He had a few things in the spare room. During the day, he took Sarah to her appointments and Finn to daycare. Then he met with Doug at his offices, polishing a script for a new documentary about the politics of traffic.
The cat, returned from the house next door, lay on the pillow beside him while he slept. James was constantly rubbing fur from his mouth. When Finn and Sarah were asleep, James stayed up late with his laptop and the cat, fiddling with footage of Finn on the new editing software he’d bought.
His own house, his house with Ana, sat empty several blocks away. He was glad not to be there. For the first weeks that Ana was gone, friends had come by, not knowing what to say about the split. James fielded many calls, and a lasagna. People were sympathetic, but no one really knew what he had lost. He was now carrying sadness, the man who had never tasted of it, whose parents were alive, whose mother had survived carnage and spared him its description, refusing to burden him with even a single image. He knew now why she would die with that war inside her. He knew what it was to pretend anything for a child.
Sarah was like a dimmer switch slowly being turned to maximum, getting brighter every day. But there were ugly moments, too, bursts of anger followed by tears, and collapse. James took over then, cleaning the kitchen and bathing Finn, putting him to bed. But most nights, Sarah tucked him in alone, and James could hear her, singing: “ ‘You are the light in my dark world …’ ” The great mystery of the light song was solved—it turned out to be a song by an obscure eighties cow-punk band that even James had never heard of.
James brought his guitar over from the house and learned the song in a few minutes from the Internet. But Finn was indifferent to James’s performance. It turned out he cared about the singer, not the song.
When she was recovered, James would have to go. He couldn’t imagine returning to the house. Maybe Ana would come back from Montreal and want to live there. She had revealed no plans. The e-mails between them were polite; unadorned information traveling between machines.
“Ready, Freddy,” said James, picking up the bag containing a Mexican blanket and plastic containers of snacks. Finn put his hat on without a fight.
James was anxious to get Finn to the park and catch the good early afternoon light for his filming. The night before, Sarah had invited some former colleagues over for dinner. James had done the cooking so Sarah could rest and be ready. It was a gentle evening (everyone was afraid to be raucous, afraid of Sarah’s new softness), but after Finn went to sleep, James, Sarah, and the two high school teachers drank a glass of wine in the living room, and Sarah told the story of Finn’s birth.
James was determined to take this story back to Finn.
James locked the door behind him, and they headed down the street.
“You lead the way to the park,” said James, and Finn ran ahead. He was three now and had a good sense of direction.
In the distance, James saw a woman clutching a large bouquet of pink flowers. Finn stopped in front of her, and she crouched down, pulling him toward her. James picked up speed, his heart pounding. Since Halloween, he was prepared at any moment for rescue—and then he saw the woman rise. Finn turned and came running back toward him.
“Ana! James! It’s Ana!”
James felt short of breath. She got closer. Her blond hair was longer and her face a little rounder. My Ana, he thought. My wife of a different substance. My vapor wife. But she was really there, watching him. He ran his fingers rapidly across the raised scar on his knuckles.
She stopped, across from him but still far away. “Hi,” she said.
“You’re here,” said James.
“I’m sorry. I should have called. It was spontaneous. I wanted to see Sarah, but I didn’t know—”
“Let’s go to the park now!” said Finn, tugging on James’s sleeve. “Come! James! Come to the park! Ana!”
Ana stared at James. Bats flapped inside her torso.
Ana gestured at Finn, running ahead again. “You’re going out.”
“I promised him. We’re working on this movie and …” James rubbed his face, fumbling in Ana’s presence.
“Should I go to the house? Is Sarah there?” asked Ana.
“She is, but she’s sleeping. She won’t get up for another couple of hours.”
“Oh,” said Ana, looking down at the flowers in her hand. They seemed suddenly ridiculous.
“Do you—you could come to the park with us, and then, you know—come back after …” James had wondered how he would feel at such a meeting, and now he knew: He was famished for her. He didn’t want her to go yet. He needed to show her that he was not the bleeding mess she’d left in November, and that even then, he hadn’t been the mess she’d presumed. He wanted a chance.
Ana smiled. “I’ll come,” she said.
Finn reappeared and chatted as the three walked to the park. He and James had banter: “Tell Ana about the goose at the farm.” “It had a bad foot!” said Finn. “Tell Ana about your favorite color.” “Green!” “What things are green?”
Ana was impressed. He had found his gift. For the first time, she didn’t feel excluded. It wasn’t her failure; it was their victory.
She thought suddenly how in all their time together, there must have been a moment where that other life would have been possible. If they had been able to have a child easily, or accidentally, then maybe the propulsion would have kept them aloft. They would have been like everybody else, never looking down because they wouldn’t have had to. But without either of them noticing, that moment had passed. Motherhood had passed. They got this instead.
Ana felt the sun on her face and heard the sounds of other people’s children, and she didn’t want to mourn anymore.
She stood back, holding the pink flowers and James’s bag as he pushed Finn in the swing. Then his phone rang, and he called to her: “Can you take over?”
“Sure, sure,” she said, putting the bag on a bench.
“Higher, Ana!” cried Finn as Ana pushed him, glancing at James, pacing under the tree with his phone. She startled at the sight of James’s arm in his T-shirt, the twist of muscle and lean forearm. She knew every inch of that arm and felt like she was seeing a part of her own body that had been hidden away under a cast for months.
“It was Doug,” said James, putting his BlackBerry in his pocket, returning to take over. But Finn had found a daycare friend and was immersed in sandcastle building. Ana and James sat on a bench, side by side.
“You look good,” said James.
“So do you. No more beard.” James touched his chin.
“Do I look younger?”
Ana laughed. “Not really. Sorry.”
“Dammit.”
Finn was placing twigs in the castle, making arms or antennae.
“How’s Sarah?”
“She’s a miracle patient. The brain just kicked in. Where the connections were damaged from the accident, her brain made new connections. No one really knows why.”
Ana nodded. “I do.”
“Why?” asked James.
“She needed to get back to Finn.”
They watched him frowning while he built, as if everything depended on the height of this castle. He worked so earnestly that Ana felt like applauding. Maybe he would be an engineer, she thought, like his father.
James looked at her looking at Finn. She was smiling at first, and then she tilted her head, and it was as if she was looking through Finn, and through all the children in the playground, and through the parents, too, spectral along the park’s edges. She was looking ahead of them all, into old age and after, as if she had set her eyes on what was waiting there and made peace with it. And James wanted to be with her while she went, weakening and old, to where they would all end up, the parents and the children. He wanted her, wanted her under his fingernails, in his mouth.