Everybody Has Everything - By Katrina Onstad Page 0,1
sound of the machines clapping and whirring was like a language, the body announcing itself to this room, singing its name: Sarah.
This room. James glanced around at all the people who emerged then, slowly, in full relief. Unfamiliar faces and, in the middle, a male nurse cradling a bundle of sheets in his arms. Out of the sheets, dangling in the air, was a foot encased in a small white running shoe. James moved then, fast toward the sheets, which were not sheets at all, but a boy, and not a boy, but Finn. Marcus and Sarah’s Finn. It was the longest walk James had ever taken, those six steps through a room of strangers, his arms out, his body trembling.
“Give him to me,” he whispered hoarsely, angry at the time between the now and the boy he needed to put to his chest, angry that no one had given him over sooner. He grabbed the bundle, and My God, it was still warm, which meant he was alive – didn’t it? And then something happened that was not of this earth, that was transporting, undenied. The bundle shook to life, let loose a howl never heard before, a howl from a place in the boy of all knowing, of the mines beneath the beneath, a sound of despair that rolled like a boulder over James. He held the boy closer, the boy who would soon be too big for this kind of holding, his legs dangling from James’s torso, a sneaker on one foot, a dirty sock on the other, as if he had been running. The sticky black tar was not tar, James recognized finally, but blood. Blood in Finn’s blonde hair that James was weeping into, keening along with him but holding on, holding him, the unbreakable, undroppable boy.
Ana became a mother during a conference call.
Staring out the window, she had just finished leaning into her desk phone, explaining the history of solid-state drives over the speaker, an opinion based on two weeks’ worth of research delivered that morning in bound copies and via e-mail. The air outside was bluest blue and a surprise burst of early autumn warmth wrapped gold around the city. Her cell phone shook on her desk. She ignored it.
“Mark? Any thoughts?” Rick Saliman’s voice always sounded clearest. He had a more expensive conferencing phone in his office, three floors up.
She listened as the men turned over the information, searching its crevices for a way to save their client, a multi-million dollar tech company that had behaved like a shoplifting teenager tucking a piece of cutting edge technology in his pants and scurrying out of the office the day before a merger.
A text message appeared: COME HOME URGENT ACCIDENT J. Instantly, lightly, Ana stood up, dropping a pen from her hand and leaving it to roll off her desk.
“If you’re done with me, I have to take another call,” she said, and hit the button to disconnect.
She must have grabbed her coat, her bag, but only in the elevator did she notice where she was. She tried to call James, but he didn’t answer. Then, with a boneless finger, she hit the number of her mother’s nursing home.
“I’m looking for Lise Laframbroise,” she said. “I’m her daughter.”
“She’s at lunch. Do you want me to page her?”
Ana hung up, put her hand, that same empty hand, up in the air until a cab pulled over. She instructed the driver to take her home, and he began ploughing through thick traffic.
“I’ll take University,” he said, and Ana noted the dots of sweat lined up like a smile at the base of his bald head.
Even as it was happening, she was aware that she would remember that ride forever: the rising heat outside; the traffic on University; the cyclist in her skirt, hiked up a little too far so that a dangerous flash of white underwear revealed itself with each push of the leg.
The third number she dialled was Sarah’s. No answer.
She texted James: I’m coming.
And a response, instantaneous beeping: UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL, which was approaching in the distance, an odd, jarring coincidence. The wide boulevard the driver had chosen held several hospitals. Patients wandered the sidewalks slowly, in hospital gowns. A man smoked, leaning on an IV drip.
“I’m sorry, can you take me to University Hospital instead, please?”
The taxi swung across three lanes, setting off honking. The driver stuck his fist out the window.
Ana felt that if she were in a movie, she would grab a