Every Last One (18 page)

An hour later, when I’m in the kitchen fixing lunch, José knocks at the back door. He hands me a package—brown paper, red ribbon—and at first I think it is from him and am even more embarassed. But apparently it was leaning against our front door. There is no card, no writing on the outside.

That night, after we’ve had our roast beef and potatoes and Christmas cookies, recorded carols blending into a pleasing and familiar background noise, while Glen and Alex are watching football in the den, when Max has gone into the living room to bang away at his new drums—“Not after nine o’clock,” calls Glen, and I think, Oh, let him go until ten; please, let him go forever—I show the package to Ruby. It is a photograph of her. She’s outside somewhere, and her hands are aloft, almost ceremonial, as though she is conducting, or conducting a religious service. The sun is behind her, so that the edges of her hair are a haze, almost a halo. It’s the sort of photograph, of joy and life and beauty, that any mother would love to have of her daughter, and if things were different I would find a nail right now and hang it on the wall.

But I knew when I opened it that there was something wrong with it, something sad and scary, so I waited until the last few minutes of the day, so as not to spoil the happiness of Christmas, the camaraderie and pink cheeks of sledding, the easy and uncomplicated
dinner conversation, the drowsy uninflected evening. Ruby holds it for a long time, her face expressionless, so different from the face in the photograph. She looks almost plain in the light from the chandelier above the table, the demitasse of light. She looks almost old.

I expect her to erupt, but she doesn’t. Perhaps it’s the aftertaste of the day, but she just sighs. Finally she says, “I don’t even know when he took this.”

“Maybe last year?” I ask.

She points to a sliver of shirt at the bottom of the photo, barely visible. “I bought that at the thrift store in September. It’s a pretty recent picture.” She squints. “I think I’m outside of Sarah’s. He has that really good zoom lens. He must have used that.”

“He’s just lost, sweetie.” Even as I say the words they sound glib, empty.

Ruby shakes her head. “Mommy, the thing you do, trying to make everyone happy? Sometimes it makes nobody happy. You’re always making excuses for him, like you’re trying to make up for something, like you’re trying to make it up to poor Kiernan that his life sucks. And that makes me feel bad, and it makes him feel entitled.”

“He doesn’t come to the house anymore.”

“Oh, Mom, of course he does. You just don’t see him. That ring has been under my pillow again twice.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“What, so you could say, ‘He’s such a sweet guy, he was so nice to Max’?”

“Oh, honey. I’m so sorry.”

I look at the photograph again. I see something I haven’t noticed before: With what looks like India ink, Kiernan has drawn the ring of hearts on Ruby’s finger. Silently, I point to the place, leaving a smudge on the glass.

“Of course,” says Ruby.

“I’ll talk to him. Your father will talk to him.”

“You know, in the beginning I kind of liked it, I have to admit. It was kind of flattering. Then it was annoying. Now it’s creepy like he can’t stop himself. He’s always been like that, like he couldn’t do anything halfway. It’s one of the reasons I broke up with him. It was just so exhausting.”

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t get it, not really.”

“Why would you? For a long time, I was happy. Why would you worry when I was happy? When we’re happy, all you see is the happiness.”

“I think it’s just the opposite. I always think that when you’re unhappy all I see is the unhappiness.”

“That, too,” Ruby says. She stands and looks down at the photograph. “What are you going to do with that thing?”

“I hadn’t even thought about it.”

“Just get it away from me,” she says, and goes upstairs.

“No way,” says Max from inside his room, the door closed. “No fucking way,” he adds, muttering. I can scarcely hear him over the music, but I choose to ignore it. I have just asked if he wants to go with us to Nancy and Bill’s house for New Year’s Eve. Their children will be there, although as the evening staggers toward midnight they’ll leave, Fred with his girlfriend, Sarah with Eric and Ruby and Rachel and the rest, Bob to a pool party someone has organized at the Holiday Inn for the younger teenagers, to keep them out of trouble. There’s no curfew for New Year’s Eve yet, but if there are many more car crashes on the winding roads around here it’s only a matter of time. “Safety at any price,” the head of the council has said to the local paper.

“Maybe we should stay home,” I say to Glen.

“We’re going out,” he says as he threads his belt through the loops. “We’re not going to keep catering to his moods.”

“I don’t think that’s the word I would use to describe what’s going on with him,” I say.

“I don’t care what word we use. We’re going to the party.”

After Max asks, “How late can I play my drums?” I give up and let him stay home alone. If he’s on the drums, at least he won’t be in his room, where I open the windows to the sharp winter air and exorcise the yeasty smell of unwashed teenage boy. There is a faint grubby impression of his body on the sheets, like the Shroud of Turin. Twice a week I gather clothes from the floor into the laundry basket and send them down the chute to the mudroom, where Ginger will snuffle through them happily. She loves Alex’s sports uniforms, too, of which there are many. No. 18 in soccer, No. 21 in basketball, number still to be determined in lacrosse. Alex has gone on a ski trip, organized hastily, with the family of his friend Colin from camp. I suspect that one of Colin’s school friends has canceled at the last minute, but his mother sounds nice on the phone, and says all the right things about parental oversight on the trip.

By evening’s end, I am beginning to think that Max has the right idea. Each year Glen and I talk of staying home on New Year’s Eve, watching an old movie, having a glass of Chardonnay and a sandwich and going to sleep at 10
P.M.
But someone always has a party, and it seems churlish to say no. Nancy has sworn that she has planned a quieter version of the usual cocktail-dress-and-canapés event, but there are forty people, and chafing dishes, and endless champagne.

“Half of the people I asked are in the Caribbean,” she says, popping another cork in the kitchen.

“I wish I were in the Caribbean,” I say. My skin is pasty, and I have the ghost of a head cold.

Sarah has already chosen a college, the one with the new athletic center and the winning swim team. She is standing at the buffet table with an enormous pile of crab cakes on her plate. Eric is sitting in one of the dining-room chairs pushed back against the
wall, frowning. Ruby has a hip pressed up against the piano, talking to Nancy’s colleague from the university, the one who teaches philosophy. “My father was a philosophy major,” I hear Ruby say as she catches my eye across the room and raises a glass. She’s wearing a black lace dress that comes to mid-thigh. Her shoes have been abandoned by the back door. Her toenails are painted orange. I smile and lift my glass in return, amazed that I am the mother of this beautiful girl. Here’s to her.

When I was Ruby’s age, New Year’s Eve was always anticipated, always disappointing. I remember the first New Year’s I spent with Alice’s family, and how she had convinced me that I would meet someone, someone older, someone wonderful. Instead, a twenty-two-year-old with beer breath had tried to push me into a closet, I had gotten Stroganoff sauce on a pink silk dress, and I had had two glasses of champagne atop four White Russians and been noisily, messily sick in Alice’s bathroom.

Perhaps because of that, Alice always calls me on New Year’s Eve. Her greeting never varies: “Every time I puke after a party I think of you, babe.”

“When’s the last time you puked after a party?”

A thoughtful silence, then: “I think I was pregnant. Does that count?”

“No. Are you going out tonight?”

“How soon they forget. Have you ever heard of anyone being able to get a babysitter on New Year’s Eve?”

We’ve never needed one. In our circles, the children were all of an age; we brought them with us, tucked them into one another’s cribs, lifted their boneless little bodies into the cars after the ball dropped in Times Square. They slept effortlessly, utterly, never awakened by the shouts, the laughter, the garbled chorus of “Auld Lang Syne.” Nancy once showed me a newspaper story about a toddler who had suffocated under the coats at a party. “I’ve had my
moments, but I think I would notice a two-year-old before I tossed my coat on the bed,” she had said.

We once put coats over little Declan Donahue as Ruby and Kiernan bounced to old soul music in the living room and the twins slept on a sofa. But Declan’s face, slack in sleep, had remained uncovered and elevated on the pillows, so that he looked like an enormous wooly bear of a man with the head of a seraph. That was the night Kiernan’s father had kissed me in the bathroom, his hand sliding up inside my satin blouse. I vowed the next morning, while opening a bottle of Tylenol, to avoid being alone with him in the future. I wished more than once that I had kept that vow.

New Year’s Eve: always disappointing, now simply dispiriting. Our children still have the slightly glassy expectant look of people determined to somehow wrest a very good time from the frigid night. After they leave, the party loses its gaiety, and suddenly there is merely a kitchen full of scraped plates and several dozen adults talking of how their tolerance for alcohol has diminished with age. “I’m in bed by ten every night,” one woman says, to a thundering silence, because of course all of us are in bed by ten every night, every night but this one. Glen and Bill have a hurried conversation just after midnight, talking in the kitchen about whether the philosopher is too drunk to drive. But by the time they come into the living room to find Nancy and ask her what to do, the man has already sped away. “Were his headlights on?” Glen asks.

“Why in God’s name do I do this?” Nancy says, hugging me hard at the door.

“It was a great party,” I say. “There’s no one I would rather spend the evening with.”

“Tell me in the morning, when I can understand what you’re saying. Let’s have a wonderful year together. Let’s live through the nightmare of sending those girls to college.”

“Oh, God, don’t even mention that.”

“Okay, Nance, this is getting maudlin,” says Bill.

“If we can’t be maudlin on New Year’s Eve, when the hell can we be maudlin?” Nancy cries, her arm still draped around my shoulder.

“Are you drunk?” I say to Glen as we walk home hand in hand.

“Yes, I am,” he says flatly. “I’m not proud of it.”

“We’re too old for this. I had three Cosmopolitans, two glasses of red wine, and two glasses of champagne.”

“Wow! That’s a lot to drink.”

Ahead, our house is lit up, the kitchen and the mudroom windows bright against the black outside. This says nothing about what is happening within. Our children have been known to go up to bed with the television and all the downstairs lights still on. Inside, I look around for clues. There is no sign of Ruby, of her little red Chinese purse on the table, of her towering purple heels in the middle of the kitchen floor. Ruby leaves a trail of herself downstairs after a party: shoes, jewelry, sometimes a box of Band-Aids for blisters. Upstairs, Max’s door is shut, with no telltale line of light along its bottom sill.

“Don’t turn off the lamps,” I say as I take a sleeping pill.

Glen frowns. He wants to tell me that I shouldn’t take a sleeping pill when I’ve had alcohol, but he knows I know. And I know he knows to leave the lamps on. I say this every time we get home and one of the children is still out. This is what it is like to be married: conversations in which no one actually speaks.

I carry my shoes up the stairs. There is no sound from Max’s room. Ruby’s light is on, and several rejected party dresses are on the floor, along with a tangle of underwear and fishnet stockings. Someday she will have forgotten about this and will be telling her own daughter that her room is a sty. Or she will insist that I was too indulgent and should have demanded that she be tidier.

“Is he asleep?” Glen whispers under the duvet, pushing up my
nightgown. Glen believes in sex on New Year’s Eve. Afterward, I find my nightgown wadded up at the foot of the bed. Glen puts on a T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts, and begins to snore, and I match my breathing to his, and I immediately fall down the chute of sleep.

I half wake when I hear a noise from downstairs, and I look at the digital clock: 3:43, it says. I wait to hear Ruby on the stairs, but instead it sounds as though something drops below. Glen coughs, rolls over. For a few moments, I hear nothing. My head is muddled and now I’m not certain I heard anything at all, that it was not the closing salvos of a dream or a side effect of the sleeping pill. One night several years ago, I went downstairs because I smelled chocolate-chip cookies baking, but the kitchen was dark and smelled only of lemon oil and Ginger, who had whined softly from inside her kennel. Glen says the sleeping pills can do this.