Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

Her face still did not move and he picked up one of her hands, pressed it gently.

"It's me," he said, "T. You're in the hospital."

Finally her mouth worked dryly and he put down her hand. He ran to the bathroom and filled a paper cup with water.

"Here," he said. "Here, drink this."

He spilled the water over her chin and down the sides of her face, trying to tip it into her mouth.

"Can you talk? Do you know me?"

"Tell me your name," said a nurse, cutting in beside him.

"Angela," said his mother.

"And can you tell me what year it is?"

"1990," said his mother.

"OK," said the nurse. "Just lay back there, honey."

"I died," rasped his mother, after a long pause. "I died."

He leaned in and clasped her wrist.

"You almost died," he said. "You had a stroke. But here you are.

"Thirsty," she whispered, and he poured more water into her mouth. He could hear her gulping, and the nurse raised the head of the bed so that his mother sat up.

"You don't need to talk," said the nurse. "Just relax. You're doing great"

"I died and went to another place," whispered his mother, straining to lift her head off the pillow. "But it was nothing like what I expected, T. It was nothing like it."

"You can tell us all about that later," said the nurse. "OK? Right now we need you to just lay back and relax."

"You believe me, don't you," whispered his mother, reaching for his face. "You believe me."

"Of course I do," he whispered back.

"I was surprised. I thought it would be heaven, T. But it was bad, very bad," said his mother, and moved her feet suddenly beneath the sheet. "It was the International House of Pancakes."

"I'm surprised too," said T.

"I thought it would be more expensive than that."

He studied her face to see if he could detect humor but there was nothing, only a vague and yet urgent concern.

"We're just glad to have you here with us," he said, and leaned down to kiss her cheek.

"I don't want to go back there again," she said, and closed her eyes. "I must have done something wrong, T. Something very wrong to go there."

"I'm going to get the doctor now," said the nurse. "And you best be letting her get some rest. Visiting hour's almost done anyways."

"Sure," he said.

Before he left he reached over and removed the barrettes.

He found her a small apartment, on the first floor of a yellowbrick building a block away from him. She would convalesce there and T. could check in on her easily. It was pleasant and any, modest and clean; the windows of the large living room gave onto a common garden whose grass was a deep green, with white plastic lawn chairs and a kidney-shaped pool. The doors were wide enough for a wheelchair and the inside smelled of lemon.

He and Beth furnished the apartment on the day his mother was to be released, drinking coffee and watching as men from a furniture rental company rolled in the chairs and sofas on dollies. They brought over her few belongings from T.'s apartment and Beth put daisies in the window.

"Oh T.? I think we forgot something," she called from his bathroom when they were getting ready to leave for the hospital. She came out holding the Bo Peep figurine.

He was struck by the sight of this-how the statuette, which he had previously viewed as ridiculous, did not appear so the way she held it, how the fluidity of her gestures seemed to steady and ground its frivolity. In her hand it was almost acceptable.

"No," he said softly. "I don't think so."

"Are you sure? It doesn't remind me of you," she said, and put it down on a shelf as they walked together through his front hall, keeping pace, both their key chains jangling.

"She bought it for me," he said, and pulled the door closed behind them. "She believed in guest soap."

He never found out whether the overdose had been an accident. Angela was changed, shifted sideways from her previous self; it was not quite that she was absent, merely that she seemed dislocated. The patterns of her speech had altered and frequently her sentences wasted into nothing; but then some days she seemed to rise from the fog, sharptongued and beady-eyed, and would lecture her son on his selfishness or his lack of religion.

Her time in the coma had persuaded her into an angle of devotion more stringent and bizarre than her old way of worship. She had always assumed that when she died the Blessed Mother would shelter her; instead she had been relegated to a dingy House of Pancakes, and the shock was considerable. Whether her banishment had been to hell, purgatory, or as she first implied a disappointing version of heaven remained unclear to him. But she seemed to be certain of what the experience signified; she had found herself in a place of disillusionment where fluorescents had threatened to bring on a migraine and the other patrons, fat, pasty-faced, and dressed in loud prints, had studied her resentfully. None of them were Catholics.

It had been a stern warning, and one she would heedfor the House of Pancakes outcome could be averted, she told T., by renewed attention to matters of the spirit. She had fallen away from attention to faith in recent months, she said, with her self-absorption and her self-pity. Of course the divorce itself, being a violation of doctrine, might also have brought on her punishment despite the fact that she had not had a hand in it personally: it was no coincidence that she ended up in the Pancake House the very day she was notified of the legal severing of her conjugal bond. Starting now she would devote more of her time to charity, attend church daily and curb her language.

But her concern that he might end up in an IHOP was greater than her worry for herself. Her admonitions to him were constant, and on her sharper days he sometimes caught himself wishing she would return to dimness. If an elderly lady with a walker was preparing to cross the road a half a block away, she would wave wildly with both arms to stun her into halting her progress; then grab T. firmly, pinching, to hustle him over to the woman's side so he could support her for the brief traverse. And as he and his current ward made their way through the crosswalk she would often leap around wildly beside them, fending off cars with a fierce and mobile series of facial expressions despite the fact that all of them were already at a standstill. Recipients of her largesse were not always grateful for the interruption but she ignored this; and several times, hands flapping on T.'s back to hurry him along, she pressed him into the service of perfectly hale and hearty men in their early forties.

She also urged him toward charitable contributionshere five thousand dollars for a local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, there five hundred for the Roman Catholic Anti-Defamation League of Newfoundland. When T. resisted her tithing demands she would finger-wag and remind him of the flicker of long tubes over his head, the blue-white light, and the laminated menus with close-up pictures of heavy foods.

Behind the wheel of her car she carefully avoided not only the various Los Angeles locations of the International House of Pancakes but all breakfast-oriented restaurants that were national chains. And if she was struck as she drove with the sight of a Denny's or Waffle House, unexpected, she closed her eyes tightly until it was past.

He rarely saw the men he knew from college days. But early that spring there was a call from a fraternity brother reporting that Ian Van Heysen, Jr. had relocated to the Hollywood Hills and was hosting a housewarming gala. The new home had a pool with a view of the city, a whirlpool and sauna and steam room; it had previously been owned by a B-list actress with famously beestung lips. This, and not the independent features of the property, was what had attracted Van Heysen and inspired him to cajole from his father a purchase price in the mid-seven figures.