Every Last One (32 page)

All the casserole and all the brownies are eaten, even though the two girls have eaten very little of either. They help me carry the plastic plates into the kitchen. I’ve never done a big load of dishes here before, and I let them help me load the dishwasher because this is the first time I’ve used it and I’m not yet accustomed to some specific way of doing it. “Are you a sophomore, too, Allison?”
I ask in my friendly-mother voice, which sounds slightly false from disuse.

“I am, Mrs. Latham,” she says. “And I don’t know if you remember, but I was at your house last Halloween. Your other house. You know. The old house.” Her voice is wavering, and I inject, “Tell me your costume. Then I’ll remember. There were so many of you guys there.”

“Annie Oakley?” she says, and suddenly I do remember her, her hair in braids, chaps hugging her legs, a huge cowboy hat.

“You were adorable,” I say. But I can’t bring myself to promise that there will be a party again this year. “Trick or treat,” I hear Max say, and I turn back to the sink.

The boys are talking in the yard, and when we’re done in the kitchen they scramble to their feet and come inside. For some reason, they take up more room than the size of their bodies would suggest. The girls don’t displace much space; I’ve noticed this before. But with the guys inside the room is suddenly crowded, and I notice how small it is. Alex is as tall as the older ones, although his shoulders and his waist are not as broad.

“You ready?” Alex says to Elizabeth.

“Where are you going?”

“To Tony’s for ice cream.”

“Ice cream?” I say. “Didn’t you all have enough to eat?”

“There’s never enough to eat,” growls one of the boys, who the others call Moose. He’s the son of the orthodontist who put in Max’s palate expander. We were waiting until this year to see if it would resolve his crowding problem and make braces unnecessary.

“Plus we’ll get to see everybody, hang out, whatever. Come on.”

Suddenly Alex has moved up into a different teenage gene pool, the one in cars. I wish Glen were here to tell me what to do.

“Who’s driving?” I ask.

“God, Mom. Come on.”

“Dude, it’s cool,” says Terrence, who is one of the captains of the team. “It’s me, Mrs. Latham. And I’m eighteen, so I’ve already been driving for two years. No tickets, no accidents. Swear.” And suddenly they’re all in the car, and I’m waving, and in an instant there is nothing but the dishwasher’s hum and the spotty thump of night insects hitting the screens and the silence that presses on me like a low ceiling. I try to hold on to the moment, the feeling, the noise and life in the house, but it is gone, at least for now.

I go back into the kitchen and there is an inch of water on the old linoleum. “Oh, goddamnit!” I yell, scrabbling under the sink for the water valve. Mop, bucket, towels. In the morning, I have to call the plumber.

By eleven, I’ve cleaned up the mess and done all the dishes by hand. The casserole dish soaks in the sink. I throw Alex’s duffel bag down to the basement; I know from past years that there will be nothing in it except clothes so filthy with mud and sweat that some of the shorts and nearly all of the socks will simply have to be pitched. I could start the wash now, but the basement is damp and dimly lit, and there are centipedes that undulate up the stone walls. Suddenly I realize I am exhausted and drained, that my body hurts as though I have been planting, exercising, running. I sit on the porch for a while, looking out at nothing. It is a moonless night, and the tree line has merged into the black night sky. I go inside and turn on the television, pick up a book, pretend to be doing something when what I am doing is listening for the sound of a car on the road, tires grabbing at the loose gravel. Midnight is Alex’s curfew. I am sure he will ask to have it extended this year, but I won’t agree. Ruby had midnight for the first two years of high school, then 12:30, then finally 1
A.M.
senior year. The only exceptions were special occasions: birthday parties, prom. New
Year’s Eve, of course. Ruby was allowed to come in late on New Year’s Eve. Another mistake.

By one o’clock, I’ve started to do the laundry because I can’t sit still and when I read I have no idea what I have just read. It sounds as though the weather is changing; there’s the sharp intermittent whistling of a storm wind through the trees. I’ve called Alex’s cell phone twice, but when I empty his duffel onto the concrete floor of the basement I find it amid a welter of T-shirts, its battery dead. I wonder if I should call Elizabeth’s parents, but her last name is Jackson and I know there are at least three or four families in town by that name, and I don’t know which is hers. I think of calling Olivia to get Terrence’s phone number from the team list, then remember that Olivia is in London, on vacation with Ted and the boys. I could call her cell phone—it is morning in England, blessed safe morning—but I don’t think she travels with the team list. I check with information and get a number for the sole Holzberg family in the area, which must be Allison’s, but then I can’t make myself call. I remember how this would occasionally happen, how the mother of one of Ruby’s friends would phone and wake us, stammering apologies. No, I would say, Ruby was home, in bed, had been for some time. I wonder if Deborah had ever wanted to call looking for Kiernan, whether she had started to dial the old familiar number and then hung up.

At quarter to two I’m in the basement, putting the first load in the dryer, imagining Alex as the car hits a tree, as the ambulance sirens sound, when I hear a noise from above and Ginger barks. I take the stairs quickly, stumbling on the top one, and go to the door. The SUV is idling, and Alex slides from the backseat, calling something to the guys inside. I stand in the doorway with my arms crossed over my chest. With the overhead light just above me, I must look like an avenging angel.

“Where the hell have you been?” I ask.

Alex goes right into the kitchen, and I hear the water running. When he comes back into the living room, his eyes are half shadowed by his hair, but I can see that they’re red. I step closer and smell beer.

“What the hell are you thinking?” I shout.

“Nobody can even find this place,” he says, blinking and slurring. “Like, even at the gas station they didn’t know how to get here. They never even heard of it. None of the guys ever even heard of it. Hidden Valley Road? What the hell? I bet the cops never even heard of it.”

“It’s Hidden Cottage Road, Alex. Hidden Cottage.”

“Oh, great. I don’t even know the name of my own street. That’s great. I don’t even know where I live.”

“You’re grounded,” I say.

“I don’t even know where my house is.” He looks around and does a little two-step because swiveling his head has left him off balance. “Is this my house? I don’t know. Where the hell am I?”

“Go to bed, Alex,” I say. “We can talk in the morning, when you’re sober.”

“Where’s my bed? Huh? Where’s my bed?”

“Go upstairs.”

He goes upstairs and shuts the door, and I hear a heavy thump and know he will be asleep atop the new comforter, the new sheets, with his clothes and his shoes on. I’m twitchy with the adrenaline buzz I’ve always gotten after a fight with my children. One night, after a midnight dispute with Ruby over the smell of pot in her hair, I rearranged the kitchen cabinets. Glen had come down after an hour, watched what I was doing, then gone back to bed. He could yell at the kids and be asleep again in a minute. That was what I had thought would happen on New Year’s Eve.

I wish Glen were here. I want to take a pill to sleep, but now I can’t, never can again. How can I allow myself to be insensible on
nights like this one, insensible to what happens elsewhere? I’ve already done too much of that. When I packed up our things in the guesthouse, I crawled beneath the bed in which Alex slept to remove the baby monitor, but it was already gone. For months I’d been sleeping with the receiver, thinking I was hearing the sound of peaceful sleep, when I’d been hearing nothing at all.

I lie in bed. There’s no light from outside on the ceiling. Once, I start to doze and am awakened by the throaty bark of some animal outside. Ginger is sleeping in Alex’s room; I picture her opening her eyes, raising her head, then settling herself again. Later, I wake from a half-sleep to hear retching from the bathroom across the hall. I turn over and look at the digital clock on the floor in a corner of the half-furnished room. It’s just after four, that cursed hour when night has worn itself out but morning is forever away. One of the babies always used to wake then, wanting to be nursed, but I’m not certain which one. I only remember the inexorability of the darkness. I lie still for a few minutes, then sigh and go downstairs to make coffee and nurse it on the porch as the dryer tumbles and the sun struggles to rise again. There is one last load of wash to do, all jeans, and I empty Alex’s pockets, hoping I won’t find a joint or a condom. It’s been a long night.

But, incredibly, all his pockets are empty except for a stray M & M and a key that I don’t recognize. Last of all are the jeans he wore home from camp, and in the back pocket I find his wallet. Without qualm, I open it and look inside. Seven dollars. His school ID card. A picture of Elizabeth holding some sort of certificate, smiling and squinting. Glen’s college yearbook photograph, black-and-white and blurred in the fashion of the time. I’d wondered where that picture had gone. Behind it is a piece of unlined paper, folded into a small square so that when it’s open the folds are furry and thin. It looks as though it may fall apart soon into a handful of tiny rectangles.

Of course I recognize Ruby’s pretty, slightly mannered writing, the enormous curving tails of the
Y
s, the crossing of the
T
s extravagant. She always wrote that way when she copied the final draft of a poem, still young enough to believe that you could change your penmanship and thus change yourself. It is the poem she wrote for Alex for Christmas. I don’t know where Max’s wound up. Maybe it’s in his wallet, too, wherever his wallet might be. Maybe someday I will open a box and find it.

Oh, bear
,
I see you in your wooly coat
Moving swiftly on your big paws
.
I know there is a small voice inside of you
,
Asking for honey
.
But when you try to speak
,
They just hear a growly sound
.
Only you know what you are saying
.

I read it over and over. The sun rises. The porch grows warm. I fold the last of the laundry, read the poem again, refold it, and put Alex’s wallet on the kitchen counter. I want to copy it, but it seems wrong somehow, and that night in bed I realize that I have committed it to memory without even trying.

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
X
s 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?”