She put on her scarf and jacket, took her bag. The door was hollow and caught on the rug behind her.
“Good night, madame,” said the doorman as she passed through the lobby.
“Bonne soirée,” she replied.
Ana went to the gym and ran farther than usual on the treadmill. Her body was getting stronger. She had put on a little weight, and with it came a sensation of being rooted, heavier in her feet. She liked the new curve of her hips.
After her workout, Ana sat in the steam room, something she had only started to do in Montreal. There was one woman in the room with her, concealed by puffs of steam. At one point, she shifted to reveal a long, vertical scar along her chest plate, and then vanished in the heat again.
After showering, Ana applied her makeup carefully. Half the guests would be francophone, and though her French was rusty, it was passable, and she had found herself enjoying speaking it, even when she struggled for the right word. She felt as though she were leaving everything, even her tongue.
The party turned out to be dull. By dessert, Ana had stopped listening to the conversations around her, gazing instead out the large paned windows at the frosted streetlamps, wondering why there was no music playing.
A man in an elegant suit switched seats with a colleague in order to sit next to her. He spoke English and asked her the same questions she was always asked: What did she think of the city? Was she cold? Was she following the government corruption scandal? His name was Richard, and he had a practiced intensity, locking her gaze. As he filled her glass, Ana assessed the gray hair, the weathered but moisturized face and tidy nails. He was a type. At the end of the evening, she gave him her number when he asked for it.
The first date, Richard picked her up in his car. He took her to dinner at a restaurant in Outremont, ordering in his perfect French, complimenting Ana on her own efforts. Afterward, she went back to his apartment in Old Montreal, a prewar loft now walled with glass, with views out to the skyline.
The sex was another foreign experience. She hadn’t slept with that many people, really. She was suddenly acutely aware of how her body had changed; only James knew what she really looked like, who she had been when she had been her physical best. As Richard pulled down her tights, Ana imagined the pale blue veins in her legs. He kissed her neck and shoulders, and she saw the skin on her elbows thinning, puckered. But Richard murmured worship about her body: “You’re gorgeous,” he said, gripping and smoothing, and she let herself fall into him. He was forceful, too, and the staged roughness turned her on. She came with stuttered breath, but then he glanced at her with a triumphant gaze that made her look away.
Ana went through the courtship with the fascination of an archaeologist at a dig. This was here, all this time, and I didn’t know! She thought of him as her first adult boyfriend.
Richard sent flowers and took her to the opera, where the heels pinching her feet didn’t stop her from luxuriating in the music. He would vanish for days into his work, and that was fine. She could do the same, and he said nothing. Once, he went away to Florida for a weekend of golf with old friends. There was no talk of fidelity or future. A fifty-three-year-old man without any children spoke to long-ago decisions, not to be reopened. He never asked her why she had no children, and at first, this silence was emancipating.
And there was much silence between them, which Ana had thought she needed.
One night, Richard cooked her dinner, and they had sex, furiously, on his bed. It was only ten o’clock, but Richard lay sleeping, shirtless with a chest of gray hair, arms like a starfish. He slept in this odd way, totally untroubled. She felt a pull of longing for James, an urge to share her strange new reality with him. She knew James would find Richard outrageous; corporate and trivial. This comforted Ana somehow, for part of her agreed.
She had awoken that morning feeling that she had left a piece of herself somewhere, the way she imagined a heroin addict might feel joining the sober and straight life. This, she realized now, was how it felt to be bound to James. Their past, known only to them, could rear itself anywhere, even here, in the bedroom of another man.
Ana pulled on her underpants and went to the window. Below, on the cobblestone streets, snow lay shining, inviting in the streetlamps. She put on her skirt and her boots, washed her face in the bathroom. In a week, she would see her mother for Christmas. She had booked a hotel. She wouldn’t call James, not yet.
She left Richard sleeping.
The cold was still shocking to her. It had begun to snow, large, fat flakes that melted on Ana’s face.
She walked quickly, crunching in her boots past Christmas lights in trees. Illuminated wreaths hung from the streetlamps on Sherbrooke.
She heard the choir before she reached the church, which was modest, its stained glass clouded with dirt. They were having a rehearsal, starting and stopping, with laughter in between. Ana stood and listened until the singers fell into one another and the music rose, draping her body.
She stood for a long time in the snow that made equal the sidewalks and the shrubs, shrouding the skyscrapers. She listened to the strangers’ voices calling glory, glory through the trees of the city where she now lived.
* * *
Finn had a candy cane in one hand. A crowd of people waited outside Sarah’s door. Suspense bounced back and forth between all of them.
Finn stood on James’s feet, clutching James’s pant leg with his free hand, looking up at him.
“Let’s dance!” said Finn.
“Shh,” said James, reaching down to rub Finn’s head.
The young doctor with her hair tightly pulled back was speaking. The content of her speech mattered less than the way she was saying it, which was hot and breathless. She had not learned to mask that yet. She was thrilled.
“MRI indicates complete brain function,” she said.
“Complete?” asked James.
“Extensive therapy will be required. Hers is a serious brain injury, but she’s extraordinarily lucky.” James tried not to roll his eyes at the word “lucky.”
“James! Dance!” said Finn, hopping up and down on James’s feet. James put Finn’s candy cane in his coat pocket so they could hold hands.
“Has he been in to see her yet?” asked the doctor.
James shook his head. “We were waiting. I was waiting to talk to you guys.…”
With both of Finn’s feet on his, and their hands clasped, James began to waltz Finn around the corridor, singing: “Dance me to the end of love. La la, la la, la la …” Finn laughed. The doctors watched and waited. Finally, the routine was done, and they went inside.
Sarah looked as she had looked for the past fifteen weeks, but her eyes were open. It startled James, as though the glass eyeballs of an animal in a museum diorama had moistened. A patch of white gauze on her neck covered the hole where the tube had been. She had been liberated from the machines and brought back to a private room, which was suddenly quiet. She didn’t move her head to look at anyone in the crowd that had gathered.
His hand in James’s, Finn walked slowly toward his mother. A doctor moved a chair to the bed’s edge. Halfway there, Finn stopped, looking up at James with an expression of great concern.
“It’s okay, Finny,” he said. “She’s sick, but she’s going to get better. Do you want to say hello?”
“Yes,” he said.
James lifted him and put him on the stool. He looked down at Sarah. The marks of the stitches of her face had faded to pale shadows. Her hair was covered with a kerchief, pink and black, a gesture for Finn, James noted to himself; someone tried to cover her trauma so Finn wouldn’t be frightened.