One True Thing (27 page)

But he was still a respected criminal trial lawyer, and the $25,000 my brother gave him was not enough. I told Jeff we should pay him in food, bring in the lasagna in disposable foil trays, the crockpot soups, the pineapple upsidedown cakes and the brownies that still littered the counters in my mother’s house and filled the freezer so that it was impossible to open it, Jeff had told me, without having some funeral meats fall at your feet. Let him eat cake, I said.

“You’ll give me the rest when you sell your story to television,” Bob Greenstein said, “like that girl upstate who had her father killed because she didn’t like her curfew and he didn’t like her nose ring.”

“Fat chance,” I said, my mouth full of chicken salad.

That was one of the things I liked about him, that there was none of the hush, the reverence, that accompanied conversation with most people on the subject of my mother’s death, no matter how they thought it might have happened. Even the reporters would talk in funeral home tones, what passes for understanding when people talk about death. “I know this is probably a difficult time, but if you could give me a half hour,” they would say on the messages on Mrs. Forburg’s home machine. “We do hair and makeup,” said the assistant to a producer at a television station. “In case that’s a concern.”

But Bob never dropped his voice, never leaned toward me with concerned brown eyes beneath lowered brows. He was in many ways an unattractive man, short and squat, with only a fringe of hair, a tonsure that looked as though it had been drawn in with an eyebrow pencil. His shirt fronts stretched tight and dully white across his paunch, and his office smelled of cigar smoke, although for some reason he never smoked in front of me. His desk was a
mahogany reproduction piece, perhaps of something at Monticello or Mount Vernon, and its big surface was scratched, the finish worn off here and there by a cigar that had been allowed to burn low, taking the veneer with it. One wall was lined with file cabinets, with files piled untidily atop them, and behind him was a breakfront with photographs of a boy and girl, stiff school portraits with fake rustic backgrounds.

“Wife?” I said when I first sat in the chair across from him.

“Left,” he said.

I enjoyed communicating with someone like that, without explanation or recriminations, without psychologizing or pontificating, just clean and pure, almost like math: Wife. Left. I was a client to Bob Greenstein, a case, a problem, a fact pattern, a task to be mastered. I liked that, too. It was a great relief to be with a person who did not want to know my soul, my deepest secrets. Quite the contrary.

Jeff would drive me in the jeep up the interstate to a small city that rose just beyond the highway the way all the others did, the shabby houses beneath the overpass ranged around the ramps, and then the center of town, and then just beyond it the homes of those with money and position. In the years to come, when I traveled more, I would realize that every American town was so constructed, that only New York was different, the rich and the poor hopscotching across the horizon, Park Avenue one way in the eighties and another in the hundred and twenties, Riverdale and the South Bronx only a long, long short walk away from one another.

I don’t know where Bob lived, although I had his home phone number in case, although I was never entirely sure what in case was in this case, whether the police might come in the middle of the night or the judge revoke my bail without cause. I imagined him in a bare apartment somewhere, his wife living with the children in one of the Tudor houses just beyond the center of town, so like the ones in Langhorne. Although for all I knew he had a splendid contemporary on a swath of open land ten miles away,
with a Jacuzzi that provided a view of the woods and lots of action in the evenings.

I didn’t need to know much about him, nor him about me, except for the story. I told him of how the police had brought me to the station for questioning a week after my mother’s funeral, of how they arrested me after talking to me for four hours.

“And you talked to them?” he said.

I shrugged.

“Never asked for counsel?” he said. “Answered all their questions? Cooperated fully?”

I nodded.

“You went to Harvard?”

“I didn’t go to the law school,” I said. “My boyfriend did.”

“Yeah, your boyfriend. Some boyfriend. You watch television, Ellen?”

“Not much. Old movies, mainly.”

“Don’t talk to the police. The police are not your friends. If your cat is up a tree, then you want to be nice to police officers. If you are under suspicion in a murder case, you do not. They are on the other side. They are not interested in the search for truth. They are interested in the search for you.”

That’s when you could see what Bob Greenstein would be, when he made a speech like that. He came on like a nightlight, a faint and steady glow of something not quite conviction, something closer to what carny salesmen used to do when they sold patent medicines and Bibles.

“You’re cynical,” I said quietly.

“I’m realistic,” he said, shaking his head. He kept shaking it as he looked through a pile of papers on his desk. He lifted the blurred Xerox of a newspaper piece, and when I saw the headline and picture I winced.

“Yeah,” he said at the gesture. “I bet you are very sorry you ever wrote this essay, or at least that you won with it.”

“I’m not sorry I wrote it. I’m only sorry it’s not better.”

“‘A fifteen-year-old dog lies on a metal examining table,’” he
began to read. “‘His breathing is ragged. Behind him a veterinarian fills a needle with clear fluid to do what needs to be done—put the animal out of his misery.’”

He stopped and peered up. “Where’d you see them put the dog to sleep?” he said.

“I never did. I made it up.”

“Age of the dog and everything?”

“And everything,” I said.

He sighed. “Blah blah blah blah,” he said, a stubby finger running down the article. “Blah, blah, blah, here, ‘It seems outrageous that those humans suffering just as much as animals, even those who say that they are tired of life and want to end it, are kept alive by extraordinary means. What are feeding tubes and respirators but playing God on the part of men? What is keeping people alive when they would be better off dead than extreme cruelty?’ Blah blah blah, ‘participate in decisions about our own deaths,’ blah blah, ‘truly, mercy killing is an apt name.’ Yow.”

He looked at me again.

“What can I say?” I asked, shrugging. “I was seventeen years old and I knew nothing about the subject. It’s glib, it’s self-righteous, and it’s badly written.”

“You wrote it?”

“Yes.”

“Did your mother ever read it?”

“Yes.”

“Did she disagree with your conclusions?”

“We didn’t discuss it.” Actually, I think she said, when I was mailing it in, “It’s a horrible subject.” Or perhaps that is only my reconstructed memory.

“Your father?”

“There’s a grammatical mistake near the end. A ‘that’ where a ‘which’ should be. He was livid. We didn’t discuss the content.”

“I’m curious about your father. He’s been the mystery man in this case. Do you talk to him.”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

Again I shrugged.

“Why didn’t he bail you out?”

“Ask him.”

“He’s been asked. He says he didn’t know they were holding you until the next morning, by which time you’d already been released by your English teacher. Is that possible?”

“Yes.”

“He was sleeping when your mother died?”

“Yes.”

“He was not alone with her the night before?”

I paused. I did not know what my father had told the police. As though he read my mind, Bob added, “That’s what he says.”

“Right,” I said.

“But you were with her. She was in a completely helpless state. And when she died you didn’t call him, you just sat with her until morning.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t want to let go of her hand,” I said, and he nodded. “Good,” he said. It was the right answer. It was true as well. I felt as though I’d won an office pool, some sort of lottery. Correct and accurate.

“What was the last thing she said to you?” he asked, but I could not remember. I could only remember the endless silence of that night, rubbed raw with the sounds of breathing.

We went over everything I had gone over with the police, the morphine pump, the settings, the mostly full vial of pills. And all the time I saw the spoon with the rice pudding going in her mouth and out again, my mother’s eyes glittering like topaz: I saw her mouth work until the food went down, saw the death’s-head on the pillow as we breathed in tandem. Bob took notes on some sheets of paper. Then he leaned back, rocking slightly in an old wooden desk chair with a pillow placed at the small of his back.

“Here’s the problem with what’s appeared in the papers so far,”
he said. “And I say that because I’m getting a whole lot more on this case from the
Tribune
than I am from Ed Best, who is playing this very close to the vest. Maybe that’s because he only did it in the first place to get himself in the papers so he can be attorney general or run for Congress. His wife, by the way, says you were cracking jokes at the funeral. Anyhow, you put it all together, and people will see this one of two ways. Best case scenario is that you did give your mother the morphine, but that you had justification for doing so, that it was the right, even the moral thing to do.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“The other is what will be the prosecutor’s case, and that is that you are a very tough, very hard young woman who got tired of being tied to this dying mother and gave her the morphine so you could go on about your business.”

“Well, that’s the view of me that conforms more closely to reality.”

“Now, you see, that’s the sort of thing that you say that is counterproductive in this context. It’s very Upper East Side, but it’s like telling the police that anyone in their right mind would have killed your mother if they had a chance—”

“That’s not what I said.”

“All right.”

I folded my hands and looked down at them, the veins seeming bigger, bluer, knottier than they had before. “I know people like to make up little stories about life,” I said, “that they like things to have a certain shape. Daughters who adore their mothers and would lay down their lives for them. Daughters who hate their mothers and kill them. Noble gestures, grand passions. The right thing. The wrong thing. Made for each other, happily ever after.”

I looked Bob Greenstein straight in the eye and continued, “Everyone makes up their little stories and then they wonder why their own lives aren’t like that. It makes life so much simpler if they can get rid of all the loose ends. Ellen is such an angel, loved her mother so much she couldn’t bear to see her suffer. Or, Ellen is such a witch that she walked over her mother in spikes to get
what she wanted. I can’t be responsible for other people’s little stories. I have enough trouble making sense of my own.”

“That’s very poetic, but here’s my trouble, and I’ll lay it right out for you. I need some little story to go into court with, because experience tells me that if I don’t have one you are in big trouble.”

“I’m already in big trouble,” I said.

“A trial and a possible jail term will be bigger trouble. Much bigger. You have no idea.”

“I’ll tell the grand jury that I didn’t do it and they won’t indict me,” I said, almost believing it.

“Very bad idea for you to appear. Very bad. I don’t envision having you testify.”

“I’m testifying,” I said. “I need to testify. I insist. Absolutely.”

Bob Greenstein leaned back and sighed. “Oh, what a prize I got with you, kid,” he said.

Being in therapy always reminded me of being in Bob Greenstein’s office, of watching someone try to make my little story into a coherent whole. Sometimes I wished my therapist would just lean forward, her hand splayed over her notebook, and say with feeling, “Oh, what a prize I got with you, kid.” Sometimes now at work I think it myself. What a prize.

E
aster did come early that year, before the gray sticks of the azalea branches had begun to soften with a pale-green haze, before the crocuses and snowdrops were anything more than sharp points lifting improbably from soil still hard. The little girls would be disappointed, their flowered dresses hidden at church beneath their worn winter coats, their white straw hats incongruous above the wool collars, their white patent shoes incongruous beneath. Mrs. Forburg went to visit a cousin in Philadelphia. Brian came home for the weekend, but he didn’t call and he didn’t come to see me. Jeff went to stay with a girl he knew from school.

Bob Greenstein had told me to stay close to Mrs. Forburg’s house, to keep a low profile in Langhorne, to live like a nun. But I felt so lonely that weekend, after I’d waxed Mrs. Forburg’s linoleum and washed her curtains, that I ignored all his advice and went out on Good Friday. I drove alone to Sammy’s in Mrs. Forburg’s beige Chevy sedan, drove through the thick rich blackness of the cold night until the bar sign sprang from the darkness of a corner just shy of the center of town, its neon profile of a corpulent
gentleman in a red stock tie bright against the starless sky. There were few cars parked outside. I’d combed my hair but I was damned if I was going to put on lipstick just so the auto mechanics and retail clerks of Langhorne wouldn’t talk about how I’d lost my looks.

“Where is everybody?” I asked the bartender, a guy named Mark who had graduated from high school four years before I did, one of those guy who always wore a baseball cap in a vain effort to disguise premature baldness.

He shrugged and brought me a beer. “Easter’s one of those vacations kids don’t come home for. Too short, I guess.”

“So where are all the Langhorne kids?”

“There’s a dance there tonight. The place has been dead since the lunch crowd left.” All but one of the tables were empty, the red glass globes burning steadily in their centers. Against the wall four men somewhere between senior year and middle age were hunched forward over their candle, their chins red in its reflected glow, reminding me of the game we once played with buttercups, looking for the yellow to tell us who liked butter. One man met my eyes across the room and let his drop conspicuously. I turned around.