One True Thing Read online

  “Lovely, Ellie,” she whispered sometimes, even when they were gone. “Lovely flowers.”

  Teresa came one morning and attached the little machine, like a tiny tape recorder with its red digital numbers, that would pump morphine into my mother’s catheter whenever she pushed a button on its side. Teresa programmed it and taught me how to do it, too. “We will have to say how much is enough, and for how long,” said Teresa.

  “Could she overdose with this?” I said.

  Teresa looked at me, one brow raised slightly. “Not likely,” she said.

  My mother winced when Teresa lodged the needle in the catheter, but when it was taped in place and the little box placed at her side she said she felt nothing except the pull of the tape on her tender skin. “I can retape it, Mrs. Gulden,” said Teresa, smoothing her hair, held back from her face with a black band. “Perhaps it is too tight.”

  “No, Teresa,” my mother said. “It’s fine. Thank you.”

  We sat by her side for almost an hour without speaking, Teresa and I, she making notations in the small log she always carried, me finishing the background on the sunflower pillow. As she slept, my mother pulled fretfully at the diapers she now wore. Three times in the past week she had soiled the bed, and I had called Teresa, who was not supposed to do such things—they had a health aide to change beds, someone not as skilled or as salaried as a nurse—but had insisted that this was no time to have someone new and foreign in our home. After Teresa cleaned my mother and helped her onto the sofa, I gathered up the sheets with a great deal of bustle and carried them to the basement, holding my breath so that I would not gag.

  “I’m so sorry,” my mother said each time.

  Finally Teresa had taken her hand and sat on the side of her bed. “Mrs. Gulden, I would like to catheterize you,” she said.

  My mother’s hand came up slowly to touch the small mound on her chest, above her heart.

  “A urinary catheter,” said Teresa. “So you need not use the bedpan or depend so much on Ellen.”

  “Oh no, Teresa,” she said. “I don’t need that.”

  “I think perhaps you do.”

  “No, no.”

  “Then I think perhaps you should wear protective pants.”

  “Oh no,” she said, and lay back on the pillows. Tears began to slide from beneath her eyelids down the furrows from eyes to nose and nose to chin. “This is too much.”

  “I know it is upsetting,” said Teresa softly, stroking the back of my mother’s hand. “But I believe it will be easier for you. And for Ellen, too.”

  But whenever my mother dropped off to sleep she pulled at the diapers as she did now, as though when she was unconscious they became the tangible reminder of the pain, the disintegration, the life that had become a half life.

  She ate nursery food when she ate, which was not often. She ate oatmeal, applesauce, puddings, yogurt. Her lips were cracked and dry, and several times a day I smoothed petroleum jelly over them so that they would not peel or bleed. It had become difficult to tell whether she was awake or asleep under the thin blanket of consciousness, or simply lying with her eyes closed, thinking the unimaginable thoughts that anyone must feel when they are standing on the bluff overlooking the abyss.

  “How are the boys getting on?” she said slowly after Teresa had gone.

  “Fine, I guess. Jeff is his usual wisecracking self. Brian has a new roommate and seems to like him better than the old one.”

  “Good. I worry about Brian.”

  “Do you want me to bring them home, Mama?” I asked.

  “No, Ellen,” she said clearly.

  That last afternoon I gave her cream of tomato soup for lunch, but after three spoonfuls she shook her head, perhaps because the act of moving the spoon from mug to mouth was so slow, so torturous, so messy that I had to put on a new top sheet afterward. She wore her velour housecoat, its nap flattened by the days in bed, and from beneath it her legs were sticks.

  “I look like those people in the films about the camps,” she whispered, looking down.

  I tucked the clean sheet, with its nice fresh smell, in around her, and pushed back her hair. On the metal cart in the corner that held her pills, her water, a box of tissues, now her soup mug, was a tiny picture in a heart-shaped frame of a newborn, its face the color of your skin after a hot shower. Her tiny fists were balled up and thrown over her head as though she was surrendering, and her face looked like an uncooked biscuit with raisins for eyes. The dome of her head, atop which there was only fuzz, was off-center and misshapen. Halley had had her baby and had brought over the hospital picture to give to my mother. At the door I said that my mother could not have visitors, but then a voice had called faintly, “It’s all right, Ellie,” and I had brought Halley in for a few minutes at my mother’s bedside. She was nursing, she said, and could not stay long because her milk was coming in. But at the door she hugged me and said, “I’m so sorry, so sorry,” as she wept. There were dark circles under her eyes and her hair looked nearly as unkempt as my mother’s. Ground down by maternity, the two of them, I thought.

  “This must be so hard on you,” she had sobbed, trying to muffle the sound with a tissue she pulled from her pocket.

  “It’s almost over,” I said.

  When I came back into the room my mother had been staring at the photograph. “That baby is no beauty,” I said.

  “Babies are never beauties, especially first babies. They’re a long time coming out, and they get knocked up in the process.”

  “The little mother doesn’t look so good, either.”

  “She’ll be fine,” said my mother. “It’s hard work, but she’ll manage. When I think of the people I’ve known who’ve had children who had no business even owning a cat—well, they all get raised somehow.”

  “You were a good mother,” I said.

  “I worked hard,” she had said.

  It was around four when she woke up and started to turn toward me. Then, remembering, she reached up and pushed the button that released the liquid morphine into her catheter and from there to a vein. She closed her eyes and her breathing became hoarse and very loud, like the noise a stick makes when you run it down the length of a fence and it hits the pickets, one by one, with that surprising carrying sound. I paced my breathing with her own, the two of us raising and lowering our chests in unison to keep ourselves alive. “That works better,” she said after a few minutes. Her hand found the medication machine again and pressed, but I knew nothing would come out. Perhaps it had a placebo effect, for she slept again for another hour. I turned on the lamps around the room after I saw her eyes glittering in the half darkness.

  “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.