“We came the other way.”

“I hope it means we can get more funding for the library,” said Diana.

They finished their water and smoothed their skirts, but as they were walking toward the door, Ana stopped: “What did you mean, functional? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Ana,” she said, a quick, deep-voiced response that suggested Ana was right to press further. “It’s difficult to be a mother.” She paused. “Don’t tell James I said that.”

Ana shook her head.

“It is more than just giving up your freedom, or your marriage, in many ways. It’s a loss of an idea of who you are. And they will tell you: ‘Oh, you get an abundance in return, you get it back, it’s simply different.’ But that’s not quite true. What is true is that you are altered, and I suppose it depends who you were to begin with, if you have the kind of genetic structure that can withstand such change. Does it make sense?”

“I don’t know. Maybe,” said Ana, caught in Diana’s unyielding gaze. “Did you feel like you’d been changed enough already before you had kids? By the war?”

Diana flinched and looked away, and Ana recognized a misstep on her part. They would remain in the realm of abstractions.

“Perhaps in some way,” said Diana. “I sympathize with you. I can’t say I regret my children. Of course I care for them. But I do sometimes wonder what was lost to me.”

Footsteps outside the door passed, and Ana felt as if she was about to be caught in something illicit. James would never believe this; he always said that his mother had locked away the sentient part of life. She had once cut her hand on a can opener and strode into the living room where the boys were playing, a newspaper wrapped to her wrist, blood speckling the ground behind her. “There has been an accident,” she announced like a town crier, before dialing a cab with her other hand. Wesley loved to tell this story, but James didn’t see it as valor, the way his father did. He saw it as a way of defying her family, announcing that they were, for her, not a source of comfort. There was nothing she could possibly need them for.

And now this confession and warning by the kitchen door. What was Ana to do with it? The illness in her head bloomed.

The door swung open, and Finn stood at their knees.

“Hungry,” he said. Diana moved to meet his hunger. Cupboards opened and drawers rattled and food came forth for the boy, pieces of cheese cut in tiny squares, which he placed in his mouth with chipmunk propulsions, humming cheerfully, oblivious to the eyes of the women. Ana watched her mother-in-law, imagining that she was seeing in Finn her own son in a different kitchen, and she, a young wife forever new in a foreign country where the cheese had the consistency of soap.

Ana looked upon the boy and rooted around for some kind of feeling. It was there, but not the texture or the size she sensed was required. Still, she could feed him if he was hungry. Not all women could do this. The apartments of Ana’s youth had empty refrigerators, still slimy from the previous tenants, burned-out bulbs. As a teenager, she was often a dinner guest in the homes of her friends. Ana loved these evenings, reveling in the overflowing plates of chicken and bowls of vegetables, quietly taking in the large families with their regular seats at the table, the mother and father like dollhouse figures that had been placed at either end. (Who were those friends? What were their names? Ana had lost all of them, like a bough shedding ripened fruit, as she moved from school to school.) And then, out of fairness, she remembered sitting next to her mother in their favorite restaurant, against the banquette, while the waiter flirted with them both. And Ana drinking her Coke, nestled against her mother’s arm, and the two of them content in their quiet.

There had always been food. A bagel wrapped in a paper towel stuffed in her backpack. The remains from the doughnut store, or later, the catering company where she had worked as a teenager. Sitting on the couch late at night, eating pasta salad from take-out containers with plastic forks, her mother telling her about her Ph.D. that she would never finish. Poetry.

“I’m not feeling too well,” said Ana, and Diana nodded, as if it were a given.

“Come, Finneas,” said Diana, extending a hand. Finn got up from the table and walked past her hand, toward Ana. A small strand 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 into 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.

James tried to imagine what played over in Finn’s head from the twisted wreck of the car: the empty face of his father, with a small scar by his lower lip. Finn had woken up screaming only that one time. His nights were deep and long. He was not yet haunted, James thought, but it would come.

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 glimmer, and her 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.