half-running away from the brothel house.
Finn screamed like an injured bird, high and squawking. James glanced back to see the door to the brothel open and a woman’s shape appear. She was transparent, the tops of her bare legs covered by a long T-shirt. She held a cigarette by her hip. James moved quickly away.
They approached their house like this, with Finn wailing, a slab of snot and tears across James’s body, his legs kicking. Ana opened the door to them.
“I heard you coming,” she said, glancing up the street toward the other houses, their insides lit up in the dusk. Noise travelled between the houses and got trapped, like a tunnel.
James dropped Finn on the couch. The boy lay on his back, still screaming and kicking. Electrocution. Drowning. Ana hovered in the doorway.
“Is this normal?” she had to shout to be heard.
“I don’t fucking know!” screamed James.
“What are you going to do?”
He glanced at her. She was shivering; she looked barely born.
James went to Finn, squatting down, trying to pin him like a wrestler.
“It’s okay! Finny! It’s okay!”
Finn’s arms flailed and his small right fist jutted upwards, clocking James in the eye. James reeled back; Ana screamed, and at that sound, Finn went still and silent at last, shocked to hear Ana scream, shocked to see James, his hand over his eye, staggering backward in a stream of fuckfuckfuck.
Finn sat, bewildered, his face streaked.
Ana was upon James, pulling back his hand, looking at his eye, a small trickle of blood.
“Oh my God,” she said.
“His fingernails are too long,” said James.
“His fingernails!” gasped Ana, reaching for the blood. Finn watched from wide eyes as Ana quickly stroked James’s hair, then hurried to the bathroom for supplies.
James watched her leave the room and felt the familiarity of Ana in charge. Something fluttered nearby, in the corner of his bloodied eye. Finn, terrified on the couch, quivering.
“Hey,” said James, opening his arms. “It’s okay. It was an accident.”
“Sorry,” said Finn, flinging himself into James’s embrace. James wondered if he could hear the man’s heart up against his child’s ear.
“Me, too.”
Ana came upon them like this, a tube of medicine in her hand. She had the strange impulse to turn around and give them the privacy they looked like they deserved.
James knew how to reclaim Finn. He whispered to him until he began laughing, rocked him gently.
“Kleenex,” said James, with his hand out. She frowned, but found him a Kleenex in her purse.
“Blow,” said James, and Finn did.
Finn’s breathing slowed to something human. James sang quietly: “Rockin’ rockin’ leprechauns, they’ve come back to rock ‘n’ roll …” Finn smiled.
Ana blurted: “Look, Finn, I picked up some of your things.”
James glanced at her.
“I left work early,” she said. Finn was off James’s lap, toward a stack of books on the coffee table. Ana had lined up his toys as if they were for sale: a puzzle, a small Thomas the Tank Engine, a flashlight.
“Scaredy Squirrel!” he crowed, flipping pages.
In this way, the evening was rescued.
There was a pattern now, after only a week. The script was foreign to Ana but James recognized in it shades of his own childhood. In James’s earliest memories, he was only a little older than Finn, in kindergarten. James and his brother walked home from school together past rows of identical stucco houses differentiated only by the garages: single or double, left or right. Lawns were square. Trees were thin and young. James’s mother waited in the kitchen with a tray of Yugoslavian cookies. James and Michael sat cross-legged in front of the television. James licked the frosting off the cookies, leaving the soggy wet breadstick. No one else had these cookies in the unmarked plastic bags from the market downtown.
With his mother’s nudging and prodding, the family moved from wake-up to breakfast, from breakfast to school, school to sports, and on through the steps until bedtime, when James leaned between her knees as she combed his wet hair. The entire day’s effort designed to push the clock toward sleep beneath Star Wars sheets.
If James’s father ever brushed James’s hair, he tugged and pulled with bear hands. He had a job like Ana’s that bored James to the point of cruelty. He came home late and got up early, always catching the train into the city or back from the city. Where is he? “He’s on the train,” said his mom. So when James pictured his father, he was astride a train: a superhero with legs dangling past the