“Is she going to be okay?” Jane asked.
“Yes, I think so,” he said, pulling the chart up from where it was hanging at the foot of the bed. “The doctor should be around in an hour or so. She can tell you more.”
“But she is okay, isn’t she? You said that. I mean, she’s going to wake up, right?”
“They gave her something to calm her down for the MRI. That’s why she’s sleeping now.”
“So she was awake and talking earlier? Please tell me she was talking.”
“She was talking well enough to tell me that she wanted a different nurse.”
“That’s odd,” Jane said. “Did she say why?”
“She didn’t say directly, but I got the impression that she wanted someone lighter skinned.”
Jane felt a mixture of humiliation and relief. She looked down at her mother and shook her head and sighed. “Well, she must be all right then. I’m really sorry if she offended you. She can be that way.”
“I’ve heard much worse,” the nurse said with just the hint of a smile. Then he added, “She’s actually my favorite patient now that she’s sleeping. Why don’t you relax and if I see the doctor, I’ll let her know that you’re here.”
Jane’s nap on the plane had not done much to make up for her mostly sleepless night, and she had just nodded off in the chair when the doctor came in and woke her.
“You must be the daughter,” the doctor said, drying her hands and picking up the chart. “I can see the resemblance.”
Jane sat up, then she stood. Then she wondered if maybe she should wash her hands too; she wasn’t sure what to do. The doctor looked far too young to be a doctor to Jane. But she knew that Harborview had some of the best in Seattle. It was chilly in the room, and she crossed her arms for warmth and waited for the doctor to finish updating the chart.
“I spoke with the neurologist a little while ago, and it looks like your mother had a transient ischemic attack.”
“Is that a stroke?” Jane asked.
“It can be a warning sign for one,” the doctor said. “Do you know if there’s a history of heart disease in her family?”
Jane shook her head. “I’m not sure.”
“It looks like she scored well on the cognitive and motor tests. She doesn’t have diabetes, so that’s good. We’ll get her on an aspirin regime and talk with her about diet and exercise, but I have every reason to believe she’ll make a full recovery.”
“When can I take her home?”
“We’ll keep her one more night for observation, but she should be good to go as early as tomorrow morning.”
Jane thanked the doctor and followed her to the front desk to claim her mother’s purse. She opened it, got out her mother’s health insurance card, and gave it to the nurse along with her mother’s address and other information. She was putting the card back when she found a pack of Virginia Slims, the same brand Jane occasionally smoked, having picked up the habit when she was young by stealing them from her mother’s purse. She tossed the cigarettes into the waiting room’s trash can. Then she bought a cup of coffee from the machine.
Her mother was awake when she returned to the room. She took one look at Jane and her face fell into a frown. “What are you doing here?”
“Not exactly the welcome I was expecting, Mother.”
“Let me have my purse,” she said, struggling to sit up in her bed. “What are you doing with my purse?”
“You need to relax, Mom. I didn’t steal anything out of your billfold. Although I did throw away your cigarettes.”
“You did not.”
“I sure as hell did. You had a stroke, Mom.”
“I had a fainting spell.”
“No, you didn’t. You had a ministroke, probably brought on by heart disease, and you probably have heart disease because you smoke and you hardly eat and you never exercise.”
Her mother opened her purse and looked inside as if to verify that everything was there. “I didn’t realize you’d gone off to Texas to attend medical school,” she said. “I don’t need advice from my own daughter.”
“I’ll tell you what I didn’t do. I didn’t fly all the way back up here to be beaten down again by you.”
Jane could hear the resentment in her own voice, so she looked out the window at the rain and told herself to relax, to remember why she was here. Then she looked back at her mother, determined to use a calmer tone.
“I’m scared for you, Mom. Really scared. And you should be scared too. This is a wake-up call.”
Her mother looked up at her with her mouth pinched tight and her eyes glassed over, as if she were doing her best not to cry. When she finally spoke, she said, “You need to go and see your brother. You need to tell him I’m okay.”
“He’s in jail, Mom. How would he even know that you’re in the hospital?”
“Because I was visiting him when it happened.”
“Oh, great. Can’t we call him or something?”
“You know damn well we can’t call him in the jail.”
“But I don’t want to go there, Mom.”
“He’s your brother, Jane.”
“Yeah, for whatever that’s worth. It’s probably not even visiting hours.”
“What day is it?”
“It’s Friday.”
Her mother glanced at the wall clock. “Friday hours are five thirty to seven thirty. You can make it if you catch a cab.”
Her brother was waiting behind the glass when she walked into the visiting room. He looked as if he’d lost some weight, and his hair was cut short for once and he was clean shaven. She could tell he was nervous because he picked up the receiver from its cradle and held it to his ear before she had even sat down. She picked hers up too.
“Is she okay?” he asked.
Jane nodded. “She’ll be fine.”
He let out a huge sigh and looked up at the visiting room ceiling, mouthing, “Thank you.”
“They said it was a ministroke. A warning sign.”
“I was so scared, Jane. She was sitting right where you are now, lecturing me about politics or some shit, and she just went limp and dropped the phone. I went crazy in here. I mean, I was pounding on the glass. Then the door. The guards finally came in and tried to cuff me, and I paid hell getting them to even look through the window to where she was slumped on the ground. I almost caught a new charge. You sure she’s okay?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. Back to her usual old self as soon as she woke up. I’ll get her home and stay with her for a while. She needs to quit smoking and she needs to exercise.”
“Good luck on either of those,” he said.
“How are you?” Jane asked. “You look healthy.”
“Shit damn. It must be all these cold sausage disks and Cheerios they feed us in here. I’m telling you, Jane, they don’t fuck around at the King’s Motel. High-class all the way, as I’m sure you saw from the concierge who checked you in.”
He flashed a half smile. Then his expression turned serious and he adjusted his grip on the phone. “I’m sober, though, Jane. I am. And not just because I’m locked up either. You can score in here easy if you want to. But not me. I’m clean. No more blame game for me. And no more stinkin’ thinkin’ either. I’ve been doing step work, and we’ve got a Sunday meeting after service and everything. You’d be proud of me, sis. You would.”
“I am proud of you,” she said. “That’s all I ever wanted for you. You know that. You’re a good egg when you’re sober, Jon. You’re a rotten egg when you’re not.”
He looked down at the worn metal shelf in front of him and nodded. Then he took a deep breath and looked up again. “So, how are you, sis? How’s life in the South? Mom said you moved to Texas with your gardener.”
“He’s not my gardener. But yes, I moved to Texas and we’re great.” She held
up her hand to the glass and showed him her ring. “We’re getting married.”
“Holy shit, sis. No way. Congratulations. Really. Ain’t that some shit? My big sister finally tying the knot. I guess Mom can quit telling her church friends you’re a lesbian now. When are you doing it? I’d like to come if I’m not still in this damn cage.”
“We haven’t set a date yet. I’d love to have you there, Jon. But only if you’re still clean when you get out.”
“Shit, sis. I’ll be clean. Clean and sober. I’m not drinking again for the rest of my natural-born life. And that’s a fact. You can take that check to the bank and cash it right now.”
“Well, maybe just do it one day at a time,” Jane said.
She spent a few minutes telling him all about Austin, and he spent a few telling her all about the ninth floor of the King County Jail. Then a recorded voice came on to let them know that their visiting time was ending. They said their good-byes, and Jane promised to have their mother give him her number and her address so they could stay in touch about the wedding. She was about to hang up when he asked her the question she knew all along that he would ask.
“Sis, would you mind leaving a little money on my books? Mom was going to do it the other day but she had her thing, her ministroke, I guess . . . and . . . you know, it would really help me out. Maybe I’ll get a new A and A book or something when I order my personals.”
Jane smiled and said that she would. Although she knew damn well that the last thing he’d use it for was an Alcoholics Anonymous textbook.
Her mother’s house smelled of mothballs and bad memories. A kind of hopeless odor that hung in the air and clung to Jane’s clothes. They had hardly walked through the door when her mother went straight to her room and closed the door, leaving Jane to fend for herself.
She took her bag to her old bedroom and paused with her hand on the knob. She had not been inside since she’d left home at seventeen. She took a deep breath, then opened the door, and was met by twenty-three years’ worth of boxes piled everywhere, even on top of the bed. It was as if her mother had used her room all this time as a dumping ground. A fitting idea, Jane thought, since all she ever did was dump on her.
She cleared the bed and stacked the boxes out of the way. Then she removed the bedding, shook it out in the hall, and remade the bed. When she finally lay down on the soft old mattress, she looked up at the popcorn ceiling and saw the same brown water stain that she had looked up at as a girl and tried to make into interesting shapes. Drifting continents and passing clouds. A dragon. A Cheshire cat. It had been her favorite pastime. Once she had even seen the face of God.
The stain was somewhat more faded, but there it was just the same. How long? Had there been a time before? Yes. She remembered the rainstorm that had brought it. She remembered waking up with water dripping on her face. She remembered running into her parents’ room, afraid. She remembered the booze on her father’s breath. She remembered his calling her a liar. She remembered her mother too, passed out on her wine. And she remembered creeping back into her room and sleeping in the closet on the floor, praying for the thunder and the lightning to pass. In the morning, the rain had stopped and the leak was gone, and she had begun to believe that maybe she had made it all up, that maybe she was just a scaredy-cat and a liar. But three days later, the stain had appeared.
Jane felt her stomach drop and knew she was going to be sick. She got up and hustled into the bathroom, lifted the toilet lid, and retched. She was kneeling on a shaggy sea-blue bath mat; the toilet seat lid had a matching blue shag cover and the seat itself was padded. The bathroom smelled heavily of the perfumed decorative clamshell soaps that filled jars on the shelf above the toilet, and the odor made her even sicker. She retched again, losing the contents of her stomach, and flushed it away.
She was numb and light-headed when she finally stood up. She took her mother’s car keys, then left and drove to the nearest pharmacy. The lights were glaringly bright, the music too chipper for the depressing atmosphere. There were no other customers, and she was grateful for it.
She added some chips and some cotton balls to her basket, just to avoid being so embarrassed when she checked out. But she needn’t have bothered because the clerk seemed to be in a Thorazine stupor as he rung her up. He didn’t say hello or thank you, or even offer her a bag. She stuffed her purchase into her purse and left the chips and the cotton balls free for the taking on top of the trash can outside the pharmacy door.
Twenty minutes later, Jane was back in the blue perfumed bathroom, sitting on the padded toilet seat with her eyes closed and a prayer on her lips. She opened her eyes and saw a blue cross. It couldn’t be. She reached for another test and peed on it. She waited, and she watched. Another blue cross. She looked at the claim on the box. Over 99% Accurate. She took out the last tester, but she couldn’t pee again, and what was worse was that she knew she didn’t even need to. She threw the tester across the small bathroom.
“Fuck,” she said. “Not again.”
Her mind raced away from her across twenty years of heartbreak and pain to when she had first found out she was pregnant with Melody. If she’d known then what had been coming for them both, she never would have survived the pregnancy. She almost hadn’t survived losing her later.
She buried her face in her hands and cried. “Why? Why? Why?”
Later that night, she lay on her bed and looked up at the stain on her ceiling, trying desperately to shape it in her mind into some familiar face she might ask. Ask about the future; ask about the past. But her childhood faith had long since been lost in the real world, and all that remained in its place were bad memories and an old faded water stain.
PART THREE
Chapter 19
Jane’s mother was late coming to the table for breakfast. When she did finally appear from her room, she was wearing her church clothes and smelled of Avon powder and perfume. She sat across from Jane, and Jane rose and retrieved hot water from the stove and poured her a cup of Earl Grey tea. Then she sat down again and watched as her mother selected a boiled egg from the bowl of them on the table, cracked it with her spoon, and peeled it, dropping the shell pieces onto her plate with tiny clinks that seemed to echo in the silence between them.
The clock ticked loudly on the mantel. The refrigerator began to whir. Jane sensed that they were both under some spell of speechlessness cast by the years’ worth of things unsaid, the resentments of a life of regret, and as much as a part of her wished for some way to break this spell, a larger part of her wished to let it be and just run.
When the egg was peeled, her mother cut the tip off with her knife and salted it. Then she held it up as if to inspect it in the gray light coming in through the kitchen window.
“The rosebush looks to be doing okay,” Jane said.
Her mother replied without looking away from the egg. “Marta’s taking me to church, if you care to come along.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Jane asked. “I mean so soon after—”
“I’m fine,” her mother snapped. “I had a little fainting spell and now I’m fine. And if the good Lord decides to take me, I hope he takes me at church, so that’s where I’m going to be. If you want to come, you’ll need to change.”
“I think I’ll pass. I was thinking of going to the island.”
Her mother nodded, but she didn’t look at Jane. Instead she picked up the shaker and salted her egg again, perhaps having forgotten that she had already salted it once.
“You may use the car,” she said simply. “Since Marta’s coming by to collect me, as I said.”
“Thank you, Mother. That’s very kind.”
Her mother winced and set the egg on her plate as if being called Mother had made it suddenly hot in her hand. She picked up her cup and sipped her tea.
Jane watched the steam rise and run up around her mother’s long nose. T
he mother she remembered was in there somewhere, hidden behind the mask of makeup and the thin skin and fine lines. Jane watched as she cradled her teacup with both hands, as if trying to absorb its warmth.
“I went once, you know.”
“Went where?” Jane asked.
“To the cemetery.”
“You did? To visit Melody?”
Her mother nodded. “It was a nice day and I just went. I brought pink scabiosas and pink tulips from Brenda Thompson’s old shop. I think she would have liked them.”
The thought of her mother visiting Melody’s grave on her own softened Jane’s heart. She was her grandmother, after all. Jane felt a lump in her throat, and she looked at the tablecloth in an attempt not to cry.
“Mother, there’s something I need to talk to you about. Something important. If you don’t mind.”
When there was no response, Jane looked up and saw that her mother was gazing past her out the kitchen window, her mind somewhere else. In the gray light, Jane could see her eyes clouded with advancing cataracts, and she almost appeared to be already among the blind, seeing nothing but the past, and even that blurred by lies and by time.
“Mom, did you hear me? I need to tell you something.”
Jane watched for a response but there was none. Then a horn double-honked out on the street, and her mother rose from the table as if responding to some command.
“There’s Marta,” she said, pushing in her chair. “I had better not keep her waiting or else someone will get our seats.”
She disappeared down the hall, then reappeared wearing her big church hat. She paused at the door and turned back. “You don’t have to stay, you know. I’ll be fine.”
“Do you not want me here?” Jane asked.
Her mother took a long time to answer. “I appreciate you coming. I know it’s been a lot of trouble. But I just think you should get back to your own life.”
Jane looked away from her and nodded, but she didn’t say anything. Several quiet seconds passed, and she could feel her mother watching her from the door. She heard the door open, saw in her peripheral vision the wash of gray light, and then the door closed, snatching from her sight any and all hope of ever connecting with her mother in a meaningful way.
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