There had always been food. A bagel wrapped in a paper towel stuffed in her backpack. The remains from the doughnut store, or later, the catering company where she had worked as a teenager. Sitting on the couch late at night, eating pasta salad from take-out containers with plastic forks, her mother telling her about her Ph.D. that she would never finish. Poetry.
“I’m not feeling too well,” said Ana, and Diana nodded, as if it were a given.
“Come, Finneas,” said Diana, extending a hand. Finn got up from the table and walked past her hand, toward Ana. A small strand of snot joined his ear to his nose, like a purse handle. Diana reached out with a Kleenex and wiped it away.
“Up,” said Finn, his arms extended to Ana, his face tired.
Ana nodded at him. Diana said softly: “Ana, he wants you to pick him up.”
“Oh, of course,” said Ana. She bent and pulled him up, his legs tightening around her waist like a spider trapping a fly, but his hands on her neck were loose and soft. Ana rubbed his back, felt the warmth of him bending into her, his sweetness drowned out by her sadness, her humming knowledge that hers was not the body he needed, that they were caught together in this web of compromise. A smell of orange cheese in her throat.
Ana lay in bed with the lights out, trying to still her head, which seemed to keep pushing away from her, as if trying to unscrew itself. The fever came quick and angry, leaving her drenched and shaking under the duvet.
James came in with aspirin in one hand and a tall glass of iced juice in the other.
“Turn out the light,” she said, but there was no light on.
Finn stood in the frame of the door, staring. James wondered if he could yet recognize other people’s pain. His friends at daycare broke skin and bled and it interested him. He informed James of these accidents, the stickiness, the hidden possibility that a body could just leak itself dry.
James tried to imagine what played over in Finn’s head from the twisted wreck of the car: the empty face of his father, with a small scar by his lower lip. Finn had woken up screaming only that one time. His nights were deep and long. He was not yet haunted, James thought, but it would come.
Ana moaned slightly in the dark and James straightened the duvet at her shoulders. He looked over to see Finn reaching out a hand in front of him, as if trying to touch something. His hand extended into space made James think of Sarah, reaching for the boy as he toddled across the room, the two of them laughing, and Finn reaching her to place his own small palm between his mother’s clapping hands, which would still and hold him.
James took Finn gently by the shoulder, moving him out of the doorway, shutting the door behind them. Finn resisted.
“Ana,” he said. “Want Ana.” He slipped behind James, knocked on the door, loudly.
“Finn, she needs to sleep. She’s sick,” said James.
Finn banged on the door. “Ana! Ana! Come play!”
James picked him up, and he went soft in his arms, put his fingers in his mouth and began sucking.
James carried Finn downstairs and settled him on the couch. He sat beside him, stroking Finn’s forehead, the boy’s furrowed brow.
James was used to being a study in contrast to Ana: He didn’t mind mess, could sleep in knotted bed sheets until Ana, annoyed at the lumps, roused him in the dark, smoothing and tucking. But he was struck now by the sensation that he had turned into his wife, and knots were digging into his skin. Marcus. His lost job. And upcoming losses were queuing for him, too: Finn, who might be taken back or away, and his wife, who was always leaving, and now had good reason to do so. Soon his mother and father would corrode with illness and then he would be alone, a childless middle-aged man, bald and suspect.
Oh, he missed them all, even Emma, young Emma and that fleeting moment of debauchery that might be his last. In a few years, she would lose her glimmer, and her love of risk, and become a mother to somebody. Getting older was infuriating. He needed the steady footing of his youth, the certainty of opinion, and it was gone. James took a deep, quivering breath.
On this note of self-pity, James turned to the window and saw Chuckles pulling in with his other car, not the SUV but a white van, planks of wood sticking out the back, dangerously untethered. He was taking up two spaces again, leaving a huge gap on either side. His silver SUV was parked up the street.
James placed a throw pillow under Finn’s sleeping head and stood up. He strode toward the door.
Chuckles had not moved from his van. He sat shuffling papers and smoking when James appeared at the window. In his anger, James had failed to put on shoes and stood now on the road in a pair of dark blue cashmere argyle socks. He rapped on the glass with his knuckles. As Chuckles rolled down the window, he seemed to take in James from the top of his head—the thinning hair slightly shining with wax, the ironic beard, the expensive untucked button-down shirt in a grayish pink—and then stopped at his feet. James, too, looked down then at the dumb, dog-snouted, shoeless appendages and thought: Disadvantage.
But oh well, he was in it now, hot with rage. Up close, James was surprised by Chuckles’s face. He had pcitured him as a kid, a know-nothing just out of trade school. Yet up close, the face was lined and browned, as if from some stain, like the hands of a leather dyer. And the guy was bigger, too, than James had supposed, as often seemed to be the case at moments like this, he noted to himself. And also, Chuckles looked angry. This anger, located mostly in the sneer of Chuckles’s lips, snuffed any small hope in James that this might go a different way (A surprise friendship from across the divide? A human interest story on the local news?). No, Chuckles did not like to have his paper shuffling interrupted, or his cigarette. This much was clear.
But what else? What next? James was now upon his enemy empty-handed, without a plan. His entire body tingled. He would, then, improvise.
“Sorry to bother you,” he said, a phrase that he knew did not match the previous furious shoeless strut across the street, the door slamming and knuckle rapping. James’s voice, too, wasn’t quite as loud or manly as he’d anticipated, but instead sounded, even to his own blood-rushed ears, like a little French schoolgirl buying a croissant from a friendly baker. It was in this dulcet tone that James delivered his kicker: “You’re taking up two parking spots. Do you think you could move up?”
Now James waited. The truck leaked a prickly odor of cigarette and rust. Chuckles took one final drag and James waited for the Bazooka Joe finale, the stream of smoke blown in his face. Instead, Chuckles turned and exhaled on the passenger seat.
Then he turned back to James and said: “You the guy who left the note?” His voice was firm, with a vaguely Godfatherish tinge.
Did he? Did he leave it? James hurried through his thoughts. If he answered yes, then that door might open and James might get picked up by his belt loop and hung from the branches of the nearby oak tree. If no, then James had officially slapped down his admission to an amusement park only for pussies, where the rides were slow and low to the ground and the seatbelts thick and castrating. He made a quick decision.
“Yeah, that was me,” said James.
Chuckles’s eyes narrowed. “Why didn’t you sign it?”
“What?”
“Why didn’t you sign it?”
James considered this question and how it firmly located him on the wrong side of reason. If he had signed the note, he would not be here now. The whole thing could have been resolved at the kitchen island over one of Ana’s perfect espressos. But no, he had not put his name on it, had, in fact hidden, once again, behind his little pen and his paper, his tiny ideas, his life of distant reportage.
James elected not to answer the question.