Authors: Anna Quindlen
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 stares, 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.
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 next 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.”