Everybody Has Everything - By Katrina Onstad Page 0,84

of snot joined his ear to his nose, like a purse handle. Diana reached out with a Kleenex and wiped it away.

“Up,” said Finn, his arms extended to Ana, his face tired.

Ana nodded at him. Diana said softly: “Ana, he wants you to pick him up.”

“Oh, of course,” said Ana. She bent and pulled him up, his legs tightening around her waist like a spider trapping a fly, but his hands on her neck were loose and soft. Ana rubbed his back, felt the warmth of him bending in to her, his sweetness drowned out by her sadness, her humming knowledge that hers was not the body he needed, that they were caught together in this web of compromise. A smell of orange cheese in her throat.

Ana lay in bed with the lights out, trying to still her head, which seemed to keep pushing away from her, as if trying to unscrew itself. The fever came quick and angry, leaving her drenched and shaking under the duvet.

James came in with aspirin in one hand and a tall glass of iced juice in the other.

“Turn out the light,” she said, but there was no light on.

Finn stood in the frame of the door, staring. James wondered if he could yet recognize other people’s pain. His friends at daycare broke skin and bled and it interested him. He informed James of these accidents, the stickiness, the hidden possibility that a body could just leak itself dry.

He tried to imagine what played over in his head from the twisted wreck of the car: the empty face of his father, with a small scar by his lower lip.

Ana moaned slightly in the dark and James straightened the duvet at her shoulders. He looked over to see Finn reaching out a hand in front of him, as if trying to touch something. His hand extended into space made James think of Sarah, reaching for the boy as he toddled across the room, the two of them laughing, and Finn reaching her to place his own small palm between his mother’s clapping hands, which would still and hold him.

James took Finn gently by the shoulder, moving him out of the doorway, shutting the door behind them. Finn resisted.

“Ana,” he said. “Want Ana.” He slipped behind James, knocked on the door, loudly.

“Finn, she needs to sleep. She’s sick,” said James.

Finn banged on the door. “Ana! Ana! Come play!”

James picked him up, and he went soft in his arms, put his fingers in his mouth and began sucking.

James carried Finn downstairs, and settled him on the couch. He sat beside him, stroking Finn’s forehead, the boy’s furrowed brow.

James was used to being a study in contrast to Ana: he didn’t mind mess, could sleep in knotted bed sheets until Ana, annoyed at the lumps, roused him in the dark, smoothing and tucking. But he was struck now by the sensation that he had turned into his wife, and knots were digging into his skin. Marcus. His lost job. And upcoming losses were queuing for him, too: Finn, who might be taken back or away, and his wife, who was always leaving, and now had good reason to do so. Soon his mother and father would corrode with illness and then he would be alone, a childless middle-aged man, bald and suspect.

Oh, he missed them all, even Emma, young Emma and that fleeting moment of debauchery that might be his last. In a few years she would lose her gleam, and love of risk, and become a mother to somebody. Getting older was infuriating. He needed the steady footing of his youth, the certainty of opinion, and it was gone. James took a deep, quivering breath.

On this note of self-pity, James turned to the window and saw Chuckles pulling in with his other car, not the SUV but a white van, planks of wood sticking out the back, dangerously untethered. He was taking up two spaces again, leaving a huge gap on either side. His silver SUV was parked up the street.

James placed a throw pillow under Finn’s sleeping head and stood up. He strode toward the door.

Chuckles had not moved from his van. He sat shuffling papers and smoking when James appeared at the window. In his anger, James had failed to put on shoes and stood now on the road in a pair of dark blue cashmere argyle socks. He rapped on the glass with his knuckles. As Chuckles rolled down the window, he took in James