Everybody Has Everything

by Katrina Onstad

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

After years of unsuccessful attempts at conceiving a child, Ana and James become parents overnight, when a terrible accident makes them guardians to 2 year-old Finn. Suddenly, two people who were struggling to come to terms with childlessness are thrust into the opposite situation-responsible for a small toddler whose mother's survival is in question. Finn's crash-landing in their tidy, urban lives throws into high relief some troubling truths about their deepest selves, both separately and as a couple. Several chaotic, poignant, and life-changing weeks as a most unusual family give rise to an often unasked question: Can everyone be a parent?

Release date: June 25, 2013

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 338

Sample

IN THE END, it took Ana and James only an hour to become parents.


James arrived first, stumbling toward a police officer sitting on a chair by a door marked MORGUE. He felt his eyes ballooning, growing too big for his face. He tried, but could not blink. You are awake, he thought. This is happening.


“My name is James Ridgemore,” he said to the policeman, who stood up quickly, as if caught in the act. James noticed he was short, or shorter than James. “My name is James Ridgemore.”

“Just a moment,” and the policeman went into the room, leaving James in an empty hallway, sniffing at alcohol and something he couldn’t identify: Fire? Burning hair? It was freezing down here, devoid of heat. The second finger on his left hand turned white at the tip.

The policeman reappeared, holding open the door. When James entered, the contents of the room dropped away. All that was left was a body covered with a sheet hovering in bottomless space. But in fact, the tray jutted out of the wall. A matchbox sleeve. James could not tell if the thing upon it was male or female. Other people were there (he would remember that: the chatter, the grocery store dullness of all crowds), uttering words he knew from television shows about coroners and death reports. No voices were lowered.

A woman pulled back the sheet. She wore clear rubber gloves that left her wedding band visible.

James looked down and recognized Marcus, the check-mark scar beneath his bottom lip. His black hair was matted with tar. Why would that be? Who closed his eyes? James ran rapid-fire through questions but silently, his mouth too dry to speak. Why does he look so different? Is it only the difference between the living and the dead?


Then he realized that the difference, the strangeness, came down to something simple: Marcus was almost always smiling. James had never seen his lips so straight. There was no peace about him, no angel in repose, no release, no calm. He looked agitated, unsettled, as if he’d just been annoyed by a telemarketer.

“Yes, it’s him,” said James, though no one had asked a question. His legs felt hollow, swirling with smoke. But he did not feel ill. He was not repulsed or disgusted. He did not find it hard to look upon the body. Then the tray slid back into its cabinet and was sealed with a heavy handle.

The woman in the rubber gloves smiled at him ruefully. Well-worn, this smile, thought James.


On his way upstairs in the elevator, she stayed with him. She had removed her gloves, staring straight ahead as she did it. She was tiny. Everyone seemed small that day.

“You have a strange job,” James told her. She pecked a nod. “You’re so little. How do you lift the bodies? Is it hard?”

Then there was a roaring in his ears, the sound of steel twisting, a train exploding off its rails. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, heard a stream of sound pour forth from the tiny woman’s mouth, but he was unable to distinguish one word from the next.

The elevator stopped, and the woman put her hand under his elbow. She guided him out on his empty legs, past green walls, his feet on different-colored footprints stenciled on the floor. She appeared to be following the line of purple footprints, and so James did, too, pulled along as if riding a skateboard, past elevators, around corners. At first there were a few patients walking here and there. Someone with his papery ass hanging out in the open air, pushing an IV. But as the other colored footprints disappeared, the corridors grew quieter, more deserted. Though he knew it already, James was reminded that what was coming next was serious; not as serious as the basement, as Marcus frozen in a drawer, but serious.

At Room 5117, they stopped before a closed door. The woman propped up James against the wall and entered the room alone, a bellhop doing one last pass before opening the door to a guest. When the door opened for him at last, James saw a body on the bed; it was cleaner than Marcus, its face bloated, the head held to the body by a large collar. Tubes snaked from the fingers, and white bandages soaked with deep brown circles covered the head. A plastic hose hung from the open mouth like something being expelled. Her eyes were closed, but the sounds of the machines clapping and whirring were like a language, the body announcing itself to this room, singing its name: Sarah.

This room. James glanced around at all the people who emerged then, slowly, in full relief. Unfamiliar faces and, in the middle, a male nurse cradling a bundle of sheets in his arms. Out of the sheets, dangling in the air, was a foot encased in a small white running shoe. James moved then, fast toward the sheets, which were not sheets at all, but a boy, and not a boy, but Finn. Marcus and Sarah’s Finn. It was the longest walk James had ever taken, those six steps through a room of strangers, his arms out, his body trembling.

“Give him to me,” he whispered hoarsely, angry at the time between the now and the boy he needed to put to his chest, angry that no one had given him over sooner. He grabbed the bundle, and my God, it was still warm, which meant he was alive—didn’t it? And then something happened that was not of this earth, that was transporting, undenied. The bundle shook to life, let loose a howl never heard before, a howl from a place in the boy of all knowing, of the mines beneath the beneath, a sound of despair that rolled like a boulder over James. He held the boy closer, the boy who would soon be too big for this kind of holding, his legs dangling from James’s torso. There was a sneaker on one foot, a dirty sock on the other, as if he had been running. The sticky black tar was not tar, James recognized finally, but blood. Blood in Finn’s blond hair that James was weeping into, keening along with him but holding on, holding him, the unbreakable, undroppable boy.

  

Ana became a mother during a conference call.

Staring out the window, she had just finished leaning into her desk phone, explaining two weeks’ worth of research that she’d delivered that morning in bound copies and via e-mail. The air outside was bluest blue, and a surprise burst of early autumn warmth wrapped gold around the city. Her cell phone shook on her desk. She ignored it.

“Mark? Any thoughts?” Rick Saliman’s voice always sounded clearest. He had a more expensive conferencing phone in his office, three floors up.

Ana listened as the men turned over the information, searching its crevices for a way to save their client, a multimillion-dollar tech company that had behaved like a shoplifting teenager tucking a piece of cutting-edge technology in his pants and scurrying out of the office the day before a merger.

A text message appeared: Come home. Urgent. Accident. J. Instantly, lightly, Ana stood up, dropping a pen from her hand and leaving it to roll off her desk.


“If you’re done with me, I have to take another call,” she said, and hit the button to disconnect.

She must have grabbed her things, but only in the elevator did she notice she was holding her bag. She tried to call James, but he didn’t answer. Then, with a boneless finger, she speed-dialed her mother’s nursing home.

“I’m looking for Lise Laframbroise,” she said. “I’m her daughter.”

“She’s at lunch. Do you want me to page her?”

Ana hung up, put her hand, that same jelly hand, up in the air until a cab pulled over. She instructed the driver to take her home, and he began plowing through thick traffic.

“I’ll take University,” he said, and Ana noted the dots of sweat lined up like a smile at the base of his bald head.

Even as it was happening, she was aware that she would remember that ride forever: the rising heat outside; the traffic on Spadina; the cyclist in her skirt, hiked up a little too far so that a dangerous flash of white underwear revealed itself with each push of the leg.

The third number she tried was Sarah’s. No answer.

She texted James: I’m coming.


And a response, instantaneous beeping: University Hospital, Room 5117, which was approaching in the distance, an odd, jarring coincidence. The wide boulevard the driver had chosen held several hospitals. Patients wandered the sidewalks slowly, in hospital gowns. A man smoked, leaning on an IV drip.


“I’m sorry, can you take me to University Hospital instead, please?”

The taxi swung across three lanes, setting off honking. The driver stuck his fist out the window.

Ana felt that if she were in a movie, she would grab a twenty and fling it at him for the eleven-dollar ride. But that kind of drama wasn’t in her, and she paid him thirteen dollars exactly and waited for the receipt.

She rushed, sincerely, up the stairs, stopping for another stolen moment to use the hand sanitizer.

The man at reception acted as if he had been waiting for her: “Yes, yes,” he said. “Third bank of elevators, north side.”

Ana continued rubbing her hands after the sanitizer had evaporated. Up she rode in the elevator until her ears gently popped.

She saw James immediately, or the back of him, through the glass window of a cordoned-off waiting room. He faced a panel of three white coats, as if taking an oral exam. The three doctors weren’t talking but nodding and listening to James. Though the glass prevented her from hearing his words, from the stabbing and flapping of his hands, Ana knew that James was holding court.

She opened the door.

“They want information,” James said to her once the tides of introduction had receded and they’d all sat down.

“We are trying to establish a medical history,” said the young doctor, an Asian woman rescued from her adolescent looks by painfully thin eyebrows. Next to her sat a stout Indian doctor, bored and fuller-browed. “Your husband thought you might know if Ms. Weiss had any history of high blood pressure? Diabetes mellitus? Kidney problems?”

Ana stared at the Asian doctor’s blank face.

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, Christ,” said James, who had been bobbing up high in his shock, caught in its currents. “You don’t know what happened.”

“How would I know? I was on a call and I got a message—” The unspeaking doctor looked at her watch.

“There was a car accident. On the Lakeshore. Some kind of debris in the road, and Marcus swerved—” James spoke without any emphasis, a witness giving a police report. “No other cars were involved, but Marcus’s car went headfirst into a retaining wall. Finn’s okay, but Marcus—he died.” The last two words sounded like a book clapping shut.

Ana put her hands together, and they rose to her mouth, touched her lips, then moved to the bridge of her nose and stayed there. She closed her eyes, bowed her head, and tasted the information. She felt James’s hand on her back and shrugged it off quickly, her whole body in thrall to a sensation of bugs crawling and burrowing. Then she realized what she had done, the quick and urgent rejection of her husband’s kindness, and felt upon her that pettiness, and on top of that, the awful loneliness of what had happened. She saw, bright and burning in her head, a red station wagon crumpled like a rolled toothpaste tube up against a concrete wall. She felt the hopelessness of flesh between car and cement. And she dizzied and reached quickly for James, for his arm, his shoulder, clasping his left hand, finally, to her right.

As all of this was happening, the doctor explained that Sarah had hit her head. “We stopped the bleeding,” she said, and the other doctor perked up with pride.

“Where is the bleeding?” asked Ana.

“A good question. In the frontal lobe, so focal processes are affected.”

“Wait—her brain?” The muted phrase “hit her head” had tripped up Ana. She hadn’t considered the brain inside that head, somehow picturing an external cut to the scalp, like a nick from shaving.

“Most people wake up from a coma within a few days or weeks, but hers is a severe trauma.”

“Coma!” Ana said.

The doctor ignored her incredulousness. “We’re waiting to hear from her GP, but it would help us to know her medical history. James said she has no living relatives.”

“No parents. She’s an only child,” said Ana, scanning her memory for cousins, aunts, uncles. “She’s—she was—very healthy. I don’t know. There’s a lot I didn’t know. Don’t know.” James squeezed her hand.

“Neither of us have heard her talk about taking medications,” he said suddenly. Ana wondered, just for a moment, how he could speak with such authority.

“Wait—” Ana shook her head. “Why did you call us?”

“We’re the emergency contact, remember?”

“We are?”

“I’m the executor.”

“The executioner?”

James stared at her. “What?”

Ana rubbed her forehead. The conversation had occurred a few months ago, in a wine haze. It came to her now, lightly, faded. “We’re in such an unusual situation—would you guys consider—if something happened to us—” Flattery and consent.


“Do you know if she’s allergic to penicillin?”

Everyone looked at Ana, as if women shared all such intimacies—pedicures, and Pap smears.

“No,” she said. And then James remembered when he had last set foot in this hospital. It was the day after Finn’s birth.

“She had her son here,” said James. “There must be records.…”

The silent, bored doctor suddenly stood up and left without a word. James hated her for a moment. He knew the type: young, overachieving, and indifferent. A straight-A suck-up.

The remaining doctor said they now had to wait. Sarah was too swollen for an accurate reading of the depths of her sleep. To James, waiting seemed like a euphemism for futility, but the doctor went on, painting a picture of a future in which Sarah could be better, where she might move a little, then a lot, and one day, snap to. But then that happy picture was snatched back by the phrase “potential persistent vegetative state.”

“We have her on a cocktail, if you’re wondering about the IV.”

“Cocktail?” said Ana, and she glanced at James, whose mouth began to twitch.

“Vitamins and glucose and—”

From her husband’s mouth, a small laugh, which Ana caught and returned.

“I need a cocktail, too,” said James, wishing it didn’t bother him that the doctor didn’t crack a smile.

  

Two days later, they arrived at an unadorned apartment building, the rectangular shape of proletariat Russia, one of several jutting out of the cement, circled by parking lots.

Earlier that morning, Marcus’s lawyer had called about something called “direct cremation.” This request was in the will. James gave the lawyer his Visa number to cover the $1,600 cost and scribbled instructions on an envelope about recovering the money through the insurance policy. James marveled at Marcus’s foresight. He couldn’t even plan lunch.

James negotiated the buzzer and doors of greasy glass. Ana held his hand, gripping him in a way she almost never did.

“Did you eat anything?” he asked her, as they walked up the stairs to the third floor, obeying the OUT OF SERVICE sign on the elevator.


“No,” said Ana.

“Me neither. Maybe we can take him for some food after.” Ana nodded.

The hall smelled like burned wax, which Ana identified as sesame oil. In places, the carpet curled up at the edges, as if trying not to touch the walls. On the door to the apartment, someone had hung a little straw heart with a stuffed red bird dangling in the center.

The door opened to reveal a short, heavyset black woman. Her breasts were half her body, it seemed to Ana. “Hello,” said the woman matter-of-factly, as if they were there to sell her something she might or might not want to buy. “Come in.”

But the apartment was sunny and clean—Ana felt relief. A stack of children’s books sat by the sliding door that led to a tiny balcony where a child could slip through the bars, dropping to the parking lot below, James thought.

A tall, stoop-shouldered woman stood up from the couch and offered her hand. “I’m Ann Silvan, Finn’s caseworker, and this is Mrs. Bailey,” she said.

Mrs. Bailey had moved over to stand by a makeshift mantel, a shelf right above where a fireplace might go, and a row of thumb-size glass animals. Above that, along the wall in matching gold frames, were dozens of photographs of children and babies, brothers and sisters leaning into one another, smiling.

James turned around and around, searching.

“Where is he?”

“The boy needs to nap,” said Mrs. Bailey, revealing a thick Jamaican accent.

“I’m Ana,” said Ana, extending a hand first to Mrs. Bailey, then to Ann Silvan.

“We have the same name,” said the social worker. Ana smiled and nodded, even though she had never felt like an Ann, letting her mother correct every bureaucrat and schoolteacher: “It’s On-na,” her mother would say, “as in: ‘On a moon.’”       

“Mrs. Bailey is one of our best foster parents,” said Ann Silvan, smoothing her skirt, which had a prominent wrinkle down the front, Ana noted. “She’s been with us for sixteen years and worked with more than eighty children. Is that number about right, Mrs. Bailey?”

Mrs. Bailey nodded. James wondered about the use of the honorific, if the foster mother had requested it, a grasp at a kind of authority. They were sitting now, Ana and James in oversize armchairs, Mrs. Bailey and the social worker on the couch. James felt a strange urge to lean back and kick out the footrest he knew would appear at his ankles.

“I have three of my own, but they’re gone now.” Mrs. Bailey gestured to a triptych of photos, three teenagers in their graduation caps. “Each one has gone on to university.” Finally, she smiled.

“So there’s much to discuss,” said Ann Silvan. “How are you feeling?”

Ana felt like spitting, all of a sudden.

“Our lawyer told us the will wasn’t being contested,” said James.

“It’s not, but there are checks and balances.” A strange phrase, thought Ana, a phrase to connote democracy, as if there were choice in this room. Ann Silvan continued to talk about Children’s Aid and home visits, leafing through papers.

“You’re not working right now, Mr. Ridgemore?”

“I’m writing a book.”

“What’s it about?” asked Mrs. Bailey, raising a penciled eyebrow. Ana was curious, too; she hadn’t been able to ask about this herself since James had been fired. All three women tilted toward him.

“It’s nonfiction. It’s about terrorism,” said James, his voice thinning. It was a little bit true that if anything had been written, it might have been on terrorism.

Ann Silvan wrote on her pad of paper.

“So you’ll be at home with Finn, then? Or will you be taking time off, Ana?”

Ana shook her head. “Maybe a couple of days. I—my work is quite unforgiving.” She felt this statement take hold in the room. It stuck like neglect.

“It will be something of a transition.” Ann Silvan continued to talk, and Ana piped in from time to time, working from a list of questions that she had researched. There was money to be released. There was a court date pending. There was suddenly a fleet of people in their home, in their bank accounts, her office. Ana had begun to feel like a criminal, as if she were trying to steal this boy who had, in fact, been given to her, shockingly, without her request, even her knowledge. Between lunch and dinner, Ana and James had become the stewards of a human being.


  

“Did you know we were the guardians?” Ana had asked, her head in her hands in their living room. “I thought we were just executors. I don’t remember agreeing to guardianship.”

“I think we did,” said James. “I don’t know.” He felt guilty somehow. He hadn’t told Ana about his visits with Finn, the ones that had filled up so many afternoons lately. Maybe they had meant more than he’d realized. Now James could never tell Ana about those visits, though he had been waiting to tell her about them, searching for the right moment. But suddenly his relationship with Finn had taken on new significance, and he couldn’t explain it to Ana, just as he knew that, with Sarah in her hospital bed, there was no one to expose him to her.

But he hadn’t done anything wrong, had he? This had been for James, privately, the summer of Finn. He remembered their last visit in the park: He held a miniature soccer ball and a bag of graham crackers while Finn ran in circles, over and over, until he collapsed. Finn wore a plush panda suit, his face peering out from below the ears, his wrists and ankles exposed, a pair of white sneakers on his feet. It was still hot, but according to Sarah, his panda suit obsession was nonnegotiable, and she had decided not to fight it.

Finn got up, arms out, and ran in a small circle until he collapsed again. James laughed, crouched down on the grass, irritated by the cigarette butts, the stupidity of people who smash beer bottles where children play. A tall hipster walked by, smoking a cigarette, wearing sunglasses as big as the front window of a car. James felt a surge of hatred toward the guy’s skinny legs, his huge headphones, probably playing something electronic. He picked up an old cigarette butt and tossed it at the guy’s back, narrowly missing him as he trotted along, oblivious. Even though James still had four or five cigarettes a day, around Finn he became a virulent nonsmoker.

James and Finn had already been to the museum that week to look at the dinosaur bones. The week before, they had taken the ferry out to Toronto Island, and James had steered a paddleboat with Finn at his side. Sarah said she was thrilled to get a break, that she could finally get some time to herself to work on her photography, to sleep.

“I can’t go back to teaching,” she had told James. “But I can’t always be around him, either.” James was impressed with how efficiently Sarah sliced and packaged time. Three days a week, Finn was in day care, but only until two. Marcus often didn’t get home until seven or eight, when Finn was in bed. The daycare mornings were catch-up time for chores, household management. Sarah needed just one afternoon a week to herself, open time. James was happy to take Finn. He liked the idea of saving someone.

When James was with Finn, he felt useful again, which he hadn’t in the months since he’d been fired. He got a different response from people when he entered a store or rode the streetcar with Finn than he did when he was alone and suspiciously present during the city’s working hours. But with Finn, the world was a gigantic welcome mat. People hummed a low, inviting note that only parents could hear, that James had never known existed. It reminded him of when he would walk with his black friend, Kyle, and Kyle would exchange a little nod with every other black person who went by. James had considered researching this phenomenon for the show, but when he took a pretty black intern to lunch to covertly test his theory, she just looked straight ahead and never glanced at anyone.

“Finny, do you want to get a croissant?” asked James.

“Oh yes please I do!” cried Finn, and he began to run toward Queen Street, a two-and-a-half-year-old who knew the way to the city’s best croissants. James wondered if he could work that into his unwritten novel.

While they sat on the bench eating croissants, James asked Finn questions.

“What did you do at daycare yesterday?”

“Panda suit.”

“How’s it going with the panda suit, then?”

“I like croissant.” James pulled out his ears and made a silly face at Finn, and Finn laughed and laughed, little pieces of croissant stuck to his chin, a strange bearded panda.

Marcus was waiting on the porch when they arrived back at Finn’s house. His feet rested on a broken tricycle, and his laptop was open on his knees. His briefcase balanced on a scabby paint tin.

“There he is,” he shouted. Finn dropped James’s hand and ran up the walk toward his father. Finn curled into Marcus’s . . .