Every Last One (36 page)

“I didn’t know that, about the flu.”

“It was really bad. I saw this thing about it on the History Channel.”

“With your father.”

“Yeah.”

We will be going to Ellis Island together, although Alice insists
that all of us will freeze on the ferry ride over. We will go to the museum, although I may let Alex look at the armor by himself while I stare at the Impressionist paintings. On New Year’s Eve at midnight, there is a four-mile run through Central Park, and Nate and Alex are registered to run it together. Apparently, there are fireworks and noisemakers and champagne and costumes and big, jolly anonymous crowds of people. “Happy New Year,” I will say to strangers. Somewhere along the route, I will watch as my son streaks by in the silvery night, the streetlights keeping the dark at bay. Someday Alex will say, “Remember that midnight run in Central Park?” And I will nod, and maybe even smile.

Alex jumps up from the table, afraid he’ll be late for practice. Rachel and Sarah are going into town anyway; they will take him. He runs upstairs for his gear. “My dad says he’ll be all-state junior year,” Sarah says. “He’s a great soccer player,” says Elizabeth, who goes back to the screened porch for her jacket.

“Has either of you seen Kiernan’s mom?” I ask.

“My mom saw her a couple of weeks ago, delivering a cake,” Rachel says. “My mom says she’s totally crazy. She says she’s moving someplace. Maybe California? Or Canada? But really, really crazy.”

“Don’t say that, honey,” I say as I put my arms around her.

Sarah hugs me, too. “My mom really misses you,” she whispers.

A sharp voice says, “She knows where I live.” I’m going to ignore that voice. Instead I say, “Tell her I miss her, too. Tell her I miss her a lot. Will both of you come over Friday for turkey sandwiches? My friend Alice will be here with her little boy and her boyfriend.”

“Is he cute?” Rachel says.

“The little boy or the boyfriend?”

“You always get me with stuff like that.”

“They’re both very cute,” I say.

“I’m going to be late!” yells Alex as he clatters down the stairs. “The coach is going to kill me!”

I can hear the noise inside the car as they pull away which makes the silence afterward seem deeper. I go into the backyard and sit in an old Adirondack chair that I found in the back of the barn. There’s only one, which is odd. I think the other one must have broken. These things always come in pairs.

The cat has followed me outside, and now he sits at the edge of the woods, the tip of his tail threshing the air. Ginger scampers toward him. For a moment, all four paws lifted from the dull autumn grass, she’s a young dog again. I have to start cooking side dishes for dinner Thursday. I can make the sweet potatoes and the creamed onions. My father-in-law likes those. My mother is going to make some biscuits at Olivia’s and bring them that morning, although she really doesn’t bake so well. Olivia and Ted and the boys are coming over after their own dinner, with pies for dessert. She says they’re going to hike through the woods together. “I don’t doubt that you’ll hear us before you see us,” she told me.

My mother thinks going to New York is a mistake. “You can’t run away from things forever,” she said. “It’s not forever,” I replied. I wanted to add, “Nothing is forever.” But I know my mother knows that. In my top bureau drawer is the card Dr. Vagelos gave me, the grief therapist’s card. Maybe I will call her in January. I don’t plan ahead much anymore.

In the barn is a box marked “Xmas Ornaments.” For some reason, the thought of them won’t let me be. I can see them all in my mind: The china cherub wreathed in holly that I got as a shower gift when Ruby was born. The candy canes made out of dough that the twins made in first grade. The tiny tawny papier-mâché dog that Ruby bought on a class trip to New York. Max’s ceramic dinosaur. Alex’s glass soccer ball. I could buy new ones, fresh ones, with no history, no memories. But what sort of tree would that
be? It would be like those color-coordinated trees I criticized all those years, the ones I was hired to put up and decorate. I don’t want one of those trees. But I’m afraid to open that box.

“Don’t be afraid, Mom,” I hear Max say. But it’s a different Max, a wiser Max, a Max who knows now that most of our fears are petty and small, and that only our love is monumental.

“It’s me,” I hear Ruby say, the way she did when she came into the house after school. “Who’s me?” Glen would say if he was home.

He will be young forever, my Maxie, always shaggy-haired and splayfooted and long-limbed. And Ruby, too, with her incandescent eyes and her dancing hands. And Glen will never get any older, but I will. Maybe someday I will be an old woman with a young husband, a young husband struggling to belt his pants, his mouth set as he goes down to put a stop to that ruckus. Maybe someday I will be an old woman with a grown son, saying to his wife, “That house is just too damn big for my mother. I wish we could get her to move someplace smaller.” And his wife—please, please, make her nice, make her like me, make her a good mother herself—his wife will say, “She has a lot of memories in that house.”

Ginger snorts and turns onto her side and sighs. And then, because I want to, because there is no one there to think it strange, I call their names, one by one, into the silence. The silence is as big as the sky, and as I call to each of them it is as though the name is a bird, flying out over the trees and into the lowering afternoon. Ginger’s ears twitch at the familiar sounds. Maybe
crazy
is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.

“How are you holding up?” my mother said the other day when she called to tell me about their Thanksgiving travel plans.

“I’m trying,” I replied.

“That’s good,” she said. “That’s all anyone can ask.”

I am. Every day I am trying.

I am trying for Alex.

I am trying for Ruby.

I am trying for Max.

I am trying for Glen.

It’s all I know how to do now. This is my life. I am trying.

A CONVERSATION WITH ANNA QUINDLEN

Random House Reader’s Circle:
Every Last One
is arguably your darkest novel since
Black and Blue
in 1998. What made you want to write about tragedy striking an ordinary family? Or was it a theme that first intrigued you?

Anna Quindlen:
For a long time I’ve been thinking about illusions of security and control, especially in terms of motherhood. We think that if we do the right things, provide the right kind of care and oversight, we can keep our children safe from any perils. I suspect that’s at the heart of the epidemic of so-called helicopter parenting we see today. But it’s completely illusory. Sure, you can teach your teenager to drive carefully, but what difference does that make when a drunk driver roars through a stop sign? That sense of randomness, of the contrast between the care that parenthood requires and the dangers lurking in the world, sometimes right under our noses, is what I chose to explore here. I also wanted to illuminate the ways in which small events in our lives can combine to create unexpected results. I tried to make that clear through a combination of the details that make up the bedrock of a happy family life, and the occasional suggestion that the bedrock had cracks within it. It required a kind of subtlety and control that I haven’t needed quite so much in my other novels.

RHRC:
What is it like to write about devastating, violent events like those encountered by the characters in
Every Last One
? Was your day-to-day experience of writing this novel different from that of your last novel,
Rise and Shine
? What was the biggest challenge for you in writing
Every Last One
?

AQ:
I think everyone assumes I was in a funk during the creation of this novel, but it just wasn’t so. The explanation for that lies, I think, in the narrator, Mary Beth Latham. My experience as a novelist—this is my sixth—is that once you’ve nailed your protagonist, those around her come to life. And at some level she becomes your reason for being. I resonated with Mary Beth right away, felt that I knew her, which of course was critical since the book is written in the first person and is really her story. Most of the challenges were about how to make her real. It’s hard to write a novel about motherhood without creating either a plaster saint or a punching bag. I’m sick and tired of both those ways of looking at the very difficult, joyful, and complicated task on which I’ve personally been laboring for the last quarter century. Mary Beth is an ordinary woman, involved and distracted and smart and unaware, all of those things that simultaneously make up human behavior. That’s what I was after. And it’s what made me able to live in the world of this book, because I was living on her shoulder.

RHRC:
Like Mary Beth, you are a mother of three. How much of you is in Mary Beth? Is she your favorite character in the novel?

AQ:
When you’re a novelist people are always looking for the you of you within your books, often in your main character. But there’s nothing here even dimly autobiographical, except that I have three kids and I have good women friends. Ruby, Alex, and Max are in no way modeled after my children, nor is Mary Beth modeled after me. You bring everything you know, everything you are, to the table when you write a novel. But my work has become less autobiographical as time has gone by. The most autobiographical of my novels is the first one,
Object Lessons
; the link to my actual life has lessened with each successive book. I think that’s pretty typical.

For some reason, my favorites are always secondary characters. It’s probably because I’m a Dickensian, and in his books the secondaries are the most vivid: Peggotty, Uriah Heep, the Cratchits. I love the English teacher in
One True Thing
and Cindy in
Black and Blue
. Sunny, Lydia’s brother in
Blessings
, is a real favorite, and I still have a soft spot for Irving Lefkowitz in
Rise and Shine
. Sometimes your favorites sneak up on you. Dr. Vagelos in
Every Last One
started out as a very minor character. As his role grew, he became more and more a moral center. I also like Mary Beth’s college friend Alice. She seems very real to me.

RHRC:
Mary Beth tells the story of
Every Last One
in first person, but she withholds certain things from the reader, and, perhaps more important, from herself. How do you think this limited perspective affected the novel? Could it have been any other way?

AQ:
Actually, Mary Beth doesn’t have the opportunity to reveal all to the reader because the book is written in the present tense. I was very concerned when I started that that might seem like an affectation, but it’s really essential here. What did she know? What ought she to have known? How much do we really know our children? How much do they hide from us, and how much of the process of maturation is in that deception? All of those are critical questions the novel raises, but only if you are living the action of the book right alongside Mary Beth as it’s taking place. She’s learning about most of the action of the book at the same time we are, which was an absolute necessity here. So was the first person. This is the story of one woman’s life and the moment when it went awry. It never occurred to me not to have her tell it. That was the best way to tell the story, and to connect with its emotional truth.

RHRC:
You’ve managed such an extraordinarily successful writing career along with being a full-time mother. What has it been like to juggle the two?

AQ:
There are lots of ways in which being a mother has helped my career as a novelist. I think the portrait of teenagers in this novel is a direct result of having mothered three. And my work habits are still determined by the rhythms of the school day. I write during the time when kids are in school although I have no kids in school any longer. It’s the legacy of my early mom life, when I dropped them off, ran home, wrote, ran back to school, then made dinner. I’ve retained the ability to compartmentalize from those years that stood me in good stead while writing
Every Last One
. When I had young children, I always left about an hour between the time I knocked off writing and the time I got to school; I thought of it as a psychic or emotional palate cleanser, and I was convinced it would make me more present in the moment when I was with them, although in the years since I’ve been told more than once that that wasn’t necessarily true. But it certainly helped while doing this book. I gave myself some time each day to leave the Lathams and become myself again. Now that they’ve read the book, my family and friends seem rather astonished that I was relatively cheery during the years I was working on this. I wrote the book; Mary Beth got the life. Big difference.

Profiles frequently emphasize the sacrifices I made for motherhood: not rising to the top echelons of editors at
The New York Times
, leaving the paper to make room for my fiction writing at a time when I was deeply immersed in day-to-day child care. Trust me, I got a whole lot more than I gave. I got three years of a column called “Life in the 30’s,” which was a weekly account of my humdrum life when the boys were small. I developed an audience around writing about motherhood that followed me when I started to write fiction. And as a novelist, my understanding of the human condition was expanded by reexperiencing life through the eyes of our sons and daughter as they grew. They made me a better writer and a better person. That may sound saccharine, but it happens to be true. And now I have these three great adults with whom to discuss books and writing and what TV shows I should watch on a regular basis. I totally scored on the parent front.