across the street. A few patients had been wheeled there, and they sat with their wheelchairs pointed toward the jungle gym like it was a television. Knit blankets sausaged their legs. Their faces ranged from glazed to sleeping. A nurse, jacket over her green uniform, huddled and smoked, ashing behind her back.
“Come in and say hi. She’d like it,” said Ana. James nodded.
It had taken forty-five minutes to reach the home. Ana had carefully chosen this old age home, in a quiet, unvisited patch of the city. It had a good reputation, but that wasn’t why Ana chose it: placing her mother in a home closer to their house was unthinkable. Ana couldn’t imagine being out on one of her night jogs and running past a building that contained her mother, or turning a corner to see it on her way home from an evening out. Her mother being groomed and fed in the daylight was an image of some comfort, but to think of her locked in at night, her favourite time of the day, forced into her room like a cat in a cage – this wasn’t something she could bear to stumble upon accidentally.
There was the unbuckling and the gathering of gear that had spread across the car during the drive – water bottle, diaper bag, book, octopus toy. Finn himself came last, the final object.
Finn ran whooping up the wheelchair ramp, then hopped in and out of the electric sliding doors. James did the same, leaning his body outside: “In!” he called when the doors began to shut and then opened again as he kicked a leg over the invisible line. “Check it out, Finny! Out! In! Out! In!”
Ana signed her name in the reception book. “Hi, Lana,” she said.
“Hi, Ms. Laframboise,” said the nurse loudly. Lana spoke to the patients the way she, Ana, spoke to Finn: masking her discomfort with volume. It was Lana who put up the flimsy photographs of pumpkins and elves around the holidays, cut from women’s magazines. Now, in early fall, with nothing to celebrate, little circles of cellophane tape peeled off the walls.
Ana scanned the offices behind Lana for her favourite person in this place, the young man that James jokingly called Charlie the Chaplain. Charlie had been a tree-planter in B.C. in his early twenties, and that was only a few years ago. Now he crouched and spoke kindly to the men and women who punctuated the corridors and dining area. Ana had seen him walking from room to room turning off televisions where patients had fallen asleep. Ana could talk to him about neural pathways and reasons, and he always had an unsentimental, interesting bit of science on hand to soothe her. There was nothing evangelical in him; no condescension, no appetite for cuteness in a space abundant with both. Ana wondered if she could talk to him about Finn, and the uncertainty that was swelling in her. But she felt too shy to ask for him, picturing his lean body, his alert eyes.
“Harry Glick died. Do you remember him?” said Lana.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“He and your mother used to eat together quite often. You might want to speak to her about the loss.”
Ana tried to imagine that conversation and suppressed a laugh.
In his knit hat with frog eyes on the top, Finn was a rock star in the nursing home. The halls cleared for him. Spotting the boy, an old woman with a walker, spine like a C, stopped and, with the exertion of a body builder, raised one fist in a small cheer. Wheelchairs ceased their slow crawl and murmured. Ana had never seen so many smiling faces. They erased the smell of antiseptic and dish soap.
What a horror movie for Finn, thought James. The half-living inmates roused from their coffins. He kept the boy close, their hands locked together. James glanced at him and was surprised to find that he did not look frightened. He looked curious, which was his most common look; a mouth like an O.
James watched Ana gain her rigidity; she could not know how angry she looked, how frightened. It was an expression she wore only in this place, breaking it slightly to smile at the occasional patient as if cued to do so.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Wainwright,” said Ana. Mr. Wainwright, a former civic politician of some prominence (he developed the city’s waterfront in the fifties – a factoid that popped into James’s head as if in a cartoon