Every Last One (24 page)

“I have to pee very much!” yells Luke from inside the car.

“I have a lot of homework,” Alex says as we pull away.

“We’ll make it fast,” I say. My voice sounds false to me, and I realize it is my company voice, the one I used with Sandy, and with the man in the hardware store who told me which sort of hammer to buy. “We’ll make it fast,” I say again, and this time I sound more like me.

“Cool,” Alex says.

“How was practice?”

“The new coach is really mean.”

“Really?”

“Nobody likes him. Like, he’s really sarcastic? He goes to me, ‘Latham, the ball belongs to the whole team, not just you.’ Like I’m a ball hog? And I wasn’t hogging the ball.”

I haven’t met the new coach, but I love him for his gift of meanness. I love him for not being kind and gentle to Alex, for not reminding him and all the others that Alex is indelibly marked as wounded. I will go to the next game and I will say, “Hi, I’m Alex’s mother.”

“I talked to Dr. Vagelos today about meeting with you,” I say as we come down a steep hill. Alex rummages through his backpack as I decide what to say next. And I wonder if he is as careful with me as I am with him.

I do not say, What made you go to see him? I do not say, Why didn’t you tell me? I do not say, Why can’t you talk to me? I do not say, What does it feel like, to be you, to have them all gone? I know what it feels like to be fatherless, with a mother who never speaks of it. It feels bad. It feels so bad.

I say, “That sounds good to me.”

“Cool,” Alex says. After a few minutes he says, “I really feel like pizza.”

“Anchovies?” I want to say. It is an old family joke. “Not if you value your life,” I can hear Ruby replying. She taught both the boys to say it, too.

In silence, we drive as the night fills the car.

Alice is coming to visit for two days. “There’s a crafts fair!” she says, as though she were describing a Broadway opening or a royal visit. As her car comes down the drive Ginger barks, and I look up the slope toward Olivia’s house. I imagine that Olivia has pulled the flowered curtains in her bedroom gently back to watch Alice arrive. Alice is bad at keeping secrets, and she will surely tell me if Olivia called to say it might be a good weekend to stay with me. This is another thing I’ve come to expect but cannot like: the idea that people are talking about me, taking my emotional temperature. My father-in-law calls, and then the next day Glen’s brother Doug does, too, and I imagine the conversation that took place between them: She sounded down, she’s not getting out much, she needs to get to work, to get a house, to get out of the house. At least Nancy refuses to hide behind pleasantries: The last time we spoke, she said, “I was looking for you at the basketball game. Where were you?”

Where was I? Was that the night I was watching the movie on television, or the night I cleaned the bathroom? Or was it a more ordinary night, a night when I had a cup of tea and steered my mind through a treacherous maze, past the sight of Ruby behind the wheel of her Volvo smiling up at me, past Max pounding away at his drums with his hair marking time, past Glen bending to pet the dog and then laying his arm along the back of the couch behind me. My memories are booby-trapped. A week ago, I was in the supermarket and found myself in front of the freezer case, staring at boxes of veggie burgers, the kind I had to track down for Ruby when she stopped eating meat in eighth grade. I abandoned the cart, and the shopping trip, and drove home, shaking. Yesterday I found a black dress sock among my T-shirts, one lone sock of the sort my husband wore all his grown-up life, and I held it to my face, then left it on the edge of the bathroom sink, then hid it under the vanity so that Alex would not see it, then took it from beneath the sink and put it back in the drawer where I first found it. The photographs and family mementoes are still in the other house, the haunted house, the abandoned house. And yet I am ambushed still, by frozen food, by misplaced socks.

“I brought bagels!” Alice says, holding the paper bag aloft.

“You brought enough bagels for an army,” I say.

“Mary Beth, I know you’re going to kill me for saying this, but you just sounded like your mother,” she says, and I swat her arm, and she hugs me. When I smile, it is like the front door to our old house, all disused rusty hinges. But I try.

Alex and Ben have gone away for a weekend basketball workshop. “I have to go,” Alex had said when he handed me the consent form and saw the look on my face. I drove over to the high school to watch the team get on the bus. I handed Alex his duffel bag and a box of chocolate-chip cookies. “They’re still warm,” I’d
said. As the doors to the bus closed with a hiss, I saw the cookies being passed from seat to seat. Alex was talking to someone across the aisle as the bus pulled out. I waved goodbye to no one.

“Can you join us for dinner?” Olivia had said as we walked back to our cars.

“I think I’ll just stay in tonight,” I said, as though that was not what I did every night.

“Let’s go out to dinner!” Alice says, and I understand that this is the visit designed to reintroduce me to the outside world—the happy visit, the small-talk visit. Even Alice is afraid to hear what I am thinking. I don’t blame her; I am afraid to think what I am thinking. We drive to a steak house where Nancy and I have had dinner several times, and Alice talks about a book on Thomas Jefferson that she is editing, and a controversy about a water-treatment plant in her neighborhood, and the price of real estate in New York, and I let her words roll over me, my face arranged as though I am listening. There is a trick to this, but I have learned it: uh-huh, uh-huh, nod, uh-huh, uh-huh, nod.

“Is that not good?” she finally asks, looking at my steak.

“I had a big lunch,” I say.

“Doggie bag?” says the waitress.

“We actually have a dog to bring it to,” says Alice.

Ginger gets half, and we put the other half in the refrigerator. “For later,” says Alice. What that means is that in four days, which seems the proper length of time, I will throw it away. Alice bends to look inside the fridge. “What is that?” she says, pointing.

“It’s a turkey. Rickie brought it over the other day. One of the guys I work with.”

“The big guy?”

I nod.

“A whole turkey?”

“And a cordless drill,” I add. He had appeared at the door in a
down jacket and a baseball cap, his brawny arms full. He had grown a beard, and there were crumbs in it. I offered him coffee, but he couldn’t stay, or said he couldn’t. A turkey and a power tool: I pictured him racking his brain. I’d kissed his cheek.

“I’m exhausted,” I say to Alice, and I am. It is exhausting to pretend to be a different person for this length of time. Or not a different person—the same old person, who seems like someone I knew a long time ago. Mostly I only have to do it in small doses—ten minutes here, an hour there. The rest of the time, I busy myself with small repetitive tasks. I have thought about learning how to knit, but I picture Alex leaving for school in misshapen sweaters and stuffing them guiltily to the back of his locker. Maybe I will make an afghan. Someone once said that no one really wants an afghan. It was me, before, that other me.

“It’s not even nine o’clock,” Alice says. She sits on the couch, and I sit next to her, both of us facing forward. We have used up all our small talk. We must look like two people waiting on a bench for a bus. Two strangers.

“I don’t know how to do this in person,” she finally says. “Somehow it’s easier to talk on the phone.” Her voice sounds husky, and when I look she is crying. She sobs, and I rub her back.

“Oh, my God,” she finally cries. “This is just unforgivable. Why am I the one sitting here crying while you comfort me? I’m ashamed of myself.” Ginger sniffs at her face, whines slightly. Ginger is distressed by tears. This helps me to stop, sometimes.

“It’s all right, Al.”

“What’s all right? That I’m completely useless to you? That I spent the entire evening trying to act as though nothing had happened in the past six months except that an apartment in my building sold for two million dollars? That you’re my best friend and I can’t even find a way to talk to you?”

“It goes both ways,” I say. I know this is true. How many times
in the past three months have I been reminded of Ruby’s two selves, the careful courteous young woman who spoke so sweetly to strangers and the person she let loose at home, where she was safe, where she could be spiky and harsh and uncertain and at sea? I have two selves now, too, the one that goes out in the world and says what sound like the right things and nods and listens and even sometimes smiles, and the real woman, who watches her in wonder, who is nothing but a wound, a wound that will not stop throbbing except when it is anesthetized. I know what the world wants: It wants me to heal. But to heal I would have to forget, and if I forget my family truly dies.

I manage to bury her, that wounded woman. I try to push her down. But last night when I came back from the high school, knowing that Alex was gone until Sunday night, she had taken over the house, her self-possessed twin banished to the closet with my wool coat and scarf. The quiet was like a hand over my mouth and nose, and I felt that I would suffocate. I was afraid I would start to scream, and I went into Alex’s room, which faces away from Olivia’s house, so that no one would hear me. I sat down on my son’s borrowed bed, and realized that it was uncomfortable, that the mattress sagged in the middle, and I filled the room with wailing. For some reason, I found myself repeating aloud the words “No more. No more.” It was not so much that I wanted to die; it was just that I could not bear the incessant feeling of being alive. And then it occurred to me that I was already dead, that what was left behind was a carapace, like the shells of cicadas we found a few summers ago. I had been full, of creating children, of taking care, of tasks and plans and a big bright future, and now all that was left was a translucent skin of what had once been my life.

“Can we talk? Really talk?” Alice says, mopping at her eyes with the side of her sleeve the way she had in college.

“About what?”

“About everything. About them. About how you’re feeling. About what it’s like.”

I sit for a moment and truly think about what she has said instead of pretending I am thinking. I owe Alice more than the Mary Beth I have designed for public consumption, but I can’t show her that other, hidden woman. She is too terrible, as though I have been throttled and cut up, too, as though the real me is maimed and torn and murdered. I can’t show Alice the body. She is not as tough as she thinks she is. She has a hidden woman, too, a softer, less certain self.

“I can’t really do that yet,” I finally say. I think perhaps I will never be able to do it, not in the way Alice means. Why should I share what no one wants to know? Why should I listen to the words of those who know nothing? I can predict what they will say:

It will get easier.

Lie.

You can handle this.

Lie.

Time heals.

Lie. Time just passes. Slowly.

“I’m afraid for you,” Alice says. “I feel like I’m failing you. When we were young, I was so good at this.”

“Don’t mope!” I say. “That’s what you always said.”

“Hey I got you to go to a lot of parties and bars you didn’t want to go to by saying that. I got you to go to that party where you met Glen.”

“I remember,” I say. “Remember when you thought you might want to become a therapist?”

“Wow!” says Alice. “I’d almost forgotten about that.”

“And how you volunteered on that help line, talking to people about their problems?”

Alice winces. “And after two weeks,” I add, “you came back to the room and said, ‘I quit. I’m only interested in the problems of people I actually know.’”

“That’s true. But now …” Alice says, her voice starting to quiver.

“I know. I know.” I hug her, hard. “Did Olivia call you and tell you to come today?”

“Olivia? No. Alex did. He said you’d be alone for the weekend. I was going to come anyhow, soon, but he told me this weekend would be good because he was going away.”

I sit back. “He keeps surprising me,” I say. “First the therapist, then you.”

“I don’t think me sitting here crying is what he had in mind,” Alice says, blowing her nose. “At least you have him. Oh, God, that’s a stupid thing to say, isn’t it?”

“No,” I say, “it’s the truth.” But I don’t have him in the way Alice means. When he comes home, he goes into his room and shuts the door. The music comes on, and I am reminded of Max, except that, as always, Alex has reversed things. He is contented out in the world, but when he comes back here—to this little house, to his makeshift home, to the kitchen table with just two chairs—his loss is a terrible, palpable thing. He puts it in a box of a bedroom, holds it prisoner.

“I really am tired,” I say. “Do you mind staying in Alex’s room? I changed the sheets.” I know that Alice wants to share a room with me, the way we did when we were young, but that would mean she would sleep on Glen’s side of the bed. And I can’t bear that.

The next morning, we go to the crafts fair. Alice buys Liam a felt jester’s hat with bells. She buys a silk blouse made out of pieces of old kimonos, and earrings for her assistant’s birthday. I wander past pieces of pottery, copper wind chimes, tapestry scarves, and
stop in front of a booth with framed samplers, a display of axioms: “A Daughter Is a Lifelong Friend.” “There’s a Special Place in Heaven for the Mothers of Little Boys.” “Live Laugh Love.” A woman is sitting in a lawn chair, cross-stitching a piece that says “More Today Than Yesterday.” “Can I help you?” she asks. “No,” I reply.