Every Last One

by Anna Quindlen

  "Oh, my God," she finally cries. "This is just unforgivable. Why am I the one sitting here crying while you comfort me? I'm ashamed of myself." Ginger sniffs at her face, whines slightly. Ginger is distressed by tears. This helps me to stop, sometimes.

  "It's all right, Al."

  "What's all right? That I'm completely useless to you? That I spent the entire evening trying to act as though nothing had happened in the past six months except that an apartment in my building sold for two million dollars? That you're my best friend and I can't even find a way to talk to you?"

  "It goes both ways," I say. I know this is true. How many times in the past three months have I been reminded of Ruby's two selves, the careful courteous young woman who spoke so sweetly to strangers and the person she let loose at home, where she was safe, where she could be spiky and harsh and uncertain and at sea? I have two selves now, too, the one that goes out in the world and says what sound like the right things and nods and listens and even sometimes smiles, and the real woman, who watches her in wonder, who is nothing but a wound, a wound that will not stop throbbing except when it is anesthetized. I know what the world wants: It wants me to heal. But to heal I would have to forget, and if I forget my family truly dies.

  I manage to bury her, that wounded woman. I try to push her down. But last night when I came back from the high school, knowing that Alex was gone until Sunday night, she had taken over the house, her self-possessed twin banished to the closet with my wool coat and scarf. The quiet was like a hand over my mouth and nose, and I felt that I would suffocate. I was afraid I would start to scream, and I went into Alex's room, which faces away from Olivia's house, so that no one would hear me. I sat down on my son's borrowed bed, and realized that it was uncomfortable, that the mattress sagged in the middle, and I filled the room with wailing. For some reason, I found myself repeating aloud the words "No more. No more." It was not so much that I wanted to die; it was just that I could not bear the incessant feeling of being alive. And then it occurred to me that I was already dead, that what was left behind was a carapace, like the shells of cicadas we found a few summers ago. I had been full, of creating children, of taking care, of tasks and plans and a big bright future, and now all that was left was a translucent skin of what had once been my life.

  "Can we talk? Really talk?" Alice says, mopping at her eyes with the side of her sleeve the way she had in college.

  "About what?"

  "About everything. About them. About how you're feeling. About what it's like."

  I sit for a moment and truly think about what she has said instead of pretending I am thinking. I owe Alice more than the Mary Beth I have designed for public consumption, but I can't show her that other, hidden woman. She is too terrible, as though I have been throttled and cut up, too, as though the real me is maimed and torn and murdered. I can't show Alice the body. She is not as tough as she thinks she is. She has a hidden woman, too, a softer, less certain self.

  "I can't really do that yet," I finally say. I think perhaps I will never be able to do it, not in the way Alice means. Why should I share what no one wants to know? Why should I listen to the words of those who know nothing? I can predict what they will say:

  It will get easier.

  Lie.

  You can handle this.

  Lie.

  Time heals.

  Lie. Time just passes. Slowly.

  "I'm afraid for you," Alice says. "I feel like I'm failing you. When we were young, I was so good at this."

  "Don't mope!" I say. "That's what you always said."

  "Hey I got you to go to a lot of parties and bars you didn't want to go to by saying that. I got you to go to that party where you met Glen."

  "I remember," I say. "Remember when you thought you might want to become a therapist?"

  "Wow!" says Alice. "I'd almost forgotten about that."

  "And how you volunteered on that help line, talking to people about their problems?"

  Alice winces. "And after two weeks," I add, "you came back to the room and said, 'I quit. I'm only interested in the problems of people I actually know.'"

  "That's true. But now ..." Alice says, her voice starting to quiver.

  "I know. I know." I hug her, hard. "Did Olivia call you and tell you to come today?"

  "Olivia? No. Alex did. He said you'd be alone for the weekend. I was going to come anyhow, soon, but he told me this weekend would be good because he was going away."

  I sit back. "He keeps surprising me," I say. "First the therapist, then you."

  "I don't think me sitting here crying is what he had in mind," Alice says, blowing her nose. "At least you have him. Oh, God, that's a stupid thing to say, isn't it?"

  "No," I say, "it's the truth." But I don't have him in the way Alice means. When he comes home, he goes into his room and shuts the door. The music comes on, and I am reminded of Max, except that, as always, Alex has reversed things. He is contented out in the world, but when he comes back here--to this little house, to his makeshift home, to the kitchen table with just two chairs--his loss is a terrible, palpable thing. He puts it in a box of a bedroom, holds it prisoner.

  "I really am tired," I say. "Do you mind staying in Alex's room? I changed the sheets." I know that Alice wants to share a room with me, the way we did when we were young, but that would mean she would sleep on Glen's side of the bed. And I can't bear that.

  The next morning, we go to the crafts fair. Alice buys Liam a felt jester's hat with bells. She buys a silk blouse made out of pieces of old kimonos, and earrings for her assistant's birthday. I wander past pieces of pottery, copper wind chimes, tapestry scarves, and stop in front of a booth with framed samplers, a display of axioms: "A Daughter Is a Lifelong Friend." "There's a Special Place in Heaven for the Mothers of Little Boys." "Live Laugh Love." A woman is sitting in a lawn chair, cross-stitching a piece that says "More Today Than Yesterday." "Can I help you?" she asks. "No," I reply.

  "You didn't get anything?" Alice says at the car. I should have bought something, anything, to soothe her.

  When we get home we have bagels with smoked salmon and even capers, which Alice has brought in a little jar, and we walk up to the house so that Alice can see Olivia. "She's great," she says as we walk down the hill again. "She's been a good friend," I say, and when I see Alice's face I say, "Al, you've been wonderful. You've been there from the very beginning."

  "I feel like I haven't done enough."

  "There's not that much anyone can do," I say.

  Ginger follows behind us. "Let's walk in the woods," says Alice. A deer trail leads from the back of the guesthouse deep into the thick pines. Alex says there is a stream farther in, but I have never gone that far. When I walk too far, even with the dog with me, I begin to feel afraid. I'm not afraid of those things people might imagine, of sudden sounds, the appearance of a stranger. It is that with each step I feel that I am walking into another world, the world of Mary Beth without Glen, Mary Beth without Ruby and Max. That's why I couldn't buy anything at the fair, none of the mohair throws or wooden salad bowls or even a string of glass beads. If I acquire anything, it means I am building an afterlife.

  "Let's go back," I say to Alice.

  Nancy has invited me for lunch with the two girls, with Sarah and Rachel. There are daffodils in a vase on the round table in one corner of her kitchen. Sarah has baked a quiche, and Rachel made Waldorf salad. There is a women's-magazine quality to the event: Have a Girls' Lunch with the Girls in Your Life! But sometimes I feel as though everything in my life now is a how-to article: How to raise an only child. How to tell if you're using too much medication. How to get out of bed in the morning.

  "The girls need to talk to you," Nancy had said when she called. That's why I am going, for the girls.

  Basketball season has given way to lacrosse, winter to spring. It has been nearly four months since I was at Nancy's house for the New Year's party. I wonder if Nancy has even thought about how difficult it is for me to be here, t
o walk through a door that is the last place I held Ruby in my arms. She and I haven't seen each other very much since the weeks right after I left the hospital. Nancy had been fierce and focused when ferocity and focus were required. She had bullied the nursing staff and called the school and harassed the police and taken care of Ruby's friends, who poured into her house. They sat on the den floor and watched the recordings of school events and looked at old yearbooks and told one another stories. Sarah taped the stories, and wrote them all down and sent them to me in a big box. I haven't read them yet. I have so many boxes that I don't want to open.

  But Nancy seems unable to soften with the passage of time, to offer solace or simply silence, as Alice does on the phone and Olivia has in her kitchen. She barks questions at me, or instructions: I need to see a grief counselor, to walk through the old house, to demand the police report. "I would want to see the photographs," she has said sternly. "I would want to know." She thinks the facts are important, the precise choreography of that night. Maybe it's because she's a biologist. Maybe it's a scientific approach.

  I know as much as I need to know. My daughter was strangled. My son was stabbed several times. My husband was stabbed twice, in the back and in the neck. The chief of police told me this when he came to see me. "That was a wise decision you made, to have your mother do the identifications," he said, as though I would know exactly what he meant.

  Perhaps it will please Nancy to hear that I've been looking at rental houses. The agent took me to see one, and when I walked outside I was looking into Kiernan's old backyard. There was a slight dip to one side that I knew had once been the pool. The deck was still there, the deck where Deborah and I had spent so many afternoons holding each other upright against the turgid drift of daily mothering, the deck where my husband tried to breathe life back into little Declan after pulling him from the clear blue water. "Not this one," I had called over my shoulder to the agent as I walked through the rental house and back to the car.

  Rachel and Sarah come downstairs as soon as I ring the bell. I hug them both tightly, as though I were trying to absorb them into my body. Both of them are still wearing their friendship bracelets. Rachel is indeed thinner. Sarah looks exhausted and has cut her hair. It's not becoming. Both of their eyes gleam with tears as soon as they see me. "You look good," Rachel says. I look down. I'm wearing a gray sweater and black pants. Both are baggy, and too warm for the weather. I'm cold all the time, and I suspect I've lost a lot of weight. There is no scale in Olivia's guest cottage.

  "I love seeing you guys," I say as Nancy stands in the kitchen, watching.

  "Let's sit," she says.

  I tell them I'm looking for a house to rent, and tell them about some of the terrible places I've seen, trying to make it all sound amusing, and ordinary: the house so close to the road that the high beams of passing cars would scour the living-room wall; the one that smelled like cats; the one that had a sink in the bedroom and no closet; the one that had an indoor pool, so that even the kitchen smelled like chlorine. "I know those people," Sarah said. "Their son was on the swim team when I was a freshman. Even they couldn't stand the smell."

  I send love to Nancy from Alice and from my mother, although I am making this up: I can tell that Alice doesn't like Nancy, not after the days in the hospital, and my mother isn't in the habit of sending love to anyone. I ask about the basketball coach, whose meanness has now become legendary. I coax the girls into discussing those things they won't talk about because they worry that they will make me sad: their college plans, the prom, the summer. All the things that Ruby will never do. The college counselor had called me to tell me she was preparing to contact all the schools and rescind Ruby's applications. I had been asleep when the phone rang, and I had taken some pills, and I shrieked at her, "Don't you dare! Don't you dare!" Now I receive the acceptance letters. "Please send your deposit by May 1 in order to hold your place," they all say. I've put them in the drawer, beneath my nightgowns. Ruby could have gone anywhere.

  Instead, they'll plant a tree in the senior courtyard of the high school, a flowering pear that will have a spring snowfall of tiny white blossoms every April. They'll put a page in the yearbook, although I suspect they had a hard time finding a really good picture of Ruby that had not been taken by Kiernan. On the bottom of the page will be the quote from "Thanatopsis" that Ruby loved and that I will always hear in Glen's voice. The entire poem was on the back of the program for the memorial service, and days later I noticed that the last two words were "pleasant dreams." Sometimes I say that to Alex at night, before he disappears into his room. I don't dream at all because of the medication. I am so glad not to dream.

  Sarah clears the plates. There's carrot cake for dessert. Suddenly we're all very quiet, and I realize that no one else is at home. I hear something fall heavily in the next room, as though there is someone clumsy I can't see, and a sharp sword of panic pierces my side. Then the cat enters the kitchen and I know I've simply heard him leap to the floor from the furniture. My hand goes to the ropy scar in my shoulder where the knife went in.

  Sarah and Rachel look at each other, and then Sarah inhales, hard. "Rachel and I think there are some things we need to tell you," she says.

  "About Kiernan," says Rachel, holding the patterned blue-and-yellow napkin to her mouth.

  "I think I know."

  "No, you don't. Not really," says Rachel. "He was following her everywhere. We were all like, Ruby, it's stalking, what he's doing. We even told her she should go to the police. We told her she needed to go to you and Dr. Latham."

  "He left things in her car," Sarah says. "We would get to the car and there would be flowers or a book of poems. Once she yelled 'Kiernan! Stop!' as loud as she could. But we never saw him."

  "And he would call her a million times a day. She couldn't leave her phone on. She would go to get her messages, and her mailbox would be full. He was totally obsessed. And sometimes, when we did see him, he seemed--I don't know, he seemed pretty off."

  "We knew he couldn't be going to that new school," Sarah says. "He was around too much. But she wouldn't do anything. I think she felt like it was her fault. Like she had made him crazy or something."

  "We told her she should call Kiernan's mother, but she said she couldn't."

  "She said she didn't want you or Dr. Latham to do it, either."

  "We tried to get her to tell you that somebody needed to do something," Rachel says.

  "We told her over and over again to tell you how bad things were getting," Sarah says.

  "Nobody knew he was in the garage," Rachel adds.

  "We would have said something to you if we'd known he was in the garage."

  "Ruby would have freaked if she knew," Rachel says. Suddenly it's quiet again. The cat rubs against my ankles.

  "We just wanted you to know that we tried to tell her," Sarah says. "We really tried."

  "She just wouldn't. You know how Ruby was when she didn't want to do something. We just wish now that we'd said something to you, even if she got mad at us for doing it."

  "So why didn't you two tell me?" I say softly. "The two of you were at the house all the time. Why didn't you just pull me aside and tell me what was going on so I could have done something about it? I wouldn't have told Ruby."

  "We wanted to, we almost did one day, but we didn't know how Ruby would feel about it," Sarah says. "We didn't want to go behind her back. She told us how happy you were that Kiernan was nice to Max. And we were worried about Max, too."

  "But that really wasn't the issue," I say. "The issue was that all this was going on and the grown-ups should have known. Her father and I should have known about it."

  "She said you did know," Sarah says.

  For a moment I am speechless, and then I realize that, as always, Ruby was right. I'd seen the ring, seen the photograph on Christmas Day. I had heard Kiernan scream out his love as he sobbed on our lawn after the prom. I knew about it all, and I had done nothing. I had searched for the line bet
ween my daughter's care and her ability to care for herself, and I had figured it all wrong.

  Rachel bursts into tears. "I hate this!" she wails. "I miss Ruby so much. Everything is ruined. Everything!"

  Sarah puts her arms around Rachel and begins to cry, too. "We knew how much you loved Kiernan," she stammers.

  "But you know I loved Ruby more," I say.

  "We all loved Ruby so so much," Rachel cries. "We're so sorry. It's all our fault."

  "Oh, honey, no. It's not your fault."

  "It is!" Rachel wails.

  "That's enough," Nancy says in a low voice. "Sarah, take her upstairs."

  Rachel whispers, "I want to stay."

  "Right now," Nancy barks, and Sarah gets up and her chair falls over and I jump slightly again. I put my face in my hands.

  "I'm sorry," I say. "I'm not used to talking about this. I'm sorry. I'll go upstairs in a few minutes. I'm so sorry they think they were at fault."

  "You should be." And Nancy's voice is so harsh, so venomous, that I look up. She is in a rage, her face mottled and clenched. The last time I saw her like this was when she was passed over for the promotion at work that she had thought was a certainty.

  "You obviously have something you want to get off your chest," I say.

  "Me? Me? What about you? At what point in this whole conversation are you going to acknowledge Kevin Donahue?"

  I know my face has gone red, but I refuse to drop my eyes from hers.

  "I talked to Deborah," Nancy continues. "She thinks you're responsible for Kiernan's death. She thinks you set in motion the entire chain of events. She thinks you had an affair with her husband and that that's when her family fell apart."

  I listen for any sound from upstairs, but there is none. "Could we continue this conversation someplace where the girls won't overhear it?" I say coolly. I'm stunned and very angry, and the fissure in my shoulder aches with adrenaline and emotion and perhaps some primitive muscle memory, as though Kiernan is once again slicing at me with one of my own carving knives.