Every Last One

by Anna Quindlen

  "You wrote this," Alex says.

  "Dude, I didn't," Kiernan says, his hand over his heart. "I'm the picture guy. Strictly visual. The sports editor wrote it."

  "You lie. You wrote it."

  "I swear. I'm barely literate."

  "Mom! Mommy!" Ruby cries from her room, and Kiernan lifts his head and tracks the sound like a dog listening to a high-pitched whistle.

  There are peppers in a saute pan. I am going to finish cooking them before I go upstairs.

  "This is really great, Alex," I say. "You have to show this to Daddy the moment he walks in the door."

  Alex looks down at the paper again. "When they say 'may help to fill the gap,' do you think that means Ben and I make varsity?" he says.

  "Dude," says Kiernan, raising his hands palms up, a you've-got-it-made gesture. I give him a look over Alex's head.

  "Oh, honey," I say, pushing peppers around in the pan. "I think a lot depends on who else is playing and what positions need to be filled. Besides, if you play JV you get a lot more playing time when you're a freshman."

  "Mo-meee!" Ruby shrieks.

  "Shut up," Max mutters. He is on the window seat, eating cherries and reading a comic book.

  "You're a jerk," Alex says. "Just because no one ever mentioned you in the paper doesn't mean you have to act like a jerk. Jerk."

  "What?" Max says.

  "Dude, I think he was remarking on your sister's banshee wail," says Kiernan.

  "What he said," Max mutters again.

  When I'd called Max's drum teacher, he said he thought Max was seriously depressed. "That guy can't even stand up straight, and he's qualified not only to teach music but to do psychological analysis?" Glen said as we talked in bed. There were four panes of bright light aslant on our ceiling from a white June moon. The light through this window, the smell of the air, the witchy line of a tree branch that has insinuated itself into the sight line of my side of the bed: this is how I track the seasons. I can't say why, but when I see those squares of light on the ceiling I feel as though all will be well.

  "We should find another music teacher," Glen had said. He was really annoyed, mainly because he is as worried about Max as I am. Two of his teachers say they will fail him for lack of class participation. One of the two says she has never heard his voice.

  Upstairs, the house smells like hot olive oil and gym socks. When I open Ruby's door, a puff of incense mixes with the other two and makes me feel faint for just a moment. The dog is lying at the foot of the bed. Ruby is sitting cross-legged at the head, tapping at the keyboard of her computer.

  "I called you, like, ten times," she says without looking up.

  "I am cooking dinner and talking to your brothers. And Kiernan. Who is waiting downstairs for you, I assume."

  Ruby lets down her hair, winds it around her hand, puts it up in a bun that looks identical to the one she just dismantled. Her reconfigured prom dress hangs from the back of her closet door. It's beautiful, a swirl of primary colors with a deep U-neck and trumpet sleeves. No one will have anything like it.

  Above her bed is a photograph of the hands of a girl wearing dark nail polish holding an ornate silver pen. Ruby writes, and Kiernan takes pictures. There were many reasons that they became a couple, including the fact that he has always been in love with her, with the specificity of her appearance and her personality. "That's so Ruby," Sarah says sometimes about a movie, a book, a dress. But Kiernan finally won her with a series of black-and-white photographs. She had written a short story about a high school student undone by writer's block, and Kiernan gave her a series of photos to accompany the story--a close-up of a hallway locker, a half-erased blackboard covered with a plot outline of Anna Karenina, Ruby's own hands as she wrote in her journal. The last had run in the literary magazine alongside the story, and by that time Ruby's hand was most often woven tightly into one of Kiernan's, on the street, in the lunchroom, in our den, where the hands told a story Ruby and Kiernan's decorous public behavior belied. If Kiernan thinks in pictures, Ruby thinks in stories, and I can imagine her making up one in her mind now--one that begins, "When I was in high school I had a boyfriend."

  "Can you just tell him I'm surfing the crimson wave?" she says. "He knows not to bother me then."

  I find it astonishing how open my daughter and her friends are about menstruation. Ruby, Sarah, and Rachel talk as though there is no reason the world shouldn't share in their moods, cramps, and back pain. It's not that they're insensitive: I remember one afternoon at our kitchen table when Sarah started to weep because of some fairly mild criticism from Eric, and Ruby and Rachel put their arms around her, draped themselves over her the way they do, and said, "Oh, honey, we'll make you some hot chocolate." It's just that they are open to knowledge and immune to shame. The other day I found the box for a pregnancy test in Ruby's bathroom. I'd hesitated and then held it up wordlessly. The air seemed to vibrate. It's so odd that, depending on the circumstances, pregnancy is either the thing we embrace most wholeheartedly or the thing we fear most. Ruby's eyes had narrowed. "Rachel," she'd said flatly adding, "It's fine." I'd stood in the doorway, holding the jamb with one hand. "It's. Fine," Ruby said without looking up, in a voice that told me that was as much as I was going to learn.

  "I don't have to make excuses for you," I say. "Sometimes Kiernan stops by just to stop by. He brought Alex a copy of the Newshawk with Alex's name in it."

  "It's just that he's always here, whether I want to see him or not."

  "I think you're the only one who can put a stop to that, honey," I say, scratching the spot where Ginger's tail meets her hindquarters. Dreamily, the dog raises one cocked back leg. It twitches in the air, as though she were dreaming that she is doing the scratching herself, then falls heavily back onto the bed.

  "Ya think?" Ruby says harshly, and then she rearranges her hair again. "Seriously, don't you think that with all three of us away for the summer he'll get used to not stopping by?"

  "He might stop by just to say hello."

  "He's so intense, Mommy. So intense. Like, nothing is casual, everything is so--" She searches for a word, pounds the keyboard, sighs so that her whole slender rib cage rises and falls. "Intense."

  I don't reply that Ruby is intense as well. She has so much in her life--Sarah, Rachel, her brothers, her father, me. Her writing, her politics, unformed though they may be. Kiernan doesn't see his father much since the divorce, and, I've heard, or overheard, that he doesn't talk much to his mother. He has no brothers or sisters. He has Ruby, and everything that Ruby carries with her: the confidence, the happiness, the brothers, the parents.

  "Do you want dinner?" I ask.

  "I'm working on my story." I have begun to think that Ruby's story is less a piece of fiction than the flotation device that is buoying her and carrying her away from here.

  Downstairs, I add chicken to the peppers and start the rice. Kiernan is telling Alex a story about a soccer league in which his father once played that allegedly toured Europe. It may be true; it may be Kevin Donahue's invention. Kiernan's father is the sort of charming and irresistible man who is always only one remove from the big moment, the big idea, the big score. "I can taste it," Kevin used to say to Glen when he was coming up with yet another scheme, and I could feel my husband's disapproval and disbelief as though it were a change in temperature.

  "K, are you having dinner here?" Alex asks. I don't turn from the stove, and I imagine Kiernan staring at my back. Finally I say "There's plenty." Kiernan has heard me say this hundreds of times, but I'm afraid that there is now something crabbed and reluctant in my voice.

  "Nah, dude," he says, and the chair scrapes against the tiles. "I've got stuff to do."

  "Ruby is working on her story," I say.

  "I know," Kiernan says. "I'll see her later."

  "Why is Ruby being mean to Kiernan?" Max asks over dinner.

  "Really mean," says Alex.

  "You just like him now because he brought over that stupid paper,"
Max growls.

  "What? I like him. I just think he can be weird sometimes."

  "Who?" Glen says. He has arrived home late from work, and he is abstracted.

  "Sometimes your sister just needs to be by herself," I say. I overcooked the peppers. They're khaki mush around the pieces of chicken. No one notices. If, in an hour, I asked them what they had for dinner, they wouldn't remember except that they would agree it had been good.

  "Where's Ruby?" Glen asks.

  "Upstairs. She's working on her story. She says she'll have yogurt later." Glen makes a face. He still worries about what Ruby eats, how often, and how much.

  Alex hands Glen the copy of the school paper, folded to a small square so that it is nothing but the soccer story.

  "Wow!" Glen says. "This is pretty impressive, buddy."

  "I don't know," says Alex. "Like, do you think it means I'll make varsity?"

  "Mom!" Ruby calls from upstairs.

  I pull into the driveway late, as the sun is beginning to smear lilac and fucshia across the horizon, turning the tops of the green hills candy-colored, mocking the pale blue of the fading evening sky. The long hours now that the days are warming make up for the lackluster pace of the winter months, and I'm often exhausted, sore, and grubby. But occasionally I stop and sit at the wheel to look at my house. It's nothing much: medium blue, white shutters, a Dutch Colonial with little to set it apart but a steeply sloping roof with three sharp dormers. The trees around it were planted long before I knew an elm from a beech: two large oaks at one corner, a flourishing blue spruce at the other, and a Japanese maple to one side of the front door. There were topiary yews around the foundation; I hacked them down within three days of taking title. The children were little then; they sat cross-legged on the front lawn, mesmerized by the suggestion of violence in my behavior, and my borrowed chain saw. "Mommy really, really hates those trees," Ruby had told the boys solemnly.

  I imagine that the house looks happy, but I suppose that's because it's what I want to believe. But it never looks happier to me than it does at twilight on a warm night when the lights come on. It's pretty when it's frosted with soft snow in the blue haze of a winter evening, but it's usually too cold in my car then to do more than leap out and hurry into the welcome of a good furnace. But on a mild night like this one I can afford to sit for a while and watch the windows, rectangles of gold. A spill of lamplight through a pane of glass spells home to me. When the kids were babies, I used to sing nonsense songs as I rocked and nursed them, and suddenly, out of nowhere, I remember one of them: Safe and sound, safe and sound, all around is safe and sound.

  And then the other night Rickie drove me home, and looked up at the house, and saw something else. "Maybe you want to put in some of those motion-detector lights yourself," he'd said, and, with the best intentions, tainted it all.

  "Oh, come on," I replied.

  "That cop said they've had some things going on--break-ins, that kind of stuff. And that thing with the trees--I just don't like the way it feels."

  I don't like the way it feels, either, whether it was vandalism or theft, teenagers or adults. But I patted Rickie's arm and said, "There are always lights on at my house. Glen complains all the time about our electric bill."

  Even as I sit watching, a lamp comes on in the den, and I wonder who is in the room: Glen with the front part of the paper, Alex with the sports section, Max with a letter from one of his friends from camp. Or maybe it's Ruby, who has learned to walk through the house and turn a switch here and there to make the dim corners bright. I feel as if I'm watching my life. I feel as if I'm not in my life. I get out of the car and go though the door so that feeling will pass.

  I pause in the mudroom to hang my big canvas bag on one of the pegs. The three of them are in the kitchen, making s'mores if the smell of singed graham crackers is to be believed. I wonder if anyone actually makes s'mores, or whether everyone pretends that's what they're planning and then does what we do: put the Hershey bar and the marshmallow between the graham crackers and swear softly as the crackers snap in two, try again, abandon the graham crackers, toast the marshmallows, eat the Hershey bars. I can see Ruby in profile, a square of chocolate in her hand. She eats with tiny bites, like a small animal, a mouse maybe. The therapist said she would probably always eat that way. I slip off my rubber clogs, mud thick in the treads after another long day restoring the vandalized property on Winding Way. The workmen were truculent and fist-faced about repeating a job they had already done. When they were finished and got into the van to be dropped off at the shabby motel, none of them responded to my "Good night!"

  I want to run upstairs and get into the shower, but I like to watch my children when they don't know I'm there, convinced that they'll reveal themselves to me in some essential way. They're so different when it's just the three of them, together. "Three people united against a common enemy," Nancy says of her own kids. "Or enemies." But it's not that. My brother, Richard, and I were two people related by blood, with little in common. When he left for college, it was as though the pond of our family had rippled slightly, then closed around the disturbance and become smooth again. We went from two adults and two children to one adult and one child with scarcely a thought, or at least a spoken one. And I went to college and left my mother, and she married and left me, and I moved East and she moved South. She and I talk once a week by phone, and she sends me news clippings, and occasionally a book that her book club has enjoyed. I have no idea what she felt when my father died, how she feels about me, what terrifies and what moves her. I remember spending most of my college vacations at Alice's house, a big confusing old place with two staircases and four brothers and parents who worked side by side in real estate. They told smutty jokes and drank whiskey sours, and her father said that when the kids were away he and his wife went skinny-dipping in the lake, and her mother said that was a nice thing to say in front of me, I would get the wrong idea about all of them, and the boys spit beer at one another at the table, and Alice said, "Oh, grow up, all of you."

  They were a clan, not, as my family had been, people sharing a house and a name. Somehow my own children have become a clan, too, even when they are mean to one another, even when Ruby is short with the boys or Max is ignoring Alex and Alex is picking at Max. I think they are perfect at the same time that their inadequacies terrify me. Two years ago, I was worried all the time about Ruby. Now it's Max. I don't think it will ever be Alex.

  "No, you're right, Mrs. Ruffino is hard," I hear Ruby say sympathetically, putting down her square of chocolate.

  "Like, my grades are okay in every other class," Alex says, "and she says she's going to give me a C. And I'm like, Mrs. Ruffino, what? I show up, I read the stuff, I write the papers. I think she's always on me because, like, I'm not that good a writer, and I'm getting trashed because of you."

  "So it's my fault you're failing English? That sounds like a lame excuse," Ruby says, licking her finger.

  "Are you gonna finish that?" Max says, and Ruby pushes the rest of her chocolate bar across to him.

  "I'm not failing," Alex says.

  "A C," Ruby replies. "The parents will not be pleased."

  "Duh."

  "What are you reading?" she asks.

  "Scarlet Letter," Max mutters.

  "And Melinda Bernstein is like, Oh, Mrs. Ruffino, I love this book--it's so good." Alex has pitched his voice falsetto. Ruby laughs.

  "You both have Mrs. Ruffino? I thought Mom made sure you were in different classes."

  "Two sections," Max says, unwrapping another chocolate bar.

  "And, anyhow, Max is in genius math and I'm in dummy math," Alex says.

  "It's not genius math," Max says. His voice has become so indistinct that I feel as though at any moment it may disappear entirely and we will have to read his lips on the rare occasions when he speaks.

  "When we get to the high school it's going to be completely bogus, because every English teacher will be like, you're Ruby's brother?"<
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  "No, they won't."

  Max mutters. He has a marshmallow in his mouth. "What?" Alex says.

  "You're the favorite," he says.

  "Me?" Alex says.

  "Ruby," says Max.

  "Oh, don't be stupid, Max," she says.

  Ruby drops her eyes to her lap and frowns. I can tell she doesn't believe what she is saying. She's scratching at something on her painter's pants, probably a blot of chocolate.

  "Bullshit," Alex says.

  "You'd better not let anyone hear you talk like that."

  "You say it all the time."

  "I do not say it all the time," Ruby says. "I use profanity very little, actually, compared to most people I know. And I'm three years older than you."

  "It's because you're a girl," says Max.

  "That's sexist," Ruby says primly. "Why shouldn't women swear as much as men do?"

  "Not the swearing thing. The favorite thing."

  "It's because she's the oldest," Alex says.

  "It's not true," Ruby says.

  It is, in a way. I'm often distressed by the difference between my feelings for Ruby and those I have for her brothers. Perhaps it's because she's the oldest, and I was so young, and I discovered myself as I learned to know her, discovered that I could do without sleep, without stimulation, could subvert myself to a greater good. I felt triumphant when I survived her colic, her fall from the bed, the morning she caught her tiny pink finger in a closet door.

  But sometimes I think part of the problem is that I've never really seen the boys as two distinct people. I hadn't even known I was expecting twins until the very end of the pregnancy. Ruby had been a large baby--"nine pounds," I once told the therapist desperately, when her weight was down to ninety, as though that would show there had been some terrible mistake--and the enormous ovoid belly that preceded me into every room could be explained away until we heard the dissonant heartbeats.