That evening, we slept on the pull-out sofa bed for the second week in a row. Mia jumped up and down, excited for another sleepover with me, another viewing of Finding Nemo.
She fell asleep halfway through the movie. I got up to turn down the heat. It would be three hours before I could start to doze off, and I found myself wishing for wine or even decaf coffee—something to keep me warm. Instead, I crawled back into bed next to Mia’s warm body, feeling her breathe and twitch in her sleep. Finally, I drifted off as well.
PART THREE
23
DO BETTER
Em-i-lee-ah?” the nurse called out. I roused Mia by moving my shoulder out from under her head.
“Here,” I said, standing and reaching down to pick my daughter up to hold in my arms. “She goes by Mia.”
The woman neither acknowledged what I said nor that I opted to carry my three-year-old. She just told us to come with her. After a brief pause to stand Mia on a scale, we sat in another chair to wait.
“What seems to be the problem here?” the nurse asked, her attention on the file she held instead of looking at me.
“My daughter has had a bad cough at night for the last week,” I began, trying to remember how long she’d been suffering, how many times I’d sent her to day care when she should have stayed home. “I think it might be a sinus infection or allergies, maybe? Her eyes get really red sometimes, and she complains of her ear hurting a lot.”
The nurse, a larger, gruff-looking woman, continued to somewhat ignore me, but now she had a look of pity for Mia, who sat in my lap. “Oh, sweetie, your ear hurts?” she said in a baby voice.
Mia nodded, too worn out to be shy or argue. She let the woman take her temperature and clip a plastic thing on her finger to check her pulse and oxygen levels. Then we sat there to wait. I leaned my head back to rest on the wall, closing my eyes, and tried not to think about the work I was missing. It was the Plant House again, whose owner became so annoyed over my having to reschedule that Lonnie said she all but threatened to cancel her service. Mia coughed her guttural bark again. She was too young for cough syrup, and it wasn’t like I could afford it anyway. Mia woke up twice a night, crying out in a howling sort of way with her hand grasping the side of her head, and coughed in her sleep.
The pediatrician who opened the door wasn’t our usual one, since I’d called that morning for a same-day appointment. This woman was smaller, boyish, and had her black hair bobbed like Mia did. “Okay.” She looked at the chart, squinting. “Mia.” So the nurse heard me after all, I thought, while Mia lifted her head at the sound of her name.
“Why don’t you have her sit up here,” she said, patting the papered seat on the examination table. She looked at Mia’s face while I talked, then in her eyes. “What are your living conditions like?” she asked. I frowned at the question, fighting off an urge to feel incredibly hurt and offended. She could have said “How are things at home?” or “Is there something that could be making her sick?” or “Are there any pets in the home?” or anything but asking what our living conditions were like. Like we lived in a…then I thought of what we lived in, and my shoulders fell.
“We live in a studio apartment,” I said softly, admitting some kind of secret, part of me afraid she’d call child protective services if I indulged what our living conditions were actually like. “There’s a lot of black mold that keeps showing up on the windowsills. I think it’s coming from the basement. There’s this shaft that comes up into our bedroom, and you can look down it and see the dirt floor.” The doctor had stopped examining Mia and stood with her hands clasped in front of her. She had the tiniest watch with a black band. “It has a lot of windows.” I looked down at the floor. “I have a hard time keeping it warm and dry in there.”
“Your landlord is required by law to do what he can to get rid of the mold,” she said, looking in Mia’s ear. “That one’s infected,” she mumbled, shaking her head, almost like it was my fault.
“He cleaned the carpets,” I said, suddenly remembering. “And painted before we moved in. I don’t think he’d do anything else.”
“Then you need to move.”
“I can’t,” I said, putting my hand on Mia’s leg. “I can’t afford anything else.”
“Well,” she said, nodding at Mia, “she needs you to do better.”
I didn’t know what else to say. I nodded.
I looked at Mia’s hands where they rested in her lap, fingers laced together. They still had that chubbiness to them, dimples instead of knuckles. I felt my failures as a parent every time I opened the door to our apartment, but it was nothing like the burning shame I felt in that moment.
As I carried Mia out to the car, I needed the weight of her head on my shoulder and the tickle of her hair under my nose. The pediatrician had given us a prescription for another round of antibiotics and a referral back to the specialist who’d put Mia’s ear tubes in almost a year before.
When we saw the specialist a few days later, they put us in a room with a long, padded brown table. After sitting there for several minutes, the specialist rushed in, again barely acknowledging us, and said, “Why don’t you put her on the table there.” I stood up, still holding Mia, who’d been sitting in my lap, and sat her on the table again. “No, lay her down,” he said, turning his back to us to rustle through boxes of instruments. “I need her head under the light.”
Mia’s eyes went wide as I said, “It’s okay, Mia, he’s just going to look at your ear.” It was hard to be sincere as the specialist rummaged around, calling in a nurse for help, before turning abruptly to me, forcing out a sigh. He sat next to the table on a rolling stool, quickly sticking an instrument in Mia’s ear. My daughter, who hadn’t been able to sleep without doses of ibuprofen and gingerly placed her hand over her ear when she went outside, opened her mouth in a silent cry of pain. The specialist worked quickly, first examining her ear, then cutting a hard piece of cotton to the size of Mia’s ear canal, which he placed in there, adding a few drops of liquid.
“There,” he said. “You’ll need to put antibiotic ear drops in there like I just did.”
“She’s already on antibiotics,” I injected.
“Do you want your daughter to get better or not?”
I didn’t know how to reply. “When I gave her those ear drops before, she got dizzy and fell over. I had to hold her down to get them in.”
“You’re the mom,” he said. He was standing by the door, looking down on me as I sat with Mia in my lap. “You need to do whatever it takes.” Then he opened the door, exited, and closed it behind him so fast I felt a breeze. His words, like the pediatrician’s, burned into me: I wasn’t giving Mia what she needed.
* * *
Spring in the Skagit Valley is called Tulip Season. It begins with fields of yellow daffodils, purple irises, and the occasional crocus. As the weeks go by, tulips of every color bloom, carpet the ground. The locals like to say there are more tulips in the Skagit Valley than Holland. Tens of thousands of tourists descend on the area, clogging up back roads and freeway exit ramps, cramming the restaurants and parks. But although the tulip fields, with their stripes of red, purple, white, and orange, are stunning, I have never much cared for the flower.
Tulip season is a digging out from the long winter, but it also means rain, dampness, and mold. By April, the dehumidifiers in the Plant House were constantly set to high, and another air filter appeared in the bedroom. I wiped tiny spiderlike growths of black mold from her windowsills, knowing I’d have to do the same at home.
Mia coughed at night, relentlessly. Some evenings, when we walked into the apartment, her eyes turned bright red and filled with goopy deposits. It seemed obvious that it was the house—that the home I’d chosen, with the vent that pulled in air from the hundred-year-old moldy basement, was making us sick.
Besides always being sick, my own symptoms didn’t bother me too much as long as I could afford over-the-counter allergy medication. I’d been tested for s
ensitivities to allergens a year earlier, when my income was still low enough to qualify for Medicaid. The test revealed that I reacted to dogs, cats, some type of grass and tree, dust mites, and molds. “Indoor allergens,” the doctor had said. I’d just started working for Jenny, and my chest cold hadn’t let up for weeks. They’d given me inhalers and saltwater nasal sprays. Moving out of Travis’s trailer—which had black mold in the walls and feral cats living beneath it—had done me a lot of good, but I still had allergy symptoms from the hours spent cleaning up dust mites, cat dander, dog hair, and mold spores in houses across the valley.
The Cat Lady’s House gave me burning eyes, a runny nose, and a cough that lasted until I could change my clothes and shower. First thing in the morning, I cleaned the master bathroom. The bedroom was pink-carpeted and contained two litter boxes and three scratching posts. While I moved the litter boxes and vacuumed where they’d been, four cats stared at me from plastic carriers lined up on the bed. My presence was an inconvenience to them, and it meant they were trapped in boxes for the day. They growled if I came too close.
The days I cleaned her house, I doubled up on my dosage of over-the-counter allergy medication. But when I ran out, it felt like I’d snorted cayenne pepper. On those days, I cracked the windows, desperate for some relief. But I never told Lonnie or Pam.
When I did my taxes through TurboTax that spring, I nearly fell out of my chair. With the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, I’d get a refund of nearly $4,000. “That’s more than I make in three months,” I mumbled out loud, into the darkness of our apartment. It didn’t seem possible to get that amount. I anxiously waited for the IRS to accept my forms, feeling like I’d gotten away with something. In a notebook, I listed things I could do with the money—get a tune-up, oil change, and CV joints for the Honda; pay off the credit card debt; finally buy kitchen sponges and dish soap, toothbrushes, shampoo and conditioner, bubble bath, vitamins, and allergy medications. Or we could maybe go on a road trip.
Like many, most of what I knew about Missoula I had read in Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. People who visit Missoula in search of places to fly fish can attest to the pull of that particular novel, or the movie made from the book. But for me, it was the way John Steinbeck wrote about Montana in Travels with Charley that convinced me to leave Alaska and begin heading toward Big Sky Country. I chose Missoula not because of Maclean, but for David James Duncan, author of The River Why, who, at a reading in Seattle, admitted to living and sometimes teaching at the university there. What compelled me to dream about waking up one summer day to drive east for nine hours was, plainly, a hunch. A hunch that had grown into a constant hum. One I’d had for more than half a decade.
Missoula’s wages are low and housing costs are high. That much I knew from conversations I’d had with people who used to live there but couldn’t afford to anymore. Jobs aren’t easy to come by, and they don’t pay well in a small college town with nearly seventy thousand people. Parents of college kids rent apartments for them, driving up rent costs in sought-after parts of town, where even a one-bedroom basement apartment goes for at least eight hundred bucks. When I thought about whether or not to relocate, this conundrum remained at the forefront of my mind. But when I spoke to people who lived in Missoula, they deeply loved their town. Those who had moved there said that while they had given up competitive salaries or high wages, it was worth it because they got to live in Missoula.
I wanted to know why Steinbeck wrote so lovingly of the place. Why Maclean claimed the world increased rapidly in bastards the farther one got from Missoula, Montana. People spoke of this place like a sensational flavor of ice cream they’d had on vacation once, one that they’d never been able to find again and weren’t sure if they’d dreamed of or not.
The night the tax refund money hit my account, we went out to eat at Red Robin. I let Mia get a chocolate milkshake. We went to the store and filled the cart with food we normally couldn’t afford: avocados, tomatoes, frozen berries for pancakes. I bought a bottle of wine. Over the next week, I bought a frame and a full-sized mattress and a heated pad so I didn’t have to heat the whole room at night. I found insulating curtains and cheap rods on clearance. I bought Mia a kid-sized trampoline for her to jump on instead of the couch and bed. I bought myself something I’d been wanting for several years—a titanium, tension-set diamond ring for $200. I was tired of waiting for a man to come into my life who would buy one for me. It was more money than I’d spent on something unnecessary in years. As hard a decision as it was, I needed to make a commitment to myself. To trust in my innate strength. I could do this, all of this, just fine on my own. The ring that slid down over the middle finger on my left hand served as a constant reminder of that.
With money, even temporarily, life felt almost carefree. I filled my gas tank without subtracting the total from the amount remaining in my account. At the store, I didn’t go through a process of mental math—the date, what bills had been paid, what bills were due, how much money I had, how much I’d pay, or what credit cards had available balances—before deciding if I could afford to buy paper towels. I slept—without extra clothes on to keep warm, without a knot in my stomach, without too much worry. But Mia still tossed and turned, coughed and sneezed, waking up complaining of pain in her throat and ears. And while I could temporarily afford to take time off to take her to the doctor, I couldn’t keep the sinus and ear infections from consuming her.
Late at night, when I needed a break from homework, I scrolled through the classified ads. I gazed longingly at photos of houses, two-bedroom apartments, all completely out of my price range. My income barely covered my rent at the studio, roughly half of what the other places would cost. Even though I had a little extra income now, it wasn’t sustaining. It was a cushion to catch us in case we fell. And, if I’d learned anything, when you’re teetering on the brink of making it, you always lose your balance and fall. I shook my head and clicked away from the ads, back to my homework. Even dreaming seemed like something I couldn’t afford.
For days, I heard the pediatrician’s voice in my head. “She needs you to do better.” How could I do better? It didn’t seem possible to try any harder than I already was while dealing with hoops placed in front of me to jump through, which sometimes held me, trapped in place.
That week, I’d submitted a copy of a handwritten paystub from Classic Clean to renew our childcare grant, and a woman from the DHHS office called me, demanding I submit a real one. When I kept trying to explain that it was my boss’s handwriting, and an official paystub, she threatened to pull my grant approval and deny my assistance immediately. I started sobbing. She told me to go to the local office to get it sorted out the next day.
People lined up outside the Department of Health and Human Services office long before it opened in the morning. Not knowing this, the first day I arrived about thirty minutes after the doors were unlocked. Every chair in the waiting room was full. I grabbed a number and stood leaning against a wall, watching the interactions between mothers and children; between caseworkers and clients who didn’t understand why they were there, why they were denied, why they had to come back with more paperwork.
A chair opened, but I let an older woman, wearing a long skirt, holding the hand of a small, meek child, take it instead. I glanced at my watch. An hour had passed. When I looked at it again, another had gone by. I started to get nervous about my number being called before I needed to go get Mia from day care. She would have been bouncing all around me here. Not like the children who surrounded me, sitting quietly, whispering to ask if they could go to the bathroom. Most stereotypes of people living in poverty weren’t seen here. In the lines on their faces, I could see the frustration, the urgency to get out of there so they could go to the store and buy food, go back to work. They, like me, had been completely drained of hope, staring at the floor, waiting, sincerely needing what they asked for. We needed help. We were there for help so that we could survive.
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br /> When my number glowed in the black box, I rushed toward the window, fearing they would call the next number if I didn’t get there fast enough. I placed my purple folder on the counter, pulled out all the copies of the checks I’d received from clients and the handwritten paystub. The woman picked up a couple papers while she listened, then examined the paystub.
“You need your boss to print out an official one,” she said and stared at me. I blinked. Her expression didn’t change.
I told her I had been there all morning, that my boss’s office was forty minutes away. I couldn’t spend another day here, waiting.
“If you want to keep your childcare grant, that’s what you need to do,” she said. I’d been dismissed. It was almost one o’clock.
Lonnie shook her head as she printed out a paystub for me. This paystub was for a pay period that was weeks ago. All my self-employment income came from checks handwritten by my clients. I had no idea how this situation could possibly make sense. But the next day, I waited outside for the office to open, then waited for hours to present my income for the past three months, a written schedule of my current work hours, and letters from several of my clients formally saying I worked in their home at the time I said I did.
Without food stamps, we would have frequented food banks or free meals at churches. Without childcare assistance, I wouldn’t have been able to work. The people lucky enough to remain outside the system, or on the outskirts of it, didn’t see how difficult those resources were to obtain. They didn’t see how desperately we needed them, despite the hoops they made us jump through.
When I cleaned Henry’s house that Friday, he noticed I seemed down. I still had about a quarter of my tax refund left. It was sitting there for the time being, until my car broke down or Mia was sick, or a client canceled, or all the above. Though I still put myself to sleep imagining Missoula—what it would be like to walk across the bridge over the Clark Fork River, or lie in a field looking up at that big sky—it seemed impossible to consider making a trip now.
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