“I want some candy.”
When her mother was conscious, she would say this. She no longer remembered her stay in Golden, but she was able to tell Mitsuki and her sister apart. When she opened her eyes and saw Mitsuki, she would say her name and stretch out her hand.
After a week, the sisters began to allow themselves to think openly that their mother was really dying. They had never truthfully expected that day to come—had purposely avoided the thought—so it felt almost unreal. Though reluctant to have others see her as she was now, the following day they divided up a short list of people whom they thought she should see once more before she died, and contacted them.
The next morning, the doctor requested a family conference. He wanted to confirm that proceeding only with low-calorie IVs was acceptable if the antibiotics continued to fail to take effect. They reassured him that it was fine with them, hoping after the words were out of their mouths that their feelings hadn’t come across too baldly. Continuing low-calorie sustenance meant their mother would be dead in a matter of weeks.
Soon now, the day would finally come.
Eating a late lunch together, they could not hold back their excitement.
“Unbelievable.”
“Mind-boggling.”
Little did they imagine that the doctor would have more news for them the following morning.
THE END POSTPONED
“Anyway, she’s gradually beating the pneumonia on her own,” the doctor told Mitsuki over the telephone just after the test results came in. “It looks like her final call won’t come this time.”
This sounded sarcastic to her.
He said he had something he needed to discuss with the family, but it was still early in the morning so she decided to get in touch with Natsuki later, after she had found out the details. She took off for the hospital alone. The smooth-faced doctor was sitting at a computer in the nurses’ station. When she said good morning, he looked up and told her that he wanted to switch her mother’s IV to a high-calorie solution.
“That will increase her chances of recovery. Once she recovers, we can begin therapy for her dysphagia so she can eat again.”
He went on to explain that her mother was now receiving “peripheral hyperalimentation,” scant nutrition inserted through a vein in the arm or leg. If she was switched to high-calorie intake, she would have “central venous hyperalimentation” with nutrition going directly into a main artery, allowing her to absorb a far richer glucose solution.
More new words Mitsuki would rather not have to learn.
“At her present weight, about seven hundred calories a day should be sufficient.”
The number itself meant little to her. The doctor’s voice receded. Her mind went blank. He went on for another minute or two but the interval seemed interminable, a deviation from the laws of physics.
“Very well, please go ahead.”
The voice scarcely seemed her own. A new world had been on the verge of opening, a world where she could finally breathe freely and bask in sunlight, and now she was shut again in blackness.
How would her sister deal with the shock of this turnabout? Mitsuki went slowly downstairs to the telephone room. She won’t do us all a favor and die: before she knew it she was mouthing the words. The stairway was blurred by what she realized were her tears. Fortunately she met no one on the way, and the telephone room was empty.
“Nooo!” Natsuki wailed and then was silent.
Over the line she could sense her sister too plunging from sunlight into darkness.
“She’s not going to let us be free, is she?” Natsuki’s voice was low and faint. She slowly began to make the convulsive noises that signaled tears. After a bit she said brokenly, “I mean really, when will we ever be free of her? At this rate, we’ll die before she does! No joke. I might die, for real.”
“Don’t be silly,” Mitsuki retorted. “If anyone keels over, it’ll be me.”
Her voice had an edge. After all the time and money that had been lavished on her, Natsuki had never truly been involved as a caregiver until their mother’s fateful fall. Once she lost favor with their mother, her chronic ailments had provided an easy way out, and in the end she had gone through but a portion of Mitsuki’s travail.
“Maybe you’ve been through a lot more than I have,” Natsuki allowed. “But I suffered more actual damage. I wasn’t allowed to live my own life!”
Mitsuki had indeed lived her own life. But her life was a mess. She pictured Tetsuo standing in the kitchen with that young woman. He held his liquor well and liked to sip wine while cooking, the way Westerners did. Long ago in the kitchen of a garret in Paris he had prepared a meal for her, and she, swooning in the glow of myriad flickering candles, had said, “I’m sure. Somebody like you will do just fine.” That had been the start of the mess, but this Natsuki did not know.
She changed the subject. “Anyway, it’s a good thing we have money. Just imagine, we’re keeping her room at Golden while paying for a private room here at the hospital! Last time, she was in a double room, and I was on pins and needles, remember?”
“I remember.” Then Natsuki said again, in a low, faint voice, “She’s not going to let us be free after all, is she?”
After hanging up, Mitsuki went out for lunch and then returned to the hospital. She had brought some translation work, but all she could do was stare in stunned silence at her sleeping mother. The gurgling sounds in her chest were unchanged.
When her mother opened her eyes, she said into her ear, “Your pneumonia is getting better.”
Wearing an oxygen mask, her mother widened her eyes as if to ask, Really? She seemed to understand that there was something to be glad about, and her toothless mouth curved in a smile; but her smile bore a trace of the artificial simper her daughters disliked so much.
Feeling blackness deepen inside her, Mitsuki said, “I know you’re uncomfortable, but don’t worry. You’re getting better and better.”
Her mother nodded.
They went on taking turns visiting her. Unlike before, these visits were dreary. Yet as the dreary visits stretched on, to her surprise Mitsuki found herself wishing now that her mother would go ahead and make a full recovery. A few months ago the sight of her in her wheelchair had seemed unbearably pitiful, but if her mother’s life was to be spared, she wanted her to regain enough strength to sit up in that same wheelchair and resume her former life in Golden.
And yet to all outward appearances, her condition remained the same as ever. Dark, cavernous mouth, hollow eyes turned to the ceiling: how could a patient recovering from pneumonia look like this? Even if she were cured, it was hard to believe she would ever be able to swallow again, let alone sit up. One day Mitsuki asked the nurse in private and was told that even if the pneumonia responded to treatment, regaining the ability to swallow was rare at her mother’s age. Did this mean that the only effect of the high-calorie solution would be to drag out the process of her wasting away?
In time the doctor suggested a blood transfusion. Her hemoglobin level was dangerously low, and there was blood in her stool, a sign of internal bleeding, though he could not pinpoint the source. After talking it over with her sister, Mitsuki hardened her heart and said no. If the unexplained bleeding went on and their mother died of pneumonia, that was her fate, they concluded. So be it. But once again she defied expectations. The bleeding stopped of its own accord, and her hemoglobin level rose.
The second time the topic came up, Mitsuki gave in and said yes. The bleeding had returned. Her pneumonia was almost entirely cleared up, and he was more eager to administer blood. The sisters consented, but they remained skeptical. Even if her pneumonia continued to improve, as long as she had unexplained hemorrhaging, the goal of returning to Golden could only recede further into the distance.
That day, Mitsuki arrived at the hospital just as the plasma for her mother’s blood transfusion came in. A minivan marked JAPAN RED CROSS pulled up in the emergency parking space, and two me
n in work uniforms got out and went inside, carrying a shiny silver cooling box between them. She remembered the Red Cross staff in front of Isetan always urging passersby to donate blood. They would stand with a placard indicating in red letters how many more liters of which blood types were needed in one hand and a megaphone in the other, shouting till they were hoarse: “We need more blood! Please donate today!” This was that precious, hard-won blood.
A blood transfusion would put their mother back in the pink, the doctor said, but it did no such thing. She just lay in her bed, breathing with difficulty, as before. Mitsuki went on clasping her mother’s hand when she reached for hers and stroking her arm to comfort her. Now and then her mother would murmur, “I’m so tired.”
So am I, Mitsuki felt like saying, but didn’t.
If her mother didn’t hold out her hand, Mitsuki would sit by the bed and work on a translation. Sometimes a memory would come to her of the grieving man in a dark suit whom she had encountered more than half a year ago at that first hospital. What might have become of his Wakako Matsubara?
She looked at her mother, sleeping with mouth open.
There must have been a time when her death would have been a terrible blow. If she had died before Mitsuki grew up, Mitsuki would have yearned for her the rest of her life, despite everything. Had her half-sister, the one who was left behind and drowned in a lake, spent her short life longing for a mother known only in dim memory?
Was there ever a right time for one’s mother to disappear from the face of the earth?
Eventually the dysphagia therapy got under way with great fanfare, carried out by a team of three: her doctor, a therapist, and a nurse. The nurse would raise her up in bed and, after the therapist carefully massaged her throat muscles, feed her a tiny spoonful of thickened liquid. Then the doctor would check with his stethoscope to see if she had been able to get the liquid down. She never could.
In time antibiotic-resistant bacteria began to show up in her lungs, a common complication of chronic pneumonia. They were instructed to wear a special mask when entering her room, and always wash and disinfect their hands when leaving. The appearance of resistant bacteria made the goal of returning their mother to Golden recede ever further into the distance.
Summer seemed to go on forever.
Mitsuki didn’t think about anything, but just dragged her weary body back and forth between the hospital and her apartment under burning skies. Her sister went by taxi. Mitsuki mostly took the bus, but on days when she was particularly beat she took a taxi. Her sister urged her to pay for taxis out of their mother’s money, but she was reluctant to do so every time she went to see her mother in the hospital.
The bus air-conditioning was at its midsummer peak.
She wore winter underwear as a precaution, but by the time she walked to the bus stop she would be dripping with perspiration; the frigid air on the bus couldn’t have felt more unpleasant. She tried slipping handkerchiefs beneath her underwear, one in front and one in back, and removing them when she boarded the bus. Even then her underwear was soaked with sweat. She took to carrying an extra set to change into in the ladies’ room at the hospital—yet another item for her to lug back and forth.
After she entered her mother’s room and put on a mask, the first thing she did was turn off the air-conditioning. The nurses, technicians, and aides were young, and moving around besides, so chilly air didn’t bother them. Her mother, who had come down with air-conditioning syndrome shortly after Mitsuki did, showed no sign of being cold, whether because the IV fluids kept her warm or because she was barely conscious. She only lay with her mouth open.
BONES UNDER GRAVESTONES
The people they had contacted back when they thought their mother would soon die now began stopping by her room.
First to come was Masako. Divorced, she had struggled on her own to raise a daughter who’d recently developed an eating disorder and had no fixed job. She donned a hospital mask and leaned solicitously over the bed, murmuring, “I owe her so much.” She often used to visit them at the house in Chitose Funabashi, and during the fuss surrounding her divorce, she had taken shelter there with her daughter instead of returning to her stuffy, disapproving parents. Mitsuki’s mother had welcomed her gladly during her troubles.
Someone from their father’s side of the family came too. Orphaned at a young age, he had been kindly taken in by the impoverished Katsura family and grew up close to their father, calling him “Big Brother,” though they were not related by blood. He had no great love for their mother but came to see her anyway out of a sense of duty. He offered words of comfort to Mitsuki and her sister: “Whenever I used to go see your father, he would tell me how good you both were to him.”
Uncle Yokohama’s much younger brother and his wife also put in an appearance. Time had taken its relentless toll; both Uncle Yokohama and Madama Butterfly had passed on. Cousin Noriko was a precious link to the family’s bygone glory days.
Next came Auntie’s daughter, Satsuki, with whom the sisters felt a special bond on account of their names, which were patterned after hers. After her visit, the three of them went into a coffee shop to catch up and commiserate. Auntie had entered a nursing home around the same time as their mother and was now confined to a wheelchair. Satsuki’s naturally curly hair, once so adorable, was streaked with gray; she didn’t dye it as the sisters did theirs.
One day a sixtyish woman whom their mother had become friends with at the chanson studio dropped in. They had hesitated about whether to contact her, since the acquaintance was not of very long standing, but when their mother parted from That Man and quickly aged, this woman had taken pity on her and shown her kindness, not just calling her on the telephone but occasionally going to the house in Chitose Funabashi and fixing her a hot meal.
She knew what had become of That Man. “It’s a good thing he had his wife’s pension from teaching junior high school. They live quietly on that now. He has grandkids. He’s just your typical granddad.”
The last to appear was a relative from their mother’s side. The connection was complicated, but their mother had treated her simply as a niece, and in fact she, Mitsuki, and Natsuki all shared the same grandmother—the one known as “O-Miya.” This niece, though pretty, was a no-nonsense person seemingly free of “O-Miya’s blood.” Standing at the foot of the bed, she looked at the sleeping figure and declared, “She lived her life the way she wanted. What more could you ask?”
Everyone looked at her lying in bed and politely said the same thing—“Still as beautiful as ever.” When someone came, Mitsuki or Natsuki would rouse her and say the visitor’s name loudly in her ear.
Their mother would open her eyes and be surprisingly capable of a normal response, clasping the visitor’s hand and saying in an affected tone, with tears in her eyes, “How lovely to see you!” They must have all gone away never realizing how advanced her dementia was.
Their mother did not get better.
Phlegm that she could neither swallow nor spit out gurgled constantly in the back of her throat.
Before anyone noticed, autumn breezes began to blow, and the summer heat thankfully receded; but for Mitsuki, caring for a mother who was hovering between life and death, there was no rest.
One late afternoon, she took a walk to the nearby Myohoji temple for the first time in a long while to give herself a little lift. Founded some three hundred years ago in the Edo period, the temple was believed to have the power to ward off evil spirits and promised help in everything from getting married and giving birth to prospering in business, recovering from illness, and passing college entrance examinations. What to pray for? Mixed in with old worshippers she saw young ones too, standing with palms together and heads bowed. Past the main gate with its statues of guardian Deva kings on either side was the well-swept compound with a large founder’s hall in the center and a smaller main hall in back. The area behind that was shaded by tall trees, their leaves just beginning to show a scattering of yel
low, orange, and occasional scarlet in the surrounding deep green. Her feet turned of their own accord toward a small gate still deeper in the compound, the entrance to the graveyard. Normally her spirit was soothed by the quiet of rows of gravestones, small and large, each with its narrow wooden tablet for the repose of the deceased; but today the myriad whitened bones from three centuries back seemed to rattle ominously under their gravestones.
Soon her mother had another blood transfusion.
Mitsuki no longer thought it possible that her mother would ever recover the ability to swallow. Even if she did return to Golden, she would be bedridden, condemned to a life of intravenous feeding while waiting to die. How many months—years—might that go on? Could they possibly get her back on the low-calorie solution? The doctor, his expression smooth as always, did nothing but sit and stare at the computer. Mitsuki hesitated, uncertain whether to broach the topic.
Then, to her consternation, the doctor brought up the idea of a surgical feeding tube. One Friday in October he stopped Mitsuki as she passed by the nurses’ station, where he was seated as usual in front of his computer. Her mother’s veins were reaching their limit, he said; he wanted to implant a tube directly into her stomach.
Mitsuki couldn’t believe her ears. She had shown this doctor her mother’s signed statement from the SDD, had spelled out to him that neither her mother, nor she, nor her sister wanted any kind of tube feeding. He had said, “Yes, of course. I understand.” Did the man have amnesia? Speechless, she stared at him hard enough to bore a hole in his face.
He then delivered another blow. “Her pneumonia isn’t entirely cleared up either, and with her hemoglobin level making these sudden fluctuations, even with a surgical tube in place I’m afraid I can’t authorize sending her back to the nursing home.”
Mitsuki gave him a steady look and managed to ask in a normal voice, “Where, then?”
Inheritance from Mother Page 17