Now You See the Sky

by Catharine H. Murray

  Chan lay emaciated in our bed with his face like an old man’s. I was finishing wiping a washcloth over his naked body. Dtaw had gone to pick up Cody from school at lunchtime so Chan wouldn’t have to wait for him so long. When Cody came into the room, I think the shock of seeing how thin Chan’s naked body was made him burst out crying. He said it was because he had so much homework, but I thought at the time that because Cody hadn’t really seen Chan without clothes much lately, the sight just broke his heart.

  Chan said, “You can go listen to Cody,” after Cody stormed out of the room. So I did. I fought and struggled with him as he screamed and cried about his “homework.” Finally he hit me on the head with his schoolbook, which was the point where I always lost my temper, so I left. That was the end of his cry.

  I came back to Chan, and soon Cody followed me, bringing his math book to work out the problems next to me as I tried to feed Chan some grilled fish. Cody soon gave up on getting any help from me, and left with his unfinished homework. I pulled bits of tender meat away from the fine bones of the mackerel, whole and crispy from the fire, to press between Chan’s cracked lips, but the tears wouldn’t stop flowing down my face as I thought about Cody’s sadness.

  Chan sat up in bed, his shoulders hunched forward, his shrunken head jutting out from the exhaustion of trying to hold it up. “It’s okay, Mom, you can go cry with Daddy.” He said this gently and lovingly a couple of times as I struggled to control my tears.

  “Does that mean you don’t want to listen to me cry?” I joked, smiling between the tears.

  “You can cry with me,” he said. “It’s good to cry. Go ahead.” The sweetness and gentleness with which he said these words in such an adult way brought the sobbing on even harder, and he lifted his bony arm to put around my shoulder. I moved in closer and laid my head against his chest, careful not to bump any of his painful parts. “It’s good to cry, Mom. Just keep crying. Cry as much as you want to. You can always cry with me. It’s good to cry with your children. Just keep crying.”

  I couldn’t stop myself. I sobbed so hard into his lap and said, “I just love you so much. There’s no one like you in the whole world.” The words I had to keep biting back, though, were, Please, please don’t die, Chan. I really don’t want you to die.

  Despite his repeated encouragement to keep crying, I stopped after a few minutes, feeling much better than before and amazed at Chan’s ability and willingness to do that for me.

  A few days later, I mentioned what a great job he had done listening to me and how much it helped.

  “When I feel stronger, I can listen to you again, Mom. Just today I feel too weak.”

  “I know, baby.”

  Sweet Things

  We celebrated Tahn’s third birthday on December 18, 2004. I was proud of the pineapple tart I managed to make on the covered pan over the fire. With flaxseed, oat, and sunflower seed crust, it was crunchy and sweet with the fresh chunks of pineapple on top. Dtaw’s mom and brother came just in time to sign the card I’d made and deliver the Christmas and Tahn’s birthday presents my brother Dave, his wife Vivian, and my mother had sent through the mail. I couldn’t believe how happy and animated Chan became over all his Christmas presents. He smiled, and said out loud to the sky, “Thanks, Dave and Viv, I love you!” and, “Thanks, Grammy, I miss you!” And he shouted over each of his presents as he opened them. “YES! Cheerios! YES! The Kim Possible video game!” And best of all, when he opened a gorgeously illustrated children’s book about one of the greatest miracle makers in history, he cheered, “YES! Gandhi!” I couldn’t believe it. He was usually so listless and sad. The entire day amazed me. He asked to go down to the village in the trailer to watch his favorite show about a ten-year-old village boy with superhero powers. A total surprise to me—only forty-eight hours ago I’d thought he was at the end of his life.

  After the excitement of the presents, things quieted down as we all shared a dinner of noodle soup on the porch floor. It was dark and late when Chan finally begged to go to bed. We sang happy birthday to Tahn and he loved it. He said he wanted to hear it again. When I gave him his card, he looked at it and asked for more. He took awhile to blow out his candles, but was finally successful. We quickly ate the tart and got everybody into bed. Mei Ya and Dtaw’s brother Giat were gone by the time we started reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

  The next day Chan was very worried about his swollen toes. I’d rubbed them and elevated them and put hot herbal compresses on them. I called the palliative care nurse from Seattle Children’s Hospital. Standing among the broken rice stalks in the field above the cabin where there was decent cell reception, I listened as she explained that the swelling could be leukemia in the feet or it could be leukemia in the kidneys or it could be the weakened heart just not able to pump the blood well enough to the extremities and organs. I hoped it was only lack of use and maybe we’d be able to get them working again. Chan wanted so badly to stand. Later he struggled up, leaning on me, hoping to be able to get upright. His legs were far too weak, of course.

  * * *

  For days Chan had been begging for sun-dried bananas. I was too busy worrying about which day would be his last to take time to fulfill this small request. But Tong listened. Back at home, she told me later, she carried her machete into the jungle and came out with a thick green stem heavy with bunches of bananas, like hands curled over each other. In her hard-dirt yard, she set to work among the pecking hens. Peeling each banana, she dropped the fruit onto a circular tray of woven bamboo strips darkened with age, and covered them with stiff blue netting to keep the birds and flies away. These she set atop the low corrugated tin roof of the kitchen to catch the afternoon sun.

  After two days, they were ready. Sliding the trays off the roof and briskly shooing the chickens that had followed at her heels, Tong carried them into the kitchen where she stoked the fire in the bucket stove and set the water to boil in the wide-bellied pot. On the lip that flared around the rim, she set the conical basket used so many times a day for steaming rice, vegetables, tubers, jungle crabs, and now bananas. She laid down each one, shrunken and golden from the sun, leaving space for the steam to swirl evenly through. She adjusted the burning sticks in the fire to create a low blaze.

  Later, lifting the dented lid from the basket and squinting through the smoke and steam, Tong pushed her fingertips against the sweating fruit to check their softness. Calling to Cam to ready the motorcycle, she wrapped the warm fruit in sections of banana leaf. Cam came and stooped in the low doorframe, forearm resting above his head, the darkening afternoon sky behind him.

  When the bananas were ready, Tong and Cam left their home for ours. Up over the rutted dirt they rode, past the fields that rolled away, yellow and brown, down to the valley below.

  Change

  Chan sat on his makeshift daytime bed, colorful flat square cushions lined up to hold his thin body above the rough planks of the porch. With a low railing around three sides, our porch was big enough for all of us to sit together. Chan loved to watch the jungle below—the distant waves of mountains far across the valley and the white puffs of cloud that chased across the sky. He had sat like this for weeks.

  Too weak to walk, he had to be carried everywhere: down the hill to see the horses in their pasture, up the path above our cabin to watch the birds that floated below, into the clearing to lie back and gaze up at the spindly treetops, soaking in the quiet of the sunny jungle here in the middle of the universe. But in the last few days, he had been growing more and more tired, and even thinner. And the night fevers had gotten so high that I couldn’t find the end of the silver bar of mercury in the glass of the thermometer. It didn’t matter. There was nothing we could do.

  We went on with life. I took the bedding out to air like I did every day, removing the sheets, soaked each night in sweat from the fevers that raged through my boy’s flesh. I gathered up the thick comforters filled with fresh cotton, plucked and matted by our neighbors in tow
n, and stuffed them out the small wooden window frame to air out on the warm tin roof of the kitchen. In the wind and mountain sunshine of the dry season, they were always fresh and light again by lunchtime.

  Two days after Tahn’s birthday, I was in the bedroom, a few steps away from Chan who was seated on the porch. I had brought the sheets and blankets back in and laid them in a pile in the small margin of floor next to the bed. As I raised a fresh sheet swirling above my head to spread onto the bed, I turned to look out the narrow door to where Chan sat. He looked somehow amiss. His skull jutted out in front of his torso. His body listed to the left. I thought of Dap’s slack-jawed face. I left my work and went to my son. His eyes and tongue seemed to be roaming from side to side. Something about it spelled out brain damage to me, and I could only imagine that the cancer had spread into his brain.

  He was trying to play with his toy trucks. He asked me to bring all of them. I said I already had. He shook his head slowly, as if with effort to think and speak, and said, “No. Another.”

  I glanced around, panic rising as I tried again to succeed at giving him what he needed. I went down the steps and found the missing vehicle, a small space shuttle, beside where Tahn was playing in the dirt. I hurried up to place it on the low table over Chan’s lap. Mystified by this change in him, I watched him try to play, his hands suddenly clumsy, as if too big to control. I waited, counting to ten, coaching myself to be patient. I checked the urge to reach out and help him load the space shuttle onto the tractor trailer, wanting him to still feel independent, powerful. Three-year-old Tahn bounced up the steps and tried to grab the backhoe from Chan. I told him to stop, and Chan said in his thickening speech, “We share, Tahn, remember, we share.” With something crippling his brain before my eyes, how, I asked myself, could he remember this golden rule?

  Tahn gave in and the two boys played quietly together. I called to Dtaw to take a video of them, but he didn’t. I didn’t bother hounding him about it. I wish I had. I asked Chan to lie down to rest, but as weak as he looked, he refused.

  “Mama, are we going to the hospital tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Yes, honey. I think it would be a good idea to get some red blood cells into you.”

  He started to cry then. “I hate it when they treat me like a baby!”

  I assured him we wouldn’t let them.

  “Why do the nurses here do that?” he asked me. “I hate it when they do that.”

  I had no answer.

  Chan cried more, talking about how hard he’d been trying to get well. He said, “I used to love it when Tahn came to see me at the hospital in Seattle because he’d always hug me when he got there.” This sent him into fresh tears. “I used to love Tahn so much when he was little, but then he turned into a bully.”

  I told him that deep down Tahn wasn’t a bully, he just watched too many fighting cartoons and played too many Ninja Turtles video games.

  As Chan’s crying slowed, Cody, who had wandered up to the porch when he heard the crying, lay down next to Chan and said, “I don’t care if Tahn’s mean, I just wish Chan didn’t get leukemia.”

  “Me too,” I agreed.

  Chan spoke up: “The one good thing about leukemia is that I learned about my power.” Then, smiling as if he had a special secret, he added, “You know what I love more than you, Mom?”

  “No. What?”

  “My power.”

  After a little while, Chan began to cry about how he missed his grandmother. “I want my Grammy! I want to see your mama! I miss Grammy!” He went on with this heartbroken talk until I was crying too. We assured him she was coming to visit soon.

  “When?” he demanded.

  “In three weeks,” I answered.

  “How many days is that?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “No, Mama,” Cody called from the bedroom where he had gone to consult the calendar, “it’s only nineteen days from now.”

  “How many is nineteen?” Chan asked.

  “That’s all your fingers and toes except for one,” I told him.

  “Just tell her to come soon! I want to see Grammy. I love Grammy! I miss Grammy.”

  I kept hugging him and crying as he cried. When the tide subsided, we sat quietly for a few minutes.

  Then with a new round of grief, he said, “I miss my Uncle Dave and my Aunt Vivian and little David.” This time the tears fell even harder. “I just want my aunt and uncle and baby! When are they coming? Tell them to hurry and come see me!”

  Eventually he progressed to, “I love Aunt Vivian the most! She always helped me and we did origami together. I love her more than anybody.” After this outpouring of grief, he calmed down and asked me to bring him the postcards he had picked out on our last trip to the city. I brought them and he picked out one for Dave and Vivian and little David. He then dictated while I filled the card with his words, mostly telling them how much he would like to see them. He asked for one to write to Grammy, but by the time he had chosen one, he was too tired to dictate, and asked me to help him lie down. Seeing me get the morphine from the shelf, he questioned if it was okay to take it. “I don’t want to die,” he said matter-of-factly.

  I was taken aback and said, “What, honey? What do you mean?”

  “I mean about the morphine and the breathing.”

  I reassured him that a little bit would be okay. He dutifully swallowed the small brown pills I held out to him and soon fell asleep.

  * * *

  We heard the buzz of the motorcycle before we saw it. Cody and Tahn called out as they always did, “Mei Tong ma laow!” (Mama Tong is coming!) The boys ran to meet Paw Cam and Mei Tong as their motorcycle chugged up over the rise toward our house. Chan stirred and wakened. I looked up toward Cam and Tong, relieved. Finally, some help. They would look at Chan and tell me what to do. But they only came to him and smiled, Tong announcing, “Gluay tak!” (Sun-dried bananas!)

  Chan smiled, happy as always to see his second set of parents. Head jutting out too far in front and tilted oddly, he said, “Khap jai lai lai” (Thank you so much) to Mei Tong in her mountain dialect.

  As soon as she put the plate of sticky fruit in front of him, he began to shove the bananas into his mouth one by one. I was amazed by such an appetite. How could my boy who seemed to be so close to death eat like that? But I was not reassured.

  The way his fingers fumbled clumsily into his slackening mouth haunted me afterward. His head and hands swung toward each other in their effort to eat with the uncertainty of the limbs of a marionette. I’d never seen him eat with such greed. What made him press one small banana after another into his mouth, as if he’d never get his favorite treat again?

  Even as I worried, I watched and smiled at this small pleasure, this moment of freedom from pain, this moment of a little boy’s simple enjoyment of food. But I knew I could not stay in that moment for long.

  Scared

  When Dtaw came in from his work planting trees later in the afternoon, I pulled him aside. “I think Chan is dying and I’m scared and I don’t know what to do,” I said. He looked at me with his usual loving skepticism. I told him I had promised Chan we’d go to the hospital the next day for red blood cells. “I just want things to be simple,” I said. “I’m afraid we’ll get there and the nurses and doctors will freak out and put him in ICU and give him oxygen and not let us leave.”

  “We’ll just get the blood and come home. Not stay overnight.”

  “Are you sure we can make that happen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you really think the red blood cells will help?” I asked, not because I was wondering. I was sure they wouldn’t. But if Dtaw truly believed that they would, I didn’t see how I could deny him the chance to try to save Chan’s life or at least make him more comfortable. If he felt we could help our boy with the transfusion, then we had to try. I explained that because of the way Chan seemed to have slowed and drooped, I thought the cancer had reached the brain. I said nothing we could do woul
d help now, and what if he needed platelets, then would we take him to Bangkok? But that was only borrowing trouble. We agreed that we would go to the provincial capital for blood the next day.

  That night I readied Chan’s usual space in the middle of the bed, a small clean baby blanket over a baby pad in case he wet the sheets, though that hadn’t happened yet. We lay down together facing each other, arranging our legs just right so that I wouldn’t hurt his tender limbs while we slept. I bent my knees toward him, then he carefully placed his bottom leg, hardly more than a few long bones, between my soft thighs, then his other leg on top of the stack.

  After we said good night and how much we loved each other and made sure the other was comfortable and all was quiet, I sensed him making the painful and difficult effort of moving his arm so that his small hand could reach over and rest gently against the skin of my chest, so he could feel my warm skin on his own. That night he had the best night’s sleep he’d had in a long time.

  In the morning when he woke up, Chan’s speech was more slurred than ever, but we were still able to understand him. He insisted on having his shorts put on because he didn’t want the nurses to tease him, pointing to his penis, laughing, Joo, joo. Despite the pain in his toes, we managed to get him dressed and into the car. He had made it clear the day before that he wanted Cody to go with him to the hospital. We had some indecision over whether to take Tahn. There was always the worry that when we took Chan to the hospital he might die there, and then I wanted his brothers to be with him. Last time all five of us had gone for a transfusion. Tong came too, despite her aversion to car rides, to give Chan her blood because there was no match for him left in the province that day. After that trip, with toddler needs, crankiness, and car sickness on top of all the other stress, I concluded this time that a small crowd was more than I could handle. We decided to leave Tahn at home with Cam and Tong.