as she read about Carver, too drunk to notice his editor thieving his words, she couldn’t fathom why Sarah had recommended it. She often seemed to hold an image of Ana that was entirely foreign to Ana’s own conception of herself. Sarah had told Ana when they first met that she thought Ana looked like a figure skater. Even James had no idea what this meant.
But Ana couldn’t concentrate on the story. She was pulled back to the meeting of the previous evening, and the blonde, quivering woman in the Chinese slippers who had told them she would “set things in motion.” Uncharacteristically, James had arranged the meeting, calling people who knew people for recommendations and booking the appointment. Ana rushed to be on time after a long meeting and met him outside the agency doors. She was still red-faced from her sprint when she learned that yes, they were good candidates for international adoption. The white woman in the Chinese slippers told them this while sitting beneath a giant oil painting of the Great Wall of China. Now they had to find a social worker who would come by the house and interview them. Several meetings for several thousand dollars. And then, if they passed, it was back to the agency, and a series of courses on cultural sensitivity, and several thousand more dollars. And then their names at the bottom of a long scroll that could take years to wash up on the shores of China.
Ana drank tea and ate her flavourless sushi, prying apart the upcoming invasion. “It’s bullshit,” James had said. “But we have to do it.” He was determined, and with James, that was significant. Still, it was Ana who had spent the years before being opened and scraped. Now she would have to do it again, but in her own house.
She was waiting for the softness, the cool white space. Ana had invented this state of being when she was a child, lying in bed during the loudest parties, the doors slamming and the accelerated roar of her mother’s nightlife. Or even on a quiet night, alone with her mother, watching her shape shift over the course of the evening, the ice cubes clattering in the tray, and the bottles ringing in the garbage against the other bottles – then, poof. Ana could vanish. She thought of the white space as a destination, a place she had to get to in order to block the noise. Now the noise came from the woman at the adoption agency: “And Ana, what kind of hours do you work?” The voice hungry for judgment.
Ana arrived, finally, at her white space, even and unsullied. She paid her bill and stepped outside.
As soon as she re-entered the human stream on King Street, Ana recognized the girl in the cardigan from work. She was smoking, walking slowly, wearing the very same cardigan, buttoned properly. If Ana walked as slowly as this girl, it would look like she was stalking her. She wanted to cross the street, to ignore her, to make her vanish, but it seemed impossible not to be found out. She walked at her normal pace, and was quickly next to her. She said: “Hello, Ruth.”
“Oh!” said Ruth, putting her cigarette behind her back, as if her mother had snuck up behind her at school.
“Did you have lunch out?”
Ruth shook her head. “I can’t really afford it. I just went for a smoke.”
Ana recognized the phrasing as something rural and coarse. She sounded like Ana’s distant cousins, who said things like: “I’m going to the can.”
“It is a nice day,” said Ana. “How are you doing anyway? How do you find it in the office?” Ana had a flash of altruism, pictured herself as the kind of lawyer who might take the girl in, mentor her. She had been to a few of these events in the past, wearing a pink ribbon for charity and walking a few kilometres with other women lawyers. Legs looked pale in their shorts, and everyone seemed vaguely embarrassed. Ana had not been able to stop herself from beginning to jog, slowly at first, and then running. The walking women were far behind when Ana finished the course before anyone else and left quickly.
Another time, at a luncheon called Women Lawyers: A Dialogue About Transformative Leadership, she had sat at a table with a group of married associates, mother lawyers she had rarely seen on the fifteenth floor. They exchanged numbers about outsourcing: