Everybody Has Everything (5 page)

And then the social worker was silenced by Sarah’s light laughter, ringing gently. Ana squeezed her eyes shut.

“Where were they going?” Ana asked. “Were they going to get groceries? What was the point?”

“I don’t know,” said James. Ana opened her eyes and frowned.

“It’s going to be okay,” said James. Abruptly, Ana reached for the light, sliding down past the pillows onto her back, so that not even her head was elevated. Now James was too high, looking down at her.

Ana pictured Sarah alone in her own bed, suspended from tubes, that yellow sunflower bruise across her eye, the black stitches slicing her face. A goalie’s mask glowing in a dark hospital room.

James had his own vision: Marcus in the drawer. A life-size doll of Marcus.

“What’s happening?” she asked, strangled, and James went down to her so they were face to face. He stroked her hair, murmuring. She let him. She gave that to him until, somewhere in the middle, it felt like something she wanted, too.

* * *

Two years before, on a spring morning, side by side in narrow chairs, Ana and James had received the third opinion, which was the same as the first two.

The specialist was young and well known in certain parts of the city. As he delivered the news, his features puckered and aged with a sadness that struck Ana as suspect.

“Okay, then,” said Ana, gathering to go, wanting to escape the sensation that she should comfort this celebrity doctor.

After, across from the subway station on the gravel path that cut through an orderly church lawn, Ana held James. He did not weep exactly, but pulsed evenly on her shoulder—in and out—his face buried in her wool coat. A mechanical sound. Ana pictured a bright silver electronic heart held aloft by a surgeon and then—
plunk
—dropped into James’s open chest.

Above him, she raised her head and looked up at the flat blue sky.

What to make of this sudden calmness that wiped her down, erasing the faint, pulling panic she had lived with for two years? It was the relief of shutting the hotel room door after a day in a New York mob. It was the feeling she used to get when she was totally alone at the end of a long, loud evening out, sitting on her couch in the old apartment that only she lived in.

“Then we can look into adoption,” James said, pulling apart, wiping his face on his sleeve.

Ana nodded.

“Or surrogacy,” he said.

Ana nodded again, then turned back to the sky.

“They have great weather,” she said.

A streetcar slid by, noisily, and Ana couldn’t hear, but saw James’s mouth move: “What?”

“Great weather for the wedding.”

James looked at her, and she could see him thinking:
This is how she copes
. It was likely that he had read an article or written a segment for his show on how to comfort her in the event of this confirmation that they were indeed in that select statistical sliver for whom treatments were useless.

“Do they care about the weather? It’s indoors, isn’t it?” He touched her hair. She reached up and took his hand.

“We should get ready.”

“Whatever you need.”

Ana dropped his hand, deciding that not holding it was what she needed.

She was surprised to have been invited to the wedding. Sarah and Marcus were new friends. The four of them were tentative around one another still, counting on the wine to pull them through.

James followed Ana through the church gardens. She stooped to pick up a half-empty McDonald’s cup of Coke. James watched her: her foot popping ever so slightly out of the arch of those black shoes that looked like ballet slippers. He didn’t think about her beauty, but her lightness, the sense of upward motion in her body at all times, the ever-present possibility that she might bend her knees, push off, and float up and away from him.

“Just leave it.”

“It’s too pretty here for all this garbage.”

This wasn’t true. Ana was projecting a month into the future, when the famous gardens would be in bloom. At the time she received the referral, she had been pleased that the doctor’s
office was so close to the church, picturing bougainvillea and tulips bracketing each visit. But her timing had been off. Their first appointment had been in winter, when snow blanketed the grounds. Now the gardens were just dirt beds, thawing, and the grass was patchy, defeated. And they wouldn’t be back for the bougainvillea. They were done. Ana carried the cup in front of her, arm straight, thumb and pointer finger just skimming the rim, the other fingers curled into her palm like a TV dad confronting his first dirty diaper.

Ana deposited the cup in a garbage bin. Following, James glanced over the bin’s edge. Soda everywhere, soaking old newspapers and fried chicken bones and dog shit and a single needle.

He walked behind her to the parking lot. He knew that he cried too easily, and the crying acted like a defenseman’s shoulder check, sent her flying. But still he hoped, just a little, that she might break. Then he could be wonderful.

“Give me a second,” he said.

Ana sat in the car while James lit a cigarette, leaning on the hood, frowning. In the sky, a flag appeared. Wind must have loosed it from a pole, and now it flapped above James’s head, moving closer, as if preparing to drop and cover him. And then the flag revealed itself to be, in fact, a flock of birds, diving down in a solid, waving page.

He flicked his cigarette butt into the garden.

In the car, Ana had a small white mint in her hand. As she held it out to him, James remembered all the women who had held out a hand to him over the years, uncurling a palm to reveal a joint, an ecstasy tab, a condom, a ZIP drive.

“Let’s go,” said Ana.

* * *

At 2:47, a sound, deep and dark. A moan, gathering strength as it awoke, fattening into a full scream.

James got up first, running down the hall in his boxer shorts, turning on lights, trying to flood it out. Ana was behind, walking quickly, arms around her torso.

“Finny, Finny,” said James. He could hear him but not see him, his eyes scanning the room, the empty bed, the quilt on the ground. And then he saw the boy, limp and piled in a corner on the floor, his head next to a bookshelf. The sound had returned to a moan by then, gaining momentum, like a police car getting closer.

“Finny,” said James. He gathered him up off the floor. His body softened in James’s arms.

The moan became a whimper, and then the whimper silenced.

Ana put the quilt on the bed and turned back the top in a triangle.

Slowly, James placed Finn on the bed. Instantly, the boy flopped toward him, hands up, the moan returned. James sat on the bed, rubbed his hand along Finn’s back, feeling his spine through the thin material of the borrowed pajamas. The boy quieted again, his breathing slowed.

James felt like he knew exactly what Finn was seeing, because he was seeing it, too: the wall coming toward him, the stupid thump of bodies on a dashboard, the shattered glass. Or maybe it was just a kid’s monster, a purple one with bony knees. Finn didn’t have the language. There was no way in.

“I’m going to stay here for a while,” James whispered.

Ana nodded, useless again. She straightened the cushions on the floor surrounding the bed, then left them alone.

Finn ran up ahead of James, stopping at the fence enclosing the playground. James glanced down at the piece of paper in his hand with the address on it and then up at the sign: FAMILY PLACE DAYCARE. He had walked by the gray stone building, a former elementary school, many times and never considered who was inside. So Finn was changing the city for him, too. James remembered that when he finally bought a car, auto body shops seemed to suddenly spring up everywhere, tucked between the buildings in the neighborhood where he lived, previously unneeded and therefore invisible.

Early in the morning, when the sun was just rising and Ana and Finn still lay sleeping in their separate rooms, James had walked to Sarah and Marcus’s. He had a key, and implicit permission, but a neighbor appeared immediately on her porch next door, peering at him. They had met before—James remembered that she was a teacher, like Sarah, and Marcus complained that while she was going through her divorce, she whaled on some kind of brass instrument at all hours of the night. The neighbor informed him that she was looking after the cat (
There was a cat!
thought James, stung by all he couldn’t remember) and had put a lamp on a timer. “I suppose you’ll be taking care of the rest,” she said.

James nodded weakly.

Inside, the one lamp made everything seem darker. James felt criminal. He couldn’t bear to look around. He would find the address of the daycare only and leave the rest to Ana. He tiptoed through the domestic scramble of dishes and strewn
clothes. On the fridge he found a handwritten list of phone numbers: M at Work, M: cell, S: cell, Dr. Garfield, and Family Place Daycare. He took the paper, picturing himself on some future day carrying Finn, hot with fever, into the office of this Dr. Garfield.

Now, at the gate of the daycare, James looked around: So this was where Finn spent his three days a week away from Sarah.

“James open gate?” Finn called. The cheap black sneakers from the social worker looked gigantic and theoretical on his feet, an idea of sneakers sketched in a factory by someone who had never seen them.

Finn led James inside the building by the hand, toward a hook marked with the name
FINN
in a laminate square. Finn had already removed his red hoodie and dropped it on the floor, then his baseball hat, a breadcrumb trail behind him as he ran down the hallway in a race with a smaller black-haired girl. James was a beat behind, picking up after Finn, putting the coat and hat on the hook, walking quickly to keep up.

A woman did the same, collecting her daughter’s droppings. James glanced at her hair; it must have been a style at one point, but now it was just a shape, a rectangle. Her eyes were padded with exhaustion. James turned on a smile and tried to catch her eye, hoping to share a moment of parental chaos. But she looked straight ahead and strode away, putting distance between them.

The classroom was a whorl of sound, high-pitched. One wall was covered in paper plates painted different colors: some splattered, some entirely solid, one or two with just a brushstroke. James moved closer, scanning for Finn’s name like he would at a gallery opening.

“You must be with Finn,” said a voice next to him, a man with two gold hoops in his ears and a glowing bald head. He held out his hand: “I’m Bruce, one of the educators in the preschool room.”

“I’m James,” he said, surprised by the man’s strong grip. “Finn’s—” They looked at each other, waiting. “Guardian, I suppose.”

Bruce nodded knowingly and ushered James to the sink, out of range of the children.

“We heard what happened from the social worker, and we’re all so unbelievably, unbelievably sorry,” he said.

“Oh, I believe you’re sorry,” said James with an awkward laugh. He became glib when nervous. But Bruce was not the kind of person to be hindered by other people’s responses. He continued.

“I want you to know that I personally have taken a training seminar in children’s grief, and everyone is on alert,” said Bruce. “Sad to say, but it’s not the first time we’ve had a child lose a parent.” James glanced at the circle of kids sitting cross-legged on a blue carpet, eyes upon a young woman reading a book out loud: “Olivia likes to try on
everything
!” Their size was incompatible with Bruce’s admission; how could these children possibly contain such sadness? Where would it go?

“Where do you take that kind of seminar?” asked James. At the five-minute mark, he had learned that Bruce had a B.A. in social work, and an Early Childhood Education Certificate. He hated the caseload as a social worker and always wanted to run a daycare, but it’s unusual for men to work with children in this day and age with all the suspicion, and on and on and on.

Oh, how much people will share. James saw Bruce naked in
animal form, snarling and crouched in waiting, praying to be asked to spring upright and grunt out a story.

“How is Sarah doing, anyway?” asked Bruce, laying a hand on James’s forearm.

James was struck by guilt: He had not been thinking of Sarah. He had considered the situation decided.

“We have to wait. The prognosis is still vague.”

Bruce nodded. “Just keep us informed.”

“Same here,” he said, gesturing toward Finn, who had separated himself from the circle of readers and was stacking plastic animals: a bear riding a tiger; a hippopotamus astride a dinosaur.

“I’d like to live in that world,” said James.

“Pardon me?”

“A world where a tiger gives a ride to a bear. You know, everyone helping one another out.” He was joking, but Bruce lit up.

“If only!” he said.

James turned to find Finn, anticipating his first public sendoff. But the boy was captivated by the stacking animals, frowning as each pair toppled.

Suddenly, Bruce let out a chirp: “You know, James, I remember you from TV, right? Aren’t you on TV?”

“I used to be.”

Bruce clapped his hands together.

“Ha! I knew it! You know, we have a lot of famous people at this daycare. Ruby’s mom wrote that cookbook, the one about organic baby food? And in the kindergarten room, there’s a little boy named Luke whose mom was in that miniseries, the one about the hockey wives?”

James clucked his interest, but he did not appreciate being in this particular lineup.

James leaned into Finn’s line of vision, tried to catch his attention. He felt Bruce watching as he blew him a kiss that went uncaught.

James crossed the street, glancing back at the daycare.

As he did at least once a week, James walked back to the TV station where he used to work and sat facing the building on his favorite bench. He thought of these visits as a kind of crime-scene reenactment, as if by going back again and again to the site of his firing, he could make sense of it. He lit a cigarette.

The day James got fired had not been the worst day of his life. He was as still as a man Tasered to the ground and he contemplated this calmness as Sly—his old friend, his boss—sat across from him, slick with sweat, panting, saying what they both knew was coming. “This kind of television isn’t resonating in our research.… It’s not you, we think the world of you, it’s the genre … the demographic … the economy … the Internet …”