Inheritance from Mother

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Inheritance from Mother Page 19

by Minae Mizumura


  They discussed what clothes to dress her in when the time came. The first idea was one of the floor-length gowns she’d had made for her chanson recitals. The association with That Man made them flinch, but the gowns had been ridiculously expensive and Natsuki, who had plenty of storage space, had taken several of them home. There was one in black silk that had been especially becoming on their tall mother; sending her off dressed in that, surrounded by a hundred crimson roses, would suit her perfectly.

  Burial clothes fit for a star of the silver screen…or a hostess of a Ginza club. They both reached the same conclusion: “Let’s not.”

  Instead they settled on a dress of pale-gray mohair with a longish hem, as soft and light as a wisp of cloud. Even after her back grew so bent that she couldn’t wear it, she’d been unable to part with it. That one took up little space, so Mitsuki had taken it home with her. That dress and a silver-colored scarf of gauzy silk would be fitting attire for their mother’s final journey.

  Rather than a hundred crimson roses, they decided instead to fill her casket with simple flowers such as might grow wild in a meadow. They hoped that the angelic garment and simple flowers might have a purifying effect on their mother, who seemed almost to have been burdened her whole life long by frustrated passions from past lives. When she set off on her journey to the next world, they hoped that she might go to a place as pure and peaceful as possible, be it nirvana, heaven, or paradise. Or, if she were to be reincarnated in human form, they hoped to lessen her burden in the life to come and so reduce her suffering and the suffering of those around her.

  But she wouldn’t go quietly—as they should have known.

  After a week or so, Mitsuki went into her mother’s room expecting to find her asleep as usual, but instead her large-pupiled eyes were open. She focused them on Mitsuki and held out her hand.

  It was as if the dead had returned to life.

  After putting on a hospital mask, Mitsuki clasped her mother’s outstretched hand and said loudly into her ear, “We moved you to a hospital in a more convenient location,” repeating what she had told her on the first day.

  “Oh. I’m in the hospital?”

  Her voice was feeble. Mitsuki had expected her not to understand that she had been moved, but she seemed not to remember ever having been in the hospital in the first place.

  She looked up at the ceiling and said, “This may be where I breathe my last.”

  At such times she had an uncanny way of coming out with statements that got straight to the point.

  Mitsuki ignored this. “It’s a nice room, don’t you think? I’m Mitsuki. Do you know me?”

  “Of course I do. Why wouldn’t I?”

  Her voice might be feeble, but she sounded almost her usual self. Incapable of a simple yes or no, Mitsuki was thinking wryly, when her mother said her name and held out her hand again. When she took it in hers, her mother started talking loquaciously, asking after Auntie, then others. Finally, when Mitsuki was about to leave, she said, “Give us a kiss”—words borrowed from the silver screen, words Mitsuki hadn’t heard since she was a child. Fearful of resistant bacteria, knowing it was coldhearted of her, she leaned down and gave her mother a pretend peck through her surgical mask.

  The next day her sister telephoned her. The doctor was as surprised as they were. Possibly their mother’s body, on the edge of starvation, was marshaling its forces a last time.

  That night Mitsuki dreamed that somehow, without anyone’s knowing it, her mother’s IV had been switched to the high-calorie solution. She awoke screaming in the middle of the night.

  After three days their mother’s talkativeness tapered off, but she remained communicative and agitated. She was awake more and complained of pain with a grimace. “It hurts.”

  “Where does it hurt? Here?” Mitsuki would ask, massaging her.

  The nurse put it down to nerves, but there was no doubt she was in pain. Couldn’t they give her a bit of morphine? The nurse tilted her head to one side and, with a troubled look, slowly replied: “I’m afraid…that’s not a good idea.”

  Bit by bit she was dying. Was “It hurts” her way of expressing the eerie sensation of being dragged off to the next world? Unable to make her comfortable, Mitsuki found the incessant cries of pain hard on her nerves.

  Her mother also repeated words she had said time and again over the past year: “What’s the use of going on like this?”

  Instead of saying, “Don’t worry, Mom, it’ll all be over soon,” Mitsuki took her mother’s hand in hers and stroked it. The skin was covered in purple splotches and crisscrossed with big blue veins. Stroking that death-marked hand, she took to dreamily remembering a lake scene.

  It was a place she saw years ago with her mother from the garden of a lakeside hotel. Her mother, after being run over by that speeding bicycle and aging overnight, had wanted to be taken to that hotel, built on the same site that her own mother had visited a century before. Perhaps her sudden transformation into an old woman had given her the urge; she wheedled with her usual persistence until Mitsuki gave in. When at last she was set free, Mitsuki thought, she would go back to that hotel. She would sit and contemplate the lake and take her time thinking through what to do about Tetsuo.

  Mitsuki was turning down patent translations now. She spent her time sitting next to her mother’s bed reading a French novel she had come across when clearing out her library to make space for her mother’s things. The novel was Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. For a long time it had felt like a forbidden book to her, but now with her mother at death’s door the taboo was somehow lifted. After every few lines she would look up at the IV bag. Two hundred calories, twice daily.

  One day a nurse came to change the IV bag and said gently, “Just hang in there a little longer, Mrs. Katsura, and you’ll be right as rain.” Her mother, awake, put on her company smile and mouthed the words, “Yes, thank you.”

  As soon as the nurse bustled out of the room, her mother glowered. “Something’s fishy.” She turned her eyes to the IV bag. “There’s something fishy going on. She’s lying. Look at me. I’m not getting better.”

  Mitsuki could have wept. Why oh why, when she was on the point of dying, did her mother have to become so lucid?

  Dealing with her newly communicative mother was an intense emotional strain. Her mother planted kisses on her hands one minute and wanted to be cradled the next. Over and over she would say, “I wish somebody would pick me up and carry me away.” Pity lacerated Mitsuki’s heart. But then her mother’s everlasting chant would start up—“It hurts. It hurts.”—and pity would turn again to a mounting irritation.

  A few days later Natsuki called, hysterical. As a gesture of love, she had tried to comb their mother’s hair. “You know what she did? She shook me off and said, ‘Don’t you touch me!’ I was so upset I threw down the comb and walked out.”

  Mitsuki could envision the wounded look on her sister’s face, the same look she remembered from when they were little—a look that had cropped up more often since Natsuki’s rift with their mother, who would never say such a thing to Mitsuki. It saddened her to know that even as she lay dying, their mother could be so hostile to Natsuki. Was there to be no end to this silliness between them?

  She dragged her weary bones to the clinic that evening to check on her mother. She touched her on the shoulder, and her eyes opened.

  “Mother, you mustn’t be mean to Natsuki. It isn’t nice.”

  This seemed to mystify her mother. Mitsuki gave up trying to get through to her and murmured, “This is no time to be nursing grudges. She’s doing the best she can.”

  Something in Mitsuki’s voice seemed to trigger a response. Her mother spoke up.

  “Mitsuki, don’t you love me?”

  DREAMS WANDERING DESOLATE MOORS

  I hate you, Mother, I hate you!

  For years, ever since she saw how horrible her mother was being to her father, she had longed to yell this at her. Now she was silent. That was t
he kindest thing she could do at this point. To Mitsuki’s surprise, her mother persisted.

  “Tell me. Don’t you love me?”

  “How can you say that, Mother? Don’t I take good care of you?”

  She could not make her voice sound loving. She was angry with her mother for asking such a critical question now, at the end of her life, when she was half demented. At the same time, it was sad to think that at this stage of her life her mother should need to ask such a question. With death hovering just out of reach, something inside her mother could have been taking advantage of her dementia to ask the question that had lain between them all these years.

  That turned out to be her last conversation with her mother.

  Again that night, she sat up late taking care of her mother’s paperwork. For the first time in a while Tetsuo sent her an email. His emails always reminded her that she had yet to tell him anything about her mother, even that she was in the hospital. His message ended, “You must be glad the season for air-conditioning is over.” He always was considerate in his way.

  Mother still won’t die. She still won’t die. She still won’t…That was all she wanted to write, a hundred times over. She could think of nothing else. Nearly out of her mind with vexation, vaguely picturing him over there with his inamorata, she forced herself to type: “Thanks for writing. It must always be hot where you are.” And then turned back to her mother’s papers.

  Numbers just kept whirling in front of her.

  At nearly one in the morning, she gave up, went into the kitchen to open a can of light beer, and sat down to stare absently at the news on television. None of it made any sense to her. Her nerves were jangled by the slight amount of alcohol she had consumed, and one thought went round and round her mind: on four hundred calories a day, her mother would not die anytime soon. What if she went on for another month or two, asking questions like “Don’t you love me?”

  She wouldn’t die.

  Her mother just wouldn’t give up and frigging die.

  The house was full of dust balls, the laundry was piled up, she hadn’t even had time to dye the roots of her hair. She was barely stumbling along, exhausted, but her mother wouldn’t die. Her husband was off in a foreign country living with a young woman, and she needed to think about that, but her mother wouldn’t die.

  Mother, when are you ever going to die?

  Whether she only screamed the words in her mind or actually screamed them out loud, she wasn’t sure, but with the echo of her own voice resounding in her head, she reeled into the bedroom, changed into her nightgown, washed her face and brushed her teeth, and swallowed her various prescription pills. Do not take with alcohol, they always warned at the pharmacy, but over the past few years she had taken to downing them with beer. If tonight that led to trouble, so be it.

  The next thing she knew, her face was wet with tears, like a child’s. She lay down, quietly sobbing, and pulled the duvet up to her chin.

  The phone rang.

  It was one-thirty in the morning. The call could only be from the clinic.

  It was the night-shift nurse. Her mother’s blood oxygen level had dropped to 92. If it went any lower, they would be unable to put her on a respirator; was that all right? she wanted to know.

  Yes, of course it was. Forcing calm into her voice, Mitsuki told the nurse that she had just taken a sleeping pill, then asked, “Is she in immediate danger?”

  “No, nothing immediate…How quickly could you be here?”

  In less than thirty minutes, Mitsuki replied.

  “When the blood oxygen goes below eighty-five, it’s touch and go, but at this rate if you came in the morning you would be in time.”

  Mitsuki marveled that you could calculate the time of a person’s impending demise based only on their blood oxygen level. “In that case I’ll get some sleep and be there in the morning,” she said and hung up. Then she called her sister. She hated to wake her, knowing she was chronically fatigued from steroid side effects, but felt that she should. Natsuki had missed being with their father at the time of his death. Mitsuki doubted that she would venture out alone at this time of night, but should anything happen before morning, she didn’t want to be held responsible for her missing their mother’s death as well.

  “You’re sure she’ll hang on till morning?” Natsuki still sounded a bit hurt by her mother’s sharp words.

  “That’s what the nurse said. And they’ll call right away when the numbers do drop.”

  “When that happens, I’ll go too.”

  Of course. With her sister it was always “I’ll go too.” Though that night, it hardly seemed to matter.

  In the morning, Mitsuki showered to wake herself up. She was in a hurry but, anticipating a long haul, she took a rice ball out of the freezer, heated it in the microwave, and ate it just to have something in her stomach. By the time she got to the clinic, it was going on eight o’clock.

  Beside the nurses’ station stood a machine she had often seen there before; its display screen now recorded the data of her mother’s dwindling life. Besides a little pink heart flashing on and off in time with her pulse and making small beeps, there were wavy ECG lines and numbers indicating blood pressure and blood oxygen level.

  Her mother’s eyes were open, and she was taking short breaths. She didn’t look much different from herself on a typical bad day, but when Mitsuki bent over her, her eyes didn’t move. The surface of her eyes was cloudier than usual, like dead fish eyes. But when she softly squeezed her mother’s hand, the pressure was faintly returned…or so it seemed. Thinking perhaps her mother could still hear, she put her mouth down close to her ear and said in a gentle tone, “Mom, it’s me, Mitsuki. I’m right here and I’m not going anywhere. Don’t worry.” She may only have imagined it, but it seemed as if her mother gave a slight nod. Her open eyes remained fixed on the ceiling.

  Next to the pillow, possibly for the family’s reference, was a tiny machine that registered her blood oxygen level. The figure hovered in the 90s and sometimes went as high as 98.

  Natsuki finally came, having waited till the supermarket was open so she could buy them each a boxed lunch, as they had agreed the night before. Since there was no telling when the inevitable would happen, Yuji and Jun had gone to work; if and when there was any change she would contact them. There was no point in sending for her son Ken, off at graduate school in the United States.

  She was having her family come later not just to spare them, Mitsuki knew, but to keep vigil with her, just the two of them, for as long as possible.

  From then on into the night, they waited. Sitting on hard stools all day was a form of torture. Every time they got up to use the bathroom and walked down the corridor, they would see empty beds in other rooms and yearn to go and lie down for ten minutes. They took turns sitting at the head and foot of the bed. When their mother’s hands fluttered in the air as if in search of something, whoever was sitting by her head would take her hands in theirs and hold them for a while, speaking soothing words. The one sitting at the foot of the bed would lay her head on the covers and rest. They were both wearing masks, so conversation was difficult, and anyway they had already said everything there was to say.

  Her hands kept fluttering, the withered, bony fingers waving in empty space as if in search of something. As the light faded from her mind, what scenes unfolded before her? Did her spirit, full of unfulfilled longing, wander desolate moors in search of a last gleam of light?

  Mitsuki prayed silently that her mother might know that she and Natsuki were there beside her.

  After five that evening, her oxygen level sank below 90. Natsuki contacted Yuji and Jun on her cell phone, and they arrived toward six-thirty. Once the oxygen level dropped below 85, it plummeted. The two sisters looked like just what they were, a pair of worn-out, ailing, middle-aged women, but Yuji, perhaps because he played golf, was fit and glowing with health. Jun, in her twenties now, was simply young. At some point the monitor was brought just outside
the room; they could hear close at hand the electronic beeps sounding in time with the beating of her heart.

  The attending nurse brought in some moist gauze, folded over. “The eyes get dry, you see,” she explained, closing their mother’s eyes gently with the tip of a finger and laying the gauze carefully on top of her lids. Only when she had finished did they realize gratefully that this way their mother would die with her eyes closed. The thought of those large-pupiled eyes staring sightless in her dead face was terrifying. People spoke of death as “eternal sleep,” but dying and going to sleep were entirely different physiological phenomena.

  Now when they went out into the corridor, they found the doors to all the other rooms shut, apparently to keep the other patients from sensing the flurry of activity that accompanied a death. Then they glimpsed her doctor, dressed in street clothes. The head nurse must have called him at home. After a bit he reappeared in a white coat. Evidently this had been his day off; they realized only then that he hadn’t come by earlier.

  Everything proceeded with surprising smoothness.

  How many times a month someone died in the little clinic they had no way of knowing, but it was like watching a professional show with daily performances. Theoretically, Mitsuki and the rest had leading roles in the production, but they watched in a daze while events unfolded around them. The monitor was presently wheeled inside the room. The doctor waited just outside the door, in deference to the family. With their mother’s every heartbeat, the little pink heart on the monitor flashed, and there was an electronic beep. The beeps grew farther apart. Her breathing seemed to stop. Even then, the beeps continued for some time. Just when it seemed over, after ten seconds or so there would be another tiny beep. This went on for two or three minutes.

  Then all at once the doctor came in. “I think that’s it.”

  The nurse switched off the monitor.

  “She’s gone.”

 

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