Set This House in Order (33 page)

“Hey there,” added a man in a white doctor's coat, squatting down on the other side of her. “Are you all right?”

Mouse managed to pull her hands away from her mouth long enough to say: “She's awake!”

The doctor and the nurse both looked around, as if they expected to see Verna Driver standing in the doorway of her room.

“In the bed,” Mouse clarified. “She opened her eyes.”

“Oh honey,” said the nurse. “I told you, she's done that before. But—”

“No,” said Mouse. “She looked at me. She
saw
me.”

“Really?” said the doctor. “That's a good sign, then. Why don't we go in
and have a look?” He stood up, and regarded the onlookers who were gathered around them. “I think the rest of you can move along now.”

Back in the room, Verna Driver's eyes were still open, but her gaze had become unfocused, wandering and dull. “Mrs. Driver?” the doctor called to her, waving a hand in front of her face. “Verna, can you hear me?” She showed no sign of noticing him; her eyes rolled back and forth in their sockets, their movements synchronized but settling on nothing.

Mouse shook her head. “It was different before,” she said. “She was looking
at
me.” She shivered at the memory of it: her mother's eyes, alert, aware, and totally out of place in the slackness of her face—as if, for a joke, she'd donned a cheap rubber mask of her own features and was peeping out through the eyeholes.

The doctor took a penlight from his breast pocket and proceeded to shine it in each of Mouse's mother's eyes. Her pupils contracted as the light hit them, but her gaze continued to wander.

Growing frustrated, Mouse blurted out: “She's faking!”

The nurse frowned at this, but the doctor smiled. “You mean she's pulling our legs, pretending not to see me? That would be a good sign too, if it were true. But I don't think—”

Mouse stiffened. “There!” she said, pointing. The doctor turned back towards the bed.

Verna Driver's gaze, tracking haphazardly across the room, had fallen on Mouse…and stopped. Her eyes focused, regaining their awareness; it was obvious she knew who she was looking at.

At least it was obvious to Mouse. The doctor was still skeptical. “Mrs. Driver?” he called again. She was no more responsive than she had been the first time. But this time the lack of response was different; where before she might not have seen him at all, now (it was clear to Mouse) she was simply ignoring him, too intent on her daughter to pay any attention to waving hands or lights.

“She sees me,” Mouse said, and took a half step to the right. Her mother's eyes followed her exactly.

As an experiment, the doctor had Mouse leave the room. Mouse's mother tracked her as far as she could without turning her head, and continued to stare out of the corners of her eyes for several minutes, as if waiting for Mouse to reappear. Finally her eyes lost focus, and resumed their aimless wandering. The doctor called Mouse back into the room. Another minute passed, and Mouse's mother's gaze happened across Mouse again…and locked on.

“All right,” said the doctor, convinced at last. “Obviously she recognizes
something
about you…but until we can get her to respond positively to questions, we won't really know how much coherent thinking is going on in there. Still”—he nodded optimistically—“it's a good sign.”

“So she's going to get better?”

“Well,” the doctor hedged. “This is one improvement, and we'll hope for more in the days to come. But I have to be honest with you, given the severity of the stroke, to hope for anything like a full recovery would be unrealistic. She's going to be impaired for the rest of her life, and she'll very likely require full-time care.”

“You mean,” said Mouse, “you mean
I
have to take care of her?”

“Not if you don't want to,” said the doctor, while the nurse's frown deepened. “Certainly not alone. Arrangements can be made for professional care, either in your home or at a facility.”

“At a facility,” Mouse said instantly. “Or maybe…maybe you could just keep her here?”

“We don't do long-term care at Blessed Family,” the nurse informed her curtly.

“Besides,” said the doctor, “I understand you're from…Kentucky, is that right?”

“Ohio,” said Mouse. “That's where my mother is from, but I live in Seattle now.”

The doctor nodded. “There are a number of suitable facilities in the Seattle area that your mother could eventually be transferred to. And I'm sure it would be more convenient for you, having your mother there…” There was a long pause, during which Mouse said nothing, and then the doctor continued: “Well, there'll be plenty of time to discuss options in the days ahead.”

In the days ahead.
They expected Mouse to stay in Spokane while her mother was in the hospital. The doctor suggested that her mother's recovery, however much or little it finally amounted to, would be helped by Mouse's presence. Mouse knew that he was probably right, and more, that it was her duty to stay…but notwithstanding her tears, she didn't
want
to. Not with her mother staring at her every second she was in the room—and especially not if her mother
did
recover. God, what if she started talking, saying terrible things? Or worse…what if, as a game, she only talked when she and Mouse were alone? The doctor and the nurse would think Mouse was crazy, and before long, she would be.

She stayed as long as she could bear to: five days. She only spent a small portion of each day actually in her mother's room. When the staring got to be too much—usually within a half hour, if she couldn't get someone from the hospital staff to stay in the room with her—Mouse would duck out and go for a walk around the city. On one of these walks, she happened upon a future construction site, a vacant lot near the riverfront where, according to posted signs, a new hotel was due to be erected the following spring. Mouse didn't think much of it at the time, but it must have stuck in her head.

On Mouse's fourth day at the hospital, the duty nurse asked her to stop by the accounting office on her way out, as there was a problem with her mother's medical insurance. The problem, it turned out, was that her mother's insurance had lapsed, and so long ago that it had taken the insurance company the better part of a week just to verify that she'd once had a policy; she hadn't paid a premium in over ten years. When Mouse was first told this, she wondered fleetingly if her mother had gone bankrupt without telling her. But that couldn't be it; Verna Driver had had plenty of money to pay for other things over the past decade. She must have just forgotten to pay her premiums—or chosen not to. Maybe, thought Mouse, she'd decided that health insurance was for poor people.

“Does this mean you're going to kick her out?” Mouse asked.

The accounts manager hastened to assure her that no, even completely indigent people were entitled to medical care. “We can work out a payment plan based on whatever she—and you—can afford. But this may create complications in trying to place her with a long-term care facility.”

Mouse's embarrassment over the lack of insurance quickly gave way to anger. Back at her hotel room, anger escalated into rage, and she blacked out much of the night. The next day, coming into her mother's hospital room, into her mother's stare, she blacked out again…and found herself standing at her mother's bedside, one hand covering her mother's mouth. She wasn't pressing down hard—her mother could still breathe—but the implication so terrified her that she backed out of the room (her mother's eyes tracking her the whole way) and left the hospital without saying a word to anyone. The next thing she knew, she was back in Seattle.

The next several weeks were a blur. Between her time hiding out and her time in Spokane, Mouse had fallen hopelessly behind in her coursework, and she was completely unprepared for her upcoming finals. Yet somehow, without a single cram session—or, for that matter, a single exam session—that she could later recall, she passed all her classes. Sometime around
December 16th or 17th, after the exam period ended, her life became coherent enough again that she was finally able to get a phone installed in her apartment.

She called Blessed Family Hospital. Her mother was still alive, but had not shown further improvement. In Mouse's absence, the hospital had transferred her to a state-run nursing home. The transfer was only temporary; it was still up to Mouse, as her mother's next of kin, to see to a more permanent arrangement.

Mouse procrastinated for another week, then headed back to Spokane, by bus this time. She boarded a Greyhound a few hours before a blizzard was due. The storm arrived ahead of schedule, and Mouse's bus, after only just barely getting over the mountains, was forced to make an emergency layover in Ellensburg. The full journey to Spokane took nearly two days.

The nursing home wasn't as nice as the hospital had been, but it was cleaner than Mouse expected, and the staff seemed friendly, so from the moment she arrived she began entertaining the notion that her mother might be kept here indefinitely. Mouse knew that her mother would be opposed to the idea—public facilities were definitely for poor people—but in her current state, she probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. And if she could, well, it wasn't Mouse who'd let the health insurance lapse.

Her mother's new room had four beds in it rather than two, and a different view. All of the beds were occupied: two by older patients on ventilators, a third by a young woman who, though she appeared outwardly healthy, never moved a muscle in Mouse's presence.

Mouse's mother seemed unchanged: her eyes were open, and they immediately fixed on Mouse, that same baleful stare.

“Momma,” Mouse heard herself saying. “Can you understand me? Do you know where you are?”

Nothing: not a single blink, not even a quiver of an eyelash, just a focus so intense that, very soon, Mouse had to go outside to get some air.

And yet something had changed. During Mouse's subsequent visits to the room, it seemed to take her mother longer and longer to notice her—once, her gaze swept over Mouse half a dozen times before stopping. So maybe she was weakening; maybe she was even dying. But slowly.

Mouse arranged to have her mother permanently admitted to the nursing home. This took several days, as the nursing home administrator was initially very resistant to the idea. But it got taken care of, somehow; arrangements were made.

Mouse went to her mother's room one more time. For once, her mother
was asleep, and in the absence of the stare Mouse relaxed enough that she was able to cry again. She cried, and promised her mother that she would visit often, and then she bent down, carefully, and kissed her mother on the cheek.

She never saw her mother alive again.

She didn't plan it that way, at least not consciously. Mouse honestly intended to return to Spokane once a month, or every two months at least. But once she was back in Seattle, caught up in the new school semester, those intentions were never quite realized. She was always
going
to visit her mother, soon. Soon, but never now.

She did call regularly. Every Friday evening without fail, Mouse rang the nursing home to check on her mother's condition. She told herself that she was showing her concern with these calls, but it was more complicated than that. The truth was that Mouse had begun having nightmares—guilt-induced, no doubt—in which her mother, having miraculously regained her mobility, would sneak out of the nursing home in the dead of night, intending to give her daughter one more good scare. Sometimes the nightmares ended with her mother still in transit, but closing the distance between Spokane and Seattle much faster than Mouse herself had ever done; other times she completed the trip, and found Mouse, and frightened her so severely that Mouse had a stroke and ended up paralyzed in bed, at her mother's mercy.

So Mouse's weekly calls to the nursing home were more than just an expression of daughterly devotion; they were also a way of looking over her shoulder.

Then one day—May 2nd, 1990, a little before nine in the morning, as Mouse was preparing to leave for class—the nursing home called to inform her that her mother was “in a bad way” and not expected to last much longer. Forty minutes later—Mouse was still in her apartment, trying to decide, or waiting to see, what she would do—the nursing home called again: her mother was dead.

This time Mouse didn't delay. Within two hours she was boarding a plane at Sea-Tac airport; a little over an hour after that, she was at an Avis counter in the Spokane terminal, asking if there were any station wagons for rent (one of the things Mouse had done over the last few months instead of visiting her mother was learn how to drive; it hadn't been easy—she'd had to take the driver's course three separate times—but as of April 12th, she had her license). A station wagon was, in fact, available; Mouse grabbed it and raced for the nursing home.

Not fast enough, though. “Your mother's gone already,” the receptionist informed her when she got there.

“Yes, I know she passed away. But where—”

“No, I mean physically gone,” the receptionist said. “She's not here anymore.”

“What do you mean she's not here?” Mouse exclaimed. “She's
dead,
how can she not be here?”

The receptionist stared placidly at her computer screen. “According to this, the Archangel Funeral Home picked her up half an hour ago.”

“How could they do that? Don't they need permission to do that?”

“I guess they thought they had it,” the receptionist said. “If there's been a mistake, I can put you together with someone from administration…”

“Never mind,” said Mouse, knowing it was pointless; for all she knew, she
had
given permission. “Could you just please tell me the address of the funeral home?”