We turned away and walked down the steps close to the water. From the woven farmer’s bag hanging over my shoulder, I pulled out a small bottle of hand sanitizer, relic of my time as the rule-following mother of a bone-marrow-transplant patient when we’d been indoctrinated in the fear of bacteria lurking everywhere. With Chan’s immune system suppressed by medication that we hoped would allow the donor’s alien marrow to make itself at home in Chan’s body, I had learned extreme vigilance about germs. The boys were used to regular treatments of soapy handwashings and, when a sink wasn’t available, alcohol gel before meals. We waved our hands in the air to let the fumes dissipate. Then, from the bag, I pulled out sections of green pumpkin I had boiled before we left, and we ate the wet, sweet treat while the sky grew darker and we talked.
Across the river Chan spotted a tree, towering above the others. Against the gray sky of Laos, Chan showed me how its black shadow looked unmistakably like a rearing stallion, head curved beautifully into its neck. He sat entranced with his discovery.
“Mama, why don’t real horses look like in the movies and books? Real horses look kind of dirty and messy.”
“The horses in the movies are groomed.”
“What is groomed?”
“That means they stand still while their trainers comb and brush their coats to make them look glossy and beautiful.”
“Oh.”
“Our horses are workhorses, not show horses. They wear their coats like their cousins in Mongolia in the wild. Do you think we should groom them?” I hoped that the maternal manipulation of the argument wasn’t too obvious.
“No, I like them natural,” Chan replied.
Sitting close together in the darkness, talking with my son, I told myself I must remember all the things he said so I could write them down. But when I sat down to do so later, most of his words had vanished. Why does life disappear like water falling through my fingers? I still can’t fathom that I can’t remember so much of my boys’ infancy and early childhood. Where did the recordings of all that happened go in my brain? Are they there or did they somehow never get properly entered? How can something so precious as our lives just disappear when it feels as though it’s all that means anything? Why is it trivial things like furniture and clothes can stay and clutter up our space till they, or we, rot, when what matters most is gone in a heartbeat?
On the way home in the dark, Chan suddenly blurted out, pointing up to the moon, “I can see that round part—you know the one that doesn’t shine up, the outline—I can see it!” I smiled at his delight and wrongly explained that it’s called the dark side of the moon.
“Like in that song from Mulan: mysterious as the dark side of the moon,” I reminded him.
“Mulan’s a good movie because it tells you to use your power.” His voice carried, quiet but firm from behind me, as we rode home under the purple sky, sidewalk dim in the darkening evening. But I’d ridden this way so many times before. I knew my way.
* * *
At home the kitten was gone, and the mother’s anguished cries had stopped. Certainly, she had brought it home and it was going to be fine.
PART 5
The Mountain
The day we finally left to move to our cabin in the mountains, Jew was visiting from Bangkok. Hurrying her away from her grandmother’s protests that the mountains were no place for a girl, I lifted my niece high over the metal tailgate of the Land Rover, depositing her between Cody and Chan.
“Dtaw, hurry. Let’s go before your mother changes her mind,” I called as my husband climbed up behind the wheel. Soft blankets covered crates of clothing and food that crammed the bed of the Land Rover. The boys and Jew waited, eager for the trip. The day was lovely. The four children lay down on the blanket as we drove, their toes waggling over the tailgate. They were singing and laughing and Chan was a full part of it. A day worth remembering.
When we rolled to a stop in front of our cabin four hours later and Dtaw turned off the engine, the children jumped from their seats and over the sides of the vehicle as if into cool water on a hot day. At last, the earth, the sky, so much of both without overhead wires and sounds of televisions and loudspeakers to interrupt any of it. At last we were where Chan had begged to be throughout his sickness.
We hurried to the front of the cabin where it faced east toward the line of mountains thirty kilometers away, across a valley of fields and mounded hills far below ours. We climbed the five rough steps up to the porch and Cody picked up the broom, a bundle of dry grasses, ends spread by thick string neatly woven between the stems, and began sweeping the dead leaves and gecko droppings, letting them fall through the wide cracks between the floorboards to the dirt below.
Dtaw opened the narrow door, and the rest of us followed him into the square bedroom, barely bigger than the two-inch-thick coconut-husk mattress we’d brought to lay on the floor for the five of us (six as long as Jew stayed) to sleep on. I reached the small window on the other side in half a dozen steps and slid the narrow stick from the holes in the latches, swinging open the two pieces of wood to let in the light. Lifting the children one at a time, we admired the view to the west of closer mountains and the housetops of the village huddled by the stream a mile below.
Then everyone, even two-year-old Tahn, began carrying bedding, towels, pots, and the rest of the supplies from the Land Rover. Cody and Jew climbed onto the rack on top of the canvas roof and set to work on the knots where their bikes were lashed down. Dtaw stood below, directing Jew and Cody which bike to hand him first. Soon the sound of dirt bikes buzzed from the road, and five young boys, agile and energetic, arrived to meet their new friends and help with the move in. When the gear was unloaded, Dtaw set them all to work with Cody and Jew cutting the sharp grass that never stopped striving up from the dust. With hoe blades, they chopped at the short tufts, giving us a place to play and eat and sit around the fire.
Through all of it, Chan sat at the outdoor table, watching, wishing to help, but at least content to have finally arrived where he for so long dreamed of being. Each time we passed him, he reached out to touch us, or smile, or share a joke.
At dinnertime, Uncle Shoon arrived unexpectedly. He had come up to get Jew before dark and was in a hurry to get back home. It didn’t matter that the family had agreed she could spend the night. The mountains are no place for girls, according to Dtaw’s mother’s generation. There was no arguing with the elders on this.
* * *
A few days after we arrived at our cabin, Chan became more weak and listless than usual. We realized he probably needed red blood cells and traveled back down to the hospital in the capital to get them. We settled ourselves into the clean hospital room overlooking fields and hills that spread out from the cluster of white cement buildings that comprised this up-country town. We waited for the results of the blood test and subsequent infusion.
Hours later the blood still waited in its bag hanging from the pole by Chan’s bed. “Mama, if this one doesn’t work, please don’t let them do it again,” he turned his tear-stained face up to mine and pleaded.
I couldn’t promise anything. There was nothing I could do to soothe him. He had to have the blood, and puncturing his skin and sliding the needle into a vein was the only way for the nurses to get it into him. But after eight tries, they couldn’t find a vein that worked. The second nurse said his veins were too delicate because he was dehydrated and feverish. I kept trying to think of another way to get the IV fluid and blood into him without these fruitless and painful pokes. (Surgery? Ingestion?) The answers were impossible, but my brain couldn’t stop searching, frantic for a solution.
In four hours, three different nurses leaned over his arm, his wrist, then his leg. Each of them, after the first failed attempts, grimaced in concentration, strands of black hair escaping from under white cap, bobby-pinned in place. None could not get a good path for the blood. When the needle did find a vein, the blood either would not drip in from the bag, or the site would become painf
ul and swollen, evidence of vein leakage. When the ruthless ICU nurse came in, poking his leg three times without hesitation or visible emotion despite his screams, the blood began to drip steadily.
We slept. At two a.m. Chan woke up to pee. As he drifted back to sleep, I looked up at the IV tube and noticed the blood had stopped moving. In a panic, I called the nurse. She figured out that it was because he was sleeping with his leg bent. She gently straightened it so as not to wake him from the bliss of sleep, and the precious liquid began to flow again.
* * *
A week later, back at the cabin, Mama Tong arrived perched sidesaddle on the back of Paw Cam’s rickety motorbike as it chugged up the last steep part of our hill. Smiling with her contagious enthusiasm, Tong hopped off the motorbike once Cam swung the kickstand down to the dirt and hurried to press today’s treasures into our tired hands. Fresh, tender fiddleheads gathered from the edge of the stream below her sprawling garden; wild pennywort, glossy green faces like giant shamrocks, the plant we pressed to make the bitter juice that Chan had learned to swallow, believing what we hoped, that it might beat back the cancer; balls of sweetened sticky rice stuffed with black bean paste and coated with flakes of coconut, all raised and harvested by Tong and Cam from the land they worked and loved. Like the plants they coaxed to keep on this side of life despite blight and drought, we too lived on their land, soaking fortitude from the ground under us. We brightened with their coming, and slowed and folded a little in on ourselves each time they left.
Dtaw was building things every day. Hammering nails and sawing wood and digging holes, leaving me alone with our dying child. I had to leave the house every day to force him to be with Chan and to give myself some rest. I must get on those horses, I thought. I knew long rides would be restful. Dtaw and Tong were only too glad when I left. When I wasn’t there, Chan stopped crying and enjoyed himself, going for trailer rides, spotting eagles, watching the horses.
One of the mental struggles that went on for me every day was whether or not to talk to Chan about the fact that he could be dying. As much as I tried each day to be positive and hopeful, I did think the evidence pointed to his imminent demise. The way his joints ached, the way his face seemed puffy, his fatigue, and all the hopeless prognoses we’d heard over and over—all combined to make my rational mind unable to release the sense that our days with him would be few. All my education and cultural background told me it was unfair and dishonest not to say, “Well, Chan, this is what leukemia looks like just before people die. There’s a good chance you’re dying.”
But the other theory, which I was starting to see, was that there was just as good a chance that he wasn’t yet dying, that perhaps the pain he was experiencing then was the same pain that he would struggle with for months or years until he died, or that he might even miraculously overcome. To put the idea “I am dying” into a person’s head is a very powerful thing to do, and I didn’t believe, even when he was so sick, that it was fair to do that to Chan. I told myself that when he was getting transfusions once a week and infections regularly and his platelets were not holding up, then maybe we’d talk about it, but not until then, not yet. Of course, my fear was that dying was his biggest fear, yet he was afraid to voice it because I was afraid to voice it. How could I address that fear without putting the thought into his head? This circular question worried me every day.
“Honey, I think it’s dishonest and unfair not to talk to Chan openly about what’s happening to him,” I said to Dtaw. The boys were all asleep and Dtaw and I sat up in the kitchen. We were tired but I wanted to talk. Dtaw looked at me and listened quietly, sitting still on the floorboards close to the glow of the fire. “We need to tell him there’s no way he can get through this. He has so much cancer it’s pouring out of his joints, causing swelling and pain, and he’s going to be anemic again soon if he isn’t already even though he just got more red cells on Tuesday.”
Dtaw remained quiet as usual.
I plowed on as I had gotten used to doing in the face of his silences: “What are we going to do when his platelets get so low we have to fly him to Bangkok for a transfusion or risk his bleeding to death? Are we going to put him through that exhausting trip?”
Before Dtaw had time to formulate a response or hold me close, the familiar whimpering began again in the bedroom, and I got up to check on Chan.
In the dark bedroom he was half-asleep and scared. He must have thought I was Dtaw. “Nuwat lang” (massage my back), he said in a small voice. I rubbed the smooth skin that covered the bumps of his bones, hoping in my exhaustion and in my need to talk to my husband that he would soon sleep. When I heard Dtaw snoring in the kitchen, I spoke through the spaces in the wall: “Come to bed.”
* * *
The next morning, Chan woke up and wanted to get dressed immediately to go down to Tong’s house to watch his favorite TV show. While I was gently pulling the loosest pair of pants and shirt over his swollen joints, he said, “If I could just get this ankle better, I could stand up.”
What? I hadn’t heard him talk that positively in a long time.
Then, rolling down the bumpy road in the trailer, he kept saying things like, “Oooh, I hate being this sick. I just want to get well. I wish there was no pain in the world . . . Mom, six days after I get all well, can we go to that place for special time where we had cereal? I’ve been wanting to go to that place for a long time.” I knew the place he meant, a restaurant in a lush garden of flowers in the middle of a verdant valley an hour down the mountain. It was the last place Chan had played a game of tag with Cody, Tahn, and Jew. And when I was getting organized to go make my phone calls while Chan watched his show, he smiled at me and said, “Have a nice phone call, Mom!”
I couldn’t believe it. Maybe not yet.
After I returned from hiding in the tall grass, clutching my cell phone and crying to Maggie as the herdsmen ambled by with their knobby-kneed cattle, wooden bells clacketing with each step, I came home with renewed energy to sit with Chan. He showed me how he could now stretch his arm out straight and how he could straighten both legs and flex his toes and ankles. He also reminded me that he deserved a big reward for getting his line out, a grueling medical procedure; he wanted something from Bangkok, something new he’d never seen before, because, after all, the toys change every year, and oh, he’d need another game card for the Game Boy, but that wouldn’t count as the real reward.
Time
A cool breeze blew up the steep hillside, causing the sharp blades of grass to sway in the morning sun, a moving fringe underlining the dark green stillness of the valley and waves of blue mountains beyond. A butterfly, papery and backlit yellow, fluttered past the nearest trees while a brittle brown leaf, huge as an elephant’s ear, fell from above and crashed heavy on the dry grass below. Two months since the end of the rains, and leaves were finally beginning to yellow and die. The jungle below was not entirely still. Above the tangle of young trees and reaching vines, the huge frayed leaf of a banana tree swayed slightly. Where a branch of feathery bamboo stretched toward the sky, the wind played with it like fingers touching a beloved’s hair.
I’d washed Chan’s hair the day before, but he was sweating so much at night with a fever that he awoke with it wet and matted again. By the time he cried about the pain in his limbs and how he couldn’t go anywhere and how he didn’t want to head down to the village with Daddy because he hated to leave me because he didn’t get enough time with me when he was little (fresh sobs and tears with every one of these items), his hair had dried fine and soft and sweetly messy.
Cody had his turn to complain when he heard he had to go to the village too and wouldn’t get time with me. “But you promised!” he screamed, and threw pillows till it was time to leave. Two-year-old Tahn was pushed aside by me and threatened by Dtaw. Chan sat quietly eating his almonds and raisins in the sunlight that streamed through the doorway of the dark kitchen.
“Actually, Mama,” Chan said, looking up and smiling at m
e when I turned toward him, “I think I’ll take a nap after TV so you can rest more.”
I kissed his cheek, thankful to see him smile, then I continued to prepare their things so I could shoo them all away. Cody shouted and Dtaw complained. I thought of the day before when I calmly and quietly got all three of them out of the house by six thirty a.m., returning at three thirty p.m., giving Dtaw nine hours of uninterrupted time, and here I had to be screamed at and tortured with tears just to get a couple of hours on my own.
But finally they were gone. Chan let me carry him to the Land Rover parked beyond the outhouse. “I think we can try the huggy carry,” he said, without a wince or whimper. At the car, I laid him down across the front seat. Another smile while I kissed him goodbye. Cody even let a smile escape when he dodged my goodbye kisses. “Another five minutes of time with me this afternoon if you kiss me!” he threatened. I waved till the Land Rover bounced out of sight down the dusty road lining the fold between the rice fields, stalks dry and broken on the earth.
Now I could sit and sip my tea and gather myself, at last feel the churning mud puddle that was my mind absorbing their sobs and needs and hurts and sickness begin to settle and clear to quiet.
I wished I had told Dtaw in no uncertain terms to stay away till one o’clock and to leave Tahn in the village with Cam, so I could play with Cody and Dtaw could sit with Chan. I had left it open-ended. If he comes back before ten a.m., I thought, I’ll kill him.
My tea was cold. My throat was sore. I went to heat up more. I decided not to wash dishes that morning.
It is a very hard thing we are doing, living with this illness of Chan’s, of ours, I thought. He was crying so much. But then that morning when he realized he would be without me for a few hours, he had stopped and smiled. He seemed to have some control over his strong emotions, but it felt to me like he wasn’t crying simply for attention. The day before he had called to me and said, sobbing with Daddy, “I just feel like I need to let my feelings out now.” At first he cried about having his line taken out, and then about his difficult life.
Now You See the Sky Page 12
