Every Last One

by Anna Quindlen

  Alex and I are knee to knee. He looks tired. The skin beneath his eyes looks bruised. He seems to spend hours in his room doing homework.

  "Why don't you just go for it?" Dr. Vagelos says.

  "It's my fault," Alex blurts out. It has the feel of a sentence that has been said many times, rehearsed in front of the mirror, written over and over in longhand: It's my fault it's my fault it's my fault.

  "What do you mean, honey?"

  "What happened. It's my fault. I knew Kiernan was living in the garage. I was out one night and I walked home and I went around to the back of the garage, to--to take a piss, is the truth. And he was back there in the doorway--you know, that doorway that went into the back, that we never used?"

  I nod. He needs a moment to catch his breath. I look at the doctor, but he's expressionless. He must have heard all this before.

  "I was like, Dude, what's up? And he said he'd come over to see Max and bring him some book or something, but I knew it wasn't true because it was a school night, and Ruby was home, I could see her in her room, you know? And I said, wow, it's really late, or something stupid, and he said he was going home, but then when I went in the kitchen I looked out the window and saw him going back in the garage. And I said to Max, 'Dude, is Kiernan hanging out in the garage?' And he was just like, Be cool. So I didn't say anything."

  "So Max knew, too?"

  Alex nods. "And if we had told you, you would have made him leave, and then, you know, I don't know, everything, everything--"

  His hands are up in the air, held up, cupped, the way they are when he's waiting for someone to throw him the basketball. He has lost his breath again.

  "Oh, honey," I say softly. "It probably wouldn't have made any difference. He could have come to our house from wherever he was living. It wasn't your fault. It wasn't anybody's fault."

  "You really think that?"

  I nod. I want him to feel better. I want him to feel nothing.

  "That's bullshit, Mom!" he yells. "It was Kiernan's fault. It was his fault. How could he do that to us? He stayed at our house, he ate dinner with us. We were all so nice to him. How could he do that?"

  "I don't know. I don't know. I can't imagine it."

  "See, that's bad, too. I imagine it so bad, so terrible, like a horror movie. And that's 'cause I wasn't here. I was skiing, and then I was watching some stupid movie with Colin. You know how people say twins know when the other twin is in trouble? I was watching some stupid movie on TV with Colin just at the time. Or, at least, I think it was the time. I tried to work out the time difference, and I'm pretty sure it was the same time."

  "You were away, honey."

  "That makes it worse. I didn't see anything, so maybe I make it worse than it was."

  "I know."

  "But you were there. So at least you do know."

  "I wasn't there, Alex. I was asleep." I turn to Dr. Vagelos, and he meets my eyes full-on with his own, and they are so full of understanding and sorrow that I can't hold them, and I can't look at Alex, either. "I went back to sleep after your father went downstairs. I didn't hear anything."

  "You didn't?" Alex says.

  "I didn't. I didn't see anything. I didn't see any more than you. I didn't know what happened until I was in the hospital. Then they told me. Even then it was almost like it was happening to someone else."

  "Is that why you never cry?"

  "What?"

  "You never cry," Alex says, and his voice is savage. None of my children have ever used that tone with me before. "I've never seen you cry," he says. "Not one time. It looked like you were going to cry at camp, and I didn't know why. But then you didn't." His voice is harsh. It is an accusation.

  "I didn't want to upset you," I say, and when I see his face I know it is exactly the wrong thing to say. He roars at me, "How can you even say that? How can I not be upset? Upset--that's a stupid word. Upset?" He thumps his fist hard on his chest, so hard I wonder if there will be a bruise there. "Do you know what I feel like?"

  "I don't want you to feel like that," I whisper.

  "You can't control how I feel. You can't control how terrible I feel."

  I nod.

  "I understand," I say.

  "How come you don't ever cry? That's what I want to know. You act like nothing happened. We'll get a new house and new furniture and then we'll act like everything's fine. Do you think about them at all? Do you even miss them? You never even say their names."

  I must look like a mad person, breathing through my mouth, shaking. And suddenly I break and start to wail, my head down on my knees. I feel Alex pull back, pull his legs back, recoil. I'm gasping for air, and I raise my head and then put it back again, afraid I'm going to faint. I can't stop and I cry for a long time, perhaps long enough to cover all the times when I refused to let him see it, when I got into the car and drove or shut the door to my room so I could cry and not have Alex see me do it. After a few minutes, I put out a mute hand and feel a tissue pressed into it. Finally I shudder, and blow my nose, and raise my head.

  "Alex, does that feel like what you wanted?" Dr. Vagelos says softly.

  Both of us look at Alex. He is horrified. Tears are silently running down his face. He pushes them away with the flat of his hand.

  "I think what's happened," Dr. Vagelos says, "is that you've been trying to be strong for Alex's sake. And Alex has been trying to be strong for your sake. And, because of that, both of you have underestimated how powerfully you've been grieving. And you haven't grieved together."

  "We haven't talked about any of this," I say. "I thought I would wait for the right time and place. But there wasn't really a right time and place."

  "And a lot of this is what Alex needs to talk about."

  "I talk to Max," Alex says suddenly, as though this is another sentence he's been rehearsing. "I put the covers over my head so you won't hear me, and I talk to him at night."

  "Oh, honey," I say, starting to cry again, trying to stop by holding my hand tightly over my mouth. "I do it, too. I talk to them all the time."

  "I mean, I don't talk about anything big. I go, like, 'Dude, that girl you liked? She really got cute over the summer.' Or, like, 'Man, you should have seen how I schooled this kid in my math class who thinks he's, like, a math genius.' Or, like sometimes, 'Dude, I am in so much trouble with Mom; I was way out of line the other night'".

  "Just ordinary stuff."

  "Just ordinary stuff. Sometimes, I'm like, Wow, this is nuts, I'm totally nuts. But I told Elizabeth, and she said she thought it was completely normal and it's what she'd do."

  "It's completely normal," I say. "Really, I do it all the time."

  "You do?"

  I nod.

  "Does Max talk back?" Alex says.

  "They all do," I say. "They all talk to me."

  "That's so cool," Alex says sadly, and I wonder if it's because Max doesn't talk back to him, or Ruby doesn't, or his father.

  The doctor smiles slightly. "Alex, I told you I'd like to have some time alone with your mom. Do you want to wait outside? And should we do this again?"

  I nod. Alex nods. He rubs at his face. "Can I walk over to Elizabeth's?" he asks me, and he writes the address on my forearm, and his fingers feel strong and warm, and without thinking about it I take his hand in mine, press a kiss into the palm, and wrap his fingers around it. I want to tell him he has saved my life, that he has given me a reason to survive, but I know that's too much for a boy to carry. So, instead, I say, "I love you from the bottom of my heart."

  He leans over and kisses the top of my head. "I love you, too," he says.

  When he leaves, I cry for a few more minutes. I can feel Dr. Vagelos waiting. This must be what he does a lot--just waits.

  "I was wrong about everything," I finally say. "He thought I didn't care."

  "No, I don't think that's true. He knows how much you love him, and how much you loved his father, and his brother and sister. But he needed permission to take his feelings to the n
ext level. He needs to be able to feel rage and grief. Your mother told him he had to be strong and take care of you. His grandfather told him that he was the man of the house. That was a heavy weight. He doesn't sleep because he worries that someone will break into the house and he needs to make sure nothing happens to you."

  "Oh, my God. My father-in-law keeps insisting I should get a security system."

  "I don't think a security system is going to help with that. We're working through it, through his fear and his tendency to blame himself. But he needs to be able to have more open, emotional expressions of grief. And he needs to share them with you, and have you share yours with him. Not all of them, of course, but some."

  "He's never been a particularly emotional kid."

  "And have you been comfortable with that?"

  "I thought I was. It made things easier."

  "Easier for who?"

  I shake my head. I am a stranger to myself. "Do you have children?" I ask.

  "Explain to me why that's important."

  "Sometimes we--sometimes you--there are children who need more. Or not more, but different. I'm sorry, I'm not being articulate."

  "There are children to whom parents give more."

  "I wouldn't put it like that."

  He smiles. Once again, there is something at once sad and sympathetic about his face, or maybe I'm just imagining that. "Let me rephrase," he says. "Sometimes children can get more attention because they seem to be in more need of attention. And then there are children who seem so self-possessed and competent that they seem to need less."

  I nod. "Are you speaking from personal experience?" And then I remember his brother, and I shake my head. "I'm so sorry. I meant in terms of your own kids."

  "It's fine. The whole point of this is that you can say things here that you might not say anywhere else."

  "My children used to talk about which was the favorite."

  "What did they conclude?"

  "That it was my daughter. Ruby. That it was Ruby."

  "Were they right?"

  "What difference does it make?"

  "I don't know. You brought it up."

  "I thought Alex was doing all right."

  "Alex is doing all right, considering. But you couldn't really believe he wouldn't have significant issues, given what's happened."

  "No. I just wanted to believe it. I wanted someone to come out of this alive. I wanted someone to come out unscathed. I guess that was magical thinking. He couldn't be unscathed. Some days he seems angry. Some days he scarcely speaks. He came in drunk one night."

  "All that sounds like fifteen to me."

  "Do you think he's depressed? Do you think he'll start to take drugs, and drink all the time, and act out? God, I hate that term. Ruby's shrink used to use it all the time. I'm sorry--do you hate the term 'shrink'?"

  He smiles, and I think he seems too young to have children of his own. I wonder if he takes care of his brother, if his parents are older, perhaps even if they're dead. We sit with people, and we tell them things, and we make up their lives in our heads, and we really know nothing about them.

  "I'm agnostic about the term 'shrink.' I think 'acting out' is a catchphrase that doesn't mean much, and I don't know what will happen to Alex in a year, or two, or twenty. And neither do you. But I know, and you know, that this will be with him forever."

  "I know," I say. "That's all I know. I wish I knew what would happen next."

  "Do we ever know that?"

  I look up suddenly. "No. But I thought I did. That's what I was most wrong about. I used to worry about them all the time--in utero, when they were babies, toddlers. Light sockets, swimming pools, bee stings. I worried about everything. But you know what I know now? I didn't really believe in the worry. It was a hobby, or a mind game, like a crossword puzzle. I never thought anything really bad would happen. It was all the good things that seemed real to me--where they'd go to college and where they'd live and what my grandchildren would call me."

  "What did you decide?"

  "About what?"

  "What your grandchildren would call you?"

  "Why?"

  "Because it's still important."

  I close my eyes and think, I don't care, I don't care--Granny Nana, Grandmom. I picture trying to hug a squirmy little boy imagine having him pull away, saying, "Stop, Grandmom." And at the thought I feel a stab of something inside--something like life, like what I had felt when I was pregnant. I always felt so empty in those first few sleepless months afterward, my hands pressed to my slack belly, as though having something alive beneath my skin was my natural state.

  "You know what I think?" I cry. "I think every fear you ever have, every one--thunder or spiders or roller coasters--they're all fear of dying. Every last one."

  Dr. Vagelos turns to his desk, takes a card, gives it to me. I look at the woman's name on the front. "She's good," he says. "She does a lot of grief counseling. That might be the next step for you. You said you wanted someone to come out of this alive. It's not going to be enough if it's only Alex."

  I put the card in my pocket and shake my head. "I don't know if I can live like this. Do you think it's possible, to live like this?"

  "I've never had a patient in your situation before, so I suppose the honest answer is that I don't know."

  "But what's your opinion?"

  "I think you have no choice. You have a son. You love him deeply. He needs a life. Not only that, he needs a good life, a full life."

  "How is that even possible?"

  "What's the alternative?"

  "What about me?" I ask.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I don't even know."

  "That's a start," he says.

  It's Saturday. Alex and Elizabeth are in the kitchen making oatmeal cookies. Allison was here, but she had to go home to see her sister, who is returning from college for the Thanksgiving break. Alex is due at soccer practice in three hours. I will drive him, and drop Elizabeth at her house. She lives in one of those narrow clapboard houses in town, with a square of yard in front and another behind. The first time I went there to pick Alex up, the night when the two of us first met with Dr. Vagelos, her mother opened the door wide, and I saw at once that she was one of the nurses who had cared for me in the hospital. "I've heard so much about you," she said.

  She and Elizabeth are coming here for Thanksgiving. They have no one else. Elizabeth's father lives in Phoenix. She has no brothers and sisters. I think they'll like having Thanksgiving at our house. Glen's father and his brothers and their families are coming. They will all stay in Olivia's guesthouse, sleeping bags on every floor. Alice and Liam are coming, too, with Nate, and my mother and Stan. They will stay here, upstairs. There will be twenty people. Rickie and John brought over some sawhorses. There will be ten at the dining-room table and ten on an old door set atop the sawhorses, a tablecloth masking the makeshift. It will be tight, but we'll do it. Sometimes Alex and I are distracted by the prospect and planning for all the guests, and sometimes we're distracted by the soccer playoffs, and sometimes we're not distracted at all. Sometimes we both make an effort to talk about things we don't want to discuss--about Kiernan, about what happened in the house on New Year's Eve, about how much Alex misses his father, his sister, his brother, and how much I miss them, too. Yesterday we hiked through the woods, and we talked about Max and how he was last year.

  "I should have been, like, so much cooler about the whole thing he was going through," Alex said sadly. "I was really harsh. I should have been nicer, talked to him more about how down he was, you know?"

  "It was hard, the way your brother was last year," I said. "Your dad had a really hard time dealing with it, too."

  "I think he would have gotten better."

  "Your dad or Max?"

  "Both, right? Don't you think Dr. Vagelos would have gotten Max better? Max told me the doc was really cool. That's why I went to see him. At first I just wanted to tell him that, and then I wanted to make
sure that Max was really getting better. But then I decided to talk to him myself. I just didn't think it would take so long--you know, like, I'd have to talk to him so many times. Like, maybe years."

  "Do you feel better after Dr. Vagelos?" Bless that man--if there's one thing he taught me, it is to ask questions.

  "A lot of times I do. Or, at least, I feel like I get things. Like I didn't understand things before and now I do."

  "That's how he made me feel."

  "You always did, though. We were always, like, isn't it scary how Mom gets what we're thinking while we're thinking it? Or before we're thinking it?"

  "I just pretended," I said. "No, that's a lie. A lot of times I did know. I worked really hard at it."

  "I know," Alex said then, and I cried a little, and wiped my eyes, and made a face.

  "Every time I cry now, I think you think I'm doing it because of what you said," I told him.

  "I do sometimes, but that's cool."

  I put another log on the fire. In the kitchen I hear Elizabeth say "We need three eggs." I hear her murmur something else more softly, then hear Alex laugh. The fireplace in the living room is a marvel. It warms the entire first floor of the house so thoroughly that sometimes we have to crack the windows. Then it even heats a small area of the porch. I pull up my old rocking chair and swaddle myself in the throw from the couch and listen as the wood pops. The cat sits on my lap and kneads the throw.

  The cat came out of the woods right after the Halloween party was through, when everyone had driven down the drive and we were cleaning cake off the floors. Alex had insisted that we have the party, even if it was a much smaller, more modest version. "In memory of Max," he said. Alex and Elizabeth were picking up pinata candy in the backyard when they saw the cat approach like a tardy guest, his yellow eyes narrowed and skeptical. They decided to call him Jack-o'-Lantern, Jack for short. We're all afraid someone will come and claim him, but so far he is ours. He hisses at Ginger when she comes too close, but when she's sleeping he settles himself nearby, his paws tucked under him so that he is foursquare, a black-and-white brick of fur and sinew.