Every Last One (35 page)

“I know,” I say. “That’s all I know. I wish I knew what would happen next.”

“Do we ever know that?”

I look up suddenly. “No. But I thought I did. That’s what I was most wrong about. I used to worry about them all the time—in utero, when they were babies, toddlers. Light sockets, swimming pools, bee stings. I worried about everything. But you know what I know now? I didn’t really believe in the worry. It was a hobby, or a mind game, like a crossword puzzle. I never thought anything really bad would happen. It was all the good things that seemed real to me—where they’d go to college and where they’d live and what my grandchildren would call me.”

“What did you decide?”

“About what?”

“What your grandchildren would call you?”

“Why?”

“Because it’s still important.”

I close my eyes and think, I don’t care, I don’t care—Granny Nana, Grandmom. I picture trying to hug a squirmy little boy imagine having him pull away, saying, “Stop, Grandmom.” And at the thought I feel a stab of something inside—something like life, like what I had felt when I was pregnant. I always felt so empty in those first few sleepless months afterward, my hands pressed to my slack belly, as though having something alive beneath my skin was my natural state.

“You know what I think?” I cry. “I think every fear you ever have, every one—thunder or spiders or roller coasters—they’re all fear of dying. Every last one.”

Dr. Vagelos turns to his desk, takes a card, gives it to me. I look
at the woman’s name on the front. “She’s good,” he says. “She does a lot of grief counseling. That might be the next step for you. You said you wanted someone to come out of this alive. It’s not going to be enough if it’s only Alex.”

I put the card in my pocket and shake my head. “I don’t know if I can live like this. Do you think it’s possible, to live like this?”

“I’ve never had a patient in your situation before, so I suppose the honest answer is that I don’t know.”

“But what’s your opinion?”

“I think you have no choice. You have a son. You love him deeply. He needs a life. Not only that, he needs a good life, a full life.”

“How is that even possible?”

“What’s the alternative?”

“What about me?” I ask.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t even know.”

“That’s a start,” he says.

It’s Saturday. Alex and Elizabeth are in the kitchen making oatmeal cookies. Allison was here, but she had to go home to see her sister, who is returning from college for the Thanksgiving break. Alex is due at soccer practice in three hours. I will drive him, and drop Elizabeth at her house. She lives in one of those narrow clapboard houses in town, with a square of yard in front and another behind. The first time I went there to pick Alex up, the night when the two of us first met with Dr. Vagelos, her mother opened the door wide, and I saw at once that she was one of the nurses who had cared for me in the hospital. “I’ve heard so much about you,” she said.

She and Elizabeth are coming here for Thanksgiving. They have no one else. Elizabeth’s father lives in Phoenix. She has no brothers and sisters. I think they’ll like having Thanksgiving at our house. Glen’s father and his brothers and their families are coming. They will all stay in Olivia’s guesthouse, sleeping bags on every
floor. Alice and Liam are coming, too, with Nate, and my mother and Stan. They will stay here, upstairs. There will be twenty people. Rickie and John brought over some sawhorses. There will be ten at the dining-room table and ten on an old door set atop the sawhorses, a tablecloth masking the makeshift. It will be tight, but we’ll do it. Sometimes Alex and I are distracted by the prospect and planning for all the guests, and sometimes we’re distracted by the soccer playoffs, and sometimes we’re not distracted at all. Sometimes we both make an effort to talk about things we don’t want to discuss—about Kiernan, about what happened in the house on New Year’s Eve, about how much Alex misses his father, his sister, his brother, and how much I miss them, too. Yesterday we hiked through the woods, and we talked about Max and how he was last year.

“I should have been, like, so much cooler about the whole thing he was going through,” Alex said sadly. “I was really harsh. I should have been nicer, talked to him more about how down he was, you know?”

“It was hard, the way your brother was last year,” I said. “Your dad had a really hard time dealing with it, too.”

“I think he would have gotten better.”

“Your dad or Max?”

“Both, right? Don’t you think Dr. Vagelos would have gotten Max better? Max told me the doc was really cool. That’s why I went to see him. At first I just wanted to tell him that, and then I wanted to make sure that Max was really getting better. But then I decided to talk to him myself. I just didn’t think it would take so long—you know, like, I’d have to talk to him so many times. Like, maybe years.”

“Do you feel better after Dr. Vagelos?” Bless that man—if there’s one thing he taught me, it is to ask questions.

“A lot of times I do. Or, at least, I feel like I get things. Like I didn’t understand things before and now I do.”

“That’s how he made me feel.”

“You always did, though. We were always, like, isn’t it scary how Mom gets what we’re thinking while we’re thinking it? Or before we’re thinking it?”

“I just pretended,” I said. “No, that’s a lie. A lot of times I did know. I worked really hard at it.”

“I know,” Alex said then, and I cried a little, and wiped my eyes, and made a face.

“Every time I cry now, I think you think I’m doing it because of what you said,” I told him.

“I do sometimes, but that’s cool.”

I put another log on the fire. In the kitchen I hear Elizabeth say “We need three eggs.” I hear her murmur something else more softly, then hear Alex laugh. The fireplace in the living room is a marvel. It warms the entire first floor of the house so thoroughly that sometimes we have to crack the windows. Then it even heats a small area of the porch. I pull up my old rocking chair and swaddle myself in the throw from the couch and listen as the wood pops. The cat sits on my lap and kneads the throw.

The cat came out of the woods right after the Halloween party was through, when everyone had driven down the drive and we were cleaning cake off the floors. Alex had insisted that we have the party, even if it was a much smaller, more modest version. “In memory of Max,” he said. Alex and Elizabeth were picking up piñata candy in the backyard when they saw the cat approach like a tardy guest, his yellow eyes narrowed and skeptical. They decided to call him Jack-o’-Lantern, Jack for short. We’re all afraid someone will come and claim him, but so far he is ours. He hisses at Ginger when she comes too close, but when she’s sleeping he settles
himself nearby, his paws tucked under him so that he is foursquare, a black-and-white brick of fur and sinew.

Rickie and John came over and used a log splitter on some storm-felled trees, so we have plenty of firewood. They stacked some of it at the side of the house—a wall of wood, elm and poplar and lots of oak. They put the rest in the barn. I went up into the loft and looked at the boxes. Near the front is one that says
HOME MOVIES.
I wonder when I can open that, whether I can ever watch the three of them walk across the den, pet the dog, smile out at me, even if it is only on a television screen.

Somewhere there are the boxes of ashes. I suspect that my mother put them far in the back, so that I won’t find them for a long, long time.

A car pulls into the drive, and Sarah and Rachel get out. I throw open the front door and they run to me, one on each side, hugging hard, so hard that I feel as though I might fall, except that the two of them are holding me up, lifting me as though I am the child.

“I love this place!” Rachel squeals.

Inside, Sarah reaches her hands out to the fire, and Rachel gives me two jars of homemade cranberry relish that they bought at the farmers’ market. She’s still thin, and different somehow—less tentative, secondary. I think Ruby would be pleased to see her like this. Maybe with only the two of them in the charmed circle there is more space for Rachel.

“You seem great,” I say.

“I love school,” she replies.

Rachel has discovered art history; Sarah is suddenly interested in economics. Sarah is not sure the swimming is worth it—“We’re up at six o’clock, and we always wind up hanging out with other swimmers”—and Rachel says her roommate has issues, although she won’t be more specific. Sarah is wearing jeans and a peasant blouse, and her hair now falls below her shoulders. She is dressed
less like Sarah and more like Ruby. “How’s Eric?” I ask, and she says, “Fine, I guess.” It seems I was wrong about all those assumptions I’d once made about Sarah’s set-in-stone future. But then I was wrong about most of the future, when I dreamed it so long ago, a year ago.

“Where’s Alex?” Sarah asks, and then the two of them run into the kitchen, and there are screams punctuated by the rumble of Alex’s voice.

“My ears hurt,” I hear Max say, the way he did so many times before at the high, piercing girl-shrieks.

“My ears hurt,” Alex says with a grin as I go into the kitchen.

“Too bad. These are my girls.” That’s what Ruby always said. I say it now, and the two of them look at me and blink hard. Then they shake it off and stick their fingers into the batter, and Alex raps Sarah across the hand with a wooden spoon as Elizabeth stands aside and smiles shyly.

“We are so sorry,” Rachel says to her intently, and Elizabeth’s eyes widen, and she says, “Why?”

“Because you got stuck with this loser!” And she and Sarah repeat the word a few times and make their thumbs and forefingers into a capital
L
and try to put it on Alex’s forehead.

“You two are, like, totally dubious,” he says.

We all sit in the living room, and Rachel rubs the arm of the chair, and I know she’s remembering it from the den. They’ve both come from the high school, where the swimmers broke off practice to make a fuss over Sarah. “Except for that bitch Amanda,” Rachel says.

“Uh, ladies, language, please,” I say.

“I can’t wait to go to college so I can curse all day,” Alex says, and I shiver in the hot house, thinking of it empty.

Soon they’re all hungry, and we go back into the kitchen and make grilled-cheese sandwiches. The girls finger their friendship
bracelets unconsciously and tell Elizabeth how much she’ll like college. They cluster around me at the stove as I press the bread down with a spatula. Alex wants bacon on his, Sarah and Elizabeth tomato. Rachel and I—and Ruby—like ours plain, just cheese and bread. Everyone wants sweet pickles. Sarah looks up at me as she opens the jar, smiling, and then her face changes in an instant to a look of such suffering that I almost cry out. She turns to the sink, hiding her secret self.

I know that there will always be ghosts with these girls. I will buy them graduation gifts and attend their weddings and send baby presents and perhaps even eat at their homes. And there will always be not the ghost of Ruby that was but the ghost of Ruby who might have been. I don’t know that person, and yet I miss her. I miss the Max who might have been, too. I miss the Glen who was.

“I’m having Thanksgiving dinner here,” Elizabeth says softly.

“Everybody in the world is eating here,” Alex says.

“Not me,” says Rachel.

“You’re invited,” I say quickly. “So is your mom.”

“No, that’s okay, we have plans. I bet you have better plans, though. Also better food.” Sandy is said to be dating the pro at the golf club. I know they serve Thanksgiving dinner—“Who the heck has Thanksgiving dinner at a golf club?” Glen always said—and I wonder if they are going to eat there.

We’re spending Christmas here, too. Alex says we should decorate the concolor tree, although I’ve told him it would take a bucket truck and hundreds of lights. The day after Christmas, we leave town for a week. That night after the meeting with Dr. Vagelos, neither of us knowing what to say in the car, both of us afraid of saying too much, or of sinking back into silence, I had suddenly blurted out, “If you could take a trip anywhere, where would you want to go?”

“With you?”

I nodded. His eyes were shiny picked out in the dark by the dash lights. He suddenly looked like someone I didn’t know. I can scarcely see the young Alex in him anymore. There’s a suggestion of the young Glen in his jaw and eyes. Or, at least, that’s what I tell myself.

“I really want to go to Cooperstown, to the Baseball Hall of Fame, but I don’t think you’d like that so much, so maybe not with you.”

I waited. I could hear him breathing. “New York,” he finally said.

“New York?”

“Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of other places I want to go—like Africa, maybe, someday. Or China. China would be cool. But Nate said there’s this whole exhibit of armor at the art museum that we never got to see. And Ellis Island. I told him I was thinking I might like to be a history guy, and he said I had to go to Ellis Island.”

“You want to be a historian? I didn’t see that one coming.” I didn’t add, “And neither did your history teacher, judging from your last report card.” But, as though he’d heard my thoughts, Alex said, “Mr. Betts is a lame teacher. Like, his idea of history is, Memorize a hundred dates and then I’ll give you a test. I was once, like, ‘Mr. Betts, did you know that millions of people died in Europe in 1920 when they got the flu?’ And he goes, Yes, Alex, I did, but that’s European history, and the curriculum this year is American history.’ Like you can even separate them.”