The Day After Labor Day

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 speeddialed 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.