The Second Mouse Read online

  Until maybe the next morning.

  Groaning, she worked her way over to the edge of the bed and dropped her feet to the floor, breathing deeply in order not to throw up.

  She surveyed the room through narrowed eyes, trying to separate last night’s detritus from the everyday chaos, wondering what to wear that might be halfway clean.

  The phone began ringing from somewhere under the bed.

  “Christ,” she murmured and dropped to her knees, ignoring the lurch in her stomach. Thankfully, the portable phone was under the first pillow she moved.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Wow,” said Ellis, clearly taken aback by her greeting. “Tough night?”

  “You know it.”

  His laugh sounded forced, and she imagined him putting on a brave face to mask his disappointment. “I do. He left me to go to you. I saw the shape he was in. You gonna live?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “He still there?” His voice had dropped a confidential notch.

  She stood up, the remnants of her underwear slipping down her leg to the floor. She felt dizzy and no less ill, but catching sight of herself naked in the closet mirror also came as a pleasant surprise. She paused and turned slightly, looking. The face wasn’t much—that she knew. It was becoming hard, and the jaw was wrong somehow, and the nose a little out of whack. But the body looked pretty good. Compact but athletic. Wouldn’t be too long before her butt began to go, but so far, so good. And her breasts were damn near perfect—a point of some vanity with her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Let me check.”

  Buoyed by her self-appraisal, she left the bedroom naked and entered the narrow hallway to the living room. The place was quiet, and Mel’s truck was gone from its usual parking space.

  “We’re alone.”

  “Don’t I wish,” he said leadingly.

  Not that attractive a notion right now, Nancy thought, brushing her throbbing forehead with her fingertips. But she understood his need to voice the desire, especially with Mel’s success in that department still lingering between them.

  “You up for a trip?” he asked, surprising her.

  She was more up for six aspirin, but the softness of his voice stirred a nascent interest. “Where to?” she asked.

  “I’d like you to meet my mom.”

  That made her laugh. “God, Ellis. I don’t guess I ever heard that one before. Where’s she live?”

  “Well, it’s not a house or anything. She’s in the hospital. Dying of cancer.”

  “Oh,” Nancy said, caught off guard, the smile still on her lips. Her nakedness now felt merely embarrassing, and she returned to the bedroom for a robe.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean for it to come out that way. I’ve gotten too used to it. But she’s good people and I wanted you to meet her at least once. Sort of stupid, I know—”

  “No, no,” she interrupted. “It’s not stupid. I just wasn’t expecting it. I didn’t even know you had a mother.” She held her aching head in frustration. “I mean, I figured you did, but . . .”

  “That’s okay. I don’t know anything about your family, either.”

  She laughed again, but without humor this time. “Yeah, well, let’s keep it that way if it’s okay with you. Not a place I want to go back to.” Standing again in her bedroom, the robe forgotten in her hand, she surveyed the mess around her, feeling the meaning of it seeping in. Her new boyfriend was asking her out on a date while she was staring at her husband’s underwear on the floor.

  “Hey, why not?” she finally said. “Mel’ll be gone for the rest of the day, probably cooking up new ways to get us killed. Can you give me a couple of hours to put myself together?”

  “I’ll pick you up at eleven,” he said.

  The hospital was at the edge of Bennington. They rode on Ellis’s Harley, barely talking because of the wind and the noise, the bike having a muffler in name only. But despite her slowly ebbing headache and fragile stomach, Nancy discovered it was all curiously soothing. She found herself holding on to Ellis’s waist, enveloped by the summer warmth, her eyes closed, breathing in the smell of him and thinking of next to nothing. Times like these, she could almost believe that life had a future worth anticipating. There was no Mel, no madcap schemes, no vigilance about whose headlights might be lurching over the trailer park’s uneven road late at night.

  Ellis had given her a glimpse of something better than the ever more slippery slope she occupied with Mel.

  When they arrived, Ellis stowed the helmets in the bike’s travel bags and led the way into the hospital’s lobby, bypassing the receptionist with the ease of familiarity.

  “You come here a lot?” Nancy asked, getting used to the antiseptic smell she found that all such places shared.

  “As much as I can,” he said, slowing down to fall in beside her down the wide hallway.

  “I gotta tell you, too,” he added in a low voice. “It’s been a little rough lately. Mom’s got thyroid cancer. Maybe it’s all the smoking. I don’t know—it’s not what they say, but you gotta wonder. Anyway, they’ve been trying stuff on her and they just got through something that pretty much cut her off from everybody for a few days, so she might be kind of emotional.”

  Nancy looked alarmed. “What did they do?”

  His eyes widened with the memory. “It was like Star Wars. Two guys in white suits. I was in a gown with gloves and booties and a hat. She’s in a lead-lined room where everything’s covered in plastic. All so they can give her a single pill. But it’s radiated, like nuclear or something, so it has rays. They took it out of a box inside another box, and as soon as she took it, her whole body lit up the Geiger counter one of them had. It was really creepy. And then we all had to leave—for days.”

  “Oh, my God,” Nancy said. “Why?”

  “The thyroid eats up iodine like it’s going out of style—or in her case, what’s left of the thyroid. Why, I don’t know. But that’s what the pill was—loaded with radioactive iodine. So the iodine goes straight to the remaining thyroid tissue, and the radiation kills the cancer there. At least that’s the theory.”

  Nancy pondered that for a moment before saying hesitantly, “But you said she was dying.”

  Ellis stopped to look at her. “She is. I’m sorry. I’m not doing this right. They took the thyroid out with surgery. That was before. This was just to catch what bits and pieces they might’ve missed. But no one’s kidding anybody. Her chances are basically nothing. This thing’s a killer. It isn’t always. In fact, with younger people it’s usually not that big a thing, but for people her age, it’s a done deal.”

  She reached out and put her hand on his arm. “Ellis, I’m so sorry.”

  He smiled back sadly. “It’s really not that bad. We’ve all accepted it. There’ve been counselors and everything. Most of the time we joke about it. It’s just that this time might be a little worse, only because she’s been alone so much. I did wave at her through the window a couple of times,” he added brightly. “I think that helped some.”

  Nancy frowned, trying to absorb it all. “What’re we about to do here?” she finally asked.

  He resumed walking and laughed at her, understanding her reservations. “It’s over now, Nance. It’s safe now. That’s why we came. Because they’re done and she can see people again. This is sort of a welcome-back visit.”

  “She in really bad shape?” she asked, her voice small.

  He remained upbeat, totally at ease with the patient, the disease, and the routine. “She might be a little shaky after this round. She’s just a skinny little thing, so it sort of takes it out of her, but you’ll like her. I wouldn’t have brought you otherwise.”

  Nancy kept silent.

  He tried to make her feel better. “It bummed me out at first, but she’s really been a trouper. Made me realize that if she’s okay with it, I should be, too. Here we are.”

  He held open a door leading into another h
allway, this one clearly not shared by a lot of people—narrower, quieter, and with more ominous-looking signs on the walls warning against contamination. Nancy got the distinct sensation of being swallowed deeper inside a building containing dangers she didn’t want to know about. There had been a time when not much had given her pause, from barroom brawls to men better suited to post office walls. And though she was tiring of that life now and becoming more vulnerable to its downside, she still had an instinctive kinship with it.

  But this was very different. Places like hospitals were all about the lack of knowledge, coded information, and the maintenance of a hard, placid sheen over the human business of wasting, dying, and despair. It was very far from what she knew, and it made her anxious.

  “Okay,” Ellis finally said, stopping before a door with a movable wardrobe beside it. “Here we are.” He opened the wardrobe and handed her a white jumpsuit. “Gotta get into one of these. Just this time, since it’s so soon after. And you can’t get closer than six feet today. Doctor’s orders,” he added with a laugh.

  Dreading what she was about to see, Nancy covered up and stepped over the threshold.

  The room was spare, larger than she thought it would be, and dazzling white, the outside sun reflecting oddly off a sculpture on the lawn and shooting straight at the door. Nancy stopped dead in her tracks and shielded her aching eyes. Her headache, almost gone, got a sudden jump start.

  “Come in, come in,” said a small, frail, distant voice. “It’s nice to see people, even space walkers.”

  Squinting, Nancy identified the problem and sidestepped the shaft of light.

  “Wow,” Ellis said, coming in behind her. “Like walking into a spotlight.”

  “Here,” said the voice. “I can fix that.”

  With a mechanical snapping sound, the room suddenly went so dark, both visitors were left walking with outstretched arms in a twilight brought about by a striped line of vertical venetian blinds.

  A thin, reedy laughter greeted their reactions. “God, this isn’t working out at all.”

  “No, no, Mom,” Ellis said, stepping farther into the room, with only one hand out now. “It’s okay. It’s getting better already. How’re you doin’?”

  Nancy came up behind him, using his bulk to stay half hidden, the jarring entrance having undermined her attempt at self-confidence.

  “I’m fine, Ellis. A little beaten up, but fine. Introduce me to your friend. Don’t be rude.”

  Her eyesight recovered, Nancy was ushered forward and saw a small, emaciated woman dressed in a hospital gown and sitting in a fake-leather armchair by the side of the window.

  “How do you do?” she asked, not daring to approach for fear of breaking a rule. All around her, as Ellis had described, everything was wrapped in plastic, from the furniture to the phone to the TV on the wall. She felt as if she were surrounded by invisible killer rays, all watching for a chink in her rustling white armor.

  The old woman’s face broke into a wide smile. “Dangerous question to ask around here. But I’m fine. I’m Doris Doyle, by the way, since my son has totally forgotten his manners.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nancy said, remembering her own. “Nancy Martin.”

  “The thing with the sunlight threw me off,” Ellis tried to explain.

  Doris Doyle gave her son an approving look. “I don’t care about that. You’ve done well. She’s a very pretty girl. Complicated, but very pretty.”

  Both younger people were at a loss for words. Doris nodded toward Nancy’s left hand. “The wedding ring.”

  Nancy’s face turned bright red, making Doris laugh again. “It’s all right, dear. Lives are led all sorts of ways. I’m no one to judge, God knows.”

  She leaned over slightly to fetch something by the side of her chair, clearly fumbling.

  “Can I help?” Nancy offered.

  “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.