Miriam's Well

by Lois Ruby

  “No, sir.” Adam flattened himself as Brother James brushed past him. There was an eeriness in the room that I was glad Adam was there to dispel.

  “Good thing you brought the pizza tonight. Tomorrow I go to radiation, and I’ll probably be throwing up all over the place after that.”

  Adam flipped the Pizza Hut box open, like a jeweler displaying his wares. “Ta-duh! Half black olive, and half mushroom. You look better today.”

  “It’s so dumb about the pain. It comes and goes unexpectedly.”

  “It goes when Brother James comes,” Adam said.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I wish I had that effect on women.”

  Dr. Gregory poked his head in, on evening rounds. “Oh, you’ve got a gentleman caller,” he said merrily. “I’ll come back. I just heard that the Reverend asked to talk to me.”

  “You mean Brother James?” I giggled to think of him as the Reverend. Didn’t he know that reverend was an adjective? “You just missed him. You can call him at the Sword and the Spirit Church in a little while, though. He practically lives there.”

  “Well, you seem to be spiffy tonight. I’ll check on you tomorrow, kid. I’ve got sick people to see tonight.”

  That night I lay in the dark, trying to block out the laugh track from the TV in the next room and waiting for sleep.

  MEER-EE-AHM, TAKE UP THY TIMBREL …

  I heard it, or saw it, or sensed it again, and this time I wasn’t hallucinating on a calcium high. I sprang to my feet and buzzed for the nurse: “Could you please find me a dictionary?”

  Her voice came over the tinny intercom: “Well, I’ll try, but I doubt it. Are you doing a crossword, hon?”

  The dictionary never came, and eventually I fell asleep. I don’t remember dreaming at all; maybe they drugged me. In the morning, Brother James was there when they were due to take me to radiation.

  “I’m scared, Brother James.”

  “‘The Lord is my shepherd,’ Miriam, say it.”

  “The Lord is my—”

  “He would not lead you where He does not want you to go.”

  I was impatient for him to be done, and I all but interrupted him. “Brother James, do you know what a timbrel is?”

  “A musical instrument, I believe. A kind of tambourine.”

  “Is it in the Book in Gold Leaf?”

  “It surely is. It’s in one of the psalms.” He reached into his pocket for his Book, which was bloated and dog-earred from loving use. “Here, right at the end, Psalm 150.” He mumbled through a few lines. “Here it is. ‘Praise Him with the blast of the trumpet; praise Him with the psaltery and harp. Praise Him with the timbrel—’ And it mentions a few other instruments. Has the Lord spoken to you, Miriam?”

  “I think so.”

  Brother James’s sober face ignited with a smile. “Praise Jesus,” he cried, sounding like a boy who’s just found a red tricycle under the Christmas tree. “You listen to every word carefully, Miriam, and to the words that aren’t spoken. You listen and do what He says.”

  “Yes, Brother James.”

  Dr. Gregory poked his head in. “Ready, kid?”

  “Before the child goes, Doctor, I’d like a word with you,” Brother James said. “There was a petition from this hospital that went to Judge Thaddeus Bonnell, and it was about getting medical treatment for Miriam.”

  “Yes?”

  “You signed this petition, sir?”

  “I did, yes.”

  “And are you a Christian?”

  “I believe I am.”

  “Are you, or are you not?” Brother James’s voice was rising, as it did when he warmed to a sermon.

  “About as good as the next guy,” said Dr. Gregory.

  “You believe in the body and blood of Christ, you believe that Christ died for your sins?”

  “Well, now, Reverend, I don’t think this is the proper forum to discuss such things.”

  “God is appropriate at any time and place, is He not, Miriam?” There was the muscle in his cheek, beating like a heart just under his skin.

  “Yes, Brother James.”

  “Why not, then, in a so-called house of healing, I ask you? Has it passed through your mind that you are interfering in God’s work, Dr. Gregory?”

  “I believe I am doing God’s work.”

  “Interfering in God’s work, sir. There are consequences.”

  Dr. Gregory opened the door and called for the security guard. “I’m taking Miss Pelham down to radiation. Will you please escort the Reverend to the elevator?”

  “Think about it, Doctor. Think about the price,” Brother James said, dwarfing the security guard who led him out of the room.

  Dr. Gregory’s jaw was locked tight, and his hands were shaking when he put the stethoscope to my chest. Just then the radiation technician appeared.

  True to Brother James’s word, I felt nothing from the radiation, and it was over in seconds. How much harm could it have done? Dr. Gregory had assured me that it would shrink the tumor and also reduce pain, but I knew better. I knew that they could take me down to radiation each morning at 8:00 and bombard the same dot on my back with their unseen rays for one week, two weeks, and it would make no difference at all, but that when the tumor shrank, and my pain receded like the sea at ebb tide, it would be because God had seen fit to purify me.

  Dr. Gregory stopped in on his lunch hour, but he said nothing about Brother James. “You may get sick to your stomach from the combined chemotherapy and radiation.”

  “I don’t think so.” I knew I wouldn’t. In fact, I couldn’t, if I refused to let their rays penetrate my body. Neither would my skin be burned, nor would I lose a strand of my hair.

  Dr. Gregory said, “I’ve asked a professor from the nursing school to stop in and see you today. She does a noninvasive therapy that I think will help. I assure you, it’s nothing weird or anti-Christian, no matter what your preacher thinks of us here. Give it a try, kid, okay?”

  The new nurse’s name tag read Alberta Chin, R.N., Ph.D. “You’re a doctor nurse,” I said. Any new face was a treat. The hospital boredom was draining me of energy.

  “I teach in the nursing school, which is why I’m a doctor nurse.” She had the shiniest black hair, curled under gently, and it dangled in front of her face as she leaned over me to listen to my heart. Huge pink glasses dominated her small face and made her Asian eyes seem enormous. “Dr. Gregory thinks my specialty will help in your overall treatment program. I teach a new course for nurses, called Therapeutic Touch.”

  She ran her hands down the length of my body, about four inches above my skin, pausing here and there to concentrate intensely. She spoke sparingly, but with kindness. “Sit up, please.” She helped me sit at the edge of the bed and ran her hand down the back of me, never touching my skin.

  “What’s Therapeutic Touch?” I asked.

  “What I’m doing. I’ll explain later. Don’t talk, please. How long have you had this pain in your abdomen?”

  “Only today. But I never told anyone. How did you know?”

  “Don’t talk, please.” She squatted at my feet, running her hands down my legs, never touching, but I felt the hair on my legs stand up. Dr. Chin got very busy with my feet, as if she were pulling something out of me. She seemed to be listening at my feet. What possible sound could they be making? “Yes, yes. Tomorrow we will begin.”

  “If we’re beginning tomorrow, what happened today?”

  “Today was only a diagnostic, like when you take your car to the mechanic. I can help you. I can use Therapeutic Touch to ease your pain, and for this we don’t give you any medicine, and we don’t cut into your skin, and we don’t blast you with anything. Just like today.”

  “Is it like metaphysical healing?” I asked, remembering the terrifying time on Diana’s porch.

  “Not at all,” she said, and her eyes were lost in a huge smile. “If it’s like anything, it’s like the old time laying on of hands, but I do not lay a hand on you.
”

  “How does it work?”

  “Who knows?” She shrugged. “It just works. We don’t know how any kind of healing really works. I will be back at nine-thirty tomorrow. You’ll be here?”

  “I have no choice.”

  “This will be the best thing that’s happened to you in this hospital, I promise.”

  Dr. Chin came back the next day, just after my shower. Her big round glasses were tinted blue this time, to match her blouse. She carried a plain wooden stool, and she plunked a straight-backed chair in the center of the room, across from her stool. “Wait, please.” She flashed me a DO NOT DISTURB sign that said HILTON HOTELS, and she hung it outside my door. “Sit down, please,” she said guiding me to the chair. I wished there were arms to lean on, to relieve the pressure on my back.

  “First we will breathe very deeply.” Dr. Chin put my hand up under her breasts so that I could feel where the breathing was to start from. She sat down on the stool and we breathed together, in through the nose, slow and deep, until I felt a cool draft inside my nose, and out through the lips with a faint hissing sound; in … out. “Now we will think very deeply.”

  “About what?”

  “About nothing. About the vast void of the universe. Or you may think of a scene that brings you serene pleasure. A meadow. A babbling brook. I like an ocean breeze, because you can hear it and, feel it on your skin.”

  “Would a rainbow do? ‘My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky.’ William Wordsworth.”

  “Lovely, but don’t speak, please. Think.”

  I thought deeply and wholly of the rainbow, glimmering, shimmering through the haze of a summer rain, but at the same time I was conscious of Dr. Chin’s hands. She began with both hands held like a benediction above my head, then slowly she brought her hands down past my ears, over my face, to my neck. “There is tightness here, heat.” She waved her hands over my neck as if she were ironing out wrinkles, stopping to shake her hands into the air like Mama does when she shakes off dishwater to answer the phone.

  “There, much better,” Dr. Chin said, and it was true, my neck did feel more relaxed. Down her hands moved, over my shoulders, my back, my chest. “Some congestion in the lungs,” she whispered. “Cough, please.” Though I hadn’t really noticed before, now my lungs did feel tight, the way I usually felt when I was coming down with a cold. Dr. Chin worked her hands over me, smoothing and ironing the wrinkles, but never touching. “Cough again, please.” This time the cough was looser. She reached behind her for a tissue, and I coughed up something thick and bitter. “Drop the tissue, please. Relax your fingers.”

  Down, down she moved, as if she were petting the fur of a fluffy collie. She would stop to shake off whatever had accumulated on her hands, sometimes frowning. She seemed to be concentrating very hard, her breathing slow and even.

  “Lean, please.” I leaned forward and put my chin to my chest. I felt loose enough to touch my toes, as her hands glided down and hovered above my back. She finally came to the black spot. “Much heat. Much energy bunched up here.” She worked and worked over the spot which the bone scan had betrayed. “Breathe in, breathe out. In, out.” Her motions became more jerky, and she shook the heat or energy, or whatever it was, out of her hands every few seconds now. She cocked her ear, as if she were listening for a distant train whistle, then nodded slowly, faster, faster still. “Yes, yes, better. You feel something?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Soon.” Her movements became more rhythmic as she worked down my flanks. Finally she sat on the stool and held my feet in her lap. Massaging gently, she said, “I have begun at your head and have evened out the energy all over your body. I have shaken off what I could of the negative energy, but now I must pull the rest of it out through your feet.” She ran her hands above the tops of my feet, and it looked like she was squeezing the last of the toothpaste down the tube and out through the small hole. She squeezed and shook her hands rapidly, but smoothly, not a gesture or a second wasted.

  At last, maybe thirty minutes after she’d begun, she said, “We will both breathe very deeply.” I saw that her eyes were closed, and I closed my own. “Think rainbows, please.” I did. After maybe two minutes of silence, she gently lowered my feet to the floor and stood up. “We are through. How do you feel?”

  “Like I’ve had a long soak in the tub, with bubble bath up to my ears.”

  “Good, good. I like that.” Perched on the stool again, she smoothed her denim skirt over her knees.

  “Can I ask you a question, Dr. Chin?”

  “You may ask me a question, yes. But first, stand up, please.”

  I stood up, stood on my tiptoes as she requested, stretched, reached way above my head to the channel switch on the TV that hung from the wall. It felt wonderful!

  “The question?”

  “Are you a Christian?”

  “Buddhist.”

  “Are there a lot of Buddhists in Wichita?” I’d lived here all my life and never met one.

  “Not so many. Who will my son marry? But now, I go to teach a class. You will walk around, not stay in bed. Tomorrow we will work together again,” she called to me gaily from the door, where she plucked up the DO NOT DISTURB sign. “Think rainbows through the day.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Told by Adam

  “Dismissed,” Mrs. Loomis said, a full two minutes after the bell rang. “Not you, Adam.” I told Brent to explain to Moron, and I hung around until everyone had left. Mrs. Loomis’s next period class was already straggling in, so she took me into a work area between her classroom and the next one. “I’ve read your essay,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah?” I shifted from foot to foot.

  “It was quite polished.”

  “History’s always been a special interest of mine.”

  “The style was reminiscent of another student’s.”

  If I stayed cool, she’d never be able to prove anything.

  “I want to see both your parents and you tomorrow after school.”

  “What do you think, I couldn’t write a paper like that?”

  “That is not what I think. I only think that you didn’t write the paper. Tomorrow at three-thirty,” she said. “Now, my sophomore class is waiting.” She dashed off a pass for Mr. Moran and thrust it at me without even looking at my face.

  I called my parents during lunch, then cut out to the hospital and told Miriam about my latest brush with Mrs. Loomis. Since Miriam had been having the Chinese lady’s touch treatments, she’d been feeling pretty good, so they let us go down to the cafeteria for something to eat.

  “That wasn’t too smart, Adam. Do you think Mrs. Loomis can keep you from getting into college?”

  “Are you kidding? It’s not her business anyway, it’s Grinnell College’s business, and they’re never going to read anything Diana Cameron wrote. So what’s the difference?”

  “It’s cheating, that’s all.”

  “Oh, yeah, swell, I should have known better than to tell Miss Goody Two-Shoes.” She looked hurt, and I felt a little sorry, but she wasn’t helping me feel any better either.

  “And did you think of how Diana could get in trouble for this?”

  “Naw, not Diana. She always comes out a winner.”

  “I guess so. She won you,” Miriam said.

  “Well, there wasn’t much of a competition. Like the girls were waiting in line, taking numbers.”

  “I never even got a number.”

  “Yeah, but the weird thing is, I’m around here a lot more than I’m at home, or out with my friends.”

  “I certainly wouldn’t want to keep you from your friends.” She’d come to the bottom of her Coke and was poking ice cubes with her straw.

  “There really isn’t anybody I’d rather be with, to tell you the truth.” She had the good sense not to say a word. She just kept on sucking air at the bottom of her glass.

  The Loomis thing wasn’t so bad for my father, because all he had to
do was mark off the hour on his schedule, but my mother had to arrange to leave work at the college bookstore, which meant she’d have to make it up later. They weren’t thrilled to be called for this conference with Mrs. Loomis anyway.

  “Let’s get the facts straight,” my father had said, when I dropped the bomb at lunchtime. “Did Diana write the essay, or not?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Not exactly? Well, what percentage did she write? Would you say your input was in the range of two-to-five percent? Um-hmm. Very honorable.”

  “Good grief, Adam, I thought you had better sense,” my mother had groaned. “When are you going to pull yourself together and be a real student? You’re only cheating yourself, Adam, don’t you see that?”

  Oh, I could tell we were in for a great time with Mrs. Loomis.

  There were chairs arranged in a semicircle around her desk. I took the hot seat, in the middle. My mother’s eyes shifted nervously, while my father sprawled in his chair with a yellow pad open on his knees, his Mark Cross pen ready for action. I pulled a paper clip into shapes previously unknown to humankind.

  “I am disappointed in you, Adam,” Mrs. Loomis said, lowering herself into her chair behind the desk. The chair squeaked and groaned. My mother shot a glance my way, and I wondered if she remembered that Mrs. Loomis was the one I called the Big Bang and the Great Wall of China. My mother’s eyes crinkled slightly; yes, she remembered. Never mind. I had to start taking this seriously.

  Mrs. Loomis said, “The offense is contemptible.”

  My father nodded and wrote a couple of words on his yellow pad.

  “Contemptible for two reasons. One, Adam is passing someone else’s work off as his own, and two, he is capable of something quite as good as this, but he doesn’t bother producing it. That is not only contemptible, but inconsolably sad. Do you see the gravity of the situation, Adam?”

  To me, it looked like she was blowing the whole thing out of proportion. But there was my father, feeding her just what she wanted to hear.

  “We are deeply concerned over Adam’s performance at Eisenhower,” he said, “because we have seen his IQ scores and aptitude tests, and we acknowledge that his work does not measure up to his potential.”