Every Last One (28 page)

When we reach the Natural History museum, Alex pulls a
piece of folded lined paper from his back pocket. It is Nate’s list. Ocean life, it says. Space center. We spend four hours wandering from marvel to marvel. Only once am I undone by memory and sensation, and that’s when I enter the butterfly exhibit and watch them fan the air with stained-glass wings. I lean my head against a cool wall and breathe deeply, then move on. “Mom, check this out,” Alex says, standing with his head thrown back beneath the blue whale tethered to a beveled ceiling, and for a moment he is a boy again, a boy without cares. I think about how much Max and Ruby and Glen would enjoy this and wish we had all done it together years ago.

We take the subway back to Alice’s neighborhood in Brooklyn. Across the subway car from us sit a man in a turban, a woman covered with tattoos, a woman in a black suit reading an anthology of poetry, and a teenage boy about Alex’s age, doing what looks like math homework in a spiral notebook. I feel anonymous, and glad to be so. At a row of brick houses with worn stoops Alex says, “It’s so cool to live here, isn’t it?” A small white truck is trolling the block, the man at the wheel calling something I can’t catch in a singsong voice. “The knife sharpener,” Alice says. “You can bring your knives out to the truck.”

“That is so cool,” Alex says, with no hint of what I feel—the sharpened knives, a frisson of fear.

In an Italian restaurant he finishes a plate of gnocchi, some veal, an ice-cream dessert striped like a flag. I let him have an inch worth of red wine in his glass. He and Alice discuss the space show at the museum and a book she is editing on life on Mars. “That is a cool job,” Alex says. I am an ordinary woman with her son and an old friend eating dinner. It’s the first time I have felt ordinary in so long—free of public scrutiny, and sympathy, and judgment, too. I know there is judgment. The mother of one of the boys on the basketball team took the coach aside and said her son found it upsetting
to play on the same team as Alex. The coach said he would be sorry to lose him. The kid said his mother was psycho. The mother backed down. I should stare at her at the games with a defiant gaze, but instead my eyes drop when she looks over at me. No one judges me as harshly as I judge myself. No one wants me hidden away as much as I want to hide. It’s as though I’m one of those burn victims, with a face so scarred and stripped that other people have to look, then look away.

In the window of a thrift shop Alex sees an old army jacket, and we make him try it on, and only the sleeves are a little long. Alice rolls them up once. “I wonder who Steiner was,” Alex says, looking at the name stamped above the heart. “You should buy it,” I say, and we do.

Alex is sleeping in Liam’s room, on a couch where the nanny sleeps when Alice has to work late, and as we have another drink just before midnight I hear him on the baby monitor. “Dude, the giant squid,” I hear, but I can’t make out the rest.

“He can’t be talking to Liam, can he?” I ask.

“If Liam were awake, he wouldn’t be letting Alex get a word in edgewise. I think Liam is a little jealous that we went out without him, and that Nate is paying attention to Alex. Which reminds me—I need to ask you an enormous favor.”

“Shoot.”

“Can I make you Liam’s legal guardian if anything happens to me?”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” she agrees. “But I need to know that there’s someone backstopping me. My parents are just too old. My father just turned seventy-seven.”

“What about your brothers?”

“Okay, babe, let’s recap: John is married to a crazy person; Jim is
married to a woman who didn’t want to have her own kids, much less mine; Tommy isn’t married, because that would demand a commitment; and Teddy is a closet case. I love them all. But daddy material? No way.”

“I’m not trying to get out of this. I just want to be able to stand up in court and say, ‘Yes, Your Honor, I know she has four brothers, but she didn’t think a single one of them would make a competent parent. Except maybe the closet case.’”

“Is that a yes?”

“Of course it is. You would do the same for me. You came close to having to.”

“Stop.”

“It’s true.”

On the monitor we hear Alex say something else. It sounds like “up and down the stairs.” Or maybe it was “all around, and scared.”

“Alex seems pretty good,” Alice says.

“He does. He did decide to go to the therapist. Maybe that’s helping.”

“He’s always had a really even keel.”

“I know. He’s the only one I can imagine getting through this. Ruby or, God forbid, Max? I can’t imagine it.”

Alice rubs at her eyes. “Glen is the one I think about sometimes. If anything had happened to you, I don’t think he could have survived.” Her lip trembles.

“You’ve made it through this whole visit without crying,” I say. “Don’t mess it up now.” I do my crying privately. Early in the morning, I had gone out to walk along the promenade that skirts the river. I walked for nearly two hours, first with no companions except a pair of police officers and a man asleep on a bench, then surrounded by runners who had the sure, smooth pace of those following a familiar route. When I wept, they scarcely looked at
me. Perhaps, with everyone living so close together, city dwellers expect to have a walk-on role in other people’s dramas and tragedies.

I hear Alex laugh, speak, choke up, laugh again.

“Maybe he’s talking in his sleep,” I say. I’m glad there is a receiver for the baby monitor in the living room, where I’ve insisted on sleeping. I worry that Alex may have a nightmare in the unfamiliar place. He mutters more as I doze.

But when I wake at five and tiptoe in, Alex looks like he is sleeping the sleep of the teenage boy, so deep it cannot be shaken even by Liam, who has climbed into bed with Alex and has thrown one chubby leg over Alex’s long scarred one. I go back into the living room, and think about Glen, and how he would have liked the space show, and how he would have sneaked away to the gift shop to buy me a keepsake. Alex’s keepsake will be his new jacket. “That jacket is totally great,” I hear Ruby saying. “Hands off, dude,” Alex says to Max, and Max makes a face, as though he is thinking, That jacket’s not for you, dude, it’s for me. I will sneak it out of your closet the first chance I get.

Nate and Alex exchange a complex power handshake as we prepare to leave the next morning. Liam looks confused, then distressed. “Mama!” he says. “I want to go to the park.”

“Do not screw this up,” I whisper as I hug Alice.

“I hear you,” she says.

In the car Alex puts on his headphones, and I listen to a public-radio program. A resonant voice describes colony-collapse disorder. “All over the country, beekeepers are opening their hives to discover that all their bees are dead,” the reporter says. An interview with a monosyllabic writer follows, and my mind wanders. I wonder if Alice will call to ask my advice, slowly, tentatively, about getting married. I wonder if I will ask her advice someday, about being the only parent of an only child. I look over at Alex. What
I can hear of his music, from deep inside the headphones, is tuneless and metallic, like the buzzing of bees.

“I hope Ginger is all right,” I say when he takes the headphones off for a moment.

“She’s fine. I called Ben yesterday. Luke is hanging out with her.”

“Did you have a good time?”

“Mom, I kept thinking, Why am I going away when I could just hang out with my friends? But I had a really great time. Much better than I expected.”

“Me, too. So I have a great idea—what about living there?”

“I was thinking that. Nate told me there are so many good colleges in New York. Even if I couldn’t get into Columbia, there are other places where you can go and still be in the city. He said there are even some Division 3 schools where maybe I could play. I’m really going to think about it.”

I look out the windshield. The yellow line is rushing up at me. “I was thinking sooner,” I say. I pause. “There’s no reason we couldn’t move to Brooklyn. There are lots of good private schools. That’s what Alice said. Everybody says they’re really hard to get into, but with what a great athlete you are I bet they’d be glad to have you.”

Alex is silent. His headphones rest in his lap. “Who are you?” I hear The Who singing faintly, but it sounds like just waah-waah.

“I mean, you really liked the city, right? There would be so much to do, and you don’t have to drive; you can just take the subway, go to the movies with your friends. Alice says—”

“I’m not moving,” Alex says flatly. “I’m not leaving my friends and my school. I’m not moving.” He has turned toward me, and his voice is rising. I put out my hand as though we’re going to brake suddenly. “I’m not moving,” he yells.

“All right, sorry, I hear you. Calm down.”

He’s breathing hard, the way he does on the soccer field.

“I just thought it might be a good change for us,” I say softly.

“I’m not moving.”

“I heard you.”

We drive in silence for what seems like a long time. I can’t find another decent radio station. He puts on his headphones. I’ve spoiled it. I don’t know what to do, or what to do next. The memorial service, the will, the insurance: No one tells you what to do after, when things are supposed to go back to normal. I suppose what comes next is pretend-normal. I feel exhausted thinking about it.

We stop to eat. In the bright light of a diner, I see that Alex needs a shave. This is an astonishing thought. From time to time he runs a razor over his face, but it has been more a declaration of maturity than an actual need. “What about this summer?” I ask brightly, as though nothing has happened.

“Mom, camp. I go to camp every summer.”

“You want to go again?”

“Mom, you signed me up last year. I get to be a junior counselor.”

He’s right. I signed them all up. Max was going to be the drummer in his camp’s rock band. Ruby was going to take advanced poetry composition. Glen and I talked about taking a vacation, perhaps in Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard. I’m interviewing the last doctor interested in Glen’s practice first thing in the morning. The sign outside will be changed, the name embroidered on the white coat will be different. Someone else will win the writing prize at graduation. Someone else will play computer chess with Ezra. The surface of the ocean of daily life will close over the three of them and the water will look smooth again. They will live only in a tableau that plays ceaselessly in my mind.

“Sorry, sorry, I don’t know where my head was,” I say, pushing my plate aside.

“We’re not moving, right?” Alex says when we’re back in the car.

“Not if you don’t want to.”

“Is Aunt Alice going to marry Nate?” he asks.

“Too soon to tell,” I say.

“She should,” he says, and puts the headphones back on.

“Ruby Lee Latham,” it says in overwrought calligraphy. The diploma is in a leather folder propped on the bookshelf in the small hallway. When I pass it, I touch it. It reminds me of Alice again, of going to church with Alice and her family and how all of them reflexively put two fingers in the deep marble bowl of water at the head of the aisle. My hand does the same with the diploma. It feels warm to me.

Everything happens all at once at the high school now, now that the school year is winding down again. They plant the tree and read three of Ruby’s poems, the ones I’ve heard before. The literary magazine is dedicated to her, the yearbook to Ruby and Max, which is a comfort, because otherwise it is as though Max has disappeared into the past the same way he disappeared into his room, into his head, into his unhappiness. Sarah and Rachel and Eric and a boy named Gregory I have never met come over on their way to the prom. Sarah is wearing a yellow dress, Rachel something strapless
and peach-colored. “That dress was made for you,” I say to Rachel, and she glows, and Gregory puts his arm around her waist and smiles. He has brought Rachel a wrist corsage of roses and ferns. Rachel and Sarah have brought me a big bouquet of daisies. I put them in a pitcher in the middle of the table. They’re such nice girls. I hope they don’t think I slept with Kiernan’s father. My face burns at the thought. I take their picture.

“I’ve heard so many great things about you, Mrs. Latham,” says Gregory, and I wonder whether losing Ruby has brought Rachel to this—to a nice boy, a kind boy, a boy who brings flowers and looks at her as though she deserves them.

“Is Alex here?” Rachel asks. She leans close. “We really like his girlfriend.”

Nancy is the first person I see on the football field when I arrive for graduation. She kisses my cheek and my mother’s, shakes my father-in-law’s hand. Then she looks at me and says, “This must be such a hard day for you.”

“It’s a big day for Sarah,” I say, looking toward the long long line of students in blue caps and gowns. They are taking one another’s pictures, talking about plans for the parties, laughing and waving to their families. The principal had asked if I wanted to accept Ruby’s diploma onstage, but I told him I was afraid it would attract too much attention, distract from the happiness of the day. The sun is strong, the sky white-blue, and for just a moment I feel dizzy, but I blink and look back at Nancy and smile. I hope the smile doesn’t look as false as it feels. I’m wearing a bright red dress, and I don’t care what anyone says or thinks about that. It is a Ruby color, a Ruby dress.