Every Last One (19 page)

Then I hear scuffling, and voices, and something else drops, and Glen opens his eyes. “How many times have I told them?” he hisses. So many times: We don’t care how late you stay up, or whether you have your friends in, as long as you don’t keep us awake.

Another sound, perhaps someone sitting down hard in a chair. “They’ve probably had a lot to drink,” I say. “At least they’re not driving around.” I hear something fall with a dull thump.

Glen stands and pulls on a pair of pants. “I hate it when they make me go down there,” he says.

“I’ll go,” I say, remembering that night I found Rachel soiled and sad on the den couch, but Glen is already starting down the stairs. I lose the sounds of his bare feet in the other noises of the house—the groan and whine of the old radiator below our window, the scratching at the siding from the tree that needs pruning, the window rattling at the end of the hall. There’s more noise from below, louder, and I wonder if it is the sound of adolescent exodus,
if Glen has thrown everyone out, and in the morning our daughter will be resentful, her lips set in the line that indicates we have disappointed her again. She was beautiful that evening in her black lace, her pale skin a half-moon in the boat neck. I am thinking about how she looked as sleep pulls me back under.

When I wake again, I’m not sure why. For a moment I thought someone was cooking in the kitchen, just as I had that other time, except that it was not cookies but something else. I roll onto my back and feel a piercing pain in the hollow between my neck and my skull and try to remember how much I had to drink. The bare trees outside are making shadows in the window-shaped light on the ceiling, twig fingers in black and gray, and I wonder if there’s a storm coming up, and if Ruby’s friends have made it home. I hear Glen coming back up the stairs but slowly, with a heavy tread, and I look toward the door. There is only a faint light in the hall, the one from Ruby’s room, and he stands in the doorway, and I see that it’s not him at all. Too gangly, too slender, too unkempt.

“Maxie?” I whisper softly, afraid that he will be frightened by the sound, that he will assume that I am asleep. And in one motion he moves to the bed and strikes me, hard, in the shoulder, and I cry out and roll onto the floor between the bed and the wall. I whimper, and hear breathing, and a long time seems to pass. Then I hear feet on the stairs again, this time going down, fast.

“Maxie,” I repeat.

I’m facing the wall, and I don’t know if I can move. There’s a burning in my chest and a taste in my mouth like when I used to hide pennies under my tongue when I was little. I think I hear more noise downstairs, but I’m not sure because my heart is so loud in my ears.

I know I’ve lost time, because when next I hear sound, more faintly this time, it’s light outside. I don’t open my eyes, I’m afraid to, but there is the faint gray, the vibrating test signal, that daylight
makes inside your lids when they are closed. I imagine I have had a terrible dream, but the pain is still there, and now my lips seemed to be gummed with something thick and viscous. I open my eyes slightly and see red-brown shadows all around me on the molding and the outlet and the old Oriental rug, and I close my eyes again.

The last time I wake I can hear people in the house, and I wonder if I have imagined the whole night, if Glen was right and a sleeping pill and some glasses of champagne have given me a brief vision of hell, if everyone is downstairs making breakfast and wondering when I will finally get up. “I will never do that again,” I’ll tell Glen when I finally go downstairs. Or maybe I won’t give him the satisfaction. But then I hear footfalls on the stairs, and I lie very still, my face pressed into the edge of the rug.

“Jesus Christ,” someone says, quite close by, “they’re all dead?”

“Every last one,” says a different voice.

I am staring into the sun. I can see its round edges faintly behind a quivering nimbus of light. It drills down into my head, and I remember that when I was young, at the lake in Michigan, one of my friends said that if you looked directly into the sun you would go blind. My mother said that wasn’t true, but then she asked why in the world I would want to look into the sun in the first place.

“Mary Beth!” says a very loud voice I don’t recognize. “Mary Beth, can you hear me?”

I don’t want to take any chances going blind. I close my eyes and go back to sleep.

Once, when Ruby was six or seven, we were driving in the car with all three of the children in the back, sleeping. The boys were slumped in their car seats, and she was in a booster between them, her head down so that her chin was tucked into the hollow of her throat. “They’re all out like a light,” I had said to Glen with a smile.

Afterward, I realized that we were having a humdrum discussion, about whether we should visit some old friends who had invited us to the beach, whether we should put an addition on the house, whether it was too soon for me to go back to work. I searched my memory for whether we had mentioned that the old friends had come close to divorce because of his affair, whether we had discussed how little money we had for the addition, whether we had begun bickering because Glen didn’t want me to go back to work and I wanted to get out of the house so badly. There was none of that. Our voices must have been background music, murmurs in two octaves, one bass, one alto.

But it still came as a surprise when Ruby suddenly leaned forward
between our two seats and yelled, “I’m awake!,” jolting the boys upright momentarily.

“Shhhhhh!”
I had hissed.

“I’m awake,” Ruby whispered gleefully. “I was just pretending to be asleep so I could listen to what you were talking about.”

That is what I am doing right now. At first I kept still, kept my eyes closed, because through a muzzy haze of strange sleep I couldn’t tell where I was. Then I realized by the smells and sounds that I was in a hospital. Occasionally, someone would call my name and I would lie still, listening to the beep of a monitor.

I can’t seem to pierce the shroud of thick insensibility, to move past it, but once I tried very hard to concentrate and heard voices in muted conversation. My mother and Alice, then, a little later, Alice and Nancy. When Alice began to cry, a hiccupping noise not that far removed from how she laughs, a thought crossed my mind, but I put it aside and went under again.

“She’s agitated,” someone had said as the monitor began to quicken its high-pitched backbeat. For a moment I was reminded of something, and for a moment I had it: the time in the other hospital, with the monitor on my belly, when the nurse had said, looking at the machine printout, “You’re having a contraction.” And I wanted to scream “I know I’m having a contraction! I can feel it tearing me apart.” The memory made my heart beat faster, and the beeps got faster, and someone took my wrist, and I went under again.

Now I am awake, trying to keep my mind as still as my body. My eyes are slightly slitted, so that I can see who is in the room but they can’t see me. There was a time when Max believed that if he closed his eyes he was invisible. “I can still see you,” Alex would say looking at him. “No, you can’t,” Max would reply, squeezing his lids tight.

My shoulder hurts, and an IV line is pulling at the soft skin inside
my elbow. There is a chair in the corner, and in it is my mother. She has magazines on her lap, but she’s looking out a small window. The green paint on the wall is somehow reflected on her face, as though she’s sitting on the edge of a lit swimming pool in the evening hours. It makes her look ill. She looks tired and grim, too, but she looks that way most of the time, has looked that way for most of my life. My mother never smiles in photographs. She says she doesn’t like her teeth, which look ordinary to me. At our graduations, our weddings—she is the solemn woman next to the bride, the groom. I used to wonder whether there were smiling pictures taken before her husband died, or before she was married, but I’ve never seen any of those pictures. She begins when we do, except for her wedding portrait. There is a hint of happiness in her eyes there, but no smile.

She looks at me, then narrows her own eyes as though she’s imitating me. She comes to the side of the bed and takes my hand. “It’s time to wake up now, Mary Beth,” she says. For a moment my lids flutter, and then I look up.

“Good,” she says.

I put my other hand to my throat and cough. My shoulder throbs, and I wince. “They had you on a respirator the first day, when they thought it was worse,” she says. “That’s why your throat hurts. It will go away soon.”

“Is she talking?” says a nurse from the doorway, and my mother holds up her hand without turning. “I’ll let you know when to come back,” she says in the voice she once used for failing students. The nurse withdraws.

“Where is Alex?” my mother asks. Her voice is loud, and I wonder if they all think I’ve lost my hearing. My vision is blurred. Maybe I have lost all my senses and just don’t know it.

“Alex?” It is a sandpaper whisper, and my throat burns.

“Mary Beth, you have to focus now. This is very important. Do
you have any idea where Alex is, where he might have gone? Any idea at all? Can you give me any clue?”

I close my eyes and try to think. I have it. I have it. Thinking with this brain is like breathing through a head cold, like looking at things underwater. My thoughts shimmer. My mind squints.

“Colorado,” I whisper.

“Colorado?” She sounds as though I am speaking another language.

“Skiing. Colin from camp. On the fridge.”

And then something extraordinary happens. My mother begins to cry. Her mouth is held so tight that the skin around her lips turns ghost-white, and the muscles of her face move spasmodically. But tears are running down her face and into the lines around her mouth. The last time I had seen her cry was at my wedding, and then I had assumed they were happy tears. These have something of joy about them, too, which I can’t understand.

“Alex is skiing? In Colorado? With someone named Colin from camp?”

I blink my eyes. I think it will hurt to nod. “Yes,” I hiss.

“When is he coming home?”

I close my eyes again. I hear my mother on the phone. She is telling someone to go to the ice box. “The ice box!” she barks. “The refrigerator!” You’re not allowed to use a cell phone in the hospital. There were big signs when I was waiting for Max’s arm to be repaired. I had had to go outside into the parking lot to call Glen. It was so hot on the asphalt that day. My hands were slick and I dropped the phone. When I drove Max home, he said the air-conditioning in the car was too cold. Glen said it was the anesthetic. I made Max a sandwich, but he fell asleep before he could eat it. Glen said it was the anesthetic. I wonder if I had anesthetic. I go under again.

I wake up. A nurse puts a thermometer under my tongue. “My
name is Brittany, Mrs. Latham,” she says softly. I think I have seen her trying on a dress at Molly’s Closet. When she leaves, I see Alice sitting in the chair. She’s asleep, her mouth ajar. She’ll be upset to realize that she drooled on her chin. She has a manuscript in her lap. I think my mother has gone to look for an ice box, but I can’t remember exactly why.

I watch Alice for what feels like a long time. Nancy comes in and puts a hand on Alice’s shoulder and shakes her, roughly, it seems to me. Alice starts up. “I’ll take over now,” Nancy says. Neither of them looks at me. When they finally do Alice cries out, then starts to cry again.

I think I remember something. “Where is Alex?” I say. My voice is a little louder.

“What?” Nancy says, almost shouts.

“Where is Alex?”

“Colorado,” Alice says. “He’s coming home tomorrow. He’ll be here tomorrow.” She’s sobbing. I can scarcely understand her. Nancy leaves and comes back with my mother.

“I think you should both wait outside for a few minutes,” my mother says.

Alice starts to say something, and so do I, and everyone is quiet, and I can hear the monitor, and my thoughts are not quite so fuzzy anymore, and I wish that I could go back to sleep for just a little while. I think I remember something else.

“They’re all dead,” I say, and I sound just like my mother—flat, cold. And then I repeat it and it doesn’t sound like words at all but like a terrible song, like something from an opera. I say it one more time, and then there is a loud sound in the room, but I hear it as though my ears are plugged up. It sounds like the sound I made in the hospital when they were all yelling at me, all yelling, “Push! Now! Harder.” That sound was bad, but then it was over. This time it won’t stop. People are running in the halls.