Every Last One (14 page)

“I had no idea,” I say.

“It’s a strange and mysterious relationship,” he says, looking down at the pad again. “Think about it—both twins hear the maternal heartbeat in utero. But, because of simple positioning, one sometimes hears it more faintly than the other.” And at the thought I begin to cry again.

He stands to hand me a tissue from the box on the corner of his desk. Both Glen and I rise simultaneously, as though we were doing calisthenics. Instead of the outstretched hand this time, the doctor reaches to touch each of us lightly on the forearm.

“I think Max and I can work together well,” he repeats.

In the doorway, Glen turns back and says, “How did you come to concentrate on twins?”

“I’m a twin myself,” Dr. Vagelos says, and he gestures to a photograph on the bookcase of two men standing side by side, their arms around each other. At this distance I can’t make out faces, but it’s easy to see that one is a full head shorter than the other.

“Your brother taught you about differences as well as similarities?” I say with a laugh.

“My brother has Down syndrome,” he says, “so that would be a yes.”

Neither of us speaks in the car as we drive past the hospital and turn onto Main Street. Someone beeps, and we both raise our hands in a wave. “Who was that?” Glen says.

“I have no idea.” We edge around roadwork and then turn onto our street. The back of my truck is filled with mums, a blanket of yellow and orange.

“What was he, about sixteen?” Glen says, looking straight ahead as the car idles at the curb.

“He’s younger than I thought he would be,” I say. “Did you like him?”

Glen nods. His shirt collar is askew in the back, and I pat it into place. “All I care about is whether Max likes him,” he says.

Max is responsible for our Halloween party, which has become such a tradition that when I once suggested we skip it my family behaved as though I had blasphemed in church. “Mom,” Alex had said in a peremptory fashion, “if we don’t have a Halloween party what will people do for Halloween?”

Of course, everyone in town does not come to our Halloween party, although in recent years, as friends of the kids brought their own friends, and their girlfriends, and sometimes even their parents, it began to seem that way. As I drive down to the minimart to buy more ice, or some extra marshmallows for the cocoa, I see lots of families doing what we once did, many years ago: adults walking slowly down the sidewalk, sometimes with a baby dressed as a pumpkin or an angel on one hip, while ahead run princesses, pirates, skeletons, and ghosts. I can tell how long they’ve been out and about by the gray shadow at the hem of a white satin dress, by the slow plod as the bag full of candy grows heavy, by the tempers
of mothers and fathers standing on the street: Just four more houses and, I swear, we’re going home.

Ruby loved Halloween, loved to dance up the front walk to strangers, to announce, her consonants precise, “I am Sleeping Beauty.” Or the Little Mermaid. Or a ballerina. Glen and I each carried a boy that first year—one a bunny, the other a cat. “Dr. Latham!” one or two of the older people had said as they looked over Ruby’s head to the two of us waiting across the lawn. “I’ll see you next month.”

But when Max was four our routine altered. He would no longer approach a strange house. He stood on the sidewalk, dressed as a fireman with a hat so red and shiny you could see your own fun-house face in its surface, and refused to go farther. From time to time during the next few weeks, he would feed us a clue at the dinner table or at bedtime: We were not supposed to go to strangers’ houses. We were not supposed to speak to strangers. We were not supposed to take candy from them.

“Halloween you can,” Alex said. “I got good candy, and I don’t know how come I had to give you some ’cause you were too scared to go.”

“Maxie, I’ve been going out on Halloween for a long time, and nothing bad ever happens. It’s fun! You’ll like it!” seven-year-old Ruby had added brightly, in the same voice she used to tell him how wonderful school would be.

Max shook his head. The next year, he put on his costume and stayed in the house. I stayed with him as he handed out Hershey bars to the other children. Afterward he put three Hershey bars in his own bag, then traded Alex for a peanut-butter cup. Ruby refused to trade. She had lost patience.

Thus, the Halloween party was born. That was not how we explained it to others. A disaster provided cover. When the boys were in first grade, on Mischief Night—“which is such a lovely poetic
name for horrible mass destruction,” said Nancy, who had just become my friend at the time—four juniors at the high school had decided to try to bring down a lamppost by chaining it to a trailer hitch. They had indeed brought the lamp down; it smashed through the back of the truck and grazed the head of one of the boys, who went on to spend nearly eight months in a rehab facility learning to tie his shoes and recognize the alphabet. The town council imposed a Mischief Night and Halloween curfew of 8
P.M.
for anyone under the age of twenty-one.

“That so has to be unconstitutional and, like, completely illegal,” some teenager will say in our kitchen at some point during early fall. But no one has done anything about it in the years since it first went into effect. The parents of the little kids, weary of complaints about sore feet and heavy bags, have them home long before then. The parents of the older kids are happy to have someone else assume the burden of getting them off the streets at a reasonable hour. The parents of teenagers are delighted that the opportunity for mayhem is curtailed by law.

And it was a godsend for us, because it enabled us to create the Halloween party without having to explain that it was because our son was terrified of trick-or-treating. Our friends brought candy and their costumed children. There was a pumpkin piñata and apple-bobbing. We set up a benign haunted house in the basement, with an illuminated witch who cackled on a continuous loop and a ghost that swooped on a zip line. Max was allowed to see everything in daylight before the evening of the party so that he wouldn’t be afraid.

The children are all old enough to come on their own now, but most of their parents still arrive, bearing plastic pumpkins full of Milky Ways and Swedish Fish. Some of them even dress up. Glen wears a dark suit and a mask of whoever happens to be president at the time. Alex always wears what I think of as a man-of-action
costume; this year he is a member of the Boston Red Sox, which hardly seems to count as a disguise. Ruby’s outfit is always more of a fashion statement: This year she is a turn-of-the-century newsboy with her hair under a flat cap and knickers set off by red suspenders. She already had everything she needed in her closet.

Max seems a little better these days, or, at least, no worse. There have been no more calls from school, and now that they are in different rooms, he and Alex seem more civil to each other, although Ruby says that Alex still ignores his brother at school. “I guess just because they’re twins everyone thought they would always be friends,” she said ruefully.

“Did you talk to Max about that?”

“He barely speaks to me, Mommy. I hope he outgrows this before I leave for college.”

I felt a terrible twinge at the thought. “Oh, Lord, I hope it happens long before then,” I replied.

I am relieved to peer out the dining-room window at dusk and see a silver robot at the end of the walk, handing out Hershey bars to small children, a few of whom pat his big boxy body. Max still likes to be the one to dispense candy to the smallest trick-or-treaters. The box costume is his specialty. One year he was a set of dice, another a box of crayons. His greatest achievement was a refrigerator, with a door that opened, although it seemed ready to tear free any minute. Inside were cardboard shelves with some empty containers—milk, yogurt, a discarded pickle jar—and, atop the foodstuffs, Max’s face, peering out from what would have been the freezer compartment.

The robot lumbers toward the house to get more candy. I wave. He raises a hand in an old ski glove painted silver. He is walking stiffly, an authentic automaton. He must have made this in the garage or the house would have reeked of spray paint.

“Great costume,” I call.

Muffled by the box, I hear “Thanks.”

The lawn is studded with cornstalks twined together with raffia and large piles of gourds and pumpkins. There are big terra-cotta pots of gold mums on either side of the front door. I’m glad we do this. I sometimes think of having grandchildren who will believe that people always have Halloween parties, who will gently mock Grandpa in his presidential mask and wonder why Grandma doesn’t wear a costume. “She never has,” one of my children will say. I know this may well be a delusion, that it’s possible there will be no grandchildren, or they will live half a world away, or their parents will be too busy to give more than the most cursory notice to Halloween.
It’s only before the realities set in that we can treasure our delusions.

Almost as soon as I put the trivets on the table and the spiced nuts in the bowls, the guests begin to pour in, until I am not sure I know who is here and who is not. Nancy is always dressed as a witch. “Totally appropriate,” she says at some point every year, her black synthetic hair falling around her face. Sarah is dressed as a nurse, perhaps to annoy her mother. I am surprised to see Ben’s mother, Olivia, with her blond hair in ringlets, wearing a girlish gingham dress. As small as she is, she looks like a child. Ben has disappeared out back with Alex, but her three younger boys surround her. They are dressed in bear suits. “Goldilocks!” I say, laughing, and hug her. “This porridge is just right,” she says airily, and we both laugh. This is the first year she has come to the party, and I’m touched that she made such an effort.

Sandy comes with Rachel, and is dressed—barely dressed—like a Playboy Bunny. Rachel is wearing a Wonder Woman costume, which is really just a Playboy Bunny costume in red, white, and blue. “Wowwee,” I say to Rachel, who blushes fiercely. Here is what I know about dressing like your teenage daughter: She will always look better than you. I look around for Ruby.

“Have you seen your buddy?” I ask Sarah, who is listening to Eric’s heart with her stethoscope.

“I think she went upstairs. Her hair keeps falling out of her hat. Maybe she’s going to braid it up.”

“How’s his heart?”

Sarah listens carefully. “He doesn’t have one.”

Eric says, “I gave it to you.”

“Ooooohhh,” Sarah and I groan together. “You are so slick,” Sarah adds.

The macaroni and cheese is running low, and I take another pan from the oven. Glen is eating ham with his fingers. “Make yourself a plate,” I say. “I’ll just pick,” he says.

I carry the trash out back and see that most of the children of a certain age are standing around in the yard, only half costumed. Ben has unzipped his bear suit and pulled it down to his waist. For once it hasn’t rained, the great Halloween catastrophe. “Noooo,” Ruby would wail if we made her wear a slicker over her sequins and satin. Both my boys are talking to a pirate with an enormous gold hoop earring and long dark curls half hidden by a knotted headscarf. Through the eyeholes of his black mask, I see the glitter of green.

“Aaarrrggh!”
Kiernan shouts in a pirate’s voice. “Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest. Dude, is that right? Fifteen? Sixteen?” He is brandishing a long plastic sword. He pokes Max in the front of his robot box. “How many men on a dead man’s chest?”

I put the trash at the side of the house and come back and touch his arm. “Shiver me timbers!” Kiernan says.

“And yours,” I reply. “How’s school?”

“It’s all right,” he says.

“How’s your grandmother?”

“Kind of crazy. Whoops, sorry, I’m not allowed to say that.
She’s the same.” Eric and Sarah come outside. “Ahoy, mateys!” Kiernan calls.

Suddenly like the sound of a door closing, we have run out of conversation. All the years I’ve known this boy, and now there is nothing for us to talk about that is not dangerous: his mother, his future, his father, his feelings, my daughter.

“Did you eat?” I say. This is what mothers say when they don’t know what to say: Did you eat?

“Nah, I’m not really hungry. I’m going out later. I just wanted to stop by. You can’t fool around with tradition. I told Max I think I’ve been coming to this party from the beginning.” Almost, but not quite. The year of the first Halloween party, Kiernan and his mother were still living elsewhere. Nancy told me she heard afterward that during those years he had had night terrors and begun to wet the bed. I remembered he had once told me that what was so difficult was knowing that his former life was so close by and yet so far from him. At least now he can drive.

“I’m working on a big, big project,” Kiernan says.

“What’s the subject?”

He puts his finger dramatically to his lips, and leans toward me. Suddenly I realize that he’s drunk. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. “Top secret,” he says.

Night is beginning to fall, and someone inside turns on the backyard lights. Illuminated, Kiernan looks thin and bony, more skeleton than pirate. Ginger lumbers over and he scratches her ears.