Every Last One

by Anna Quindlen

  "How do you know they don't already know? How do you know Ruby didn't know back then? And what about Kiernan? Maybe he knew, too. How do you know Deborah didn't tell Kiernan, and Kiernan didn't tell Ruby?"

  Nancy doesn't really know, and neither did Deborah. At least that's what I tell myself. I don't know for sure. All I know is that one evening I was finishing up the foundation plantings at a house where Kevin was building a stone wall. After the coffee shop he owned had foundered under the weight of Declan's death, he opened a framing shop, then closed it and went into patio construction in a small way. "He's always got some surefire project," Glen had said harshly. Kevin and I had both been working in a cul de sac of new construction, chatting during lunch breaks, talking about the work as we stood side by side, and when the sun fell that evening, a bloody disk beneath a striation of gray clouds, Kevin came into the bare garage where both of us left our tools, its walls still smelling of fresh wood.

  I can still evoke the feeling after all this time. He leaned in to kiss me and pulled me into the whole length of him, and there was that burst of sensation that you forget until it is improbably and unexpectedly resurrected--nothing more or less than heat and need and drive. It only lasts for a minute or two, and then is swiftly replaced by the awkward and embarrassing logistics: buttons, bare floors. I remember a Sheetrock nail beneath one thigh that branded me with a livid red circle. But that was later. In that instant, at the outset, there is only ever one sensation: yes. Yes. Yes. Now.

  There were three times that week--two in the garage, one upstairs. Maybe my marriage had grown stale. Maybe I had begun to notice gray hair amid the brown. Maybe Ruby's flowering made me conscious of my own fading. Maybe I was living out every cliche about women that I had ever heard or read. But at the time it felt as though none of it had anything to do with my husband, my family, my everyday self. For a moment I felt sharply, strongly undeniably something that I had long missed, and then when it was done I felt only chagrin and disgust. All I know is that when Kevin called me at home and wanted to meet somewhere more romantic, as he put it, I never allowed myself to be alone with him again. For a month or two he called and called, just as his son would later do with my daughter, and I left his messages unanswered. At a party he tried to corner me in a guest bedroom, and I pushed past him with an embarrassed laugh. And it would not be deceptive or delusionary to say that within a year I had learned not to think of what happened, to unmake its place in my life.

  "She was my best friend!" I imagined Deborah shrieking as she threw him out. But that's just my imagination. Kevin was so unfaithful and unwise that the last straw could well have been someone else--that girl who worked at the quarry where he bought stone, the teacher at the middle school who cut a broad swath through the fathers before she moved on. But it's possible that he had told her about me. That foolish man, with his bright blue eyes and his seductive grin, might have thought he was doing it out of expiation, but if he did it it was because he knew it was the perfect form of torture.

  Deborah crossed Main Street the next time she saw me, so I knew something was wrong. Then she simply faded from my life. But she couldn't keep Kiernan away.

  "I don't want the Donahues here anymore," Glen had said one morning from behind the shield of the newspaper, and I said nothing. I told myself it was because of the scene Deborah had caused in their yard when she finally threw Kevin out, not because of anything she had told Glen, not because of the angry red circle burned into the back of my leg. It had left no scar.

  I say quietly now, leaning toward Nancy, "Let me ask you a question, Nance. Are you angry because you think I did what you're accusing me of? Or are you really angry because you think I did it and I didn't tell you about it?"

  I stand and put my napkin back on the table. She had loved me when we shared the same life--husband, children, safety, security, control. She always hated uncertainty. A scientist, after all. I was a universe gone awry.

  "How do you know that Glen wasn't unfaithful?" I ask. "Or Bill, for that matter?"

  She inhales loudly. "Glen? Glen cheated on you?"

  "Not that I know of, but what do I know? What do you? I thought Kiernan was a great kid. I thought Ruby was going to college in September. How do you know, Nance? How do you know what's right in front of you when you're looking the other way?"

  "If you know anything about my husband or my children, maybe you should come right out and say it."

  "I don't, and you are missing the point. The point is that I don't know anything, but that doesn't mean there's nothing to know. The point is that we're all icebergs. Ninety percent is under the surface. Thanks for lunch. Tell the girls I said goodbye, and that I'm sorry I upset them." At the door I am tempted to turn back, to say "fair-weather friend." But I can't manage it.

  I drive without knowing where I'm going, drive while I cry and then stop crying and feel something worse than tears, something finished and dead and done.

  Once Ruby and I were sitting in the yard, watching the monarchs swarm the bee balm. It must have been early September, one of those slow late-summer days when school had just begun yet everything felt tentative--the textbook unopened, the sweaters still packed into their plastic beneath the bed. Ruby loved to tell me things I didn't know, and that afternoon, as we sipped lemonade and scuffed our bare feet through the shaggy grass, she had told me about the butterfly effect, how the beating of their wings in Mexico could cause a breeze in our backyard.

  "That's kind of terrifying," I replied. But even as I spoke I realized that that was what we had all believed from the moment we had children. The breast-fed baby became the confident adult. The toddler who listened to a bedtime story went on to a doctorate. We flapped our wings in our kitchens, and a wind blew through their futures.

  "It is terrifying," Ruby had said, but with gusto. "But it makes you think before you act." That was how she spoke then, as though life could be analyzed and therefore lived not simply well but according to plan. And I remember knowing at that moment that someday, when her first child had colic or her second clung to his thumb and his blanket into preschool, she would turn to me and tell me that she had had no idea what life truly asked of us.

  My ghost daughter talks of butterflies, her legs graceful beneath thrift-store dresses. My ghost son slouches past me, his hair untidy. My ghost husband lies with me at night, so that half of the bed is still made each morning, the pillows still plumped. Did I arrive at this half-life because three times I was unfaithful, which for a mother is not simply betrayal of a man but of a family and a vocation? Did I trade my ordinary, average, perfect life for hasty couplings on a cement floor?

  Did Ruby know it, or sense it, and stop eating to stifle her horror, her fear, her own sexual yearnings? Did she turn to Kiernan for solace, or to somehow make amends? Did Kiernan believe his parents had divorced because of me? Did he turn our own family into a lifeboat despite or because of that? Did he go mad when Ruby deserted him and left him alone in open water? Did he put his hands around her throat and snuff her voice because he'd heard it raised against him? Did he intend to leave the house afterward, Ruby crumpled in one corner of the couch, when he was surprised by Max, coming in from the den where he had dozed off? Did he take the knife from the kitchen block then and stab Max with wild and panicked strokes, then sit and marvel at how far he had gone in so short a time? How long did he wait there, bloodying the kitchen chair where he had sat through so many meals, before Glen came down the stairs and he stabbed him in the back? Was it then that he decided to go upstairs and kill Alex and me, too, to obliterate the happy family that had been the last thing he saw each night as he slept above the garage, close enough to hear the bursts of laughter, see the lamplight, smell the cooking? Or had he planned to do that from the very beginning, to wipe those smiles off all our faces?

  I wonder what he thought when he realized that Alex was not at home. I wonder if he felt a sense of defeat, or frustration or perhaps even relief, as he left his own bloodstained j
eans and T-shirt in the center of the bedroom floor and put on clean clothes from Alex's drawer. And then there was only me. I wonder if he thought he had put the blade through my heart, or if, finally, I was the one he couldn't bear to kill. I even wonder if he meant to leave me alive as retribution. I wonder how much that happened was the drugs he had apparently been taking, how much the drinking no one had acknowledged, how much the erosion of his self from isolation and grief, how much an illness that seemed ominous only in retrospect.

  I wonder how much was me.

  I drive so fast that my tires lift off the road on the curves, then so slowly that the teenager in a car behind me sounds the horn until I pull over. The dead place is still inside me because Nancy has said aloud only what has been a whisper ever since I half woke in the hospital. Now it is screaming, the voice that says my children and my husband are dead because I was not careful enough, attentive enough, good enough, awake enough. Not enough.

  When I pull into the driveway of the guesthouse I'm breathing hard, and I put my head on the steering wheel, and then I look up to make certain Alex is not watching from the window. Sometimes I live so much in my mind that I forget what is right before my eyes.

  Soccer, basketball, now lacrosse. Alex has the perfect schedule for a boy who doesn't want to think too much. He is busy almost every waking hour. I don't see him much, my boy. Or I see him, I am near him, but I don't talk to him. Sometimes when we are in the car I try:

  How was school?

  Fine.

  How was the algebra test?

  Hard.

  How was practice?

  Good.

  The headphones go on, the music plays. We both lapse into a reverie. In the rearview mirror I see a flash of something, and for a moment I think it is Max's hair.

  The headphones come off. "There's a dance Friday," he says. That's what passes for conversation. I am lost without the familiar sibling conversational badminton. Ruby talks to Max. Max talks to Alex. Glen and I listen. This was how it went, night after night, year after year. I remember my mother and me, after Richard left for college, bent over our meat loaf in a thick cloud of silence, broken mainly by the click of forks on Melmac.

  Alex and I have little opportunity to talk. For the last two months of school he has early practice Tuesdays and Thursdays, after-school practice every day until 6:00, Dr. Vagelos Wednesdays from 6:30 until 7:30, four hours of homework each night, a game every Saturday. I pick him up from lacrosse practice, I go to every game, I sit in the next room while he studies. "Mom, chill," he says sometimes, as though he can read my anxious mind. Last week he brought me a form: Eligible sophomores will take driver's ed. I keep forgetting to sign it. I try to drive him everywhere myself. I have never said it or even let the thought take full form in my mind, but I know it is so that if there is an accident we will be together. I try to spend Sundays alone with him, but he sleeps until noon, and he likes to watch TV and to talk on the phone to a girl named Elizabeth. "What's Elizabeth like?" I ask. "She's pretty cool," Alex says. I see her one day as Alex is getting into the car after practice. She is tall and narrow, with long light hair and enormous eyes. Their joined hands make me nervous. "We need to get home," I call more sharply than I mean to from the car window.

  For several weeks I kept him close and away from Ben's house, telling myself that sooner or later he would have to become accustomed to our amputated family. I know Olivia understood. She stops by from time to time during the day, but she never stays long, as though she has an intuition for the limits of my social skills. Last week she came over to the guesthouse when everyone was at school to ask me if I would stay with her sons the weekend she and Ted were going to New York for a business conference. My eyes filled at the idea that she would trust me with their safety. I knew there were those in town who said I had been careless, that I should have set the alarm or gone downstairs or even called the police. I wondered how many parents now came awake at any sound from downstairs.

  "I can't think who else I could ask," Olivia had said. "I mean, four of them. Even I find it overwhelming. I pictured posting it on the board at the university and having all the students burst out laughing at the thought. Or demanding huge sums to do it."

  "I'm demanding huge sums," I had said.

  "I will gladly pay."

  "You've already done so much for us. I swear that we'll have found our own place by summer. It's just grim, what's out there for rent. I probably should buy something." I don't want to buy something for the same reason I don't want to go to any of the dozen therapists whose names have been recommended to me. The point of that is to move on. I don't want to move on. I want to go back.

  "You can stay here as long as you like," she said. "My boys love it. Ted loves it. We all do."

  I'm staying in their guest room Friday and Saturday night while they are in New York. It's one of those smallish rooms in which all the bits and pieces that didn't land elsewhere have come to rest: an old pine dresser, a chair upholstered in poppy-colored linen, a log-cabin quilt. As a result, it is the nicest room in the house. As I'm drifting off to sleep the first night, Luke, who is five now, appears in the doorway, a black silhouette backlit by the hall light. I shiver and then try to smile.

  "I had a bad dream," he says, edging closer and frowning at me.

  "What was it, honey?"

  "There were monsters."

  "Get in," I say, flipping back the quilt and moving over. Olivia says occasionally Luke wets the bed. I hope it won't be tonight. I'm sorry now that I took half a sleeping pill, even though it doesn't do much anymore. What if the monsters return? I have to learn to sleep again without medication. I remember the last time I did. It was in another world, another life.

  Luke turns onto his side and puts his thumb in his mouth, speaking around it. "What?" I say.

  He doesn't remove the thumb, but he says very loudly, "I have a penis."

  I nod, and as I watch, his eyes close, and he is asleep, as though he's the one who is drugged. And then I am asleep too. I wake just before dawn, moonlight still bright through the open curtains. It paints Luke's smooth brow silver.

  Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning. The soft web of sleep begins to clear and then, in an instant, your mind asks and answers a dreadful question. Instead of doing battle with this, I have now decided to yield to it in this last hour of the night, when I am always awake and always newly bereaved. Luke makes it easier, the soft clicking sound as he works his thumb, pinker and more swollen than its partner. First I mourn people who had disappeared long ago: little Max squatting in the tall grass at the back of the yard to watch the crickets, Ruby at five lifting her dress over her head with sheer ebullience. Then I mourn imaginary people: Max the New York comic-book artist, Ruby the professor of poetry at a small college. I invent my own children. Sometimes Max and Alex and Ruby are all together, strung in a line across the street, pulling their sleds toward the hill, the sun so bright on the silver of the snow that it makes a burst of light and I am dazzled and they disappear. Luke is in Glen's place in the bed, and I reach out a hand and touch his hair lightly.

  At six-thirty, his eyes open. "I like pancakes," he says. At seven he asks to call his mother, and at eight I let him do so. "I told Alex's mommy that I have a penis," I hear him say to her.

  "You have my permission to banish him to his own room," Olivia tells me tartly.

  "Are you ready for tonight?" I ask.

  Ted is the director of research and development for a big pharmaceutical company and there is a black-tie dinner tonight. We went to Molly's Closet together to shop for a dress. Molly had watched me pull into the space in front of her window, and her smile was fixed and ready when we entered. I sat on the bench outside the fitting room and tried to think of nothing. But each time I looked I saw Ruby's feet, her baby toe curved, beneath one of the curtains. Olivia had emerged in an ice-blue silk dress--"the goddess look," Molly said--with a jeweled c
lip in her hair. And from behind me I heard clearly a single word, said with the high clear sound of a Christmas bell: "Perfection!" I couldn't turn, afraid both of the possibility that Ruby would be standing there, winding her hair up, her eyes alight with approval, and the possibility that there would be no one there at all, just another empty space. I stared straight ahead, sightless.

  Looking at me, Olivia had said sadly, "No good?" And with an effort I had focused, looked her up and down, and said without thinking, "It's perfection. Perfection."

  "Give my love to, to--your boy," Molly said to me. I was quiet in the car.

  "Sorry," I'd finally said. "I'm distracted. I've got so much to do. My mother is coming in three weeks for the high school graduation, and my father-in-law, and who knows who else. It could turn out to be a houseful. It'll be fine. I certainly shouldn't complain to you, of all people. I'm sure you'd love to see your parents more often." There is a large photograph on the piano in Olivia's living room, two handsome people in sweaters and hats, laughing at the camera.

  "They're both gone, actually," Olivia had replied in an offhand tone that I suspected she'd used for just this subject many times in the past. "They were in a motor crash, a long time ago, when I was at Oxford. That was how I met Ted. He was there doing the Rhodes, and we met at a pub, and I thought, Ah, so you want to whisk me far, far away from here? Yes, please."

  "Oh, my God. I can't believe I'm just hearing about this."

  "Everyone has something, don't you think? It's just that it doesn't come up in the usual way. You don't chat up some nice woman at a drinks party and suddenly say, 'Oh, so your parents are dead. Mine, too.' Bit of a bitch, isn't it?"

  "I don't even need to tell anyone," I said. "Everyone already knows. Did you hear Molly hesitate as we were leaving? As though if she had said children, plural, by mistake I would have fallen apart."