Everybody Has Everything - By Katrina Onstad Page 0,25
parents, their wilful ignorance about adulthood, how they chose anything else over it whenever they could. “I love you, kiddo,” said her father once when she returned from the park, eager to show him a dirty dollar bill she’d dug out of the sand. “But man, I wish I could go to India.”
Ana considered India every night, tucked away in her room where the window looked at a brick wall. She thought about cows and cinnamon and swarms of silk-swathed bodies in crayon colours, a National Geographic spread. She thought about India when they moved, lying in her room with the window that looked at another window, or the next time, when there was no bedroom for her at all but a bed in the hallway. By then, her father had his wish. He went away, transforming from flesh and blood into a series of Christmas cards and occasional phone calls. Examining the stamp (Nepal) and opening the worn, translucent envelope one year, a photograph of a young woman (blonde, like Ana’s mum had been) clutching a baby fell out: “You have a sibling!” he wrote. It took another year before Ana found out the sibling was a boy.
Her father moved to Costa Rica, and the letters never again mentioned this boy, or his mother. Ana got older and stopped opening them. And as if her father knew the audience had left the theatre, they stopped coming. Silence, now, for eight years.
So Ana and her mother became a pair. Ana went with her mother to the courthouse and, in front of the judge, erased her father’s name, took her mother’s. There was love, but also the bottle. Once her father left, Ana’s mother navigated them toward the smallest apartments in “better neighbourhoods,” a phrase peeled from the walls of her own childhood in a riverside university town. Her mother had been a child in a house that could properly be called a mansion, with a small circular swimming pool and a brainless Doberman pincer that barked at the bushes. Ana spent weeks there in the summer heat. She saw her grandmother’s long, teenage fingernails on her curved hand, shot through with purple veins; her grandfather’s high-waisted pants, his box of war medals.
They wept when Ana waved good-bye in the driveway, days before September. Her mother sat sober and stared straight ahead, shaking hands clenching the wheel.
“You don’t know what they’re really like,” she said, when Ana began to echo their wails, dramatically reaching a hand through the open window as her mother revved and reversed. “You’ll never know, thank God.”
In her own car, James looked at Ana, coiled in silence. He wondered how long her absence would last.
In the back seat, Finn yammered, incomprehensible words that James attempted to interpret, responding in a range of theatrical voices. He could make Finn laugh easily, a sound which rang the bells of James’s own pride, and moved along the knots of Ana’s spine with a tentacled, creeping dread.
Finn sat high up on a barstool at the island in the kitchen, swinging his feet, smiling.
“Maybe we should sit in the dining room. It seems like he might fall off,” said James.
“But the rug in the—” said Ana, then withdrew. “Whatever you think.”
“Finn stay up!” he cried when James went to lift him. “No! Want to stay here!”
James set him back on the stool, where he wobbled in all directions. Finn picked up the grilled cheese sandwich Ana had cooked for him, taking mouse bites around the edges. Ana and James stood side by side, staring across the island at the boy like he was a hostage, and any minute the authorities might bang the door down.
Ana began to unpack the groceries. Animal crackers; organic macaroni ‘n’ cheese; miniature apple sauces. All things she had seen at Sarah’s, empty boxes and sticky half-filled containers for Ana to step around. Where should it go? She pulled open drawers and cupboards, finally stuffing the boxes next to the white balsamic, moving aside the olive oil from a trip last spring to Umbria.
“Finish,” said Finn, dropping his sandwich and pulling himself to standing. Within a second, he had his arms high, a diver preparing for his descent. Ana let out a yelping sound and James rushed toward the boy. Ana breathed quickly; the danger Finn brought with him felt all-encompassing, like they had all been submerged together in a water tank of sharks.
She glanced at the hole in the back yard, abandoned again by the workers for