One True Thing (17 page)

The Presbyterian choir stood in their red robes with songbooks under their arms, and Amanda Bollan, who’d been in Honor Society with me, waved and then turned to say something to the woman next to her.

“Is Brian home yet?” one slender girl with fur earmuffs asked me, ducking her head.

The mayor shook hands with us all. So did Mr. Best, wearing one of his
MAY THE
BEST
MAN WIN
hats.

“Linda says you gave her good advice on her tree,” he said to my mother.

“Oh, Ed, she didn’t need it,” my mother replied.

“You’re looking well,” he added. “And you, too, Ellen.”

The Minnies usually stood in a semicircle behind the podium, but this year they grouped themselves around my mother’s wheelchair. The mayor read their names amid the sounds of mothers
ssshusshing
their children and one little girl wailing loudly, the sound fading, like an ambulance turning a corner, as she was carried away into darkness.

I’d been a little girl here once, riding on my father’s shoulders, clutching at his hair while my mother held Jeffrey awkwardly against her hip, to one side of her bulging stomach. The year she had first been a Minnie I had looked every morning in the basket in the hallway to see what she’d made for her tree the night before. But I’d never helped decorate before that morning. She’d never asked. I’d never offered.

“Happy holidays, Langhorne,” the mayor said, a change from the “Merry Christmas” of years gone by because of the complaints of a Jewish professor of economics at the college that had occupied page one of the
Tribune
for a week two Januaries before. He raised his hand and the trees came alive, sparks leaping from amid their branches, the sequins on my mother’s tree winking red and gold. The crowd burst into applause and the choir began to sing.

There was a moment of silence as the last deep sonorous note
of “Silent Night” died away. My father’s eyes were fixed on my mother; his lips were held together tightly, one to the other, but when she looked over, he smiled broadly.

“Which one did she do?” he asked, as though the tables and countertops of his home had not been littered with sequined ornaments for weeks.

“Third from the left,” I whispered, smelling the lemon of his cologne and the musty wool of his coat. “Papa smells,” I called them when I was a little girl, along with the smells of shoe polish and leather shoes.

“I suspected as much,” he said.

The choir bounced through “Deck the Halls,” their consonants as sharp as could be, punctuated with little white bursts of warm breath on the cold night. The Minnies hugged one another, and the mayor thanked them, and the crowd surged forward to look at each tree closely. For a moment I lost sight of my mother as she disappeared amid a circle of neighbors. The young cop smiled across their heads at me, then turned away, his pale face a moon above the children pushing through the crowd to find their friends.

“Are you Ellen?” said a woman with blond hair held back from a high forehead with a red velvet band dotted with silk holly leaves and sequined berries. She had on a black wool cape that swung open when she moved. She was very pregnant.

“I’m Halley McPherson,” she said, shaking my hand. “We just moved here from Atlanta. My husband is comptroller at the college. This is such a nice thing, isn’t it?”

“It is, but it must seem sort of small town after Atlanta.”

“Well, everything really is small town, anyhow, isn’t it? My husband always says there are no big ponds. Although your mom says you’re a New Yorker, so maybe you wouldn’t agree.”

I smiled noncommittally. I didn’t.

“Well, I just wanted to meet you because your mother has been such a saint to me. I told the man at the hardware store that I was looking for a decorating book to do the baby’s nursery and he
said that I didn’t need a decorating book if I talked to your mom.”

“Oh, you’re the crib person. How’d it turn out?”

“It’s beautiful. Nobody can believe I did it myself.”

The crowd around us moved aside and there was my father, pushing the wheelchair. My mother smiled and put out her hand.

“Oh Halley, there you are in person.” She looked down at Halley’s midsection. “You look wonderful.”

“Fecund,” said my father.

“I’m due a week from Friday,” Halley said.

“Mama, how did you know it was her?” I said.

“She talked me through making the headband, too,” Halley said, raising her hand to her hair. “That’s how she was going to recognize me. And soon she’s coming to see the crib.”

“Very soon,” my mother said.

As we walked back up the hill, children eddying around us, adults calling greetings across the street to all three of us, my mother looked up at the moon again and said, “I do love Christmas. It’s always been my favorite holiday. I used to decorate the whole apartment with construction-paper things when I was little.” She took my hand as we walked. “Ellen, we need to get a tree,” she said.

“No, no,” I cried, and people turned around to look. “Please, Lord, not another tree to decorate. Let this cup pass from me.”

“Just one more,” my mother said, laughing. “Only eight feet tall or it won’t fit in the living room.”

“One more,” I said. “That’s my limit.”

“And the boys will be home in two days, and we’ll have ham for Christmas dinner. Much easier than turkey.”

“Turkey wasn’t so bad.”

“And it’s good to know how to make a turkey, just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“Oh, you,” my mother said.

“The Gulden tree was the most beautiful one,” my father said.

“I know,” said my mother.

The moon was as perfect and bright as a dime, and from some of the houses bits of colored lights shone out, the lights on Christmas trees whose outlines were lost in the dark of sleeping houses, empty houses, houses whose people were still winding their way up the hill. There was a slight wind, and the outdoor evergreens made a sound like hands rubbing softly together.

My mother shivered. “You’re cold,” said my father sternly. “You ought to have worn a coat.”

“I’m not cold,” my mother said.

A little boy in a red cap pulled low ran past us, crying “Mommy!” and faintly, from the bottom of the hill we could hear a group of people singing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” in stops and starts, searching aloud for the words.

“I love Christmas,” my mother said with a sigh.

My father leaned down so that his head was close to hers. “And Easter,” he said. “I have it on good authority that Easter comes early this year. Very early. And that nice young woman will surely need you to teach her how to paint eggs or weave baskets.”

My mother put her hand to my father’s cheek, and then she looked up again at the moon. “No, Gen,” she said. “Easter was never my holiday. To hell with Easter.”

T
he second time Teresa came to the house Jeffrey and Brian were home from school. They had climbed out of Jeff’s leaky jeep sopping wet, caught in one of those dreadful soaking winter rainstorms just outside of Philadelphia but determined to make it home for dinner. Our mother was asleep upstairs when they first arrived; the night after the tree lighting she had woken up crying with pain soon after she went to bed and then had woken again, after I gave her more morphine, weeping incoherently about the babies and a thunderstorm and a tree splitting in the front yard and falling on the house. I stood in the doorway of their room while my father tried to calm her, undone by her blank eyes and senseless rant. He held her arms and repeated, “You are having a nightmare, Kate. It is a nightmare. A nightmare. There is no storm. There are no babies.”

“No babies,” she said.

“No.”

“I’m here, Mama,” I said.

“A nightmare,” she said.

“Yes.”

Finally he eased her back and pulled the covers around her shoulders. Like a light turned off, her lids went down and she began to breathe heavily, as though she had a bad cold. My father got out of bed in his boxer shorts. While I looked away, leaning against the doorjamb, he pulled on last night’s pants and shirt.

“I cannot sleep after that,” he said. “Are hallucinations a side effect of the medication?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What if they are? I’d rather have her hallucinating comfortably than suffering from the pain.”

“I’m not suggesting that she should suffer. I’m suggesting that we should not administer medication without knowing all its side effects.”

“Oh, Papa, who gives a shit? Who gives a shit if it makes her skin turn purple and blood come out her nose if it stops her from hurting? This is not an intellectual exercise. This is day-to-day let’s get through this.”

“Just ask the doctor,” he said, going downstairs.

“You ask her,” I said.

But instead I asked Teresa when she arrived with her bag. Jeff had been out with his high school friends until nearly dawn, and he was in the kitchen in bare feet and running shorts when the bell rang.

“My public,” he said, holding a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in his fist and throwing open the door.

“It’s Teresa,” I said, looking over his shoulder. “Come in, Teresa. She’s upstairs and the area around her catheter seems a little red. She was hoping you would look at it and at some lumps she has on her sides.”

“Certainly,” Teresa said as Jeff held the door and watched her pass. She laid her coat over one of the wing chairs in the living room, took the small pouch from her duffel bag and went upstairs. In a moment I heard her call, “Rise and shine.”

“Give me a clue,” Jeff said.

“The nurse.”

“The nurse?”

“I told you. Dr. Cohn wanted to send a nurse once a week. That’s her. Teresa Guerrero.”

“Teresa?”

“Jeffie, hon, I have a floor to wash and three loads of laundry. Dr. Cohn sent a nurse, her name is Teresa Guerrero, and I too have noticed that she is extremely young and attractive.”

“When you said a nurse I pictured someone who looked like a dinner roll. Round. White. Fluffy. Comforting.”

“Well, this is what you get instead.”

“My stars,” said Jeff, eating his sandwich. “Sakes alive. Well I’ll be.”

Before Teresa came downstairs Jeff had put on a pair of jeans and a rugby shirt. “Even shoes,” I said. “My stars.”

“Put a sock in it, Ellie,” my brother said.

“I’m really glad you guys are home,” I said.

“Me too. Especially for Brian. He’s having a really hard time at school. Hates his roommate, hates his adviser, hates his courses. I think it’s basically because he hates not being here. He even talked about transferring to Langhorne so he could be near Mom.”

“Dad would never stand for it. Besides, if he doesn’t do it next semester, he won’t have to do it at all.”

“You think?” Jeff said.

“Yeah. Unless there’s some kind of miracle, I think we’ll be coming into the home stretch soon.”

“Ah, shit,” Jeff said. “How soon?”

“I’m like an alcoholic. I take it one day at a time. I can’t tell you what next week is going to be like.”

“I saw Jon in Cambridge a couple of weeks ago. I went up to see the guys at BU and had a drink with him. He told me he wasn’t coming home for Christmas.”

“I don’t think he can deal with the idea of someone losing their mother.”

“Yeah, well, that’s very understanding of you, but I think he needs to play out his little personal psychodrama at some other
time, when someone he allegedly cares about doesn’t need him quite as much. I think his behavior sucks.”

“And you told him that.”

Jeff smiled. “Is the Pope Polish?” he said.

“And?”

“He’s not the kind of guy you need in a tough time,” Jeff said.

“No,” I said.

“On the other hand,” Jeff said, “a year ago I would have said the same thing about you.”

Teresa was swinging her stethoscope when she came downstairs. She had on big gold hoop earrings and a dress this time, with a long full white skirt that almost swept the ground, and she was carrying a small box, wrapped in red with red-and-green striped ribbon. All week I’d been delivering gifts while my mother slept, to neighbors, to nurses, to Dr. Cohn, who took out the small needlepointed pillow on the end of a ribbon that said OY VAY and hung it on the doorknob of her office. “The oncologist’s creed,” she said. “I believe that was the thought behind the gift,” I had said.

Teresa held up her little box and smiled. “What a lovely woman she is,” she said.

“You have any more jokes?” I said.

“No, no more. Those children are fixated on Blueberry Hill, Blueberry Hill, I believe because we told them it was vulgar. The boy keeps repeating the word, vulgar, vulgar, as though he loves the idea.”

Jeff stuck out his hand. “Jeff,” he said. “Gulden.” Recovering a bit, he added, “All County Soccer, All County Lacrosse, eldest son, power serve.”

“I believe your mother already told me all that,” Teresa said cooly. Turning to me, she added, “I don’t see any real problem with the catheter site. I’ve irrigated it again, and taken a blood sample, which Dr. Cohn wanted. When was her last medication?”

“I’m not sure.”

“She seems very very tired to me. I don’t believe the adjustment
on the dosage or frequency is exactly right. May I speak to Dr. Cohn about it?”

“Sure. She naps in the morning and the afternoon now, but she doesn’t plan them so much as she just drops off. Sometimes she’ll fall asleep on the couch while she’s reading or in her chair when the TV’s on. Then she’ll be fine for a while and then she’ll start to fade again. She’s particularly tired this week because she had a bad night Tuesday. My father wants to know—does the morphine cause hallucinations?”

Teresa looked up the stairs, then at Jeff. “Can we sit down?” she said.

“There are a variety of opinions about hallucinations and the use of morphine,” she said when we were in the living room. “Many physicians will tell you that it does not happen. Others will say that it is one possible side effect. Some nurses will tell you that what happens are not hallucinations at all. When did this happen?”