“Nice poster,” says Tracy, and Ana combs the comment for sarcasm. She looks at the poster with Tracy’s eyes: a pink satin toe shoe balancing on an egg. Ana has never taken ballet in her life. Her mother had a boyfriend last year who gave it to her for Christmas. He was a dancer once.
They are in her room long enough to complete this exchange before Ana notices the bundle under the blankets on her bed. She sees it heaving, face covered. Ana breathes quickly, spins on her axis, tries to lead Tracy out of the room. At that moment, a scream from down the hall, and Siobhan appears, jumping up and down, her arms flapping, a yell that sets off a yell in Tracy, and there they are, the three of them in the tiny hallway, two screaming and one frozen in anticipation.
“Your dad’s in the bathroom! He’s in the tub! He’s totally naked!” Siobhan’s eyes like planets.
Her dad? It can’t be; he’s gone, gone away. But a small part of Ana thinks Siobhan knows something she doesn’t, thinks: Maybe today, maybe—and shoves the girls to get past in the dollhouse dimensions of the basement apartment.
“Watch it!” shouts Siobhan, and Ana, for once, ignores a command, flinging her body through the open door to the bathroom. There is a man in the bathtub, but the bathtub is empty of water, and the man is not her father. He is older, with a thatch of gray pubic hair, a flaccid penis hanging to the side, an afterthought. His hand flops over the edge of the tub. He’s dead, thinks Ana, matter-of-factly, and she wonders if she should draw the shower curtain, like in police procedurals on TV.
“He’s dead,” she says out loud.
Behind her, their bodies against hers in the little room, Tracy has her hand over her mouth, moaning softly. Siobhan is alert, electrified.
“Don’t be stupid. He’s breathing,” says Siobhan, and she is right: The spilling stomach, lined with hair, rises and falls. The natural order of things.
It is this, the breathing, that infuriates Ana, that shifts her mood from terror to rage.
“Go outside. I’ll meet you,” she says—growls, really, and the girls halt their flapping, surprised to hear Ana, pretty Ana, issue a feral order. They obey, stumbling over each other, and Ana hears their footsteps running, the slamming of the door.
The man’s legs are folded, his feet under the taps. Ana gags as she reaches past his toenails and quickly turns on the water, cold, pulls the lever so it comes pouring out of the shower. She pulls the curtain shut, a sound like a train whistling past that covers just a little the scream of the man, the “FUUUUUUUCK” that shakes the thin walls of the bathroom. Ana slams the door behind her.
In her room, she pulls back the quilt on her bed. Her mother has pink underwear on, a thin white T-shirt. Bruises are spaced up and down her legs like piano keys. Her helplessness repulses Ana; the incongruity of her mother’s size in her little bed.
Ana leans over her. Quietly, she says: “Mom, Mommy, Mom,” and her mother murmurs, rolls, and goes still again. Down the hall, she hears the man stumbling, falling against the little corridor, cursing to himself. Ana imagines the girls outside constructing their story, waiting to pass it along the corridors of the school, to use it to maneuver Ana into a corner where she has nothing, where she will grovel not to be lonely.
And in this moment, Ana—who has wept for dead caterpillars in jars, who has nodded and agreed and packed and unpacked and arrived in new classrooms again and again, genial, amicable, okay with it, the most remarkable, adaptable, malleable daughter!—that Ana exits her body, and a new one settles in. This new one arrives in the split second where she lifts up her open palm and brings it down, down, a cartoon anvil from the sky dropped upon her mother’s face, a cheek that jiggles pathetically beneath the weight of Ana’s fury. Good. She wants it red, wants it bleeding, down to the bone.
Her mother’s eyes flash open, confused. “What—?” She stares at Ana with the blankness that will define her later, in her dementia, right up until her death. “Ana—” But Ana can’t look at her, and she is moving down the hall, past the naked hulk of a man in the living room searching on his hands and knees, a glimpsed shadow that Ana refuses to focus on. She grabs her backpack off the kitchen chair and the rainbow shoelace that holds her key. She opens the door to the bright day, the smell of lavender and gasoline.
Tracy and Siobhan are still there, staring at her, wondering how far this transition will go. The new Ana, coarse and livid, stays with them the entire afternoon, as the three girls walk the neighborhood, buying fried chicken and potato salad and Coke at a fast-food place. They carry all of this to the park, eating atop the jungle gym, scaring away the little kids.
When they are finished, Ana says: “I’m staying up here. Show me something funny.” She is trying it on. The girls glance at each other; they are unnerved enough that they are willing to obey, for a while longer anyway.
They climb down, and from the top of the jungle gym, Ana watches as Tracy throws her legs over a bar on the swing set and turns upside down, hanging from her knees, back and forth, her arms folded across her chest. Siobhan finds a patch of grass, juts one leg in front of her, throws her hands to the ground and begins flipping her body up into the sky, then back down again; a perfect handspring. One into the next, as if she could go all the way home like this, as if she could start a new human race where everyone walked on their hands, spun with joy from moment to moment.
When she stops, finally, she makes an exaggerated Y shape with her body, like an Olympian, facing Ana in the role of judge. Ana gives her nothing, nods, knowing that boredom is the only right response with these girls.
But she is reeling. The heat of her sore hand spreads through her whole body, up the top of her head, where it pours down over her forehead, into her eyes. The heat combines with the sensation that she has become totally disconnected, as if she is dangling with one hand from the sun. She wants Siobhan to keep flipping, out into traffic, hands first, into a car. She realizes suddenly that she has been bracing herself, living her whole life in anticipation of the bloodiest, most gruesome disaster. Maybe it has happened today.
The sun sets, and the two girls go off, walking west, backpacks bobbing. Ana walks in the dark, past shops that are closing, through the courtyard of a small church. Cars are parking; fathers emerging; teenagers with hockey bags over their shoulders and ballet slippers in their hands. This is when Ana sees the woman get out of her Audi, high heels over black stockings, a gray pencil skirt. This is a businesswoman.
Ana stops, and sees herself in the woman’s eyes: a girl in a pink ski jacket, blond hair and bangs. She knows already that if she didn’t look like this, it is unlikely that she could stop and stare without being chased away. If she had gray teeth; if she were ugly—then what?
The woman gives her a small, puzzled smile and opens the backseat door. She leans in and backs up with a baby in her hands. Over her other shoulder, the woman has an overstuffed purse, and she balances these two things in the smeared beige early evening, striding toward her home with its porch light on. Its plain redbrick facade is almost identical to the house that Ana and her mother have just moved into. She imagines it might have an identical basement apartment. Who might be down there?
James was searching for a place to park.
“Look at that bastard,” he said. “He’s taking up two spaces! It’s so contemptuous! Where’s his humanity?”
Ana nodded, not certain to what he was referring.
“Car!” cried Finn.
“You guys get out here, and I’ll circle around,” said James.
Ana did what she was told, unclipping Finn and letting him go ahead of her up the walkway. James, glancing from the car, thought: Take his hand, Ana, take his hand.