"It's a simple 'I love you' will," Larry the lawyer says. What a lovely legal term. I love you, I love you. It means that if I died everything we had belonged to Glen, and if he died everything belonged to me. I love you I love you I love you. The sentence is running through my mind, a continuous loop, like one of those digital signs. I love you. Glen wrote it every year when he sent roses on my birthday, on the little card the florist gave him: I love you. Larry's mouth moves. Bill's mouth moves. I love you I love you. I've missed something. I'm not sure what. I try to pay attention again, but I can't seem to do it. I love you, I love you, where am I?
"... guardian," Larry says.
"Obviously, that's not an issue," Bill says.
I remembered how, years ago, we had argued over who to appoint legal guardian of our children. I wanted to talk about Deborah and Kevin. But Glen wouldn't hear of it even before Declan drowned. In my will now, my brother, Richard, and his wife would get Alex if anything happened to me. I look over at my brother, and he runs his hand over the back of my chair. I will change that as soon as I have a chance to think about it. Olivia, I think, or maybe Alice.
Glen was so careful, so responsible. The insurance on the house means there is no mortgage left to pay. The value of his practice means that there are three potential buyers already. And Glen's life insurance means that I now have a great deal of money. Bill knows all this, since he is our insurance agent. "So she's set for life?" my father-in-law asks, and I know that this will be one of the things he will say: Glen made sure his wife was set for life. A kind of lottery.
Everything's done. The will will be probated. The insurance money will be paid into our investment account. The investment account will be transferred to my name alone. Glen's practice will be sold. "Highest bidder, correct?" says Bill, but I speak.
"I want to interview them," I say suddenly. I'm surprised to hear myself.
"The potential buyers?" says Larry Reinhold.
"We can take care of that for you," Bill says. Everyone wants to do things for me. I wonder what they think I will find to do when everything is done for me. Make soup. Drive aimlessly. Page through cookbooks. Sleep. The ghost of Mary Beth Latham will move, senseless, through her own existence, waiting for something to do, waiting for someone to call. Waiting, and listening, for three familiar voices.
"I want to interview them," I repeat. "I don't want Glen's patients to wind up with someone they won't like. He wouldn't want that." It is something I can do, I think. I love you, I think. I almost say it aloud.
No one responds. Finally Larry makes a note, and nods. "I can arrange that. Probably here, don't you think, not in the office itself? Anything else?"
"What about a lawsuit?" my father-in-law says. "Can we sue that son of a bitch? Can we sue his mother and father for their, their, you know--"
"Negligence," Doug says. "Is that doable?"
It took them three days to find Kiernan. The local police were out of their depth, if you were being kind, or incompetent, if you are talking to Glen's father. They spent a full day looking for Alex after they found bloody clothes in a pile on the floor of his room and his bed still made. They visited the homes of the kids' friends, they interviewed the neighbors, they made a mess of the house and any evidence to be found there. And three days later, when the story, and the screwups, and the fact that Alex had been thousands of miles away while they combed the forest for him were all over the newspapers, the state police took over. They went up into the room above the garage, and there was Kiernan, hanging from a rafter with a gaudy blue-and-gold nylon rope around his neck, a rope I had bought to tie some plywood to the roof of my car for a landscaping project I could no longer remember. The only reason I remember the rope was because it was in the school colors.
Apparently, he'd been living above our garage on and off for months, while his mother thought he was spending the weekend with his father, while his father thought he was with her, while both of them thought he was at the home of a new school friend, although he hadn't made any friends because he had barely attended the new school. When someone called to say he'd missed class, he'd erase the message; when the letters arrived, he destroyed them. How cold he must have been as winter closed in, in that uninsulated room, huddled in his old sleeping bag, the one he'd used all those nights when he and Ruby watched the heavens. He'd been telling the truth at Halloween, when he said he was working on a project. It covered the bare walls of the garage room: dozens and dozens of photographs he had taken of the members of our family--at the dinner table, in the yard, on Main Street, outside the high school. Ruby dominated, of course, but we were all there, and once he had pasted them up he spraypainted over the wall of black-and-white images the words HAPPY FAMILIES over and over in red. The police didn't get the reference to Anna Karenina, but I did. Ruby and Kiernan had read the novel in AP English, and Ruby had been disdainful of Anna for leaving her son behind and choosing Vronsky instead. Kiernan had said she couldn't help it, it was love that made her do it, love that made her leap in front of that speeding train, it was love that made people do things they wouldn't do otherwise.
I heard Alice and Nancy talking about it, and about the fact that a gallery in New York had asked to remove the walls of the garage and exhibit the whole thing. "People have no shame," Nancy had said, and Alice said, "Did you see the picture of it?" and Nancy said, "Don't tell me it's really amazing, because if I hear that one more time I will hit someone."
I think I was supposed to be sleeping when they had that conversation, when they were discussing the "various scenarios" of what happened that evening in terms of timing and intent. But when I imagined those red letters obliterating our faces, our eyes, our lives, the only scenario that really made sense to me was the one I found hardest to believe. He just wanted to wipe us all out.
"No lawsuit," I say, and I think Larry Reinhold looks relieved. Perhaps he knows what I know: that either I am a woman who was blind to the mania of a young man who was a fixture in her own household or I am a woman who knew exactly what he was capable of and embraced him nonetheless.
"We're not talking money here," my father-in-law continues. "We're talking responsibility. If he was still alive, he'd be convicted and he'd rot in jail. Now it's like nobody has to take responsibility." I remember what Glen once said of his father, "Everything has to be somebody's fault. If lightning strikes your house, it has to be because you put the lightning rod in the wrong place."
"No," I repeat. "End of discussion." I want to go home. I want my pills. I can't breathe. There is a moth hole in my dress.
I've already risen to my feet to shake Larry's hand by the time my father-in-law says, "What about me? Can I sue the bastards?" I'm on my way to the door as Doug says, "Pop, this is not the place."
"What the hell do you mean? It's a lawyer's office."
"Pop, come on."
I felt obliged to invite them all to lunch. I'll finally have a chance to empty out the freezer. The lasagna, the whole-wheat rolls. We sit in the living room with plates balanced on our laps. Ginger barks when the strange men enter the house, then moves around the room, her nose raised and searching blindly. My brother gives her a piece of bread. "Richard, don't," I say reflexively "She'll get fat."
"Alex might feel different about a lawsuit," Glen's father says.
"Pop, enough," says Doug.
"Where is he?" my father-in-law says.
"He's at school. Then he has basketball until six. Do you want to join us for dinner? You'd be welcome." I feel as though I am saying lines from a play. I can't wait for them to leave. When they're gone, I can sit in a chair. Just sit.
"We got six hours in the car," he says, cleaning his plate with a piece of bread. "I got a job starting first thing in the morning. Maybe we'll go over and watch him play ball."
As they start to leave, I pull my brother-in-law into the bedroom. "You make sure he doesn't say a word to Alex, you hear me? I'm trying to keep him on an even keel, and I don't want your father upsetting him."
"I'm on it, MB," Doug says. He's the only one who calls me that, and I've always found it endearing. In some ways, he is more like my brother than my real brother, who is more like my doctor. My brother was on the phone to the nurses' station, overseeing my medication and my care, the whole time I was in the hospital. He stayed on the line with me the third night, when they wanted to discharge me but I was afraid to leave. "It feels like when I put my feet on the floor I'm stepping into an empty space," I'd said, working hard to string the words together. "It's like, just like when we went to the lake and I fell in that deep spot and went down and Daddy had to pull me out. It feels just like that."
There had been silence, and then my brother said, "That was me, not Dad." I don't know what to believe anymore. "I'm going to get them to change your medication," Richard had said.
"I don't know how the hell you're holding it together," my brother-in-law says, and I almost laugh at the idea. "I just can't get my mind around it--you know what I mean?" he continues. "You know, sometimes we'd go a month, two months without talking. But I always knew Glen had my back. It's like I lost a piece of myself." He looks up, then away again. "I can't believe I'm saying this to you, of all people. And you know what kills me? I remember meeting that kid here two summers ago. What was it, Memorial Day weekend? He seemed like a nice kid. We all thought he seemed like a nice kid. The papers said he dropped acid or PCP or something. I never would have figured him for a druggie."
Apparently, that is one of the various scenarios. Kiernan was bipolar and wasn't medicated, was medicated and had stopped taking his medicine, was addicted to drugs, was addicted to alcohol. Was addicted to us. What difference does it make now?
"Who knows?" I say wearily.
"Douglas!" barks my father-in-law from the front door. Cold air shoots through the little house. Ginger pushes her muzzle into my hand and licks my fingers, greasy with the bit of butter I put on the bread to try to get it down.
I know I'm supposed to hate Kiernan, but I can't manage that, any more than I can manage to believe that I will never see Ruby again, or Max, or Glen. Maybe it will all come later--the realization, the rage. I remember how we put in a security system to keep intruders out of the house, and how we only used it when we went on vacations. It didn't matter: Our intruder had a place at our table, knew where we hid the Easter eggs and where we'd buried the pet guinea pigs, was so familiar that when I saw him in the bedroom doorway that last time I thought he was my own son, come to kill me.
Ginger jumps up on the counter and eats a piece of bread. A big piece, mine, with only a small corner nibbled. She runs into the bedroom, crawls beneath the dust ruffle, assuming I'll try to pry open her stubborn jaws, but I let her go. Let her get fat. I clean the kitchen, lie down on the couch. Ginger stays under the bed. It must be like a cave. For a moment, I wish I could go under there. It reminds me of when I wanted to get into Ruby's crib when she was an infant so that I could see what she was seeing. "Okay, that's nuts, Mary Beth," Glen had said.
The phone rings. It's Olivia's cell. "Can I have Chinese with Ben?" Alex asks. The insurance, the house, the will--it's all done, and everything seems softer and smoother because of the pills. Let him eat there. It must be noisy and bright and uncomplicated there.
"Grandpop came to practice," says Alex. "He says if I grow enough I might be able to play college ball. He and Coach have the same tattoo."
"Semper fi," I say.
"Grandpop says it means 'stay strong.'"
"More or less," I say. "It means 'always faithful.'" And, as the words leave my mouth, I put my fist to my lips. There is something about the phrase, about what it means to me now, that makes me feel as though I am going to begin to scream. I understand that I will have to be faithful forever myself--to memory, to history, to a life that has ceased to exist except in my mind.
"Ben's mom says she'll send me home with a flashlight," Alex says. "She says she'll stand in the door and watch."
There is a long silence while I try to push back the wave of my feelings. My knuckles press on my front teeth. Always faithful. Always. My God, always is such a long, long time.
"Mom?" Alex says. "You there?"
"I'll stand at the door and wait, too," I say, but he is already gone, and soon so am I. Sleep, sleep. It is the only time I feel safe. What an irony. Sleep. I love you, I think as I drift away.
I have a new phone. The old one is somewhere in my old house. I haven't been there, or even driven by it. "Have you figured out what you're going to do with the house?" my father-in-law always says when he calls. "Not yet," I say. "You're going to have a hard time selling it," he says. "I know," I say.
I have a new phone number, too. Somehow reporters discovered the old one, before they lost interest in me. Alice says we were lucky: In early January a senator was arrested for sexual misconduct in a restroom, and an earthquake took down a section of a small town south of San Francisco. A day after that, a terrorist cell was uncovered in Detroit. The police chief had told reporters that my house looked like the scene of a terrorist attack, and I suppose he was right. But instead of religious or political zeal, the attack on us was fueled by something more potent--love, rage, despair, all those things that the adult world decries and can't understand because it has ceased to feel them. If only Kiernan could have lived long enough to learn how to feel less.
My phone rings, and the man's voice on the other end is slightly familiar; at first I think it's one of the reporters, who has gotten interested in us again. There's a buzz on the line, and a sound like the one a needle used to make skittering across an album on a turntable. Then the noise clears and I hear, "Mrs. Latham? It's Dr. Vagelos."
I'm standing in the kitchen at the table. It's March, and the roof is dripping loudly into the gravel gully around the foundation.
"Yes?" I say.
"I wanted to talk to you about your son."
I can hear the water hitting the stones. Ping. Ping. The smallest sounds are loud to me now. Last year Max started to read all these comic books about the apocalypse, the end of the world. "Disaster porn," Ruby had said dismissively Now I understand the point. The visions of cities being leveled are only attempts by human beings to come up with an alternative universe in which they are not sentenced to grieve alone. I know how disaster really comes, not with a mushroom cloud but with a whimper, a handful of matted tissues, the loud, incessant plink of water on gravel.
"He's dead," I blurt out. And for some reason saying it aloud makes it more real than it has ever been before, more real than when the death certificates came in the mail, more real than when the lawyer made me sign the papers for the insurance and the estate, more real than when the square boxes heavy with ashes arrived from the funeral home and I put them on the top shelf of the closet in the bedroom. For a moment I lose all the air in my body, and then I put the phone down on the table and walk out the back door onto the grass. I don't know how much time passes, but when I step back inside there is no one on the phone. Then it rings again, and I hear Dr. Vagelos's voice, softer now.
"I'm so sorry," he says without preamble, and I remember that I thought I saw him at the memorial service. Dark hair, dark frames on his glasses. His glasses. That was how I remembered who he was. If it was him. There were so many faces that day. Patients, classmates, neighbors, clients, friends. So many.
"Thank you," I say, as always.
"I'm actually calling about Alex."
"Alex?"
"He came by to see me yesterday. He wants to work with me. It's a little unusual, treating brothers, but I do it from time to time, especially if they're twins. I'd like to help him out if it's all right with you."
"Alex? Alex wants to talk to you?"
"If that's all right with you."
"He didn't say anything to me."
"I thought that might be the case. I get the impression that he's concerned about worrying you. I know you know this already, but he's in a tough position. People use the term 'survivor's guilt'
casually, but it's a real phenomenon. I think he feels the need to talk to somebody who's outside his usual circle." As he speaks I can see the doctor in my mind, see him and the photograph of him and his brother. I assumed his brother was alive, but maybe I was wrong about that. I don't want to ask him. I've discovered death is the thing people don't want to discuss.
In the silence he adds, "If you're uncomfortable with me because of Max, I can recommend someone else." And for a moment I feel such love for this man, who has spoken my son's name. No one does this; no one says their names. And because I am as guilty as the rest, I repeat it back: "Max."
"I miss seeing Max," Dr. Vagelos says, and with a great effort I say, "I do, too."
I sit for a long time at the table, and then I walk up the hill to Olivias house. I've begun to think about looking for a place to rent, although Olivia and Ted have said over and over that we can stay in the guesthouse indefinitely, that Ben loves having Alex nearby, that Ben's grades have improved in the past two months because the two of them do homework together, that the younger boys feel as though they have another older brother.
"I need to talk to you," I say when she opens the back door.
I tell her about the phone call from Dr. Vagelos. She looks down at her hands, flat on the table, and then says, "Don't you think it's a good idea? I think it's a good idea."
"Do you think he's struggling? Are you worried about how he's behaving around you and the boys?"
"Not really," she says. "He's quieter than he once was, but I think it would be strange if he wasn't. Ben says he seems sad sometimes. He says sometimes Alex starts to talk about Max, and then stops, as though he still doesn't know how to do it, or what to say. But they're boys. They don't pour their hearts out, do they? I wish he could. And if he actually took the time to go on his own to see this man and ask to work with him, I think that's all to the good. He needs to vent. I assume he doesn't feel there's anywhere to do that except perhaps this doctor's office."
"Has he ever really let go with Ben? I mean, they're best friends." And even as I say it, I realize that I have not spoken with Alice or Nancy or Olivia herself about any of this, that my greatest care has been to keep the agony and the anger I feel away from the light, for fear that if it can be clearly seen it will be insupportable. As though she can hear my thoughts, Olivia replies, in a soft voice, "I'm sure sometimes it seems easier, or at least simpler, not to talk about it."