Every Last One (23 page)

“I’m so sorry,” he says without preamble, and I remember that
I thought I saw him at the memorial service. Dark hair, dark frames on his glasses. His glasses. That was how I remembered who he was. If it was him. There were so many faces that day. Patients, classmates, neighbors, clients, friends. So many.

“Thank you,” I say, as always.

“I’m actually calling about Alex.”

“Alex?”

“He came by to see me yesterday. He wants to work with me. It’s a little unusual, treating brothers, but I do it from time to time, especially if they’re twins. I’d like to help him out if it’s all right with you.”

“Alex? Alex wants to talk to you?”

“If that’s all right with you.”

“He didn’t say anything to me.”

“I thought that might be the case. I get the impression that he’s concerned about worrying you. I know you know this already, but he’s in a tough position. People use the term ‘survivor’s guilt’ casually, but it’s a real phenomenon. I think he feels the need to talk to somebody who’s outside his usual circle.” As he speaks I can see the doctor in my mind, see him and the photograph of him and his brother. I assumed his brother was alive, but maybe I was wrong about that. I don’t want to ask him. I’ve discovered death is the thing people don’t want to discuss.

In the silence he adds, “If you’re uncomfortable with me because of Max, I can recommend someone else.” And for a moment I feel such love for this man, who has spoken my son’s name. No one does this; no one says their names. And because I am as guilty as the rest, I repeat it back: “Max.”

“I miss seeing Max,” Dr. Vagelos says, and with a great effort I say, “I do, too.”

I sit for a long time at the table, and then I walk up the hill to
Olivias house. I’ve begun to think about looking for a place to rent, although Olivia and Ted have said over and over that we can stay in the guesthouse indefinitely, that Ben loves having Alex nearby, that Ben’s grades have improved in the past two months because the two of them do homework together, that the younger boys feel as though they have another older brother.

“I need to talk to you,” I say when she opens the back door.

I tell her about the phone call from Dr. Vagelos. She looks down at her hands, flat on the table, and then says, “Don’t you think it’s a good idea? I think it’s a good idea.”

“Do you think he’s struggling? Are you worried about how he’s behaving around you and the boys?”

“Not really,” she says. “He’s quieter than he once was, but I think it would be strange if he wasn’t. Ben says he seems sad sometimes. He says sometimes Alex starts to talk about Max, and then stops, as though he still doesn’t know how to do it, or what to say. But they’re boys. They don’t pour their hearts out, do they? I wish he could. And if he actually took the time to go on his own to see this man and ask to work with him, I think that’s all to the good. He needs to vent. I assume he doesn’t feel there’s anywhere to do that except perhaps this doctor’s office.”

“Has he ever really let go with Ben? I mean, they’re best friends.” And even as I say it, I realize that I have not spoken with Alice or Nancy or Olivia herself about any of this, that my greatest care has been to keep the agony and the anger I feel away from the light, for fear that if it can be clearly seen it will be insupportable. As though she can hear my thoughts, Olivia replies, in a soft voice, “I’m sure sometimes it seems easier, or at least simpler, not to talk about it.”

“Even with me.”

“Especially with you.” Her blue eyes sparkle in her bright white kitchen, and I realize that she is on the verge of tears. I think of the
circle that has grown up around us, our families, our friends, and how we have all taken a vow of silence that is eating us alive.

I nod and stand, walk down the hill, and get my purse and keys. I put Ginger in the back of the car, and begin to drive. I drive fast, slow down, speed up again, past hills and valleys, past narrow gravel one-lane roads and town intersections. I am aimless, with no destination. I find myself at the weekend house where we put in all those large trees, and I let Ginger out. She sniffs suspiciously at the unfamiliar ground, then squats and jumps back into the car. I can tell by the suggestion of green shoots at the end of a few branches that the trees all took, all except one close to the drive that looks like a gray skeleton. It will need to be pulled up and replaced, and I wonder who will do it. The idea that someday I would be standing here, with Rickie and a backhoe and a plan for the future, for the future of something as simple as a tree, seems unthinkable. I can see that woman, in her Capri khakis and her gardening clogs, with her hands on her hips. Yet somehow she is not me.

And yet I have suddenly decided to try to pretend to be her for just this afternoon, for the sake of my son. I park on Main Street and walk past Molly’s Closet, the three flowery dresses on the mannequins in the window a harbinger of a spring that seems unlikely as the cold weather drags into March. I go into the drugstore, and the pharmacist, who is on the phone, waves while I look at things I do not really see and will not buy. I choose some shampoo that I realize is the same shampoo I already have in the bathroom. I look up at the second-story window to the room where Max took his drum lessons, but there’s no sign of movement there.

My phone rings. It’s Alice. “Hey, honey,” she says softly. It’s been a while since she asked my advice about Liam, and I miss it. I decide to tell her so.

“You have so much on your plate,” she says.

“I have nothing on my plate. I’ve just spent an hour doing—
what were those things you told me about in church, where you walked around and looked at those plaques of Jesus making it up the hill? They had numbers, and prayers, or something?”

“The Stations of the Cross? I haven’t thought of the stations of the cross in years. The only one I can remember is when Veronica wipes his face.”

“Who’s Veronica?”

“I have no idea. You don’t mean the real Stations of the Cross, do you?”

“No, I’m on Main Street, doing the stations of the cross of Center Valley. I feel like I have to try to act like a normal person. It’s been two months already.”

“Oh, honey,” says Alice. “Two months is no time at all.”

“Alex wants to see a shrink. Do you think that’s a good thing? Olivia thinks it’s a good thing.”

“I think it’s a good thing.”

“I guess I do, too. How’s Liam?”

“He’s in love with the preschool teacher. Just like you warned me.”

I fall silent. What else did I warn Alice about? Improperly fastened car seats? Little plastic toy pieces? Those are the kinds of things people warned me about. They didn’t warn me about strange noises in the middle of the night, about the room above the garage.

“Mary Beth?” Alice says.

“Sorry, sorry, I’m distracted. I have to go. I’m going to go to the hardware store. I need a hammer.”

I buy a hammer.

It’s the middle of the day, and there are few people on Main Street. The wind is still harsh, and the jaundiced clouds suggest rain. But naturally I run into one of the people I feel least inclined to see, Rachel’s mother, Sandy. I have to call Alice back and tell her
that there was a special cross awaiting me. There are people who want all the trappings of tragedy without any of the pain, and I know Sandy is one of them, and that she’s told anyone who will ask, and even some who don’t, that we are close close friends and that she’s devastated by what happened. Her hug lasts too long, and her eyes fill too quickly. “I think of you constantly,” she says.

“Thank you,” I say.

“This has been terrible for Rachel,” she says. “She feels responsible. She and Sarah feel responsible.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You can’t help your feelings. Your feelings are your feelings.” She sounds as though she is reading aloud from a self-help book. I have a whole shelf of them now:
Working Your Way Through Grief, How It Feels to Lose a Child, The Legacy of Violence, Prayer and Healing
. People sent them to me. Stan’s daughter sent one called
Making a New Life
. I can’t find it, and I suspect that my mother threw it away after she threw it at the wall. When I got married, I got a silver chafing dish with a Sterno candle underneath, and when Ruby was born I got a black velvet dress with a delicate lace collar in an infant size. These books are every bit as useless. When I go home, I think, I’m going to put them all in the recycling bin.

“Tell Rachel I send my love.”

“She wants to see you. This has been terrible for her. She misses you all so much.” She leans in close, conspiratorial. “She’s going to a psychiatrist. I had no choice.”

I nod.

“She’s lost ten pounds since it happened,” Sandy continues in a confidential way, and she can’t stop herself from sounding pleased.

Our conversation runs down quickly. I can’t blame Sandy for that. Small talk feels too small, big talk too enormous. I already know this from shameful experience. I’ve thought often in the past two months of the couple in town whose son died of leukemia.
The first time I saw his mother afterward I said the right things, even remembered that he played guitar and wrote songs. But the second time, after her bereavement was a little shopworn, I couldn’t figure out how to move forward. I saw her on the sidewalk and arranged my face just so—not smiling, not sad, just attentive. We stood on the street and worked to reach across the divide, and the working made it impossible to bridge it. Her survival seemed not only incredible but somehow unseemly. “How is she making it through the day?” we would ask ourselves, smug in the knowledge that our children would be dirtying the kitchen and leaving towels on the bathroom floor that very night. One of the worst aspects of living now on the far shore is that across the chasm I can see my glib unknowing former self. I despise that woman, her foolish little worries and her cheap sympathies. She knew nothing. But I can’t truly wish on her what I know now.

I stop at the florist and buy an orchid plant for Olivia, and the florist tells me she has heard from several people that they hope I will be back in the landscaping business soon. I drive past the deserted motel outside town and suspect that that won’t happen. The police spent two days questioning all the Mexican guys, and when the questioning was done my men left the state and then left the country, which they had all entered illegally. I knew they were illegal, of course. I just never asked. I wonder if José is living with his two little daughters now, if the younger one has managed to get her tonsils removed. The ramshackle windows in the motel are broken out, and someone has dumped some old tires to one side of the parking lot. In the paper the other day, it said the town was thinking of demanding that the owner repair the place or tear it down.

Maybe that’s what someone will do with my house, too. If they raze it, rip off the dormers and the roof, reduce the garage to a pile of old planks, will it be as though New Year’s Eve never happened?
I know that Nancy arranged for a cleaning crew, that the couch in the living room where the police found Ruby lying is gone, that the carpet in our bedroom was disposed of, and the carpet in the den, too. But I know those things only by hearing other people discuss them. This is what I wonder: Did they turn out the lights? If I had driven by afterward, would I have seen the yellow glow in the winter night, seen the lamps burning to welcome me home? If I lived across the street, would I have watched the lights go out over time, one by one, until the dark house disappeared in the dark night?

Nancy went into our old house and packed a duffel bag with Alex’s clothes and his uniforms and his balls and bats. She brought over his soccer ball, too, the signed one in the Lucite case, but it’s on the top shelf of his closet, behind a box packed with his swim trunks and his camp polo shirts.

The high school glows in the night, not yellow but the harsh white of fluorescence, light that deters rather than welcomes. A row of cars makes a wall between its low-slung beige walls and the road. One of the juniors took the curve I’m on too sharply four days ago and was airlifted to the hospital with a broken back. It’s one more way in which what happened to our family has started to fade in the town consciousness.

I pull up next to Olivia’s car. She’s half turned toward the backseat. I can tell she is reprimanding one of the little boys. She doesn’t raise her voice; she has a clipped tone that I suspect is more effective than my shrill rants ever were. She sees me, stops, and then smiles. Little Luke follows her eyes, looks at me, and then frowns dramatically, his lower lip out, his brow furrowed. It’s become clear that he resents all the attention his mother gives me.

Alex and Ben run out to the car together, their winter jackets unzipped, their backpacks bouncing off their right shoulders, their faces crimson from exertion and sweat. I hear Alex laugh, and I realize
that it’s the first time I have heard that sound for months, perhaps since Christmas Day. He has a deep laugh now, not a man’s laugh but moving toward it. I see him run toward Olivia’s car, and suddenly I realize why I drove here without even knowing it. Among Ben’s family Alex is comfortable, easy, insulated from rage and grief and bitterness and brokenness and horror and silence. Among Ben’s family he can pretend to forget what happened, pretend that everything is nice and normal, that life is simple and safe. He could so easily become their family’s Kiernan, a boy seeking a temporary place in a happier kitchen.

Olivia gets out of the car and says, “Alex, love, look who’s here.” I get out, too, and look at my son. His face is expressionless.

“What’s wrong?” he says, and it’s all I can do not to say what’s in my mind, not to say, What more could be wrong?

“Nothing,” I say. “I just thought we could go out for pizza. Ben can come if you want.”

Alex looks at Ben, then back at me. Olivia says warmly, “I’m keeping Ben with us. You take Alex. Are you going to drive him to school tomorrow?” And in that moment, when I know that she sees and understands it all, Olivia becomes not just my savior but my friend. To cap it off, she winks at me.