Everybody Has Everything (22 page)

“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 sneakers and boots.

Ana walked up the creaky stairs. The banister 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 center of the room. The TV blared gunshots and “Incoming! Incoming!”

“Hey, dude,” he said, his voice coated in gumminess.

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 among 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 in new fleece
footie pajamas 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 ax 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 demeanor, 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 labeled 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 them, in black marker, read:
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 $1,600 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 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 honor, 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,” he said 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, uncallused, 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 gray, 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 harbor, the grim black lighting and reflective surfaces that ensured 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 hors 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 his final meeting with HR.