“We’d have to get a sitter,” he said.
“What? Are you joking? Did you guys adopt or something?” Doug laughed then, as if such a thing were entirely improbable. “Did you get a dog?”
“We’re looking after a little boy. His parents died,” said James. “Well, his father died. We don’t know if the mother’s going to be okay or not.” (James didn’t mention that the daily call to the hospital was always the same: “Stable.” Ana had visited twice, while James looked after Finn. With her coat on, she reported: “Stable,” pouring a glass of wine so quickly that it splashed.)
“What the fuck? Who? Are you serious?” said Doug.
“You don’t know them.”
“Maybe I do.”
“Marcus Lamb and Sarah Weiss.”
“Don’t know them.” Doug’s voice contained a hint of disappointment, as if he’d been unfairly excluded from a party.
“How old’s the kid?”
“Two. A boy. Finn.”
“Todd Banks and his wife, you know them? They’ve been trying to adopt from China, but it’s totally fucking impossible right now.”
“I guess we’re lucky,” said James, and Doug didn’t notice the sarcasm in his voice, or let it be. (But a gnawing thought now: What about China? What about the baby in China, separated from them by only a few signatures and uncut checks?)
“That is fucking crazy, man. How’s Ana?”
“She’s okay. Good.”
Mark Pullen, sitting on James’s other side, leaned in. “Did you hear that? Alice sold her screenplay.”
James turned to her.
“I didn’t even know you wrote,” he said, trying to add a smile to the observation.
“I don’t really. It’s a comedy about catering for the rich and famous. I wrote it in three weeks.” She beamed. Mark, her husband, put an arm around her. He directed commercials, and in all the years that James had known him, he’d never heard him aspire to anything else.
Alice Mitchell had only ever been kind to James, and her peanut brittle was a phenomenon. But he hated her a little in that moment.
“She’s being modest. She’s a great writer,” said Mark. “We just got back from L.A., and the producer said she had a voice like Nora Ephron.”
“ ‘Like Nora Ephron before she got boring.’ It was more of an insult to Nora Ephron than a compliment to me.” Alice kept smiling, so wide and bright that James could hardly look upon it.
He stood up suddenly, searching his pockets for cash.
“Alice, I’m thrilled for you,” said James, leaning down and giving her a kiss on the cheek.
“See you Friday?” shouted Doug as James walked off, waving over his shoulder. James didn’t answer.
At home, he dropped his gear in the hall and walked quickly up the stairs to Finn’s room. He went in and put his hand on Finn’s chest, which rose and fell confidently. This touch drained him of his anger.
After he’d showered and crawled into bed next to Ana, sleeping soundly, James had a thought: This might be temporary. Finn might be only a houseguest. Marcus’s parents could appear, with their blood ties ready to tighten around the boy. Or Sarah—Sarah could wake up. She could wake up and Finn would be reabsorbed into her, never to be seen again.
James turned over these scenarios in the dark, still feeling Finn’s chest under his hand. These futures burned behind his open eyes, waiting for an answer.
“Should we wait out here?” James always looked for a reason not to go into the nursing home. Usually he would arrive after Ana, with coffees purchased in slow motion, or drop her off to circle the block several times under the guise of looking for parking. This time, of course, with Finn in the car, he had a good reason to be absent. Still, Ana was irritated; he had begun to throw Finn in front of her to block motion—conversations and fights ceased because the boy was there, indicated by James with a flick of his head, a finger to the lips.
But he was right, of course, that no child would want to come into this place, especially when there was a playground across the street. A few patients had been wheeled there, and they sat with their wheelchairs pointed toward the jungle gym like it was a television. Knit blankets sausaged their legs. Their faces ranged from glazed to sleeping. A nurse, jacket over her green uniform, huddled and smoked, ashing behind her back.
“Come in and say hi. She’d like it,” said Ana. James nodded.
It had taken forty-five minutes to reach the home. Ana had carefully chosen this old age home, in a quiet, unvisited patch of the city. It had a good reputation, but that wasn’t why Ana selected it: Placing her mother in a home closer to their house was unthinkable. Ana couldn’t imagine being out on one of her night jogs and running past a building that contained her mother or turning a corner to see it on her way home from an evening out. Her mother being groomed and fed in the daylight was an image of some comfort, but to think of her locked in at night, her favorite time of the day, forced into her room like a cat in a cage—this wasn’t something she could bear to stumble upon accidentally.
She had been feeling responsible for her mother most of her life. That responsibility trailed faintly after her, a tissue on her heel, slightly shameful. Even as a child tucked away in her room where the window looked at a brick wall, and on that wall she could see India, where her father always talked about going. She pictured cows and cinnamon and swarms of silk-swathed bodies in crayon colors, a National Geographic spread. She thought about India when they moved again, lying in her room with the window that looked at another window, or the next time, when there was no bedroom for her at all but a bed in the hallway. By then, her father had his wish. He went away, transforming from flesh and blood into a series of Christmas cards and occasional phone calls. Examining the stamp (Nepal) and opening the worn, translucent envelope one year, a photograph fell out—a young woman clutching a baby. “You have a sibling!” he wrote. It took another year before Ana found out the sibling was a boy.
Her father moved to Costa Rica, and the letters never again mentioned this boy, or his mother. Ana got older and stopped opening them. And as if her father knew the audience had left the theater, they stopped coming. Silence, now, for eight years.
So Ana and her mother became a pair. Ana went with her mother to the courthouse and, in front of the judge, erased her father’s name, took her mother’s. There was love, but also the bottle. Once her father left, Ana’s mother navigated them toward the smallest apartments in “better neighborhoods,” a phrase peeled from the walls of her own childhood in a riverside university town. Her mother had been a child in a house that could properly be called a mansion, with a small circular swimming pool and a brainless Doberman pinscher that barked at the bushes. Ana spent weeks there in the summer heat. She saw her grandmother’s long, teenage fingernails on her curved hand, shot through with purple veins; her grandfather’s highwaisted pants, his box of war medals.
They wept when Ana waved good-bye in the driveway, days before September. Her mother sat sober and stared straight ahead, shaking hands clenching the wheel.
“You don’t know what they’re really like,” she said, when Ana began to echo their wails, dramatically reaching a hand through the open window as her mother revved and reversed. “You’ll never know, thank God.”