One True Thing Read Free

smile I had had while asleep was still on my face, just a little half-moon curve above my pointed chin and below my pointed nose.
    On page one of the
Tribune
I smiled my Mona Lisa smile, my dark hair braided back from my forehead, my widow’s peak an arrogant
V
, my big white sweater and a peacoat flapping over dirty jeans, a smudge faintly visible on one cheek. And I knew that even the few people who still loved me would look and think that here was Ellen’s fatal hubris again, smiling at the worst moment of her life.
    Some of them did say that, as the days went by, and I never answered them. How could I say that whenever I went out in public and someone leapt into my path, a Nikon staring at me like a tribal mask on an enemy’s face, all I could hear was a voice in my ear, an alto voice over and over, saying, “Smile for the camera, Ellie. You look so pretty when you smile.”
    And my mother spoke, alive again inside my brain, edging out Becky Sharp and Pip and Miss Havisham and all the other made-up people I had learned so long ago from my father to prize over real ones. She spoke and I listened to her, because I was afraid if I didn’t her voice would gradually fade away, an evanescent wraith of a thing that would narrow to a pinpoint of light and then go out, lost forever, like Tinker Bell if no one clapped for her. I listened to her, because I loved her. She’d asked so little of me, over the course of our lives, and I wanted to do this one small remembered thing, to smile for the camera.
    At the end I always did what she asked, even though I hated it. I was tired to death of the sour smell of her body and the strawof her hair in the brush and the bedpan and the basin and the pills that kept her from crying out, from twisting and turning like the trout do on the banks of the Montgomery River when you’ve lifted them on the end of the sharp hook and their gills flare in mortal agitation.
    I tried to do it all without screaming, without shouting, “I am dying with you.” But she knew it; she felt it. It was one of many reasons why she would lie on the living-room couch and weep without making a sound, the tears giving her gray-yellow skin, tight across her bones, the sheen of the polished cotton she used for slipcovers or the old lampshades she painted with flowers for my bedroom. I tried to make her comfortable, to do what she wanted. All but that one last time.
    No matter what the police and the district attorney said, no matter what the papers wrote, no matter what people believed then and still believe, these years later, the truth is that I did not kill my mother. I only wished I had.

PART ONE
     

 
     
    I remember that the last completely normal day we ever had in our lives, my brothers and I, was an ordinary day much like this one, a muggy August-into-September weekday, the sky low and gray over Langhorne, clouds as flat as an old comforter hanging between the two slight ridges that edged the town. We’d gone to the Tastee Freeze for soft ice cream that day, driving in Jeff’s battered open jeep with our arms out the windows. My brothers were handsome boys who have turned into handsome men. Brian has our father’s black hair and blue eyes, Jeffrey our mother’s coloring, auburn hair and eyes like amber and a long face with freckles.
    Both of them were tanned that day, at the end of their summer jobs as camp counselor and landscapes I was pale from a summer spent in a New York office on weekdays and house-guesting at Fire Island weekends, spending more time at cocktail parties than on the beach, where melanoma and Retin-A were frequent talking points among my acquaintances.
    Afterward I wondered why I hadn’t loved that day more, why I hadn’t savored every bit of it like soft ice cream on my tongue,why I hadn’t known how good it was to live so normally, so everyday. But you only know that, I suppose, after it’s not normal and everyday any longer. And nothing ever was, after that day. It was a