One True Thing (32 page)

It was a chilly day but there was a little bit of warmth rising
from the ground, so that you could imagine, if you took a good long sniff, that from this soil in the foreseeable future would come lilacs, then hollyhocks and roses. The Belknaps’ perennial border would soon begin to come back from the dead. The grape hyacinths, those baby fingers of purple panicles, so small you had to search for them amid the grass, would unfurl slowly from the ground around my mother’s headstone this time next year. The tulips would follow. Long after people had ceased to talk about me at parties and in the aisles between the Duanes’ oak bookshelves, the hyacinths and tulips would revive, thrive, yellow, die, sleep, revive again. And she would never, ever see them. Even the flowers went on without you, so fierce was death.

“No bill” was what they said on the radio, “no cause.” No case, no trial. No nothing. No nothing. I felt nothing as I drove over the curving back road that led to Mrs. Forburg’s house, or perhaps what I felt was that odd sense you have when you are barreling down a street and you discover it is a cul de sac, a dead end.

I came around the S-curve and before me one of the small valleys surrounding Langhorne was spread, a patchwork of different greens, deciduous and evergreen, in the afternoon light. At the bottom of the hill was the house that had bailed me out two months before, and in front of it and across the road, too, I could see a coven of cars and a van with a satellite dish. I made a U-turn and drove down the road behind, parked on the shoulder and hiked through the woods, laden with grocery bags. They saw me, some of them, as I emerged from the line of trees and sprinted to the back door; I could hear someone shout and then the others begin to move, like a battalion on the battlefield. But I was in before they had time to shoot me.

The red light on the answering machine glowed in the dimness of the closed house, with its blinds drawn tight for so many days. “Ms. Gulden, this is Nancy Barrett at CBS. This—” and with a push of a button it was gone. Gone was the
Time
magazine reporter with the name that sounded as though it had come off a headstone in Boston’s oldest cemetery, the
Times
reporter, who
sounded as if she had a cold, and Julie Heinlein, her voice weary: “If by any chance you want to talk to anyone it could be completely on your terms.” With the push of a button I made them all disappear.

Jeff sounded jubilant. “Don’t go anywhere,” he said. “We’re coming to get you.”

I could hear the reporters outside, one of them taking a coffee order for the others, prepared to drive all the way downtown to the luncheonette. “Regular or light?” he said. “Betts—I asked you a question. Regular or light? And a roll? What the hell do you think this is, a restaurant?” Two of the men were talking about their children, about how much trouble they were causing now that they’d learned to walk. “Wait until they’re fifteen,” someone else said.

I browned the meat. I rolled the crust. I kneaded bread dough and put it aside to rise in a bowl that Mrs. Forburg said had belonged to her mother. The phone rang, the machine picked up, and I heard her voice, “Ellen, if you’re there—”

I picked up the receiver, leaving flour on the mouthpiece, the dial. “I’m here,” I said.

She must have been in the pay phone just outside the gym. I could hear a babble behind her, dozens of voices in a fractious harmony, a shout or mock-scream punctuating it all. “Hello?” I said.

“It’s noisy here,” Mrs. Forburg said. Then there was silence again and I could tell by her breathing that she was crying.

“I’m making your dinner,” I said.

“You just leave it there for me on the stove,” she said, “and you pack your bags and you get as far away from there as fast as you can for as long as you can.”

“They must have believed me,” I said.

“They damn well should have,” she said.

“Yo, Michael,” someone shouted in the background, then said, “Oh, sorry, Mrs. F.”

“You’ll get your money back on the bail,” I said.

“Lord, Ellen,” Mrs. Forburg said, “you think of the most irrelevant things. Is Jeff taking you to the city?”

“I think so.”

“When you get settled you call and give me your address and I’ll come and visit.”

“I’ll miss you. Thank you.” And after a time from the other end there was the echo, “I’ll miss you. Thank you.” When we hung up, the phone rang again immediately, a reporter from the Associated Press, but the machine just took the message while I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote out instructions on how to finish making the bread and when to take the stew out of the oven. Then it rang again and I heard a soft and slightly accented voice: “Ellen, this is Teresa Guerrero calling.” There was a pause as though she knew I was listening. I don’t know why it was only when I heard Teresa’s voice that something inside me broke just a little, and I began to cry.

“Hello, Ms. Guerrero,” I said.

“I am happy today, Ms. Gulden,” she replied evenly. “And many of my patients will be, too, fellow sufferers who followed this with personal interest.”

“How is the woman with the breast cancer and the kids?” I asked.

“Not so good.”

“Teresa, I just want you to know something,” I said. “I didn’t do it.”

“It is not important.”

“It’s important to me. It’s important to me that you believe it. Especially you.”

“I always have. But it was never important. You have many more important things to do. So much work. So much work. I pity you, friend.”

“I have no job.”

“Ah, Ellen,” Teresa said, “you know quite well that is not the work I mean.”

“Will you come and see me in the city?”

Teresa sighed. “Only for you would I go there. Only for you.”

When Jeff came to the back door, his face pink with pleasure and the exertion of sprinting across the yard, my duffel bag was already packed.

“The last time I tried to do this, the cops came,” I said.

“So we won’t take any chances,” Jeff said, and he grabbed my hand and together we ran across the backyard to his jeep, parked next to Mrs. Forburg’s car, and jumped into our seats. The reporters were eating in front, eating and having their afternoon coffee, too, and they never even saw us sneak away, hand in hand, like Hansel and Gretel.

“Haul ass,” I said quietly.

“Not yet,” Jeff said, and he headed downtown, toward the town square and Main Street, the courthouse rising above it all. I thought of the woman in the blue suit, of how she’d seemed to lean just a little forward. “They must have believed me,” I said as Jeff tried to tune in the all-news station.

The next day the papers said that maybe they hadn’t, maybe they’d believed, as so many others had, that I’d done what I was accused of doing because of love or duty, that the prosecutors had gone too far. But just for that afternoon, as Jeff whipped around the curvy roads, I thought that maybe someone had believed what I said.

“…Gulden, a former Harvard honors student, with the murder of her mother, Katherine. Mrs. Gulden, the wife of the chairman of the English department at Langhorne College, died in February and an autopsy …” the radio bleated, and then the signal wavered and a Brahms concerto took its place. We rounded a corner and heard a fragment of Ed Best talking, and then the weather. Tomorrow would be sunny, highs in the seventies. Spring had arrived.

No one had planted flowers in the tubs at the bottom of the porch steps and the azalea by the side of the garage looked as though it had died, although a few green leaves on one stem had made a valiant effort. Jeff turned off the engine. “I thought you
might want to go inside,” he said. I stared at him, then back at the house. “Pop will be here in fifteen minutes. He called me when he heard. The first thing he said was ‘Perhaps now I can see your sister.’ Not ‘isn’t it great.’ Not ‘whoopdedoo.’ Just like that: ‘Perhaps now I can see your sister.’ I’ll never understand him. Never, no matter how hard I try.”

Jeff opened the door of the jeep. “I can’t, Jeffie. Especially not right now.”

“You sure?”

“Perfectly sure.” I looked back at the house, my home. “Is it dusty?” I finally said.

“He’s got a cleaning lady from the college coming in once a week.”

“That’s not enough. Has he changed anything?”

“No.”

“I can’t,” I said again.

Jeff climbed out of the jeep. “Okay, wait,” he said, and he went toward the kitchen door, and I could see the table in my mind, unpolished, untidy.

“Jeff,” I called, and he turned back to me. “I want something.”

When he came out of the house he had it under his arm, the glass in the frame glittering as the sunlight caught it. He laid it on my lap, the photograph of my father, my mother on one arm, I on the other, at my college graduation. I unzipped my duffel, wrapped a nightshirt around the picture, and shoved it deep in the bag.

“Isn’t there one of you and her alone?” Jeff said.

“No,” I said, “I don’t think there ever was one.”

He drove down the hill, past the shoe store and Phelps’s Hardware and the Duanes’, and I thought I could see the shadow of Mrs. Duane’s pale hair through the window, past the displays of books. The daffodils stood straight on the green, so many of them. If I squinted there was only a yellow blur beneath the flagpole.

“Which way are you going?” I said.

“Train station,” Jeff said, and he grinned.

And there on the platform was Jules in her city clothes, her long gauzy black skirt, her cowboy boots, her black leather jacket and black sunglasses, her black backpack and black hair curling wildly around her head. I got out of the car and she ran, her boots making tapping sounds on the platform and the stairs, and grabbed me so hard we both listed to the left.

“I told you to stay in the city,” I said, holding her and looking at her, holding her and then looking again. She was thinner than I’d remembered, and her eyes looked different.

“I had eyeliner tattooed on,” she said, blinking. “It hurt like a bitch but it’s one less thing to do in the morning.”

“Oh, Jesus, Jules,” I said.

“You were on the AP wire,” she said. “They spelled your name wrong. They made you Golden.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You are Golden,” Jules said, and she climbed into the jeep.

“I just didn’t think you should be alone for the ride,” she said, once I was in back and she next to Jeff.

“Excuse me, but what am I, the chauffeur?” Jeff said. “Yes, Miss Julie, ma’am, where we going, Miss Julie?”

“Oh, you know what I mean,” she said.

Every news station had something about the grand jury, and so we turned on a music station and played it loud. Jules decided we should put the top down, and our hair whipped around our faces, sticking to our lips and teeth, blinding us. We rode for an hour like that, singing along with the radio. When Jules turned around to talk to me I leaned forward, one hand on my duffel so it wouldn’t blow away.

“I found a new place, two blocks from mine!” she shouted, the only way she could be heard. “It’s prime, honey. A fireplace, two bedrooms, a bathroom with a window.” I’d almost forgotten how much a window in the bathroom meant in New York City.

“How much?” I said.

“Only three hundred more than I’m paying now. Let’s do it, El. I have to make a decision tomorrow or let it go—you know
how they are. You’ll find a job and three hundred will be nothing.”

“Or I’ll sell my story to television.”

“So you’ll find something. C’mon.”

“I don’t know, Jules. No guy right now? No hot prospects?”

Jules held back her hair with her long fingers. “There was a guy, now there’s not a guy, then there’ll be a guy, then no guy, guy gone. You know the routine.”

“I do,” I said.

“That shithead,” Jules said, and we both knew who she meant.

“Yeah, well,” I said.

“Yeah, well, nothing. If I run into him I’ll take him apart.”

“No men for me right now,” I said.

“So let’s take this place.”

“All right,” I said, and Jules bounced up and down in her seat like an excited child.

“You’re the best, Julie Julie Boboolie,” Jeff said.

Jules leaned toward me until her hair touched my arm softly. “If only he was a little older,” she said.

“I heard that,” Jeff yelled. “That’s completely and totally unfair. Younger men are happening. Younger men are a trend.”

“Oh, stop,” Jules said. “You can’t settle down with a trend.” Jeff accelerated and we came over a rise in the highway and there, poking into the air like a quiver full of arrows, was the island of Manhattan, the Emerald City, a glorious mirage.

Jules turned around and smiled at me. “Click your heels together three times and say there’s no place like home,” she said.

“Yeah, and if I do where will I wind up?” I said. And over the ramp and through the tunnel all of us were silent, until on the other side we came into the center of it, came out next to a hotdog cart with a yellow-and-blue umbrella and steam rising from the square hole in its center, to a young black man with a squeegee, the skin tight on his facial bones, who jumped back and yelled, “Hey, motherfucker!” when Jeff turned on the wipers, shifted gears, and took off down Ninth Avenue.

“I’m not sure where I am,” I said.

“I know, honey,” said Jules. “Welcome to the island of lost souls.”

“You two are a pair,” Jeff said.

“I’d marry her in a minute if I could,” Jules said, turning around to smile at me and pat my knee.

“There’s no place like home,” I said. “There’s no place like home.”

“We’re not in Kansas anymore,” Jules said.

“There’s no place like home,” I said again as we headed south to the Village.

M
y beeper went off during the second act of a new musical about children in a tuberculosis hospital at the turn of the century. All down the row of velvet seats in the rich darkness of the theater, I saw heads turn and eyes glisten out of the black disapprovingly, as the tinny birdsong issued, muffled, from between my wallet and my checkbook. I reached down into my purse, switched it off, and looked at Richard, smiling ruefully. “Always, always,” he whispered, squeezing my upper arm and sending me up the aisle, crouched a bit so as not to disturb the audience, to call the hospital.