Every Last One

by Anna Quindlen

  It's hard to care for two infants at once--to nurse them, comfort them, make certain you know each of them individually. I used the word wait so often. Nancy says that I'm fooling myself, that she never gave Sarah and Bob the time she gave Fred, her firstborn, that it would have been the same had Alex and Max been born three years apart. But she's wrong, in part because I can't tell her what I really feel--that in some peculiar and shameful way I think of my sons as two halves of a single whole, as though they were Siamese twins inextricably joined together by their differences. I wonder if that's the reason they seem to have moved to opposite ends of the gene pool, become the athlete and the artist, the conventional and the quirky, whether I'm responsible for the fact that Alex is almost annoyingly energetic and Max is sinking deeper into a pit of torpor. Each occupies the place not taken up by the other.

  "Okay so which parent is your favorite?" says Alex, and my throat closes.

  "Oh, please," Ruby says wearily. "That's stupider than the other." I realize that, like a small child, I am thinking, Pick me, pick me, and then I'm ashamed of myself. Poor Glen, spending day after day gently lifting bifocals onto the seamed faces of retirees, asking wriggling kindergarteners to read the fourth line on the chart, comforting teary teenage girls who have just been told they need glasses for the classroom, who has uncomplainingly taught skating and bike riding while I waved from a window, who cried in the delivery rooms and drove cautiously to the ER even when there was blood and screaming--he deserves to be more than first runner-up. He's a good man, a good husband and father, and I emphasize this extravagantly for the sake of the kids. "Look at your father out there," I say when he throws a thumbs-up as he whizzes by on skis. "Your father did that surgery," I say when Ruby comes home from school and narrates the miracle of some girl seeing the board without glasses for the first time in her life. "We'll eat when your father gets home," I say when they're swarming the kitchen, opening and closing the refrigerator door as though, like a fairy-tale cave, the contents will have magically changed in the past three minutes. And in making him central to their existence, and their happiness, perhaps I am doing the same for myself. I can't quite recall, or evoke, that strange and powerful feeling that made me yearn to be with him every moment of every day, that made me think "till death do us part" sounded wonderful instead of simply like a very, very long time.

  "No, but, like, if the house was on fire would you save Mom or Dad?" Alex insists.

  "I would save Max, because he wouldn't even notice that anything was wrong," Ruby says, licking her fingers like a cat.

  Max yawns, and the other two laugh.

  Pick me, a voice inside cries again, and then the three of them look up as one. I see the resemblance: the glossy hair, although Alex's is trimmed short and Max's is too long now; the dark brown eyes, although Ruby's tilt up at the corners like my own do. They make her look flirtatious, along with the habit of ducking her head and looking up through her lashes. That look has led to many misunderstandings, and a number of Kiernan's thunderstorm rages.

  All three of them smile--even Max, a little bit--and the front door slams shut with the whine of stiff hinges. "Didn't anyone notice this poor old dog sitting by the door?" Glen says, and I hear Ginger's toenails on the tile, and then the soft rhythm of her drinking.

  "We never use the front door," Ruby says. "Ginger knows that."

  "She didn't bark," says Alex. "She needs to bark if she wants us to let her in."

  "She never barks, do you, Ging? She doesn't want to put anyone out. She is the perfect puppy, the most perfect puppy ever in the whole wide world." Ruby is using her dog voice, which is not dissimiliar to her baby voice.

  "Dad," says Alex, "which kid is your favorite?"

  They all grin. This is a setup question. Glen has had the same answer since they first asked this question on a family trip to visit their grandparents, when Ruby was eight and the boys were five.

  "Ruby is my favorite on Sundays and Thursdays, Max is my favorite on Mondays and Fridays, and you are my favorite on Tuesdays and Saturdays."

  A silence, with the sound of Ginger panting, then the familiar coda: "And on Wednesdays I can't stand any of you."

  "That is so old," Alex says, but he is still smiling. He is glad he didn't have to choose between us. One tree, two trunks. That is what we are to our children. And that is the way I will make certain it stays.

  It is that dolphin-gray hour just before sunup, and there is the sound of wailing from outside. In the first fuzzy moments of waking, I think it's that tom cat from the house behind us, but there's a powerful emotional undertone to it, and finally I realize that it's someone repeating a word: No, no, no, no, high-pitched and terrible.

  "What the hell?" Glen says.

  I look outside onto the lawn. Kiernan is standing looking up at Ruby's window, his hair askew, his bow tie a tired snarl of satin hanging around his thin neck. He sways, so that it looks as though he is being buffeted by the wind, although it is a still morning. He is crying, so that the consonants flatten and disappear.

  "It's Kiernan," I say, taking my robe from the foot of the bed.

  "I don't care if it's the president of the United States. If that noise doesn't stop, I'm calling the police."

  "Go back to sleep," I say.

  The last I saw of Ruby and her friends was just after 2 A.M., when a big group had come back to our house to have breakfast after the prom was over. Rachel's date had disappeared. The girls had had to convince Rachel not to call him, although it was unclear whether it would be to beg him to come back or to tell him that he was the lowest and should expect never to be acknowledged again.

  I knew better than to ask about this as I stood at the stove, scrambling eggs. Rachel's mascara was a dirty shadow beneath her eyes, and I heard Sarah say "That is so not acceptable" several times in a peremptory tone much like her mother's.

  "The DJ sucked a big one," one of the boys said, too loudly, and I smelled something sweet and yet astringent--maybe bourbon--on his breath.

  "Dude," Kiernan said reproachfully.

  "Sorry."

  Ruby's glossy head was bent over Ginger, who had been given special dispensation to leave her kennel in the middle of the night. Eric was passing bits of corn muffin under the table. "You're not supposed to feed her," said Sarah. They already acted like a long-married couple.

  At eight o'clock, burnished to a fine sheen, flawless, untouched, they had tolerated photographs in the front yard. Sarah wore a white strapless dress, her shoulders a sharp muscular shelf above the band of eyelet. Rachel had on a black satin halter dress too old and too snug for her. Kiernan had brought Ruby a beautiful nosegay, tiny roses of a bright pink that matched the obi belt. He bowed ceremonially as he handed it to her, and when he lifted his head his eyes were yearning, pleading. I've seen his father, Kevin, with that same look. "Dance with me?" he'd said once when we were all younger, at a backyard party by the Donahues' pool. Glen, who doesn't like to dance, had watched the two of us as we jitterbugged barefoot. He's a good dancer, Kevin Donahue, I'll give him that. Ruby says Kiernan is a good dancer, too.

  By the time the stretch SUV had delivered all of them back to the house for breakfast, Sarah's hair had begun to slip out of its upsweep in the back, and she had a faint spot on one side of her dress. Rachel's gown was creased from sitting through the banquet-hall dinner of prime rib and mashed potatoes, and, I suspected, watching her date dance with others while she sat alone.

  Kiernan, too, looked as though the evening had been a disaster. His suit was streaked with dirt in spots, and he sat at one end of the long table in the kitchen, legs spread, arms crossed on his chest, eyes down. "No thank you, Mommy," Ruby had said when I put a plate of eggs in front of her. The edges of her roses had begun their slow, sad deterioration.

  Glen thinks I am overinvolved with our children's inner lives, especially Ruby's. Before Ruby stopped eating during freshman year, he used to complain loudly that his parents never worried, and he was right.
Neither did mine. Our children still find it astonishing that my father died and no one went to a therapist. Instead, my brother, Richard, turned into an adult overnight, standing at the head of an oak casket with his uncles behind him. He also became one of the least emotional people on earth, which I suppose may be something of an advantage for an oncologist. His patients die, and he prevails. Everything, as they say, is a trade-off.

  The wailing rises and falls from outside. "Somebody has to talk sense to that kid," Glen says through clenched teeth. "Some of us have to get up for work." I almost reply, "Both of us do," but decide this is not the moment. Glen throws the covers aside. "You cannot go out there," I hiss. "I'm going to take a shower," he says.

  The grass is cold and wet on my bare feet. I fold my arms over my chest, conscious of the fact that I am wearing only my nightclothes. As I come outside, the noise stops, and the early-morning silence is resonant with nothing in it. A light goes on in our neighbor's kitchen. He is a widower who liked our children better when they were small and went to bed at eight o'clock.

  Kiernan is sitting cross-legged on the grass. His tuxedo jacket is thrown over one of the wooden chairs in the backyard. The knees of his pants are sodden. I pat him on the shoulder. His face is all puckers, the way it was when he was little and he'd skin a knee and his mother would pour peroxide on it. "This will hurt," Deborah always said, as though knowing would make it better, when it only made him cry more. First the promise of hurt, then the hurt itself.

  He sobs into his hands. His emotions are adult, his behavior childish. And then I realize that his emotions aren't really adult at all. They're too unguarded, too undiluted. In the words of Ruby Latham past, they are too authentic. If he were forty, and this woman he loves had left him, he would never sit in her yard and sob. He would say she'd always been a bitch, never been much. Or he would get drunk and try to turn another woman into her in a bar and then in bed. Or he would work too many hours, or play too much golf, or find some other way to swallow whatever he was feeling, preferring a rock in his gullet to his heart on his sleeve, preferring anger to grief, resentment to bereavement. Anything but this, this undisguised despair.

  "Honey, I think it's time for you to go home," I say softly. Kiernan puts his arms around my legs and presses his face against the side of my knee. I can feel him shaking beneath my flattened palm. I remember when I first saw his little moon face, when the Donahues moved in next door to us, when we all lived in smaller houses, little Cape Cods across town. "Hi!" he'd chirped, standing in a break in the scraggly hedge fence between the yards. "My mommy says I can play with you. This is my new house. I have a green room." Even then his eyes had followed Ruby around the yard as she danced in her pink tutu, her eyes half closed, singing to herself, conspicuously ignoring him.

  They had both been ready to enter kindergarten. The twins were toddlers, and Deborah was pregnant and not certain that she was happy about it. Long afternoons we sat on her back deck drinking iced tea and giving the kids Popsicles. Instead of bathing them all, we let the sticky stuff wash off in the shallow end of the pool, let Kiernan and Ruby paddle down to the diving board in their bright-colored tubes. How lonely we would have been without each other!

  And all those years later, this: Kiernan sobbing into the muted florals of my robe, the smell of alcohol coming off him like a disinfectant, a smear on his tuxedo shirt. He had always been an emotional little boy, prodding dead birds with his lip trembling, or stamping into the house, head lowered, if he were teased too much. I had warned Ruby about the strength of his feelings when they were much younger, before they became more than friends. I had warned her that the pendulum of his emotions swung wide. "Oh, Mommy, Kiernan? Like kissing my brothers," she'd said in eighth grade. But then she'd become an injured bird herself, and Kiernan had helped her heal, heal so well that she had flown away.

  "I love her so much," Kiernan says, his words slurred by sorrow, and drunkenness, too, so that it's hard to understand him.

  "You'll feel better after you get some sleep," I say.

  He looks up at me and squints. "You need to talk to her," he cries, loudly. "She'll listen to you. You tell her this is a mistake. A big mistake." He makes the word last forever, and his head drops again. "She's making a big mistake," he says into his hands.

  "Let's get you home, Kiernan," I say.

  "Tell her!" he screams suddenly, and the sound echoes off the house, the ridge, the sky.

  "That's enough," I say sharply. "You need to go home."

  He slumps over, elbows on knees, head down. "I love her so much. You tell her."

  The sun crests over the edge of the pumping station on the hill, turning its bricks from brown to red the way it does to Ruby's hair, and I realize I am afraid to move. Kiernan will finish his senior year in high school, and he will go away to college, and he will become something fine and true: a beloved teacher, perhaps, or the sort of lawyer who represents the indigent. He will have a life in which this one seems merely like the sort of dream that is vivid at the moment of waking and has vanished by the time you've had your coffee. But this day my daughter has cast him out of the closest thing to paradise he has known, our kitchen. To us it seems so ordinary, so little to have, but I have seen in his eyes, and in Rachel's, too, the glitter of yearning, and felt sad that the best we could offer was a kind of borrowing. Kiernan had believed he could turn the borrowing into ownership. And from time to time as he grows older, he will remember Ruby Latham, and how he loved her, and how he lost her. Every other girl will have a Ruby ghost hovering over her without her knowing it.

  When I go into the house, Glen is sitting at the table, eating cereal. I expect him to chide me for the time I've spent standing barefoot on the lawn, for my failure to simply put my foot down, which is an expression handed down from his father to him and well worn in our house. Instead, he looks up briefly and makes a rueful little curve of the corner of his mouth. "Poor guy," he says. There was a Ruby Latham in Glen's life, too, a girl with whom he went to high school named Betsy. We ran into her once when we were first married, and I could feel the push of the past as she and my husband talked in front of his parents' house. It goes without saying that she looked a bit like me. Or I like her.

  The coffeemaker comes on with its customary click, and I put on water for oatmeal. Glen steps outside and in a moment I hear a car door slam. I realize that my husband, always practical, had figured out that Kiernan had no way to get home and had taken him in the car. I hope he won't tell Kiernan that he will get over it. Later, Glen says that they didn't speak at all, except once when Kiernan asked him to pull over. Even as he threw up at the curb of the Sunoco station, Kiernan was still crying.

  Upstairs, Ruby has climbed into our bed the way she did when she was small and there was a storm. "I feel like a terrible person," she whispers, her voice breaking, and I know she does, and I know, too, that there is some part of her that is going to enjoy this, enjoy being so beloved and so mourned. I go into the bathroom and when I emerge she is sound asleep, a long piece of hair twisted around her finger. Down on the lawn, there is some flattened grass where Kiernan sat, and the pale blue tuxedo jacket left behind.

  Ruby's writing program begins the week after school ends. The night before she leaves, Sarah and Rachel crowd into her bed for a sleepover. "Why do they call it a sleepover when they never sleep?" grumbles Glen, who says this at least five or six times a year. In the morning they gather in the kitchen and weep, but it is the pleasurable weeping of girls to whom nothing really bad is happening. Ruby doesn't cry. She's been quiet and sad since the night of the prom. I saw her smile genuinely only once, when at the awards assembly she won the prize for writing, a red Webster's dictionary with her name embossed on the front cover.

  "Kiernan's mom told my mom that it will turn out that this is the best thing that ever happened to him, that he needs a fresh start," Rachel says while Ruby is upstairs getting her bags.

  "God, Rachel, you have the world's biggest mouth," S
arah replies. Outside in the driveway, the three girls hug. "I'll find you a surfer guy in California after I find one for myself," says Rachel, who is spending the summer with her father.

  "You just be careful," Ruby replies.

  "Always," Rachel says, putting Ruby's bags into the back of the car while Sarah and Ruby exchange glances over her bent head.

  "Are you worried about Rachel?" I ask as we drive out of town.

  "I'm always worried about Rachel," Ruby says absently.

  She is mostly silent for the rest of the drive, looking out the window, playing with her hair, bundling it up, taking it down. She is tolerating the classical-music station. She's nervous, I know--not that she will feel out of place but, oddly, that she won't, that she is now the strange and beautiful girl in the vintage housedresses whose story takes up the front third of the literary magazine, and that this summer she will find herself among dozens such, and lose her sense of determined self-invention. It's been several years since she began to develop this assured persona, and in retrospect it seems that I didn't handle it well at the beginning without really understanding that I was handling anything at all. There was a period just before I turned forty when I grew my hair and traded my pants and sweaters for dresses that swirled atop my knees. "You're wearing that?" Ruby had said one night, wrinkling her nose.

  "What's wrong with this?"

  "It would be fine if you were my age," she said.

  Was I ever her age? Sometimes I put her music on in the car and step hard on the gas and I can feel it from somewhere deep in my body, a double yellow line atop the asphalt egging you on and a bass beat throbbing in your midsection, that feeling of being young. But I was never that girl when I truly had the chance. My mother liked everything just so, and neither my brother nor I wanted to rattle her. There are two kinds of tempers, hot and cold. The second is worse. My mother had a cold temper, silent and hard. I was never pierced or inked, never wore strange jewelry or provocative clothes. I went to the prom with a boyfriend who was as much an accessory as a person. Our relationship faltered when I was at college and ran out of stamps for my increasingly infrequent letters. My senior year at a party I met Glen, who was already in med school and was visiting one of his brothers. The two men walked me back to the shabby garden apartment I was sharing with Alice and two other friends, and then they flipped a coin to determine who would call me in the morning. Whenever Glen's family gathers for holidays, his brother Doug will flip a quarter in the air and slam his hand over it. "Too late, Dougie," Glen likes to say. Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.