Every Last One (21 page)

She never saw the letter from Deborah Donahue or I’m sure she would have thrown it away, perhaps even burned it. “You killed my son,” Kiernan’s mother wrote, in a block print not unlike those of the crazy people. We’d always been in unlikely sympathy with each other, Deborah and I. There was a year there, when the kids were small, when even our menstrual cycles were in sync, and we made a pact not to go to each other’s house at those times because we were both so out of sorts that we would certainly quarrel. Now
we are both bereaved mothers who had seen disaster creeping up and had somehow convinced ourselves that it was an optical illusion.

Kiernan’s father came to the memorial service. He tried to hug me afterward, but I turned away from him. I do remember that. There was a large ring of public avoidance around him, as though he had a contagious disease, or gave off a force field. “I can’t believe he had the unmitigated gall to come to this,” Nancy had said, loud enough for him to hear.

“It’s fine,” I whispered, and moved away. What did it matter to me? What did anything matter to me? Except Alex. This is what I have to keep reminding myself. In the hospital, my mother had heard one of the nurses whispering that my whole family was gone. “She has a son,” my mother said coldly. “She has a son.”

I have a son. He will be hungry. Because of the hospital, and our shut-up house, and the police, and the questions, people had not come to us with casseroles and cakes the way they do after someone has died. When I look in the packed freezer, I realize I am making my own funeral meats.

I carry most of the pot of soup up to Olivia’s house, and she answers the door and says, “I’ve just put the kettle on.” Ginger comes in, too, and lies between the two of us beneath the kitchen table. I don’t think Ginger should be left alone. The house is so quiet between our sentences that I can hear the grandfather clock in the hall tick, but Olivia doesn’t always try to fill the silence. She is a good listener, except that I have nothing to say, or nothing I can say aloud. When the ticking becomes too sharp, I go back down the hill with no memory of what we’ve talked about. I sit on the sofa again, Ginger’s head on one of my insteps. I finger the long scar on my shoulder and think, Glen is gone, Ruby is gone, Max is gone. It’s the way I used to memorize poetry when I was younger. It’s like I am trying to teach it to myself so I will understand.

So this is what it is like not to be medicated, or, at least, medicated less: The light feels like shards of glass, the glass in the windows looks like mirrors, the mirrors reflect back a gray woman with black eyes. I’m wearing the same dress I wore to the memorial service, and as I zip it awkwardly, trying to snake my good arm up the middle of my back, I tell myself that I will throw the dress away in the morning. “Give it to Goodwill,” I know my mother will say but I think its fabric now holds its history, so that it would be like donating a sweater full of moths or a chest of drawers with woodworm.

I pull into the lot in front of the lawyer’s office, and as I do men in dark suits emerge from a line of cars. The slam of metal doors is my welcome. They converge on me, and I think they look like pallbearers: Glen’s father; his brother Doug; my brother, Richard; Nancy’s husband, Bill. The men are here to mourn the way that feels most useful to them, by taking care of business. One by one, they kiss my cheek. They have come together in a caravan from
Nancy’s husband’s insurance office, and I wonder if their cars had the lights on like a funeral procession as they came over the back roads.

My brother moves in to take my hand and we walk, entwined, into the large, glistening lobby. He announces us. Glen’s father smoothes back his hair with the flat of his hand. His jacket is open, and I’m certain his suit would not button if he tried. I think it’s the same suit he wore eleven years ago, when his wife died of breast cancer. Even then he didn’t cry. “They did everything they could,” he repeated to the mourners, and “She fought it to the very end.” The widows have been bringing him pots of stew and plates of cookies ever since, but he still lives alone and runs the roofing company with Glen’s brother Peter, still climbs the ladder and straddles the eaves. Peter’s wife buys his clothes and arranges for his cleaning woman and does his grocery shopping, so that his life is not so different than it was when his wife was alive. I used to say that to Glen all the time, but now I’m ashamed, because now I know that there is something about having another person in the house, even if you barely speak to them, barely notice them, that is far far different from being in the house alone.

“How are you doing, Dad?” I say, and he coughs, to hide his bloodshot eyes, and because I hardly ever call him this, and the kindness makes him feel exposed.

“Okay for an old man,” he says, as usual, but he squeezes my shoulder.

Glen says that when he was little he thought his father was a giant, and he’s still a big man, aging the way big men do, with a hard medicine ball of a belly and a thick neck thrust forward like a raptor’s. He insisted on coming. So did my brother, although the way he keeps putting his hand to his heart, to the breast pocket where he keeps his phone, tells me his office is buzzing him incessantly. I like and admire my brother, but in that way you do someone
you see twice a year at parties. He feels the same about me. We would do anything for each other but are grateful that we have never really had to.

“How’s Alex?” asks my father-in-law in the elevator. “Is he getting much playing time?”

“He’s only a freshman, Pop,” says Doug.

“For a freshman, he gets a lot of playing time,” says Bill. “Unless he gets injured, he can probably wind up playing in college. Not Division 1, but one of the smaller places.”

“I don’t know,” my father-in-law says. “They got monsters playing college ball now. Freaks of nature. You have to see how big he gets.”

My brother sees the look on my face and squeezes my hand. Without the pills the squeeze feels hard, more like he is trying to bring me to my senses than to comfort me. Maybe he’s afraid that I’ll scream if I hear another word about whether Alex can play college basketball. Maybe he’s simply concerned that I am going to scream. Even those who know me best look at me now as though they are afraid. They are afraid of me, afraid that if I broke down under this great weight it would be a horrible thing to see. They can’t know that I spend all my time and energy now making certain that that doesn’t happen, for Alex’s sake. “She has a son,” my mother told the nurses.

I remember the lawyer’s office from the signing of our wills, five or six years ago. His name is Reinhold. It seems amazing to me that I have been able to recall that, even though it is written on a file I am holding in my lap. I can’t remember his first name, but it doesn’t matter. “Hello, Mr. Reinhold,” I say, and he says, “Please, call me Larry.” “Larry,” I repeat dutifully. He comes around the desk, leans in, murmurs, “Mary Beth, I’m so sorry.” I wave a hand in the air to stop him from saying more. People don’t understand
words—how empty, how useless, how awful they can be. Words don’t soothe; they only set us apart. Please, I want to say, be quiet, so I can be ordinary again, so we can act as though this is business as usual, so I can go back to the sofa in Olivia’s guesthouse and make my mind blank.

People’s looks are just as bad. When I go out, which is still not often, their looks are like words, too. Once their eyes would move over me unthinkingly, an offhand observation of a look—glib, empty, the equivalent of “Have a nice day.” Now they stammer as they try not to stare: smooth, smooth, stop, back, stop, back, stutter, slide down. It’s like a dance move: Oh my God, oh my God, do you know who that is, that poor woman. Even the receptionist out front did it. I am like a burn victim, except that they are all imagining my scars. And I am feeling them, feeling the skin gone, the nerves exposed. I have to get back to the house.

Our lawyer has decorated his office as though he is a British barrister: mahogany desk and credenza, red leather chairs, hunting prints. I think Glen and I joked about it after we left the last time, but for a moment I hear Glen’s chuckle and I make my mind blank again. Some straight chairs are brought in from the conference room to accommodate all the men. The medications must stay in your system. I will have to concentrate very hard to follow the conversation.

“Do any of you happen to be attorneys?” Larry Reinhold asks.

“We’re businessmen,” says my father-in-law.

It’s all quite simple, really. There’s no need for these men to be here in the first place. Perhaps they felt done out of some ceremonial role when I decided, in the hospital, that I would have the bodies cremated quickly. The bodies, I said to myself over and over again as though it would make me believe it. “I wanted to say goodbye,” said my father-in-law, whose wife had appeared in
her open casket in her Easter suit from the year before, her usual lipstick—Coral Reef, I think it was called—on her thin lips.

I had already said goodbye. I said goodbye to Max when we were leaving for the New Year’s Eve party at Nancy and Bill’s. Max had been behind the door of his room, and I could hear him shuffling around, waiting for us to go, and I tell myself now that it is all right that I didn’t push my way in, nuzzle his neck, tidy his hair, drive him wild with my affectionate meddlings. I said goodbye to Ruby as she put on her coat over her dress to leave for some other, younger, better party. I said goodbye as I held her close, her hair tumbled over my face, and I tell myself now that it is all right that I didn’t remind her to be careful, to come home early, force her to turn on me with her impatient face and shut off my nervous burbles. I said goodbye to Glen as he rose in a temper, his spot in the bed warm beside me as I fell back to sleep, and I tell myself now that it is all right that I didn’t say to him, one last time, the way I did when we were young, with my heart and not simply my lips, “I love you.”

“Would you like to see them?” they had asked me in the hospital, and suddenly, with terror and revulsion, I had known that they were there, in the same building, waiting to be claimed, waiting for someone to make some decision. I suddenly understood that, if I stumbled into the hall and then the elevator and rode down to the bowels of the building, I could find their bodies—not them, just some terrible battered empty facsimile. “No,” I said. “No.” For a moment I thought that terrible noise would begin again, now that I knew that the noise came from inside myself.

“Are you certain?” Nancy said. “It might help.” Help what, I thought even through the haze. Help to kill them forever, to turn my laughing, loving family into a silent parade of the sightless and the still?

“Stop,” I’d said, and Alice had looked at Nancy with horror and
what looked like hatred and said, “Just leave her alone. Leave her alone.”

“It’s a simple ‘I love you’ will,” Larry the lawyer says. What a lovely legal term. I love you, I love you. It means that if I died everything we had belonged to Glen, and if he died everything belonged to me. I love you I love you I love you. The sentence is running through my mind, a continuous loop, like one of those digital signs. I love you. Glen wrote it every year when he sent roses on my birthday, on the little card the florist gave him: I love you. Larry’s mouth moves. Bill’s mouth moves. I love you I love you. I’ve missed something. I’m not sure what. I try to pay attention again, but I can’t seem to do it. I love you, I love you, where am I?

“… guardian,” Larry says.

“Obviously, that’s not an issue,” Bill says.

I remembered how, years ago, we had argued over who to appoint legal guardian of our children. I wanted to talk about Deborah and Kevin. But Glen wouldn’t hear of it even before Declan drowned. In my will now, my brother, Richard, and his wife would get Alex if anything happened to me. I look over at my brother, and he runs his hand over the back of my chair. I will change that as soon as I have a chance to think about it. Olivia, I think, or maybe Alice.

Glen was so careful, so responsible. The insurance on the house means there is no mortgage left to pay. The value of his practice means that there are three potential buyers already. And Glen’s life insurance means that I now have a great deal of money. Bill knows all this, since he is our insurance agent. “So she’s set for life?” my father-in-law asks, and I know that this will be one of the things he will say: Glen made sure his wife was set for life. A kind of lottery.

Everything’s done. The will will be probated. The insurance
money will be paid into our investment account. The investment account will be transferred to my name alone. Glen’s practice will be sold. “Highest bidder, correct?” says Bill, but I speak.

“I want to interview them,” I say suddenly. I’m surprised to hear myself.

“The potential buyers?” says Larry Reinhold.

“We can take care of that for you,” Bill says. Everyone wants to do things for me. I wonder what they think I will find to do when everything is done for me. Make soup. Drive aimlessly. Page through cookbooks. Sleep. The ghost of Mary Beth Latham will move, senseless, through her own existence, waiting for something to do, waiting for someone to call. Waiting, and listening, for three familiar voices.