Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  The joy Mouse felt at having escaped her mother’s house (felt, but never openly expressed or acknowledged) was tempered by her instant dislike of her new college roommate, Alyssa Geller, who struck her as a slightly-grown-up version of Cindy Wheaton. Alyssa didn’t like Mouse much, either. This was partly due to Maledicta’s frequent outbursts, and partly due to Mouse’s mother, who phoned the dormitory almost every day and became suspicious and abusive when Mouse wasn’t available to take her calls. Relations between Mouse and Alyssa declined steadily over the first half of the semester, reaching a low point when Alyssa’s bed and most of her possessions inexplicably ended up in the hall. Not long afterwards, Mouse found herself living in a basement apartment off campus.

  The apartment, despite an inevitable tendency to dampness, was surprisingly nice, with brightly painted walls and a surfeit of lamps to drive away shadows. It was small but still larger than her dorm room, and it was all hers: after she got over the shock of the transition, Mouse was so pleased to be living alone that she went an entire week before wondering if her mother knew where she was. Several more days passed before it occurred to her that her new apartment had no telephone, so that even if her mother did know where she was, she couldn’t call. At that point Mouse considered getting a phone, or at least calling home from a public booth, but instead of doing either she went to a florist’s on University Avenue and bought a big wreath of dried purple flowers, which she hung on her apartment door like a NO TRESPASSING sign.

  Another week went by. It was November now; one cold wet day Mouse was trudging across campus when Alyssa Geller tried to intercept her. Mouse could tell by the look on Alyssa’s face what Alyssa wanted to talk to her about, but rather than hear how Verna Driver had been calling night and day demanding to know her daughter’s whereabouts, Mouse ran away. An hour later, as she waited for a psychology lecture to begin in Kane Hall, a pair of university security guards entered the auditorium and called her name; Mouse, seated in the very last row, stayed quiet, and when the guards turned to confer with a teaching assistant, she slipped out the back.

  She left campus immediately, ran home, and hid out like a fugitive for the next six days. Of course she understood that she was being ridiculous—she couldn’t hide from her mother forever—but sitting alone in her apartment, with the door locked and no one creeping up behind her, Mouse decided she didn’t care if she was being ridiculous.

  In the early evening of the sixth day, there was a loud knock on Mouse’s door. Mouse had to stop herself from rushing to put out the lights; that would only give her away.

  The knock came again. A man’s voice called through the door: “Ms. Driver?…This is the Seattle Police Department. Could you please open up?…Ms. Driver, are you there?”

  Mouse held her breath. Go away, she thought, but after a third knock the voice, speaking to someone else outside, said, “Open it,” and there was a rattle of a key in the lock. Mouse had a wild thought of toppling a bookshelf in front of the door to barricade it, but it was already swinging open. Four men entered: two policemen, one of the security guards from the lecture hall, and Mouse’s landlord. Between them they took up most of the space in Mouse’s little living room; one of the policemen was so tall that he had to duck his head below the low ceiling.

  “Ms. Driver?” the tall policeman said. When Mouse only stared past him at the still-open door—she was waiting for her mother to come in—he turned to the landlord and asked, “Is this her?” The landlord nodded, and the policeman continued: “Ms. Driver, are you OK?”

  “Where is she?” Mouse asked.

  “Where is who, Ms. Driver?”

  “My mother,” said Mouse. “She sent you to find me, didn’t she? Is she outside?”

  “No,” the tall policeman said uncomfortably, and hesitated.

  The security guard cleared his throat. “As a matter of fact,” he told Mouse, “your mother was pretty concerned that she couldn’t get in touch with you. She was, um, very insistent that we track you down. She thought you might have gotten hurt.”

  “No,” said Mouse. “No, I just moved…”

  “That’s what your roommate told us,” the security guard said. “But, uh, I’m afraid your mother wasn’t satisfied with that. In fact she suggested Miss Geller might have, well, done something to you.”

  “Oh God,” said Mouse. It was even worse than she’d imagined; Alyssa must be furious. “Well you’ll tell her that’s not true, won’t you? That I’m not…”

  “Um…”

  “Only,” said Mouse, “only one thing, if you haven’t told her where I am yet, could you maybe not? Tell her I’m OK, that I’m not hurt, but don’t—”

  The tall policeman took over again: “Ms. Driver,” he said, “I’m afraid we can’t tell your mother anything right now. The reason we’re here—”

  “Why not?” asked Mouse, thinking it must be some law-enforcement rule. Maybe they couldn’t get involved, now that they knew Alyssa hadn’t murdered her. “I’ll pay for the call, if that’s what the problem is. I—”

  “Ms. Driver,” the policeman said, “we can’t tell your mother anything because she’s in the hospital. She’s had a stroke.”

  “A stroke?” said Mouse. “You mean she’s dead?”

  “No, no,” said the security guard, holding up a hand reassuringly. “Not dead, just hospitalized.”

  “But…” Mouse shook her head, confused. “My grandmother had a stroke,” she said. “She died.”

  The two policemen exchanged glances. Then the tall policeman said: “I don’t know anything about your grandmother, Ms. Driver, but your mother is alive, at least for the time being.”

  “Well is she going to die?”

  “Her condition was described to us as serious, but stable. Beyond that I really can’t say. I’m sure the hospital staff could tell you more…”

  “Which hospital is she in?”

  “Blessed Family General Hospital,” the tall policeman said, consulting a notepad. “In Spokane.”

  “Spokane, Washington?” More confusion. “What’s she doing there?”

  “She was on a plane,” the policeman explained. “On her way here, I guess to look for you.” A note of reproach crept into his voice as he said this. “The plane was over the Idaho-Washington border when it hit a patch of turbulence, and your mother had some sort of episode.”

  By “some sort of episode,” Mouse assumed that the policeman was referring to her mother’s stroke. In fact, as she would later learn, her mother’s fear of flying (which was not as bad as her purple-phobia, but still severe), along with her anxiety about Mouse, plus whatever other dark currents moved in her brain, had combined to trigger a full-blown paranoid fit, to which the stroke was only a coda. As the plane rocked and bounced at 29,000 feet, Verna Driver had gotten out of her seat and begun loudly accusing her fellow passengers of conspiring against her; the flight attendants moved to restrain her, chasing her up and down the length of the plane twice before she finally collapsed, on her own, in the first-class galley.

  “Spokane,” Mouse repeated, trying to remember exactly where that was in relation to Seattle, how far it was.

  “The plane had to make an emergency landing,” the tall policeman concluded. “Your mother was taken to Blessed Family, and they eventually contacted us. Two days ago.” Another note of reproach. “We had a devil of a time finding you.” Mouse said nothing to this, and the policeman went on: “Ms. Driver, it’s really none of our business, but were you and your mother having some sort of…difficulty?”

  “Difficulty?” said Mouse.

  —and the door clicked shut behind them as they left. Mouse, alone again, sat on her couch until a memorandum appeared with the address and telephone number of Blessed Family Hospital. The memorandum also contained scheduling information for the various planes, buses, and trains that traveled from Seattle to Spokane, but, curiously, there was no accompanying list, no “to do” specifying when Mouse should go.

  Of c
ourse no list was necessary. Her mother was in the hospital, possibly—but not definitely—dying. Mouse should go to her right away: that’s what any good daughter would do. But Mouse wasn’t a good daughter, she was a worthless piece of shit, and though the police had come to her apartment on a Wednesday, it wasn’t until Friday morning that she boarded an eastbound Amtrak train at King Street Station.

  The train was scheduled to get into Spokane at 7:00 P.M., but as it made its way over the Cascade Mountains, someone twice pulled the emergency brake. After the second brake-pulling incident, the train sat for more than an hour as a team of conductors interrogated everyone in Mouse’s passenger car. No culprit was uncovered, and eventually the train started up again, reaching Wenatchee at half past five and not getting to Spokane until almost midnight. By then it was too late to go to the hospital, so Mouse found a hotel.

  The next morning, she overslept, then got lost on the way to the hospital, and didn’t actually set foot in Blessed Family until noon. Noon, Saturday: three days since she’d first heard of her mother’s stroke, six days since it had actually happened: more than enough time for her mother to have died, if her stroke had been anywhere near as bad as Grandma Driver’s.

  But Verna Driver was still alive. “She’s stable,” the duty nurse said, as she ushered Mouse down a long hallway.

  Stable: the same word the tall policeman had used. Mouse guessed that it meant her mother was as bad as she was likely to get for a while, without getting any better, either. “But how bad is she? Can she talk?”

  “Your mother isn’t fully conscious,” the nurse explained. “Since she was admitted, she’s opened her eyes a few times, but she doesn’t seem aware of where she is or what’s happened to her. Also—and you should prepare yourself for this—she’s suffered some paralysis, so even if she were wide awake, she might not be able to speak.”

  “Paralysis,” said Mouse. “And is that temporary, or…”

  “You’d have to ask a doctor about that. After I show you to her room, I’ll see if I can find one to talk to you about her prognosis…Here we are.”

  The hospital room had two beds in it. The bed nearest the door was unoccupied; in the other, beside a window that looked out on downtown Spokane, Verna Driver lay still as a corpse.

  Mouse had seen her grandmother in the hospital, after her stroke. Mouse’s mother hadn’t wanted to take her, but Mouse had insisted, in a rare show of defiance, and had actually gotten her way. The sight had torn her heart: Grandma small and wasted in the bed, hooked up to a ventilator machine, with one whole side of her face gone slack. Mouse had begun to cry, and then her mother, seized by a fit of wickedness, had hooked a finger into the drooping corner of Grandma’s mouth, pulled it up into a mock grin, and said brightly: “There you go! All better now!”

  Well, time had come round, and now it was her mother’s turn.

  Verna Driver was breathing on her own, but the right side of her face had that same paralytic droop. Actually, droop might not be the best term. The word that really came to mind was melted: the slack folds of skin had an unnatural sheen that suggested wax or putty. Likewise her right arm, laid out above the bedsheet, seemed less a real limb than a damaged prosthesis, the fingers hooked halfway between a fist and a claw.

  Remembering her grandmother, Mouse tried to be hard, to think of this as just deserts—an effort that lasted all of two seconds. “Momma,” she said, and broke down sobbing. “Oh, Momma…”

  “Poor girl,” the duty nurse said. “I’ll go find the doctor for you…”

  “Hmmph?” Mouse sniffled, realizing belatedly that the nurse meant to leave her alone in the room. “No, please, wait—”

  Too late. By the time Mouse turned around, the nurse had already stepped out. Mouse gave another sniffle, the tears drying up as her sorrow was displaced by sudden tension. With a nervous sigh, she turned back towards the bed.

  Her mother’s eyes were open.

  —and Mouse was out in the hallway, balled up in a defensive crouch against the far wall. From the way people were clustered around her and the fact that she was gnawing on her fists she concluded that she must have been screaming.

  “Dear?” said the duty nurse, gently touching Mouse’s shoulder. “Dear, what’s wrong?”

  “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.”
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br />   “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.