therapy will be required. Hers is a serious brain injury, but she’s extraordinarily lucky.” James tried not to roll his eyes at the word “lucky.”
“James! Dance!” said Finn, hopping up and down on James’s feet. James put Finn’s candy cane in his coat pocket so they could hold hands.
“Has he been in to see her yet?” asked the doctor.
James shook his head. “We were waiting. I was waiting to talk to you guys—”
With both of Finn’s feet on his, and their hands clasped, James began to waltz Finn around the corridor, singing: “Dance me to the end of love. La la, la la, la la …“ Finn laughed. The doctors watched and waited. Finally, the routine was done, and they went inside.
Sarah looked as she had looked for the past fifteen weeks, but her eyes were open. It startled James, as though the glass eyeballs of an animal in a museum diorama had moistened. A patch of white gauze on her neck covered the hole where the tube had been. She had been liberated from the machines and brought back to a private room, which was suddenly quiet. She didn’t move her head to look at anyone in the crowd that had gathered.
His hand in James’s, Finn walked slowly toward his mother. A doctor moved a chair to the bed’s edge. Halfway there, Finn stopped, looking up at James with an expression of great concern.
“It’s okay, Finny,” he said. “She’s sick, but she’s going to get better. Do you want to say hello?”
“Yes,” he said.
James lifted him and put him on the stool. He looked down at Sarah. The marks of the stitches on her face had faded to pale shadows. Her hair was covered with a kerchief, pink and black, a gesture for Finn, James noted to himself; someone tried to cover her trauma so Finn wouldn’t be frightened.
Finn was silent, staring down.
“Say something, Finny,” said James, quietly.
After a long pause, in his small voice, Finn said: “Mommy, hello.”
Sarah remained unmoving.
“Lean right over her,” instructed the doctor.
James tried to show the boy how to lean over the bar’s edge, and in helping him, James was close to Sarah, too, with Finn at her face and James at her torso, when the flicker happened. Sarah turned her head slightly, and the mother and son saw each other. It was palpable, this act of seeing. The moment of recognition consumed the room like a backdraft of fire bursting through a doorway.
She opened her mouth, and the voice was rough and wooden: “Hi, love,” she said.
“Mommy,” said Finn, and he dropped his head onto her chest. Sarah’s eyes filled with tears.
James began laughing. Even as he pulled back and leaned against the wall, watching the two of them hold onto each other in disbelief, he could not stop laughing.
LATE SPRING
Ana stood by the open door of Charlie’s office. She could see him, bent over his computer, his dress shirt untucked. She knocked lightly.
Charlie looked up and at the moment of recognition, beamed.
“Ana,” he said. They went toward one another, extending hands, then fell into an awkward hug. Ana let herself be enfolded, breathing in the scent of Charlie’s neck.
“How are you?” she asked, pulling back. They stood close together in the small room.
“I’m okay,” he smiled. “Are you back for good?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“James has been in to see Lise a few times,” said Charlie. In their e-mail exchanges, Ana had given no details about why she had left. But it was clear that Charlie knew. She realized he was telling her about James’s visits for a reason; he was counselling her like a chaplain, nudging her toward her husband. “He brought Finn.”
Ana raised her eyebrows. “I didn’t know that.”
Looking at Charlie, hands in his pockets, grinning and blushing before her, Ana realized that whatever live current had been between them was snuffed out now. Ana saw Charlie’s youth, which had seemed at that last meeting in the bedroom such a thrilling unknown, as a liability. Her age was the same. The simple fact of time apart had broken their pull. He was the smart young man taking care of her mother, ushering her through these last years, to the upcoming. That was all, and comforting in itself. She was another daughter of a patient, shackled by duty and love.
“How is she?” Ana asked, but the answer didn’t really matter. It was always the same: a little worse.
Ana asked after Charlie’s lethargic roommate, and was pleased to hear he’d found work and