, the roots grown out. James had never thought about Sarah’s hair, about the number of small decisions she made that led her to dye it so black. What was coming in, forming a slab along the side part, was grey, wiry.

“Finn’s doing great,” James said quietly, glancing back at the woman watching television. He crouched down and spoke directly into her ear. “We’re taking care of him. I don’t want you to worry.” He saw her hand, bonded to tubes and tape, and placed his own hand on it. Her fingers were warm, soft. It had been years since he had held another woman’s hand. He had become used to Ana’s poor circulation, her corpse fingers yellow-tipped from November to April.

“What would you like to know?” he said. On his last visit, the nurse had told him to talk to her, that it might fire her brain up, shake her to life. Online he had read of a teen-aged boy who woke up after months in a coma and said: “I hate that doctor. He called me a vegetable.”

“Finn’s funny. I bought him Pull-Ups, and we’re working on that. He has this dance he’s doing, pretty hilarious. He’s all—” James waved his arms. The breathing machine whirred. “Bruce at the daycare says he’s doing really well. They went on a neighbourhood walk and picked up fall leaves. They made these elaborate collages. You should see Finn’s. It’s clearly the best one. He’s a master gluer.”

James straightened the card on the bedside table.

“The Leafs suck, as usual. The economy – it’s not good. You picked a good time to check out,” he said, laughed, then cleared his throat. “Sorry.”

He thought a moment. “We took Finn to my brother’s. He seemed to really like it there. They have an entire floor devoted to toys, so you can guess why he likes it. They also have four cars. Four!” James shook his head. “The parking downtown is still bullshit. There’s a systemic bias on Sundays, when the church people take up all the spaces on the block and the cops never ticket them. So last week I parked across the street, which is always no parking, right? And the parking guy was coming along and was about to write me a ticket. I couldn’t believe it. I ran outside – and hey, don’t worry, Ana was with Finn in the house, we wouldn’t leave him alone in the house – and I said: ‘Look, those church people don’t have permits, they park here for hours on Sunday, taking up all the permit spaces. Why don’t you ticket THEM?’ And you know what he said?” James dropped Sarah’s hand, which landed hard. He was gesticulating, pointing and poking the air. “He said: ‘We make exceptions for religious observation.’ What the f*ck? Is this Iran or something? Aren’t we a secular state? I wanted to kill the guy, just smash him—” The woman with the headphones cleared her throat loudly. James turned and saw that she’d taken off her headphones and was exaggeratedly flipping through a magazine.

He lowered his voice. “Anyway, that’s not so interesting.” He glanced at the woman’s bedside table, which looked as if it might buckle under the weight of photographs: two little girls dressed up like Easter bunnies; two little girls in matching red dresses. James realized there was no photo of Finn by Sarah’s bed. He would have to bring one in.

“I saw your lawyer today and he said you guys had very clear directives around guardianship. You were protecting him from Marcus’s parents, I guess. I wish I knew more about that. I wish I could …” Could what? As the possibility burst at the seams of this sentence, James croaked a little, then silenced himself.

“You’re a good mother, Sarah,” he said, again touching her hand. “You and Marcus were such good parents. You have this beautiful child …” He didn’t continue, embarrassed that he’d immediately transformed a thought about her to one about himself, and all he hadn’t made.

James stopped talking and stood again in his coat, looking at Sarah’s affectless face, listening to the machines.

“Are you family?” asked a nurse, one he hadn’t met before, a small black woman in cornrows punctuated with glass beads. Her hair clicked as she checked numbers on a screen by Sarah’s bed, jotting them down on a chart.

“We’re guardians to her son. We have power of attorney,” James used “we” even when Ana wasn’t with him.

“Have you spoken to the doctor lately?”

“No. Why?”

“She’s stable, and we’re continuing with therapy. But you need to talk to Dr. Nasir about your plans for her.”

James heard a different kind of question. How could there be plans when she hadn’t come back yet? Or died? James couldn’t imagine any movement between those two possibilities. “What do you mean? Plans for what?” And as he spoke, it came to him: He worked on a documentary about this once, a woman who had been in a coma for a decade; her husband’s wish to divorce her; her family’s outrage. Would they move Sarah into their home, would James wash her body with a sea sponge, change feeding tubes, bedpans? Would Ana pluck stray hairs from Sarah’s chin? He remembered the mother of this woman, her mouth tight from worry, insisting that the strapping young brother wheel her bed into the living room for Christmas. And there she was, year after year, a wedge of person growing older at the side of the room while the tree lights twinkled and grandchildren scattered the trash of their opened gifts.

“Long term care is one option,” said the nurse, her pen scratching: kstch, kstch, kstch. Such music in this woman, thought James, listening to her hair clicking, her pen. “You have to talk to the doctor about a DNR. Emergency measures. We have counsellors here—”

The size of his circumstances came upon James suddenly, an Encyclopedia dropped from a top bunk.

“This is f*cked,” he said out loud, rubbing his hands through his hair until it stood in a forest of tufts at different furious angles. The woman reading her magazine froze. “We didn’t even know them that well.”

The nurse ceased her scratching, and looked at him firmly. “Well, this must be very difficult for you, then.”

James deflated a little. It wasn’t compassion, really; there was a tinge of mockery in it, as if this nurse had seen much worse than James ever could. He nodded.

“I’ll see you soon, Sarah,” he said. He leaned down and gave her a kiss on the top of her head. In her ear, he whispered: “He asks about you.”

Then he stood and at the door, turned and waved at Sarah.

In the hallway, the nurse appeared again by James’s side.

“It’s not that uncommon,” she said. James looked at her for the first time. She was about his age.

“In this day and age, not everyone has a family. If something happens to me, my kids are going to my doorman. He’s the best person I know.”

James smiled at this. “Did you give him any warning?”

“No need for that,” said the nurse, handing James a photocopied list of phone numbers, counsellors’ names. “People rise to the occasion.”


When James opened the door to the house, the scent of cold and streetcar on his jacket, Finn was alone in front of the television watching a small animated hamster singing about summer. He didn’t so much watch TV as sit prostrate before it, concentrating entirely, as if he were a medical student observing an operation. The Moo blanket that Ana had brought from his house was clasped between his fingers. He rubbed and rubbed, frowning. The joylessness around TV concerned James. Ana was letting him watch too much.

“Hey Finny,” said James. “How was daycare today?”

Finn broke his concentration and grinned upwards. “Hi James! Hamster!” Then he turned back to the TV and vanished again.

Ana was in the kitchen. A small pink plastic plate of spaghetti sat on the island. Ana placed a blue plastic fork beside it.

“How did it go?” she asked.

“It’s done. We’re in charge. It’s official,” said James, and he beat his chest for emphasis. In one hand, he had a Ziploc bag that he placed before Ana. Plastic parts of a cell phone, the silver of a broken chip.

“This is all they found?”

“The police have a few other things. They’ll be released when the investigation is settled.”

Ana put her hand on the bag of phone parts. “Was it awful today?”

James considered this. “Neutral. It was like opening a bank account. Lawyers.” He was trying for a joke, but Ana didn’t respond.

“The body’s been cremated,” said James. “I guess I arranged that.” It occurred to James that Marcus’s dying was becoming his new job.

“Oh – will we get the ashes?” asked Ana. “What will we do with them?”

“Save the box for Finn, I guess. When he’s older.”

Ana pictured a grown man with Finn’s little boy face tossing ashes into a roiling sea.

“I know you don’t want to talk about it, but the funeral—” said James.

“I think we should wait.”

“What about closure?”

Ana raised her eyebrows. “You don’t actually believe that exists, do you?”

James sighed. “You’re right. It’s bullshit.”

“It’s her husband’s funeral. Sarah should be the one to—” said Ana. “She could still wake up.”

“I don’t think she’s waking up.”

He moved a glass of water over an inch on the table. They were quiet for a moment.

“We should still wait,” said Ana. She took James’s glass of water, dumped it in the sink and put it in the dishwasher.

“I have to go to work,” she said.

“Now? It’s four o’clock.”

“Yes. I can’t miss an afternoon right now. We’re busy. I told you. It’s Emcor. Discovery is coming up “

The legal profession’s use of the word “discovery” had always struck James as abuse. Discovery was a magic word, one that should only refer to new planets or sexual pleasures. But in law, it meant a bunch of suits interviewing another bunch of suits to drag out enough information to ballast their theories in court.

Finn appeared. “ ’Getti!” he cried, climbing onto the stool. James steadied him, snapping a bib around his neck.

Ana put her laptop in her briefcase, which was filled with days of notes from combing over the definition of “life”: If soybeans could be patented, then what next? What other living things would they see bought and sold in their lifetime? She wanted to tell James about how the case made her heart race. The possibilities were terrifying, exhilarating. But Finn was singing as he ate, filling the room.

At the same time, James had an urge to tell Ana about visiting Sarah, but something stopped him. He didn’t want to speak until he knew what he needed to say.

Ana leaned in and pecked a kiss on his cheek. From afar, she called: “Good-bye, Finn!” before shutting the door.



At ten o’clock, Ana was not the last to leave the office. The articling students stayed, surrounded by their empty Styrofoam food containers. They circled the boardroom table, clicking on their computers. Ana was not sure why they didn’t separate and use their cubicles, but something compelled them to come together at night. She suspected some of the evening was spent updating their Facebook profiles, or texting people they sat across from all day. On these late nights, laughter sometimes came out of the room.

When Ana said goodnight, the comic mood broke. “Good night,” they chorused, soberly.

The night was warm. Ana decided to walk home. When she arrived in front of the bar, she didn’t bother to feign surprise at herself. She had known all along, then, where she was going.

It was a place she had first gone to when she was still a kid. Her mother had dragged her to poetry readings there. Ana had been too short to see through the crowds. She’d sipped ginger ale and kept her head below the adult currents, eyes watering from the smoke. Her mother had looked so happy, cigarette in one hand, white wine in the other, her uncut hair moving in all directions as she laughed. Men watched her, and listened to her. She talked and talked and cheered at the dirty words. Ana leaned against her, warm and smiling. It was, Ana decided, a happy memory. She cut it off at the drunken edges.

Inside, the room was half full. A young woman in cowboy boots and a dress stood on stage with a guitar, tuning it. When she turned to the side, fiddling with an amplifier, Ana saw that her guitar was resting on a pregnant stomach.

A clatter of glasses and low conversation filled the space. One table was flanked by beer-drinking guys in plaid shirts, murmuring to one another through their facial hair, art students assuming the look of lumberjacks. Another table held an older couple; a man with electrocuted thin grey hair; a woman in granny glasses.

Ana found a small table near the back. She kept her jacket on until her beer arrived. She sipped and warmed herself. She no longer felt nervous alone in public; it was an advantage of reaching forty-one and becoming less visible. She revelled in the peace, anticipating the singer.

The singer leaned into her microphone and tapped away a blast of feedback. She adjusted it to the right height and strummed. “This one’s about what’s going to happen to me in about three months,” she said, pointing at her stomach. A few laughs.

The song was silly to Ana’s ears, filled with wishes and half-lullabies. But the woman had a strong voice. It climbed around the words with confidence, put them in their place. Ana stared at her. Her eyes closed, then closed harder, as if she were squinting her way to the high notes. One leg buckled and straightened at the knee.

“Hey,” said a voice. Charlie crouched down next to her. Ana was startled, she had almost forgotten about him.

“You came,” he said. “Can I sit?”

He did, pulling the chair close to Ana, speaking in a low voice, something James always did in bars, too, out of respect for the musician.

“Guess what?” he said. “You missed me. I already played.” She saw now that his black T-shirt was wet with sweat around the collar. Part of her was relieved; she did not feel like playing fan.

“I’m sorry to hear that. How did it go?”

Charlie grinned, put his hands together in prayer and looked up at the ceiling. “Terrible,” he said, laughing. “But it doesn’t matter. I lived through it.”

A beer arrived. Charlie thanked the waitress with familiarity. She squeezed his shoulder as she left. Ana was surprised to see him drinking, the froth caught on his upper lip. She could not associate religion and pleasure; they were back to back in her mind, walking away from each other, like duelling gunfighters.

Why had she come here? The smell of the place, years of watery beer and old smoke, seemed to be rising up from between the spaces in the wood floors, seeping out of the old, cracked chairs.

“This is a cover,” said the woman on stage. She strummed a few chords and Charlie exclaimed: “Oh, this is a great song. She does this – yeah, it’s – she does this beautifully.”

The woman on stage closed her eyes and began:

“You are the light, in my dark world. You are the fire that will always burn …“

Ana watched her. The woman strummed, her voice swelling: “ … When I can’t stand on my own …”

Ana wanted to turn away from the woman, the guitar on her absurd belly. She was rocking, her eyes closed, in what could only be described as rapture. But Ana felt a kind of heat, and sadness too. She glanced at Charlie. If he was moved, he didn’t show it.

The singer repeated the line, and dove down inside it: “You are the light, you are the light …“ until she came back around the other side, quietly, “ … in my dark world.” And then she opened her eyes. Shook her hair. Exhaled. It struck Ana as obscene all of a sudden, that they should be all together for this moment. It would be better to experience it alone, with the blinds drawn. People clapped. Ana felt her cheeks redden.

“I should go,” said Ana.

“Really?” said Charlie. But Ana had her coat on already.

“Okay, I’ll walk you.”

“No, no. You don’t have to—”

“I know.”

They walked past the bars, the restaurants, through the bodies going in all directions. Charlie was carrying his guitar in a padded case on his back, turning at an angle to avoid hitting people with it. Ana was aware of how tall he was next to her compared to James.

When they turned south, onto a residential street, Charlie said: “I always liked these windows.” He pointed to an old mansion, a huge house with coloured glass leaves curling in a vine around the doors. It had been divided into apartments; a row of ugly silver mailboxes, things found in a skyscraper, stacked up by the doorframe.

Ana tried to imagine going home right now, tried to picture herself in the living room, surrounded by toys and sippy cups. “Where do you live?” she asked.

“Not far,” said Charlie.

“Can I see it?” He glanced at her quickly, flickering, and nodded.

They had to turn around, retrace their steps.

“I like those windows, too,” said Ana, as they went past the house again.

Charlie’s house was only two doors down from College. The noise of the street spilled over onto his lawn. Two front seats of a car were on his porch in the place where a nice café set should go.

Seeing Ana’s glance lingering upon the seats, he said: “That’s not mine.” Charlie unlocked the door. “Those guys have the front apartment. We have the top.”

We?, thought Ana.

Half of the hallway, large and smelling of rotten food, was taken up by a pile of men’s runners and boots.

Ana walked up the creaky stairs. The handrail wobbled.

As soon as the apartment door opened, Ana saw the “we.” A man played a video game on a couch, connected by a long wire to a console in the centre of the room. The TV blared gunshots and “Incoming! Incoming!”

“Hey dude,” the voice was coated in a gumminess that suggested its owner might not have used it in a very long time.

When Ana could separate the hallway and the sticky little gamer from the space, she saw that the apartment was actually warm and clean. The furniture was cheap but minimalist, and shelves of books tidily arranged lined the walls. Art books. Philosophy. Several different editions of the Bible.

“Ana, this is Russell. Russell, Ana,” said Charlie.

Russell nodded. “I’d get up. I’m not usually this bad, but I’m killing here—” he said.

“Don’t bother, really,” said Ana. “Nice to meet you.”

Charlie led her into the kitchen. He shut the door behind them, muffling the sound of missiles.

“Ambush!” screamed Russell. “Die! Die!”

Charlie said loudly: “Tea? Wine?”

Ana found a place for herself at the kitchen table. It was white and empty but for a stack of newspapers and a bowl of oranges.

“Wine, if you have it,” she said.

“Russell lost his job,” said Charlie in a low voice, uncorking a bottle of red. Suddenly, he looked at the label: “I don’t know too much about wine. Does this seem okay?” Ana glanced at it. It was from a winery in Prince Edward County that she had visited once with James, years ago.

“It’s fine. What was his job?”

“He worked at the university bookstore.” Charlie passed her the glass. “Cheers,” he said. “Wait – it sounds like we’re celebrating the fact that Russell lost his job. Let’s think of something better.”

“Okay. To music,” said Ana. She felt like James, like she was doing an impression of James, his impulsiveness, his ability to be touched by things.

“To music.” They clinked. The wine was good.

“Do you worry he won’t be able to handle the rent?” asked Ana.

Charlie shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “He’s an old friend. I’ll carry him. He’ll be back on his feet.”

“That’s a nice idea, but you probably make very little money, if you don’t mind my saying that,” said Ana.

Charlie laughed. “This is true. My father points out this fact to me from time to time.”

The word “father” peeled ten years from his face.

“Charlie, how old are you?”

“Wow, first my salary, now my age!” Ana was struck by how much he laughed. It filled his spaces like breathing.

“I’m twenty-eight,” he said. “I’ll be twenty-nine next month. Then thirty. Aah!” He raised his hands like he was going down a roller coaster. “It’s weird to think my mom had three kids by thirty.”

“My mom had me at thirty,” said Ana. She finished her glass of wine.

“How much did she drink, your mom?”

Ana paused. “You know about that?” Files. Everything in files.

“She’s pretty young, and alcohol-related dementia is common. And when she first came, I don’t think she ever told me a story that didn’t take place at a party.” Now Ana laughed.

“God, is that true? She’s declined a lot in two years, hasn’t she? I haven’t heard her tell a story in a long time.”

Charlie nodded. “What are you thinking these days? How are you doing?”

“Oh, well, you know, mostly I’m not thinking at all,” said Ana.

“What do you mean?” His head was turned, close to hers.

“I don’t know. I think I have dementia, too. There are things I can’t remember …”

“What kind of things?”

“About my life. About what I was trying to achieve.”

“Wow,” said Charlie, and he laughed. “That sounds awful.”

Ana laughed, too. “It does, doesn’t it? I don’t know what I’m talking about, really. I guess you’re around that all day, nobody making sense.”

“Well, sometimes. Mostly they make sense to me though.” Ana noticed that he drank slowly. “When I started doing this work, I thought I was prepared for it. But I had times when I would see things, I’d see this, you know, decay, and I’d think: What’s the value in this? What’s left here? But you see them every day and—” He stopped.

“And what?”

“You don’t feel so scared. You think you stop living because you fragment, because the mind gets less reliable, but you don’t. There is something primal in there. There’s something that eclipses the damage. There’s this instinct for life. It’s, you know—” He paused again.

“Holy,” said Ana.

“Yeah, that’s better. I was going to say ‘awesome,’ ” said Charlie, laughing.

The conversation moved to small details, films recently seen, Ana’s work and how Charlie had arrived in the city (on a bus from Victoria, with a scholarship in his pocket). These ordinary things seemed intimate now, because of that one true moment that had come before. They finished the bottle and looked at each other.

“Well,” she said. She saw that Charlie was blushing. “I should go.”

He nodded.

They made their way through the war zone in the living room.

“Private Miller, noooooo! Charlie – the Emperor is totally giving the signal!”

Charlie didn’t answer.

At the door, Ana wondered if she should lean in and give him the two cheek kiss that had become fashionable amongst her friends. But she wasn’t sure she could put her face so close to his without wanting to add her body, so she moved fast, waving as she went down the rattling staircase.

Ana walked light-headed, uncertain. She headed back along College. The bar where she’d seen the woman sing was now closed.

When she got home, the lights were off. She flicked them on and saw the living room strewn with toys, plastic bits and Lego and animals. She began to move through the room, tossing objects into Sarah’s wicker basket, which sat now in the hearth. Occasionally, things beeped and whirred. But halfway through her tidying, Ana felt exhausted, weighted. Without finishing, she turned out the lights. Upstairs, she passed the door to Finn’s room, slightly ajar. She glanced inside at him. He had kicked off the cover and was lying on his side, his legs scissored. He was covered from neck to toe: new fleece footies pyjamas that James had bought for the cooler weather. His chest rose and fell.

Ana undressed in the bathroom and slipped into bed next to James, who was half snoring on his back. She nudged him to roll onto his side and he mistook it for sex, coming at her hips with his hands, throwing a leg her way.

She pushed him away, gently, rolling him like an overturned car until he was facing the wall, away from her.


The next day James made lunch for himself and Finn. Hot dogs. A tin of beans. Finn played on the floor, moving a wooden train through a forest of pots while James cleaned the dishes.

The doorbell rang. Finn ran ahead.

“Wait!” called James, wanting to stop Finn from discovering if the person on the other side would be wielding an axe or a clipboard.

Finn scurried around James’s ankles as the door opened.

“Sign here, sir.” The invoice read: Kingston Engineering. Though young, the man had a military demeanour, chest puffed. Maybe it was just the courier uniform.

“Box!” cried Finn. James signed and the courier nodded, turned on one toe and marched away.

James tore off the tape strip: CD-ROMs, memory sticks, file folders labelled with various projects: Robertson Creek, Garrison Park.

“Look,” said Finn. He had removed a piece of white paper covered in a crayon scrawl. At the bottom, in an adult’s handwriting: “ ‘The windy day’ by Finn Lamb.” Along the top, holes from a pushpin, as if the picture had been moved around a lot.

James pulled out a stack of business cards: Marcus Lamb, Civil Engineer, Trenchless Technology Specialist. There were so many of them, the box was brick heavy.

“Put the picture back in, Finny,” said James. Finn shook his head.

What was he preserving it for? For Sarah’s great awakening? What movie did he think this was?

“You want it?”

Finn nodded.

James pressed the curled tape back along the box’s spine, and carried it to the basement, Finn trailing behind. The walls were cement, stacked with boxes and bicycles. Ana had imposed order even down here, in what was little more than a cave.

One of the boxes was labelled, in black marker: “THE BOOK.” James stopped, and pulled it down. Finn immediately tore at the tape, and James let him, watching as he worked open the flaps.

“What this?” Finn asked, pulling out the hardcover book. Identity Crisis and James on the back, with a short-lived goatee and a blazer. James picked up a copy too; there were at least a dozen in there, both the hardcover and the softcover.

Every year his agent sent him the statement of earnings, and it was always negative. It seemed there were so many books out there unsold that they’d be flooding back forever, salmon spawning in reverse. He flipped its pages, realizing that if he ever wrote anything again, people would probably read it on their telephones. The edges of the paper were yellowing. Cheap. Disposable. The shame of it was overwhelming. He took the book from Finn’s hand, threw it in and was sealing the box when the doorbell rang again.

Finn charged up the stairs first, skidding down the hall in his socks. On his tiptoes, he opened the door.

“Wait for me, Finn! Did you forget something?” said James, confronted again with the young man in the yellow courier suit.

“No,” he said quickly, reddening. “I have another package, that’s all.”

As James signed, the courier muttered: “Our computers were down. I just got flagged.”

He handed James another box, smaller, the size of a paint tin.

Basic Cremation Services, said the invoice.

James shut the door.

“I see box?” asked Finn.

“Not now,” said James. He tried to walk past Finn.

“Box?”

James thought of the $1600 charge on his credit card, and reminded himself to invoice Marcus’s insurer quickly.

James knew that he was focusing on his credit card because he could not think about what would befall this little boy were he to learn that the box contained the answer to every question he would ever have, and that the box would never speak of these things, and the box was filled with dust, and the dust was the father he would never know. This is his childhood. It’s happening right now, thought James, and felt tears welling up. And he has no father to take him through.

Finn looked up at James, holding the drawing. He had his mouth in the O shape, puzzling over the world again.

James rubbed at his eyes and managed a smile. He walked back down to the basement, to the shelf containing Marcus’s business detritus. He put the box on top of the larger one so it resembled the world’s brownest, most depressing wedding cake. He gave the small box a gentle pat.

Finn, who had crushed the picture to the size of a walnut, was now kicking it across the basement floor.

“Hey, wait a second,” said James, rescuing the balled-up picture. He smoothed it out against the wall. “Now this is a really good picture. I think it should have a place of honour, don’t you agree, Sir Finn?”

In the kitchen, James put it on the fridge. It was a blank stainless steel canvas. They didn’t even have a magnet, and James had to root around for tape.

“Fantastico,” he told Finn, who pointed at the picture. “Mine,” said Finn cheerfully.


Hours later, James put Finn down for a late afternoon nap. Finn crawled in like it was his duty, holding his cow blanket and squeezing his eyes shut. James kissed his soft hair.

The door to James’s office was closed. He hesitated, then went inside.

He hadn’t been in there since Finn had arrived, a month ago.

James felt instantly soothed by the chaos of the room, the papers and teetering books. He removed the hockey helmet from his guitar and plugged in the amp. He turned it high and began to play. How long had it been? His fingers on the strings were too silky, un-calloused, but the pain felt good. He went back and forth through the chords, closing his eyes, trying not to see Marcus when he did. He breathed hard, letting the sound get bigger and bigger.

When he opened his eyes, Ana and Finn were in front of him.

“Finn try!” cried Finn, jumping up and down.

“You smell good,” said James. Ana was wearing a fitted black dress, her breasts flattened in a way that was incongruously boyish and sexy at once. Her eyes were painted grey, her lips red.

“Where are you going?”

“Me? We. We’re going out, remember? This is the great sitter experiment.”

James had forgotten. He could see instantly in his mind’s eye the firm party, the new restaurant at the top of an office building overlooking the harbour, the grim black lighting and reflective surfaces so you could never escape anyone’s face. The room would be filled with Ana’s colleagues, men growing fatter and louder in their pressed suits; the women thinner and meaner, denying themselves h’ors d’oeuvres.

“Let me shower,” he said.

“Finn try!”

“We need to get going,” said Ana.

“I can’t not let him try it,” James squatted and held the guitar across his knees. Finn made a few swipes and laughed.

“Don’t be Paul McCartney,” said James. “Be Mick Jagger. People will tell you to be Paul McCartney, but don’t.”

In the shower, James looked at his hands, and his buttery belly. He had put on weight; he was becoming immovable.

James’s dress shirts hung in a dry-cleaned bundle, twist-tied at the neck of the hangers, bagged in plastic. Ana must have taken them in for him. He had not worn one in months, not since the final meeting with HR.

As he slid his torso into a blue shirt, the crease along his elbow like a margin, he remembered a party a decade ago in a different bar in a different tower. Ana was a new associate, and James showed up wearing a concert T-shirt – Jesus Lizard – under a black blazer. He was lighter then. He walked fast and everywhere, never taking buses or taxis or driving, held to the ground only by army boots under his black jeans. It was only when he set foot in the bar, glanced around at the feet of the guests, all high heels and dad shoes, buffed and barely worn, that he realized how badly he had misjudged. It was one of the first times his youth had been revealed to him as crass, rather than a badge of honour. In the cool, crisp spaces between people, placed in elegant groups of two and three, James recognized new worlds that required other currencies, worlds in which his father moved back and forth with ease. He thought of his father, standing outside James’s bedroom door, his diagonally striped, navy blue tie in a full Windsor, his overcoat on, glancing bewildered at the posters on the wall, the guitar amp humming. And James, nearly naked on the carpet, having fallen asleep there in his white underwear, deeply stoned and sixteen.

Finn appeared, holding Moo.

“Where you go?” he asked.

James scooped him up, pulled him close on the bed, breathing in his limbs, his small pumping chest, the worn comfort of the blanket.

“We’re going to a party. There’s a babysitter coming. She’s really nice. You guys will play and you’ll go to sleep and when you’re asleep, we’ll come home and kiss you on the cheek,” said James. Finn looked unconvinced.

“Ana!” called James. She appeared quickly, as though she had been lingering in the hall.

“We better get going. Ethel’s here,” she said.

“Ethel?” said James, incredulous, and then, to Finn: “The babysitter’s name is Ethel.”

“She’s from the Philippines.”

“Oh, God. This is someone’s nanny?” He spoke in a hushed voice.

“Elspeth, from work. I told you that,” said Ana. “She’s her night nanny.”

“Her night nanny? How many are there? Is there a dusk nanny? A dawn nanny? A mid-afternoon snack nanny?”

It was quite likely true that Ana did tell him about the evening, and he couldn’t remember, or hadn’t found it worth noting. But now, suddenly, the thought of this Ethel alone with Finn …

“What do we know about her? Did you check her references?” Again, his career backed up on him: He recalled interviews with police officers, macho men of the law who appeared before him red-eyed and destroyed, choking out stories about child slavery rings; pedophiles masquerading as caregivers. All the experts he had sat across from, dumbly and humbled, and now all James could remember from those conversations was: Don’t trust anyone.

“I just told you. She lives with Elspeth and her family. She’s been here for almost two years. She has a whole family back there. It’s quite sad.”

James took Finn by the hand, and went downstairs. Unexpectedly, Ethel turned out to be a boyish young woman with short hair. James wondered if the hair was a nod to her new modern life, if such a cut would fly back home.

Sensing a nervousness in her – she seemed to be shaking giggles out of her mouth like a swimmer shaking off water – James began to be James, spilling over with curiosity. Within a moment, she had a glass of juice in her hand, and Finn was sitting next to her playing with the clasp on her purse, and James had learned that she had two daughters in the Philippines, in a town he had never heard of. Still, he nodded with an insider’s understanding when she said the name: “Oh, yes, of course.” And Ana, putting on her coat in the hallway, heard her husband and recognized in his response the smallest lie.

At the door, waving good-bye, both Ana and James were flung backwards into their childhoods, each separately watching a marching band of babysitters who had walked through their parents’ doors over the years: the gum chewer, the sour old woman, the pre-adolescent with the babysitter course card. For James, the doorways were always the same, and his parents’ assurances the same, and his excitement the same. For Ana, the memories arrived in an aureole of confusion. Everyone was faceless, and the doors led to apartments and houses she’d lived in for only months at a time, some of which she wouldn’t recognize if she walked by them today.

“We’ll see you soon, buddy,” said James, preening a little for Ethel. He crouched down to give Finn a hug.

Ana made rustling noises, noting that James had never called Finn buddy in his life. Finn laid out Ethel’s makeup kit on the coffee table. Ethel seemed unfazed.

“Good-bye,” said Ana, who bent down and delivered an awkward kiss atop Finn’s head. She felt a million eyeballs rolling over her as she did it.


They left him like that, lining up lipstick next to Chap Stick next to hair clips. James wondered lightly if Finn lifted his head or felt any kind of sadness when they shut the door, if the boy’s unease in any way echoed his. He pictured Marcus’s ashes in the basement, and felt a panicky certainty that Finn needed more comfort. For a moment, he thought of turning to Ana and saying: “This is insane. We have to go back.” And pushing through the door to scoop up the boy and bury his face in his honey hair, feel his small cat paw hands around his neck. Ana would send Ethel home and lock the door behind her, keeping the three of them in, and the cold October evening at bay.

He stopped walking.

“What is it?” asked Ana. She looked grave, as if anticipating exactly what he was thinking, but terrified to hear it said out loud. He won’t be able to leave him. His wife, bundled and moving slightly to keep warm, her hands in her leather gloves anxiously swinging by her side.

“Nothing,” he said. And then he lunged at her, grabbed her from the waist and pulled her to his mouth, lips smashing.

“James—” she pulled away, ran her fingers through her hair.

“Let’s go in an alley and f*ck.”

“Jesus.” He reached for her again, tried to get his hand through the buttons of her jacket, but there wasn’t enough space. “You’re going to rip it—” said Ana before he closed his mouth over hers.

“Let’s get ugly,” whispered James. “Let’s get a hotel room.” He was panting now, shaking her lightly from the shoulders.

Ana shoved him back. “James. It’s not like that,” she said.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. It’s not – we’re not—”

“Animals?” he said, and he let out a dog bark. Ana stared, and James felt all the lust draining from him as his wife frantically pushed down her short hair, which was perfect, entirely in place.

He breathed in the cold and made a declaration: “Let’s take a cab.”


Rick Saliman had spent thousands of dollars bonding his teeth and the result, when he pulled back the curtains of his lips, was a strange erasure of the lines between each tooth. Something smooth and terrifying, resembling a long, narrow bar of soap, sat where his smile should have been.

“James,” he said, and gripped James’s hand like they were jumping from a cliff together. This was Rick Saliman’s greeting: No hello, just the loud singular recitation of a name. On the strength of this fantastic memory, and three decades of practice, the Saliman name was second on the firm’s stationery, right after the dead McGruger.

“Rick,” said James. Ana swooped over the waitress walking by and grabbed a glass of white for her, red for James.

“She does everything for you, is that right, James? Even gets the drinks these days?”

Ana tried a laugh.

“Only the things that matter,” said James, raising his glass for emphasis.

Ana left his side, beckoned by a wave from Elspeth, who stood with two young associates, new hires. One was blonde, breakably thin beneath feathery hair; she reminded Ana of Woodstock, Snoopy’s friend. The other was tall, taller even than Ana, and less pretty but exuded a kind of burnt anger: her eyes narrowed when offered Ana’s hand.

“Jeanine is working with Steven’s group,” said Elspeth, and the tall one gave an exhausted sigh topped by a world-weary smile that Ana found falsely mature for her face.

The blonde one gazed sleepily around the room as if looking for a place to nap.

Ana felt a pull in the back of her head, an interior whisper – How’s Finn? Who’s in her home? – and she wondered if it was like that for Elspeth all day every day. Elspeth had three children, boy-girl twins and a boy. Ana only discovered these children after the two women had worked together for a year, when she saw Elspeth waiting for an elevator at 9:30 in the morning, her eyes teary, her jacket on, clearly hovering in the shadows hoping to be unseen.

“What’s wrong?” asked Ana, who hadn’t sought out this moment but was merely on her way to the washroom.

“My son’s sick,” said Elspeth.

Taken aback, Ana said: “You have a son?” And the son was sick, which could mean a cancer boy, bald in a ward somewhere being entertained by a volunteer clown. “Is he all right? What do you mean, sick?”

“Oh, he’ll be fine. But the school sent him home and my day nanny is having day surgery, and of course Tom can’t take a day off. I tried to get our night nanny to come early, but she sees our number on the phone and doesn’t pick up. And I have a conference call at eleven …” And off she went in a gnarled, furious voice entirely unlike her calm, measured self at meetings. Ana stepped back a foot or so, overwhelmed by a mixture of sympathy and disgust. Ana had taken to heart the two tenets she learned early on from a female professor in law school: “Never cry, and always take credit.” And at the same time, Ana was mortified to recognize in front of her exactly the situation she, who considered herself a feminist (right? didn’t she? had it really been that long?), knew was disastrous, unfair, a shivering, pathetic creature of inequality flushed out into the light.

She put her hand on Elspeth’s arm, and offered a Kleenex from her pocket. She rode down in the elevator with her and put her in a cab. The look of sheer gratitude on Elspeth’s face when she glanced back through the glass filled Ana with self-loathing. Why was there so little altruism in her? She thought about those workplace surveys that get published in national magazines and newspapers once or twice a year: Is this a good place for women to work? In truth, the firm was not, but Ana liked the idea of working in a place that was, and decided this was a moment in which to pretend otherwise.

Since that day, Elspeth had confided in Ana from time to time. Shutting Ana’s door behind her, she gingerly showed her photographs of the kids. Ana nodded and murmured and Elspeth relaxed into it eventually, growing more familiar, bitching about this and that family matter, presenting Ana with a picture of a life that was torturous in many ways, all drop-offs and pick-ups and nanny extortions and infected mosquito bites and exorbitant hockey fees. But sometimes, once in a while, great pride over somebody’s triumph at school. A picture painted. A report of a surprise cuddle from the eldest late one night.

One time, she forwarded Ana a family photo from a weekend vacation to an amusement park. The kids tumbling off Elspeth’s lap in front of a fiendish cartoon mascot, and Tom, Elspeth’s husband, at the edge of the picture with half his body sliced away. This was the image Ana saw in her mind’s eye whenever Elspeth spoke of her family, whom Ana had never actually met.

No one else at work spoke of Elspeth’s outside life. She was sober and efficient, stayed until nine or ten at least two nights a week, took the bare minimum holidays, and moved up fast. And Ana would be next, everyone said, the next woman to make partner. Soon.

Ana heard the low laughing of the men growing more boisterous; drink three had been drunk, the volume was increasing. She grabbed a second glass of wine from the tray, dropping down her empty glass, and taking a long, deep sip. Ana looked across at James, nodding as Rick Saliman gesticulated. These parties were one of the few places in the world where Ana saw James being deferential. She took this for love.

Ana recalled that Rick Saliman’s desk contained a photograph of two children, sunburnt on a boat, but he hadn’t spoken of them in years, or not to Ana. Perhaps only Elspeth dared confide in the hollow crone. She thought of the word “childless,” spreading like a fungus across her, infecting everyone: She is less a child, so don’t dangle yours in front of her or she might snatch it away.

Ana was overcome with the sensation that she needed to speak. “Where are your kids tonight?” she asked Elspeth. The young women glanced about, surprised.

“Tom – my husband,” said Elspeth, for the benefit of the juniors. “He has them, of course. He would never come to one of these things.”

“One of your nannies is at my house,” said Ana, finishing her second glass of wine, feeling it rise to the top of her head.

Elspeth smiled. “That’s right. How strange.”

The blonde one inquired politely of Ana: “How many children do you have?”

“Oh, none. I just borrowed one from a sick friend.” The three women shifted. Elspeth tried to intervene.

“Ana’s a godmother to a little boy whose mother is in the hospital. He’s staying with her.”

“Godmother? Oh, Elspeth. That makes it sound so profound. Fabulous. Can I start using that phrase?”

Ana knew that this bitchy streak was awakened only with alcohol, yet she replaced her empty wine glass with a full one as the young waitress walked by. She took another sip.

The blonde one took a swallow of her drink, as if steeling herself for what she was dying to ask.

“So it’s possible, then, to have children and work here? I never hear anyone talk about that. The statistics about women lawyers—” Ana noticed a huge ring on her finger, an eyeball-sized diamond. She won’t be working in a year, thought Ana.

“Of course it’s possible. You don’t have to sacrifice every feminine experience to be successful,” said Elspeth in a hectoring voice. Ana dwelled on the word “feminine,” picturing her childless self moustachioed, wearing a hard hat. “I’m surprised someone from your generation would subscribe to such a retrograde notion.”

The blonde woman coloured pink.

“Well, Elspeth, I wouldn’t say that’s entirely true,” said Ana. “Suppression is a significant aspect of the working world. What do people say? ‘It’s business, it’s not personal.’ ”

The blonde woman, buoyed by what she perceived as Ana’s defence of her, piped in: “I read in some magazine that if someone at work ever says that to you, like because you were crying or something? That what you should say is: ‘It might be business, but I’m a person, so it’s personal.’ ”

Ana took this in then laughed bitterly for a moment until halted by the girl’s crestfallen face. She had meant this anecdote seriously.

“I only have one piece of advice for your generation,” said Ana. The two women leaned in. “Get off Facebook. It will back up on you.”

Ana excused herself, gliding through the room on rails, making stops here and there to shake hands, dole out praise, make mention of her most recent settlements and victories.

She was looking for James, because James was her way of differentiating herself from this. Even now, he remained her rock ‘n’ roll connection, some vestige of her childhood in the demimonde. Whenever she drank this much, she longed to seem like she had just been dropped into her work, temporarily, like someone in a witness protection program. This part of the job was tolerated for the sake of the hours it allowed her in the office. If she could suffer through these nights (and she did, adored by all), then she could retreat tomorrow to the sprawling problems waiting to be clipped and contained on her computer.

He was in the shadows, back to her, arms moving, beer sloshing out of his glass. When he pulled back, he revealed Ruth, looking less wan than usual in a black dress of indeterminate taste. Her feet, however, were in thick-heeled laced booties that made Ana think of war nurses. But her face was ecstatic, flushed, her eyes alight, and James, when he turned to Ana, was panting as if he’d sprinted through a door, his forehead shiny, his hair on end.

“Ana!” he said, too loudly. He leaned in for a nuzzle.

“James was telling me about when he went to Liberia,” said Ruth, revealing the piled teeth. “I’m really into Afro beat.” Ana nodded. She had almost forgotten about James’s trips, how many years he’d spent travelling with a film crew, and how he would return with stacks of photos and anecdotes and some unwearable beaded garment as a gift. What struck her about those trips was how similar they were, how every country suffered exactly the same poverty and the same corruption. Back and forth between those two poles, with James vacuuming stories from the inside of the countries, all that heartbreak residue to collect.

“You used to spend so much time on the road,” said Ana, reaching a hand out as a server walked by, plucking another glass of white wine.

“Do you guys want to go dancing?” asked Ruth. And if he were a cowboy, James would have taken off his hat, flung it in the air and hooted: “Hell, yeah!” Ana considered the alternatives and nodded her assent.


The club was on a street between a Portuguese grocer – salted cod suspended in the window; a strange chemical soap smell as they walked past – and an auto garage. Ana rubbed her hands together to get warm while Ruth stood to the side, texting invisible friends about guest lists and entry.

James said: “We should call Ethel.”

“Should we?”

He dialled, his fingers growing colder. Ana couldn’t hear what he said, standing between two people on their cell phones in the nothing street light, watching the babies, babies going in and coming out, their unlined faces under knitted caps and curtains of long hair. This season, Ana noted, beards were back. Almost every guy entering had a grizzly backwoods coating. Is that where James had gotten the idea for his?

But around their eyes, only youth, flat and nervous and boyish, like they couldn’t believe they were out on a school night.

“Everything’s good,” James said, putting his phone in his pocket. Ana looked at him blankly.

“With Finn. Everything’s good.”

“Oh,” said Ana. “Good, good.”

“He went right to sleep,” said James, covering a little pull of disappointment over the fact that Finn didn’t require him at bedtime.

Inside the club, the band, too, was bearded, all except the female singer, who had bangs that covered half her face. There were so many of them, Ana felt like she was looking at a Dr. Seuss picture of alike creatures populating a village: This one has an accordion, this one has a saw, this one has a tuba. But when they turned it up, it sounded good, cacophonous, pure.

“It’s not a band, it’s a collective,” shouted James at Ana, delivering a new piece of information.

Ana laughed. “How Stalinesque!”

Ana sipped her beer, far from the band, near the bar, while James and Ruth attempted to talk over the noise, their heads tilted together, nearly touching at the top. They gave up and James separated, stood upright and stared, fighting the impulse to go to the front, to climb up on stage. I could have done that, he thought, I could have been that! That exact thought was already snaking through the room, especially in and out of the heads of the few guys over thirty. For the younger ones, there was no sense of regret yet; still a possibility, still a chance.

James bought two beers, knowing that the severance money was going to run out in six weeks and wondering what that would look like: Would he get an allowance from his wife? He shut up the thought, taking in the stink of old bar cloths and the deodorant of strangers. He saw his wife moving away from him, cut off from her by young men that looked like James used to look, and women in lipstick that seemed black in the dark.

“Do you want to smoke?” asked Ruth. James couldn’t see Ana, and he nodded, feeling bundled in bandages. He handed Ruth a beer.

He went outside with her, under the streetlamp. He lit a cigarette and offered her one. She raised an eyebrow, led him to an alleyway and pulled a joint out of her wallet. James laughed stupidly at himself: “That kind of smoke,” he said. How long had it been since anyone had invited him to smoke pot?

He studied her face as she lit up: slight lantern jaw keeping her from prettiness, and a kind of a put-upon sadness that was unappealing. But she was sympathetic, too, because she was trying so hard. He took a long, deep drag, and another.

Nearby, a small crowd of people were doing the same thing, two guys and a girl. A pretty girl with black hair, smiling at him as she exhaled, lifted her fingers in a wave. Emma.

She walked with her hips forward. Her jacket was tight around her breasts, and came out from her waist like a bell. As she moved, she was backed by the muffled sound of the band, frantic and ominous (an organ? did they bring out a goddamn organ too?).

“My God. How weird is this,” she said it like it was a good weird. “I see you everywhere.”

Ruth, if James wasn’t mistaken, looked a little annoyed. Her hand was extended into space, waiting for James to take a drag.

“I don’t – this is Ruth.”

“I think I know you. Were you at Yoshi’s book launch?” asked Emma, peering at her.

Ruth shook her head no, suddenly a bumpkin, and the difference between the two women glared like a lantern in the darkness.

“Do you want—?” Ruth thrust the joint at Emma, who plucked it from her fingers and inhaled.

“Where’s your wife?” Emma said, as if she knew Ana. She was bolder tonight, perhaps buoyed by the frisson from the club, the pot. She passed the joint to James, who was feeling the widening of his sensations, but inhaled deeply anyway.

James gave Emma a back-story: a few hours earlier, she had come from her father’s place in an Edwardian in the north end of the city. There, in one of her two childhood homes, she had sat through a long meaty dinner, enduring a simpering lecture from her stepmother whose face was so chemically altered that she resembled a bank robber with a stocking over her head. On her way out, Emma stole a handful of Xanax from the master bathroom, chewing them up on the subway platform. So probably she was afloat right now, even higher than he was. James watched her burning electric, like a neon-coloured cartoon character outlined in black ink.

What James couldn’t remember later was how he got separated from Ruth. He didn’t see her forlorn expression, her stubbed out half-joint gingerly placed in her wallet for later, her trudge inside the club to the tune of a slow morbid song, the organ and the saw. While James was in the alley, Ruth re-entered the bar, searching the crowd for Ana’s blonde cap, nowhere to be found.

James, at that moment, was in an alley crushed against the body of a woman eighteen years younger, the scent of urine clouding his ankles. He pushed her to the wall and it all came back to him, what to say, the slow constant patter – You’re so beautiful, you’re so, so – and his hand, and then his fingers, all this with her coat on but opened and the feel of her soft bra, black in his mind’s eye but even with his eyes open, he couldn’t see much, just shadows. But he had mapped the body in his mind so often that he knew where to go, and found her wet beneath her clothing, moving until she shuddered in his hand. Then she had her hand on his buckle and he thought of his belly hanging over the edge of his jeans, but it wasn’t repulsive enough to stop her sliding down the wall, getting on her knees. He could no longer hear the music then – they were far away – just the white noise in his head, a string between the noise and the feeling of her warm mouth around him, her tongue and a slight nibble that he found both painfully self-conscious and unbearably good, so much so that James put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her mouth off him just in time, the wet mess remaining on his pants, far from her face looking up at him, the chewed lipstick on those thick lips. He looked upon the strangest grin, a smudge of destruction and shame and pride.

James backed away, the two of them returned to their own bodies, their hands doing snaps and buckles and putting themselves away as easily as they had served themselves up just a few minutes before.

James wanted to be heroic, to apologize, to beg forgiveness, to swear it off forever, but he said nothing, only felt the walls around him tilt and whirl ever so slightly. They walked back to the club together, but a half block before it, still in the shadows of the alley, Emma stopped.

“I’ve got to meet some people,” she said. James wondered if he should kiss her. Before he could decide, she reached into her pocket, and James felt a tingle of curiosity: What else did she have to offer? Is it not over? Then, she pulled out her phone and ran her fingers over its face. She backed away, typing and waving.

The club was still full. James felt he had been away for days, but it had been less than a half hour from the air to the joint to the girl’s mouth around his cock.

Ana appeared beside him, carrying two plastic cups of beer. What surprised him was the calm he felt, and how recognizable it was. He had almost forgotten, in his time with Ana, that he had always been a liar, that he had gone from bed to bed in one night on several occasions, and looked women in the eye with ease. Just washing a few key body parts and carrying a toothbrush in his backpack had been enough to get him through university. He was good at this.

What he wouldn’t consider (until morning, oh, morning) was how refined Ana’s sense of him was. What did she know, or fear, about this part of James, that had been lying dormant for all those years?

“Were you smoking a joint with my subordinate?” Ana shouted over the music, smiling, passing him the beer. James relaxed. Her face was dancing with drunkenness. He had not seen her so loose in weeks, or longer. If he was honest with himself, that static between them had been crackling long before Finn arrived. James took the beer and drank it in one sip, washing away Emma’s taste. Then he grabbed his wife by the waist and kissed her. Those hipbones against him; her familiar mouth, welcoming, and a wave of loss smacked him, broke his grip on her. The band was louder than it had been, but sadder, too, filled with urgency.

“Careful,” she said, as he lurched apart from her, brushing the droplets of beer that had splashed on her wrist.

“What about Finn?” Ana asked suddenly.

“What about him?” shouted James.

“We should get home.”

Both of them drained the plastic cups. James made a gesture to throw his on the ground, but Ana intercepted, depositing them both in a recycling bin as they pushed through the crowd.

They were close enough to walk home, through city streets full of people shouting for no particular reason, into phones, at each other, at cabs roaring past.

“I need to go in here,” said James, under the glow of the 24-hour drug store sign.

“Can it wait until tomorrow? I’m so tired,” said Ana, realizing how true that was, how she felt that her skin had separated from her flesh. Inside, the aisles were painfully bright, but quiet. Ana followed James silently.

“Here,” he said, pulling a small brown stuffed dog from a rack of animals. “What kid doesn’t want a dog?”

“That’s what we came in here for? It’s two in the morning.”

“We’re a block from home,” said James, paying in a great clattering shower of coins.

“Yes, but I’m tired,” said Ana, the drink thickening her voice. Back outside in the cloud of yelling youth, she added: “And where the hell did you go anyway? I was waiting for you. Your little girlfriend looked crushed that you left her.”

James gripped the dog tightly by the neck. “What girlfriend?”

“Ruth. Why, is there another one?” Ana laughed, and the arrogance of James’s question seemed to distract her from her irritation. She put an arm through James’s as they turned on to their block, toward the brothel house, where candlelight flickered in an upstairs window. As they got closer, Ana realized it wasn’t candlelight, but the blue flutter of a television set.

“It’s nice you got him that dog,” she said. “You’re a good doggy. A good daddy, I mean.” And she was laughing like a lunatic again when James unlocked the door of the house. There was Ethel sleeping on the living room couch, a magazine and a green throw blanket covering her body, and the quiet hum of a house in order singing along beneath his wife’s drunken laughter.


Ana felt the burn move from her head down to her fingers where she clutched the car door handle. She closed her eyes as if to keep every possible orifice sealed, afraid of what might escape.

“I’m sick,” she moaned.

“You’re just hung over,” said James.

“Ana sick?” asked Finn from the back seat. The high pitch of his voice felt like a letter opener inserted into Ana’s ear, cleanly slicing her head in two.

“No, I have a fever,” she said. James placed a hand on her forehead, which was slick, warm.

“Yeah, maybe,” he said. Then, to Finn: “It’s when you don’t feel good because you drank too much.”

“Does he need to hear that?” asked Ana.

“Drink juice?” asked Finn.

“Grown up juice. Ana’s sick today.” He beeped the horn. “Isn’t that what Michael Jackson called it, when he drugged those kids? Grown up juice?”

Ana swallowed; steel wool taste.

“Jesus Juice!” said James. “Jesus Juice! Can you imagine? Bringing Jesus into that shit?”

They were in the very centre of the highway, surrounded on all sides by cars, lane after lane of indistinguishable noise and speed. The scenery beyond the cars repeated: mall, massive concrete industrial building with a parking lot as big as the building, then another mall. There were no mountains, no sign of water. Any trees they passed were as trim and contained as if they had been unwrapped from cellophane yesterday. The highway continued like this, without a rise or a curve, on and on for almost an hour.

James had considered his actions, all through the night, his drunken sleep broken by waves of possibilities. What shape would he lend to this transgression? He wrote a partial confession, a general unburdening without detail: “Something happened last night. I stopped it before it went too far.” He couldn’t imagine Ana seeking follow-up. She was not a woman who needed to know. And how would it make him feel, what would it relieve him of, really, this rubbery admission? And then there was the possibility of silence, which was sitting with him this morning like a grey, furry egg in the pit of his stomach. In exactly the way of love songs, he found himself unable to look at his wife. He could not meet her eye.

Well, the truth, then: “A girl gave me a blow-job last night.” What could Ana possibly say? In all the scenarios he played out in his head, she did what she did best – she left.

Right after James moved into Ana’s apartment, when she was amassing a wardrobe of blazers and carrying around a gigantic black leather daytimer, James had run into an old girlfriend in a bar. That night Ana had stayed home to get up early for work but James was barely working then, teaching just one unpopular class, on Aristotle. The small, dark club had no chairs and a band, two guys, one on bass, one on guitar. It sounded awful, and drinking more didn’t alter that fact. Then Catherine appeared, oh Catherine with the baby bangs and the cigarette tongue, and the T-shirt spilling over with flesh right along the pink scoop neck. As a girlfriend, she had been dumb but untroubled, up for anything in bed. She was a type of girl that James was always meeting, with a clerical job in an art gallery and ideas the size of peas, which she reiterated up against the bar: “I’m doing these paintings about the body, uh, about how men were always painting the body but now, like, I’m a woman painting the body …” He had nodded, and imagined peeling off her T-shirt, getting her to bend this way and that. A few more beers and she was running her hand along the inside of his thigh (did she remember how that killed him, or was it a generic move, available to all? He decided not to be bothered either way), and then they were upon one another in the bathroom. He was actually f*cking in a bathroom stall! The thrill of fulfilling this cinematic objective lasted for about eighteen seconds and then he began to question the initiator. Only an artist as bad as Catherine would fail to recognize this event for the creative cliché it was. And also, in fact, uncomfortable – she was a little tall for him – and when he glanced down and saw the cigarette butt floating in the yellow water of the toilet, James had to close his eyes to finish.

When he got home Ana was asleep. James was wearing the paramedic shirt he always wore in those days. He buried it at the bottom of the laundry basket.

After a long, scrubbing shower, he emerged and stood naked above his new girlfriend asleep on the mattress, the first real bed he had bought in his adult life, after years on futons on floors. And she had helped him achieve this milestone. He took in the exposed brick walls of the loft, and Ana’s briefcase leaning by the door, her red leather gloves across the top, the empty fingers flopping gently. He could feel in that moment that they had already begun their ascent, that they were unmoored and lifting toward adulthood, and she had chosen him to accompany her, he who would have stayed on the ground, in the filth, forever. She had chosen him and he had rewarded her with this, the most crass kind of betrayal, one involving toilet paper and an unsigned band.

And so he woke her, and confessed every detail, and wept and wept, naked on the bed. Ana lay frozen, nodding from time to time. He told her he was filled with shame, that he had always been filled with shame, and that he needed her to remind him to be good. Ana lay there, expressionless, asking only one, unanswerable thing: “What do you mean?”

The sun broke through and Ana rose for her shower. When she came out of the bathroom, she was already fully dressed and made up.

“If it matters to hear me say it, I would never do it again,” said James, from under the duvet, as Ana gathered her keys, put on her jacket. She thought of her mother, of the keening and wailing. She had no memory of her father leaving, just her mother flailing in his wake.

She turned to James.

“Okay,” she said.

Because it seemed appropriate, James nodded fiercely.

He spent the next days trying to revive Ana. Her eyes flattened, and she would go for hours without talking, even as they continued their routine as if nothing had happened. From the moment they woke, James talked. He talked through her silence at breakfast, her quiet sips of wine at the pub after work. “You picked the wrong guy if you think I’m going to run out of things to say,” said James, folding laundry and talking about baseball, C.S. Lewis, Rodney King. He thought she was weighing whether or not her “Okay” was sincere, and that was when he knew that he could not have a life without her, that such a future would be entirely without purpose. So he talked, hoping some of his words would hook and reel her in.

Ana had arrived to him, at age twenty-six, exhausted by the needs of those who claimed to love her. She no longer wanted to be tired out by the folly of others. James knew how her father had vanished literally, and her mother vanished nightly into the drink. He knew her teen-aged days stopped at ten p.m., when she shut her door and put on headphones to drown out the rattle and rant of her mother on the telephone or cackling in the living room with a new friend. And in the morning, when the sunlight hit the African violets, Ana felt optimistic again, and was eager to bring her mother back to the world, carrying her a tray of Tylenol and tea.

Later, Ana tended to boys who only loved her part of the time, too. She might stitch a torn sleeve, or show up on the doorstep with the right album, but even a f*ck in some vacationing parent’s bedroom was never enough to keep the full attention of these sleepy-eyed lovers. They left.

But James would be present. James wouldn’t take advantage. James promised to fill this vacant building from which all the people who had promised to love Ana had fled. He knew that she couldn’t sustain any more betrayal. And three weeks after he had sex in the bar bathroom, he awoke to Ana’s eyes on him. They were her real eyes at last. “Never again,” she said, and James held her so tight he left a faint yellow bruise on the back of her left shoulder.

This was their covenant, then. It seemed to James that there were things he needed to keep from her, and that she had asked him to do so, in fact. And almost twenty years later, driving to his parents’ house, he tried to convince himself that not telling her about his weakness and terrible mistakes was a gesture akin to love. He told himself this while attempting to ignore the rotten stench floating up from his guts.

“Where doggy?” asked Finn.

“He didn’t come with us, Finny,” said James. Ana opened her eyes, saw a mall before her, closed them again, her headache rotating.

And then it began. Finn started to snarl, and the snarl begat a kind of bark that was actually a cry, a sob, a wracking of body, a flailing of legs, small, strong feet pounding into James’s back as he drove.

“Dogggyyyyy!” he wailed through a wall of sobs and screams.

“Finn, don’t kick me! I’m driving!”

A huge truck went by James’s window, too fast, too close. He swerved, and bodies thrust forward and back.

“James!” said Ana, clutching her side.

“Doggyyyy! Want him! Want him! Want him!”

Ana’s stomach bounced up and down. She put one hand over her belly, one on the top of her head, holding both in place.

“Doggyyyy!”

“Make him stop,” whispered Ana.

“What?”

“Make him stop!”

“Doggyyyy!”

“What can I do?” shouted James.

“Just do your thing! Just do it!” A bile rose in her throat; she choked it back.

“Finny! Just stop it. We’ll get the dog later,” shouted James.

Finn seemed to regard the words as a challenge, ramping up the volume, the kicking. James felt Finn’s snot and spit flying in droplets through the car.

James took the next exit, following the signs to Tim Horton’s.

“Are you coming?” he asked Ana from the back seat, unstrapping the flailing body. She nodded, trying to unlock the door.

“Drug store,” she said, feeling her throat, parched and burning.

“Maybe you could f*cking help me,” he said, but Ana didn’t hear him.

They split off from one another, then, Ana retreating to the relative calm of the small pharmacy in the strip mall. She bought a box of cold medicine, throat lozenges, a large bottle of water.

While she thumbed through a magazine, the pictures shifting and sliding in front of her eyes, James guided Finn into the handicapped stall at Tim Horton’s. There was no hook for Sarah’s diaper bag, a pink and yellow striped tote with the words “Yummy Mummy” stitched along one side. James placed it far from the sticky floor surrounding the toilet.

Finn was calmer. He stood, puffy and shellacked with snot, pulling at the toilet paper roll, pointing at random, vaguely disgusting objects that James had never noticed existed in a bathroom stall. “What’s that?”

“A wad of toilet paper someone stuffed in the lock.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s called graffiti.”

“What’s that?”

“It says: ‘Blow me.’ ”

“Ha!” Finn laughed.

Without a changing table, James was reduced to pulling off Finn’s Pull-Up as he stood, which meant shoes had to come off, which in turn meant he was standing in his stocking feet in the sticky circle. James located the wipes, which had been left open, and had become dry and useless.

“Wait here.” At the sink, James tried to dampen a wipe with water. It began to disintegrate in his hand, forming small globules.

A man entered the bathroom and nodded, began peeing in the urinal.

“What’s that?” cried Finn from the bathroom at the sound of the urine rushing with the force of a shaken beer can being dumped down a sink.

“It’s someone—” James hesitated. The man’s girth had not escaped him, nor the fact that he was wearing a sleeveless jean jacket with no shirt underneath. The word “peeing,” which sat on the edge of James’s tongue, didn’t seem adequate to the task, suddenly.

“—going—” he considered the word “urinating.”

“Tinkle?” shouted Finn, who had flung open the door of the stall, and stood naked below the waist, his pants around his ankles, Spiderman socks pulled up around his calves. He glanced at the man. “Giant go tinkle?”

“Yes,” said James, entering the stall quickly and shutting the door. He wiped the boy with a paper towel.

“Do you want to try to pee in the toilet? We should get moving on this issue.”

Finn looked alarmed.

“Toilet?”

“Don’t the big kids at daycare use the potty? Big kids go peepee in the toilet?”

James was speaking in a tiny voice, trying not to be heard by the giant who washed his hands at the sink, though James realized the giant could easily peer over the stall if he were so inclined.

James whispered again: “Let’s go pee in the toilet. Maybe later we can buy you some underwear.”

“Spiderman underwear?” Finn had seen this in the mall with James only a few days before. James marvelled at his recollection.

“Sure, sure,” said James. “Want to pee in the toilet? You can sit.”

Finn shook his head.

“Another time,” said James, strapping the Velcro on Finn’s runners that matched his own.

“Spiderman underwear,” said Finn.

The urinator left the bathroom, and James hoisted Finn to the sink to wash his hands. James took small pleasure in depositing the wet diaper in the garbage and wiping Finn’s face clean with a paper towel. He exited like a victor, pink diaper bag slung over his shoulder, the giant glancing his way with a manly nod as they left the restaurant.

When he got to the car, Ana was in the front seat, staring at the row of garbage and recycling cans in front of the car.

“Thanks for your help back there,” said James, strapping Finn into place.

Ana said nothing.

“I can’t do everything,” he said, backing out of the space quickly.

Ana reached down between her legs and into her purse. The dog in her hand was small, brown, not unlike the one James had bought Finn. She turned and held it out for Finn, who grabbed it, as if starving.

James looked at his wife. Her head was turned so he couldn’t read her expression. He had a strange thought: Now the dog James had bought was second rate, older and lesser. James had been elbowed aside.

“Now he’s going to think if he cries, he gets what he wants,” said James.

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James rubbed his hand across his forehead.

“We can’t have children,” said Ana.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Diana, tell them about the cottage,” said Wesley, nervously redirecting the room.

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

“You hate cottages, mom,” said James.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why didn’t you go?”

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

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

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

“We came the other way.”

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

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

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

Ana shook her head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The door swung open and Finn stood at their knees.

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

Ana looked upon the boy and rooted around for some kind of feeling. It was there, but not the texture or the size she sensed was required. Still, she could feed him if he was hungry. Not all women could do this. The apartments of Ana’s youth had had empty refrigerators, still slimy from the previous tenants, burnt out bulbs. As a teenager, she was often a dinner guest in the homes of her friends. Ana loved these evenings, revelling in the plates of chicken and bowls of vegetables, quietly taking in the large families with their regular seats at the table, the mother and father like dollhouse figures that had been placed at either end. (Who were those friends? What were their names? Ana had lost all of them, like a bough shedding ripened fruit, as she moved from school to school.) And then, out of fairness, she remembered sitting next to her mother in their favourite restaurant, against the banquette while the waiter flirted with them both. And Ana drinking her Coke, nestled against her mother’s arm, and the two of them content in their quiet.

There had always been food. A bagel wrapped in paper towel stuffed in her backpack. The remains from the donut store, or later, the catering company where she had worked as a teenager. Sitting on the couch late at night, eating pasta salad from takeout containers with plastic forks, her mother telling her about her Ph.D. that she would never finish. Poetry.

“I’m not feeling too well,” said Ana, and Diana nodded, as if it were a given.

“Come, Finneas,” said Diana, extending a hand. Finn got up from the table and walked past her hand, toward Ana. A small strand of snot joined his ear to his nose, like a purse handle. Diana reached out with a Kleenex and wiped it away.

“Up,” said Finn, his arms extended to Ana, his face tired.

Ana nodded at him. Diana said softly: “Ana, he wants you to pick him up.”

“Oh, of course,” said Ana. She bent and pulled him up, his legs tightening around her waist like a spider trapping a fly, but his hands on her neck were loose and soft. Ana rubbed his back, felt the warmth of him bending in to her, his sweetness drowned out by her sadness, her humming knowledge that hers was not the body he needed, that they were caught together in this web of compromise. A smell of orange cheese in her throat.


Ana lay in bed with the lights out, trying to still her head, which seemed to keep pushing away from her, as if trying to unscrew itself. The fever came quick and angry, leaving her drenched and shaking under the duvet.

James came in with aspirin in one hand and a tall glass of iced juice in the other.

“Turn out the light,” she said, but there was no light on.

Finn stood in the frame of the door, staring. James wondered if he could yet recognize other people’s pain. His friends at daycare broke skin and bled and it interested him. He informed James of these accidents, the stickiness, the hidden possibility that a body could just leak itself dry.

He tried to imagine what played over in his head from the twisted wreck of the car: the empty face of his father, with a small scar by his lower lip.

Ana moaned slightly in the dark and James straightened the duvet at her shoulders. He looked over to see Finn reaching out a hand in front of him, as if trying to touch something. His hand extended into space made James think of Sarah, reaching for the boy as he toddled across the room, the two of them laughing, and Finn reaching her to place his own small palm between his mother’s clapping hands, which would still and hold him.

James took Finn gently by the shoulder, moving him out of the doorway, shutting the door behind them. Finn resisted.

“Ana,” he said. “Want Ana.” He slipped behind James, knocked on the door, loudly.

“Finn, she needs to sleep. She’s sick,” said James.

Finn banged on the door. “Ana! Ana! Come play!”

James picked him up, and he went soft in his arms, put his fingers in his mouth and began sucking.

James carried Finn downstairs, and settled him on the couch. He sat beside him, stroking Finn’s forehead, the boy’s furrowed brow.

James was used to being a study in contrast to Ana: he didn’t mind mess, could sleep in knotted bed sheets until Ana, annoyed at the lumps, roused him in the dark, smoothing and tucking. But he was struck now by the sensation that he had turned into his wife, and knots were digging into his skin. Marcus. His lost job. And upcoming losses were queuing for him, too: Finn, who might be taken back or away, and his wife, who was always leaving, and now had good reason to do so. Soon his mother and father would corrode with illness and then he would be alone, a childless middle-aged man, bald and suspect.

Oh, he missed them all, even Emma, young Emma and that fleeting moment of debauchery that might be his last. In a few years she would lose her gleam, and love of risk, and become a mother to somebody. Getting older was infuriating. He needed the steady footing of his youth, the certainty of opinion, and it was gone. James took a deep, quivering breath.

On this note of self-pity, James turned to the window and saw Chuckles pulling in with his other car, not the SUV but a white van, planks of wood sticking out the back, dangerously untethered. He was taking up two spaces again, leaving a huge gap on either side. His silver SUV was parked up the street.

James placed a throw pillow under Finn’s sleeping head and stood up. He strode toward the door.

Chuckles had not moved from his van. He sat shuffling papers and smoking when James appeared at the window. In his anger, James had failed to put on shoes and stood now on the road in a pair of dark blue cashmere argyle socks. He rapped on the glass with his knuckles. As Chuckles rolled down the window, he took in James from the top of his head – the thinning hair slightly shining with wax, the smooth shave, the expensive untucked button down shirt in a greyish pink – and then stopped at his feet. James, too, looked down then at the dumb, dog snouted, shoeless appendages and thought: Disadvantage.

But oh well, he was in it now, hot with rage. Up close, James was surprised by Chuckles’s face. He had seen him in his mind’s eye as a kid, a know-nothing just out of trade school. Yet up close, the face was lined and browned, as if from some stain, like the hands of a leather dyer. And the guy was bigger, too, than James had supposed, as often seemed to be the case at moments like this, he noted to himself. And also, Chuckles looked angry. This anger, located mostly in the sneer of Chuckles’s lips, snuffed any small hope in James that this might go a different way (a surprise friendship from across the divide? a human interest story in the local news?). No, Chuckles did not like to have his paper shuffling interrupted, or his cigarette. This much was clear.

But what else? What next? James was now upon his enemy empty-handed, without a plan. His entire body tingled. He would, then, improvise.

“Sorry to bother you,” he said, a phrase that he knew did not match the previous furious shoeless strut across the street, the door slamming and knuckle rapping. James’s voice, too, wasn’t quite as loud or manly as he’d anticipated, but instead sounded, even to his own blood-rushed ears, like a little French schoolgirl buying a croissant from a friendly baker. It was in this dulcet tone that James delivered his kicker: “You’re taking up two parking spots. Do you think you could move up?”

Now James waited. The truck leaked a prickly odour of cigarette and rust. Chuckles took one final drag and James waited for the Bazooka Joe finale, the stream of smoke blown in his face. Instead, Chuckles turned and exhaled on the passenger seat.

Then he turned back to James and said: “You the guy who left the note?” His voice was firm, with a vaguely Godfather-ish tinge that many second generation Portuguese in the neighbourhood had adopted, to James’s consternation.

Did he? Did he leave it? James hurried through his thoughts. If he answered yes, then that door might open and James might get picked up by his belt loop and hung from the branches of the nearby oak tree. If no, then James had officially slapped down his admission to an amusement park only for pussies, where the rides were slow and low to the ground and the seatbelts thick and castrating. He made a quick decision.

“Yeah, that was me,” said James.

Chuckles’s eyes narrowed. “Why didn’t you sign it?”

“What?”

“Why didn’t you sign it?”

James considered this question and how it firmly located him on the wrong side of reason. If he had signed the note, he would not be here now. The whole thing could have been resolved at the kitchen island over one of Ana’s perfect espressos. But no, he had not put his name on it, had, in fact hidden, once again, behind his little pen and his paper, his tiny ideas, his life of distant reportage.

James elected not to answer the question.

“The point is, you have a garage, and we don’t. Why don’t you use it?” His squeak grew fuller, if not deeper, and the little French girl in him whined: “Show some respect for your neighbours! Show it! Show it!” The last words sputtered and landed on a face, one that was suddenly up against James’s, a large hamburger face attached to a larger neck and a body that had exited the car so swiftly, James had barely seen it happen. Chuckles was wearing steel-toed work boots as tall as downhill ski boots, and one of them was on James’s right argyle foot, grinding down.

“Respect this, cocksucker,” said Chuckles, not living up to his nickname, grinding James’s right foot like it was an unsnuffable cigarette butt. James closed his eyes and let the heat pour over his toes, smelling Chuckles’s meaty breath, waiting it out.

His work done, Chuckles stepped back and slammed his door shut. He leaned against the car, crossing his arms as James limped slowly into the road, backing away.

“It’s—” he squeaked—“about … courtesy!”

Chuckles barked a laugh and shouted:

“This is what you have to worry about? Don’t you have a f*cking family, cocksucker? Go worry about your family!”

“The social contract!” called James, limping toward the island of his porch where he leaned on a post to straighten up, trying to keep his crippled foot tucked beneath him. Something moved in the picture window, a blur of blonde hair. Finn had not been sleeping, then. James shut his eyes against that reality.

“Have a nice day, cocksucker!” yelled Chuckles as James opened his door, suggesting that he, James, had earned his own nickname. Cocksucker and Chuckles: the sitcom no one wanted to see.

The orange tin bird that Ana had hung in the centre of the door swung on its discreet nail.

Inside, James turned the lock and inserted the chain. He hobbled to the living room and immediately saw Finn, rigid and upright on the couch, staring at him.

“Who that guy?” said Finn, pointing out the window, a look of grave concern on his face. “Who?”

James sank down next to Finn, his foot throbbing. “It’s no one. It’s a guy. A neighbour,” he said. Finn looked down at James’s foot and made a sound like a lion tearing meat. “Grrr!” he said. James tried to smile, but pain shot through his leg. At his wince, Finn returned to his look of fear.

“It’s okay, Finn,” he said. And he tried to conjure up some of the anger that had taken him over there in the first place, but he couldn’t touch it. “I did a stupid thing.”

Finn looked at him. “Why?”

In lieu of answering that particular question, James echoed something he’d seen a large purple puppet utter during a children’s show on the same public television station that had fired him: “It’s not right to fight. It’s better to use your words.” Finn had a look of incredulousness on his face that struck James as extremely mature.

James picked up the remote control and found an attractive young Asian woman in a cape and bodysuit singing a song about recycling. The effect was instant; Finn turned to stone, mouth slack in the television’s glow.

Grasping the handrail, James pulled himself to the bedroom, opening the door to the strange midday darkness of the ill. Ana rattled in her chest as she slept. The room smelled of sick breath and orange juice.

James clumped past the bed to the bathroom. He turned on the light and shut the door, perching on the edge of the bathtub. He pulled his sock from his foot. The sole of the sock was thick with dirt, specks of mysterious gelatin and baby stones. His toes, as they emerged, were grotesque, red and swelling before his eyes like sea anemones. Only the little one looked undamaged and pale up against its expanding siblings.

“Ana,” he whimpered. She would know what to do: ice and peroxide and bandages. But she remained in her bed, burdened by her own illness. She was dreaming of the Max Klinger painting on Mike’s coffee table; she could hear the crunching of the grass as the man stole away, baby in arms. She could feel the mother breathing, but not waking. She tried to rouse her, to step into the painting from the outside and shake the mother awake: Tend to your disaster! she wanted to scream, but she could not make a sound, and she could not wake herself, either. She was trapped in the four borders of the grey and white idyll.

“Ana,” called James, but softly, too, wanting her to sleep, and wanting her to wake and care for him, wanting it both ways, always, again.