Between Two Kingdoms

by Suleika Jaouad

  Dear All,

  My cancer is back in my lungs and throat, and I’m going to undergo surgery tomorrow at Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles. The recovery time on this surgery is unknown—we don’t know how difficult the tumors will be to access. We also don’t know at this moment if the immune treatment I was on was effective in some measure, or if it wasn’t effective at all. The surgery will determine all of this, and help us plan next steps.

  If you need to reach me, or send me anything I’ll hopefully have access to email, but who knows how alert I’ll be…Please don’t ask too many questions about what the logistics look like, or where and when I’ll be where and when—we just don’t know that right now and will not for a little while. FOR INSTANCE:

  Good message: “Wish Max well! No need to reply!”

  Bad message: “When is Max next going to the bathroom, and in what city—I’d like to bring my schnauzer to visit him; he’s a good luck healing massage schnauzer from Ireland. Is Max going to die? How often will Max die? Can he attend my event in four months?”

  I love all of you very much, and am extremely grateful for your support.

  The part about the “good luck healing massage schnauzer” made me smile. Max fancied himself a comedian and was always trying to make everyone laugh, even now, but once I was done reading, I thought about what this all meant—about the fact that he’d had multiple relapses since his first diagnosis at sixteen, and that in spite of all the treatments, the cancer continued to spread. The fucking cancer. The water in the tub felt like it was weighing down my limbs. I slipped beneath the surface again; this time, I closed my eyes and screamed.

  Perhaps the greatest test of love is the way we act in times of need. It is the moment of accountability that all relationships seem to arc toward. I’ve prided myself on being a good friend in tough times—on being capable of sitting with hard things and going above what is required to be there for someone as they near the knife’s edge. Over the last few years, I’ve sent care packages, bouquets, and musical telegrams. I’ve helped check items off bucket lists, been a third wheel on a Make-A-Wish adventure, organized meal deliveries, set up fundraisers, and sat vigil in hospice.

  But as I thought about Max, it felt as if my well for such gestures had run dry. I didn’t even have it in me to respond. As I got out of the tub and went to bed, I told myself, Tomorrow.

  Now “tomorrow” is here and I still haven’t reached out.

  I press down on the accelerator, the pedal quivering beneath my foot. No. No. No, I think as I drive along a frozen stretch of highway. I cannot go through this again. There is no greater cruelty than being met with silence from a friend who you thought would be one of the first to say, I’m here, I love you, what can I do? I know this firsthand. But right now my impulse is self-preservation. It’s to withdraw, to hedge against the pain of losing him, too. The thought of more heartbreak makes me want to cut myself off from the world. I wish to never get close to another person again.

  * * *

  —

  I take Highway 141 toward Avon, Montana. It’s the type of rural ranching community where the cattle far outnumber the human inhabitants. I’m on my way to visit Salsa, the ranch cook who sent me a care package when I was in the hospital, promising to feed me in abundance if I ever found myself in these parts. She’d given me detailed, albeit cryptic, directions for how to find her family’s ranch. When I asked her for an address or coordinates, suggesting that it might be easier to simply plug this information into my GPS, Salsa’s response had been: Go with God on that one.

  I travel three miles down a dirt road. When I spot the small shed Salsa described—it’s wood with a painting of a blue-and-gold quilt on the side—I take an immediate right, my tires skidding slightly on ice. I rumble over a cattle guard and onto another dirt road, winding toward the green ranch house up the hill. As I approach, Salsa runs outside. With her round, rosy cheeks, and blond hair poking out from beneath a winter hat, she looks like she could be cast in the local Christmas pageant as Mrs. Claus. Her smile splits wide as I get out of the car, and she jumps up and down in her boots and anorak, woo-hooing with infectious enthusiasm. “Welcome to our big-ass, beautiful state! We’ve all been peeing our pants a little at the thought of you coming,” she says, squashing me into her bosom.

  Salsa tells me she’s been preparing for my visit for days and has made enough food to feed a fleet of cowboys—trays of lasagna, sheets of her famous chocolate chip cookies baked to gooey perfection, and heaps of caramelized popcorn balls for late-night snacking. She swept the little bunkhouse on the ranch where I will stay, made up the bed with a hand-sewn quilt, and lit a fire in the woodstove so that it would be toasty by the time I arrived. As if this wasn’t enough, she has gotten me a “real Montana hat”—a Davy Crockett–style coonskin cap with a long black-and-brown ringed tail hanging off the back.

  This is the type of person Salsa is: She loves hard and holds nothing back. I first got a glimpse of her generous spirit two years earlier when we met briefly at what we called “cancer camp”—a free weeklong outdoor adventure program put on by a nonprofit called First Descents for young adults with cancer.

  Salsa was there in the capacity of “camp mom,” as she invited everyone to call her. She had volunteered to cook three meals a day and to make sure all of us were well taken care of for the week. She had a nurturing presence and a saucy sense of humor that drew me to her right away. Whenever I was too tired to partake in camp activities, I sought refuge in the kitchen, where she plied me with brownies, still hot from the oven, and made me snort with laughter as she ranked the counselors—all of them strapping young outdoorsmen—in order of hunkiness. She also took swigs from a bottle of illicit whiskey that she hid from “camp authorities” inside a zippered purse decorated with Bible verses, which made me like her even more.

  I’d loved every minute of my time at cancer camp. The counselors taught us to kayak and we spent hours drifting down the river each day, the thought of doctors’ appointments and chemo receding with every paddle stroke. I stopped fixating on how my body had failed me, or worrying about the ways in which it struggled to keep up now, and focused instead on the smaller victories—mustering the guts to jump off a cliff into the river, learning to do a “sweep roll” in my kayak, and navigating a set of rapids without flipping over. By the end of the week, I was bruised and sore, but I felt proud of my body for the first time since my diagnosis.

  I returned home brimming with resolutions to be someone “out living it,” as the camp’s motto proclaimed. I resolved to leave the city on weekends for hikes and I proposed to Will that we go on a camping trip in the Adirondacks. But soon after I returned, I was hospitalized with a bronchial infection and hooked up to an oxygen tank for days. Somehow Salsa found out I was in the hospital, and she immediately overnighted me a package containing a beautiful glass bluebird to hang in the window of my room and a card inviting me to visit her in Montana once I was well enough. You could come to my daughter’s ranch, meet some real cowboys and ride the range on horseback, she wrote. Lying there, in my hospital bed, I’d tried to picture the ranch in my mind’s eye. I saw mountains, white massifs jutting up mightily from the earth. I imagined myself on horseback galloping through the woods. The beeping of my monitor jerked me back to reality. The oxygen tank that hissed air through a tube in my nostrils had become unhooked. Montana was thousands of miles away.

  * * *

  —

  Within minutes of arriving, Oscar starts chasing the chickens. Around and around the barn they go. Oscar’s running as fast as he can, ears flapping in the wind, but he has trouble keeping up on his stumpy legs. He’s gunning after one chicken in particular, a portly russet hen who squawks as she flees from him, seemingly less frightened than irritated by his pursuit.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to Salsa. “I don’t think he’s ever seen a chicken before.”


  “Honey, I’m not worried,” Salsa says. “No offense, but from the looks of your pup, I doubt he’d be able to catch much of anything.” It doesn’t help Oscar’s image that he’s dressed in a plaid red-and-black winter coat.

  Salsa’s daughter Erin joins us outside, and the three of us look on at the spectacle, laughing. Even the ranch dogs—tough herding mutts with missing front teeth from getting kicked one too many times by cattle—seem to smile. But as the minutes pass, Oscar gains speed, his tiny paws whirring through the air, his brown eyes glossing over with determination as he inches closer to the hen. And then it happens: Oscar flies forward in a fantastic lunge and catches the hen by her tail feathers.

  “Oh shit, no no nononooo,” I shout, breaking into a sprint. I grab Oscar by the collar and clip his leash back on, and as I do, Erin inspects the hen, which is thankfully unharmed. “Good thing my husband isn’t here,” she says. “A rancher’ll shoot a dog for going after a chicken.”

  Whereas Salsa is plump and fair, Erin has dark, luminous eyes, long chestnut hair, and the wiry, muscular build of a woman who never stops moving. When Erin’s not running the household, looking after the kids, sewing quilts on commission, and leading Bible study, she’s helping her husband wrangle the cattle. The ranch, she tells me, has been in her husband’s family for five generations.

  Despite the scuffle with the chicken, Erin and I take a liking to each other right away. We head up to the green ranch house on the hill. Inside, we all take off our boots and line them up against the wall beside a wood-burning stove. “Let me give you a tour,” she says, hooking her arm through mine. I follow her around the house, and she points out the bedrooms and the mountain views, then takes me into the cellar, where the shelves are filled with an impressive stockpile of canned goods, provisions, and whiskey—or as they call it, “hooch.” “We hunt, gather, and grow pretty much everything we need right here from our land,” Erin says proudly.

  We head back upstairs to the kitchen, and I do what I can to make myself helpful as she and Salsa prepare an omelet soufflé and thick slabs of bacon. Summoned by the warm smells, Erin’s four kids appear in the kitchen doorway and gawk at me with curiosity. They attend a three-room schoolhouse down the road where the other students are also the sons and daughters of ranchers. They wear work boots to class, attend 4-H as an extracurricular, and make jokes about cow farts, Salsa says, ruffling the hair of the youngest boy, Finn.

  When the kids are out of earshot, Erin tells me she’s also been sick. “Cervical cancer,” she whispers. It never ceases to surprise me just how many people I encounter who are living with some private struggle. The greater the distance I travel and the more people I encounter, the more convinced I’ve become that these human experiences bridge differences that might otherwise feel insurmountable.

  As I help set the table, Erin’s husband, William, arrives. He’s dressed in his ranching clothes—a wool cap, silk neckerchief, snug-fitting Carhartt jacket, blue jeans, and leather boots. He has an impressive beard, so long and fluffy that it looks like it could be a nesting place for birds. He tips his cap cordially at me and takes a seat at the head of the big wooden table.

  “Let’s say grace,” William begins. My body stiffens when everyone reaches out to hold hands. I’ve never said grace in my life but it seems rude not to partake, so I bow my head and close my eyes. He then leads us in prayer, short and sweet: “Thank you, Lord, for this day and this food, and bless it to the nourishment of our bodies. Amen.”

  * * *

  —

  Each week, the ranchers’ wives gather for an aerobics class in town, which consists of the three-room schoolhouse, a post office, and a small gymnasium. Erin invites me to come, and Salsa tags along. The gym is brightly lit with polished wood floors that squeak beneath our sneakers. About a dozen women, spanning several decades, stretch in windbreakers and sweat suits. They stare at me as I am introduced; I get the sense they don’t get many outsiders here. I imagine that my foreign name doesn’t help much either. But when Erin begins to tell the women about my road trip, they listen with curiosity, and at the mention of the word “leukemia,” their faces visibly soften.

  “Welcome,” one of the women says. “I’m a survivor, too.”

  “We’re glad to have you join us,” another tells me.

  “Have you met William’s brother?” a third jumps in. “He’s single. And real handsome.”

  “Wait! If you marry William’s brother, we’d be sisters!” Erin exclaims.

  “About time we find you a real cowboy, not some Yankee city slicker,” Salsa adds playfully.

  When it comes to working out, the ranchers’ wives do not mess around. Over the course of the next hour, we move around the length of the gym where, at each station in an exercise circuit, we endure some new kind of abuse. We do jumping jacks until our legs tremble, squats until our glutes burn, and burpees until we are ready to collapse. But much to my surprise and satisfaction, I’m able to keep up.

  Afterward, I go to wash up and in the bathroom mirror, I am met with a reflection I vaguely recall. My complexion used to have the moonlight pallor of silver birch, but now my cheeks are flushed and my eyes shine. Endorphins flow through my body like electricity, and I feel strong, energized. I smooth the jagged tips of my hair, now long enough that I can just about tuck it behind my ears—very nineties Leonardo DiCaprio, I think to myself. I am nothing like the girl who left home nearly fifty days ago. I am a sojourner, an adventurer, a road warrior, crushing the big miles, even if I still go to sleep shattered with exhaustion at the end of each day.

  * * *

  —

  Later that evening, we all gather in the bunkhouse for dinner. William’s brother shows up, every bit as handsome as everyone says, and he keeps stealing shy glances at me from across the room. Outside, the temperature has dropped to well below freezing, and Salsa tells me it isn’t uncommon for the temperature to get as low as negative thirty at night. They heat their house with a woodstove, using logs that William chopped himself. Even with a fire crackling and long johns underneath my jeans it’s the kind of cold that makes me wonder if I will ever be warm again. They pass out mugs of hooch, and the whiskey warms our insides a little more with each sip. Once the brothers have a good enough buzz going, their diffidence melts away and they join in the conversation.

  “So, what do you have for protection?” William asks, turning to me.

  “What do you mean? Like, birth control?” I ask.

  Salsa guffaws, spitting her beer.

  “No,” William clarifies, frowning a bit. “Like a gun. For safety.”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that. I’ve never touched a gun in my life. I’d sooner end up accidentally shooting myself in the foot than brandishing it in self-defense. Nope, it’s just me and little man,” I say, giving Oscar a pat.

  “Aren’t you afraid?” William’s brother asks. They seem disturbed by the thought that I’ve traveled all these miles without even a pocketknife. A woman with a small, neutered lapdog for protection shouldn’t travel unarmed, they insist. William offers to give me one of his guns to take with me on the road. I decline, but only after we strike a compromise: I won’t leave the ranch until I’ve learned how to shoot a tin can from at least twenty feet away—a challenge that will take me the better part of the next afternoon.

  For our dinner, we feast on elk sausage, then bowls of Erin’s beef stew. They tell me that the elk was one William had hunted, and they’d raised the cow themselves. “I don’t like to be dependent on anything or anybody,” William says. He spends a few moments expounding on his suspicions of government, public schools, even doctors. “We have everything we need to survive and to protect ourselves right here.”

  As the night goes on, William’s brother moves to the couch and sits next to me. He has a ginger beard and blue eyes, and wears a flannel shirt. He speaks sparingly, but even so, I
get the sense that he might like me. I can feel his eyes on me as I talk, and when I catch his gaze, we both blush. These days, I’m always surprised when men pay me a certain type of attention. While in treatment, I’d felt scrubbed of my sexuality altogether. No one catcalled as my mother rolled me down the street in a wheelchair. No one’s eyes roved over my skeletal silhouette, unless it was to do a double take at the catheter tubes poking out from above my neckline. If anything, people averted their eyes. Now, whenever men flirt with me, I don’t feel compelled to set a boundary or mention that I’m in a relationship. I relish the attention, even crave it.

  Our knees brush and, for a moment, I allow myself an absurd fantasy about a life with William’s brother on the ranch. Stability for me has always been in someone’s arms, no matter how fleeting the time there. Whenever I am feeling lost or stuck, it’s been my pattern to end whatever relationship I am in and immediately find my compass in a new man. This has always been a convenient way to avoid figuring out what I want for myself or working on the problems at hand. It’s easier to fixate on a new love interest than to face what’s really at stake. But I know what a self-deceptive trick this is, so I stand up, say good night to my cowboy suitor, and head to bed.

  * * *

  —

  The next afternoon, we all troop to an empty clearing on the outskirts of the woods, where William lines up six cans on a fallen log. I’m wearing my new coonskin cap and can’t help feeling a bit ridiculous as William teaches me how to load bullets and fire. I start off with a pistol—otherwise known as a “lady gun,” they tell me—for practice. After a couple shots, William deems me ready to graduate to a long rifle. “The kick’ll knock your teeth out if you’re not careful,” he says. “Hold it against your shoulder.” He adjusts my posture.