Every Last One (31 page)

“They’re measuring for carpet,” my mother says disapprovingly. “And new cabinets in the kitchen.”

We carry our sandwiches out to the porch and eat in silence. My mother must be tired. She is fit and thin—thinner, now, perhaps than she used to be—but she is seventy years old, and she has been working hard for days. I’ve searched for traces of tears on her face, but I’ve seen nothing, which means nothing. She’s good at keeping herself to herself, so good that it is difficult for me to know how to speak to her sometimes. As I wrap up the second half of the sandwich to eat for dinner later, I say, forcing myself to look into her face, “Thank you for everything, Mom. You’ve been a rock through all this.”

I’ve taken her by surprise, and she looks down. Finally she says, “I have great admiration for how you’ve handled yourself, Mary Beth. You’ve been very strong.”

“Did I have a choice?”

“That’s not the point. Lots of people would have fallen apart in this situation.” I wonder how falling apart would feel different from this. I can’t believe it would be worse.

In the silence the crickets are loud, an insistent snapping sound.
Finally I say, “You saw them.” It is an imprecise, almost mysterious sentence, but as my mother looks up I realize that she not only knows what I mean; she has been waiting for this moment. She nods.

“The chief of police told me you had to identify them,” I say and she nods again.

“How did they look?”

My mother sets her mouth. “Like they were asleep,” she says.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I’m telling you, they looked like they were asleep. There were sheets pulled up to their chins, and they looked like they were asleep.”

“The police have pictures I could look at,” I say.

“There are pictures in all these boxes, too,” my mother says. “There’s Ruby on a pony at a farm, and there’s Max swimming in a lake, and there’s your wedding picture, and your tenth-anniversary party. If you want to look at pictures, look at those pictures.”

“I don’t want to look at pictures,” I say.

“Not yet,” my mother says. She hands me her paper napkin to wipe my tears.

“In the beginning, all I wanted to know was what those last few minutes were like,” I say. “I imagined it all the time. I was afraid to imagine it. What they were thinking. Whether it hurt. Whether Glen knew about Max and Ruby. I felt like that was the worst part. And now I feel like the worst part is just—”

“That they’re gone.”

“All the things they’re missing. All the life they won’t get to have.”

“That’s it,” my mother says, looking me in the eye, her mouth held tight, as though she’s angry. “All those unlived years.” She takes my hand, and suddenly I have a vision, sharp and clear, and it
is of Max and Ruby and Glen, side by side, asleep. Max’s mouth is a little ajar. Ruby’s hair cloaks her neck and shoulders.
My mother has done it. She has made me see what she wanted me to see. The one person who understands is the one person I never expected to understand me.

Together we are quiet and still.

“I hope Alex likes this place,” I finally say.

My mother looks around her. She doesn’t like old houses, my mother. Sometimes I think the nicest thing Stan ever did for her was to take her to a place where everyone had skylights and double sinks and soaking tubs.

“He’ll like it fine,” she says. “You’ll make it nice for him.”

My father-in-law doesn’t like old houses much, either. I had told Doug that I was thinking of buying this one, and two days later Glen’s father came down the driveway in one of the roofing trucks, collapsible ladders rattling on the side racks as he lurched down toward the back. He climbed slowly from the cab—leg, leg, a heave, and the torso followed—and looked up disapprovingly as I came out the porch door.

“Slate,” he said. “You know why you don’t see slate much anymore? One, it’s expensive. Two, it’s a bitch to maintain.”

“There’s no sign of water damage in the attic.”

“No obvious sign,” he said, and took one of the ladders off the truck.

At noon he broke for lunch. Glen had once told me that his father broke for lunch at noon every day, no matter what. Saturdays, Sundays. During the high school graduation, which began at eleven, his left leg had begun to jiggle uncontrollably by twelve-thirty.

“You want the good news first?” he said, popping the cap off a beer he’d brought in a cooler. “The good news is it’s hundred-year slate.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“The house is almost eighty years old. In twenty years, you’ll need a new roof.”

“I can handle that,” I said.

“In twenty years, I’ll need a new roof,” I say to my mother.

She shrugs, goes inside, and cuts us both a slice of pie. I eat around the edges of mine. I have some tea. “Do you think there’s any point in going over there one last time?” she says. “The closing date is right after Labor Day. After that, you’ll never have the chance again.”

“I can’t do it. I just can’t. I can’t even drive down the street. If I pulled up in front of the house—I don’t know what I’d do, but it wouldn’t be good. So I guess if the question is do I think it would be helpful, the answer is no. Just the opposite. Completely the opposite.”

“Done,” my mother says, and I don’t know if she means her slice of pie or the conversation or our old house. She taps the edge of my plate insistently and goes inside. I slide my pie onto the floor, and Ginger makes it disappear in an instant.

My mother calls from the kitchen. “Let’s arrange furniture,” she says.

The parents are asked to stand at the base of the hill to wait for the campers to bring their duffel bags down. “I hate this part,” one of the mothers says, folding and refolding her arms across her chest. I always felt that it was a good way to avoid the crazed parental scrum, but today I’m wild to run up the long drive to cabin 14, where my junior-counselor son has been sleeping amid a dozen little boys. “He’ll never want to have kids after this,” a voice trills sarcastically in the back of my mind, and I realize it’s Ruby’s. I want to talk back to her, but there are so many people around. A tall man with colorless hair combed over an evaporating hairline shoulders his way toward me. “Alex’s mom?” he says. “Colin’s dad. It’s good to meet you in person. I think I met your husband two summers ago.” He looks up the hill. “Any sign of them?”

A trickle of small boys begins to appear. Behind them comes a pickup piled high with duffels. “Brendan! Brendan!” calls one of the mothers. A faint aurora of camera flashes lights the line of descending campers. One of the boys falls, and a man darts forward.
“You’re okay,” he says in an insistent voice. “You’re okay.” Colin’s dad and I drift to the back of the crowd, trading forgotten first names. His is Jack. We agree that it seems unlikely that our boys were ever this small. Alex told me Colin wears a size 14 shoe. I look down at Jack’s moccasins. Heredity.

“Were we this crazy?” I whisper, watching the parents of the younger boys.

“I wasn’t. My wife was.”

I look around. “Where is she?”

Jack shrugs. Perhaps it’s a family trait, like shoe size. “She’s at home. She wasn’t feeling well.”

“Oh, no,” I say, and I suddenly, almost explosively find myself fighting tears. This happens to me from time to time now, usually because of someone else’s misfortune. The morning I came upon a fawn with its legs smashed on the shoulder of the road—that had begun a crying jag that lasted for a long time.

“Justin!” a mother calls as the line of campers grows into a jostling crowd.

“Look,” Colin’s dad says, and at the top of the hill I see Alex. As he walks, a small boy runs up behind him and grabs his hand, and Alex grins, turns back to call something. “There’s Colin,” his father says warmly, and a giant of a boy runs to Alex’s other side.

“How tall is he?”

“Six-three,” Jack says. “We hope he’s almost done.”

“Wow!” I say.

“That’s my counselor, Mommy,” I hear one of the little boys cry in that high, birdlike little-boy voice. Chirping, we used to call it when Max told a story. Alex had a lower voice. “Hey, lady,” he calls as he draws near. When he squeezes me, he feels like a grown-up in my arms, long-boned and strong. Every summer I’m sure he has changed, but this summer I’m certain of it.

“Where’s Mom?” Colin asks sharply.

“Waiting at home,” says his father. “Making you dinner.” Subtext, subtext. If I had been able to do this a year ago, to hear the words that were not being spoken, would everything have been different?

My eyes fill again. “I missed you so much,” I say, my mouth against Alex’s shoulder.

The little boy is still stuck close to his side. “Hey, Charlie,” Alex says, “this is my mom.” Charlie waves. His thumb creeps toward his mouth, then goes into his pocket like a temptation placed well out of sight. Alex walks with him to the office. When he emerges, he looks grim. He and Colin give each other handshakes that turn into back slaps that turn into hard hugs. “I am definitely coming to visit, man,” Colin says.

“Yeah, that’s dubious, dude. You say that every year.”

On the car ride home I tell Alex about the storm, how the rain had blinded me, how I careened into the house we’re now renting. I explain that his grandmother came to help me, and his grandfather inspected the roof, but that I had done the painting and the floors myself, and that I suspected it had done me more good than weight lifting or jogging. “That’s dubious,” he says.

“So ‘dubious’ was this year’s camp word?” I finally ask.

“I guess,” he says, and then he falls asleep, slumped to one side. When he wakes up at a truck stop he says, “You know that kid Charlie? His parents sent him to camp from England. I had to sleep in his bunk the first week because he cried every night. Now he has to fly back all by himself, with some sign around his neck with, like, his name and phone number and stuff. His parents must be total assholes.”

“Language,” I say. There are usually two or three intensely profane days after camp before the habits of civilization are relearned. As we stand in line for hot dogs I say, “I don’t think the camp should have agreed to that. That’s inhuman.”

“What?”

“Charlie. England.”

“Totally dubious, right?”

When we turn onto the road, I begin to talk too fast—about how Ben’s house is a short walk through the woods, about how I have left the room next to Alex’s empty so he can use it for whatever he wants, about how well I think the chimney will draw. I’m breathless by the time we get down the drive and turn in front of the front porch. I’ve put rockers along it. I had placed them in a row yesterday, then realized there were five and took one out to the screened porch and put it in a corner. When I open the front door, Ginger leaps out and puts her paws on Alex’s chest, licking frantically at his stubbly chin. He takes her paws in his hands and dances with her, then sits down on one of the rockers and rubs behind her ears.

“Do you like it here, good girl? Do you? Is this a good place?” Ginger rolls onto her back and pedals with her paws as he scratches her belly. “Plenty of squirrels, huh?” He looks up and shakes his head. “That’s a monster tree,” he says.

The phone rings once, twice, three times, but I ignore it as he circles the interior of the house, looks out the windows, opens the refrigerator. When we get to his room, which I’ve painted a soft gray, he asks, “Is that my bed? From the house?”

“Yeah,” I say. “The movers brought it over.”

He sits on the edge. There are new sheets, a new quilt. It looks like a new bed. It’s nearly new.

“Cool,” he says.

I have an enormous casserole in the oven, chicken tetrazzini just the way he likes it, without the mushrooms, and a big plate of brownies. He takes a shower like he does every time he comes home from camp, where, I’ve been told, the water is too cold, too hard, too much of a trickle, where the towels always smell of
mildew and someone is always taking the decent soap. He takes a long, long shower, and I turn the oven on.

“Can Elizabeth come over?” he asks when he comes downstairs smelling of lemons.

“Of course,” I say a little too heartily. Elizabeth has never come to the house before. I was formally introduced at graduation. I was happy to see that she was wearing a pretty floral dress, neither too low nor too short.

And suddenly, before I know it, Elizabeth is standing on the screened porch with her best friend, who tells me her name is Allison Holzberg, and three boys from the soccer team, who will be seniors this year, one of them Allison’s boyfriend, all of them Alex’s teammates. I spread quilts on the back lawn and put the food out on the kitchen counter and make a salad and open some applesauce. And in an instant, just in an instant, with the slamming of screen doors and the crunch of car wheels on gravel and the tintinnabulation of silver on china, our house is that house once more—the house where the kids come, and go, and come again. I feel something strange inside and wish I could catch it somehow and put it in a jar, like fireflies, with holes in the top so it can breathe.

“You really should have Colin come visit,” I say as I pour lemonade into paper cups.

“My best friend from camp,” he tells the others. “With, you know, Ben. He’s dubious, dudes. Totally dubious.”