I have no excuse for my own tears. In the way of women my age, I increasingly count my blessings aloud, as though if other people acknowledge them they'll be enough: three wonderful children, a long and happy marriage, good home, pleasurable work. And if below the surface I sense that one child is poised to flee and another is miserable, that my husband and I trade public pleasantries and private minutiae, that my work depends on the labor of men who think I'm cheating them--none of that is to be dwelled on. Besides, none of that has anything to do with my tears. If I were pressed, I would have to say that they are the symptom of some great loneliness, as free-floating and untethered to everyday life as a tornado is to the usual weather. It whirls through, ripping and tearing, and then I'm in the parking lot of the supermarket, wiping my eyes, replacing my sunglasses, buying fish and greens for that night's dinner. If anyone asks how things are, I say what we all say: fine, good, great, terrific, wonderful.
Even among women, we don't speak of this. Only once did I catch Nancy, sitting on her patio with a glass of wine as the first leaves did a whirligig from the elm shadowing the yard. Fred had just left for college, and Sarah was at swim practice. I said, "Oh, Nance, Thanksgiving will be here before you know it." But when she turned her face to me her eyes were blank, as though she couldn't understand what I had just said. The next day when we drove to a brunch together she said, tartly, "At least you didn't ask if I was having my period. When I was a teenager, I thought women were only allowed to cry every twenty-eight days."
How foolish we are sometimes. When we were first together, I once said to Glen, my hand on his thigh in that way that doesn't survive marriage, "Do you ever just cry for no reason?" We were so alike, so compatible. Everyone said so.
"I don't think so," he said, his face creased with thought. "I can't remember ever doing that." Now I wouldn't think twice about that response. Now I wouldn't even ask.
"How was your day?" I ask.
"Fine," Glen says. "Did you have someone take a look at the roof?"
"They're coming tomorrow," I say. "Do you want some wine before dinner?"
"I think I'll have a beer," he replies.
What if I were to tell him that that night, driving home late from weeding a garden, heading into a line of darkening pink and mauve where the sun had settled below the ridgeline, I had sobbed as though brokenhearted. "Why?" he would have said, and what would I tell him? Could I sit opposite this open-faced man, with his pink cheeks and his warm brown eyes (not clinically significant), and say, "Loneliness?" Worse still, what if he said that he had done the same, felt the same? Then where would we all be?
"There's a six-pack in the fridge," I say, taking dill from the crisper drawer.
On and off during July, we've gotten hang-up calls in the evening. "Hello," I say, and then, louder, with a sharp edge of anger, "Hello?" There are three in quick succession one night in late July. Glen gets the third as we are undressing for bed and says, "Next time we call the police." The fourth call comes just after eleven and wakes us both. "What?" Glen says like an expletive, sitting up. The phone is on my side of the bed.
"Mom, don't freak out," Max says in a shaky voice, and I hear noise in the background and make out the symphonic blare of a hospital, a sound still familiar from Glen's residency.
"I'm so sorry he got you on the phone before I did," says the camp director, who calls as Glen and I are deciding which of us will make the long drive.
Max has fallen from a tree. His arm is broken. The X-rays look bad. Glen calls our orthopedic surgeon.
"No, it's Max, not Alex," I hear him say. Alex has separated his shoulder, broken his collarbone, and had his knee repaired. Max has had stitches only once. "This is the second time he's fallen out of a tree," I say to Glen.
I drive through the night, a cup of bitter coffee from the gas station beside me. In the hospital waiting area Max is slumped in a chair, his arm in a sling, a twitchy young man who I assume is a counselor beside him.
"Hey honey," I say, sitting next to him and putting my arm around his shoulder. There are grubby paths on his cheeks from tears. The counselor leaves for the bathroom.
"I have to go home, don't I?"
He does. His things are already packed. At the steps to his ramshackle cabin stands a tiny girl, a little Tinkerbell of a person, with hair dyed a horrible harsh black. She has a diamond on one side of her nostril. Max disappears around the side of the cabin with her while I load the car with his duffel bags and his boxes of drumsticks. Despite the arm and the tears, I'm thrilled. Max has a real girlfriend. They embrace in the shadow of the cabin, and I look away.
"You should come visit us," I say, turning as we get into the car, and the girl sobs by the passenger door.
"Mom, chill," Max mutters.
The next day the orthopedic surgeon repairs the arm, which has broken in a way that requires a pin. I can tell by Max's breathing, short and shallow, that he's afraid. His hair is almost to his shoulders, and his shoulders are squaring off in a way that looks familiar, that reminds me of Glen. But once the sedative has taken effect and his full lower lip has relaxed, he looks almost exactly as he did when he was a toddler, waking on a summer day like this one, his eyelids heavy over his dark eyes, his small bandy chest glossy with sweat.
"I love you, baby boy," I whisper as they wheel him away.
"Love you, too, Mom," he whispers back.
It is almost the last nice thing he says to me for the rest of the summer. It is almost the last thing he says to me for the rest of the summer. He lies on the couch in the den, watching nonsense TV, ignoring the stack of required school reading I've put on an end table. He grows thin, grows thinner, and becomes sullen and sad. The girlfriend's cell phone doesn't work at camp, and when she calls from the pay phones by the canteen he can hear the raucous sounds of the life he's missing. Dishes pile up on the coffee table beside him, and he leaves them there until someone else puts them in the sink.
"He's not a paraplegic," Glen hisses angrily one evening in the kitchen.
"He'll hear you."
"I hope he does," replies Glen.
"I hate my life," Max says one day as I leave for work. It's a sentiment I've heard from Ruby before, but Max says it as though he really means it. I call the therapist who helped Ruby to see if she knows someone for Max.
"He's depressed?" she asks.
"I'm no expert, but I would say yes." Max has no writing on his cast. What could be more depressing than that? The fingers curling out of the plaster look as though they had been living in some underground burrow, as though, exposed to direct sunlight, they would shrivel.
"Any suicidal thoughts?" the therapist asks.
"Do kids who have suicidal thoughts share them with their parents?" I say angrily. I was always angry when she was treating Ruby, too, always sure she was passing judgment on us, on our family, on our happiness. Always afraid of what she was going to say.
"Come to work with me," I say to Max. "You'll feel better if you get some fresh air." I have become Glen's father, who thinks and talks always in cliches: A little hard work never hurt anyone. Make hay while the sun shines. Early to bed, early to rise.
Max shakes his head. Glen wants him to start cleaning up after himself, to get a haircut. "He's not going back to school looking like that," Glen says.
"He's depressed," I say.
"I understand that. He can be depressed with a haircut. He can be depressed loading the dishwasher."
That night I arrive home and there is a pizza box on the kitchen counter. From the den I hear a sound; it is Max's deep goofy chortle, so long unheard. Smiling, I take a slice of pizza from the box and go into the den. "Hey, Mom, look," Max says, and Kiernan stands up, puts his arms around me, and squeezes, hard. "I missed you guys," he says.
I've missed him, too. He draws the solar system on Max's cast, then makes a black-and-white photograph of it; in the center there is a star, and on the photo he handcolors the star a deep, deep yellow, so that it glows
amid the monochrome. Max hangs the photo on the wall of his room, above his bed. I ignore the fact that Ruby's return is approaching and put the list of therapist's names I've gotten in the desk drawer.
Kiernan is driving a rusty clunker with a burgundy matte paint job that he says belongs to his uncle. He is mowing lawns in the early mornings, just after the dew has burned off but before the sun is too high. "It's really good money," he says, selling himself to me with a peculiar edge, as if he's looking for work.
He and Max are a pair, both thin and mop-headed, almost like brothers from the back. This makes me nervous, that and the fact that while Max is still mostly quiet, Kiernan can't stop talking. But after a while I recognize something about his behavior. It is a little like the way I was when I was home with an infant and would go out to a party. I was crazed by human contact, chatting relentlessly conscious that before long I would be back in my cage. I realize that Kiernan has no one to talk to.
"Senior year," says Glen at dinner one steamy August night.
"Really!" Kiernan says. "Talk about the end of an era. And you, dude. High school! It's the first day of the rest of your life."
"I want this cast off," Max says.
"Think positive! You can make it happen! It's all about attitude!" Kiernan sounds like an inspirational speaker. Glen looks at me across the platter of spareribs. The doctor has said Max will likely have to keep the cast on until the end of September. He's eating spareribs awkwardly with his one good hand, and I mentally remind myself not to make them again until he can use both hands. Kiernan is eating almost nothing. He's like one of those young religious aesthetes I used to encounter in some of my comparative-literature readings, all limbs and eyes and fervor. If he were a medieval monk, he would be flaying himself before bed every night.
"You need to talk to him," Glen says quietly as we finish the dishes. "Ruby will be home next week." There is the faint rumble of deep voices in the next room; Kiernan and Max are watching television together.
"You can't speak for yourself?"
"Mary Beth," Glen says. "You know I won't say what you want me to say. You know you want to do this yourself. You live for these mother moments."
"That's a terrible thing to say. I hate this. I hate it. He's such a nice kid. He's been like a part of our family." I think of all those early evenings, Ruby reading her work aloud, Kiernan sprawled on the couch listening, shaking his head at the end, saying, "That is so good, Rubes. Do you know how good that is?" I remember the two of them eating sandwiches on a quilt in the yard, lying on their backs afterward and dreamily naming the constellations. Last year Kiernan gave Ruby a star for her birthday She has a certificate. I wonder where it is.
A part of our family I think again, as Kiernan helps me with the garbage and puts a hand out to stop me at the end of the drive.
"I need a big, big favor," he blurts out. "Can I live here this year?"
I'm stunned. It must be apparent in my face, because he continues, the words tumbling from his mouth so quickly that I can barely keep up. "My mom is staying with my grandmother because she's getting worse and worse, she hardly knows anything anymore, she doesn't even know who I am, sometimes she screams when I walk in the door, she goes, who is that man, and my mom has to say, that's your grandson, and my mother keeps saying she needs my help with her and that I'll adjust but, like, it's my senior year, my senior year! And she wants me to go to school up there, she says it will be better, a fresh start, a fresh start--I don't need a fresh start, I don't have friends there, I don't know anyone, I'm going nuts. I promise I won't cause trouble, you won't even know I'm there, I don't even have to come in the house if you don't want me to, I've got it all figured out--there's that room over the garage, there's that toilet downstairs, you won't even know I'm there." His eyes are wild, and he's breathing as though he's been running, and I put up my hand, palm out.
"Kiernan," I say, and he stops.
"Breathe," I say.
"Really," he says, inhaling sharply. "Really. I promise I won't be any trouble. To anybody. I can help around the house. I can shovel snow or run the leaf blower. Or I can just disappear. I can live here and no one will even know I'm around." We both know who he means.
"There has to be another way," I say softly. "You've got the truck. It would be a long drive, I know, but you could drive down here to school every morning. I'm sure the school district would look the other way."
"No," he says, shaking his head. "I won't have the truck every day. Or a car. My mom says she needs her car for deliveries. Or in case there's an emergency with my grandmother."
"You've already discussed this with your mother?"
"If you can call it a discussion."
"And she said no."
"She laughed at me! She said, 'Like hell.'"
"What about your old house? You could live there by yourself. I could look in on you."
"She already rented it to some guy. She says she needs the money."
"And your dad?"
He just shakes his head.
"I can't go against your mother."
"I'll be eighteen in three weeks. I can do what I want. I just need a hand for a little while."
He turns and locks the lids on the garbage cans. "Kiernan," I say again, but he won't look at me.
"Never mind. It was a stupid idea. I'll think of something."
"Kiernan, I'm so sorry."
"Never mind," he says, and walks to the truck and gets in.
Glen is finishing his glass of wine when I go back inside. "I don't know what the hell Deborah is thinking," I say heatedly, sitting down beside him. Through the doorway I can see Max, the reflection from the TV screen a flickering shadow across his face. He has five books to read before school starts in three weeks; they're in a pile on the floor, the spines still stiff. "Alex didn't do it yet, either," Max said when I mentioned it.
"How do you know that?"
"Mom, get real," he replied, pointing the remote.
"I'm way too tired to have a Deborah conversation," Glen says, looking straight ahead.
We were never really couple friends, the Donahues and the Lathams, even when we were neighbors. Glen and Kevin would stand in the adjoining driveways and chat occasionally, and sometimes they would come to our house for dinner, and sometimes we would go to theirs.
But it wasn't like it is with Nancy and Bill, when, over time, the men started to describe themselves as friends quite apart from the friendship between their wives. It was mainly Deborah and me. She was so vivid, so unequivocal. She wore Indian-print tunics, ornate silver earrings, cuff bracelets. She could stand on her head. I don't know why that impressed me so.
She was the one who told the abusive peewee baseball coach that he was a sadist, and followed it up with a letter to the county athletic league. She demanded that they get rid of the separate boys and girls soccer leagues, and it happened, too, although too late for Kiernan and Ruby, who wouldn't have cared much in any event. "I'm not fighting for my kid, I'm fighting for all the kids," she had said in a fury. Glen said that she reminded him of a bumper sticker he had seen that said, "I love mankind. It's people I can't stand."
Once, in the parking lot of the supermarket, I watched her rip into a guy whose pickup truck had a pair of fake rubber testicles hanging from the back hitch. "We have children in this car!" she yelled, while the man kept repeating, "Lady, you're nuts." The argument got so loud that the twins and Ruby, Kiernan and his baby brother, Declan, all began to cry, and someone in the store called the police. The police made the guy take the things off the truck. In a minivan full of sobbing children, Deborah had been triumphant. But when seven-year-old Ruby told the story at the dinner table--"And Kiernan's mommy yelled and yelled, and it was so scary, Daddy, and the police came, and they had GUNS"--Glen gave me a look, and that night he said, "I don't really want our kids in that kind of situation."
"She doesn't take any crap," I'd said.
"There's a difference between being assertive and lookin
g for a fight," Glen replied. "I don't know how Kevin stands it." Maybe that was why Glen didn't particularly like Kevin, that and the fact that there were already rumors that Kevin liked other people's wives better than he liked his own.
It was Glen who heard Deborah screaming, that summer evening, when Kevin was gone somewhere, probably to someone else's home, to someone else's queen-sized bed and waiting wife. We were eating at the patio table in our backyard, and Deborah was next door, in the kitchen, with the sliding doors open to the deck so she could keep a close eye on her two boys. Kiernan was floating in a tube in the pool, and Declan was in some flotation device shaped like a boat with a canvas harness inside. He was two then, Declan, a placid little fair-haired boy entranced by the bigger kids. No one ever figured out exactly what happened, although it seems likely that he somehow wriggled free of the harness, shifted his weight, and silently, suddenly, slid south. One moment, Deborah cried afterward, she was making faces at her baby boy and the next he had vanished.
I remember the day in stutter-stop images: Deborah shrieking high and loud; Glen standing up at our patio table so suddenly that his chair fell over onto the concrete; our three kids staring as he ran into the Donahues' yard and up the steps of the deck to the pool. All the while, Kiernan floated in the tube in the deep end, frozen as Glen dove in, then lifted Declan to the deck and knelt over him. There was a moment of deep silence before Glen began to work on the little boy, a moment broken, as Ruby said, in her fluty, unknowing, precocious little girl's voice, "Mommy, is Declan drowned?"