Every Last One (13 page)

“He thought it was going to be more than you did,” I say.

“I don’t think that’s it. It was a big deal for me, too. But after a while I started to think that Kiernan didn’t really want to be with me, the way I am now. I think maybe Kiernan just wants to freeze everything forever. Like, like—like Peter Pan.”

“And you’re Wendy.”

“See, that’s it. That’s the problem. I’m not Wendy. I’m Ruby. And I’m not Ruby when she was five, or fifteen. I’m a different Ruby.” And she starts to sob, the kind of sobbing that refuses comfort, and all I can think is, Life is hard. Life is hard.

Finally she reaches for a paper towel, blows her nose, and wipes her eyes.

“Should I tell him he’s not welcome?” I say.

“How can we do that? It would kill him.”

How deeply she feels, my grown-up girl. I can remember the moment when I realized that. We had gone to London together, the five of us. It was just before Ruby began to waste away, but she was already starting to concern herself with odd things, to plumb the scope of the universe: ocean life, the constellations. In retrospect, I wondered if she was immersing herself in notions that made her feel small before she took the next step of actually making herself smaller.

Before our trip, she had read a half-dozen books about the Tudors and the Plantagenets, and she wandered the aisles of Westminster Abbey carrying a royal family tree. The boys were eleven, bored and hungry, sitting in the back banging the heels of their sneakers against the bottom of a bench until I had to hiss a warning. Ruby and Glen were standing together by a pale marble tomb, and as I joined them I saw that atop it was the figure of a woman.

“It’s Elizabeth,” Ruby had said. “Isn’t it terrible, to think that she’s under there, dead? And Shakespeare, and Charles Dickens, and Henry VIII, and everyone else I read about? They’re all dead.”
Her voice was rising. A tour guide at another tomb paused, then resumed in a slightly louder voice.

And then Glen began to speak as though his whole heart were in his words. He turned to Ruby and said, “All that tread the globe are but a handful to the tribes that slumber in its bosom.”

“What?” she whispered.

“All that tread the globe are but a handful to the tribes that slumber in its bosom,” he repeated. “‘Thanatopsis,’ by William Cullen Bryant. I wasn’t always an eye doctor, pumpkin.” The lines from the poem were still on an index card in the center of Ruby’s bulletin board. I was betting they would wind up on her yearbook page.

I cover the ring with my palm, feel it warm under my skin. “I’ll figure out how to handle this,” I say.

“No, Mommy,” Ruby replies. “I have to give it back myself. I just hope he’ll listen to me. I don’t think he really listens to me anymore.” We both look up as Max tromps across the floor above us. “I’ll take Max some nachos,” Ruby says, putting the ring back into her pocket. “He didn’t really get much to eat at dinner. I’m worried about him.”

“I know. Bring him up something to eat. Just make sure he brings down his plate after.”

“Yeah, right, that’ll happen,” she says, not yet completely transformed.

We’re sitting side by side in a small office that was clearly once the best bedroom in a Victorian house one block over from the hospital. It has a bay window and a tin ceiling. There are tea-colored lace curtains, but all the rest is standard doctor’s office: a slab desk, some framed diplomas, two armchairs covered in a brown-green nubby fabric, the kind that no one uses in the home, the kind that is designed to endure.

I cross my legs and smile. I am wearing a dress and carrying a real purse, instead of a canvas tote bag filled with shears and spades. This is my good-mother apparel. I may have been wearing the same dress when we met not far from here with the woman who helped Ruby begin eating again.

“I think this is a remediable situation,” she had said.

“Who uses the word ‘remediable,’” Glen said angrily in the car afterward.

“This is less about body image than about Ruby’s sense of autonomy,” she said.

“She’s a kid,” Glen said as we pulled away from the curb. “She needs autonomy?” When Glen is afraid, he loses his temper. “Where’s the goddamn doctor?” he’d yelled when I abandoned my rhythmic breathing and started to wail as Ruby was being born. “The goddamn doctor is right here, Dr. Latham,” the obstetrician had said, pulling on her gloves.

I am breathless with anxiety. Once, when I was thirteen, I broke a bottle of perfume that sat on my mother’s bureau. I could never remember her wearing the perfume, which looked like old scotch and smelled as dark and exotic as its amber color suggested. But I couldn’t remember a time when the heavy cut-crystal bottle was not on the right-hand corner of the lace doily, balancing a set of silver-backed brushes on the left. I’d yanked open a drawer, and the bottle wobbled and crashed to the floor, filling the room with the suffocating odor. I left the pieces there, and when later my mother called sharply, “Mary Beth!” I sat on one corner of her bed, the smell making me sick and faint, and said I couldn’t imagine how such a thing had happened. Many years after, it occurred to me that perhaps my mother had made so much of it because my father had given her the perfume, but at the time I simply insisted I’d done nothing wrong, even in the face of the evidence.

That feeling is the same feeling I have in this doctor’s office.

His name is Pindaros Vagelos. Nancy told me he was the psychologist who treated a girl in Fred’s class who had tried to kill herself her junior year, although the girl’s mother insisted that it was an accident. “An accidental wrist-slitting after thirty Xanax—you don’t see that very often,” Nancy had said in her harshest voice. Apparently, the young woman was now doing brilliantly at one of the most prestigious liberal-arts colleges and was planning to attend medical school. “She’ll probably go into psychiatry,” Glen had said on the drive over to Dr. Vagelos’s office. “All the nuts do. The beautiful girls go into dermatology. The jocks do orthopedics.”

“And the ophthalmologists?” I said, but it was not a day to try to jolly him.

“I guess,” Max had said when we asked him if he would talk to someone about how he was feeling. The painters had finished turning the guest room a mustard color that Ruby said might as well have been called Depression Yellow, and Max’s furniture had been moved from one side of the hall to the other. He got the old bunk beds, since it turned out that he didn’t care about a double bed the way Alex did. There was something so sad about those bunk beds, the lower all tumbled and untidy, the top one neatly made, waiting for the kind of sleepovers that, at least for the moment, were unlikely to take place. After only two weeks of school, a counselor had called to say that Max was a “student of concern” and that several of his teachers had reported that his homework was not complete. His cast had come off, but he still held his arm at a right angle by his side, and his handwriting was crabbed and illegible. “Did somebody go in my room?” he would say if I emptied the hamper or cleared the crusty dishes from the night table. Sometimes I swore I was in an empty house, and then I would hear the faint creak of a floorboard. The week before he had finally left his room after school to come here, to see Dr. Vagelos, to pronounce him acceptable.

“What’s he like?” I had asked.

“He wears glasses,” Max said, carrying a slice of pie upstairs. I put a hand out to touch him, and it slid along the length of his arm as though I had stroked the banister.

Glasses, a beard, a slight stoop, a cardigan: It was all in the name. So Glen and I are both surprised when a young man in a striped shirt unbuttoned at the throat opens the varnished oak door. He smiles as he shakes hands and settles us both. Thirty-five, perhaps a very boyish forty, wearing the rectangular black-framed glasses I associate with fashionable architects. My heart sinks.

“We’ve had two useful sessions,” he says of Max, leaning back in his chair slightly.

“I don’t want to sound insensitive, but all this just reads like puberty to me,” says Glen, lacing his fingers together in what I take for a doctor-to-doctor gesture. “I was depressed for most of high school.”

“That’s interesting,” Dr. Vagelos says.

“Not clinically depressed. But you know what I mean. The girls don’t like me, I don’t like algebra, my parents are a pain in the butt.”

“Do you think Max might be clinically depressed?” I say. Nancy has told me the medications are wonderful nowadays, although how she knows I can’t imagine. Her children run on endorphins and milk.

“Is there anyone in either of your families who suffers from depression?” the doctor asks evenly.

My stolid mother, his peripatetic brother, my brother the workaholic, his father the alcoholic.

“No,” says Glen.

“Maybe,” I say. “Undiagnosed.”

“Look,” says Dr. Vagelos, “why don’t you give me some time to really get to know Max? He and I have had two good conversations. He seems willing to talk.”

“Not to us,” I say.

“It could be he’s worried about upsetting you.”

“He’s upsetting us by not talking,” Glen says, and I hear a slight quaver in his voice. So much for puberty, girls, and algebra. For purposes of our union, he carries the stoicism, I carry the concern. At times like this, I want what he’s having.

“He loves you both very much. And he loves his sister and his brother.”

“He said that?” I ask.

“He did. But he also said—and I tell you this because he said I could—that he feels like a loser. Especially compared with his brother.” He looks down at a legal pad on his desk. “His brother, Alex.”

“That’s ridiculous,” says Glen, his voice strong again. “We’ve never indicated in any way that Alex is superior to Max.”

“The twin relationship is complex,” the doctor says, and suddenly I remember a day when I was sitting in the rocking chair by the window, trying to nurse both babies at the same time. Their legs were entwined, and each was trying to push the other away with his splayed feet. “They don’t like each other,” Ruby had said solemnly, standing by the side of the chair with her thumb in her mouth, twisting a curl.

“Of course they do, pumpkin,” I said. “They were inside together all this time.”

“If they like each other, then how come they’re kicking?” she replied.

“They’re fraternal twins,” I tell the doctor. “If you saw them together, you wouldn’t even think they were related.”

“And that carries its own particular set of issues, doesn’t it? In the twin relationship, issues of difference can be even more significant than issues of sameness.”

“I’m just not sure that’s at the root of his problems now,” I say.

“What’s your best guess?” the doctor says, looking into my eyes.

“I think he feels like he doesn’t belong anywhere anymore,” I say, and, shocked and dismayed at my own words, I begin to cry. “I love him so much. I don’t want him to feel bad about who he is.” Glen pats my arm gently. I look, and he is crying, too.

“I actually think he knows that,” Dr. Vagelos says. “I think we’re ahead of the curve here in terms of how Max feels valued by the two of you. But how the world values him may be a different matter,
and that goes to how the world values his brother.” Dr. Vagelos picks up a newspaper clipping from beneath the legal pad. I know what it is, even though I am still wiping my eyes. “Latham First-Year Soccer Standout,” the headline says. It’s a feature from the local paper called Player of the Week, and two weeks ago they chose Alex. Glen sent the clipping to his father, and his father sent Alex a copy of the story laminated onto an enormous wooden plaque.

“Did Max tell you he plays the drums?” I ask.

“Yes, he did. And that he’s an ace computer programmer. But you should know that at some level he doesn’t feel that his gifts are important. And he doesn’t feel he’s entitled to his negative feelings. That’s another reason he doesn’t feel comfortable discussing them with you. He says that he has a great home, great parents, great siblings, and that he should be happy because of all that. In some ways, he’s as distressed by what he sees as the wrongness of his emotions as by anything else. I think one of the phrases he kept repeating was ‘I just can’t help it.’”

“So maybe it’s chemical,” I say.

“That’s certainly something I’ll be considering. But we have a lot of ground to cover. I wanted to talk to you, and he wanted me to talk to you, to let you know that we think we can work together.”

“We appreciate that,” says Glen. “You come highly recommended. I’m impressed that you thought to clip the newspaper story.”

“I didn’t see this myself, Dr. Latham. Max brought it to me, I think to show me what he was up against. He has another copy that he kept himself.”

“I swear,” I say, trying to laugh, “I never dressed them alike.”

Dr. Vagelos smiles again. He has a warm smile; his whole face is in it, especially his eyes. “As I said, sometimes difference can be more of an issue than similarity.”

“You obviously have given the fact that he’s a twin a lot of thought,” Glen says.

“It’s my area of expertise. I’m sorry I assumed you knew that. I assumed that’s why you sent Max to me as opposed to someone else.”