but privately ruined.
James took her upstairs to look in on Finn. Ann Silvan went to the edge of the bed and leaned over his gently sleeping form. She didn’t wake him. She said she would return in the morning. She told them the police were not concerned, that everything was routine. She told them not to worry.
Ana took almost nothing from the house. A large suitcase stood in front of the James’s desk, where their printer sat. James leaned in the doorway as she ran off her tickets.
Down the hall, Finn napped.
“What about your books?”
“Don’t need them.”
It was the first time she had entered the house in a week, but she’d been in his dreams so much lately that her actual presence made James feel like he was asleep. He was exhausted: sleep came in quick furious bursts, electric with Ana, and then he’d wake and stay that way until the sun came up, looking at his empty room, his empty house.
Ana had been living in a downtown suite that the firm owned. She worked until one or two in the morning and then collapsed into bed. Only when James asked her about the hotel did she realize she couldn’t describe a single physical detail of where she’d been sleeping. Maybe wallpaper?
And now she was going to live in another hotel suite in another city.
“You’ll need your winter jacket,” said James.
“I shipped it.”
Seeing him made her angrier than she had expected. She didn’t flick aside her anger, either, but kept it close, her eyes down, pushing past him with her suitcase jostling his body.
“I’ll take it,” said James.
“Don’t,” she said. They collided a little, disentangled, and made it downstairs with Ana carrying the bag.
“Ana—” said James.
He shadowed her as she did one final sweep of the house, picking up a few letters and a reusable coffee mug. She considered the mug, then put it back down on the edge of a bookshelf where it had left a brown ring. She called a taxi on her cell phone, giving the address with the prickly awareness that she might never say it again.
In the living room, James moved in front of her. “Ana, I’m sorry. I said this in my e-mail: it was nothing, a drunken grope – I was going to tell you – I was even writing it that day—”
Finally, she looked at him, scanning his face angrily. James was relieved to have her eyes; it seemed like progress somehow. “So you get to shed your little story and I get a picture of my husband getting blown by a twenty-year-old?” said Ana. “I don’t want your confession. That’s your burden.”
Ana walked past him, kicking at the mess on the floor, the toys and dirty clothes. The entire house smelled like blackened banana. She opened the door. Leaves spun on the pathway outside.
James suddenly moved in front of her, slamming the door.
“Let me go,” said Ana.
“Ana, I’ve – been thinking—” He moved to grab her arms, then thought better of it and clasped his hands together. “Here’s the thing: We don’t have to live here, right? We could move to one of those small towns outside the city, with a big yard. People are doing that now. We could scale down. Maybe I could do something totally different, get into my music – you can take the train into the city. I’ll look after Finn – just simplify, right? Just get back to the land—”
“We were never on the land, James.” Ana tried to get past him.
“But we could try it. We could leave, and really try being a family—”
Ana threw her hands in front of her face and yelled: “I don’t want it! I don’t want to be raising everybody!” Her jaw clenched. “What if I had gotten pregnant? I’d be here, at home, glued to a baby, and where would you be? Off with some intern?”
“I would never do that to you.”
“But you did it.” She wiped her nose with her sleeve. “For one night, you did what you wanted. You’re always the one who gets to be free.”
“Okay then, let’s go back. Let’s go backwards. We’ll be like we were before, but with Finn—”
“And have more brunches? And go on more holidays? And all the time, you’ll be thinking: My empty wife. My poor empty wife. The one thing you need, the one thing that will make you grow up, I can’t give you. Do you forget that? Do you forget that I don’t make babies?”
“Neither do