James watched her leave the room and felt the familiarity of Ana in charge. Something fluttered nearby, in the corner of his bloodied eye. Finn, terrified on the couch, quivering.
“Hey,” said James, opening his arms. “It’s okay. It was an accident.”
“Sorry,” said Finn, flinging himself into James’s embrace. James wondered if he could hear the man’s heart up against his child’s ear.
“Me, too.”
Ana came upon them like this, a tube of medicine in her hand. Her first impulse was to turn around and give them the privacy they looked like they deserved.
James knew how to reclaim Finn. He whispered to him until he began laughing, rocked him gently.
“Kleenex,” said James with his hand out. She frowned, but found him a Kleenex in her purse.
“Blow,” said James, and Finn did.
Finn’s breathing slowed to something human. James sang quietly: “ ‘Rockin’ rockin’ leprechauns …’ ” Finn smiled.
Ana blurted out: “Look, Finn, I picked up some of your things.”
James glanced at her.
“I left work early,” she said. Finn was off James’s lap, toward a stack of books on the dining room table. Ana had lined up his toys as if they were for sale: a puzzle, a small Thomas the Tank Engine, a flashlight.
“Scaredy Squirrel!” he crowed, flipping pages.
In this way, the evening was rescued.
There was a pattern now, after only a week. The script was foreign to Ana, but James recognized in it shades of his own childhood. In James’s earliest memories, he was older than Finn, in kindergarten. James and his brother walked home from school together past rows of identical stucco houses differentiated only by the garages: single or double, left or right. Lawns were square. Trees were thin and young. James’s mother waited in the kitchen with a tray of Yugoslavian cookies. James and Michael sat cross-legged in front of the television. James licked the frosting off the cookies, leaving the soggy wet breadstick. No one else had these cookies in the unmarked plastic bags from the market downtown.
With his mother’s nudging and prodding, the family moved from wake-up to breakfast, from breakfast to school, school to sports, and on through the steps until bedtime, when James leaned between her knees as she combed his wet hair. The entire day’s effort designed to push the clock toward sleep beneath Star Wars sheets.
If James’s father ever brushed James’s hair, he tugged and pulled. He had a job like Ana’s that bored James to the point of cruelty. He came home late and got up early, always catching the train into the city or back from the city. Where is he? “He’s on the train,” said his mom. So when James pictured his father, he was astride a train: a superhero with legs dangling past the tiny windows, hurtling down the tracks, briefcase under his arm.
The year James entered high school, his mother got her own job, at the library. It turned out that she had been going to school, too, while he was in school. Where was the evidence of this? The studying, the exams? In the house, her talk was only expended on two boys and a man. Their mother vacuumed, shooing them from the room. And they would go, the three of them moving into the next empty space, still talking baseball and hockey statistics, a triangle that kept relocating as she approached with her machine.
James was the handsome one and got a little leeway for it, space to grow his hair and start smoking pot. He hung out with older kids who were into Bauhaus and New Order. When he didn’t sign up for any sports teams in eleventh grade, he and his father had nothing left to talk about. (Years later, James started playing hockey again and following the NHL like he had as a kid, memorizing statistics over the evening paper. Hockey returned as the animating force of holiday conversations with his father.)
With his mother at work, his father stayed in the city later, and the house was empty more and more, so James kept out of it. He began taking the train himself, hopping off downtown for concerts, hovering until closing in record stores and bookstores, absorbing Aldous Huxley and Tom Wolfe and Bob Dylan. Meanwhile, Mike got his hands on a computer and began programming. Tapes gave way to floppy discs until finally, at twenty-six, he built a software company and designed a font called Tamarind. Then, a decade later, he sold both for an amount that was never made clear. Millions. Mike was still around, living in a northeast pocket of the city where people had driveways and no sidewalks.
James hadn’t called his parents in weeks. When he spoke to them last, he hadn’t told them he’d lost his job. That they hadn’t called to ask him why he was no longer on TV was confirmation of what he’d suspected for years: They weren’t watching. It’s not that they disapproved of what he did, but it had never occurred to them that it mattered.
James went over this story. He didn’t think about it often, but it had been rising up in him lately, especially as he held Finn between his knees after the bath, combing his hair. What had happened between Marcus and his parents? How did Sarah’s parents die? Only vaguely, James remembered a tale of a car crash. Maybe.
Though James had a gift for the narratives of strangers, he had never been good at keeping straight the most dramatic events of his friends’ lives. He’d had a girlfriend for two years in university who told him in the first week of their relationship about having childhood cancer, and it left his mind almost before she’d finished speaking. Then, a decade later, James had run into her on a crowded street, thin and wasted, a toque pulled down over her forehead. “It’s back,” she said hoarsely, and for days, he had no idea what she was talking about until the memory slithered up, its head poking through the potholes in his memory while he was alone on the southbound University line: leukemia.
If Sarah’s parents had been killed in a car accident, she probably felt inured to that particular disaster; she had been struck once, it could not happen again. What are the odds? He once interviewed a woman who gave birth to a child the size of a pop can, a preemie born at twenty-six weeks. She told him: “As soon as you’re on the wrong side of statistics, statistics don’t mean anything.”
James saw Finn before the boy noticed him in the doorway. Finn sat in the middle of James and Ana’s bed, surrounded by stuffed animals. Past him, through an open bathroom door, Ana’s back was bent, yellow gloves pushing, scrubbing out the tub.
James snuck up behind him, then leaned down and kissed Finn’s warm neck. Finn squealed a little, as if he’d been tickled. As he clipped Finn’s fingernails with his large nail clippers—he could fit two of Finn’s fingers between the blades—James was filled with a sensation of pure joy. He had escaped so much. Loss was all around, but it had never really landed on him. This realization gripped him and shook him into something like dizziness. He looked at the small pile of fingernail clippings on the tissue, and thought: Oh, happiness, happiness, happiness.
James read Finn the book about the squirrel and tucked him under his new sheets, beneath a swirling mobile of a bald eagle. “Sing light,” said Finn.
“Can you sing it?”
Finn shook his head. “You.”
“ ‘You light up my life’?” sang James in a silly voice. Finn laughed and was distracted enough to let James lead him away from this unmet wish. He turned out the lamp.
“Door open,” said Finn. James opened it a crack. “More.” And that was fine.
James had one leg in his sweatpants when Ana appeared in the bedroom doorway.
“Where are you going?”
“Wednesday. Hockey,” he said, pulling his Maple Leafs jersey over his shirt.
“You’re leaving me alone with him?”