Every Last One (20 page)

Alice wails, and Nancy puts her arms around her. A nurse comes in. I feel something dripping off my chin. “A moment, please,” my mother says to the nurse, pressing a tissue to my face, and I understand that she is the perfect person for this moment, that she is the perfect person to tell someone news so bad that no one else can even form the words. I wonder if she was always this way, or if she learned to be this way when someone told her terrible things. The noise gets smaller and smaller, as though it is moving away from me.

“Shh, shh, Mary Beth,” my mother says, sitting on the edge of the bed, putting her face so near to mine that I can smell the shampoo she uses. “Alex is coming home tomorrow. Alex is coming home tomorrow. Do you understand?” She looks fuzzy, and when I nod her face seems to shimmer in the fluorescent light. I realize my mouth is open, and I close it. She puts her face next to mine. I feel her cheek, wet. I want everything to be still.

“Max and Ruby and Glen,” she whispers.

“Someone,” I finally say, and she nods.

“They don’t know who.” And suddenly I remember. I remember that I thought it was Max, Max who came into my room, who hit me, who hurt me. And I hear that sound again, louder this time, and my throat burns and my shoulder aches and the lights in the room are all like suns and I am so, so ashamed that I thought my poor sad boy could have hurt any of us. My mother holds me tightly.

“Alex,” I say when I can speak again.

“The police thought it was him. Because he was gone. Because they couldn’t find him. No one knew he was away.”

“Alex?” I say again.

“I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. I told them they were wrong.”

“Does she need a sedative?” says the young nurse from the
doorway. What is her name again? I can’t remember. The monitor is making so much noise. I can’t breathe. It’s like a head cold.

The difference between the doctor and the nurse is that the doctor has a white coat. It’s just like Glen’s. It must have come from the same place. The doctor is a woman. She tells the nurses what to do, but I can’t really hear her. That sound is in my ears. The sun dims. My mother’s mouth moves, but there are no words. I think that when Alex comes home I will make him chocolate pudding. Chocolate pudding is his favorite. The sound stops, and I am gone again.

Ginger is wandering around the kitchen of the guesthouse at Olivia and Ted’s, looking for a corner in which to settle. Three, four times she makes the small circle and finally decides that the best place to lie is directly in front of the stove. I don’t have it in me to try to move her, although this makes it difficult to reach the burners. My left arm is a damaged wing, floppy and unreliable. A physical therapist comes three times a week and makes me squeeze a tennis ball. “Much better, Mrs. Latham,” she says, looking at my arm, avoiding my eyes. My mind tells my body to do things, and it stubbornly refuses, as though it is still half-asleep. Since I left the hospital three weeks ago, my mind has slowly become accustomed to demands that are ignored by my body.

Ginger whimpers and I give her a piece of carrot. She chews noisily and whimpers again.

I am making vegetable soup. It’s a good recipe, and it freezes well. I will put it in ice-cube trays. Then when I want lunch, or
Alex wants lunch, or both of us want dinner, I can take out a few cubes and heat it back up. It’s very good soup. Glen always loved it this time of year. “Soup!” he would say, as though a bowl of wet-hot was the greatest gift a person could give. Alex says he likes it, too, but I can’t remember if this is true. He mainly eats at Olivia’s house now, with Ben and Ben’s brothers. When he is here he stands with his plate in his hand, leaning against the kitchen counter. I think it’s because the table is tiny, only big enough for two. When we sit at it together, across from each other, it tells a story neither of us wants to believe.

I take out the ice-cube trays. There are only two of them. I have made a lot of soup. There’s no more room in the freezer. There is the lasagna I made last week, and the lamb stew, and the four loaves of bread, one with cheese. This is what I’ve always done. I’ve always had food in the freezer so there would be a good, hot meal for dinner, even when I am out of the house.

I don’t go out of the guesthouse much. I mainly stay here, inside. It’s a nice place, small and cozy, decorated the way Olivia does things. Warm. Homey. Pretty. It’s the kind of place that makes you feel safe. Sometimes I walk around the edge of the woods with Ginger, but she always wants to go back inside, and so do I. There’s old snow on the ground, and dark pits in the snow, grimy pits of cinders and mud and sad tattered grass. The pits are my footprints. The snow has a glossy veneer of ice, and Ginger leaves no prints because she is too light to break through. For the first two weeks she ate nothing at all, not even her favorites—slices of apple, pork-chop bones. “Come on, you know you want this,” Alex would say, sitting cross-legged on the floor with some scrap of meat or cheese on his palm. She would put her head on her front paws and look up at him, her brow twitching.

She will be ten years old in May. We used to work out how old
the kids would be when Ginger was five, when Ginger was ten. We never went any higher than that. We didn’t want to think about how old they would be when Ginger was put to sleep.

I was the one who went to sleep, sleep so deep that the police officers thought I was dead while they walked around my house. One of them took Ginger out to his car and put her in the back, behind the metal grille. Then they let her out because she threw herself so hard against the grille that she broke two of her incisors and ripped out a dewclaw. Olivia took her to the vet while I was in the hospital, and the vet pulled the two teeth and bandaged her paw. She still limps a bit, and I wonder if it’s more memory than injury.

Ginger saved my life. Our next-door neighbor woke on New Year’s Day and saw the back door open, waving wildly in a cold sleety wind, and when he went over to shut it—“Hello?” I imagine him calling, although I never heard him. “Glen? Mary Beth? Everything okay?”—he heard Ginger keening inside her kennel. He called the police. That’s what I’m told. Everything about that night is what I’m told. All I heard were the sounds of my kids’ friends hanging out in the den and making too much noise. All I heard was my husband going downstairs to reprimand them and send them home. Or that’s what I thought I heard. Nancy says the newspapers wrote that I slept through it all, which is more or less true. I can imagine myself reading that about someone else and disbelieving it. That’s what people do: They imagine themselves in your place, and they know that they would be different, better. They scare themselves a little with borrowed tragedy, and then they retreat to the safety of their own safe place, or what they think is their own safe place.

When I start to imagine myself in my place, I take another pill. The way it makes me feel reminds me of how I saw the world, and how the world saw me, when my wedding veil was over my face,
before Glen lifted it. The blusher, they call that piece of the veil that covers your face and gives everything around a soft whitewash. Sometime soon I am going to stop taking the pills. But not at night. I can’t imagine how I will ever sleep again otherwise. I take the sleeping pill, and then I pick up a book, turning the pages in the exact rhythm of someone who is reading. I have no idea what has happened on the page, and suddenly I am asleep for five or six hours. Alex doesn’t know it, but there is a baby monitor under his bed. The receiver is under my pillow, turned up as high as it will go, so that any sound would wake me from my drugged sleep. Before I take the pill, I listen for a half hour. I watch the clock. There’s never any sound.

Ginger rearranges herself against the stove and drops her head heavily on the floor. I stir the soup and then move into the little living room and sit down on the sofa. My mind whirrs and stops, whirrs and stops, like a broken clock. I lose time all the time now, the way I did that night, the way I did in the hospital. But I’m awake when it happens. I look across the room at the beveled frame of a mirror or the oval doorknob and I’m in a waking dream, except that there’s nothing in it, no people, no feeling. From time to time I hear a familiar voice, and when I do I shiver and the waking dream is over and I find something to do, even if it’s only to stir the soup again. Sometimes when I move I realize that my face is wet. I wipe it with a paper towel. I can’t think of it as crying. The good thing about living in this new place, where I still don’t know how to shift the oven racks or set the thermostat exactly right, is that I don’t feel like this is my life. It’s some suspended animation, between what was and something else, something I can’t think about. I don’t think of what comes next, except that there is a recipe for chili in a cookbook on the shelf here that I might try. Chili, tomorrow. Or maybe even today.

It’s not even noon yet. I wonder how I will fill the rest of the
day, and I think that maybe I will put Ginger in the car and drive around the mountain roads, passing some of the houses where I have planted things in the past. You can do things in a car that you can’t really do anywhere else. Scream. Curse. Talk to yourself, or to people who aren’t there. No one can hear you in a car, although at traffic lights it’s important to stop so that the person in the next lane won’t look over and think you’re crazy. “Poor Mary Beth Latham,” the person might tell everyone, at school, at the club. “I saw her talking to herself at the corner of Main Street and Valley Road.”

The first time I went out in the car, I made sure to get back by three-thirty so I could be home when Alex came in. I heard the doors of Olivia’s Suburban slam, and I arranged myself in the kitchen, by the little table but not at it, and I told my brain to give my face a smile, and it did, although when I told it to put my left hand on the back of one of the little ladder-back chairs it refused. Ginger whined, and after ten minutes Alex had not come, and I ran up the hill in a pair of thin driving shoes that were sodden by the time I got to the back door of Olivia’s house.

“What?” Olivia said when she saw my face and heard the dog barking shrilly.

“I heard your car,” I said, “but Alex hasn’t come home. Do you know where he is?”

“Basketball,” she said, very low and slow, her hand still on my arm, her eyes locked on mine as she pulled me into the house. “They have basketball this afternoon.” Her precise English voice is so calm that I understand, and believe. In the hospital and then afterward, when she had stayed with me, I noticed for the first time that Alice’s voice is glissando: up the scale, down the scale. It made my head hurt and my heart beat faster. “When is Aunt Alice going home?” Alex had asked one night as we ate sandwiches
again for dinner, and I said without thinking, “Tomorrow.” Liam was living with his Trinidadian nanny, but he cried each night when the sun went down. “I’ll be back soon, babe,” Alice had said as she kissed me.

Olivia’s voice is as measured and restful as Olivia herself. She saved my life, too. She gave us both a place to stay. When Alex came back from Colorado, with a toffee-colored tan, when I was still in the hospital, she put him in Ben’s room, and for the first three nights she slept on an inflatable mattress in the hallway just outside the door. “He says he doesn’t want to talk about it,” Ben had told her. We don’t talk about it. Alex goes to school. I cook his meals. Together, the week after I left the hospital, we went to the memorial service. I held Alex’s hand tight throughout it. It felt lifeless in mine. That’s mostly what I remember. Sarah spoke, and Ezra, and Nancy and Bill together, and Glen’s brother Doug, and the high school choir sang. I think it was “You’ve Got a Friend,” although I am not certain. I took a lot of pills that day. But I remember Alex’s hand, and the big bouquets of amaryllis and evergreens on the stage at the community center, and the photographs of Glen and Ruby and Max on easels. There was a picture in the center of all five of us together in London. Max was looking to the side. Ruby’s hair was in her face. “Is that the best one?” Glen had asked when I chose it for our Christmas card. “Everyone’s moving in every one of them,” I’d replied. “This is the one with the fewest people moving.”

Ruby’s friend Jacqui, the girl she roomed with at the summer writing program, read a poem of Ruby’s I had never heard before:

How can I ask for more
Than this minute, when the stars lie bright against the velvet
Without the curtain of cloud
And the earth beneath smells ripe and full
Of both of us, lying here,
Looking toward heaven
.

I remember I wept then, and Alex’s hand became rigid in mine, and he had a hard and angry frown, the face that men make when they’re trying not to break. Glen’s father had the same look. Behind him Stan sat with his arm around my mother and heaved into an enormous handkerchief, and my mother patted his big, meaty leg as though it were a baby that required comfort.

I never spoke to Jacqui after she read at the service. Somewhere on the little desk in the living room of this little house, in the big pile of papers, there is a lovely letter from her, and a note from that boy Chip that Ruby met at the college writing program, and the girl Max liked at camp. The pile was much much bigger in the beginning, but Nancy went through it every day after work for a week, and took out the religious tracts about a better place and life everlasting, and the messages from inmates who wondered if I wanted to correspond, and the letters, in their unmistakable spiky block print, from the schizophrenics who needed me to understand that my family was being held prisoner in a nuclear facility in the desert. “There are so many pathetic crazy people in the world,” Nancy had said through clenched teeth, and for a moment I thought she meant me.