Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  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?”

  The Archangel Funeral Home was located in a part of Spokane that reminded Mouse uncomfortably of Trash Town. Mr. Filchenko, the funeral director, was a squat hummock of a man in a rumpled black suit. When Mouse attempted, as discreetly as possible, to find out whether she had spoken to him before, Mr. Filchenko evaded her questions; he also tried to discourage her from viewing her mother’s body.

  “Why not let us make her a little more presentable first?” Mr. Filchenko suggested. “To lessen the shock…”

  “No thank you,” said Mouse. “I’d like to see her now, please.”

  “It’s just that death, even the most peaceful death, can have an effect on the appearance that is…unkind. And when the deceased is someone we’ve been close to, a best friend or a parent—”

  “I’d like to see my mother now, please,” Mouse insisted, grateful that Mr. Filchenko was not much taller than she was.

  Mr. Filchenko sighed. “If you’re sure…”

  He took her back into his mortician’s workshop, which, like a police-movie morgue, had a double row of body lockers set into one wall. “I really think you’ll be happier if you let us finish the cosmetic work first,” Mr. Filchenko said, pausing in front of the lockers. “Let us make her up nice for the funeral, dress her properly, put her in a beautiful casket with some flowers…that way you’ll have a lovely parting memory of her, not—”

  “Oh,” said Mouse, figuring it out. “You want to charge me lots of money.”

  Mr. Filchenko paused, mouth open at this impertinence, and then tried to go on as if Mouse hadn’t spoken: “As I was saying—”

  “I don’t need her made up,” Mouse told him. “There isn’t going to be any funeral.” She fingered the list in her pocket; it was quite specific about what was to be done. “I want her cremated.”

  “Cremated, very good, we can do that.” Mr. Filchenko bowed his head graciously. “But”—looking up again—“perhaps a small memorial service first, just to—”

  “No,” said Mouse. “I just want to see her, once, and then I want her cremated. Nothing else.”

  “Oh-kay…we’ll just have a look then”—Mr. Filchenko gestured at the lockers—“and then, back in my office, you can pick out a casket…”

  “Why would she need a casket if she’s going to be cremated?”

  “My goodness!” Mr. Filchenko said, aghast. “My goodness, you don’t…you wouldn’t want us to just toss your mother into the furnace like a bag of garbage, now would you?”

  Time broke up after that. Mouse had only one more solid chunk of memory, of a locker being opened, a slab rolling out, and a sheet being twitched back. She saw her mother’s face, gone completely slack on both sides now. Verna Driver’s lower incisors jutted shrewishly from her mouth; her eyes were open but fixed and unaware, finally emptied of all malice. “All better now,” Mouse heard a voice say.

  —and then it was later, perhaps another day entirely, and Mouse was out behind the funeral home, watching as one of Mr. Filchenko’s assistants loaded a covered plastic tub into the back of her rented station wagon. Mr. Filchenko was watching too; he stood just outside the rear door of what Mouse assumed must be the funeral home’s crematorium, with a cross look on his face.

  “This is really very improper,” Mr. Filchenko complained. “State laws are being broken here.”

  Mouse looked at him, and was both gratified and startled to see him flinch. He recovered himself quickly, though, and said: “So, may I have it?”

  “Have it?”

  “My money,” Mr. Filchenko said flatly. “No-frills or not, this isn’t a free service.”

  Mouse reached without thinking into the pocket of the coat she was wearing, and brought out the plain envelope she found there. She handed the envelope to Mr. Filchenko, who immediately opened it, pulled out the packet of bills from inside, and began counting them. It looked like a lot of cash to Mouse, but Mr. Filchenko didn’t appear to agree—he counted the bills four times, and rechecked the envelope to make sure he hadn’t missed any. Finally he seemed to accept that he’d gotten all he was going to get, and tucked the money away again.

  “I still say you should have gone with the urn,” Mr. Filchenko groused. “I’d have given you an excellent deal.”

  Those were his last words to her. His assistant had already closed up the back of the station wagon and gone back inside the funeral parlor; now Mr. Filchenko followed, slamming the crematorium door behind him. Mouse got into the station wagon.

  She looked into the rearview mirror, at the plastic tub containing her mother’s ashes. She didn’t like having it behind her, but at least she could keep an eye on it. To have it out of sight in a trunk—even a locked trunk—would have made her much more nervous.

  She turned the key in the station wagon’s ignition—

  —and it was sometime later, definitely another day, just after sunrise. Mouse leaned up against the chain-link fence that surrounded the hotel construction site, the one she’d seen the signs for back in November. The site was active now. A convoy of cement trucks stretched in a line out the site’s main entrance; they were pouring the hotel’s foundation.

  Mouse’s back hurt, and she was very tired, as if she’d been up all the preceding night. She was filthy, too: her shoes were caked with mud, and there was dirt on her clothes, on her hands, and even in her hair. But though she was aware of all of this in a detached way, she ignored her own discomfort and focused on the work going on inside the fence. With each load of cement that was poured into the foundation pit, Mouse felt a corresponding lightening of her own spirits, all the anxiety of the last six months sloughing away.

  Hours passed. At last—the sun was high in the sky now—the final truck emptied its mixer into the pit, and the construction workers hurried to finish smoothing the surface of the foundation before it set. Mouse turned away, satisfied. The Navigator helped her locate the station wagon; Mouse slid into the driver’s seat and glanced up at the rearview mirror again. Her mother’s ashes were gone.

  Mouse drove to the airport, returned the rental car, and caught the next flight back to Seattle. Over the next few months, she tidied up her mother’s remaining affairs. She never went back to Willow Grove; instead, she hired a lawyer to arrange the sale of her mother’s house and its contents, and to close out her mother’s bank accounts. Most of the money went to pay off her mother’s hospital bills and other outstanding debts; the remainder went into a fund to help cover Mouse’s college tuition.

  A day came in September of that year when it dawned on Mouse that she had begun a whole new life. The last ties with her past had been cut; she had become, in effect, a blank slate, and could make of herself whatever she wanted to. This realization, though liberating, also marked the start of a new series of blackouts. Where before Mouse had most often lost time in the wake of traumatic events, now the blackouts started happening in moments of relative calm—when she was out walking, or at the library, or shopping in a store.

  It was around that same time that Mouse first began finding things in her apartment—clothes, jewelry, children’s toys—that she couldn’t remember buying. Sometimes the things were in plain sight, but more often they were hidden away in drawers and cabinets, or at the back of shelves, where Mouse would happen across them by chance. There was one closet in particular, in the alcove that connected her kitchen and her bathroom, that she learned never to look into without a very good reason.

  A third thing that happened around then was that Mouse’s personal finances started to unravel. Over the course of her sophomore year, the money in her special college fund seemed to evaporate. By the start of her junior year, even with her scholarship, she had to request additional fi
nancial aid in order to make tuition. That was also when she started taking part-time jobs to help make ends meet—lots of part-time jobs.

  In the years that followed, as she struggled to pull her new life together, Mouse tried to think of her mother as little as possible. Though she had no direct memory of it, she knew, on some level, what she had done with her mother’s remains. She didn’t like to dwell on that; it was a shameful act.

  Shameful, and yet comforting, too. Occasionally Mouse would still have nightmares in which her mother, dead but not dead, would creep ever closer along back roads in the dark of night. And whenever Mouse woke, in terror, from one of these dreams, she had a ready antidote for the fear. She had memorized the phone number of the reservation desk at the Spokane Charter Hotel—long since completed—and any time day or night she could dial it, and as soon as the desk clerk picked up and said, “Spokane Charter. May I help you?” Mouse would know that the hotel was still standing—and still pressing down, with the weight of all fourteen of its floors, on everything buried beneath its foundation.

  She was a bad daughter, a worthless piece of shit; she had treated her mother abominably in the last months of her life. But she knew where her mother was now—always—and to know that, to be sure of it, was worth all the shame in the world.

  18

  Now, driving towards Autumn Creek, a few car lengths behind Dr. Eddington’s Volkswagen Jetta, Mouse wonders what sort of final arrangements Dr. Grey made for herself. It’s not something Mouse should be concerned with—she should be thinking of Andrew—but she can’t help speculating.

  That the doctor planned her own funeral, if any, and arranged (and probably paid) in advance for the disposal of her body, is not even a question. Despite only having met her the one time, Mouse feels sure that Dr. Grey was not the sort of person who would trust such details to anyone but herself. And Mouse can almost pity—almost!—the poor funeral director who, like Mr. Filchenko, tried to sell her a service that she didn’t want.