Free Every Last One by Anna Quindlen Page B

standing in a break in the scraggly hedge fence between the yards. “My mommy says I can play with you. This is my new house. I have a green room.” Even then his eyes had followed Ruby around theyard as she danced in her pink tutu, her eyes half closed, singing to herself, conspicuously ignoring him.
    They had both been ready to enter kindergarten. The twins were toddlers, and Deborah was pregnant and not certain that she was happy about it. Long afternoons we sat on her back deck drinking iced tea and giving the kids Popsicles. Instead of bathing them all, we let the sticky stuff wash off in the shallow end of the pool, let Kiernan and Ruby paddle down to the diving board in their bright-colored tubes. How lonely we would have been without each other!
    And all those years later, this: Kiernan sobbing into the muted florals of my robe, the smell of alcohol coming off him like a disinfectant, a smear on his tuxedo shirt. He had always been an emotional little boy, prodding dead birds with his lip trembling, or stamping into the house, head lowered, if he were teased too much. I had warned Ruby about the strength of his feelings when they were much younger, before they became more than friends. I had warned her that the pendulum of his emotions swung wide. “Oh, Mommy, Kiernan? Like kissing my brothers,” she’d said in eighth grade. But then she’d become an injured bird herself, and Kiernan had helped her heal, heal so well that she had flown away.
    “I love her so much,” Kiernan says, his words slurred by sorrow, and drunkenness, too, so that it’s hard to understand him.
    “You’ll feel better after you get some sleep,” I say.
    He looks up at me and squints. “You need to talk to her,” he cries, loudly. “She’ll listen to you. You tell her this is a mistake. A big mistake.” He makes the word last forever, and his head drops again. “She’s making a big mistake,” he says into his hands.
    “Let’s get you home, Kiernan,” I say.
    “Tell her!” he screams suddenly, and the sound echoes off the house, the ridge, the sky.
    “That’s enough,” I say sharply. “You need to go home.”
    He slumps over, elbows on knees, head down. “I love her so much. You tell her.”
    The sun crests over the edge of the pumping station on the hill, turning its bricks from brown to red the way it does to Ruby’s hair, and I realize I am afraid to move. Kiernan will finish his senior year in high school, and he will go away to college, and he will become something fine and true: a beloved teacher, perhaps, or the sort of lawyer who represents the indigent. He will have a life in which this one seems merely like the sort of dream that is vivid at the moment of waking and has vanished by the time you’ve had your coffee. But this day my daughter has cast him out of the closest thing to paradise he has known, our kitchen. To us it seems so ordinary, so little to have, but I have seen in his eyes, and in Rachel’s, too, the glitter of yearning, and felt sad that the best we could offer was a kind of borrowing. Kiernan had believed he could turn the borrowing into ownership. And from time to time as he grows older, he will remember Ruby Latham, and how he loved her, and how he lost her. Every other girl will have a Ruby ghost hovering over her without her knowing it.
    When I go into the house, Glen is sitting at the table, eating cereal. I expect him to chide me for the time I’ve spent standing barefoot on the lawn, for my failure to simply put my foot down, which is an expression handed down from his father to him and well worn in our house. Instead, he looks up briefly and makes a rueful little curve of the corner of his mouth. “Poor guy,” he says. There was a Ruby Latham in Glen’s life, too, a girl with whom he went to high school named Betsy. We ran into her once when we were first married, and I could feel the push of the past as she and my husband talked in front of his parents’ house. It goes