Everybody Has Everything (13 page)

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t talk to me in your TV voice.”

“Come on—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was what she had meant to say.

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

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

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

“Doug’s an asshole tonight,” she shouted.

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

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

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

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

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

“Who’s your publisher?” asked Doug.

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

Doug recognized that pause and changed direction.

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

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

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

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

“We’d have to get a sitter,” he said.

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

“We’re looking after a little boy. His parents died,” said James. “Well, his father died. We don’t know if the mother’s going to be okay or not.” (James didn’t mention that the daily call to the hospital was always the same: “Stable.” Ana had visited twice, while James looked after Finn. With her coat on, she reported: “Stable,” pouring a glass of wine so quickly that it splashed.)

“What the fuck? Who? Are you serious?” said Doug.

“You don’t know them.”

“Maybe I do.”

“Marcus Lamb and Sarah Weiss.”

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

“How old’s the kid?”

“Two. A boy. Finn.”

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

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

“That is fucking crazy, man. How’s Ana?”

“She’s okay. Good.”

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

James turned to her.

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

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

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

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

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

He stood up suddenly, searching his pockets for cash.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She had been feeling responsible for her mother most of her life. That responsibility trailed faintly after her, a tissue on her heel, slightly shameful. Even as a child tucked away in her room where the window looked at a brick wall, and on that wall she could see India, where her father always talked about going. She pictured cows and cinnamon and swarms of silk-swathed bodies in crayon colors, a
National Geographic
spread. She thought about India when they moved again, lying
in her room with the window that looked at another window, or the next time, when there was no bedroom for her at all but a bed in the hallway. By then, her father had his wish. He went away, transforming from flesh and blood into a series of Christmas cards and occasional phone calls. Examining the stamp (Nepal) and opening the worn, translucent envelope one year, a photograph fell out—a young woman clutching a baby. “You have a sibling!” he wrote. It took another year before Ana found out the sibling was a boy.

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

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