The Second Mouse (11 page)

“No. You better not. There’s some candy they gave me. I keep it in a cup. The treatment swells up your throat a bit.”

She finally located a plastic cup and poured a lemon drop into her thin hand.

“Was it pretty uncomfortable?” Nancy asked.

They were a little farther than six feet apart by now, and she could almost see the pain pulsing at the back of Doris’s eyes.

“It’s nothing much,” the older woman said quietly. “There is one thing, though.”

“What’s that?”

She looked at her son. “Do you remember that pendant your aunt Rose gave me years ago? The heart-shaped one?”

“Sure,” he said, pulling two chairs over and proffering one to Nancy.

“It disappeared. I think I threw it out by mistake when I was cleaning up around here. They had me tying off garbage bags like there was no tomorrow, even for a couple of tissues.”

Ellis shrugged. “Too bad.”

His mother leaned forward slightly. “But that’s not it. I think I can get it back. When they do all this radiation stuff, they keep everything you throw away—all your trash, your clothes, your laundry. It’s contaminated and they have to lock it up for a long time before they can throw it out for real, or they get in trouble with the landfills for pollution. One of the nurses was telling me all about it. It’s very regulated.”

“Did you ask them about it, then?”

“No. I just barely noticed it was gone. I’d taken it off, and I was looking for it this morning because I knew you were coming. Ellis, sweetie, could you see if you could find it? I hate to ask, but . . .”

Ellis held up his hand, already half out of his seat. “Don’t worry, Mom. I’m on it.”

He hesitated halfway across the room. Doris knew why. “You can leave Nancy here,” she told him. “I’ll fill her ears about what a problem child you were.”

Ellis wandered down the hallway toward the nurses’ station, unsure of how to proceed.

“May I help you?”

He turned to a woman in her mid-forties wearing a friendly expression. “Are you a friend of Doris’s?” she continued. “I saw you come out of her room.”

“I’m her son.”

She smiled broadly. “You have a terrific mom. She really lights the place up. Can I help you with something? I’m Ann Coleman.”

He touched his throat. “She lost a pendant. She’s afraid she threw it out in one of the garbage bags. It’s a real sentimental favorite.”

Coleman made a face. “Ooh, that’s not good. Does she remember when?”

“Maybe just this morning. Somebody told her you keep all that stuff until it’s safe.”

Coleman nodded. “That’s true. We do.” She seemed to mull something over in her mind for a few moments before finally saying, “Okay, tell you what. This is totally against the rules, but I really love your mom. You have to keep it under your hat, though, okay?”

Ellis held up his hand, pleasantly surprised. “You bet. I promise.”

Coleman led him over to the empty nurses’ station, looked around guiltily, and then opened a drawer under the counter. “I’m actually the floor supervisor here, so it’s not like it’s a criminal act or anything, but it’s hot-water territory for sure.” She extracted a key from the drawer. “I’m not even supposed to
have
one of these, for example, but it just makes life so much easier. Follow me.”

They went down the hallway to a door marked Stairs and descended a flight to the basement as Coleman continued chatting. “Between you and me, most of the security around the low-level nuclear medicine stuff is a little much. In the old days, they had no idea and I don’t think it killed anyone, but everybody’s so hypersensitive nowadays that they’ve almost started analyzing pencil shavings. Did Doris wear that pendant all the time?”

“No—mostly just to dress up.”

“Meaning she probably just had it in her nightstand drawer while she was undergoing treatment. I bet if they ran a Geiger counter by it, it wouldn’t even register. The more I hear, the less worried I am about returning it—assuming we find it,” she added, looking over her shoulder at him.

Upstairs, Nancy sat awkwardly in her chair, her hands between her thighs, wondering where to look. She didn’t want to stare at Doris but didn’t want to be rude by looking out the window.

“It’s okay, honey,” the older woman said. “I used to hate going to hospitals, and the sick people were only part of it. These places smell bad, and they give you the willies, and half the time you don’t know what anybody’s saying.” She laughed. “And then you throw us old folks on top of it.
We
smell bad,
we
give you the willies, and you can’t understand
us
half the time, either.”

Nancy was already shaking her head. “No, no . . .”

“Don’t kid a kidder, girl. I wasn’t always a fossil at death’s door. And don’t you believe for a second that Ellis’s old man was Father Knows Best.”

Nancy stared at her, unsure how to react. Doris raised what was left of her eyebrows. “There you go. Fact is, Ellis doesn’t even know who his father was, and to be honest, I don’t, either. Could’ve been one of several friends I had at the time.”

Nancy smiled nervously.

“You shocked?” Doris asked, still upbeat and cheerful. “You’re cheating on your husband.”

The headache returned with new fierceness. Nancy was torn between defending her ground and simply leaving the room. Had her companion taken another tone of voice, she would have left, but all this was being said almost as if Doris considered her the best of pals and was just pulling her leg.

Nancy took a breath and, more for Ellis’s sake than hers, decided to trust to this last notion. She forced a small smile. “Not to be mean to Ellis, but you should see his competition.”

Doris put her head back and laughed. “Oh, that’s good,” she finally said, wiping her eyes. “Poor Ellis. He’s a nice boy, but my God, I do wonder sometimes.” She reached out and waved at Nancy in lieu of tapping her on the knee. “I like you. Did the second you walked into the room. You’ll probably end up dumping my son. Most people do. But while he’s got you, I hope you can do him some good.”

Nancy was struggling for her footing. She understood that she’d passed a test of some kind, and she appreciated Doris’s candor, but she was still left wondering about how mother and son were connected emotionally. The simplicity of the images Ellis had evoked in Nancy when he’d invited her on this supposedly sentimental trip had been muddled and warped by how Doris really was. The older woman might have looked the role of a nursery rhyme mother, but her attitude made Nancy doubt how great she’d been performing it.

“What was Ellis like as a kid?” she asked, hoping for both a place to start and a way to duck the spotlight.

Doris shook her head and for the first time looked a little thoughtful. “You’re probably asking the wrong person. I’m not going to pull your chain here . . . What did you say your name was?”

“Nancy.”

“You have kids?”

“Not yet. I’m hoping to someday.”

Doris waved her hand in the air dismissively. “Yeah, well . . . Somebody told me once that having a kid changes your life, moves your priorities around, makes you realize stuff you hadn’t thought about before. I think all that’s a bunch of bull. I had a kid because I had sex with somebody. I probably could have had an abortion, so I won’t deny I was curious about being a mother, but once he was out and I figured out the lay of the land, I couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. I’ll always owe my sister for that. She took him off my hands almost from the start. She may not have been any big shakes as a mother, but Christ knows what I would’ve done to him.”

Nancy was disappointed, if not startled. She wished better for Ellis, and perhaps herself by proxy, but given her own knowledge of the world, she didn’t find Doris’s admission shocking. In fact, she appreciated her honesty. She’d known her share of parents who only paid lip service to what Doris had been smart enough to heed. Doris might have been careless getting pregnant and selfish afterward, but who was Nancy to say that she hadn’t best understood her own limitations and, in fact, acted in the child’s best interest? Despite her own yearning to become a mother eventually, Nancy was the first to admit that many humans had nothing on bugs when it came to child rearing.

For that matter, maybe Doris should be complimented.

She went at her next question obliquely. “Ellis has never mentioned your sister. Is that the aunt Rose who gave you the pendant?”

Doris’s expression was rueful. “Good sister, not so good at life. That’s what threw Ellis and me back together—they fell out once he got to be a teenager. No surprise there. She’s gone now, so I’m all he has left, and as adults we’re pretty good. But bad as I would’ve been, I wonder if I couldn’t’ve done better than Rosie, now that it’s all said and done.”

She glanced out the window and sighed. “God, what a life it’s been. I’m not really sure why I’m bothering to hang on. Scared, I guess.”

She looked back at Nancy. “Rosie drank herself to death. She took Ellis in, but she never treated him as her own, and he was real sensitive to that as he got older. He had to pretty much figure out growing up by himself, and he didn’t have very good examples to go by. I give him credit for still being alive.”

“He’s better than that,” Nancy said, finally seeing a place for her own insight. “He’s gentle and kind and thoughtful.”

Doris smiled at her. “That’s nice to hear. I think so, too. He learned it all the hard way, that’s for sure, and it cost him a lot, but he’s a good man. I realize now how smart I might have been not having that abortion.”

Nancy nodded, but the words kept rattling around inside her, taking on more complex and contradictory meaning with each lap. Maybe it was better enjoying how Ellis and his mother had finally ended up than analyzing how they’d gotten there.

In the hospital’s basement, Ellis and Ann Coleman walked down a sterile, windowless hallway clearly designed for employees only, with all the doors labeled with numbers and letters, until they came to one with nothing on it whatsoever.

Coleman slipped in her key and turned the door’s lock. “Discreet, huh? You’d never know what this one led to.”

She swung it back, and they entered a small corridor. There were three more doors leading off from it.

“That’s the dangerous one,” she said, pointing to the end. “Even I’ll admit that. The stuff they keep in there’ll kill you before you reach the lobby. They lock it in a huge lead safe called a pig.”

She stopped at the first door. “But that’s not for us, so we don’t need to worry. The iodine treatment trash is all in here.”

As she put the key in again, he stepped back a foot.

“Don’t worry,” she told him, laughing. “I wouldn’t do this if it was dangerous. Like I said, they’ve overreacted a little. Occasional exposures like this one amount to less than if you stepped out into the sunshine. Radiation is all around us, after all.”

She opened the door to reveal a small room filled with a towering pile of thrown-together semitransparent plastic garbage bags. It looked like the very clean interior of a rental moving truck.

“Jesus,” he said softly. “How’re we gonna find it in there?”

“Simple,” Coleman answered, stepping in amid the pile and looking around. “Each bag is labeled with a date and a room number. All we have to do is find your mom’s room number and the latest date, which”—she laughed as she reached out—“should be right on top.” She turned with the small bag in her hand. “Voilà.”

“Cool,” he complimented her.

She held the bag up to the light. “If it looks like what I think it does, and it’s loose, it should have settled to the bottom. There. What’s that? What do you think?”

Ellis squinted through the cloudy density of the plastic. He could dimly make out a hint of gold sliding around, a little bigger than a dime. “That looks about right.”

Coleman slipped on a pair of latex gloves from her pocket and opened the bag. She reached deep inside, fished around for a second, and came back out with the prize in hand, glittering from her fingers in the light.

Ellis impulsively kissed her on the cheek. “You are great. I really appreciate it.”

Ann Coleman patted him on the shoulder, resealed the bag, and threw it back onto the pile. “Happy to help. Any son of Doris’s is a friend of mine. Remember, though . . .”

He held up his hand as if swearing on the Bible. “I know. Not a word. Not even to Mom.”

Back upstairs, Ellis found Nancy and Doris laughing together and chatting as he walked into the room, dangling the pendant from his outthrust hand. His mother’s eyes widened with pleasure.

“You got it back. I don’t believe it.”

He walked over to the bed, hung it on the bedpost, and then, laughing, pushed the bed in her direction, thereby maintaining the six-foot proximity rule.

“How did you do it?” Doris asked, smiling and slipping the pendant over her head.

“I’d tell you,” he said, “but then I’d have to ki—” He stood before her, frozen, his expression stunned.

She laughed at him. “Kill me? Too little, too late, Ellis.” She looked meaningfully at Nancy and added, “And I thought we were getting along so good.”

Ellis stammered. “Jesus, Mom . . .”

She shook her head. “I’m kidding, sweetie. It was a good line. I guess you had some help out there.”

He sat down, his embarrassment still evident. “I sure did, but they swore me not to tell.”

She touched the pendant at her throat. “Well, I’m grateful. I always thought this pendant kind of holds us together, considering where it came from—puts a little Rosie in the room.”

Ellis ducked his head and stared at the floor for a few moments before saying, “Yeah.”

“She tried, Ellis,” his mother said. “In her own messed-up way, she made this possible, you and me, after all these years.”

He looked back up at her. “I’m happy for that.”

“And,” Doris continued, “maybe that made it possible for the two of you to meet up, huh?”

Ellis reached out to his side and took Nancy’s hand in his own, a gesture she wasn’t sure she could ever remember coming from anyone else.

“If it did, then I guess I can live with it,” he said.