“Oh, yes. Epicurus, right? You were reading him—”
Charlie spoke in a comic, booming voice, as if auditioning: “ ‘Where death is, I am no longer,’ ” he said, “ ‘and where I am, death is not.’ ” The hamminess didn’t suit him, and quickly, the humor dropped from his face. He spoke quietly. “Did you want to borrow the book? Maybe you’d find it useful.”
Ana was ashamed to admit that she had left the conversation with a list of errands at the foreground of her mind. By the time she had made it through the organic market, her cloth bags overflowing with basil and farmer’s milk, Epicurus had evaporated. Even now, though Charlie had just spoken, Ana could feel the words’ meaning entering her and then immediately exiting. It angered her, this sensation that she could not contain anything of substance anymore. It explained, perhaps, this floating, this inability to come down, for what was there to land on? What did she really know?
“After I saw you, only a few days after, my friend died in a car accident. Finn’s father,” said Ana.
“Oh, Ana,” said Charlie. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s strange. Until you brought it up right now, I had completely forgotten our conversation. Why were we talking about death?”
Charlie raised an eyebrow, pointed out the open door of his office. A woman in a wheelchair inched past with an electronic whir.
Ana smiled. “Yes, but something specific. What was it?”
“Your mother. We had talked about her degeneration, and you said you were afraid for her.”
Ana started. “I did? I said that?” She closed her eyes for a moment. “I’ve been so tired lately.” With her eyes shut, she could sense that Charlie was looking at her face fully, maybe mapping the lines around her eyes, the groove of worry between her brows.
Ana opened her eyes. Charlie glanced away. She remembered the conversation. “And you talked about heaven.”
“I couldn’t sell you on it, so I tried Epicurus.”
“Tell the line to me again.”
Without irony this time, Charlie said: “ ‘Where death is, I am no longer, and where I am, death is not.’ ”
“Right,” said Ana, hearing it. “The ending of life can’t be feared, because there’s no there there. The cessation of suffering.” She paused. “But you—you think of bliss. Angels.”
Charlie laughed. “Not really. I think more about grace, being finally in God’s grace.”
Ana considered this and then said: “You have to die for that?”
They looked at each other, for a held moment.
“I should—James is—”
“Of course,” said Charlie.
She clicked the information into her BlackBerry, then placed the flyer in her purse.
“I keep meaning to get one of those,” said Charlie. He pulled the small spiral pad of paper out of his back pocket and waved it in the air like a flag.
The visit with her mother had drained Ana, which meant she curled up inside herself like one of those red paper Japanese fortune fish that fold into a tube from the heat of a palm. James saw it, her insides recoiling while the skin of her continued on from task to task.
This faded Ana was next to him and Finn as they walked through the grocery store, as she stood inside the gas station at the cashier waiting for him to fill the car, staring straight ahead, a British beefeater in a cashmere coat. There she was again, barely speaking in Ikea, picking a quilt for Finn, standing back behind the other parents. (Other parents? He stopped here: Real parents?)
Finn ran in the children’s area, sat himself inside a shell-shaped chair, and pulled a vinyl top down so that only his feet stuck out. James tickled his ankles, threw him onto a beanbag hedgehog, tied a stuffed snake around his neck. Ana, Ana, Ana, a faint outline wavering on the hot desert horizon—where have you gone? Come back to me.
Ana, staring at the quilt covers blurring together, was thinking: If you act like a mother, you will feel like a mother. She chose one that felt soft in her hand.
Then she finds herself back in the basement apartment, her bedroom just large enough for a twin bed and a dresser, the window an air slot up high. She is eleven or twelve, blowing between groups of girls at school, back and forth, following the dictates of the girl who rules them all, Tracy with the large breasts and pink sweaters and thick lips like a wrung-out tea towel.
Ana has consented to bring home Tracy and another girl, named Siobhan. Siobhan is dark—black Irish, she likes to say, an image that conjures up African American leprechauns to other children—and bewildered, except that there is a clot of meanness at her center. She will forever be known as the girl who didn’t mind putting her hands on the dead pigeon and flinging it furiously into the bushes.
For this, Siobhan has become Tracy’s second. How did they get here? Ana can’t imagine she invited them, but there they are, they who only tolerate Ana because when she arrived at the school in the middle of the year, near Christmas—her fourth transfer in seven years—a boy named Matthew, a boy who mattered, told another boy that “the new girl is cute.” Cute is the most desired currency, and Ana was allowed in. But maybe she is too cute, or not cruel enough or funny enough, because there is no small amount of irritation circling her presence in the group. Still, the girls persist in pursuing her for now, overlooking her oddness in favor of the cute, and she does what is required to keep the scales tipped her way. She fulfills their tasks.
Tracy tells her to walk up to another girl—a girl with a sweaty forehead and sweaters that cradle the fat rolls on her back—and say: “You should tell Jason Cowie you want to kiss him. He really likes you.” Ana does this thing, with a grim stomach, but for a few days, she does not have to worry. She is tolerated again.
And then, on a bright spring day, Tracy and Siobhan are behind Ana, two steps belowground at the front of the house, at the door of the basement apartment. She has never taken anyone here before, has not even unpacked her second suitcase. But she has succeeded in humiliating the fat girl, and this visit is her reward. A wave of worry washes over her as she takes the rainbow-striped shoelace around her neck and puts the key in the lock. The door gives, unlocked after all.
Inside, an empty ashtray on the coffee table sits next to two glasses, wet streaked with melting ice. Everything else is sparse. It’s not that they haven’t unpacked yet, it’s that they don’t have much to unpack. There’s a television on a wheeled stand and a beige corduroy couch, both belonging to the landlord. Empty walls. But her mother’s African violets line the windowsill. Any new apartment must have one sunny window where they can sit, rotated a quarter turn every other day. Her mother plucks the dead outer leaves, and uses a toothbrush to remove grains of soil from the fresh foliage. Once a week, Ana and her mother carry the pots into the bathroom where the hot shower is running and the mirror lined from steam. “How are my babies?” murmurs her mother, and now Ana does this, too, when her mother is off teaching her ESL night classes, and she hears the feet of the landlord’s family overhead. “How are my babies?” Ana murmurs.
“Who lives upstairs?” demands Tracy.
“I don’t know,” says Ana, high-pitched. She is looking at her mother’s closed door, wondering if she’s awake, if she’ll come out and see her. The place is so small that if Ana turns her body here in the living room, she can see all of the little kitchen, and the time on the stove: 3:45.
“I gotta whiz,” says Siobhan.
“I’ll show you my room,” says Ana, but they only have to walk a few steps from the living room to the bedroom, banging into one another.