Every Last One (27 page)

Luke turns onto his side and puts his thumb in his mouth, speaking around it. “What?” I say.

He doesn’t remove the thumb, but he says very loudly, “I have a penis.”

I nod, and as I watch, his eyes close, and he is asleep, as though he’s the one who is drugged. And then I am asleep too. I wake just before dawn, moonlight still bright through the open curtains. It paints Luke’s smooth brow silver.

Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning. The soft web of sleep begins to clear and then, in an instant, your mind asks and answers a dreadful question. Instead of doing battle with this, I have now decided to yield to it in this last hour of the night, when I am always awake and always newly bereaved. Luke makes it easier, the soft clicking sound as he works his thumb, pinker and more swollen than its partner. First I mourn people who had disappeared long ago: little Max squatting in the tall grass at the back of the yard to watch the crickets, Ruby at five lifting her dress over her head with sheer ebullience. Then I mourn imaginary people: Max the New York comic-book artist, Ruby the professor of poetry at a small college. I invent my own children. Sometimes Max and Alex and Ruby are all together, strung in a line across the street, pulling their sleds toward the hill, the sun so bright on the silver of the snow that it makes a burst of light and I am dazzled and they disappear. Luke is in Glen’s place in the bed, and I reach out a hand and touch his hair lightly.

At six-thirty, his eyes open. “I like pancakes,” he says. At seven he asks to call his mother, and at eight I let him do so. “I told Alex’s mommy that I have a penis,” I hear him say to her.

“You have my permission to banish him to his own room,” Olivia tells me tartly.

“Are you ready for tonight?” I ask.

Ted is the director of research and development for a big pharmaceutical company and there is a black-tie dinner tonight. We went to Molly’s Closet together to shop for a dress. Molly had watched me pull into the space in front of her window, and her smile was fixed and ready when we entered. I sat on the bench outside the fitting room and tried to think of nothing. But each time I looked I saw Ruby’s feet, her baby toe curved, beneath one of the curtains. Olivia had emerged in an ice-blue silk dress—“the goddess look,” Molly said—with a jeweled clip in her hair. And from behind me I heard clearly a single word, said with the high clear sound of a Christmas bell: “Perfection!” I couldn’t turn, afraid both of the possibility that Ruby would be standing there, winding her hair up, her eyes alight with approval, and the possibility that there would be no one there at all, just another empty space. I stared straight ahead, sightless.

Looking at me, Olivia had said sadly, “No good?” And with an effort I had focused, looked her up and down, and said without thinking, “It’s perfection. Perfection.”

“Give my love to, to—your boy,” Molly said to me. I was quiet in the car.

“Sorry,” I’d finally said. “I’m distracted. I’ve got so much to do. My mother is coming in three weeks for the high school graduation, and my father-in-law, and who knows who else. It could turn out to be a houseful. It’ll be fine. I certainly shouldn’t complain to you, of all people. I’m sure you’d love to see your parents more often.” There is a large photograph on the piano in Olivia’s living room, two handsome people in sweaters and hats, laughing at the camera.

“They’re both gone, actually,” Olivia had replied in an offhand tone that I suspected she’d used for just this subject many times in the past. “They were in a motor crash, a long time ago, when I was at Oxford. That was how I met Ted. He was there doing the Rhodes, and we met at a pub, and I thought, Ah, so you want to whisk me far, far away from here? Yes, please.”

“Oh, my God. I can’t believe I’m just hearing about this.”

“Everyone has something, don’t you think? It’s just that it doesn’t come up in the usual way. You don’t chat up some nice woman at a drinks party and suddenly say, ‘Oh, so your parents are dead. Mine, too.’ Bit of a bitch, isn’t it?”

“I don’t even need to tell anyone,” I said. “Everyone already knows. Did you hear Molly hesitate as we were leaving? As though if she had said children, plural, by mistake I would have fallen apart.”

“It was a bit like that for me in the beginning. My parents were rather well known, and it was a horrid accident. But then people forget. Everyone has something.”

My mother had said something similar when she was leaving the last time to return to Florida. “This happens to everyone, this losing people,” she said as she stood in the hallway with her suitcase, a valedictory she had clearly been rehearsing. “It just usually happens in stages, not all at once. You’ve had the worst that anyone could have, Mary Beth. But you still have to figure out how to get on with your life.”

“I don’t know what my life is now,” I had said.

“You have a child. That’s what matters.”

“I like cartoons,” says Luke, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the den on Sunday morning. I wonder if he ever asks for anything, or if he always just says what he likes and expects it to follow. He has slept in my bed again. “You’re not my mother,” he said before he fell asleep. “I know,” I replied.

Andrew and Aidan emerge from their rooms. “Can we call our mom and dad?” Aidan says.

“Yes,” I say.

“Shut up about your penis,” Andrew says to Luke.

“I’m telling Dad you said shut up,” Aidan says.

“You’re mean,” Luke says, to one or the other.

“Boys,” I say darkly, and I feel joyous for just a moment at the familiar bickering, and then I feel terrible because of the joy, and then I make bacon. When Alex and Ben come wandering out, they organize a game of Frisbee on the lawn, and Luke runs back and forth, back and forth, the disk sailing over his head until finally he collapses in tears and I settle him with some cartoons and a cookie. The bigger boys come in to play Battleship. “Hit and sunk!” I hear for what seems like hours, and then I make them all gather at the big pine table to do some homework. “Andrew keeps putting his foot on my foot,” Aidan says.

“Mummy!” screams Luke as we hear a car.

Ted walks us down to the guesthouse. Alex goes inside, and we stand at the door as a sharp sudden wind starts to whip around us. “Maybe we’ll have a storm tonight,” I say, looking up at the clouds sailing swiftly past.

“I can’t thank you enough,” Ted says.

“It was nothing,” I say, and I realize that it’s almost true. It was not so terrible, being with other people for two entire days. Or perhaps it was because the people were children, who didn’t think to worry, fuss, wonder how I was feeling, persuade me to share. They wanted me only to provide meals, mediate quarrels, keep order. “Really, they were great,” I add.

“Yeah, and a whole hell of a lot of work. Believe me, I know. But I really mean thanks for what you’ve done for Olivia. Getting to be friends with you has made a real difference for her. It hasn’t been easy, living in a strange place, not really knowing anyone, having
so many kids so close together. She’s been kind of lonely. And now, not so much. She really values your friendship.”

“And I value hers. I mean that.”

“Well, good. You can take her shopping anytime. That was some dress the two of you picked out for her.”

“It was perfection,” I say.

We’re in Times Square walking north, Alice, Alex, and I. We’re dwarfed by sports stars and musicians and actors, great flat giants hovering over the three of us on enormous billboards as we thread our way among street vendors and tourists taking one another’s pictures on the sidewalks. A man hands Alex a flyer for a strip club, and I try to take it from his hand. “Lady, lady,” Alex says, “be cool.” Earlier I had tried to take his arm as we left the subway for the street. “Okay, no,” he said flatly, jamming his fists into his pockets. He has grown another inch or two, and now he is not a boy who has lost his baby fat but a half-man, bearded, basso, a different species from my own.

“Are you sad about how grown-up he’s gotten?” Alice had asked when I mentioned it the night before, her fingers idly playing with Liam’s too-long hair. There are so many ways in which she is trying to keep him a baby, from the matted curls to the onesie pajamas.

“No, not really,” I replied. I am sad that Max will never grow up,
that Ruby will never grow older. But I don’t say that. It’s nice that Alice still asks me the old commonplace questions.

Alex wants to go to a Times Square store that sells sports gear, then through Central Park to the Museum of Natural History. Alice has gotten Alex tickets to a Yankees game and to a concert at a downtown club. She’s been so thoughtful; a graduate student at Columbia who lives in a studio apartment in her building is going to take Alex to both, so that she and I can have time for ourselves. The student’s name is Nate, and apparently he loves baseball and music in equal measures. He is getting his doctorate in anthropology.

“Nate’s coming up to meet you,” Alice had said to us when we first arrived, and she buried her face in Liam’s hair.

“Nate is great!” Liam yelled.

Our ride to New York had been an unexpected interlude. The farther the car traveled from the guesthouse, and our old house, and our town, and all the people in it, the calmer I felt. My shoulders seemed to soften with every mile. When we pulled into a rest stop—coffee for me, two burgers, fries, and a Coke for Alex—I felt a little as though we were just like everyone else. Twice I had thought about canceling this trip, not sure I could bear the drive, the distance, the feigned normalcy.

“Have a nice day,” said the girl behind the counter, looking Alex up and down.

“You, too,” I replied.

Liam was right: Nate was great. He engaged Alex in a long arcane conversation about the Knicks and how a variety of injuries had affected their last season. It is the kind of conversation Alex used to have with his father. “They’ve got no defense,” Glen would say, and Alex would sigh. I wish I could remember more of those conversations, but I never paid any attention. Sometimes now Alex has them on the phone with my father-in-law.

“Nate, will you read to me?” Liam had asked, standing between Nate’s knees, his small hands braced on Nate’s thighs. “I can read to you,” Alex had said kindly, but Liam stared up at Nate’s face and shook his head. I watched as Nate lifted Liam onto one knee and continued to talk to Alex, segueing into baseball, while Liam leaned against him and sucked his thumb. Alice brought Liam a sippy cup of milk, Alex a Coke, and Nate a beer.

“I can play baseball,” Liam said, interrupting.

“You sit and listen,” Alice said, offering me a glass of wine. Nate looked up at her and smiled, and she smiled back. She went into the kitchen to get cheese, and I followed and grabbed her arm at the sink.

“I’m in shock,” I said.

“What?”

“Don’t play dumb with me. How old is he, and how long have you been seeing him?”

“Seeing him? Are you my mother?”

“Okay, fine. How long have you been sleeping with him?”

“You’re being really loud,” Alice whispered.

“Fine,” I whispered back. “Answer my question.”

And with a sweet smile Alice replied, “He’s thirty-four, and I met him in February.”

“How?”

“He lives in the building. He asked me to dinner. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. I told him I was almost ten years older than he is. I told him I had a child. I was as mean to him as I know how to be.”

“That’s mean,” I said.

“It didn’t make any difference. He outlasted me.”

“And you didn’t tell me.”

“I thought you would think I was nuts.”

I put my arms around her, and I thought that was only partly
true. She hadn’t told me because it was happy news at a terrible time. And then, because it seemed to me that all I truly heard now of any conversation was what went unsaid, I told her that.

“That’s true,” she said. “I couldn’t picture myself calling you and saying, ‘Oh, honey, guess what? I’ve got a boyfriend.’”

“Is he a boyfriend?”

“He introduced me to his mother.”

“Wow!”

“And here’s the best thing—she had him late in life. So she’s nowhere near my age. Not even close.”

“Does she know about Liam?”

“She brought him a stuffed monkey.”

“She’s a better woman than I would be.”

“Me, too. I keep trying to imagine Liam with a girlfriend who is ten years older than he is. Nate says he thinks his mother worried that he was gay when he moved to New York, so she’s just relieved that I’m female.”

“Where’s he from?”

“Nova Scotia.”

“Maybe he’s using you for a green card,” I said darkly.

“I don’t care,” she said, and I hugged her again. I will have to learn to be generous about this, about other people’s happiness. Rachel and Sarah. Olivia and Alice. Even Alex. There will come a time when good things will happen to him, and I will have to make certain to welcome his triumphs and his joys, and to make sure they’re not always shadowed by his father, his brother, his sister.

“Nate is great,” Alex had said that morning, reading the account of the game in the morning paper. “He knows a lot about the museum. He can’t go with us because he has to teach some class, but he told me what to see.”