Everybody Has Everything - By Katrina Onstad Page 0,9

of her inner life would appall Sarah, that this was not how Sarah wanted to think of her new friends. She often got Ana to talk about her life with her mother, her itinerant upbringing amongst the downtown artists and drunks. These stories made Sarah red with excitement, and they woke up Ana, too. She felt breathless sometimes to talk about herself in this way, as if she were recounting the racy chapters in a book she had read. But there were details Ana would not share, because she knew they would sour the bohemian fantasy. She didn’t tell Sarah about the famous blues musician who breathed cigarette smoke onto her hair and ran a finger under the collar of her sweatshirt when she was eleven years old, stopping there only because her mother entered the kitchen. That time, her mother did something: she slapped his hand away. A week later, they moved again.

“We need to take it back to Jesus,” said James.

“You propose living by Jesus’s doctrine?” asked Marcus.

“Well, I mean, I can’t, but even people who reject Christianity dig Jesus. Who’s not down with Jesus?”

Sarah shifted and unstuck the baby, who emerged endlessly out of the sling. A magician pulling a toy snake out of a hat.

“He’s a long guy,” said James.

Finn made a hissing sound, then burped. Sarah patted his back, and he flopped over her shoulder. James saw the baby’s reflection in the living room window, his head bobbing. He looked like Casper the Friendly Ghost, this bald kid. James wondered if anyone would be offended if he made this observation out loud. Marcus was easygoing, but it was hard to know for sure; the women were the ones bonding in this foursome. They went for lunch when James was on the road for work. What did they talk about? James tried to imagine Ana talking about him, their sex life, his balding head.

James wondered if Marcus possessed a less genial side. He couldn’t figure out where to place him yet, if he should invite him to shinny or take him to a lecture. He couldn’t quite see a future with Marcus in it. Marcus did not smoke.

“Does anyone want to hold him? I’m pretending to ask politely, but I’m actually begging,” said Sarah.

“I will.” James rarely saw his nephew and nieces, though they lived only a half-hour from his home. Holding his nephew as a baby, he had felt that he was holding a mewing, grotesquely small version of his brother. He kept expecting the baby to sit up and say: “So, Jimmy. I made an awesome trade today! Markets are up!” The boy bucked and twisted in his arms. But when held by his mother, as if to make a point, he softened, even cooed. This had seemed to James to indicate a future mean streak. He had kept his distance since.

But Finn was more of a public concern. Happy in all arms, he seemed to belong to everyone. He sat propped in James’s lap, facing outward with his legs straight in front, shaking a plastic cup. “Ba,” he said. “Babababa.”

“Exactly,” said James.

James had developed an unspoken narrative in which he and Finn had a special bond. He did not tell Ana how it made him feel, this warm bag of socks over his shoulder, the pleasure he got when Finn moved his penny-shaped mouth.

He was certain that Ana was still heartbroken, as sick inside now as after the third miscarriage, when she vanished for four days, leaving only one voicemail. She returned in the same clothes she left in, walked past James in the foyer, and straight into the shower. While she showered, James looked in her purse and found nothing, until, at the bottom, his fingertips touched a layer of sand. Sand! She had driven all the way to Lake Superior, she finally told him, her hair wrapped in a white bath sheet, seated on the edge of the white duvet. She had gone to see the rock in the shape of the old woman, and she’d slept in a motel with a sanitation sash across the toilet and a hundred channels. Those were the details she shared.

She felt better, she told him, and she was sorry.

James stood outside the door to the bathroom as she showered, wondering if he should get angry, wondering if this great writhing hatred within was visible to her. He did not want to find out, so he brought her tea, rubbed her back as she fell