One True Thing (25 page)

“It’s done for,” my father said.

“It’s by the road,” I said.

My grandfather went into the house and came out with a shotgun. He put it into the back of his old station wagon and pointed at me. “Show me,” he said.

“Nature will take its course,” my father said. But my grandfather started the car and reached across to open the door for me.

“For God’s sake, I’ll come,” my father said, shrugging off his mother’s arm. My grandmother’s face looked like the doe’s, eyes bright, mouth soft and trembling. I was already in the front seat and my father tried to pull me out by the arm, but I hung back next to my grandfather and shook my head.

“How many Goddamn deer do the townspeople shoot every fall?” he muttered.

When we got back to the place in the road, with its curly ribbon of black skid marks, the deer was still alive, still moving its legs fruitlessly. My grandfather pointed the gun at her head, and for a moment she arched away, turned to look, then lay still. His shoulder jerked back just a bit as he shot her. I cried all the way to the cabin, my face in my hands. My grandfather patted my shoulder and my father looked out the window.

“I need a drink and a new car,” he said to my grandmother as the two of them went into the house.

That and the photograph of him and his father together, those were the two things I thought of most often as I slept in Mrs. Forburg’s guest bedroom and drank coffee at her kitchen table. That afternoon Jeff came to the back door, cutting through the woods so he could avoid the local reporter and photographer who were sitting outside Mrs. Forburg’s house. He tapped on the glass of the kitchen window and peered in, his eyes framed by the yellow café curtains.

“This is like a bad spy novel,” I said.

“I have some calls to make in my room,” said Mrs. Forburg.

Jeffrey and I sat and looked at one another across the kitchen table. “You look like hell,” he said.

“I know, but what can I do? I’ve been wearing the same clothes for two days and I’m out of moisturizer.”

“I have your duffel in the jeep. I’ll bring it in if those guys outside leave.”

“They’ll get bored sooner or later.”

“They’re not going to get bored. Tomorrow there’ll be ten of them, then twenty. This is what they call a headline grabber. That’s why that asshole Best had you arrested in the first place—not because he can make a case, but because he can make page one for days and days, making speeches about mercy killing and justice for all. There are people in town saying this never would have happened if you hadn’t written the essay for the contest. Between that and the doctor who keeps hooking people up to an IV drip and the nurse up in Canada who pulled the plug on all those people last month, this is a big story.”

“It’ll pass.”

“Not soon, sweetheart. Not soon.”

“What else are they saying in town?”

Jeff bent his head, and the glints of red in his hair made me see my mother for a second. “Some of them say that you were justified in what you did,” he said.

“And the others?”

“That you weren’t.”

“Is there anyone who believes that I didn’t do it?”

He shook his head.

“You?”

He looked up in surprise. “El, you have a lot of character failings, the most profound of which at this point seems to be the mistaken impression that people are sane and sensible. But you’ve never been dishonest in your entire life. To a fault, I should add.”

“Brian?”

“Bri’s really fucked up. He calls from school and just cries and
cries. I don’t think he cares what killed her, just that she’s dead. That’s what these fools messed up with this thing—our right to just deal with the fact that she’s gone, instead of how she got that way. Cancer killed my mother. Our mother. That’s what I say.”

“When are you going back?” I said.

“I’m staying here until this is over.”

“In the house?”

“I’m there as little as possible. Pop and I have some difficulty communicating.”

I thought of my father, quiet and shrunken, in the house that Kate built, imagined his hand with the spoon in it going up and over, up and over, into her mouth and out.

“He really wants to see you, El,” my brother said. “Every morning at breakfast he says, ‘I must speak to your sister’ and every night at dinner he says, ‘Have you spoken with Ellen?’ He says the two of you need to talk. He wants me to arrange a time here when you can be alone together. He says he understands if you won’t come to the house.”

“I need to not talk to him right now,” I said. “And he needs to not talk to me.”

Jeff squeezed my hand. “He won’t take no for an answer.”

“He’ll have to,” I said. “Tell him it’s impossible.”

“His lawyer told him he shouldn’t see you until after the grand jury meets,” Jeff said, “but he insists you have to talk.”

“He has a lawyer?” I said.

“Yeah. And you need one. A good one.”

“Maybe I’ll call Jon for a referral,” I said.

“Jon?”

“F. Lee Beltzer. Mr. Jurisprudence. My nominal boyfriend.” At the funeral Jon had worn navy blue, too, but he had only taken my hand at the church after the service and had not come to the Duanes’ afterward.

“Haven’t you read the papers?” Jeff said.

I shook my head. “Shit,” Jeffrey said, and he got up and looked in the refrigerator, closed it and then opened it to look again.

“Jon is your problem,” he said. “After Mom died he told his old man that you’d been saying you wished she’d die. His old man heard about the autopsy and went to Best to get extra tests done. Jon nailed you.”

“Jon?”

“Yeah.”

“He gave me up?” I asked.

Jeff nodded.

“Pretty extreme way to end a relationship,” I said.

“Cut that crap, Ellen. He screwed you, big time. He’s scum and he always was scum and now you’re going to pay for your shitty taste in men.” Jeff took my hand again. “I know what happened,” he said. “Don’t you think I know what happened? There’s only one person you’d ever do this for.”

“I’m doing it for her,” I said.

“Who?”

“Mama,” I said. “I’m doing it for her. Jeffie, I can’t talk with you about this any more. Not one more word. I just can’t. Will you get me a lawyer?”

“What should I tell Pop?” he said.

“Tell him I understand,” I said. “Tell him we’ll talk sometime. I just don’t know when.”

“And if I run into Jon?”

I thought for a minute, my hands in my lap. I thought of Jon calling his mother in California, asking her how she could have just walked out one day and left him behind, left a two-year-old to grow up with a hole in his heart. I thought of him hearing her reply, “I just did.” I thought of his hands on my lower back and my breasts, his mouth on my belly, of the datebook and the apartment he had probably already sublet, with a big double bed. My head hurt.

“Tell him to go to hell,” I said.

“It’s a deal,” Jeff replied.

W
hen my therapist asked me to keep a journal dissecting the events of that year, she wanted me to particularly deal with the emotions I experienced immediately after I was arrested, before the grand jury heard and decided my case, decided whether to indict me or not. For a while I thought about doing what I had always done for Mrs. Forburg when I wrote compositions or poetry in her class, spinning synthetic emotions out of the silky yarn of intelligence. I was more likely to scam my therapist than Mrs. Forburg, who was far sharper and harder than her often twinkly manner would suggest. She would send my poems back with the dismissive “Clever … but!” or the softer “Nice language, but where are you in here?”

It was difficult to tell my therapist, as I finally did, that I felt very little during the weeks after I was charged with my mother’s death, although if I had known as much about psychiatry as I do today I would have realized that this was an eminently acceptable answer, easily classified as “lack of affect.” At the time I assumed it was because I had lapsed, like an alcoholic or a mental patient
who must be recommitted, that I had made a stab at being my mother’s daughter and had now reverted convincingly to being my father’s, my emotions pickled in a solution of cynicism and self-involvement. Sometimes I wondered whether all children had to choose in that fashion. I pictured my mother sitting watching a toddler, looking for the early signs: which would it be, his or hers? Like embroidered hand towels. I wondered if that was why there were three children, to break the tie. On numbers my mother had been the big winner, but perhaps not on sheer strength of devotion, at least not until the end.

It was difficult to explain how ordinary your life can be, even when extraordinary things are happening around you. Jeff was right; the number of reporters outside Mrs. Forburg’s house grew in the next few days, then ebbed, then grew again when new reports surfaced that the prosecutor was asking for help from a famous pathologist in Florida, that my former boyfriend was expected to appear before the grand jury, that the school board was considering disciplinary action against Mrs. Forburg, who walked into the glare of television lights and a half dozen flashes every morning when she left for school.

“Let them fire me,” she said, making coffee the morning this last appeared in the
Tribune
. “I can get my Social Security and maybe it’ll teach my students something about doing the right thing.”

“I still don’t entirely understand why you’re doing this,” I said.

“A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” she said.

“Seriously.”

“Seriously, you needed help and I was in a position to provide it. There’s no mystery in that.”

“You’re playing the Shirley Booth role in this movie.”

“I always hated Shirley Booth,” Mrs. Forburg said. And then she left and you could hear the noise, a hum and then a fusillade, lousy with fake intimacy: “Brenda, are you going to lose your job?” “Can you tell us how Ellen is doing?” “Have you talked about what she did?” Then the noise of the car turning over and
scattering gravel as she pulled out of the driveway, and the questions died away.

That was the only peculiar thing about my life, that and the way people looked at me in the supermarket or at the mall, the sidelong glances and the stares. After the first two weeks the reporters outside drifted away, waiting for the next hearing, the easy drama of the courtroom. But the
Tribune
kept running the picture of me leaving the courthouse after my arraignment whenever Mr. Best would make a new announcement, and I had only to smile slightly when a little girl lifted her skirt over her head in a grand gesture in the produce aisle or I thought idly of something my mother had once said about mall rats, and someone was sure to narrow their eyes and peer at me. Yes ...I’m not sure ...yes, it is ...that’s her.

“Her mother,” you could sometimes hear them whisper. The little girl would drop her dress and move closer to the stroller in which her baby brother slept, mouth open, chubby legs bowed on either side of a great diaper bulge.

In the Safeway an elderly woman pressed a little book of daily meditations with a rose on the cover into my hand. “God bless and keep you, dear,” she said.

“You’re better looking than your pictures,” said the checkout girl.

And the telephone answering machine in Mrs. Forburg’s dining room was full of messages. The
Tribune
reporter, Julie Heinlein, was tireless in her pursuit of me, scenting the sort of break that would take her away from Langhorne and on to somewhere bigger, better. Her voice wheedled and coaxed on the tape—an interview, an off-the-record conversation, a first-person account. Once she said, “I’ve been told that you, too, are a journalist.” And I remembered Bill Tweedy’s disgusted judgment one night over boilermakers in the Blarney Stone downstairs from the magazine offices: “A journalist is a reporter who worries too much about his clothes.”

There were the nut cases, of course, offering to marry me or to
hold me down and kill me painfully so that I would fully appreciate my sins. And there were the advocates. The Center for the Right to Die had taken up my cause and offered to provide me with a lawyer.

“It is time for every one of us to realize that family members know better what is right for the terminally ill than the courts, the police, or the medical personnel who would keep them alive at all costs,” said a man who identified himself as the executive director.

“I didn’t do it,” I said to the machine.

“You have become a symbol to millions of people of how caring family members are victimized by a system that offers no hope to their loved ones,” he continued. “You could be an important voice for the movement to allow people to die with dignity and, if necessary, with assistance.”

“I didn’t do it,” I said again.

The next message was from a man who said that he knew a variety of sex acts that I would enjoy. I listened to the messages myself because I didn’t want Mrs. Forburg to have to hear them, but afterward I felt sick, as though I had stomach flu. I lost weight during those weeks. I could not keep food down.

Every few days on the machine there was a voice I knew as well as my own, that in cadence and timbre was much like mine. “Ellen?” my father would say. “If you’re there, would you kindly pick up?” In the silence I would hear his breathing, a little ragged, as though he’d been running. “Ellen?” There was never more of a message than that, my name and the demand that I respond, until one afternoon he began to speak.

“Ellen,” he said quietly, “I would like to talk about what happened. I know it’s difficult for you. But we cannot leave this unsaid.” There was a long pause. The tape made a clicking sound as it moved around its eyelike spools. “I didn’t know what they were doing at the police station,” he continued. “I had no idea they would arrest you. I would have come. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t—” there was a choking sound, a sharp breath. “We
should talk,” he said. “We need to talk.” And then there was the noise, so final, of the receiver being put down.

That was the last message I got from him.

Apart from that, the days were ordinary, almost tedious. I think now the only real manifestation I had of what was happening around me, in the newspapers, in offices at the courthouse and the municipal building, was a feeling not unlike the homesickness that always filled me for the first few days when I went to stay at my grandparents’ house, and even, I was stunned to discover, during the first few months of my freshman year at college.