Everybody Has Everything - By Katrina Onstad Page 0,81
as if he’d seen a pretty girl. He fell to his knees not a foot from Wes Ridgemore. When the police officer arrived, he told Wesley: “Stabbing. Happens all the time.” And this was where his son wanted to live.
On his way out the front door at the end of those university weekends, James’s father would take his son aside, place a bundle of twenties in his hand, rolled up to look smaller than they were.
“Diana, don’t we have those puzzles? Didn’t Jenny leave a couple?”
“In the basement, I think,” she said. Wesley pushed himself up from the couch, struggling a little against the bursitis, the sciatica, all the rest. He froze for a beat halfway up and steadied himself, like a diver on a board. James averted his eyes. There were disc issues, James recalled. He had not asked after these issues in a while, and now felt too ashamed to draw attention to what he didn’t know.
Diana’s eye makeup was blue and a little thick, like crayon filler in a few creases. But otherwise, she was perfectly contained, upright in her kitten-heeled shoes and flesh-coloured stockings over her slightly rounded ankles. “Elegant” was the word she was going for. It was how she’d described Ana when she first met her: “A smart dresser. Elegant.” This was possibly the only judgment she had ever voiced around James’s biggest choice. Diana was fundamentally, agonizingly private. What had happened in Belgrade that brought her here was never discussed. James had tried, question upon question, and the answers were always the same: “It was a long time ago. It doesn’t concern you. It’s over.” But James could piece together something, a shape. He knew that she was five in 1941, and so must possess some memory of the Luftwaffe bombs raining down. But how, exactly, had her parents managed to get her out, through fascist Italy and Switzerland to the new world? Was there a priest? Were there false documents, illicit favours? Did money change hands?
He looked at her. She was talking. He remembered her saying to him, at thirteen: “I came because my family died,” she had said. Died. Not killed. As if old age had gently carried them away.
She met Wesley while working in the sock department of a clothing store. She had become a librarian late in life, through hard, private work, but why this pull toward books, James wondered? She was a woman entirely uninterested in stories. Sitting on the edge of his bed, upright in the darkening room, she would shut Narnia and say to her sons: “You must know this is only fantasy. Enjoy it as such.” She dragged James away from gulches crossed by children in the night and lions waiting and closets that led to forests, dragged him away and back to his bedroom with its glow-in-the-dark globe, his window overlooking the pebbled driveway.
“So,” said Diana. “You are playing at parenthood.”
Ana filled her mouth with water, thereby volleying the non-question to James. Her body was grateful not to be in the car anymore, but had retreated to a hum of discomfort centred in the back of her head.
Ana could see James flushing, reverting to guttural teenage responses. “Not really. Maybe. I guess so,” said James. Diana stared at him, her eyelids vanishing.
“It’s very strange, isn’t it, a child with no relatives? In this day and age, it’s possible to trace anyone. I’ve never heard of such a thing,” she said, something faintly foreign in the phrasing if not the accent.
Wesley placed three wooden puzzles on the floor. James recognized them from the toy stores in his neighbourhood: new but designed to look old-fashioned, with Depression-era line drawings of little children (Dick and Jane?) running and fishing and becoming obsolete, their socks drooping around their ankles. His parents must have kept them around for Mike’s children. Finn dumped them out, one by one, the pieces scattering on the carpet.
“Do you think about hiring a detective, to see if there’s anyone else?”
“We were stipulated in the will. They didn’t want him to go to anyone else,” said James. He tried to sound certain, but the questions brought more questions: What if right now, the grandparents were packing their bags? What if a there is a knock at the door, a phone call, a letter? Family wins, in these situations. Blood wins.
James looked at Finn, and then at Ana, who was not looking at anyone. He suppressed a quick swell of tears.