"It was a bit like that for me in the beginning. My parents were rather well known, and it was a horrid accident. But then people forget. Everyone has something."
My mother had said something similar when she was leaving the last time to return to Florida. "This happens to everyone, this losing people," she said as she stood in the hallway with her suitcase, a valedictory she had clearly been rehearsing. "It just usually happens in stages, not all at once. You've had the worst that anyone could have, Mary Beth. But you still have to figure out how to get on with your life."
"I don't know what my life is now," I had said.
"You have a child. That's what matters."
"I like cartoons," says Luke, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the den on Sunday morning. I wonder if he ever asks for anything, or if he always just says what he likes and expects it to follow. He has slept in my bed again. "You're not my mother," he said before he fell asleep. "I know," I replied.
Andrew and Aidan emerge from their rooms. "Can we call our mom and dad?" Aidan says.
"Yes," I say.
"Shut up about your penis," Andrew says to Luke.
"I'm telling Dad you said shut up," Aidan says.
"You're mean," Luke says, to one or the other.
"Boys," I say darkly, and I feel joyous for just a moment at the familiar bickering, and then I feel terrible because of the joy, and then I make bacon. When Alex and Ben come wandering out, they organize a game of Frisbee on the lawn, and Luke runs back and forth, back and forth, the disk sailing over his head until finally he collapses in tears and I settle him with some cartoons and a cookie. The bigger boys come in to play Battleship. "Hit and sunk!" I hear for what seems like hours, and then I make them all gather at the big pine table to do some homework. "Andrew keeps putting his foot on my foot," Aidan says.
"Mummy!" screams Luke as we hear a car.
Ted walks us down to the guesthouse. Alex goes inside, and we stand at the door as a sharp sudden wind starts to whip around us. "Maybe we'll have a storm tonight," I say, looking up at the clouds sailing swiftly past.
"I can't thank you enough," Ted says.
"It was nothing," I say, and I realize that it's almost true. It was not so terrible, being with other people for two entire days. Or perhaps it was because the people were children, who didn't think to worry, fuss, wonder how I was feeling, persuade me to share. They wanted me only to provide meals, mediate quarrels, keep order. "Really, they were great," I add.
"Yeah, and a whole hell of a lot of work. Believe me, I know. But I really mean thanks for what you've done for Olivia. Getting to be friends with you has made a real difference for her. It hasn't been easy, living in a strange place, not really knowing anyone, having so many kids so close together. She's been kind of lonely. And now, not so much. She really values your friendship."
"And I value hers. I mean that."
"Well, good. You can take her shopping anytime. That was some dress the two of you picked out for her."
"It was perfection," I say.
We're in Times Square walking north, Alice, Alex, and I. We're dwarfed by sports stars and musicians and actors, great flat giants hovering over the three of us on enormous billboards as we thread our way among street vendors and tourists taking one another's pictures on the sidewalks. A man hands Alex a flyer for a strip club, and I try to take it from his hand. "Lady, lady," Alex says, "be cool." Earlier I had tried to take his arm as we left the subway for the street. "Okay, no," he said flatly, jamming his fists into his pockets. He has grown another inch or two, and now he is not a boy who has lost his baby fat but a half-man, bearded, basso, a different species from my own.
"Are you sad about how grown-up he's gotten?" Alice had asked when I mentioned it the night before, her fingers idly playing with Liam's too-long hair. There are so many ways in which she is trying to keep him a baby, from the matted curls to the onesie pajamas.
"No, not really," I replied. I am sad that Max will never grow up, that Ruby will never grow older. But I don't say that. It's nice that Alice still asks me the old commonplace questions.
Alex wants to go to a Times Square store that sells sports gear, then through Central Park to the Museum of Natural History. Alice has gotten Alex tickets to a Yankees game and to a concert at a downtown club. She's been so thoughtful; a graduate student at Columbia who lives in a studio apartment in her building is going to take Alex to both, so that she and I can have time for ourselves. The student's name is Nate, and apparently he loves baseball and music in equal measures. He is getting his doctorate in anthropology.
"Nate's coming up to meet you," Alice had said to us when we first arrived, and she buried her face in Liam's hair.
"Nate is great!" Liam yelled.
Our ride to New York had been an unexpected interlude. The farther the car traveled from the guesthouse, and our old house, and our town, and all the people in it, the calmer I felt. My shoulders seemed to soften with every mile. When we pulled into a rest stop--coffee for me, two burgers, fries, and a Coke for Alex--I felt a little as though we were just like everyone else. Twice I had thought about canceling this trip, not sure I could bear the drive, the distance, the feigned normalcy.
"Have a nice day," said the girl behind the counter, looking Alex up and down.
"You, too," I replied.
Liam was right: Nate was great. He engaged Alex in a long arcane conversation about the Knicks and how a variety of injuries had affected their last season. It is the kind of conversation Alex used to have with his father. "They've got no defense," Glen would say, and Alex would sigh. I wish I could remember more of those conversations, but I never paid any attention. Sometimes now Alex has them on the phone with my father-in-law.
"Nate, will you read to me?" Liam had asked, standing between Nate's knees, his small hands braced on Nate's thighs. "I can read to you," Alex had said kindly, but Liam stared up at Nate's face and shook his head. I watched as Nate lifted Liam onto one knee and continued to talk to Alex, segueing into baseball, while Liam leaned against him and sucked his thumb. Alice brought Liam a sippy cup of milk, Alex a Coke, and Nate a beer.
"I can play baseball," Liam said, interrupting.
"You sit and listen," Alice said, offering me a glass of wine. Nate looked up at her and smiled, and she smiled back. She went into the kitchen to get cheese, and I followed and grabbed her arm at the sink.
"I'm in shock," I said.
"What?"
"Don't play dumb with me. How old is he, and how long have you been seeing him?"
"Seeing him? Are you my mother?"
"Okay, fine. How long have you been sleeping with him?"
"You're being really loud," Alice whispered.
"Fine," I whispered back. "Answer my question."
And with a sweet smile Alice replied, "He's thirty-four, and I met him in February."
"How?"
"He lives in the building. He asked me to dinner. He wouldn't take no for an answer. I told him I was almost ten years older than he is. I told him I had a child. I was as mean to him as I know how to be."
"That's mean," I said.
"It didn't make any difference. He outlasted me."
"And you didn't tell me."
"I thought you would think I was nuts."
I put my arms around her, and I thought that was only partly true. She hadn't told me because it was happy news at a terrible time. And then, because it seemed to me that all I truly heard now of any conversation was what went unsaid, I told her that.
"That's true," she said. "I couldn't picture myself calling you and saying, 'Oh, honey, guess what? I've got a boyfriend.'"
"Is he a boyfriend?"
"He introduced me to his mother."
"Wow!"
"And here's the best thing--she had him late in life. So she's nowhere near my age. Not even close."
"Does she know about Liam?"
"She brought him a stuffed monkey."
"She's a better woman than I
would be."
"Me, too. I keep trying to imagine Liam with a girlfriend who is ten years older than he is. Nate says he thinks his mother worried that he was gay when he moved to New York, so she's just relieved that I'm female."
"Where's he from?"
"Nova Scotia."
"Maybe he's using you for a green card," I said darkly.
"I don't care," she said, and I hugged her again. I will have to learn to be generous about this, about other people's happiness. Rachel and Sarah. Olivia and Alice. Even Alex. There will come a time when good things will happen to him, and I will have to make certain to welcome his triumphs and his joys, and to make sure they're not always shadowed by his father, his brother, his sister.
"Nate is great," Alex had said that morning, reading the account of the game in the morning paper. "He knows a lot about the museum. He can't go with us because he has to teach some class, but he told me what to see."
When we reach the Natural History museum, Alex pulls a piece of folded lined paper from his back pocket. It is Nate's list. Ocean life, it says. Space center. We spend four hours wandering from marvel to marvel. Only once am I undone by memory and sensation, and that's when I enter the butterfly exhibit and watch them fan the air with stained-glass wings. I lean my head against a cool wall and breathe deeply, then move on. "Mom, check this out," Alex says, standing with his head thrown back beneath the blue whale tethered to a beveled ceiling, and for a moment he is a boy again, a boy without cares. I think about how much Max and Ruby and Glen would enjoy this and wish we had all done it together years ago.
We take the subway back to Alice's neighborhood in Brooklyn. Across the subway car from us sit a man in a turban, a woman covered with tattoos, a woman in a black suit reading an anthology of poetry, and a teenage boy about Alex's age, doing what looks like math homework in a spiral notebook. I feel anonymous, and glad to be so. At a row of brick houses with worn stoops Alex says, "It's so cool to live here, isn't it?" A small white truck is trolling the block, the man at the wheel calling something I can't catch in a singsong voice. "The knife sharpener," Alice says. "You can bring your knives out to the truck."
"That is so cool," Alex says, with no hint of what I feel--the sharpened knives, a frisson of fear.
In an Italian restaurant he finishes a plate of gnocchi, some veal, an ice-cream dessert striped like a flag. I let him have an inch worth of red wine in his glass. He and Alice discuss the space show at the museum and a book she is editing on life on Mars. "That is a cool job," Alex says. I am an ordinary woman with her son and an old friend eating dinner. It's the first time I have felt ordinary in so long--free of public scrutiny, and sympathy, and judgment, too. I know there is judgment. The mother of one of the boys on the basketball team took the coach aside and said her son found it upsetting to play on the same team as Alex. The coach said he would be sorry to lose him. The kid said his mother was psycho. The mother backed down. I should stare at her at the games with a defiant gaze, but instead my eyes drop when she looks over at me. No one judges me as harshly as I judge myself. No one wants me hidden away as much as I want to hide. It's as though I'm one of those burn victims, with a face so scarred and stripped that other people have to look, then look away.
In the window of a thrift shop Alex sees an old army jacket, and we make him try it on, and only the sleeves are a little long. Alice rolls them up once. "I wonder who Steiner was," Alex says, looking at the name stamped above the heart. "You should buy it," I say, and we do.
Alex is sleeping in Liam's room, on a couch where the nanny sleeps when Alice has to work late, and as we have another drink just before midnight I hear him on the baby monitor. "Dude, the giant squid," I hear, but I can't make out the rest.
"He can't be talking to Liam, can he?" I ask.
"If Liam were awake, he wouldn't be letting Alex get a word in edgewise. I think Liam is a little jealous that we went out without him, and that Nate is paying attention to Alex. Which reminds me--I need to ask you an enormous favor."
"Shoot."
"Can I make you Liam's legal guardian if anything happens to me?"
"Nothing's going to happen to you."
"Nothing's going to happen to me," she agrees. "But I need to know that there's someone backstopping me. My parents are just too old. My father just turned seventy-seven."
"What about your brothers?"
"Okay, babe, let's recap: John is married to a crazy person; Jim is married to a woman who didn't want to have her own kids, much less mine; Tommy isn't married, because that would demand a commitment; and Teddy is a closet case. I love them all. But daddy material? No way."
"I'm not trying to get out of this. I just want to be able to stand up in court and say, 'Yes, Your Honor, I know she has four brothers, but she didn't think a single one of them would make a competent parent. Except maybe the closet case.'"
"Is that a yes?"
"Of course it is. You would do the same for me. You came close to having to."
"Stop."
"It's true."
On the monitor we hear Alex say something else. It sounds like "up and down the stairs." Or maybe it was "all around, and scared."
"Alex seems pretty good," Alice says.
"He does. He did decide to go to the therapist. Maybe that's helping."
"He's always had a really even keel."
"I know. He's the only one I can imagine getting through this. Ruby or, God forbid, Max? I can't imagine it."
Alice rubs at her eyes. "Glen is the one I think about sometimes. If anything had happened to you, I don't think he could have survived." Her lip trembles.
"You've made it through this whole visit without crying," I say. "Don't mess it up now." I do my crying privately. Early in the morning, I had gone out to walk along the promenade that skirts the river. I walked for nearly two hours, first with no companions except a pair of police officers and a man asleep on a bench, then surrounded by runners who had the sure, smooth pace of those following a familiar route. When I wept, they scarcely looked at me. Perhaps, with everyone living so close together, city dwellers expect to have a walk-on role in other people's dramas and tragedies.
I hear Alex laugh, speak, choke up, laugh again.
"Maybe he's talking in his sleep," I say. I'm glad there is a receiver for the baby monitor in the living room, where I've insisted on sleeping. I worry that Alex may have a nightmare in the unfamiliar place. He mutters more as I doze.
But when I wake at five and tiptoe in, Alex looks like he is sleeping the sleep of the teenage boy, so deep it cannot be shaken even by Liam, who has climbed into bed with Alex and has thrown one chubby leg over Alex's long scarred one. I go back into the living room, and think about Glen, and how he would have liked the space show, and how he would have sneaked away to the gift shop to buy me a keepsake. Alex's keepsake will be his new jacket. "That jacket is totally great," I hear Ruby saying. "Hands off, dude," Alex says to Max, and Max makes a face, as though he is thinking, That jacket's not for you, dude, it's for me. I will sneak it out of your closet the first chance I get.
Nate and Alex exchange a complex power handshake as we prepare to leave the next morning. Liam looks confused, then distressed. "Mama!" he says. "I want to go to the park."
"Do not screw this up," I whisper as I hug Alice.
"I hear you," she says.
In the car Alex puts on his headphones, and I listen to a public-radio program. A resonant voice describes colony-collapse disorder. "All over the country, beekeepers are opening their hives to discover that all their bees are dead," the reporter says. An interview with a monosyllabic writer follows, and my mind wanders. I wonder if Alice will call to ask my advice, slowly, tentatively, about getting married. I wonder if I will ask her advice someday, about being the only parent of an only child. I look over at Alex. What I can hear of his music, from deep inside the headphones, is tuneless and metallic, like the buzzing of bees.
"I hope Ginger is all right," I say when he take
s the headphones off for a moment.
"She's fine. I called Ben yesterday. Luke is hanging out with her."
"Did you have a good time?"
"Mom, I kept thinking, Why am I going away when I could just hang out with my friends? But I had a really great time. Much better than I expected."
"Me, too. So I have a great idea--what about living there?"
"I was thinking that. Nate told me there are so many good colleges in New York. Even if I couldn't get into Columbia, there are other places where you can go and still be in the city. He said there are even some Division 3 schools where maybe I could play. I'm really going to think about it."
I look out the windshield. The yellow line is rushing up at me. "I was thinking sooner," I say. I pause. "There's no reason we couldn't move to Brooklyn. There are lots of good private schools. That's what Alice said. Everybody says they're really hard to get into, but with what a great athlete you are I bet they'd be glad to have you."
Alex is silent. His headphones rest in his lap. "Who are you?" I hear The Who singing faintly, but it sounds like just waah-waah.
"I mean, you really liked the city, right? There would be so much to do, and you don't have to drive; you can just take the subway, go to the movies with your friends. Alice says--"
"I'm not moving," Alex says flatly. "I'm not leaving my friends and my school. I'm not moving." He has turned toward me, and his voice is rising. I put out my hand as though we're going to brake suddenly. "I'm not moving," he yells.
"All right, sorry, I hear you. Calm down."
He's breathing hard, the way he does on the soccer field.
"I just thought it might be a good change for us," I say softly.
"I'm not moving."
"I heard you."
We drive in silence for what seems like a long time. I can't find another decent radio station. He puts on his headphones. I've spoiled it. I don't know what to do, or what to do next. The memorial service, the will, the insurance: No one tells you what to do after, when things are supposed to go back to normal. I suppose what comes next is pretend-normal. I feel exhausted thinking about it.
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