One True Thing (22 page)

“I love you, Ellen,” she said.

“I love you, too, Mama.”

“I’ve always known it,” she said, and she smiled, the old smile, so warm and full that it was like the moon laid on its side. It was in her eyes, too, and her whole face, so that all the devastation of the last six months fell before it, her whole soul shining out at me.

I tried to smile back but my mouth and chin quivered uncontrollably and my eyes blinked as though I had a tic.

“Gen?” she said. “Is your father here?”

“He has a late class today, doesn’t he?”

She closed her eyes and her forehead furrowed deeply. Then she nodded. “I hope he’s home soon,” she said.

“I’ll call him,” I said, as I’d said before, but this time she did not try to stop me.

Inside the kitchen I dropped down at the table, my hands shaking, and pushed the buttons on the phone. Twice I misdialed and
when I finally had the number right it rang and rang and I could see it, the office with its wall of untidy bookshelves, the books shoved wherever they would fit, stacked atop one another, spilling onto the floor near the big heavy desk with the narrow drawers down each side, books under the two nondescript chairs where the students sat, books climbing one side of the scratched and creased brown leather couch on which there was one pillow, needlepointed by my mother, that said,
CALL ME ISHMAEL
.

“Come on, Papa, come on,” I whispered, but there was no answer and something inside me said, of course not, of course, there never is, there never was, just the incessant ringing, come home, come here, talk to me, tell. Tell. Tell. But there was no answer.

“Gen?” my mother called with that plaintive tone in her voice again.

“I’m going to campus to get him,” I called. “There’s something wrong with his phone.”

I took my down jacket from the peg near the back door and fished in the pocket for my keys. It was the first time I had been outside for three days, and the cold was shocking, the sort of still and bitter cold that freezes all the soft and vulnerable parts, the membranes inside your nose, the end of your ears, the tips of your fingers. At first the car coughed and would not turn over, and again I said, “Come on, come on.” I could not have explained my urgency except that my mother had never before called for my father at work—“bothered him during the day,” she called it—except for the day when her father had had his stroke. Good news or bad, we waited until he came home, until he had taken his leather case from the back seat of the car and come up the steps and into the kitchen, until the door had closed and he had joined the family.

At the green the streets were almost deserted, the store windows impenetrably covered with a gloss of steam, heat within and freezing air without. The gears made a grinding sound as I climbed the road along the river to the small bridge that led from
the town to the campus. The bridge was slick with ice, and I downshifted when the back end of the car began to fishtail. But still I kept my foot to the gas, desperate to give my mother what she so clearly wanted. I was afraid that when I came back to the house she might already be dead. I knew that if that happened I would never forgive my father, nor he me.

The end of the bridge sloped down sharply to a set of stone pillars, each with a plaque:
LANGHORNE
on one,
COLLEGE
on the other. I drove past the parking lot of the new science building, past the stolid gym and the two nondescript language classroom buildings to the old gray stone building with the word
ENGLISH
in capitals square as shoe boxes above the double doors. As I parked the car in the fire lane out front, the campus lights, tall poles with vaguely Victorian globes atop them, came on, and yellow lights twinkled all over the dim walkways like something on the London streets in the days of Dickens.

“Name, Miss?” said the security guard.

“Professor Gulden’s daughter,” I said, and ran past him up the stairs four flights, until on the last landing my heart rang in my ears.

The door to my father’s office was closed and the lights in the waiting area outside off. By the red glow of an exit light and a low-hanging fluorescent in the hall, I could see a piece of paper taped to his door. But it was only a sign-up sheet for conferences for freshman English students, those hapless dozen assigned to what had always been the class my father most loathed teaching.

The door of the office was locked. The rest of the hallway was dark and the only sounds were the faint ones of cars and the occasional calling voice from outside and below.

“Goddamnit,” I said aloud.

Downstairs the guard sprawled, legs apart, in a chair next to the sign-in book. “You still need to sign in, Miss,” he said unhappily.

“Have you seen Professor Gulden?” I said.

“He came down and left about ten minutes before you got here,” he said. “I tried to tell you, but you went too fast.”

Without answering I ran back out to the car and started the engine. The radio was on, perhaps had been on all the way over without my noticing it. There was an outbreak of civil war in the Sudan and a budget deadlock in Washington. In Texas a twenty-year-old man had been executed in the electric chair, and five children had died in a school bus accident. The forecast was for colder weather overnight. I hit the stanchion of the bridge with the right front bumper of the car, slammed on the brakes, backed up, and kept on going. The street lamps cast round moons of pure white light on the black asphalt of the streets. As I came around the circle, I could see the Duanes locking up the bookstore. It was such an ordinary night in Langhorne. From outside, through the lace cotton curtains, our kitchen looked as safe and warm as it always had.

Inside, my father’s book bag was on the table. In the den he bent over my mother, lifted the small canister that fed the flow of morphine into her veins, smoothed back her hair. “Where the hell were you?” he said softly without turning.

“At the college, looking for you.”

“Why?” he said, turning.

“She was asking for you. She wanted you.”

He turned back and ran his hand over the surface of her hair and down her raddled neck to her collarbone, its line a shelf above the downward slope of her chest. “You and I must have just passed one another,” he said. “I could have killed you when I arrived and the house was empty.”

“You were on your way here and I was on my way there,” I said. “Like an O. Henry story.”

“Comedy of errors,” he said. “I should have known. It was just the shock of finding her alone. How has she been?”

“Not good.”

“Has she eaten?”

“Not much.”

My father touched the machine with a fingertip, as though he was afraid of it. “This is a pump version of her medication?”

I nodded.

“Is it helping?”

“I think so.”

“My poor Kate,” he said softly, and as if she heard him she stirred, plucked at the mass of paper wadding at her crotch one last time, and slowly opened her eyes.

“Gen,” she said.

“Yes, dear.”

Both of them turned and looked at me, my mother slowly, as though it required great effort. She smiled. “Go take a rest, Ellen,” she said.

I’m not sure, even now, even after I’ve been asked more times than I can count, exactly how I spent the next few hours. I only know that as long as I heard the murmur of quiet conversation from that room I did not intrude, and I heard them for longer than I could have imagined possible. Once I heard my mother’s voice raised, thought I heard her crying, thought I heard the word “Please!,” one soprano note of entreaty. Once I heard my father’s voice raised, thought I heard him curse loudly and hit the surface of something hard with his hand. But much of what I heard was the sound of two people talking quietly a room away, that murmur that sounds like pigeons in the park, wood doves just beyond the line where the lawn meets the trees.

I did take a shower, and I lay on my bed, soaking my pillow with my wet hair, and I think I dozed off for an hour or so. The house was very quiet and a half-moon was visible outside my window, the clouds moving across its profile.

When I went back downstairs the door to the den was open and in the light, the floor and walls thick with shadows that rose and fell and wavered with slow synchronized movements, my parents were sitting facing one another. My father was in a straight chair, with a plain china bowl in his lap, and my mother had the back of the hospital bed canted almost all the way up, so she seemed to be sitting upright.

Her head was angled far from her chest, her mouth open, her
eyes dull, except when he finally finished his slow arc of filling the spoon, lifting it to the level of her mouth, and bringing it forward. Slowly she would bring her lips together and apart, and then with a visible movement of her neck and jaw muscles would swallow, her head falling back.

She looked like a baby bird and he like someone feeding a baby. The motion went on, head forward, spoon forward, spoon in, head back. Each time they made contact her eyes would blaze, but I believe now, having replayed the scene so often in my mind, in the sepia tones that I believe lit it even then, that she was looking not at the dollop of rice pudding but past it at him.

Over and over I would see him lift that spoon in the lamplight. It was the most vivid way in which I remembered my parents together after I had lost them both, and in memory I tried to decipher it, to deconstruct the movements, the motives, the emotions, the truth. Although my idea of truth now is not what it once was.

I passed on from the doorway of the den into the living room and sat there reading the same page of
Anna Karenina
over and over again, the one in which Anna rides on horseback in a black habit, her hair in curls. I still remember that, as though it’s yet another picture on our piano: the horse, the habit, the dark curls. And I thought of how my mother had already read this book, and both the others, how she had formed the book club to break through the reserve of her own daughter, to find something that the two of us could talk about before it was too late for the two of us to ever talk again. How deft she had been. “Tell,” she’d said, and I had. But she’d done it without ever saying the word.

After about an hour my father came into the room, pushing his hair back with his hand. His eyes were edged sharply in red.

“No one should have to live like that,” he said.

“How was she?”

“No one should have to live like that,” he repeated. “No one.”

“That’s what she said.”

“I know,” he said, his mouth working. “She’s right. She
shouldn’t have to live like that anymore.” He rubbed his eyes with the flat of his hand. “She wants me to sleep with her in there,” he added. “I can’t. I can’t. Not tonight. I’m going upstairs.”

“I’ll stay up for a while,” I said.

“That’s not necessary, Ellen.”

“I can’t sleep anyway,” I said.

“Let her be,” he said.

For another hour I sat in the living room, looking around at all her handiwork: the big brass bowl on the cherry chest of drawers against one wall, with the old map of Langhorne framed and hung above it, the pillows needlepointed with big blowsy roses on the velvet couch, the coffee table that had been a desk before she cut its legs down in the garage, cutting herself with the saw, holding her hand to her mouth as she came into the kitchen for the first-aid kit that was kept in the second drawer next to the sink. Her blood always looked so bright against her white redhead’s skin.

I stood in the doorway of the den for a long time and watched her after that, tired as I was. But she was not restless that night. There were no sentence fragments, no muttered names, no pushing at her hair or the hated diapers with her fingers. Her mouth hung open and she breathed in and out through it with a deep soughing noise, almost like a growl, and between those breaths a great silence hung in the air, a silence like forever.

When I sat down at the side of the bed I took her hand in mine. It was cold, and I could feel the bones, like little brittle sticks in my own warm and sweaty palm. I began to breathe in tandem with her, and when I inhaled it felt as if whole minutes went by as I waited for her to let the air out again and let me do the same. In. Out. In. Out. Perhaps it was because the breaths were so far apart, perhaps I was faint, but after a long while I began to feel as though I was watching the two of us from some corner of the ceiling, looking down on this evaporated woman with her red hair thin and dull now, her hands lying palm up on the sheet as though in some gesture of entreaty, and her daughter next to her, her rather square face hung about with a curtain of dark hair, her free hand plucking at the knee of her old black pants.

In. Out. In. Out. They breathed in unison, and as I watched them I wondered which would stop first. And then one did, the mother, and the sound brought me back to myself, out of the daze into which the slow repetitive sound had allowed me to fall. There was a sound like that a car makes when it won’t start on a cold morning, an
eh eh eh eh
deep in my mother’s throat, and I held tight to her hand as though I would crush it in my own long strong fingers. A shudder shook her body, and then the sound once more:
eh eh eh
, and one last long inhalation of breath.

I waited for her to exhale, waited for so long, holding her fingers, feeling them small under my own. I laid my head down near the foot of the bed but I did not let go until I could tell by a faint shift of the black outside that it was almost morning. Her hand was cold when I finally laid it on the sheet. The sheets were still as the snow had been after it stopped falling, still and clean. And when I looked at her face there was nothing of her there, nothing at all, as though she’d tiptoed out in the middle of the night when I’d dozed, just as she used to do when I was a little girl and fell asleep while she crooned “Safe and sound.”

I was still sitting there at sunup when my father came down the stairs heavily and stood in the doorway, shivering, with cold or something else. “How is she?” he said.