"Even with me."
"Especially with you." Her blue eyes sparkle in her bright white kitchen, and I realize that she is on the verge of tears. I think of the circle that has grown up around us, our families, our friends, and how we have all taken a vow of silence that is eating us alive.
I nod and stand, walk down the hill, and get my purse and keys. I put Ginger in the back of the car, and begin to drive. I drive fast, slow down, speed up again, past hills and valleys, past narrow gravel one-lane roads and town intersections. I am aimless, with no destination. I find myself at the weekend house where we put in all those large trees, and I let Ginger out. She sniffs suspiciously at the unfamiliar ground, then squats and jumps back into the car. I can tell by the suggestion of green shoots at the end of a few branches that the trees all took, all except one close to the drive that looks like a gray skeleton. It will need to be pulled up and replaced, and I wonder who will do it. The idea that someday I would be standing here, with Rickie and a backhoe and a plan for the future, for the future of something as simple as a tree, seems unthinkable. I can see that woman, in her Capri khakis and her gardening clogs, with her hands on her hips. Yet somehow she is not me.
And yet I have suddenly decided to try to pretend to be her for just this afternoon, for the sake of my son. I park on Main Street and walk past Molly's Closet, the three flowery dresses on the mannequins in the window a harbinger of a spring that seems unlikely as the cold weather drags into March. I go into the drugstore, and the pharmacist, who is on the phone, waves while I look at things I do not really see and will not buy. I choose some shampoo that I realize is the same shampoo I already have in the bathroom. I look up at the second-story window to the room where Max took his drum lessons, but there's no sign of movement there.
My phone rings. It's Alice. "Hey, honey," she says softly. It's been a while since she asked my advice about Liam, and I miss it. I decide to tell her so.
"You have so much on your plate," she says.
"I have nothing on my plate. I've just spent an hour doing--what were those things you told me about in church, where you walked around and looked at those plaques of Jesus making it up the hill? They had numbers, and prayers, or something?"
"The Stations of the Cross? I haven't thought of the stations of the cross in years. The only one I can remember is when Veronica wipes his face."
"Who's Veronica?"
"I have no idea. You don't mean the real Stations of the Cross, do you?"
"No, I'm on Main Street, doing the stations of the cross of Center Valley. I feel like I have to try to act like a normal person. It's been two months already."
"Oh, honey," says Alice. "Two months is no time at all."
"Alex wants to see a shrink. Do you think that's a good thing? Olivia thinks it's a good thing."
"I think it's a good thing."
"I guess I do, too. How's Liam?"
"He's in love with the preschool teacher. Just like you warned me."
I fall silent. What else did I warn Alice about? Improperly fastened car seats? Little plastic toy pieces? Those are the kinds of things people warned me about. They didn't warn me about strange noises in the middle of the night, about the room above the garage.
"Mary Beth?" Alice says.
"Sorry, sorry, I'm distracted. I have to go. I'm going to go to the hardware store. I need a hammer."
I buy a hammer.
It's the middle of the day, and there are few people on Main Street. The wind is still harsh, and the jaundiced clouds suggest rain. But naturally I run into one of the people I feel least inclined to see, Rachel's mother, Sandy. I have to call Alice back and tell her that there was a special cross awaiting me. There are people who want all the trappings of tragedy without any of the pain, and I know Sandy is one of them, and that she's told anyone who will ask, and even some who don't, that we are close close friends and that she's devastated by what happened. Her hug lasts too long, and her eyes fill too quickly. "I think of you constantly," she says.
"Thank you," I say.
"This has been terrible for Rachel," she says. "She feels responsible. She and Sarah feel responsible."
"That's ridiculous."
"You can't help your feelings. Your feelings are your feelings." She sounds as though she is reading aloud from a self-help book. I have a whole shelf of them now: Working Your Way Through Grief, How It Feels to Lose a Child, The Legacy of Violence, Prayer and Healing. People sent them to me. Stan's daughter sent one called Making a New Life. I can't find it, and I suspect that my mother threw it away after she threw it at the wall. When I got married, I got a silver chafing dish with a Sterno candle underneath, and when Ruby was born I got a black velvet dress with a delicate lace collar in an infant size. These books are every bit as useless. When I go home, I think, I'm going to put them all in the recycling bin.
"Tell Rachel I send my love."
"She wants to see you. This has been terrible for her. She misses you all so much." She leans in close, conspiratorial. "She's going to a psychiatrist. I had no choice."
I nod.
"She's lost ten pounds since it happened," Sandy continues in a confidential way, and she can't stop herself from sounding pleased.
Our conversation runs down quickly. I can't blame Sandy for that. Small talk feels too small, big talk too enormous. I already know this from shameful experience. I've thought often in the past two months of the couple in town whose son died of leukemia. The first time I saw his mother afterward I said the right things, even remembered that he played guitar and wrote songs. But the second time, after her bereavement was a little shopworn, I couldn't figure out how to move forward. I saw her on the sidewalk and arranged my face just so--not smiling, not sad, just attentive. We stood on the street and worked to reach across the divide, and the working made it impossible to bridge it. Her survival seemed not only incredible but somehow unseemly. "How is she making it through the day?" we would ask ourselves, smug in the knowledge that our children would be dirtying the kitchen and leaving towels on the bathroom floor that very night. One of the worst aspects of living now on the far shore is that across the chasm I can see my glib unknowing former self. I despise that woman, her foolish little worries and her cheap sympathies. She knew nothing. But I can't truly wish on her what I know now.
I stop at the florist and buy an orchid plant for Olivia, and the florist tells me she has heard from several people that they hope I will be back in the landscaping business soon. I drive past the deserted motel outside town and suspect that that won't happen. The police spent two days questioning all the Mexican guys, and when the questioning was done my men left the state and then left the country, which they had all entered illegally. I knew they were illegal, of course. I just never asked. I wonder if Jose is living with his two little daughters now, if the younger one has managed to get her tonsils removed. The ramshackle windows in the motel are broken out, and someone has dumped some old tires to one side of the parking lot. In the paper the other day, it said the town was thinking of demanding that the owner repair the place or tear it down.
Maybe that's what someone will do with my house, too. If they raze it, rip off the dormers and the roof, reduce the garage to a pile of old planks, will it be as though New Year's Eve never happened? I know that Nancy arranged for a cleaning crew, that the couch in the living room where the police found Ruby lying is gone, that the carpet in our bedroom was disposed of, and the carpet in the den, too. But I know those things only by hearing other people discuss them. This is what I wonder: Did they turn out the lights? If I had driven by afterward, would I have seen the yellow glow in the winter night, seen the lamps burning to welcome me home? If I lived across the street, would I have watched the lights go out over time, one by one, until the dark house disappeared in the dark night?
Nancy went into our old house and packed a duffel bag with Alex's clothes and his uniforms and his balls and bats. She brought over his soccer ball, too, the signed one in the Luc
ite case, but it's on the top shelf of his closet, behind a box packed with his swim trunks and his camp polo shirts.
The high school glows in the night, not yellow but the harsh white of fluorescence, light that deters rather than welcomes. A row of cars makes a wall between its low-slung beige walls and the road. One of the juniors took the curve I'm on too sharply four days ago and was airlifted to the hospital with a broken back. It's one more way in which what happened to our family has started to fade in the town consciousness.
I pull up next to Olivia's car. She's half turned toward the backseat. I can tell she is reprimanding one of the little boys. She doesn't raise her voice; she has a clipped tone that I suspect is more effective than my shrill rants ever were. She sees me, stops, and then smiles. Little Luke follows her eyes, looks at me, and then frowns dramatically, his lower lip out, his brow furrowed. It's become clear that he resents all the attention his mother gives me.
Alex and Ben run out to the car together, their winter jackets unzipped, their backpacks bouncing off their right shoulders, their faces crimson from exertion and sweat. I hear Alex laugh, and I realize that it's the first time I have heard that sound for months, perhaps since Christmas Day. He has a deep laugh now, not a man's laugh but moving toward it. I see him run toward Olivia's car, and suddenly I realize why I drove here without even knowing it. Among Ben's family Alex is comfortable, easy, insulated from rage and grief and bitterness and brokenness and horror and silence. Among Ben's family he can pretend to forget what happened, pretend that everything is nice and normal, that life is simple and safe. He could so easily become their family's Kiernan, a boy seeking a temporary place in a happier kitchen.
Olivia gets out of the car and says, "Alex, love, look who's here." I get out, too, and look at my son. His face is expressionless.
"What's wrong?" he says, and it's all I can do not to say what's in my mind, not to say, What more could be wrong?
"Nothing," I say. "I just thought we could go out for pizza. Ben can come if you want."
Alex looks at Ben, then back at me. Olivia says warmly, "I'm keeping Ben with us. You take Alex. Are you going to drive him to school tomorrow?" And in that moment, when I know that she sees and understands it all, Olivia becomes not just my savior but my friend. To cap it off, she winks at me.
"I have to pee very much!" yells Luke from inside the car.
"I have a lot of homework," Alex says as we pull away.
"We'll make it fast," I say. My voice sounds false to me, and I realize it is my company voice, the one I used with Sandy, and with the man in the hardware store who told me which sort of hammer to buy. "We'll make it fast," I say again, and this time I sound more like me.
"Cool," Alex says.
"How was practice?"
"The new coach is really mean."
"Really?"
"Nobody likes him. Like, he's really sarcastic? He goes to me, 'Latham, the ball belongs to the whole team, not just you.' Like I'm a ball hog? And I wasn't hogging the ball."
I haven't met the new coach, but I love him for his gift of meanness. I love him for not being kind and gentle to Alex, for not reminding him and all the others that Alex is indelibly marked as wounded. I will go to the next game and I will say, "Hi, I'm Alex's mother."
"I talked to Dr. Vagelos today about meeting with you," I say as we come down a steep hill. Alex rummages through his backpack as I decide what to say next. And I wonder if he is as careful with me as I am with him.
I do not say, What made you go to see him? I do not say, Why didn't you tell me? I do not say, Why can't you talk to me? I do not say, What does it feel like, to be you, to have them all gone? I know what it feels like to be fatherless, with a mother who never speaks of it. It feels bad. It feels so bad.
I say, "That sounds good to me."
"Cool," Alex says. After a few minutes he says, "I really feel like pizza."
"Anchovies?" I want to say. It is an old family joke. "Not if you value your life," I can hear Ruby replying. She taught both the boys to say it, too.
In silence, we drive as the night fills the car.
Alice is coming to visit for two days. "There's a crafts fair!" she says, as though she were describing a Broadway opening or a royal visit. As her car comes down the drive Ginger barks, and I look up the slope toward Olivia's house. I imagine that Olivia has pulled the flowered curtains in her bedroom gently back to watch Alice arrive. Alice is bad at keeping secrets, and she will surely tell me if Olivia called to say it might be a good weekend to stay with me. This is another thing I've come to expect but cannot like: the idea that people are talking about me, taking my emotional temperature. My father-in-law calls, and then the next day Glen's brother Doug does, too, and I imagine the conversation that took place between them: She sounded down, she's not getting out much, she needs to get to work, to get a house, to get out of the house. At least Nancy refuses to hide behind pleasantries: The last time we spoke, she said, "I was looking for you at the basketball game. Where were you?"
Where was I? Was that the night I was watching the movie on television, or the night I cleaned the bathroom? Or was it a more ordinary night, a night when I had a cup of tea and steered my mind through a treacherous maze, past the sight of Ruby behind the wheel of her Volvo smiling up at me, past Max pounding away at his drums with his hair marking time, past Glen bending to pet the dog and then laying his arm along the back of the couch behind me. My memories are booby-trapped. A week ago, I was in the supermarket and found myself in front of the freezer case, staring at boxes of veggie burgers, the kind I had to track down for Ruby when she stopped eating meat in eighth grade. I abandoned the cart, and the shopping trip, and drove home, shaking. Yesterday I found a black dress sock among my T-shirts, one lone sock of the sort my husband wore all his grown-up life, and I held it to my face, then left it on the edge of the bathroom sink, then hid it under the vanity so that Alex would not see it, then took it from beneath the sink and put it back in the drawer where I first found it. The photographs and family mementoes are still in the other house, the haunted house, the abandoned house. And yet I am ambushed still, by frozen food, by misplaced socks.
"I brought bagels!" Alice says, holding the paper bag aloft.
"You brought enough bagels for an army," I say.
"Mary Beth, I know you're going to kill me for saying this, but you just sounded like your mother," she says, and I swat her arm, and she hugs me. When I smile, it is like the front door to our old house, all disused rusty hinges. But I try.
Alex and Ben have gone away for a weekend basketball workshop. "I have to go," Alex had said when he handed me the consent form and saw the look on my face. I drove over to the high school to watch the team get on the bus. I handed Alex his duffel bag and a box of chocolate-chip cookies. "They're still warm," I'd said. As the doors to the bus closed with a hiss, I saw the cookies being passed from seat to seat. Alex was talking to someone across the aisle as the bus pulled out. I waved goodbye to no one.
"Can you join us for dinner?" Olivia had said as we walked back to our cars.
"I think I'll just stay in tonight," I said, as though that was not what I did every night.
"Let's go out to dinner!" Alice says, and I understand that this is the visit designed to reintroduce me to the outside world--the happy visit, the small-talk visit. Even Alice is afraid to hear what I am thinking. I don't blame her; I am afraid to think what I am thinking. We drive to a steak house where Nancy and I have had dinner several times, and Alice talks about a book on Thomas Jefferson that she is editing, and a controversy about a water-treatment plant in her neighborhood, and the price of real estate in New York, and I let her words roll over me, my face arranged as though I am listening. There is a trick to this, but I have learned it: uh-huh, uh-huh, nod, uh-huh, uh-huh, nod.
"Is that not good?" she finally asks, looking at my steak.
"I had a big lunch," I say.
"Doggie bag?" says the waitress.
"W
e actually have a dog to bring it to," says Alice.
Ginger gets half, and we put the other half in the refrigerator. "For later," says Alice. What that means is that in four days, which seems the proper length of time, I will throw it away. Alice bends to look inside the fridge. "What is that?" she says, pointing.
"It's a turkey. Rickie brought it over the other day. One of the guys I work with."
"The big guy?"
I nod.
"A whole turkey?"
"And a cordless drill," I add. He had appeared at the door in a down jacket and a baseball cap, his brawny arms full. He had grown a beard, and there were crumbs in it. I offered him coffee, but he couldn't stay, or said he couldn't. A turkey and a power tool: I pictured him racking his brain. I'd kissed his cheek.
"I'm exhausted," I say to Alice, and I am. It is exhausting to pretend to be a different person for this length of time. Or not a different person--the same old person, who seems like someone I knew a long time ago. Mostly I only have to do it in small doses--ten minutes here, an hour there. The rest of the time, I busy myself with small repetitive tasks. I have thought about learning how to knit, but I picture Alex leaving for school in misshapen sweaters and stuffing them guiltily to the back of his locker. Maybe I will make an afghan. Someone once said that no one really wants an afghan. It was me, before, that other me.
"It's not even nine o'clock," Alice says. She sits on the couch, and I sit next to her, both of us facing forward. We have used up all our small talk. We must look like two people waiting on a bench for a bus. Two strangers.
"I don't know how to do this in person," she finally says. "Somehow it's easier to talk on the phone." Her voice sounds husky, and when I look she is crying. She sobs, and I rub her back.