Raising Hope (15 page)

“Yeah,” she’d say. “Like a fungus.”

I’m laughing like a crazy person in my ninety-degree car, and I have to pull over because I can’t stop myself. I just keep laughing and laughing, and I swear I’m going to pee my pants if I can’t get it together. I pull into the Stop & Shop parking lot and stop the car, and then I put my head on the wheel and laugh as loud as I can. It’s damn strange, that’s what it is: The sounds coming out of my mouth are hoots of laughter, but there are tears running down the steering wheel.

When Ma was dying, it was the prettiest month of the year, and I thought that was a damn shame. She’d never liked the other months in New Hampshire—the long, snowy winters, the mud-season springs, the hot summers when the grass burned out and the mosquitoes swarmed. Even in the fall, when leaf peepers came from all over to take a look at the trees, she just sniffed and said autumn was nothing but decaying things all dressed up. So that left June, and here she was dying just as her favorite month began.

As I walked up the hospital steps for the third time that June day, I said a general “hey” to the patients in their hospital gowns holding on to their IV poles and smoking by the scraggly bushes at the front entrance. They looked pretty bad, all pale and skinny and desperate, puffing on those cigarettes like it was their last chance for happiness, but they raised their heads and mumbled their hellos back. It drove Ma crazy, these people who insisted on smoking even as it was killing them, but I didn’t have any problem with them taking their happiness where they found it.

I walked past the front desk and nodded to Cassie MacBrien, who sat there doodling on a pad of paper as she manned the phones. She looked up and cracked her gum, waving her hand at me halfheartedly, but she didn’t stop me or anything. Nobody made me check in anymore; that’s how often I was at the hospital.

I passed the gift shop and wondered for a second if I should go in and get Ma something, but I knew every last piece of goods they sold in there and decided against it. Nothing but blue and pink teddy bears, mugs with “Get well soon at Ridley Falls Hospital!” written on them, and stunted carnations dyed different colors sitting in a beat-up refrigerator at the back of the shop. Ma was past wanting a magazine or a stick of gum, and besides, I had to pee like a racehorse, so I kept going, heading for the ladies’ room across from the elevator.

I swung open the ladies’ room door and hustled into a stall, practically jumping up and down from holding my pee so long. I was just coming back from my last cleaning job of the day, and I hadn’t bothered to stop home before driving to the hospital. I jammed the stall’s lock shut, spread some toilet paper out on the seat, and unzipped my shorts. I sat down, sighed with relief to finally let all that pee out, and pressed the mute button on my thoughts. I was so tired that I rested my elbows on my knees and put my chin in my hands, just sitting there even after I had done my business. I stared at the graffiti on the door in front of me—“Tim loves Dee”; “R.L. + H.T.”; “For a good time, call Mark”—though I wasn’t reading the words as much as I was just looking at the letters I’d looked at a million times before. Then I heard the ladies’ room door swing open and some footsteps, so I woke myself up from my open-eyed nap and wiped and flushed before letting myself out of the stall. Washing my hands, I chanced to look at myself in the mirror. I looked terrible. My skin was all splotchy, probably from getting too many meals at the hospital vending machines, and there were dark circles under my eyes. I rubbed at the circles as if I could erase them, but of course it didn’t do any good. Ugly, I thought, and then I asked myself who really cared anyhow.

I opened the bathroom door and crossed to the elevator bank, then pressed the button and tapped my foot while I waited for the elevator that was older than dirt. I could hear it lurching its way down slowly and loudly, rumbling and jerking to a stop as the bell dinged and the door opened. I stepped in and punched 3, and then the elevator decided to have one of its seizures, its bell dinging and its door half shutting and then opening, again and again. It sounded like that stuttering Mr. Parsons at the garage, I thought as I pressed hard on the Door Close button. Just kept repeating the same jerky sound over and over. “You’re in need of an oil ch——, an oil ch——, an oil ch——.”

An oil change!
I screamed inwardly as I jabbed that Door Close button again and again. The elevator groaned shut and finally began to lumber its way up.

That’s not nice, I reproached myself. Mr. Parsons can’t help it if he talks funny. I felt ashamed of myself then, and a smug little voice inside my head said,
Maybe if you weren’t so mean, your mother wouldn’t be dying.
Then another voice inside that I call “the referee” piped up and said,
Time out. It’s not your fault Ma is sick.

I’m going crazy, I thought grimly. I’ve got voices in my head that talk to each other and another voice that shuts them all up.

Damn! I rubbed my goose-bumped arms. I had left my hospital sweater in the backseat of the car. It was nothing but a ratty old black cardigan that used to be Ma’s about a hundred years ago, but it kept me warm when I was visiting. I supposed I could head back down and grab it, but I probably would have a screaming fit if I had to fight that demon-possessed elevator again.

They kept it so damn freezing in the hospital. Ma and me used to joke about it when I’d drag her in for chemo. God, she’d complain every step of the way. “I hate the way it makes me feel, Ruth.” “It’s not doing any good.” “I don’t think those doctors know their asses from their elbows.”

“Come on, Ma,” I’d say to her. “We’re going for your chemo and that is that.”

When we’d get to the chemo ward on the fifth floor, I’d tell her to keep her winter coat on, that we were back in Alaska. She’d always crack a little smile when I said this, even though it wasn’t that funny a joke. “Here you go, dear,” one of the nurses would say as they covered her with a heated blanket where she lay shivering on her gurney in nothing but her hospital gown and thick socks from home. I’d wait for the nurse to hitch up Ma’s IV and flick the tube a few times to make sure the medicine was pouring into her vein the way it was supposed to. As the nurse walked away, I’d bend down and whisper to Ma, “Why don’t they just turn the damn heat up? It’d save them the trouble of heating their linens.”

No chemo anymore, though. I hadn’t been up to the fifth floor since April, when they’d opened Ma up and then closed her again, saying there was nothing they could do. I had been so hopeful before that last surgery, yammering my big mouth about how this was it—they’d cut out the cancer that the chemo surely had shrunk and Ma would be cured. I had called Bobby and Sandra to tell them that Ma would soon be well enough to go up to Maine and help Sandra before their new baby came. I had been so sure Ma would live to see her grandchild.

But if pride came before a fall, then I guess hope appeared before a letdown. Ma had kept shaking her head, saying, “Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched, Ruth. Stop telling everyone I’m going to get better.” And she’d been right.

I thought back to her telling me last September that she had cancer. “C,” she’d called it; she couldn’t even say the word. We’d been cleaning the Olivers’ house, and I’d about jumped out of my skin when Ma tapped me on the arm as I was swinging the vacuum cleaner back and forth over the dining room rug.

“What?” I had yelled without stopping work, expecting her to holler, “You missed a spot,” or, “Move those chairs out, Ruth; don’t just vacuum around them.”

She’d motioned for me to turn off the vacuum, and when I had, she’d said, “Ruth, I need to tell you something I thought I wasn’t going to tell anybody for a while. But it’s just sitting in me itching to get out and I need to tell you.”

“Let me guess,” I had wisecracked. “You’re pregnant.” I’d give anything if I could take that back. My big, smart mouth.

“No,” Ma had said, wiping her hands on her apron. “I’m dying.”

“Ma, cut it out. What is it really?”

“That’s it. Really. I’ve got . . .” She lowered her voice. “Well, I’ve got ‘C.’”

“Oh, Ma,” I had said, stepping over the vacuum cord to hug her.

Ma had just patted my shoulder and said, “I meant to spare you this for as long as possible.”

“Spare me?” I had said to her. “For Christ’s sake, Ma, I’m your daughter.”

“Yeah, well, nobody else knows, so don’t tell the others until I decide it’s time.”

The elevator finally got me to the third floor in one piece. Wouldn’t that be a fine kettle of fish if it broke off its shaky old cables and dropped to the ground, killing me before Ma was taken? I smiled to think of Ma coming up to heaven to find me already sitting there with St. Peter. “You just had to beat me here, didn’t you, Ruth,” she’d say. “Here I was hoping for a rest from you, and I’ve got you yipping at my ear up here, too.” But she’d be grinning as she said it.

“Hey, Christine,” I said, waving to Ma’s nurse at the nurses’ station. She was at the computer, scowling at the screen. “What’s wrong?”

“Just the damn computer,” she replied. She was about Ma’s age, and she was always telling me that computers were the worst things to hit the hospital. “I’m a nurse, for God’s sake, not a computer scientist,” she’d say.

“Give it a good kick,” I advised her. “That’ll show it who’s boss.”

Christine laughed and looked up at me. “How’re you doing, honey?”

I shrugged and said, “Okay.”

“I’ll come in and check on your mom in a little bit. If she needs anything before I get to her, just buzz for me, all right?”

I nodded and said, “Thanks,” and I walked down to room 305. The woman in the bed closer to the door was sleeping. She was an elderly woman, nothing but papery skin covering a skeleton. Mrs. Harris. I crept by her bed and peeked behind the curtain separating her side of the room from my mother’s.

I couldn’t tell if Ma was sleeping or not. She lay in bed with her eyes closed, but she was grimacing and lifting her head a little bit as if she were in pain. I went in and sat on the blue vinyl-covered visitors’ chair pushed up beside her bed. “Hi, Ma,” I said. “It’s me, Ruth.”

“Ruth, Ruth,” Ma mumbled as if her mouth were full of pebbles that she had to talk around. I reached over and brushed one of her wispy strands of hair out of her face. Her face was all puffy and shiny from the drugs they gave her, and for a minute she opened her eyes, set little and glittery in her doughy face. She looked at me pleadingly, and I steeled myself to not look away from her. I can’t do anything for you, Ma, I thought, but I can look at you. I won’t leave you alone with all of this.

“Hurt,” she whimpered. She lifted a hand and let it drop back to the bed.

“Where do you hurt, Ma?” I asked loudly. Jesus Christ, why was I talking so loud? Ma was dying, not deaf. “Where do you hurt?” I asked in my regular voice.

Ma opened her mouth to speak but just smacked her dry lips together and closed her eyes.

“Do you need more pain meds?” I asked, my voice rising again.
Will you cut it out?
I warned myself.
She doesn’t need you screaming in her ear.

“More pain meds?” I asked again, touching her hand.

She shook her head and swallowed hard, then croaked, “Doesn’t help.”

“Here,” I said, and I lifted Ma’s head gently with one hand and fluffed the pillows with the other. “Better?”

Ma didn’t answer, only breathed shallowly with her eyes closed.

Why didn’t anyone tell you what dying was really like? That’s what I wanted to know. You went to the movies and they made you think that someone just passes on to the next life as nicely as you please, all prettied up and ready to go. They didn’t tell you about the streams of shit and the vomiting up of blood and the wild eyes that looked at you as if you were the Judas in all of this, as if you could have prevented this from happening. They didn’t tell you about the waiting around and the endless cups of coffee from the vending machine and the hoping in spite of yourself that your mother would just get it over with and die already. Die so she wouldn’t be suffering anymore, but also, selfishly, so you could be done with the whole business, so you could finally stop worrying over what life would be like when she was gone and just
live
it, for God’s sake.

I seethed as I watched my mother struggle for a moment of comfort as she tried to die. It just wasn’t goddamn fair.

Life’s not fair, Ruth.
That was one of Ma’s favorite sayings. If I came home whining about how it wasn’t fair I didn’t get picked for softball or invited to a party, Ma would jump right at me and say, “Life’s not fair, Ruth, and the quicker you learn that, the better off you’ll be.” It was her voice echoing in my head now, telling me to get a grip and shut up about expecting anything in the world to be fair. Still, I said it out loud, defying her even as she was dying. “It’s not fair,” I whispered, just because I wanted to say it out to the air, to put myself on record as believing that life was too damn hard. I wanted to take any little stand I could now.

I patted Ma’s bony arm. Nothing but bones, I thought, and then a saying popped into my head about how “they have counted all my bones.” The Bible, I thought; it came from the Bible, when Jesus died. They have counted all Ma’s bones. The words kept repeating in my head.

“You’re too mean to die, Ma.” It’s what I used to tell her when she got scared, and she’d laugh. “I guess I am,” she’d say, but we were both wrong. Mean or not, she was heading out the door of this earth. I made a mental note to myself to call Tim and Bobby. My brothers weren’t here, Tim because he was in Montana and too chicken to come. At least that was my take on the situation. As for Bobby, well, Sandra was due to have the baby real soon, and seeing as she didn’t have any family, Bobby didn’t want to leave her by herself. I could see that. Ma would have been first to agree, too.

I remembered when Bobby and Sandra had got married, just last year when Sandra got pregnant. “You treat her well, son,” Ma had said to him the morning of the wedding, holding his face in her two hands and looking right into his eyes. None of us knew Sandra very well, but Ma had said she seemed like a nice girl who was making Bobby happy and that was all that mattered. She had wanted them to be happy.