Удушье (Choke)

Chapter 36

So Saturday means visiting my mom

.

In the lobby of St. Anthony's, talking to the front desk girl, I tell her I'm Victor Mancini and I'm here to see my mom, Ida Mancini.

I say, 'Unless, I mean, unless she's dead.'

The front desk girl gives me that look, the one where you tuck your chin down and look at the person you feel so, so sorry for. You tilt your face down so your eyes have to look up at the person. That look of submission. Lift your eyebrows into your hairline as you look up. It's that look of infinite pity. Squash your mouth down into a frowny face, and you'll know the exact way the front desk girl is looking at me.

And she says, 'Of course your mother is still with us.'

And I say, 'Don't take this the wrong way, but I kind of wish she wasn't.'

Her face forgets for a second how sorry she is, and her lips pull back to show her teeth. The way to make most women break eye contact is to run your tongue around your lips. The ones who don't look away, for serious, bingo.

Just go back, she tells me. Mrs. Mancini is still on the first floor.

It's Miss Mancini, I tell her. My mom's not married, unless you count me in that creepy Oedipal way.

I ask if Paige Marshall is here.

'Of course she is,' the front desk girl says, now with her face turned a little away from me, looking at me out the corner of her eye. The look of distrust.

Beyond the security doors, all the crazy old Irmas and La­vernes, the Violets and Olives start their slow migration of walk­ers and wheelchairs coming my way. All the chronic undressers. All the dumped grannies and squirrels with their pockets full of chewed food, the ones who forget how to swallow, their lungs full of food and drink.

All of them, smiling at me. Beaming. They're all wearing those plastic bracelets that keep the doors locked, but they still look better than I feel.

In the dayroom, the smell of roses and lemons and pine. The loud little world begging for attention from inside the television. The shattered jigsaw puzzles. Nobody's moved my mom up to the third floor yet, the death floor, and in her room Paige Mar­shall's sitting in a tweed recliner, reading her clipboard with her glasses on, and when she sees me says, 'Look at you.' She says, 'Your mother isn't the only one who could use a stomach tube.'

I say I got her message.

My mom is. She's just in bed. She's just asleep is all, her stom­ach just a bloated little mound under the covers. Her bones are the only thing left in her arms and hands. Her head sunk in her pillow, she squeezes her eyes shut. The corners of her jaw swell as her teeth clench for a moment, and she brings her whole face to­gether to swallow.

Her eyes fall open, and she stretches her green-gray fingers at me, in a creepy underwater way, a slow-motion swimming stroke, trembling the way light does at the bottom of a swimming pool, when you're little and staying overnight in some motel just off some highway. The plastic bracelet hangs around her wrist, and she says, 'Fred.'

She swallows again, her whole face bunching with the effort, and says, 'Fred Hastings.' Her eyes roll to one side and she smiles at Paige. 'Tammy,' she says. 'Fred and Tammy Hastings.'

Her old defense attorney and his wife.

All my notes for being Fred Hastings are at home. If I drive a Ford or a Dodge, I can't remember. How many kids I'm supposed to have. What color did we finally paint the dining room. I can't remember a single detail about how I'm supposed to live my life.

Paige still sitting in the recliner, I step close to her and put a hand on her lab coat shoulder and say, 'How are you feeling, Mrs. Mancini?'