At the door, Finn kicked at the stoop outside. As Ana buttoned her jacket, Jennifer appeared with a paper Whole Foods bag.
“Olivia’s too old for these,” she said. The bag rattled with puzzle pieces and Legos. Something made a few electronic grunts, then silenced.
This was how people did it, then—an ongoing exchange.
Mike appeared, put his arm around Jennifer’s shoulder. The girls had joined Finn on the porch. They, too, kicked at the leaves and squealed.
“Not in your socks,” said Jennifer, then rolled her eyes at the adults.
“Hey, Jimmy,” said Mike, clearing his throat, alerting James to the fact that a speech had been prepared. “Listen, if you need any—you know. If we can do anything for you guys. With Finn, I mean. It’s a big change. We have a little experience with this stuff.” Jennifer laughed loudly, nodding.
“Thank you,” said James. “It’s going all right, but thank you.” His brother was never good with tenderness. It didn’t suit him. James wanted to point out that they lived only a half hour from each other but got together maybe three times a year, so how much, really, could they help? But alongside that first thought, James found himself moved by his brother’s awkward gesture. He tried to picture a future of commonality, devoid of the decades-long strangeness.
He rode on this idea as they gathered and moved toward the car at the top of the circular driveway. James knew that Mike and Jennifer’s three-car garage was filled. A fourth vehicle—a Lexus SUV—sat outside. The surfeit of parking spaces seemed like mockery. It was the first puncture in James’s warm mood, but he refrained from commenting.
Jennifer called something from the stoop. All three were buckled in. Ana rolled down her window, cupped her hand to her ear.
“I’ll resend you the video card!” called Jennifer.
“Great!” Ana called back.
Finn repeatedly pressed buttons on the electronic toy, a counting game, with red and blue lights, and a robot voice: 1! 2! 3! They moved through the empty, wide streets, past the sylvan glade gardens, under the ancient trees. When they hit Bloor, the traffic thickened. Cranes and bulldozers sat unmoving by construction sites cordoned off with plastic, warning of disaster. Cars blew their horns at a taxi doing a U-turn.
“Did you get that video?” asked James.
“Yeah, I did,” said Ana.
“Me, too.”
Now was the time where they would usually dismember the evening for a solid hour or two. James would go first, noting how Jennifer referred to the girls as “Princess Sophie” and “Diva Olivia.” Then Ana would talk about the marble countertops, Mike’s crippling boringness. James might revel, once again, in the way that Jennifer had very specific opinions about very small things—the right temperature for drinking water; why Jay Leno is hilarious—but at the mere mention of politics, she left the room to fuss about in the kitchen. The kitchen. The excess.
But not that night. The venting had been neutered by the unavoidable, continuous kindness the family had shown them, by the way Jennifer had crouched down and whispered in Finn’s ear, ending the night with him in an embrace. Had that always been there? Had they just never seen it, never needed to call upon it until that moment?
“Did you have fun tonight, Finny?” James asked.
“Go see Mama,” said Finn. The beeping of the toys stopped.
Ana straightened; it was Jennifer, with her abundance of maternal warmth, who had triggered this yearning in Finn. It was seeing a real family in its chaos that made him miss Sarah.
“Go see Daddy,” said Finn.
“We can’t see them right now, honey,” said James. “I’m sorry.”
Ana looked behind her, expecting Finn to erupt, and why not? He must know he was at the center of a terrible injustice. He must be furious.
But he was simply staring out the window.
“Should we put on some music, Finny?” asked James, turning on the radio.
The three were quiet for the rest of the ride. James found a parking space right in front of their house but didn’t comment on it.
He carried Finn upstairs, leaving Ana to her work. She took the laptop to the breakfast nook. The sound of Finn in the bath moved through the floor above Ana’s head. Squealing and thumping, laughter.
Dim light from the inside of the house caught the yard, and something looked different to Ana’s glance. She leaned closer to the French doors. The men had been coming. James had not mentioned it, and with her late nights, she had been returning in the darkness and had not noticed. Day after day, while she worked in her tower, they had been transforming the yard. The limestone was laid, a gray skating rink in the center of the garden. A large red Japanese maple stood in a bucket, waiting to be planted. The perimeter was empty of plants but covered with rich, churned soil. These invisible men were determined to bring life into the place, even though winter was coming. They had been so late that James had negotiated a discount. No one used landscapers in this infertile season.
Something in the limestone unsettled Ana. She felt a tug of certainty that the hole was still beneath it, that a toe on a stone could break through the surface, pull her down into a muddy pit. This reminded her of Sarah, in her hospital bed, perched on the edge of the depths. The last visit had been the same: no change. Decisions were waiting for them, Ana knew. Decisions about Sarah, who had decided everything for them.
She pulled her face from the glass and turned to her e-mails.
Soon, there would be plants in the ground, or at least seeds. She should think about that instead. She reminded herself to look again tomorrow.
Ana didn’t want her personal life stuffed into files at her firm, so years ago, James had found a lawyer downtown whose two-room office was over a fish shop.
He went there first, to sign papers delivered from Sarah’s lawyer, whom he had visited the day before. That office had been fancier, in an office building, with a receptionist. Despite Sarah’s pigpen cloud of mess, and Marcus’s Zen-like quiet, it turned out they were affairs-in-order types. And now he, James, whose affairs had never been in order, had power of attorney over their family. He could see their bank account, which was healthy, and their credit card bills (Sarah charged $3.76 at Starbucks four or five times a week, which made James laugh). One day, he would be able to access that money. The insurance company moved along at its arthritic pace, but there had been a decent policy. If Sarah died, Finn would be rich, or richer than James.
All of these revelations were intimate and unwanted (Marcus was a careful, clever investor; their portfolio was almost as impressive as the one Ana had put together). As he met with each official and signed each document, James remembered the feeling of having sex with someone he didn’t love; a little part of him kept repeating: “I can’t bear this. I can’t do it. I’m the wrong guy.”
But as he was informed many times, Sarah was not dead. So this was just the preliminary hacking of the weeds of Sarah and Marcus’s life. The deep digging would come later, if and when. For now: temporary guardians. Although the will clearly stated that Finn was to go to Ana and James, James couldn’t find an argument against the lawyer’s suggestion that they place notices in newspapers in major cities, and online, just in case there were complications later. He pictured Marcus’s father sitting at the table with his morning paper to find an ad: “Seeking grandparents for orphan child.” James tried to imagine the most monstrous things parents could do, and then he imagined those things happening to Marcus, calm and gentle Marcus. What was it? Prodded in basements, cigarettes burned out on his forearms. Something caused that little scar on Marcus’s face. He thought of Finn, all softness, and was struck by a future in which an older Finn would have questions. He would have to anticipate those questions and be ready. He would have to work, gather the stories of Finn’s life and have them waiting.