We stop to eat. In the bright light of a diner, I see that Alex needs a shave. This is an astonishing thought. From time to time he runs a razor over his face, but it has been more a declaration of maturity than an actual need. "What about this summer?" I ask brightly, as though nothing has happened.
"Mom, camp. I go to camp every summer."
"You want to go again?"
"Mom, you signed me up last year. I get to be a junior counselor."
He's right. I signed them all up. Max was going to be the drummer in his camp's rock band. Ruby was going to take advanced poetry composition. Glen and I talked about taking a vacation, perhaps in Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard. I'm interviewing the last doctor interested in Glen's practice first thing in the morning. The sign outside will be changed, the name embroidered on the white coat will be different. Someone else will win the writing prize at graduation. Someone else will play computer chess with Ezra. The surface of the ocean of daily life will close over the three of them and the water will look smooth again. They will live only in a tableau that plays ceaselessly in my mind.
"Sorry, sorry, I don't know where my head was," I say, pushing my plate aside.
"We're not moving, right?" Alex says when we're back in the car.
"Not if you don't want to."
"Is Aunt Alice going to marry Nate?" he asks.
"Too soon to tell," I say.
"She should," he says, and puts the headphones back on.
"Ruby Lee Latham," it says in overwrought calligraphy. The diploma is in a leather folder propped on the bookshelf in the small hallway. When I pass it, I touch it. It reminds me of Alice again, of going to church with Alice and her family and how all of them reflexively put two fingers in the deep marble bowl of water at the head of the aisle. My hand does the same with the diploma. It feels warm to me.
Everything happens all at once at the high school now, now that the school year is winding down again. They plant the tree and read three of Ruby's poems, the ones I've heard before. The literary magazine is dedicated to her, the yearbook to Ruby and Max, which is a comfort, because otherwise it is as though Max has disappeared into the past the same way he disappeared into his room, into his head, into his unhappiness. Sarah and Rachel and Eric and a boy named Gregory I have never met come over on their way to the prom. Sarah is wearing a yellow dress, Rachel something strapless and peach-colored. "That dress was made for you," I say to Rachel, and she glows, and Gregory puts his arm around her waist and smiles. He has brought Rachel a wrist corsage of roses and ferns. Rachel and Sarah have brought me a big bouquet of daisies. I put them in a pitcher in the middle of the table. They're such nice girls. I hope they don't think I slept with Kiernan's father. My face burns at the thought. I take their picture.
"I've heard so many great things about you, Mrs. Latham," says Gregory, and I wonder whether losing Ruby has brought Rachel to this--to a nice boy, a kind boy, a boy who brings flowers and looks at her as though she deserves them.
"Is Alex here?" Rachel asks. She leans close. "We really like his girlfriend."
Nancy is the first person I see on the football field when I arrive for graduation. She kisses my cheek and my mother's, shakes my father-in-law's hand. Then she looks at me and says, "This must be such a hard day for you."
"It's a big day for Sarah," I say, looking toward the long long line of students in blue caps and gowns. They are taking one another's pictures, talking about plans for the parties, laughing and waving to their families. The principal had asked if I wanted to accept Ruby's diploma onstage, but I told him I was afraid it would attract too much attention, distract from the happiness of the day. The sun is strong, the sky white-blue, and for just a moment I feel dizzy, but I blink and look back at Nancy and smile. I hope the smile doesn't look as false as it feels. I'm wearing a bright red dress, and I don't care what anyone says or thinks about that. It is a Ruby color, a Ruby dress.
Alex is already here, sitting with a group of his teammates, ready to cheer for the graduating seniors from the soccer, basketball, and lacrosse teams. He is standing, scanning the crowd, and then he comes over and hugs us all. As he strides back to the bleachers, my mother touches my arm. "We should sit down," she says.
I press my hands together tightly in my lap as the alphabetical procession unfolds. Finally, "Ruby Lee Latham," the principal says, after Kimora Kim and Robert Landman. There is a rumble, like the sound of a plane, or a train, a rumble as the entire audience rises. The applause is like my heart beating in my ears, but magnified a million times, as though my heart might explode. I look up from my chair, and it is as though I am sitting at the bottom of a deep well, with walls of people all around me, and I drop my head into my hands. The clapping goes on for a long time. "Stand up, Mary Beth," my mother says, her hand on my shoulder, but I can't.
"Max Evan Latham," I whisper as the applause dies down and the principal goes on to Christine Lessig, whose name has been called right after Ruby's since they were in first grade together. Her parents are sitting at the end of our row, and I lean forward to nod, and they nod back, her mother's face wet and shining.
"Well, that's over," says my mother when we get back to the guesthouse, and my father-in-law makes them both old-fashioneds from mixers he brought in a big brown bag. "Jesus Christ, I'm starving," he says, as he hands my mother the drink. Alex comes out of the smaller bedroom in a T-shirt and shorts. "What's for lunch?" he says. "He's always hungry," says my mother. "He's a growing boy," says Glen's father.
"Fried chicken and mac and cheese," I say.
"You are the world's best mom," says Alex.
("It's true," Ruby and Max say in unison behind him. Glen just smiles.)
Glen's father drives my mother to the airport in the evening, then continues on across the interstate. "Anything you need, Mary Beth," he says. "I know," I say. He wants us to come for Thanksgiving. I say I can't plan that far ahead. My mind goes blank at the thought.
It's the same when I leave Alex at camp: I'm not sure what to do afterward. He and Ben are in different cabins, the junior assistants to college students from Australia and the Czech Republic. Their beds are set a little apart from those of the nine-year-old campers they will oversee. Alex is helping with the junior soccer league and basketball drills. He has an official polo shirt. The word LATHAM is embroidered across his heart under the camp insignia.
"I wonder if you can keep those," I say, and Alex gives me a look. "Because they're totally lame?" he says.
I walk up a steep hill to the camp office. The director comes out and shakes my hand and says some familiar words about taking special care of Alex. I tell him that I know no phone calls are permitted, but that I hope he will make an exception. He says that Alex is welcome to call home.
In the parking lot, a blond woman so thin her skin is translucent approaches me slowly. "Alex's mom? I'm Colin's mom," she says, and we both try to smile. The skin around her eyes is the gray-blue of a threatening sky.
"I never called to thank you," I say.
"For what?"
"For taking him skiing. For getting him on a plane home so quickly. For having your husband fly back with him."
"We all felt terrible about what happened. We tried to do our best to help. The hardest part--" She stops.
"Not being able to tell him?"
"That was it. Knowing, and knowing we had to pretend. Your mother said we should just tell him you were in the hospital. I don't know if he knew we were hiding the truth or not."
"I'm just grateful for what you did. I'm embarrassed that I didn't call or write and thank you."
"Don't think twice. I didn't. I was a little preoccupied myself." She shrugs, and her hand goes to her heart. "A touch of breast cancer." Another woman showing one face to the world and living a different life within. I put my hand out to hers.
"Oh, God, I'm so sorry."
"They say it'll be fine. But it's hard on the kids. Colin, especially. He and Alex are so close, and then this." She shru
gs again. It looks like a habitual gesture, almost a tic. "Shit happens," she says, and we both smile ruefully.
"Mom." I hear a cry from across the playing fields, and I turn. "Mom?" yells Alex. "You're still here?"
I stop at a nursery to buy some perennials and some zinnias. I think perhaps I will plant the perennials around the back door of the guesthouse. I am making a to-do list--not things I need to get done but things I need to do to fill the time. Few of my customers have called. Some of the ones with sprawling grounds, with trees that need pruning and large beds that need mulch, have heard that I no longer have the staff required. Rickie is working for the university as assistant facilities director. John is doing all the landscaping for the county. "You know if you need me I can help you out in a heartbeat, Mary Beth," he said when we ran into each other at the garden center. But I'm mainly doing smaller gardens for some of the people who first employed me when Latham Landscaping was just me, two college kids, and an answering machine. Mrs. Feeney, a woman in her nineties who has had me plant annuals and window boxes for her for years, had said to me when she called to make arrangements, "I don't take the local paper anymore. It's too depressing. But I gather that was you, wasn't it, at New Year's?"
"Yes, it was."
"I was sorry to hear it," she said. "You're in my prayers. Can you do the same for me that you did last year?"
"Of course," I said. It was a relief to speak to someone so matter-of-fact. Probably by the time you're over ninety you've witnessed, perhaps experienced, every sort of tragedy imaginable, loved people who died in wars and people who died in automobile accidents and people who just died suddenly and senselessly, went out like a used-up lightbulb. She liked impatiens, Mrs. Feeney and dahlias and petunias, all the bright-colored old-fashioned flowers that weren't too finicky and lasted only through summer. I'd tried to interest her in hydrangeas once, but she just shook her head.
I expected to miss my work more, but I don't. It was the kind of job you have because you have children, that gives you room for supermarket shopping, soccer games and after-school pickups, and gives you something to tell people at parties. I love to make things grow, to deadhead the foxglove and watch it improbably have a second flowering, to dig up a big bristly clump of old day lilies in the fall and break it up into five or six smaller plants and then have each of them burst into bloom the following summer. But I realize now that I don't really care for landscaping plans, terrace beds, drystone pathways, pergolas--all the things people want to make their gardens into what magazines now call "outdoor rooms." My idea of an outdoor room is a screened porch with a picnic table.
I stop at a diner just across the state line and sit at the counter with the newspaper. There are two horrible murders in it. There is one nearly every week. I didn't really notice before. I have a cheese omelet and coffee. I eat half of the omelet. "Was everything okay?" says the young waitress, worried that the cook has messed up and so messed up her tip. "Can I box that up for you?" Yes. No. I leave a ten on a six-dollar check so her mind will be at ease. I've started to buy a few clothes in smaller sizes. "You look fantastic!" Rachel's mother, Sandy, said last week when I ran into her at the drugstore. She doesn't. Sandy has decided to go blond, and with her dark eyes and brows she looks as though she's wearing a wig. She kept talking for nearly twenty minutes, and I sensed that she was lonely, that perhaps at the very last minute she's realized that with Rachel at college she will arrive home every night to that particular tangible silence that falls like dust over a house that is uninhabited all day long. I know I will feel it when I come home this evening, although Alex has left such disorder that I'll have a day or two of laundry and stripped beds to keep the vibration of the empty rooms from buzzing in my ears. At least I have Ginger. How pathetic that sounds. Sandy should get a cat, but then I remember that Rachel is allergic, to cats and to nuts. I always had to be so careful when I cooked for her.
An hour from home, and I realize that I must have just missed some violent weather. Twice I have to navigate around trees across the road, and my tires bump over limbs and branches. The tar is shiny, the clouds low, and when I put on my headlights they reflect back harshly from the patent-leather surface of the road. Then I'm in a patch of rain so heavy that I pull over, the wipers useless against the water sloughing down the sides of the car. It drags silt across the road in a red-brown swath, and I hear a noise that sounds like gunshots but is probably the limbs of big trees snapping in a gusty wind. The radio signal is scratchy, but after a few minutes the announcer says that there is a storm warning, and that we all should take shelter and stay off the roads.
"Too late," I say aloud, and put in one of the music mixes Alex has left in the car.
The storm is fierce, and no other cars pass me. After a while, like a passage in a classical concerto, the music of the storm slows, the melody of drops on metal and tar the same but more muted, less violent. I begin to drive again, and soon there's just the tapping of intermittent drops as the counterpoint to Alex's music. I hit "skip" and "scan" and finally come upon an old song that is almost all drums called "Wipeout." No words, just a maniacal beat. Then I go back over the rest of the songs, and realize that the music is Max's, although I could swear Alex was playing it this morning on the trip to camp.
The winds and rain have ripped through town, and as I crest the hill I see a blurry scrum of red lights that must be the town fire engines around an electric pole down on Main Street. It's dusky in the stormy summer afternoon, but there are no lights glowing inside the stores or restaurants, and I wonder if there will be electricity in the guesthouse when I arrive. Olivia has left a battery-powered lantern by the back door for her guests.
I come down the hill toward the turnoff for Olivia's house. Two large stands of poplars have toppled from the shallow ridge above, and the road ends in a snarled wall of limbs and leaves. The rain has stopped, and the late-day light is gilding the wet trees; I think I can see a large nest on the ground beside one of them. What a waste that would be, to build a home stick by stick, to line it with moss and lay some eggs and then watch as the whole thing fell from the sky, to become nothing but a mess of shards and twigs on the shoulder of the road.
I pull over as far as I can, but there is a steep downward pitch into heavy forest, far too steep to allow me to maneuver around the poplars. I can't take any chances. I am all Alex has. I've used some of Glen's insurance money to buy an enormous policy on my own life. "Mary Beth, if anything happened he'd have plenty of resources, between the payout on Glen and the practice and the eventual sale of the house," Nancy's husband, Bill, had said. I bought the insurance anyway.
I turn my car around and go back a mile or so up the hill, where I know there's a small gravel road that Olivia says snakes around the crest and then drops into a gully behind her house. At its end, it joins up with the road that is blocked by the trees. I've never been down it before. "Hidden Cottage Road," it's called, and soon I know why. There's nothing on it for more than a mile, the trees so thick that they make a dark ruffled roof over the car, until after one perilous S curve the road swerves so sharply that an insensible driver would careen onto a narrow stone drive that undulates away without any discernible object. And because it's late, and I've been driving almost all day, and I can't seem to drive in the car alone without seeing faces in the rearview mirror and hearing voices from the backseat, that's exactly what I do.
I can see that the drive divides to create a large oval and then meets again in front of an old farmhouse, its white paint glowing in the silvery half-light of the stormy evening. It's all that glows; the house is dark, and, despite the shadow of curtains at the window and an ornamental milk can by the door, it has the unmistakable desolation of a house that no one lives in anymore.
In the center of the driveway oval is a concolor pine, a soft-needled variant for which I've always had a weakness. We had chosen one once as our Christmas tree, or I had and Glen went along. But the children had all complained that it was a weird tr
ee, not what we were used to, that the color was wrong, not green enough. The next year we reverted to a Fraser fir.
This one is a stupendous Christmas tree, but one for a public place, the nave of a cathedral, a town hall. It's at least forty feet tall, trained into a perfect triangle. The only reason I have been able to see the house at all is because my car slid to one side on the gravel drive. Otherwise, the concolor shields the house from view. I try to gauge the direction and wonder if it makes the house dark in daylight, but it's set too far from it to cast a shadow over its rooms, or to fall through the roof during a bad storm.
Stuck in the ground in front of the pine is a battered sign. FOR SALE BY OWNER, it says, with a phone number below. There's no paper in my purse, so I write on my palm with a pen.
I'm sitting on the screened porch perspiring as a hummingbird makes noisy feints at a fuchsia hanging from a bracket just outside. The back of the house is shaded by a curtain of forest, the light falling harshly out of the shadows onto the path to the barn. It's early August, steamy, with a loamy smell, and the front of my T-shirt is gray with perspiration. Sanding hardwood floors is a dirty job, and I have been doing it since just after dawn.
Olivia used an expression one day that I'd never heard before. "Safe as houses," she'd said about something and, when she saw the look on my face, added, "Don't Americans use that one? It means certain, sure." She said she thought it had something to do with real estate as an investment, and I assume she was right. Ruby's English teacher had told me that Olivia's father was once the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.
I liked the way the expression sounded, but I thought it meant something else, the way that a house made you feel. In the way that sinners stubbornly continue to believe in good, or agnostics glimpse God when their plane starts to bounce on a zephyr, I still somewhere inside believed a home could keep us safe.
It wasn't exactly for sale by owner. The number on the sign was that of an art historian at the university whose mother was fading into nothing in a nursing home. "It's just too large for one person," the woman had said, as though she had to justify selling the place where she'd grown up. "You've seen it. You know."