One True Thing

by Anna Quindlen

  Praise for

  ONE TRUE THING

  “Hypnotically interesting.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Fiercely compassionate and frank … conveys a world so out of kilter and so like ours that its readers are likely to feel both exhilarated and unnerved by its accuracy.”

  —Elle

  “Compelling and articulate.”

  ——The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “It is simply impossible to forget.”

  ——ALICE HOFFMAN,

  author of The Ice Queen and Blackbird House

  “A heart-wrenching book—and that is what makes it so good …. One True Thing examines so many facets of life and all its pain that the reader might fear a depressing end. Yet it is far from that. Rather, the reader will come away with a new appreciation for family—and life.”

  —New York Daily News

  “Gripping.”

  —Vanity Fair

  “There is not a single false word in One True Thing. Readers of her columns in the Times are aware that Anna Quindlen has a first-class mind; now they will know she has a great heart as well.”

  —SUSAN ISAACS, author of Any Place I Hang My Hat

  “The best recommendation is that it calls you back for another read …. This is a book of catharsis.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Anna Quindlen’s gift lies in her uncanny ability to document what she calls the ‘Sturm und Drang’ of everyday life …. One True Thing tackles subject matter more painful and intense than anything she’s tackled before.”

  —Boston Herald

  “Anna Quindlen has been a woman whom other women channel through.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Anna Quindlen is a marvelous writer …. Throw in Quindlen’s remarkable ability to make you laugh, cry and think beyond the pages, and you have a wonderful book with a story that will touch anyone who cares about life.”

  —Sunday Advocate (Baton Rouge)

  “A tender, beautifully told tale … that will move you to reexamine your intimate relationships in search of the One True Thing.”

  —GAIL SHEEHY, author of Passages and New Passages

  “If literature were judged solely by its ability to elicit strong emotions, columnist-cum-novelist Quindlen would win another Pulitzer …. The clever mystery ending (complete with satisfying twist) is an added bonus.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “One thing is true: this is a remarkable book. Anna Quindlen writes about family with all the humanity, wit, and pain of going home. This is a strikingly honest and transforming book.”

  —WENDY WASSERSTEIN, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Heidi Chronicles

  “Another winning novel … It’s easy to see why Quindlen’s first novel, Object Lessons, was a bestseller …. Women will identify. Men should read [it] to understand what faces their women …. This novel offers you vivid experience without pain …. A masterpiece.”

  —Tulsa World

  “One True Thing is as thrilling in its emotions as it is in its suspense …. Anna Quindlen brings all her journalistic talents to her fiction.”

  —HILMA WOLITZER, author of The Doctor’s Daughter

  “Impossible to put down.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Insightful, beautiful, and poignant … This is a story of suffering and courage, the lost and the newly discovered. It is a tale of unexpected twists.”

  —Sunday Oklahoman

  “Extraordinarily accomplished.”

  —The Buffalo News

  Also by Anna Quindlen

  Rise and Shine

  Being Perfect

  Blessings

  A Short Guide to a Happy Life

  How Reading Changed My Life

  Black and Blue

  Object Lessons

  Living Out Loud

  Thinking Out Loud

  BOOKS FOR CHILDREN

  Happily Ever After

  The Tree That Came to Stay

  Table of Contents

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part Two

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  A Conversation With Anna Quindlen

  Questions and Topics for Discussion

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Prudence M. Quindlen

  PROLOGUE

  Jail is not as bad as you might imagine. When I say jail, I don’t mean prison. Prison is the kind of place you see in old movies or public television documentaries, those enormous gray places with guard towers at each corner and curly strips of razor wire going round and round like a loop-the-loop atop the high fence. Prison is where they hit the bars with metal spoons, plan insurrection in the yard, and take the smallest boy—the one in on a first offense—into the shower room, while the guards pretend not to look and leave him to find his own way out, blood trickling palely, crimson mixed with milky white, down the backs of his hairless thighs, the shadows at the backs of his eyes changed forever.

  Or at least that’s what I’ve always imagined prison was like.

  Jail was not like that a bit, or at least not the jail in Montgomery County. It was two small rooms, both together no bigger than my old attic bedroom in my parents’ house, and they did have bars, but they closed by hand, not with the clang of the electric, the remote controlled, the impregnable. An Andy Griffith jail. A Jimmy Stewart jail. Less Dostoyevsky than summer stock, a jail for the stranger in town who brings revelation in the leather pack he carries slung over one shoulder and has a thrilling tenor voice.

  There was a shelflike cot arrangement, and a toilet, and a floor with speckled linoleum, so much like the linoleum in Langhorne Memorial Hospital that I wondered if the same contractor had installed both. When the door was locked the policeman who had brought me down the long hall after I was photographed and fingerprinted left, his eyes more than a little sympathetic. We had once been in the same beginner’s French class at the high school, he to eke out another C in his senior year, me to begin the diligent study that would culminate in the Institut Français prize at graduation. After the sound of his footsteps died away the place was very quiet.

  From up front, where the police dispatcher sat, there was the sound of someone typing inexpertly, the occasional animal honk from the police two-way radios. From above there was a hum, a vague, indeterminate sound that seemed to come from electricity running through the wires just beneath the acoustical tile ceiling. Above me were those plain fluorescent tube lights.

  Sometimes now, at work in the hospital, I will look up at a certain angle and I see that ceiling again, those lights, and the sense of being in that small space once more is overwhelming, but not really unpleasant.

  Sitting on the cot, my hands clasped lightly between my knees, I felt relief. The lockup, I repeated in my head. The slammer. The joint. All attempts to scare mys
elf, all those cheap slang terms I had heard come from the nasty fishlike lips of Edward G. Robinson as I watched The Late Show in the den, the house dark, the screen gray-blue as a shark, my father and mother asleep upstairs. The can, I thought to myself. The Big House. But overlaying them all was a different thought: I am alone. I am alone. I am alone.

  I lay on my side on the cot and put my hands together beneath my cheek. I closed my eyes, expecting to hear a voice in my ear, a cry for help: for a cup of tea, a glass of water, a sandwich, more morphine. But no one spoke; no one needed me any longer. I felt peaceful as I could not remember feeling for a long time. And free, too. Free in jail.

  For the first time in days, I could even stop seeing my father, with his smooth black hair and his profile a little dulled by age and fatigue; I could stop seeing him spooning the rice pudding into my mother’s slack mouth, like a raven tending to the runt in the nest, all wild, weird tufts of head fuzz and vacant, glittery eyes. Spoon. Swallow. Spoon. Swallow. The narrow line of his lips. The slack apostrophe of her tongue. The blaze of love and despair that lit her face for just a moment, then disappeared.

  I can still see that scene today, play it over and over again to reduce it to its small component parts, particularly the look in her eyes, and in his. But, back then, during my night in jail, for a few hours it disappeared. All I was aware of was the hum.

  It reminded me of the sound you could hear if you walked down the street on a summer day in Langhorne, particularly where I lived, where the big houses were. There was always the hum. If you were attentive, stood still and really listened, you could figure out that it was the hum of hundreds of air conditioners. They were pushing cold clean beautiful air into cold clean beautiful rooms, rooms like ours, where the moldings teased the eye upward from the polished surface of the dining-room table or the cushions, with their knife creases left by the side of someone’s hand, on the big brown velvet couch across from the fireplace and the Steinway.

  That was how I thought about it, although that was not how it had been for the last few months of my mother’s life. That was how it looked before the couch from the den had been crowded into the living room to make room for the hospital bed. Before the furniture had all been moved back against the walls to make room for the wheelchair. Before the velvet nap of the couch had been disfigured by vomit and drool.

  Inside the lids of my eyes I could see a kind of dull reddish light, and it reminded me of the light on those streets at the end of the day, particularly in autumn. In the magic hour the cars, so distinct, so identifiable, would come down our street, to turn into driveways or continue to some of the small streets and culs-de-sac farther on. Dr. Belknap the pediatrician, whose patient I had been all my life. Mr. Fryer, who worked in the city as a financial consultant and was obsessed with golf. Mr. Dingle, the high school principal, who could only afford to live on our street because his wife had inherited the house from her parents.

  And then, late at night, after the streetlights buzzed on, with their own hum, a few others came. Always last was Mr. Best, the district attorney. My brother Brian used to deliver his Tribune every morning, just after sunrise, and Bri said that every time he pedaled his bike up the driveway to the sloping sward of pachysandra that set the Best house off from the street, Mr. Best would be standing there. Impatient at dawn, he would be tapping his narrow foot in leather slippers, wearing a corduroy robe in the winter and a seersucker robe in summer. He never gave Brian a tip at Christmas, always a baseball cap that said MAY THE BEST MAN WIN, which was what Mr. Best gave out in election years.

  An election year was coming up when I was in jail.

  The police officer came by my cell. I knew his name was Skip, although his name tag said he was really Edwin Something-or-Other Jr. I had seen him last at the town Christmas-tree lighting ceremony in December, when my mother’s tree was the nicest tree, with its gaudy decorations and big red bows. He had been on the high school basketball team and had sat out every game. His broad back had been a bookend on the bench, a short kid named Bill on the other side, both of them waiting for the team to come back from the floor so they could feel again the nervous jostle that made them part of the action for a few minutes. My brother Jeff probably knew him. He was one of the boys who lived outside of town, in one of the Cape Cod houses that punctuated the corkscrew country roads.

  The county had a lot of them, out where the corn grew in summer taller than any farmer, and tomatoes and zucchini were sold from little lean-tos with a plywood shelf out front. Sometimes, in August, the zucchini would be as big as baseball bats, and, because no one wanted them, the kids would use them to beat the trees in the softer light of the surrounding forests. The only zucchini worth having, my mother always said, were the tiny ones with the blossoms still attached.

  Montgomery County had acres and acres of farm and forest, and then a wide avenue of junk, auto-body shops and Pizza Huts and discount electronics places and mini-malls with bad Chinese takeout and unisex hair salons. And at the end, when you’d come through it all, you arrived at Langhorne. It was the perfect college town, front porches and fanlight windows, oak trees along the curbs as big around as barrels, azaleas in the spring and hydrangeas in the summer and curbside piles of leaves in the fall. Langhorne had a shoe store full of loafers and a jewelry store with trays full of signet rings; it had a bookstore run by an elderly couple named the Duanes, Isabel and Dean Duane, who had retired from a busier life in the city and who seldom consulted Books in Print because they already knew everything that was in it. They were rather like the people in Langhorne, the Duanes—they knew everything about what was going on in their little world.

  The jail was not in Langhorne proper. That was how the people who lived there always referred to it, “Langhorne proper,” so that you would know who lived on one of the oak-lined streets and who lived in the slapdash houses and trailers outside of town. The jail was over by the gas stations, the storage facilities, the Acme and the Safeway.

  The policeman, Skip, who had played in one quarter of one game his senior year, came in to check on me that night because he was concerned that I might be terrified, lonely, weeping. He was concerned that I might be unhinged by the fact that I had been in jail for nearly four hours and my father had not arrived to post bail, to say “Dark day, darling?” in that way that made my few friends go wild about him, his blue eyes, his arch and charming manner, his aphorisms. When the police had first put me here they had waited for him to come bursting in the door, with his long stride, swearing in Englishisms: “What in bloody hell is going on here, may I ask?” My father was the chairman of the Langhorne College English department and he was famous for his Englishisms; they went down exceptionally well when he would speak at the Langhorne Women’s Club or the Episcopal Book Club on David Copperfield (“Minor Dickens, Ellen, strictly minor—Bleak House is too rich for their systems”) or Pride and Prejudice. My father had called me Little Nell when I was younger.

  My mother sometimes called me Ellie.

  But my father did not come to bail me out, and so the young policeman came to watch over the scared woman he expected to find in the cell. He was apparently amazed to find me asleep beneath the fluorescent lights, my knees drawn up to my chest, my hands joined beneath my cheek as though I was praying. Or at least that’s what he told the Tribune.

  I saw the story after my brother Jeff and Mrs. Forburg agreed that it was best for me to know what was being said about me. “Shocked,” the story said Skip was. “Disbelief,” they said he felt. He said that in school I had always been a cold person, superior and sure of myself, and he was right. He said that I was smart, and that was right, too.

  But he was smarter than I was about some things, and he knew that a girl in jail, a girl just barely old enough to refer to herself as a woman when she wanted to make sure that you knew she was not to be trifled with, should be rank with fear and adrenaline, up all night contemplating the horror of her position. Especially a girl charged with killing he
r own mother.

  Instead he found me sleeping, a faint smile on my face.

  You can see that smile in the pictures they took the next morning, after I appeared in court, charged with willfully causing the death of Katherine B. Gulden. The courtroom artist didn’t capture it when she drew me, with my court-appointed lawyer at my side, his pale-blue suit giving off a smell of sizing as he sweated in the small, close room.

  (I remember thinking that anyone represented by a man in a pale-blue suit was doomed for sure. And his dress shirt was short-sleeved. “Going up the river,” I thought to myself. “In for the long haul.”)

  But in the late afternoon, when the strip mall across from the municipal building was in shadow and my bail had been arranged—$10,000 cash and a pledge of a four-bedroom Cape with a finished basement—when I finally left the Montgomery County jail, the 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.”