Everybody Has Everything (14 page)

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

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

Before entering the nursing home, there was the unbuckling and the gathering of gear that had spread across the car during the drive—water bottle, diaper bag, book, octopus toy. Finn himself came last, the final object.

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

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

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

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

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

“No, I don’t think so.”

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

Ana tried to imagine that conversation and suppressed a laugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bequeathed?” James laughed.

“Well, how do you explain it?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, let’s find it.” Ana dug down.

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

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

“I think I have to ask.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James settled into the lounge chair. The print was enormous. “ ‘The world can only change from within,’ ” read James.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Definitely hostile,” said James, turning back to the book: “ ‘When you are present in this moment, you break the continuity of your story, of past and future.’ ”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She still does,” said Charlie.

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

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