On the street, Ana had asked again: “How’s work?”
The girl looked straight ahead, put her cigarette between her lips a little defiantly. “I don’t know. It’s okay. It’s not really what I want to do. I guess I’m not supposed to admit that to the boss.”
“I’m not the boss,” said Ana, so quickly that they both knew it to be false. “So what do you want to do, then?”
“I want to make movies. Maybe documentaries. About bands, maybe.” Before she even finished the statement, her defiance drained away, as if this were the most unrealistic dream a person could hold. Her voice turned into a mumble. “I don’t know.”
It struck Ana as unlikely that this limp girl had some affinity for rhythm in her, that she liked back rooms, electric guitars. Maybe she was one of those girls who gets used. Maybe she stood at the front of the crowd and stared upward, inserted herself backstage, became a joke between a drummer and a bassist the next morning.
“My husband makes documentaries,” said Ana. “For TV.”
“Really?” Ruth looked at Ana sideways. Ana felt something: They didn’t like each other. Ana tried to pull the girl back from the brink of this mutual realization, to distract her with kindness.
“He works in public television. You should come over some night to meet him. Maybe he could help you out.” Why had she said this? The thought of Ruth, in Ana’s house in her mis-buttoned sweater, mumbling at James’s feet. This was the type of girl who would love James, and James would be kind to her, would perform for her, tap dancing through his latest thought. It would be both excruciating and sweet, a combination that exhausted Ana.
She could not imagine this evening happening and knew they had entered a conversation that had no conclusion. Ruth would be checking in with her again and again, for months to come.
Inside the building, outside the door to her office, Ana did it first: “I’ll throw some dates at James and get back to you.”
Ruth looked up at her, and something surprising happened: Her face thawed. The blandness, the boredom, slid away. She was smiling, a huge, unyielding smile that revealed a heap of crooked teeth. The teeth made Ana remember the child’s game with the hands piling up, each person pulling the one from the bottom, slapping it down on the other.
The door to Sarah and Marcus’s house opened quickly, lightly, which surprised Ana. She had expected the creaking of Al Capone’s vaults to match her sense of invasion. She drew the scattering of mail and flyers to her body.
Straightening, a grim old-lady smell washed over her, spiked by something sour, foul. Ana put down her briefcase and an empty suitcase on wheels. She made two tidy stacks of mail—urgent and not—and took off her heels. She moved quickly, glancing at the clutter of toys in the living room, the clothes and shoes strewn. That giant bag of cat food was still there, resting against the wall, though the cat was living next door now. Ana barely remembered the cat: black, maybe, and fat. Looking at the cat food, she regretted that she had never bothered to learn its name. She would take the bag to the neighbor later.
The kitchen was Pompeii: plates of half-eaten food, a booster chair covered in Cheerios and chunks of browned banana. She tracked down the smell to old milk gone solid in a blue plastic cup covered in cartoon bees, sitting on a counter.
Ana was filled by a rush of conquering energy. She marched into Sarah and Marcus’s room, pulling open drawers until she found jeans, a T-shirt, both too big, but clean and folded tidily, which surprised her. Ana placed her skirt and blouse on hangers that she put over the doorknob, careful not to let her clothes touch the ground, which was covered in a thin layer of dust. Gray balls of fluff made space for her as Ana moved around the room in Sarah’s clothes.
She rolled on a pair of Marcus’s sweat socks. In this uniform, she set to it, opening windows, gathering dirty laundry, and tossing toys into wicker baskets.
And she worked, yellow gloves filling garbage bags, scrubbing soldered food from plates, keeping the kitchen sink filled to the rim with soapy bubbles. Draining the fat swirls and food chunks and refilling, over and over.
After a couple of hours, Ana noticed the silence, the noise of her breathing. She hit Play on the stereo (and dusted it, too). A familiar CD, a lament; spare guitar, the kind of music James used to play for Ana, tears in his eyes: “Hear this part? It really starts here.…”
The music carried up to Finn’s little room, which was like wandering into Sarah’s force field, like hearing her calling: This is how much I love him. The white curtains were covered with tiny embroidered trains. Red bunnies repeated on his bedspread, and the throw rug was a scurry of cuddly bugs. All these crowds of miniatures, thought Ana, stripping the bed, throwing scattered toys into a toy box. She should take some toys home, too.
She looked through a stack of books: Tell the Time with Pooh, Olivia Saves the Circus, Scaredy Squirrel. Which ones were right for Finn? Which were his favorites? All the information was locked away, irretrievable. Most of Finn’s preferences resided elsewhere, with his parents, in the shadow world.
She pulled open Finn’s dresser drawers. The underwear was folded into little boxes; Ana felt strange packing the suitcase, wondering how it would look if she somehow got caught—pulled over by a police officer for speeding and revealed as a grown woman with a suitcase of boys’ underwear. She buried the pairs (Curious George; dinosaurs) under sweaters and socks. Then suddenly, she thought: Does Finn wear underwear? If so, why were they using diapers? She would have to ask James.
Ana looked around for a stuffed animal, anything she might remember Finn loving, but there were only block puzzles and flashlights, nothing huggable. As she turned out the light, Ana thought: I’ll buy him a teddy bear, something that James will approve of.
She continued.
In the basement, Ana moved the laundry to the dryer, stepping over the detritus that ends up in basements, the remnants of Finn’s babyhood: pieces of a crib, a high chair. Skates. Did Marcus play hockey? He’d never mentioned it.
When Ana emerged from the basement, darkness had pulled up to the windows. She went to the empty fridge that she had already wiped clean and pulled out its one occupant, a half-drunk bottle of vodka. She poured a glass and drank it whole, a snake with a mouse, then turned up the music to hear it above the vacuum.
She remembered sitting in this living room with Sarah and Finn on several weekend afternoons in the wake of James’s firing.
When it happened, she realized that she had been waiting for it. She was prepared always for the great bad thing, and when she reached the porch that evening, James’s box of books on the porch confirmed exactly what had happened. Her heartbeat doubled. She assumed a neutral face.
She had opened the door and hung up her coat, and James’s, which lay in a heap in the foyer. James was in the kitchen, but he wasn’t cooking. He was drinking a beer, leaning on the island like he’d been looking for a place to rest. Ana laid the groceries on the counter.
“I got fired,” he said. Then: “You might want to sit down.”
“There’s more?”
“What?”
“Why do you want me to sit down?”
James stared at her.
“Because I got fired. I thought you might want to brace yourself.”
“Oh. But you told me first and then you told me to sit down.”
James had drunk the beer from the bottle. Ana saw that she was making him furious, and she began to move around the kitchen quickly, trying to piece together a strategy. But there was still this twister touching down in her stomach. As if looking in from the window, she saw the two of them with all their sensible choices, and all of it vanishing like an invisible man in a movie, top to bottom, just fading out. A rush of noise erupted in her skull. She concentrated, braced herself to do the right thing.