Rickie and John came over and used a log splitter on some storm-felled trees, so we have plenty of firewood. They stacked some of it at the side of the house--a wall of wood, elm and poplar and lots of oak. They put the rest in the barn. I went up into the loft and looked at the boxes. Near the front is one that says HOME MOVIES. I wonder when I can open that, whether I can ever watch the three of them walk across the den, pet the dog, smile out at me, even if it is only on a television screen.
Somewhere there are the boxes of ashes. I suspect that my mother put them far in the back, so that I won't find them for a long, long time.
A car pulls into the drive, and Sarah and Rachel get out. I throw open the front door and they run to me, one on each side, hugging hard, so hard that I feel as though I might fall, except that the two of them are holding me up, lifting me as though I am the child.
"I love this place!" Rachel squeals.
Inside, Sarah reaches her hands out to the fire, and Rachel gives me two jars of homemade cranberry relish that they bought at the farmers' market. She's still thin, and different somehow--less tentative, secondary. I think Ruby would be pleased to see her like this. Maybe with only the two of them in the charmed circle there is more space for Rachel.
"You seem great," I say.
"I love school," she replies.
Rachel has discovered art history; Sarah is suddenly interested in economics. Sarah is not sure the swimming is worth it--"We're up at six o'clock, and we always wind up hanging out with other swimmers"--and Rachel says her roommate has issues, although she won't be more specific. Sarah is wearing jeans and a peasant blouse, and her hair now falls below her shoulders. She is dressed less like Sarah and more like Ruby. "How's Eric?" I ask, and she says, "Fine, I guess." It seems I was wrong about all those assumptions I'd once made about Sarah's set-in-stone future. But then I was wrong about most of the future, when I dreamed it so long ago, a year ago.
"Where's Alex?" Sarah asks, and then the two of them run into the kitchen, and there are screams punctuated by the rumble of Alex's voice.
"My ears hurt," I hear Max say, the way he did so many times before at the high, piercing girl-shrieks.
"My ears hurt," Alex says with a grin as I go into the kitchen.
"Too bad. These are my girls." That's what Ruby always said. I say it now, and the two of them look at me and blink hard. Then they shake it off and stick their fingers into the batter, and Alex raps Sarah across the hand with a wooden spoon as Elizabeth stands aside and smiles shyly.
"We are so sorry," Rachel says to her intently, and Elizabeth's eyes widen, and she says, "Why?"
"Because you got stuck with this loser!" And she and Sarah repeat the word a few times and make their thumbs and forefingers into a capital L and try to put it on Alex's forehead.
"You two are, like, totally dubious," he says.
We all sit in the living room, and Rachel rubs the arm of the chair, and I know she's remembering it from the den. They've both come from the high school, where the swimmers broke off practice to make a fuss over Sarah. "Except for that bitch Amanda," Rachel says.
"Uh, ladies, language, please," I say.
"I can't wait to go to college so I can curse all day," Alex says, and I shiver in the hot house, thinking of it empty.
Soon they're all hungry, and we go back into the kitchen and make grilled-cheese sandwiches. The girls finger their friendship bracelets unconsciously and tell Elizabeth how much she'll like college. They cluster around me at the stove as I press the bread down with a spatula. Alex wants bacon on his, Sarah and Elizabeth tomato. Rachel and I--and Ruby--like ours plain, just cheese and bread. Everyone wants sweet pickles. Sarah looks up at me as she opens the jar, smiling, and then her face changes in an instant to a look of such suffering that I almost cry out. She turns to the sink, hiding her secret self.
I know that there will always be ghosts with these girls. I will buy them graduation gifts and attend their weddings and send baby presents and perhaps even eat at their homes. And there will always be not the ghost of Ruby that was but the ghost of Ruby who might have been. I don't know that person, and yet I miss her. I miss the Max who might have been, too. I miss the Glen who was.
"I'm having Thanksgiving dinner here," Elizabeth says softly.
"Everybody in the world is eating here," Alex says.
"Not me," says Rachel.
"You're invited," I say quickly. "So is your mom."
"No, that's okay, we have plans. I bet you have better plans, though. Also better food." Sandy is said to be dating the pro at the golf club. I know they serve Thanksgiving dinner--"Who the heck has Thanksgiving dinner at a golf club?" Glen always said--and I wonder if they are going to eat there.
We're spending Christmas here, too. Alex says we should decorate the concolor tree, although I've told him it would take a bucket truck and hundreds of lights. The day after Christmas, we leave town for a week. That night after the meeting with Dr. Vagelos, neither of us knowing what to say in the car, both of us afraid of saying too much, or of sinking back into silence, I had suddenly blurted out, "If you could take a trip anywhere, where would you want to go?"
"With you?"
I nodded. His eyes were shiny picked out in the dark by the dash lights. He suddenly looked like someone I didn't know. I can scarcely see the young Alex in him anymore. There's a suggestion of the young Glen in his jaw and eyes. Or, at least, that's what I tell myself.
"I really want to go to Cooperstown, to the Baseball Hall of Fame, but I don't think you'd like that so much, so maybe not with you."
I waited. I could hear him breathing. "New York," he finally said.
"New York?"
"Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of other places I want to go--like Africa, maybe, someday. Or China. China would be cool. But Nate said there's this whole exhibit of armor at the art museum that we never got to see. And Ellis Island. I told him I was thinking I might like to be a history guy, and he said I had to go to Ellis Island."
"You want to be a historian? I didn't see that one coming." I didn't add, "And neither did your history teacher, judging from your last report card." But, as though he'd heard my thoughts, Alex said, "Mr. Betts is a lame teacher. Like, his idea of history is, Memorize a hundred dates and then I'll give you a test. I was once, like, 'Mr. Betts, did you know that millions of people died in Europe in 1920 when they got the flu?' And he goes, Yes, Alex, I did, but that's European history, and the curriculum this year is American history.' Like you can even separate them."
"I didn't know that, about the flu."
"It was really bad. I saw this thing about it on the History Channel."
"With your father."
"Yeah."
We will be going to Ellis Island together, although Alice insists that all of us will freeze on the ferry ride over. We will go to the museum, although I may let Alex look at the armor by himself while I stare at the Impressionist paintings. On New Year's Eve at midnight, there is a four-mile run through Central Park, and Nate and Alex are registered to run it together. Apparently, there are fireworks and noisemakers and champagne and costumes and big, jolly anonymous crowds of people. "Happy New Year," I will say to strangers. Somewhere along the route, I will watch as my son streaks by in the silvery night, the streetlights keeping the dark at bay. Someday Alex will say, "Remember that midnight run in Central Park?" And I will nod, and maybe even smile.
Alex jumps up from the table, afraid he'll be late for practice. Rachel and Sarah are going into town anyway; they will take him. He runs upstairs for his gear. "My dad says he'll be all-state junior year," Sarah says. "He's a great soccer player," says Elizabeth, who goes back to the screened porch for her jacket.
"Has either of you seen Kiernan's mom?" I ask.
"My mom saw her a couple of weeks ago, delivering a cake," Rachel says. "My mom says she's totally crazy. She says she's moving someplace. Maybe California? Or Canada? But really, really crazy."
"Don't say that, hone
y," I say as I put my arms around her.
Sarah hugs me, too. "My mom really misses you," she whispers.
A sharp voice says, "She knows where I live." I'm going to ignore that voice. Instead I say, "Tell her I miss her, too. Tell her I miss her a lot. Will both of you come over Friday for turkey sandwiches? My friend Alice will be here with her little boy and her boyfriend."
"Is he cute?" Rachel says.
"The little boy or the boyfriend?"
"You always get me with stuff like that."
"They're both very cute," I say.
"I'm going to be late!" yells Alex as he clatters down the stairs. "The coach is going to kill me!"
I can hear the noise inside the car as they pull away which makes the silence afterward seem deeper. I go into the backyard and sit in an old Adirondack chair that I found in the back of the barn. There's only one, which is odd. I think the other one must have broken. These things always come in pairs.
The cat has followed me outside, and now he sits at the edge of the woods, the tip of his tail threshing the air. Ginger scampers toward him. For a moment, all four paws lifted from the dull autumn grass, she's a young dog again. I have to start cooking side dishes for dinner Thursday. I can make the sweet potatoes and the creamed onions. My father-in-law likes those. My mother is going to make some biscuits at Olivia's and bring them that morning, although she really doesn't bake so well. Olivia and Ted and the boys are coming over after their own dinner, with pies for dessert. She says they're going to hike through the woods together. "I don't doubt that you'll hear us before you see us," she told me.
My mother thinks going to New York is a mistake. "You can't run away from things forever," she said. "It's not forever," I replied. I wanted to add, "Nothing is forever." But I know my mother knows that. In my top bureau drawer is the card Dr. Vagelos gave me, the grief therapist's card. Maybe I will call her in January. I don't plan ahead much anymore.
In the barn is a box marked "Xmas Ornaments." For some reason, the thought of them won't let me be. I can see them all in my mind: The china cherub wreathed in holly that I got as a shower gift when Ruby was born. The candy canes made out of dough that the twins made in first grade. The tiny tawny papier-mache dog that Ruby bought on a class trip to New York. Max's ceramic dinosaur. Alex's glass soccer ball. I could buy new ones, fresh ones, with no history, no memories. But what sort of tree would that be? It would be like those color-coordinated trees I criticized all those years, the ones I was hired to put up and decorate. I don't want one of those trees. But I'm afraid to open that box.
"Don't be afraid, Mom," I hear Max say. But it's a different Max, a wiser Max, a Max who knows now that most of our fears are petty and small, and that only our love is monumental.
"It's me," I hear Ruby say, the way she did when she came into the house after school. "Who's me?" Glen would say if he was home.
He will be young forever, my Maxie, always shaggy-haired and splayfooted and long-limbed. And Ruby, too, with her incandescent eyes and her dancing hands. And Glen will never get any older, but I will. Maybe someday I will be an old woman with a young husband, a young husband struggling to belt his pants, his mouth set as he goes down to put a stop to that ruckus. Maybe someday I will be an old woman with a grown son, saying to his wife, "That house is just too damn big for my mother. I wish we could get her to move someplace smaller." And his wife--please, please, make her nice, make her like me, make her a good mother herself--his wife will say, "She has a lot of memories in that house."
Ginger snorts and turns onto her side and sighs. And then, because I want to, because there is no one there to think it strange, I call their names, one by one, into the silence. The silence is as big as the sky, and as I call to each of them it is as though the name is a bird, flying out over the trees and into the lowering afternoon. Ginger's ears twitch at the familiar sounds. Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.
"How are you holding up?" my mother said the other day when she called to tell me about their Thanksgiving travel plans.
"I'm trying," I replied.
"That's good," she said. "That's all anyone can ask."
I am. Every day I am trying.
I am trying for Alex.
I am trying for Ruby.
I am trying for Max.
I am trying for Glen.
It's all I know how to do now. This is my life. I am trying.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANNA QUINDLEN is the author of five bestselling novels, Object Lessons, One True Thing, Black and Blue, Blessings, and Rise and Shine. Her New York Times column, "Public and Private," won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, and a selection of those columns was published as Thinking Out Loud. She is also the author of a collection of her "Life in the 30's" columns, Living Out Loud; a book for the Library of Contemporary Thought, How Reading Changed My Life; and the bestselling A Short Guide to a Happy Life and Being Perfect. From 2000 to 2009, she wrote the "Last Word" column for Newsweek.
Every Last One is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright (c) 2010 by Anna Quindlen
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Marvell Press for permission to reprint "Going" from The Less Deceived by Philip Larkin, copyright (c) 1955 by Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of The Marvell Press, England and Australia.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60372-6
www.atrandom.com
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Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
About the Author
Copyright
Anna Quindlen, Every Last One
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