Everybody Has Everything (15 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ana cast around in her memory.

“Wait—what was it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, Ana,” said Charlie. “I’m sorry.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Tell the line to me again.”

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

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

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

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

They looked at each other, for a held moment.

“I should—James is—”

“Of course,” said Charlie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who lives upstairs?” demands Tracy.

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

“I gotta whiz,” says Siobhan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s dead,” she says out loud.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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