Chan was working hard too. Sometimes I wished he would die so he wouldn’t have to work so hard, so he wouldn’t have to eat food he didn’t like, so he wouldn’t have to feel pain. But then I knew that was absurd. Life is simply very hard sometimes, but you never give up. People survive concentration camps, war, rape, starvation. You just don’t give up.
And then there was me. How are you? people would ask. Fine. I was. Sometimes I was so happy, usually when no one else was around grabbing for my attention. And sometimes I was so tired of being heartbroken, like when Chan told me he wished I wouldn’t be so crabby all the time and when he wept about how awful it was the night he was crying in pain and I got up and moved away from him. It was when I couldn’t take another hour of it, so I made room, woke Dtaw up, and demanded that he take over.
I loved the bare bones of our life. I loved our table where we ate, slice of tree resting on smaller tree-trunk legs planted deep in the dirt, our simple mattress where we slept, our clothes all in two crates (one for the boys, one for us), our tattered jeans and jackets hanging on nails. I loved making the fire in the morning. I loved washing out my underwear in the dented washtub under the big tree every evening after my bath.
When it rained, it was different. It was muddy and mucky and the bedding and all our clothes got damp. But I thought we could work that out before the monsoons.
* * *
In bed the next night, Cody whispered to me a wonderful report of his day at a school soccer tournament. “I got ten different kinds of candy, three oranges, and five jicama!” He was so happy with his treasure trove. I loved to be reminded that he was still just a little boy, though with all the help he was to us, I often thought of him as my equal. I wondered how to talk to him about Chan. I thought that if Chan was dying, Cody should know and be able to decide how to work with it.
The next day as we walked home from the village after school, I told Cody, “You know, honey, your friends are coming tomorrow to cheer up Chan, not just to play with you. Chan needs a lot of support right now. He’s fighting something that most people die from. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, I know.” And then after a few minutes of quiet walking, “But Mom, we can still run around and play while he’s sleeping or having a cry, can’t we?”
I said yes and told him that if he ever wanted to ask me anything about Chan’s illness, he should. After some more silence while we trudged along the dirt road over the mountain, far enough behind Chan, Tahn, Tong, and her two-year-old son Tao to be out of earshot, he said, “I just wish he’d get over the leukemia. I don’t care about his legs, but the leukemia I wish would go away.”
Earlier that day when Dtaw and I escaped our parenting duties for forty-five minutes while the boys were occupied at Cam and Tong’s with their favorite TV show, I had confessed my worst fears. We had ridden Cam’s dirt bike over the rough road to a spot high above the village where we could look down between tall leafy trees, full of birdsong and sunlight, to the two dozen rusty rooftops of the village below. Across the valley on the far eastern ridge, we could just make out the tiny square and triangle that were our house and teepee. We sat talking, Dtaw’s thick leather jacket protecting us from the roots and underbrush, and I told him my fear that Chan’s death was near.
He thought for a few moments before speaking. “Still eating. Still pooping. I don’t think that’s what a dying person is like.”
I considered his statement. I had to admit Chan still had a healthy appetite, and I supposed if someone were really going to die, he would probably exist without food for at least a week or two first. I laughed quietly at the reality he used to make his point in the face of my insistent pessimism.
* * *
“I’m going to die soon! I know I am!”
We were sitting in Tong’s living room about to have lunch, and Chan was crying about his pain.
“No, no,” I replied quickly, “not when you’re doing all this fighting, drinking your juices, eating all this good food, using your power. That’s not what a dying person does!”
“Well I’d rather die than be in this pain!”
I murmured that I understood and Dtaw explained that the pain always gets worse just before you get well, just like when you poop.
“Can Daddy just shut up! I am so sick of his explaining this to me. He thinks he’s so great!”
More screaming as Tong served lunch and I called Cody in, just down from the mountain with his friends. He said he wasn’t hungry, but I made him come in to avoid midafternoon grazing. Dtaw and I dug into the green papaya and fiddlehead salads and hot and sour soup, pungent from the galingale Tong dug from behind the house just before she cooked it, thick with oily Mekong fish we kept in her freezer. Chan screamed louder: “I can’t take this anymore! Give me morphine! I need morphine!”
I began to think we should stop eating and hurry up the mountain to get it for him, but I tried to ride it out. The lunch was too good to interrupt.
Finally he asked through his tears, “How can I relax?”
“You don’t have to now, if you don’t want to,” I said, in case he wanted to keep working. Then I realized maybe he knew what he needed, so I added, “Or I can help you.” I put down my spoon and began rubbing his back as I spoke soothing words: “Imagine the sky full of fluffy white clouds. You are one of those clouds, soft and gentle and quiet. You float high above the earth, above green rolling hills and . . .”
He settled down. His furrowed brow softened. His hands still rubbed his foot, but even his rapid breathing slowed a little.
I kept talking: “Now you float over a wide beach, silver sand, smooth and clear . . .” I signaled Dtaw to stop scraping his plate and slurping loudly. I feared the resurgence of screaming and crying, refocusing attention on the pain, but Chan rested on and finally, finally his hands stopped rubbing his foot and he drifted off to sleep.
When I tried to wrap up the imagery so I could get back to the tender moist bits of fish in my rice, his eyelids fluttered. I kept on: “And as you float along, other fluffy white clouds join you. You float together through the night, the silvery bright moon and all the many stars keeping watch over you. And as you sleep and dream, you hear a voice, no louder than the beating of your heart, rhythmic as your breathing, saying softly, May I be well. May I be well. With every breath it repeats, May I be well, and then, May I be happy. May I be free from suffering. May I be at peace. You hear these words again and again, gentle but strong, every time you return to this quiet place. May I be well.”
Chan continued to sleep, and I was amazed yet again that his pain could be so intense, yet he could pass through it and sleep peacefully without the drugs. I had been giving him morphine at night, but that morning he had difficulty peeing, so I was pleased to have been able to put off a dose, if only for a few hours.
Through the open window, I could see Tahn playing happily in the dirt outside, kicking a ragged soccer ball with Tong. All morning he played at the neighbors’ houses, sharing the children’s food and sweets. He was so happy to have people around him all the time. Cody loved being with his friends too. When we came down to the village, I rarely saw the two of them, so busy were they with their comrades. If only Chan could have enjoyed the same fun.
Horses
The horses soothed us. They spoke in grunts and breath and nickers. They expressed what they wanted to say with shudders of flesh, movement of ears, and sidesteps of heavy honest hooves. Each day we went out to squat near them just to listen, to watch. Sometimes we held out strands of yellow grass, hoping they’d walk, in their casual way, over to lip up the bristly snack. Sometimes we took cold sticky rice with us from the house and pull fistfuls from the basket, holding it out in our open palms until they came to take the treat.
Chan would peer up from the trailer, fine brown hair ruffled by the breeze, smiling at the softness of their warm breath, the tickle of the stiff whiskers of their noses. “You know what’s even better than your kisses, Mama?”
/> “What, honey?”
“Horse lips.”
I was glad to see him happy.
And in the afternoons, when Dtaw had finished working, he lifted the leather saddle from where it hung over the porch railing and walked down to the pasture where the horses grazed. He set it on the rail of the corral, and led the least aggressive stallion from the field inside the small circle of fence to saddle up and ride.
The horses were not used to saddles, and Dtaw was not used to horses. But he was determined, and I’ve never known a man with more confidence. So after he rode for a little, to test out Tolay’s mood, he would lift Cody, because he was the biggest and most physically resilient of the boys, up onto the horse’s back, holding the halter short and firm in his fist in case Tolay bucked. And with the same quiet power that we all trusted, Dtaw led the horse around the ring, satisfied at last to be able to give his children what they wanted.
He wanted Chan to ride too. I watched, frightened of what a hard fall from such a height might do to such a fragile body, noting the way the size of the animal made Chan’s legs seem even thinner, little more than bones and skin by now. But Chan smiled, enjoying what he’d dreamed of for so long, feeling the animal walk rhythmic and solid beneath him, smelling the warmth of its strong body, holding him up.
* * *
Chan’s feet and hands were swollen where the toes started like the white rubber infant doll I’d had as a little girl. Her heavily lashed blue eyes closed lazily when I laid her down, and her feet and hands had that same weird bulge of fat, only Chan’s was more exaggerated and more grotesque. One morning he looked at me and quite calmly said, “I think when it’s swollen that means it’s leukemia cells.”
“You think so?” I replied, trying to assume a light tone of interest. “Like as opposed to toxins?”
“Yeah.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“Yeah.”
He cried and moaned. But every day he wanted to get up and even eat a little. One day while Dtaw and I sat with him outside, he complained, “I just can’t get comfortable! There’s nowhere for me to get comfortable! There’s nowhere for me to go to have fun! There’s nowhere for me to get well!” And he broke into sobs. Then he turned to me and said, “It just feels like I’m going to have cancer for the rest of my life. Do you know how that feels?”
He looked at me as if to ask if I could imagine anything worse.
Well, yes, actually, there’s a much worse scenario—that the rest of your life will be only a few weeks long, I thought.
“I’m not going to have it the rest of my life, am I, Mom? Am I?”
“No, no, of course not,” I lied, and put my arm around his thin shoulders.
I thought I should tell him there was a good chance this was death by leukemia, and that there was also a possibility that he would heal. But Dtaw kept saying that if he’s still eating and still pooping, he’s not dying.
When I told the nurse in Bangkok he was in so much pain and thin and his feet and hands were swollen, she asked if he was still eating.
“Yes.”
“Oh, well, that’s a good sign. The swelling is just part of his disease.”
What the hell does that mean? I asked myself. How long can we go on like this?
Closer
The wheels of the trailer rolled over the bumps of dead grass and ruts in the road. Chan weighed so little now, only thirty pounds of skin and bone, that there wasn’t much work to roll him out to where the horses stood. The late-afternoon sun poured bright on the land. So exposed up there. No hiding from what nature offered. We lived on a wide-open landscape, but up so high above the valley we were never hot. The only shade we needed when the bright sun became too much, we could find under the dry grass of the porch roof or the dark cool of the kitchen with its floor of earth and wood. But that day the sun was already halfway down to the horizon, and the air was cooling.
“Don’t go too fast, Mama. You don’t want to scare them.” Sticky rice basket beside him on the nylon seat of the bike-trailer-turned-wheelchair, Chan was eager to touch Payanak, the colt. So young, he always stayed close to his mother. And though he stretched his neck out toward us in curiosity sometimes when we approached, he always moved in close to her dusty flank before we could pet him.
“He’s old enough now,” Dtaw had told us that afternoon. “Take him some sticky rice and try feeding him.”
I pushed Chan toward where the horses stood a few hundred feet from the hut, heads down, browsing the hard grass for soft shoots. While I pulled the lever that pressed the rubber brake against the tire, Chan turned to open the basket of rice. Lifting up the sticky grains, he rolled them into a ball so that Payanak would be able to take it easily from his small hand. I came around and squatted beside him, watching, waiting. The stems of dead grass pricked my arms and thighs, but I’d long since learned to accept that.
Soon Doc Mai, seeing Chan’s outstretched arm, stepped over to us. Her velvety lips and thick teeth moved briefly over his palm, held flat to keep his fingers safe just as I had shown him the day the horses first arrived. Then the ball of rice was gone. From behind her, Payanak peered out at his mother’s movements. With tentative steps, he walked forward. With two backward steps for every three forward, he made his way to where Chan waited. I quickly placed another rice ball on Chan’s palm. We did not speak, only watched, listening to the whoosh of the breeze in the distant treetops, feeling the warmth of the sun before it vanished. As I watched Chan’s face, I saw an expression of serenity and took a moment to soak it in. He looked to me as if there were nowhere else he’d rather be, coaxing the young horse, his face radiating affection and peace. I held still. At last Payanak was close enough, eyeing his mother to be sure this was permitted, and then quickly, in case it wasn’t, he stretched out his neck, head turned sideways, to lip up the rice from Chan’s palm. Immediately the young horse stepped back to the shelter of his mother’s side and chewed the sweet morsel.
Chan turned to me, beaming with the thrill of connection to the young animal. “Did you see that, Mama?”
“Yes, baby.”
He began rolling another ball for Doc Mai, who stood closer now, waiting. After both horses had eaten more rice, Payanak stood so close to the trailer, head almost touching Chan’s, that Chan carefully reached out to rub the stiff hair that grew above the colt’s nose. Payanak stood still as Chan moved his fingers over the flat cowlick in the center of the white patch on his brow. At last the rice was gone and the mother and son moved back to searching for shoots of grass, but not before Chan had time to bathe in the pleasure of their quiet company. I pushed Chan’s trailer back to the cabin, both of us silent.
Sometimes when I was worrying, fearing the worst, wondering how I would survive if Chan died, I looked out from the cabin, and there were the horses. Young and old together, quiet in the field, looking so calm and accepting, that it seemed to me they were resting even when they walked. And the way they stayed near one another calmed me. None ever strayed far from the others. Like our family, they seemed contented by being close.
Reliving
“Mom! Come here! It’s that feeling. I feel like someone is cutting me up, cutting me open! Mom!”
As Chan screamed and cried in our bed, I asked, trying to calm him, “What are they using to cut you up?”
“Scissors!”
“And what part of you are they cutting?”
Without hesitation he answered, “My chest!”
As I made my way across the bed and over Dtaw to kneel on all fours above my crying child, he clutched at his chest. “It hurts! It hurts!” he screamed.
“It happened a long time ago. There’s nothing happening now. You’re right here with Mama and Daddy in bed. There’s no blood.”
“It hurts! Someone is putting a tube in me and it’s banging into things.” Renewed sobs.
Though I had always worried that one experiences pain despite the use of anesthesia, I had been skeptical. Now I was su
re I was hearing Chan describe the operation he had at the beginning of his treatment when a line was inserted into the large vein emerging from his heart.The doctors wanted him to have a conduit for the highly toxic chemo drugs to enter his bloodstream.
I was intrigued that he used the word tube instead of line because for the nine months that he had the line, that was the only way we referred to it: Time to clean your line. You’re pulling my line! Watch out for his line! Shall we tape your line again? It became all but a part of him. So the fact that he said tube made it seem like he was using the word to describe something new and alien, confirming my sense that the flood of emotion that was overcoming him that night was memory recorded then and verbalized in exactly the same words as he would have experienced the surgery.
I continued to soothe, “I’m so glad you’re getting this out of your system. You don’t need to carry this around anymore.”
After a bit, he settled down and closed his eyes. I pressed him to talk to me more about this painful experience, but he opened his eyes, looked at me with his very adult rational stare, and said, “I’m going to sleep now, Mom. I promise I’ll talk to you about it more tomorrow.”
The next night he said to me as he was tossing and turning and feeling that he would never be able to get comfortable, “Oh, I just feel in my body like I’m dead already. Like my eyes are like this,” and he rolled his eyes up into his head. “Like I can’t feel my skin at all.”
At first I was alarmed that maybe he was sensing his own signals from his body, but then I thought about how lately he’d been doing a lot of emotional work on previous hurts, particularly about having his line put in. I thought about how being anesthetized might feel very much like dying. I wondered if his saying, “I feel like I’m already dead,” might be another feeling he was trying to process.
The next night after another day of Chan’s crying and complaining and my feeling hopeless and him having taken more morphine, we got into bed at six o’clock because Chan wanted to hurry up and lie down and not have to move anymore and not have to deal with anything, just cuddle up with me and go to sleep. He couldn’t sleep, however, and kept moaning with misery and sitting up and lying down and begging me to straighten his legs and rub his back and rub the taut strings that his muscles along his thigh bones had become. I did as he begged me, though after hours it seemed to be getting pointless. Finally, at nine p.m., I’d reached my limit.
Now You See the Sky Page 14
