Unless Sarah woke up, of course. If Sarah woke up, then what? He tried to want this, because it was the right thing to want, and because of Finn, looking out the car window for his parents. But when he thought of Finn leaving, and the room becoming a guest room once again, he ached.
On the streetcar, watching the city take shape in the cooling gray light, he knew Ana would be anxious for him to return, still uncomfortable alone with Finn. This was how he saw her these days: waiting for him, hovering around windows and doorframes, needing him, something he always thought he wanted. That aloofness he had tried for years to break through had been replaced by some kind of anxiety he couldn’t placate. She was angry, too, at the mess in the house, the toys, the overflowing Diaper Genie. But he left the mess to her because only she could calm herself. He fucked things up, stacked the dishwasher wrong, didn’t put the laundry in the bureau quickly enough. That was the conversation. He was tired of it. He was speaking less.
James stepped from the streetcar, moving with the crowd toward the hospital. At the second door, a security guard pointed at a dispenser of antibacterial soap. James’s first instinct was to refuse, as was his wont in the presence of a direct order, but the security guard issuing the order was bull-bodied and redheaded with a slack jaw and the bored arrogance of a bouncer. Then James spotted a withered old woman sitting on a bench, coughing into her curled waxed hand, sport socks pulled up to her green-veined knees. Eagerly, James hit the soap dispenser, slathered, and rubbed.
Up the elevator, along the painted footsteps on the floor. But he was following the wrong painted feet and suddenly they ran out. James found himself up against a pair of doors with ship’s portholes at the top; half of one of the painted feet was lost on the other side of the door. Only the heel remained. James pushed at the doors. They were locked.
He turned around and kept walking, following green feet this time and trying to make sense of the signs overheads. GR4–T76. The numbers and letters seemed random, something Finn would produce banging away on the computer.
Then he found the door, but inside, the bed was empty. He shut the door quickly. A machine on wheels, knobs and buttons, came crashing through the opposite doorway, and attached to it, a woman in scrubs.
“My friend was in here last week—”
“We’re repairing this part of the hospital.” She moved around him, pushing the cart. “Check at the nurses’ station.”
It seemed strange to him that certain ventricles in a hospital could be closed when all he ever heard about was overcrowding and waiting rooms leaking unattended illnesses. He decided to take that as a good sign, then; some kind of lessening of the amount of suffering as a whole contained in the city. Of course, the other reading, he realized as he walked, was that there was the same amount of suffering, but nowhere to put it.
A nurse confirmed that Sarah had been moved to a ward. She no longer needed a private room because there was no private self, nothing that could be infringed upon, thought James.
Outside the correct door at last, he stopped a moment, took a breath, and then regretted it, the cold black coating of hospital chemicals settling over his lungs.
The curtain around Sarah’s bed was undrawn, and she lay on her back. Of the three other beds in the room, only one contained a person he could see, a middle-aged woman with dark hair, sitting up and watching television with headphones on. Another had the curtain drawn, but a murmur came from the slit, and feet passed below. An orderly gathered food trays. Because of this normal pulse of movement, Sarah looked a little out of place, entirely still in a room of movement, the last little house on a city street of skyscrapers.
Flowers sat on her bedside table. James picked up the card, both sides of the interior covered in the signatures of her colleagues in neat, teacher handwriting: “We are thinking of you.” “We’ll see you soon, Sarah!” The water in the vase was murky gray, the stems covered in slime.
James had been to visit three times, and each time, he left his coat on. He stood above Sarah, careful not to bump into the churning machines. The bruising had cleared, and she looked more like herself, except for the long black lines of stitches crisscrossing her face. Today, her head was flung back, mouth open, crusted with white. She might have been a woman talking, frozen in midsentence. The tracheal tube running from the moist, gauze-covered hole in her throat was held in place by a white plastic collar (Like something worn by a priest, or a cat, thought James). Her hair was slightly matted, the roots grown out. James had never thought about Sarah’s hair, about the number of small decisions she made that led her to dye it so black. What was coming in, forming a slab along the side part, was gray, wiry.
“Finn’s doing great,” James said quietly, glancing back at the woman watching television. He crouched down and spoke directly into her ear. “We’re taking care of him. I don’t want you to worry.” He saw her hand, bonded to tubes and tape, and placed his own hand on it. Her fingers were warm, soft. It had been years since he had held another woman’s hand. He had become used to Ana’s poor circulation, her corpse fingers yellow-tipped from November to April.
“What would you like to know?” he said. On his last visit, the nurse had told him to talk to her, that it might fire up her brain, shake her to life. Online he had read of a teenage boy who woke up after months in a coma and said: “I hate that doctor. He called me a vegetable.”
“Finn’s funny. I bought him Pull-Ups, and we’re working on that. He has this dance he’s doing, pretty hilarious. He’s all—” James waved his free arm. The breathing machine whirred. “Bruce at the daycare says he’s doing really well. They went on a neighborhood walk and picked up fall leaves. They made these elaborate collages. You should see Finn’s. It’s clearly the best one. He’s a master gluer.”
James straightened the card on the bedside table.
“The Leafs suck, as usual. The economy—it’s not good. You picked a good time to check out,” he said, laughed, then cleared his throat. “Sorry.”
He thought a moment. “We took Finn to my brother’s. He seemed to really like it there. They have an entire floor devoted to toys, so you can guess why he likes it. They also have four cars. Four!” James shook his head. “The parking downtown is still bullshit. There’s a systemic bias on Sundays, when the church people take up all the spaces on the block and the cops never ticket them. So last week I parked across the street, which is always no parking, right? And the parking guy was coming along and was about to write me a ticket. I couldn’t believe it. I ran outside—and hey, don’t worry, Ana was with Finn in the house, we wouldn’t leave him alone in the house—and I said: ‘Look, those church people don’t have permits, they park here for hours on Sunday, taking up all the permit spaces. Why don’t you ticket them?’ And you know what he said?” James dropped Sarah’s hand, which landed hard. He was pointing and poking the air. “He said: ‘We make exceptions for religious observation.’ What the fuck? Is this Iran or something? Aren’t we a secular state? I wanted to kill the guy, just smash him—” The woman with the headphones cleared her throat loudly. James turned and saw that she’d taken off her headphones and was exaggeratedly flipping through a magazine.
He lowered his voice. “Anyway, that’s not so interesting.” He glanced at the woman’s bedside table, which looked as if it might buckle under the weight of photographs: two little girls dressed up like Easter bunnies; two little girls in matching red dresses. James realized there was no photo of Finn by Sarah’s bed. He would have to bring one in.
“I saw your lawyer today, and he said you guys had very clear directives around guardianship. You were protecting him from Marcus’s parents, I guess. I wish I knew more about that. I wish I could …” Could what? As the possibility burst at the seams of this sentence, James croaked a little, then silenced himself.