“Ana,” called James, but softly, too, wanting her to sleep and wanting her to wake and care for him, wanting it both ways, always, again.

Halloween Day

ON HALLOWEEN MORNING, Ana left for an early meeting while the house still slept.

James awoke to Finn next to him in bed, wide-eyed.

“Hey, man,” said James, reaching for him. “How long have you been there?”

“Long.”

After breakfast, James wedged Finn into his panda suit, slipping black rain boots over the paws. The suit was too fluffy and the boots too small, and Finn looked like an inflated toy from the knees up.

“Too tight!” said Finn.

James went to the kitchen for scissors. He removed Finn’s boots, and the boy sat on his bottom with his legs in James’s lap expectantly.

“This will be better. You can just put the legs on the outside of the boots.…” James strained as he cut open the bottom of the panda suit, aware of the blades slicing close to the small toes in their bright red socks.

James put a ski jacket over the top of Finn’s panda suit. At every house, the boy stopped, running up strangers’ staircases to examine pumpkins on stoops. James dragged his injured foot, trying to keep up.

A paper skeleton attached to a door made him scream: “Dead!” And then he laughed. James called Finn back, calming him, then watching him sprint away again.

Finally at the door of the daycare room, James released Finn, and the boy ran as if unhooked from a leash. Colored pictures of bats lined one wall; white paper ghosts made of tissue paper balls hung from the ceiling. Across the room, Bruce, two silver hoops replacing the gold ones, smiled his mournful, supportive smile and waved at James.

As he waved back, James’s BlackBerry beeped. The sound had become less and less frequent over the past weeks. Exiting the daycare, James looked at it: Fun night. Going to The Ossington @ 10. Halloweeeeeen. Em.

He walked to the row of cafés, selecting the one with the unflattering mirror above his bald spot. James left his hat on and ordered a coffee and sank into a chair at the window. With his laptop open, he became one of several men gently clicking away. Then he pulled out Finn’s picture, the mouthless boy floating in space. He stared at it for a long time. He wanted to hold Finn, wanted his body close to him.

Then he began to write. It made no sense, what he was writing. There was no money in it. There was barely a story. But he felt clear. He was writing at last. And he continued to write and, in doing so, forgot about Emma and the green door that held her in, just across the street from where he was writing his confession.

Leaving the café, he deleted her text.

On the walk home, James, tingling with accomplishment, stopped in a small CD store, a place where he had spent a few hours a week only a decade ago. He didn’t recognize the name of one single band in the window. It had happened, then; he was not just outside the loop, the loop was unrecognizable to him, a new shape entirely.

The girl behind the counter was difficult to take in all at once. She had a metal stud in her chin, another in her lip. Black eyeliner seeped into her acne. She wore black leather cycling gloves.

To this, James posed the question: “Do you have any children’s music?” She smiled, then, not bored, not angry, but young, very young and pretty under the armor.

“Sure. Follow me.” The children’s section was small, a single row underneath CONSIGNMENT.

“These guys are awesome. Local. This is a compilation, money goes to fighting poverty or something.” She pulled discs out one by one.

“I’m looking for a specific song. It has the word ‘light’ in it.”

The girl laughed. “That’s all you know? Who wrote it?”

“That’s what I’m telling you. I don’t know. This kid I know keeps requesting it. A song about light.”

“Man! That’s insane!” Still, she divided the row into two stacks and handed James half. They put their legs out in front of them, the discs in between like they were dividing Halloween candy. “Light … light …” she muttered. At the end of ten minutes, they each had three discs with songs containing the word “light” in the title.

“Thank you,” said James, pulling himself to standing.

As she bagged the discs, she said from her black chapped lips: “Thanks. That was fun, sir.”

Ana had missed three days of work. This long an absence was unprecedented, a fact underlined for her by others several times during the day. In a meeting, Christian’s small, loud greeting: “Nice of you to join us. How was Aruba?” But the evidence against Aruba was in the looking; Ana was pale, thinner. The skin around the bottom of her nose glowed, ravaged and peeling, its redness unsuccessfully damped down by copious amounts of foundation and concealer. But even tired and only slightly recovered, Ana fell deeply into her work, investigating soybean seeds spliced in laboratories, impervious to disease, and twice as expensive as regular seeds. Genetically modified. Ana typed the phrase eight times in one hour.

As a researcher, Ana could pluck the legal issues from any subject she was assigned like a butcher removing the feathers from a dead chicken. But the substance of the question only appeared to her when she stopped to blow her nose. She thought of the wands the doctors had put inside her, the confidence that her body could make something of itself. The doctors were certain that life could be inserted, removed, that pieces could be implanted in other people’s bodies, in other people’s lives, and that this future was something everyone could live with. But she had heard the weeping woman in the room next to hers at the fertility clinic, absorbing the bad news of another wasted round of carefully placed embryos. Ana was suspicious.

She had consented to the treatments, but had she ever really felt the need, the urgency? She couldn’t remember. James had felt it. He was rushing to the petri dish; he was desperate to keep existing. Maybe that’s the difference between us, she thought.

At four o’clock, Rick Saliman appeared in her doorway.

Sitting himself down without invitation, he said: “Croissants. Café au lait. St. Laurent Boulevard. Bagels.” Ana nodded. She had long ago realized that speaking as little as possible around Rick was the best strategy. He would simply pile on top of her words anyway. “Have you ever been to Saint Joseph’s Oratory? People throw down their crutches and crawl to the top of the dome on their knees.” Rick was enormous. He crossed his legs in the little chair. Ana felt as if a dinosaur had entered her office.

“I’ve never been there,” said Ana.

“To Montreal?”

“No, the Oratory.”

“Me neither,” he said. “We need bodies in Montreal. They’re struggling since the restructuring.”

“Bodies?”

“Your body, Ana. Would you consider it? They’re desperate for a first-class researcher. A transfer? Not permanent, just six months or so. Unless you wanted it to be permanent.”

“I don’t—”

“It’s a given that you’re beyond capable. But you’re also mobile. With James working on his book, no kids—it’s an opportunity.”

“Opportunity” was another word for “chance.” Ana felt that she had a very close relationship to chance these days. Futures kept raining down on her like cold hard pellets, scattering this way and that. She was not sure which way to look anymore. She liked the idea of making a decision one way or another. She liked the idea of croissants and a city without her childhood in it.

“Can you outline in more detail—” she began.