“I didn’t put my shoes away,” he said, as she picked up his sneakers from the middle of the floor and placed them, toes out, in the closet.
“How about: Sorry, I didn’t put my shoes away.” She moved like a machete hacking the reeds, clearing, clearing, clearing.
“Okay, sorry,” said James, just a touch of sarcasm. “It says here the ideal bedtime for a two-year-old is seven p.m.”
“Mmm,” said Ana.
“It also says we should get baby soap. He could get eczema.”
Ana was lost in her movements, saying nothing. James used to joke about the tidying. When they left her apartment to go out, James would help, putting the clean dishes in the cupboards and emptying the food trap in the sink. Then he’d stand at the door waiting and announce: “All locked down, Cappy!” In those days, Ana had smiled and laughed and, in doing so, admitted this need as eccentricity. There’s no shame in it anymore, thought James. And God knows, no comedy.
She finally climbed into bed next to him, propped up by pillows. James threw several to the ground. He placed his computer on the table and leaned to face Ana, but she was up much higher than he was, and he could see only fragments of her, smell the crook of her arm. The pillows made them silly.
“We didn’t brush his teeth,” said James.
Ana answered with a question. “What do we do tomorrow?”
“Daycare, I guess. They said to keep the routine, and it’s Monday.”
“God, is today Sunday?” Ana felt stuffed with questions, as if they would tumble out and fill the room if she dared open her mouth, a fisherman’s net releasing question marks. What she wanted was an explanation, but for what? She could sense James getting sentimental next to her, curling closer, trying to hold her hand, which lay limp above the covers.
She was waiting for the softness, the cool white space. Ana had invented this state of being when she was a child, lying in bed during the loudest parties, the doors slamming and the accelerated roar of her mother’s nightlife. Or even on a quiet night, alone with her mother, watching her shape shift over the course of the evening, the ice cubes clattering in the tray, and the bottles ringing in the garbage against the other bottles—then, poof. Ana could vanish. She thought of the white space as a destination, a place she had to get to in order to block the noise. Now the noise came from the social worker: “And Ana, what kind of hours do you work?” The voice hungry for judgment.
And then the social worker was silenced by Sarah’s light laughter, ringing gently. Ana squeezed her eyes shut.
“Where were they going?” Ana asked. “Were they going to get groceries? What was the point?”
“I don’t know,” said James. Ana opened her eyes and frowned.
“It’s going to be okay,” said James. Abruptly, Ana reached for the light, sliding down past the pillows onto her back, so that not even her head was elevated. Now James was too high, looking down at her.
Ana pictured Sarah alone in her own bed, suspended from tubes, that yellow sunflower bruise across her eye, the black stitches slicing her face. A goalie’s mask glowing in a dark hospital room.
James had his own vision: Marcus in the drawer. A life-size doll of Marcus.
“What’s happening?” she asked, strangled, and James went down to her so they were face to face. He stroked her hair, murmuring. She let him. She gave that to him until, somewhere in the middle, it felt like something she wanted, too.
* * *
Two years before, on a spring morning, side by side in narrow chairs, Ana and James had received the third opinion, which was the same as the first two.
The specialist was young and well known in certain parts of the city. As he delivered the news, his features puckered and aged with a sadness that struck Ana as suspect.
“Okay, then,” said Ana, gathering to go, wanting to escape the sensation that she should comfort this celebrity doctor.
After, across from the subway station on the gravel path that cut through an orderly church lawn, Ana held James. He did not weep exactly, but pulsed evenly on her shoulder—in and out—his face buried in her wool coat. A mechanical sound. Ana pictured a bright silver electronic heart held aloft by a surgeon and then—plunk—dropped into James’s open chest.
Above him, she raised her head and looked up at the flat blue sky.
What to make of this sudden calmness that wiped her down, erasing the faint, pulling panic she had lived with for two years? It was the relief of shutting the hotel room door after a day in a New York mob. It was the feeling she used to get when she was totally alone at the end of a long, loud evening out, sitting on her couch in the old apartment that only she lived in.
“Then we can look into adoption,” James said, pulling apart, wiping his face on his sleeve.
Ana nodded.
“Or surrogacy,” he said.
Ana nodded again, then turned back to the sky.
“They have great weather,” she said.
A streetcar slid by, noisily, and Ana couldn’t hear, but saw James’s mouth move: “What?”
“Great weather for the wedding.”
James looked at her, and she could see him thinking: This is how she copes. It was likely that he had read an article or written a segment for his show on how to comfort her in the event of this confirmation that they were indeed in that select statistical sliver for whom treatments were useless.
“Do they care about the weather? It’s indoors, isn’t it?” He touched her hair. She reached up and took his hand.
“We should get ready.”
“Whatever you need.”
Ana dropped his hand, deciding that not holding it was what she needed.
She was surprised to have been invited to the wedding. Sarah and Marcus were new friends. The four of them were tentative around one another still, counting on the wine to pull them through.
James followed Ana through the church gardens. She stooped to pick up a half-empty McDonald’s cup of Coke. James watched her: her foot popping ever so slightly out of the arch of those black shoes that looked like ballet slippers. He didn’t think about her beauty, but her lightness, the sense of upward motion in her body at all times, the ever-present possibility that she might bend her knees, push off, and float up and away from him.
“Just leave it.”
“It’s too pretty here for all this garbage.”
This wasn’t true. Ana was projecting a month into the future, when the famous gardens would be in bloom. At the time she received the referral, she had been pleased that the doctor’s office was so close to the church, picturing bougainvillea and tulips bracketing each visit. But her timing had been off. Their first appointment had been in winter, when snow blanketed the grounds. Now the gardens were just dirt beds, thawing, and the grass was patchy, defeated. And they wouldn’t be back for the bougainvillea. They were done. Ana carried the cup in front of her, arm straight, thumb and pointer finger just skimming the rim, the other fingers curled into her palm like a TV dad confronting his first dirty diaper.
Ana deposited the cup in a garbage bin. Following, James glanced over the bin’s edge. Soda everywhere, soaking old newspapers and fried chicken bones and dog shit and a single needle.
He walked behind her to the parking lot. He knew that he cried too easily, and the crying acted like a defenseman’s shoulder check, sent her flying. But still he hoped, just a little, that she might break. Then he could be wonderful.
“Give me a second,” he said.
Ana sat in the car while James lit a cigarette, leaning on the hood, frowning. In the sky, a flag appeared. Wind must have loosed it from a pole, and now it flapped above James’s head, moving closer, as if preparing to drop and cover him. And then the flag revealed itself to be, in fact, a flock of birds, diving down in a solid, waving page.