One True Thing (24 page)

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, and that was in the paper, too.

That next morning, after I’d spent my night in jail, the hum of the electrical lines lulling me to sleep, after I’d appeared in court and moved carefully through the clot of reporters at the front entrance, after I’d climbed into Mrs. Forburg’s old beige car and taken off with her to meet Jeff at the Greek diner two towns over, I told her that I couldn’t wait to tell my father about Officer Brown in his brown suit, about the Grand Guignol of the courtroom, so very Evelyn Waugh. And it was then that it occurred to me that he hadn’t been there, not during the night, not in the morning. “He has an early class on Thursdays,” I said.

“I could beat that man with a stick,” Mrs. Forburg said.

I didn’t see my father again for eight years, except for one afternoon down the long gray high-ceilinged corridor of the county courthouse, both of us yet again in navy blue, both of us knowing that the illusion of our inseparability, our fused identities, crumbling these many months since he had said I was heartless and I had set out to prove to him that I was not, that the illusion was now blown apart forever.

It was either him or me. For the last time, after they arrested me, I chose him.

I
t was the summer when I had just turned eight that I went to stay with my Gulden grandparents for two weeks and it rained without ceasing. It was that thick gray chilly rain that sometimes grips the northeast in August and sends the children of summer colonies and beach towns into sporadic fits of Monopoly, bowling, Old Maid, hide-and-seek in the closets and the basements of houses pungent with damp, sends them finally to driving their parents crazy, until their mothers let them play in the rain as one last desperate diversion.

My grandmother taught me War during those days, both of us with sweaters over our summer clothes; I remember the lamps, turned on to make a show of light against the gray outside, glinting off her wedding band and the buffed surfaces of her nails as she laid the cards down. Although I had long outgrown them, we played Chutes and Ladders and Candyland; although I played clumsily, we played Risk and Parcheesi.

My grandmother said my grandfather would teach me chess, but he never did. Even as the rain poured down outside he went
about his normal round of seasonal activities at the camp, turning off the water to the cabins, caulking windows and floating empty plastic bottles in toilets, putting antifreeze in the pool lines. He came in for lunch and dinner, hung a yellow waterproof parka, streaming with water, on a peg near the back door, ate and then went back outside, ate, and then sat in the lamplight himself in the evening for an hour or two, reading books about the Civil War or watching baseball players in sunny cities flicker by on the television while my grandmother knitted, her needles, too, catching the light.

A bottle of beautiful amber-colored whiskey sat on the little table next to his chair, and a tumbler that always had an inch or so of amber in it. It did not make him garrulous, brilliant, or mean, the way it did my father. A deeply silent man, it merely made him more silent. I can remember the words my grandfather said to me one by one, like trees on a plain, there were so few of them.

When we ran out of things to do, my grandmother took out her scrapbooks—tooled leather covers held together with rawhide ties, thick, rough black paper covered with pictures held in place with little tan triangles, the pictures with the wavy edges and flat black-and-white vistas of my grandmother’s girlhood. The picture I remember best was one of my father and his father standing side by side in front of the lake that was the southernmost perimeter of the camp.

Perhaps what first caught my attention was the date, which showed my father to be the same age in the photograph as I was at the time. But what I remembered afterward was how puny he was, a slight boy in a checkered shirt and dark shorts, his knees big knobs in the ungainly line of slightly bowed legs, his hands on his hips, his arms akimbo and shoulders squared as though he sought to take up more space in the frame than his body would normally dictate. His father was a big man, tall and square—
stalwart
is the word that comes to mind—with curling dark hair and a square jaw, with big arms and big hands, but he looks even
bigger next to his son, some great dark evergreen next to a pale-green blade of grass. Both of them had fixed expressions on their faces, and I could almost imagine my grandmother telling them to smile, smile, smile, as my mother had always told me, and their expressionless faces only becoming more grim as they stood silently without complying. In her efforts to include all of my father in the picture, my grandmother had nipped off perhaps two inches of her husband’s head.

My father had been like the boy in that picture in the two weeks after my mother died: diminished, overshadowed, frozen in some posture out of his customary place in the world. Perhaps his children contributed to that, for when they arrived home, the evening of the day on which she died, my brothers ignored him. Not in any mean way, but as though their connection to him had always been a secondary one, by means of the woman he had married and they had loved. If our family had been a wheel, a perfect round thing moving in perpetual motion down an easy road, she had been the hub and the route all at once. We were directionless, he as much as we three. He more, actually.

It was why, waking in a strange bed in a strange house the morning after I had been arrested and arraigned, I was the only one who was unsurprised that my father had not come to rescue me. He seemed so small now, so shrunken, that I could not imagine him capable of such a thing.

Besides, the others did not know what supporting me would require him to do, to admit, to confess. The rest of them had not watched him feed his wife rice pudding, the spoon sweeping through the air like a pigeon with a message, coming home. The rest of them had not heard her whisper “Help me.” In a square and drab room with a single bed, a dresser, and no pictures on the walls I closed my eyes and saw him again, lifting, spooning, lifting again. The rest of them were wondering where the morphine had come from, but I believed I knew. My mother had made perfect order in her home in large part because her husband craved it, and then she had disordered it—the undusted tables, the wheelchair, the night terrors, the hospital bed, the smell of rank perspiration
and chemicals. Perhaps he could not bear it. Perhaps he felt sorry for her.

Perhaps he even loved her. Perhaps she had asked of him, that last night when I heard them talking, what she had asked of me and he had had the courage and the love to do what I had not. For that possibility alone I believed he deserved my protection. At least that is how I think I felt when the woman I am today analyzes the one I was then.

“There’s coffee, Ellen,” said Mrs. Forburg, turning off the radio when I came out into the little kitchen in the same pants and sweater I’d slept in in the little cell in the Montgomery County jail.

In silence I sat at a small white table and looked down at its surface, drawing patterns with the side of my spoon. After a moment Mrs. Forburg sat opposite me.

“No school today?” I said.

“I took a personal day,” she said.

“Personal, all right,” I said.

“You can stay as long as you like.”

“How much money did you pay to get me out?” I said.

“Ten thousand dollars. Ten percent of your bail. I get it all back unless you leave town.”

“Skip town,” I said.

“What?”

“That’s what they always say in the movies. Skip town. Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere.”

“That’s why they say they arrested you, because you were getting ready to flee.”

“Well, I guess that’s one way of putting it. I was packing my duffel bag to go back to New York. Two guys showed up at the front door, told me they wanted to ask me some questions at the police station, and the next thing I knew I was under arrest.”

“Ellen, you knew what the autopsy found. The doctor says she told you last week, after the funeral. Why didn’t you do something?”

“Do what?”

“Get a lawyer. Talk to someone. Come to me. Didn’t you understand what would happen?”

“I didn’t do it,” I said simply.

How many different ways were there to say it? When the investigators at police headquarters had asked me, sitting in a room the color of my palms on the same kind of molded plastic chairs my mother and I had sat on as we waited for one of the nurses to clear a room for chemotherapy, I said it over and over again. I didn’t do it. Did I give her the pills? No. Did I know why the vial was empty? No. Did I love my mother? Did I hate my mother? Did I resent my mother? Did I want my mother dead?

“If you had seen my mother and you understood what she once had been, you would have wanted her dead, too,” I said, enraged.

Did I kill her?

No.

But I could see the spoon go up and over, into her mouth and out again, her eyes glittering in the light from the lamp. I never said anything about the spoon. I never have, all these years.

That summer when I was eight my father drove me to his parents’ house, a cabin on the grounds of the camp, screened from the kids and the counselors by a row of enormous pines my grandfather planted when my father was just a baby. “Georgie’s trees,” my grandmother called them. It was a long drive, three hours and then some, and we stopped at a restaurant in a town called Liberty and had club sandwiches and iced tea. The rain had already started, although they were saying on the radio that it would end the next day. But I didn’t care. As we drove my father recited poetry in his changeable actor’s voice, Shakespeare and John Donne and even Edna St. Vincent Millay:

The words, the sentiments, which I did not understand, seemed to fill the car, the end to reverberate—“that in me sings no more”—and there was a long silence afterward that seemed longer because of the small intense sounds of the woods which surrounded us on either side—the high incessant trill of some bird, the long whirr of what I assumed were bugs. Then my father looked at me and shrugged.

“Even second-rate poetry is better than no poetry at all, Ellen,” he said. I remember the sense of relief, almost a physical feeling, that I had waited for him to speak first, to tell me what to feel, that I had not told him immediately how beautiful I thought the poem was.

“You are an exceptional child, Little Nell,” he said, when he looked over at my dazzled face.

Deeper and deeper into the woods we drove, the inside of the car dark because of the great old oaks and elms that arched their branches to touch one another across the narrow country roads. We went for miles without seeing a house, a car, anything more than wild-eyed rabbits and the fat and sluggish groundhogs that grazed on the sparse grass that grew along the roadsides. It was what the parents wanted for their children when they sent them to camp, this isolation, the sense that they were being set down in the real America. But it was difficult to imagine my father here, poring over Aesop’s
Fables
by the light on his old desk, riding the school bus twelve miles to the nearest town and its stolid red-brick elementary school, leaving here with his bags
packed for prep school, where the trees had been thinned and light poured in.

We were not far from the big wooden arch that marked the turnoff for the camp when the doe leapt in front of the car. For a moment I could see her face turned toward me, the muzzle soft-looking even from that distance, the eyes black and round, those enormous ears outstretched to know the road just an instant too late. The impact when we hit her was tremendous, and flecks of black and red spotted the windshield as my father veered sharply onto the shoulder and jammed on the brakes. Afterward, when I looked into the medicine cabinet mirror in my grandparents’ cabin, I realized I had hit my head on the dashboard. There was an abrasion and a bump.

“Holy shit,” he said.

The deer was on the verge across the road, making a scrabbling motion with her narrow pointed feet. But she could not stand or even push herself along, and she only turned her body slightly, this way and that, her neck arched so it looked as though her head would touch her long, beige-gray silky back.

My father got out of the car and went around to look at the front bumper. “Damn,” he said, his face tight with rage, glancing across the road, then back at the car. “Damn.”

The noise the deer made with her feet was like someone using a typewriter:
staccato, stop, staccato, stop
. For a moment she would rest and her arched neck would fall and I could see her face, her nostrils working in time with the ragged rise and fall of her sides.

My father got back in the car and put it into gear. “Don’t say a word,” he said. I was even afraid to turn in my seat to look as we drove away.

My grandparents were outside when we pulled in at their house, past the cabins, empty as old shoe boxes, past the paddock and the pool. Through the trees you could see a sliver of lake, just below the rise on which their house sat.

“I need a drink,” my father said to his mother when he got out of the car, and he told her what had happened.

“Oh, George, what a terrible thing,” she said as she held his arm, walking him toward the house.

“The animal?” my grandfather said in his guttural voice, which clotted around the consonants.