I'm at the garden center loading mums into the back of the car. Mrs. Feeney likes mums. Every year, right after Labor Day she calls and asks for mums in the planters on either side of her front and back doors. One year I found some beautiful hybrids, coppery petals with a warm brown center. The next year she said, "I want the same old yellow ones." I have gotten the same old yellow ones, and a rose of Sharon bush that I intend to plant by the door to the back porch. It will flower white in summer. Rickie and John are going to plant a weeping cherry on one side of Olivia's house, a forever thank-you to her for taking us in, giving us a temporary home. "You must stop thanking me," Olivia had said to me one day. "Do you have any notion of what a loose end I was at before I met you?" A loose end--that's what we women call it, when we are overwhelmed by the care of small children, the weight of small tasks, a life in which we fall into bed at the end of the day exhausted from being all things to all people.
I linger over the tattered half-price perennials in the back, the boxes of bulbs. Much of the land around the house is in shade, and I'm not certain how much of a garden to plant. Olivia has had the men who tend her lawn cut a path through the brambles up the hill to my house. Ben and Alex have painted Xs on the trees. Soon the terrain will be well worn. Alex hasn't exactly said that he likes the house, or even that he's willing to stay, but he has invited Elizabeth over for dinner twice since he was grounded. I told him that if they were in his room the door must remain open, but they mainly sat on the screened porch, or hiked through the woods, or watched television with me. She is polite and quiet and always jumps up to set the table. She calls him Alexander, his full name. For some reason, I like that about her. I wonder if Ruby ever passed Elizabeth in the halls of the high school, if she and Max were ever in the same class. Maybe someday I will know.
I did ask Alex if he wanted to visit the old house one last time before it was sold. I've given the lawyer power of attorney, so that I won't actually have to sign the papers or face the buyers, with their jubilant new-home smiles.
"I've been there," Alex had replied flatly. "I looked in the windows. It's, like, completely empty." But that evening after dinner, staring out the kitchen door to the yard, he suddenly asked, "Have you been over there?"
"No," I replied, knowing immediately what he meant. "I just can't. I feel like I should, but I can't."
"Nana moved all this stuff?"
I nodded. "It was an incredible thing she did for me. For us. I don't know what I would have done otherwise."
He thought, then said, "Ben's mom, maybe. Or Aunt Alice. Or maybe Sarah's mom."
"I just couldn't do it myself."
He patted my arm awkwardly, looked at me, then away again. "It's cool, Mom. You don't need to. It's just, like, a house. Like, a building, you know? It's just a house." I wonder if he knows he's fooling himself.
I buy a hundred bulbs--white and yellow tulips and blue hyacinths. I'll dig trenches and plant them in patches and hope that the squirrels don't unearth them all. I want some tuberous begonias, but there's nothing here. That's one of the only things I wanted from the other house, cuttings of shrubs and flowers. I suppose I can start from scratch. I buy two oak-leaf hydrangeas. There's a sunny spot to one side of the front porch, and I've had good luck with them in the past.
I'd walked around the property that morning, looking at it with my professional eyes, deciding how much needed to be done right away. Newts were crossing the driveway on their bowed legs, orange semicolons in the patches of sun through the trees. One looked unusually large, but as I bent over it I realized that it was a leaf, turned orange and red too early and whirled down to earth. Soon it will be fall, then winter. It will snow, and no matter what I do it will be Christmas. I'm a little better than I was six months ago, whatever that means. I manage to listen to people talk for a longer time before my mind retreats into a dark cave, manage to go longer without shutting down or seizing up, going blank or crying. The outside woman, the woman who thanks the sales clerk and loads the groceries into the car without taking notice of how few bags there are, is in control more of the time. But Christmas terrifies her--and New Year's, of course. If I were a magician, I would make November turn to January. It is as though December will undo all the small steps I've taken to try to make a life for Alex that is anything like the life he once had.
I have until January 1 to decide whether to buy the house. When the agent used that date I shivered, the shiver that my mother always used to say meant someone walking over your grave. But I won't wait. I love the hidden cottage. The isolation that everyone else finds worrisome enfolds me and makes my aloneness seem natural. Alex is good about staying home, but he and Elizabeth together, their eyes and fingers and conversation reaching toward each other, make me feel conspicuously alone. I am a widow. The first time this thought crossed my mind, it seemed preposterous. I'm still a mother, because Alex went skiing instead of staying home. But I am a widow because Glen went to see who was making all that noise downstairs.
My phone rings. It's Alice's number on the screen. I'll call her back when I'm done loading the car with plants. Alice has a new job. She's the editor of a small imprint, publishing one literary novel a month. She is delighted. I've been talking to her in a desultory way about doing some freelance copyediting. It seems that I should have something more to do than buy Mrs. Feeney's mums and cook for Alex and Elizabeth. I do attend every soccer game. Terrence finds it hard to meet my eye after unloading my drunken son from his SUV Terrence's mother says he raved about my chicken tetrazzini. We lie to each other pleasantly in the bleachers, lie by omission. How are you? Good. The kids? Great! What if I told the truth? How are you? Barely alive. The kids? Well, I only have one left, and I have no idea how he's really doing. When I went for my physical, our doctor asked if I needed anything for anxiety. "I don't take those things anymore," I said.
"That's a good idea unless you need them," he replied.
I shut the back hatch after I load the copper sundial. Rickie has said he will pour a concrete pad to anchor it. He stops by frequently, Rickie does, always with some random offering: a wheelbarrow, a ten-pound ham, a map of the county. Last time he came by, he staked out a square for the sundial and dug a hole for its footing. I'm going to put it near the back of the backyard, where the light breaks through the leaf canopy. When I do, Alex will be sure that I have decided to buy the house, and so will I. I slide into the driver's seat, thinking about whether I should plant some bulbs around the sundial's base, when I simultaneously feel and hear the sudden explosion that means someone has hit the back of my car, hard. I haven't put on my seat belt yet, and my head hits the steering wheel, and the inside of the car goes black with silver sparks. Then it clears just as I feel the impact again. The clerks from the garden center have run to the door and are standing, staring, mouths open. A woman who was looking for deer repellent when I paid for my plants is cowering behind a shelf of garden ornaments. Her face appears from between a stone squirrel and an angel as I feel the impact for a third time. This time I am braced with both arms.
I look in the rearview mirror and through the glare of her windshield I see Deborah behind the wheel. From what I can tell, she has damaged her car more than she has damaged mine. She looks deranged, her front teeth holding her bottom lip as though she will bite right through it. Her hair is very short, almost a version of the buzz cuts the basketball coach demands, so her eyes look dilated, as though she is seeing visions, or is blind. Her mouth is moving. I hope her windows are closed, so the people watching can't hear what she is saying or screaming.
I want so badly to get out of my car, to walk over to hers and say something. But I can't imagine what that would be. I think she would run me down without a thought.
I wonder if she hears voices, snatches of conversation, the commentary that I sometimes hear. That's the difference in how I feel about Kiernan. I never hear his voice, see his shadow in the hallway, think I glimpse his back as he saunters away from the playing fields at
the high school. I suppose that's how I punish him now for what he did: Ruby laughs in my ear, Max makes a comment from the backseat, Glen offers a suggestion from the pillow next to mine. But Kiernan is dead in the garage. He's gone. He's gone forever. Ruby told me I had to take sides. And I have.
I put my head down on the steering wheel and wait, but nothing happens. There's a cloud of smoke in my rearview now, and when it clears there's nothing but the stench of burned rubber and the sound of a car limping down the highway, something damaged in its chassis. I get out, and the young man who runs the garden center cries, "Should I call 911?"
I look at the back of my car. The hatch will need to be replaced. The sundial is split in two.
"No," I say wearily. "Don't do that."
"She hit you on purpose," calls the woman behind the shelf. "I'll tell the police she hit you on purpose."
"Thanks," I say. "It's all right."
I stop at the auto-body shop for an estimate. I tell the mechanic that I left the car parked in the supermarket lot and it was like this when I came out. "Oh, man, people these days," he says.
When I get home, I call Alice and tell her what happened. "Am I crazy?" I say. "I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't throw her to the wolves that way." Or maybe I was worried about what she might say about me. I want people not to look at me anymore, to look right through me the way people used to do. But that wasn't all. I understand why she did what she did. I know how it feels to be mad with grief--to want to blame, to hit, to scream. Maybe in her place I would do exactly what she did. Maybe I would do something worse.
"You're lucky it was just the car," says Alice.
"So you would have called the police?"
Alice is silent for a long time. Finally she speaks in a hushed voice, the same voice she used to use when she lay next to me freshman year while I sobbed with homesickness. She fed me Hershey bars then until the pillowcase was beyond laundering.
"No. I would have done just what you did." I know she's thinking of Liam.
"She's got nothing. Nothing," I say and my voice breaks.
"And you have Alex."
Glen hadn't wanted to let him go skiing. "We don't even really know these people," he'd said. "We don't know what kind of parents they are."
"They sound nice," I said.
He shook his head. I remember, he shook his head.
"And I have Alex," I say.
I empty the back hatch of the plants and cart the sundial down to the barn. It will become one of those artifacts I encounter from time to time, that I will never use but will probably never throw away. A spider has built a web in one corner of the doorway, and I walk right into it; it closes over my face like a mask, a shroud, and I claw at it, shivering, until my fingers are clotted with lumps of sticky silk. One of them has a small insect inside, still struggling, and I recoil and throw it to the ground.
And then, unthinking, I run back to the house. I pick up the phone, and from somewhere, somewhere where I sense half-remembered birth dates and addresses--467 Wallingford, I suddenly recall, that was the house where I grew up--I retrieve a phone number that I haven't called in years.
"Hello?" says a flat and lifeless voice, and for just a moment I think I've remembered the number wrong. "Hello?" and now I recognize it, and I breathe in, feeling some web still stuck to my bottom lip, and say, "Deborah? Don't ever come near me again." And then I hang up.
You can't plan them, although I suppose those people who meditate and practice yoga think you can, but there are those moments when we experience physical happiness despite ourselves, before our minds remind us of the reasons we shouldn't. A slight breeze, a warming sun, a little bird music: Your senses say something before your good sense says something different. If only we could be creatures of the body more often.
I am at a soccer game. Alex has just scored a goal, and after being pummeled joyously by his teammates he has taken the time to throw up a hand in my direction. Just like televised football: Hi, Mom. I jump up and down. I smile. I feel what I feel, and shove my thoughts to the back, behind the feelings. I will allow myself this moment.
Some days Alex is all right; some days he's not. Some dinners are full of conversation, others silent. A photographer from the local paper takes his picture from the sidelines. It's a warm October afternoon, more summer than fall, and Alex's face is slick with perspiration. He holds the ball. If the photographer is any good, it will be a great picture.
I'm wearing a loose dress and a long cardigan. ("You're wearing that?" Ruby asks. "Shut up," says Max.) My hair needs cutting. That's how I will fill Thursday. I will get a haircut.
"That was some goal," says a voice behind me. It's Nancy. She kisses me lightly on the cheek. This is how it will be. When Alice and I had a falling-out, she would always end it with what she called a powwow. She would attack, I would parry, I would cry, she would cry, each of us would admit fault even if we didn't believe it, we would wrap our arms around each other. Things would be as before. Nancy won't do this. She will talk to me in public, then call, then invite me to dinner. We'll become friends again, in some fashion. There will always be Sarah to bring us together. But there will always be a wire fence between us, crisscross shadows across everything we say and do.
Fred is with her, home from college for the weekend, and he hugs me. From inside his jacket he pulls out a letter. It's from Jose, who has spent the summer picking tomatoes in New Jersey and wants him to let me know that he has been praying for me and for Alex, and that his elder daughter made the honor roll.
"That's so nice," I say quietly, reaching out a hand. "Can I read it?"
"It's in Spanish," Fred says.
"So you finally told them you speak Spanish?"
"I think they always knew. Maybe they read my face when they said certain things, you know, and could figure out that I knew what was going on."
"What does he say?" I ask.
Fred turns the letter over. "He says his wife is getting a job in Pennsylvania. They're leaving the girls with their grandmother, in Mexico."
"That's sad."
"I think a lot of them do that. The price they pay and all that. He says the little girl had--I don't know this word, she had something taken away from her? Her throat maybe? That can't be right."
"Tonsils. She had her tonsils out."
"Maybe," Fred says. "I don't know this word."
Elizabeth and Allison wander over with the slightly shy demeanor girls have when they approach the mothers of boys, especially boys they like. Ruby never had it, but then she had known Kiernan's mother almost her whole life. And very little made Ruby tentative. "He scored a goal!" I say. "Oh, darn it," Elizabeth says. I like her old-fashioned expressions. She says "golly," too. "We had a Free Tibet meeting," Allison says. "Oh," I say, and then I add, "Ruby was in Free Tibet." Elizabeth watches Alex. He's too busy running downfield to notice her. "Tell him it was a great play," I say. "He'll never know you didn't really see it." She looks shocked. She's probably still young enough to believe honesty is the best policy. Perhaps she thinks my suggestion is dubious. It seems that everyone in the sophomore class is now dubious about everything.
The girls melt away. Nancy is talking to the mother of her youngest son's best friend. A good-looking young man in sunglasses and a blue shirt approaches me. He grins. "I thought I'd run into you here," he says companionably He looks out at the game, and then I realize that it's Dr. Vagelos.
"Do you usually attend your patient's sporting events?" I ask.
"Only if they're really good," he says.
The other team gets possession, scores a goal. Alex kicks a divot of grass, and the coach says something to him. He looks over at me, and his face brightens, and he nods enthusiastically. "Cool," I can almost hear him say, and then I realize that he's looking at the man beside me.
"Did he invite you?" I ask.
"Would I be here otherwise?"
We watch in silence for several minutes, until he looks at his watch. Nancy star
es, looks away when I look back at her. I wonder if she knows who he is.
"I have to go," he says. "I'll tell him how good he looked when I see him tomorrow. We have a session tomorrow at six-thirty. Could you come?"
"Me?"
He nods. The glasses are very dark, a kind of disguise, and I can't see his eyes. "Alex and I agreed that it might be good for us to have a session together, all three of us. I think there are some things he needs to talk about that he wants to talk about with you there." He looks at me and moves closer. "I know it's unexpected. Maybe even unwelcome, I don't know. But I really think it will be helpful. It doesn't have to be tomorrow if you're busy then. We could wait a week or two."
"I'm not busy. I'm never busy."
"That's great," he says, and shakes my hand, then waves at Alex, who waves back.
"I'll see you tonight at six-thirty," I say to Alex when he leaves for school in the morning, and he nods.
The office looks the same. The photograph of Dr. Vagelos and his brother is in the same place on the bookshelves. I arrive first. The two chairs that faced the desk are now facing each other. I take one.
"He's a great soccer player, isn't he?" the doctor says, and almost immediately there's a buzzing sound, and I realize that's how he knows when someone is in the waiting room. He opens the door for Alex. My son smells as though he hasn't showered after practice. Probably there isn't enough time, and Dr. Vagelos has sat here week after week mired in the ripe smell of teenage boy.
"I was just saying you're a great soccer player," he repeats, and Alex reddens. "I had an okay day yesterday," he says. The newspaper will make him player of the week again soon. My heart thumps when I think of Max bringing that clipping here. I try to feel him in the room, then try to put him away so that I can concentrate on Alex. Already I'm losing ground. The doctor is saying that Alex has some things he wants to tell me, and in my reverie I have missed half of what he's said. I love you, I love you, I think to myself, to force myself to pay attention.
Every Last One Page 24
