Everybody Has Everything

Ana felt the sun on her face and heard the sounds of other people’s children, and she didn’t want to mourn anymore.

She stood back, holding the pink flowers and James’s bag as he pushed Fi

“Sure, sure,” she said, putting the bag on a bench.

“Higher, Ana!” cried Fi

“It was Doug,” said James, putting his BlackBerry in his pocket, returning to take over. But Fi

“You look good,” said James.

“So do you. No more beard.” James touched his chin.

“Do I look younger?”

Ana laughed. “Not really. Sorry.”

“Dammit.”

Fi

“How’s Sarah?”

“She’s a miracle patient. The brain just kicked in. Where the co

Ana nodded. “I do.”

“Why?” asked James.

“She needed to get back to Fi

They watched him frowning while he built, as if everything depended on the height of this castle. He worked so earnestly that Ana felt like applauding. Maybe he would be an engineer, she thought, like his father.

James looked at her looking at Fi

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“I am, too. James, I—”

“Watch!” Fi

“We had a marriage,” said Ana, eyes on Fi

James said: “I know.”

“Don’t forget. It wasn’t just accumulation. It was sacred.”

James nodded vigorously. “I know.”

“I miss that the most,” she said, moving her foot back and forth in a straight line in the grass. “That’s what it is to be married: You offer up your life, and the other person takes it. I miss that offering.”

James sat very still. “I miss it, too.”

Their bodies leaned toward touching.

Then there was Fi

Ana and James stood, following Fi

“Do you want to stay for this?” he asked Ana, breathing in, waiting for the answer.

Finally, she nodded. “If you don’t mind.”

“Of course not,” said James.

He set up the camera on a tripod. Fi

“Ana, you come, too,” said Fi

Ana stood to the side, next to the camera, another eye on the scene.

“No, no. You do your thing. I’ll just watch for today.” She sat down on the grass.

Fi

“Ana, can you press Record?” asked James. Ana did so, then sat down out of the frame, crossing her legs.

James could see himself and Fi

“Story time,” said Fi

“Are you ready for it? This one’s about you,” said James.

“Meeeee!” squealed Fi

He began: “You took so long to come out that your mother nearly went mad. In the fifteenth hour, she was on her hands and knees, and she kept saying: ‘Tell me what to do. Tell me what to do.’ And your dad laughed about that later because, you know, she never wanted anyone to tell her anything.

“ ‘I’m done,’ she kept saying. ‘I can’t do it.’ She was thinking: ‘Women do this? My mother did this? My grandmother? It’s impossible that women should have to do this!’ ”

Fi

“She turned onto her back, and the midwife put the long plastic arm of a machine on her belly. She was ten basketballs huge, because you were in there. I knew her during this time, and this part is definitely true: She couldn’t even see over the top of her belly to her feet. And the machine beeped, and the midwife said, in this really strange voice: ‘Now, Sarah. Now we have to push. There’s something wrong with the baby’s heartbeat.’ Your mom had been feeling so weak, so tired, but she heard that sentence and everything changed. There was just a second then where she glanced out the window, and you guys were so high up in the hospital, she could see the towers of the city, blinking in the darkness, all lit up like it was any other night. And she thought: ‘Okay now. Okay.’ ”

Ana watched them, Fi

She could remember all of it, the great love they had once. It streamed past her, the limbs and the warm pockets of it, even the brutality, the smell of it. She could see it all, from every angle, like she was turning over an artifact in her hand. She did not know yet if something new was growing in its place, if the stone was going to warm and reshape itself. She closed her eyes, tried to see the earth giving way, but she saw only whiteness, so well cultivated, so pointless. She opened her eyes.

Fi

“And she screamed, and she pushed. She screamed like she wanted to wake the city. And your dad said that no human had ever screamed like that before. It made his ears ache, he said. It shattered windows. People cowered and hid, and other people came out of their houses, onto their porches and sidewalks, trying to make sense of what was happening. But it worked. You pushed yourself out of her body. She called you, and you came to her sound.”

Acknowledgments

The epigraph is from the poem “Filling Station” by Elizabeth Bishop, in The Complete Poems, 1927–1929, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The snatches of lyrics about rockin’ leprechauns are slightly misquoted by James from Jonathan Richman’s “Rockin’ Rockin’ Leprechauns” (from Rock ‘n’ Roll with the Modern Lovers, 1977); the phrase “Dance me to the end of love” is from Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love” (from Various Positions, 1984). The line “A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare” is from Frederick Seidel’s poem “Climbing Everest” (2006). The book from which James reads the lines “The world can only change from within” and “When you are present in this moment, you break the continuity of your story, of past and future” is Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now (1999). And Marvin Etzioni generously agreed to allow us to quote some lyrics from Fi

I am indebted to my gifted U.S. editor Emily Griffin, for her patience and needle-in-the-haystack attention to detail. I am very lucky that the first draft of this book was shaped by Lara Hinchberger at McClelland and Stewart (a special thanks for lending Ana some most personal details about plastic flowers and loss). I’m especially grateful to Jackie Kaiser, who is part agent, part editor, all kindness.