Before entering the nursing home, there was the unbuckling and the gathering of gear that had spread across the car during the drive—water bottle, diaper bag, book, octopus toy. Finn himself came last, the final object.
Finn ran whooping up the wheelchair ramp, then hopped in and out of the electric sliding doors. James did the same, leaning his body outside: “In!” he called when the doors began to shut and then opened again as he kicked a leg over the invisible line. “Check it out, Finny! Out! In! Out! In!”
Ana signed her name in the reception book. “Hi, Lana,” she said.
“Hi, Ms. Laframboise,” said the nurse loudly. Lana spoke to the patients the way she, Ana, spoke to Finn: masking her discomfort with volume. It was Lana who put up the flimsy photographs of pumpkins and elves around the holidays, cut from women’s magazines. Now, in September, with nothing to celebrate, little circles of cellophane tape peeled off the walls.
Ana scanned the offices behind Lana for her favorite person in this place, the young man who James jokingly called Charlie the Chaplain. Charlie had been a tree planter in British Columbia in his early twenties, which was only a few years ago. Now he crouched and spoke kindly to the men and women who punctuated the corridors and dining area. Ana had seen him walking from room to room, turning off televisions where patients had fallen asleep. Ana could talk to him about neural pathways and reasons, and he always had an unsentimental, interesting bit of science on hand to soothe her with. There was nothing evangelical in him—no condescension, no appetite for cuteness in a space abundant with both. Ana wondered if she could talk to him about Finn, and the uncertainty that was swelling in her. But she felt too shy to ask for him, picturing his lean body, his alert eyes.
“Harry Glick died. Do you remember him?” said Lana.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“He and your mother used to eat together quite often. You might want to speak to her about the loss.”
Ana tried to imagine that conversation and suppressed a laugh.
In his knit hat with frog eyes on the top, Finn was a rock star in the nursing home. The halls cleared for him. Spotting the boy, an old woman with a walker, spine like a C, stopped and, with the exertion of a bodybuilder, raised one fist in a small cheer. Wheelchairs ceased their slow crawl and murmured. Ana had never seen so many smiling faces. They erased the smell of antiseptic and dish soap.
What a horror movie for Finn, thought James. The half-living inmates roused from their coffins. He kept the boy close, their hands locked together. James glanced at him and was surprised to find that he did not look frightened. He looked curious, which was his most common look: a mouth like an O.
James watched Ana gain her rigidity; she could not know how angry she looked, how frightened. It was an expression she wore only in this place, breaking it slightly to smile at the occasional patient as if cued to do so.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Wainwright,” said Ana. Mr. Wainwright, a former civic politician of some prominence (he developed the city’s waterfront in the fifties—a factoid that popped into James’s head as if in a cartoon bubble) sat in front of the television. He waved, smiled slowly, like his mouth was breaking through an icy surface.
Her mother’s door was closed. Lise Laframboise in calligraphy, a French name that haunted her in government offices and lineups, two generations out of Quebec, and not knowing a word of French.
Ana knocked. “Mom, it’s Ana, Mom.” No response. She opened the door a little, wondering what she might see. Only once had the fear been fully realized: That day, her mother had been naked, pinballing between the walls, looking for her money. The panic, when it came, was often about money or jewelry she had hidden, or that had been stolen, things lost or taken from her.
This time, her mother was in bed with the lights out, covered up to her chin, her short gray hair a puff atop her head. Who knits all these wool afghans? Ana imagined a sweatshop somewhere.
Ana was followed by James and Finn, who stood at the foot of the bed. Ana opened the curtains, and her mother winced in a finger of dusty light. She was not actually asleep, then.
“Mom, do you want to sleep some more?” asked Ana, praying for a “no” so she wouldn’t have to return later.
Lise shifted and rumbled, rubbing her eyes. She smiled.
“Ana,” she said, a relief for Ana that they could start from this point—her name, Ana—that she didn’t have to go back to the beginning today: You’re my mother. I’m your daughter.
“Hi, Lise, how are you feeling?” asked James, leaning in to kiss her cheek. She brightened falsely.
“Hello,” she sang. “I’m fine. It’s so lovely today. Warm, isn’t it?”
Lise had adored James, his rowdiness, his good looks. She had never said it, but Ana knew she thought her daughter wasn’t quite enough of a spitfire for this man; not enough like Lise herself.
Finn was batting at the bar on the bed, trying to hoist himself up.
“Mom, I want you to meet someone,” said Ana, lifting her mother’s hand and offering it to Finn. He looked at her, surprised, and James skipped a breath, wondering what Finn would do. He took the old woman’s hand, its dead weight, and looked at it against his own small fleshy hand, curious. James realized something: Finn was optimistic.
Ana lifted him up, placed him on the bed, his legs dangling. He turned at an awkward angle to see Lise’s face.
“Hello. It’s so lovely to meet you,” said Lise. Ana almost laughed: Her mother, to whom sobriety was once a special occasion, used to swear like a sailor and had never used the word “lovely” in her life. But these days, she sounded regal when she spoke. In her old age, she was becoming the daughter her own parents had prayed she would become. She had recited a psalm the other day, something Ana had no idea was inside her.
“He’s staying with us. There was an accident, and some friends of ours, uh, bequeathed him to us,” said Ana.
“Bequeathed?” James laughed.
“Well, how do you explain it?”
“We’re looking after him until his mother gets better,” said James, feeling an anxious twinge over the possible truth in that sentence.
Lise wasn’t going to make sense of the scenario. She stared out the window, frowning.
“Before you leave, can you ask the lady, the tall lady, if she’s finished with my camisoles? I give her my camisoles, and only the white ones come back, but I know there’s a black one.”
Ana pulled open the top drawer of the bureau to find the white camisoles, and several pairs of underpants, in a gigantic ball, as if her mother had been searching. “Mom, if you can’t find something, you have to ask for help.”
“I’m quite cold. I’d like my black camisole.”
“Well, let’s find it.” Ana dug down.
“God, maybe she’s right. That expensive one I bought her, the silk one, isn’t in here. Do you think someone would steal it?” Ana asked James.
“I doubt it. It’s probably just in the wash.” He hoped Ana wouldn’t find it and need to dress Lise. He dreaded his mother-in-law unclothed, her sunken chest and lazy belly, and Ana’s rough daughterly care.
“I think I have to ask.”
“Don’t. You’ll seem crazy and then, you know, that could make it hard for your mom.”
“What? You think they’ll punish her? Is that how this place works?”
Finn slid off the bed and stood between Ana’s legs, opening and closing drawers himself, imitating her slamming.
“Lise, would you like me to read to you?” asked James. It was the one task he enjoyed. It gave him something to do and broke the tension of Ana’s hovering. He used to bring Lise the kind of literature he believed women liked: The Age of Innocence, Beloved, The Color Purple. But his voice always sounded strange around women’s words, and soon he turned to Lise’s own stack of books, mostly self-help. They circulated on a library cart every couple of weeks.