Finn was silent, staring down.
“Say something, Finny,” said James quietly.
After a long pause, in his small voice, Finn said: “Mommy, hello.”
Sarah remained unmoving.
“Lean right over her,” instructed the doctor.
James tried to show the boy how to lean over the bar’s edge, and in helping him, James was close to Sarah, too, with Finn at her face and James at her torso, when the flicker happened. Sarah turned her head slightly, and the mother and son saw each other. It was palpable, this act of seeing. The moment of recognition consumed the room like a back draft of fire bursting through a doorway.
She opened her mouth, and the voice was rough and wooden: “Hi, love,” she said.
“Mommy,” said Finn, and he dropped his head onto her chest. Sarah’s eyes filled with tears.
James began laughing. Even as he pulled back and leaned against the wall, watching the two of them hold on to each other in disbelief, he could not stop laughing.
Late Spring
ANA STOOD BY the open door of Charlie’s office. She could see him, bent over his computer, his dress shirt untucked. She knocked lightly.
Charlie looked up and, at the moment of recognition, beamed.
“Ana,” he said. They went toward each other, extending hands, then fell into an awkward hug. Ana let herself be enfolded, breathing in the scent of Charlie’s neck.
“How are you?” she asked, pulling back. They stood close together in the small room.
“I’m okay.” He smiled. “Are you back for good?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“James has been in to see Lise a few times,” said Charlie. In their e-mail exchanges, Ana had given no details about why she had left. But it was clear that Charlie knew. She realized he was telling her about James’s visits for a reason; he was counseling her like a chaplain, nudging her toward her husband. “He brought Finn.”
Ana raised her eyebrows. “I didn’t know that.”
Looking at Charlie, hands in his pockets, grinning and blushing before her, Ana realized that whatever live current had been between them was snuffed out now. Ana saw Charlie’s youth, which had seemed at that last meeting in the bedroom such a thrilling unknown, as a liability. Her age was the same. The simple fact of time apart had broken their pull. He was the smart young man taking care of her mother, ushering her through these last years, to the upcoming. That was all, and comforting in itself. She was another daughter of a patient, shackled by duty and love.
“How is she?” Ana asked, but the answer didn’t really matter. It was always the same: a little worse.
Ana asked after Charlie’s lethargic roommate and was pleased to hear he’d found work and had been separated at last from his couch. Charlie was going home soon, he said, to be with his parents for a week, out west. Ana described Montreal, the mountain in the middle of it, and the spring changing the trees.
She hugged him again quickly and turned to leave. She was almost out the door when he said her name.
Charlie went to his desk and pulled a CD from a drawer.
“I’ve been hanging on to this for you. It has the original of that song you liked, from that night at the bar.” Ana looked at the cover: Lone Justice. Lots of eyeliner on a pretty face framed by tendrils of blond hair.
“I got it used. No one’s really buying CDs anymore. You can get anything,” said Charlie. “It’s the last song.”
“Thank you. That’s very sweet,” said Ana, slipping the disc in her purse. She was grateful for the reminder of that beautiful song, and that evening she had needed so much, during the autumn of Finn.
In her room, Lise sat in a chair. Someone had placed plastic flowers on the dresser, of no determinate type, which had accumulated a thin layer of dust. Ana wiped the leaves with a Kleenex.
Lise’s recognition seemed to be moving in and out today, like a kaleidoscope brought to full length, then collapsed, then back again, over and over. “How is James?” said Lise, pushing her hair (slightly dirty, Ana observed) behind her ears.
“He’s all right,” said Ana, sitting on the edge of the bed. “We’re not together right now.”
Lise nodded. Ana tried to interpret the nod: Maybe James had told her mother of their breakup, or perhaps she was remembering Ana’s explanation in the fall, or at Christmas. She wondered what James’s version of events would sound like, but her mother would never be able to recount that conversation to her, if it had happened at all.
“How’s your father? What’s his name?”
Ana laughed. “Mom, I haven’t heard from him in years.”
“Yes, I know. But what’s his name?”
“Conrad.”
“Yes, Conrad,” said her mother. “Conrad.” A wide look of pleasure came over Lise’s face, and she grinned. “Oh, Ana. We were at the beach. It was a very white beach, so hot that when I came out of the water, I couldn’t walk on the sand because it burned my feet.” Ana didn’t know where her mother was in this memory. Perhaps somewhere in Greece or Italy, years before Ana was born, when her parents were skimming the globe together.
“Did Dad carry you across the sand?”
Lise laughed. “Oh, no. I waited in the shallow part of the sea until the sun set. We both did. We sat down on our bums in the water and waited for the sand to cool.”
Ana squeezed her mother’s hand. Lise looked at her, and Ana could see the memory vanishing.
“I’m having a good day,” said Lise.
“Yes, I think you are.”
“Who are you?” The question would never cease to take away Ana’s breath.
“I’m your daughter. I’m Ana. You’re my mother.”
“I know that,” said Lise, snappishly. Then she sighed: “But not a very good mother.”
“You did the best you could.”
Lise looked over Ana’s head, toward the window, which was open, letting a warm breeze move across them both.
“I loved Conrad,” said Lise.
She looked back at Ana. “Oh my,” she said, as if startled by what she saw. Ana knew that she was always being seen anew by her mother, which might have been liberating, but somehow felt exactly the opposite.
Lise searched her daughter’s face and said, finally: “What are you so afraid of?”
Ana didn’t know how much meaning to ascribe to this question and suppressed the sensation that she was being had, searching for profundity where there was none. Any revelations were just the brain seizing and releasing, and not her mother at all. She tried to believe this.
“Do I seem afraid, Mom?”
“I loved being your mother,” said Lise. Ana nodded, bracing herself.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Lise, loosening her grip on her daughter’s hand. “Don’t be so afraid.”
James finished with the sunscreen and stood back to admire his handiwork. It was one of the first days hot enough to require lotion. James was now learning about Finn in spring, and what he needed: hats and sunscreen, water bottles and sandals.
Finn smiled up at him. James reached out and rubbed a white splotch from the boy’s nose.
“Ready, Freddy,” said Finn.
Sarah was sleeping upstairs in her bedroom. The day she came home from the hospital, six weeks earlier, James sat in the back of the medical van with her while Mike and Jennifer looked after Finn. Under the rim of her baseball hat, Sarah frowned at the fuss, but when they hit a speed bump and her wheelchair shifted lightly in its locks on the floor, she looked terrified. James moved into the house that day, without any discussion.