One True Thing

by Anna Quindlen

  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.

  “She’s dead,” I replied. “I’ll go make the coffee.”

  PART TWO

  I had not acquired much during the five months that I had lived in my old room, tracing the marching flowers of the stenciling around the edge of the ceiling in the dark, lulled to sleep finally by the familiar shape of the dormer window, awakened sometimes by the crying from the floor below, living and breathing and finally dying in tandem with my mother. There was the datebook, still on my desk, still empty. There was the bulky oatmeal-colored sweater my parents had given me for Christmas: that was how our presents were always labeled, although we always knew our mother bought them. There was a pair of jeans Jeff left behind at Thanksgiving that I had pirated, and a new pair of boots I bought at the mall because my mother had so wanted me to buy myself something one day in October.

  And there was the navy-blue suit I bought for the funeral, to wear with a pair of old black patent pumps I found in the back of my closet, left over from high school graduation. I would not be taking that suit with me. I would not be wearing it again.

  So when I packed my duffel two weeks after my mother died, a week after she was buried, there was little more to put in than I had taken out—less, actually, because two pairs of cords were too snug now and I left them in a drawer.

  I didn’t prepare to go right away. I stayed one morning to oversee the dismantling of the hospital bed and the return of the wheelchair, folded like an empty suit, its plastic leather seat slumping dejectedly. On another I rearranged the furniture and called someone in to shampoo the upholstery and the rugs. The silver needed to be polished. I finished the background of the sunflower pillow and took it to a shop where they would fill it and sew on a velvet back; they knew what to do from all the other times my mother had picked out the shape, the fabric, the edging. As I was turning to walk out and heard the little bell on the door jingle above me, like the one Jimmy Stewart hears at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, my umbrella half opened against a cold and heavy winter rain, I stopped and told them to send the pillow, when it was done, to Jules’s address in the city. I had decided I wanted to keep it.

  One morning as I made coffee I told my father that I would be willing to clean out the closets in his room. He did not look up from his bran and his New York Times as he said, “No. Absolutely not.”

  But after he had gone to the college, wearing the same turtleneck he’d worn for three days, I went upstairs and pushed aside the white louvered closet doors, running my hands over the rainbow of clothes, the bright blues, the summer whites, the tartans, the purples and reds. And then, without thinking, I reached out my arms and hugged them. I smelled lilac eau-de-toilette and Jean Naté and Joy and attar of roses all jumbled together, the day perfumes and the night ones, the bath oils and the face lotions. Over them all was the smell of something else, but remote, musty, so dead that it was worse than it had been when I stood in the cemetery next to the oak casket, so clean, so shiny, like the table in the kitchen.

  “This house is terribly empty,” my father had said as he ate his breakfast the morning of the funeral, and it was true. Just as my mother’s body had seemed inconsequential to me when I realized that the heat and light that lived within it had disappeared, so her house seemed hollow, a random collection of things, objects, as empty as a display room in a furniture store.

  Jules called me so often that I began to laugh at her. “Just checking in?” I said, and she responded, “Oh, go to hell.” She was all packed, ready to take the train down for the funeral, when I told her to stay where she was. I wanted to see Jules, to feel her fingers kneading mine, to tell her everything while the two of us curled up in opposite corners of the big old burgundy velvet couch in her tiny living room, our shoes on the floor beneath us. She would pick tendrils of horsehair out of the corner where the velvet had worn away; I would reach over and slap her hand. But not yet.

  “I don’t want you here now,” I said on the phone. “I want to come back there and have it all be the same, different from this, not part of what’s been going on here.”

  “Untouched by human hands,” she said.

  “Exactly.”

  “The magazine is sending a deputation.”

  “Please, Jules, tell them no. I just don’t want it. All this is one thing and my life there is something else and I want to keep the two of them separate.”

  “Can’t I be the exception?” she said softly.

  “No. Not even you.”

  “I have that nice black suit that we bought on sale in Bendel’s.”

  “You’ll wear it to dinner when we go out to celebrate my new job.”

  “What? What job?”

  “Got me. But when I get a job we’ll celebrate.”

  Jules was quiet for a minute. “I don’t know,” she finally said.

  “Please, Jules,” I said.

  “What are you wearing?” she said.

  I laughed long and hard, longer and harder than the remark required. “That’s the kind of thing I need from you,” I said.

  “You need a bottle of wine and a good cry,” Jules said, and I could tell by the slightest tremor in her deep contralto voice that she was crying. I took a breath and let it out in a sigh.

  “Later,” I said. “I promise.”

  I wore a navy-blue suit, my father wore a navy-blue suit, and the boys wore navy jackets. Wasn’t it Diana Vreeland who once said that pink was the navy blue of India? But wasn’t it true, I said at the lunch afterward at the Duanes’ beautiful, rather austere home on a hill street parallel
to our own, wasn’t it true, I said, as I wolfed down chicken salad and pound cake, that navy blue was the black of college towns?

  Of course no one laughed, and Mrs. Best said, “Always joking, Ellen.” They all remembered that moment, over the next few months.

  At the funeral luncheon my father was not himself, not the man who had taught me to say things like that. He was not the wit that day, smelling of white wine and lemon cologne, the bereaved wit talking of how my mother would have loved the chamber music and the chapter from Corinthians and Isabel Duane’s eulogy. Instead he stood by a table clutching a mug of coffee and listened as others came up to condole and reminisce.

  His hands shook, and his face was gray. He looked more ill than my mother had, those months ago, when he had come out onto the porch and told me I had no heart. He did not recognize Dr. Cohn when she took his hand, and when she bent near to say something in his ear his eyes were as glazed and blank as those of those people you see whiling their lives away in a mental institution. It was as though his soul had flown, too.

  She asked me to walk with her out to her car, Dr. Cohn, in her black wool coat and a hat with a brim turned back from her strong face. She looked exactly like one of the Orthodox women I had seen on the Upper West Side on Saturday mornings, herding gaggles of small children, girls in dresses, boys in jackets and yarmulkes, to temple. Glibly I asked, “Do you go to all your patients’ funerals?”

  “The ones I particularly like,” she said.

  She opened the front door of the car, slid inside, and gestured for me to join her. She looked straight out the windshield at the old snow, in ugly piles along the curbs and driveways, as though we were driving somewhere and she was concentrating on the next turnoff.

  Finally she said flatly, “I don’t know whether to say this or not. But I will. The pathologist found something wrong during the autopsy.”

  I made a sound, half snort, half laugh. I was a little drunk and very tired. “News flash, Doctor,” I said. “I guessed that there was something wrong with my mother.”

  “Don’t be flip, Ellen. I mean they found that the cause of death was an overdose of the morphine.”

  “The pump?”

  “Someone’s already looked at it. It’s fine.”

  “The pills?”

  “I don’t know. I just know that the toxicology reports showed that she had enough morphine in her to be fatal. More than enough. A great deal.”

  “So? So what? She took morphine all the time. You know that. And Teresa will tell them that my mother was in agony, she was like an animal by the very end, wearing diapers, drooling, never knowing what day it was, never able to get up. Who cares how she died? She should have been put out of her misery weeks ago. If she had been a dog they would have.”

  “Ellen,” Dr. Cohn said, “you should watch what you say.”

  “I don’t care what anybody thinks of me.”

  “Don’t you wonder who did it?”

  “Did what?”

  “Are you listening to me? Someone administered a fatal overdose of morphine to your mother.”

  “Did you tell my father?” I said.

  “We had to tell the district attorney.”

  I snorted again, louder. “Oh, God, Mr. Best,” I said. “Who cares? Did you tell my father?”

  “I tried,” Dr. Cohn said. “But he seems so vague. I didn’t quite feel that he was completely present, if you know what I mean.”

  And she was right. He did well enough in class, I heard, but he seemed abstracted and fatigued otherwise. The president had offered him a sabbatical, but he had replied as he had when I offered to clean the closets: No. Absolutely not.

  And I wondered whether, as he drove across the bridge over the Montgomery River to the gray stone building where he held court in that corner office, as he handed out reading lists and oversaw senior theses, perhaps even as he was offered dinner and a good dry martini by some assistant professor still looking for a life companion and knowing, at least, that a widower had not been opposed to marriage as a matter of course, I wondered whether all was obscured by a vision of his hand holding a spoon with a small seashell pattern on the handle, my mother’s second-best dinner setting, carrying rice pudding from the bowl to her mouth. After the funeral, after Dr. Cohn told me about the morphine, even before I really understood that someone was going to be hell-bent on finding out how it came to be in my mother’s raddled body, I began to think about the pudding.

  I wondered about it as I packed up, the silver clean, the furniture back in its original position. I heard a whine, a hum, from the lower floors, and for just a moment I thought it was the wheelchair, moving from the living room to the kitchen. But it was only the furnace tuning up. I thought I heard a high cry from below, plaintive, tortured, alive. But it was some bird, knocking against the kitchen window at its own seductive reflection, falling in love with its own image in a case of mistaken identity. Knock, knock. Knock, knock. It went on and on as I filled my vanity bag with aspirin and Vaseline and my diaphragm and some tubes of lipstick. There was an empty plastic container that had once held morphine tablets and I dropped it into the trash as I had the one that had stood on the table in the den, that morning after, as my father sat and whispered to my dead mother, his dead wife, his voice so soft and intimate and finally broken that I had gone into the other room and put on Vivaldi, loud, so I could not hear him, before I made a pot of coffee in the kitchen.

  Knock, knock, went the bird again, but the timbre was different this time, and I went down, my bag in hand. The train schedule was on the table in the hall. The 6:10, I thought. The 6:10 that I had last taken that day in September, after I drank the orange juice and smashed the glass and vowed to show I had a heart.

  They were knocking at the door, two men in suits, their knocking an echo of the bird, a cardinal it was, smashing himself so determinedly against the window that there were now smears of some sort of mucus and a trace of blood. The two men stood on the doorstep and when I opened the door neither moved, but the older one, the one with the brown suit, said pleasantly, with a half-smile, “Miss Gulden.” It was not a question.

  Officer Patterson, and with him Officer Brown, in the brown suit. If I could raise my father from his torpor it would be by telling him that, by telling him that it was a cheap faux Dickensian trick, telling him how Officer Brown worked the knot of his tie back and forth just before he asked a question, as though someone had created him on the page determined to give him some defining characteristic. Officer Patterson said, “Nice house.” Officer Brown said, “We’d like to ask you some questions.” Officer Patterson refused coffee. Officer Brown asked if I could come downtown.

  “What’s that noise?” Officer Patterson said.

  “A bird bashing his head into the kitchen window,” I said, and they looked at one another.

  My duffel was on the floor by the gateleg table. The train schedule was tucked beneath a blue-and-orange Chinese bowl. Everyone admired it, including Officer Brown. My mother had been jubilant about that always, because she had purchased the bowl from a grocery and kitchen supply store in Chinatown for $25, having bargained the proprietor down from $35 and demanded a bag of fortune cookies thrown in into the bargain. “A good housewife makes a happy home,” one of the cookies had said, but it was I who got it, and wrinkled up my nose as I read it aloud.

  As I walked out to their black sedan I could see my futon in the garage, ready to be thrown into Jeff’s jeep later in the week and carted bark to Jules’s apartment. After we were gone, two other police officers came, with my father, and searched the house, and they found the empty pill vial in the basket, and another at the bottom of a trash bag in the garage, and the diaphragm, and the train schedule, and the duffel bag. It said in the papers later that I had been preparing to flee. “I was catching the six-ten, for Christsake,” I said to Jeff in a diner over a club sandwich and a chocolate milk shake after he and Mrs. Forburg bailed me out. “I was going back to where I really live.�
�� Someone heard me say it, and that was in the paper, too.

  Officer Brown asked me what my mother ate, what she drank, how she slept how she looked, whether I liked her, whether I loved her, whether I was anxious to stop nursing her and get back to the city and a life of my own. He asked me about morphine dosages, administration, side effects, pills, and pumps. I knew all about it, and I told him so, and the stenographer took my words down, and the sun had set outside the windows of the municipal building and Mr. Best was waiting anxiously in his office and the 6:10 had just pulled out of the station when they arrested me and charged me with killing my mother.

  “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.