“C-A-T stands for computerized axial tomography. Simply put, it’s where patients’ veins are injected with a radioactive dye, and then they are sent through a tube that takes X-rays that will reveal anything foreign in the body.”
Resting my chin on Eli’s head, I rotate my jaw from side to side, trying to relieve the horrible ache from having to hold back my scream. Eli’s alphabet block drops to the examining table. Like an automaton, I reach down and pass it back. “What—what kind of foreign thing?” I stammer.
Dr. Vaughan meets my eyes. For a moment, I can peer beneath her bedside manner to the sorrow emanating from the difficult words she has been preparing herself to speak. “I’m going to be honest with you, Miss Stoltzfus.” She breaks eye contact and looks at her hands. “I am scheduling this CAT scan so close to the fine-needle biopsy because I want . . . I want to rule out any possibilities of cancer.”
Breath empties from my lungs. My arms constrict around Eli as if they possess the power to keep the menace away, even a menace threatening to destroy my child from the inside out. “Cancer?” The word is muted into a whimper.
Still, Dr. Vaughan can read the toxic form of it in my mouth. “Yes, Miss Stoltzfus. But don’t get me wrong; I am not saying that cancer is what Eli has. It’s just that with his symptoms—” the doctor rattles them off like a grocery list, although, when added up, they lead to a diagnosis bringing with it the possibility of death—“high white counts, difficulty breathing, night sweats, fevers, weight loss, and swollen glands . . . Well, with symptoms like that, I want to rule out the worst. I’ve always believed the sooner we know what we are dealing with, the better we can deal with it. No matter what it is.”
I bow my head over Eli and silently bathe his downy blond hair with tears. My frantic heartbeat thuds against the upper portion of his chest where the mass must be. Oh, Lord, please, I beg. Forgive me. Don’t pour your wrath out on my child because of what your wayward child’s done.
My son looks up as my sobbing chest palpitates against his own. Wiping my eyes with my fist, I breathe deep and attempt to smile at him. He smiles back, his blue eyes trusting that I possess the ability to keep him out of harm’s way. My no-longer-restrained sobs ricochet throughout the room. Over them, I hear Ida Mae get up from the chair. The paper sheet crinkles as she sits on the examination table beside me. She wraps an arm around my quaking shoulders, buoying me up when I feel like I am drowning beneath the weight of two benign syllables that crash together to reveal a malignant word.
“I’m sorry, Miss Stoltzfus,” Dr. Vaughan says, “that I even have to mention that word in regard to your son.” When I do not reply in the pause, she adds, “I’ll see you tomorrow, then. Tomorrow at ten.”
Ida Mae, her voice thick with tears, asks, “What about insurance? I don’t know much ’bout medical things, but I know that when you start mentioning biopsies and scans, we’re talking big money. This girl don’t got insurance. She don’t even have a car.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you there.” My eyes remain clenched, but I can tell that Dr. Vaughan has slipped into her role of the detached doctor again. “But if more testing is required, you will be assigned a social worker who will help you figure out your financial situation. Until then, go down to the billing department on the first floor. They might be able to answer your questions.”
The door clicks as Dr. Vaughan exits. Every muscle in my body spasms; my teeth chatter inside my throbbing skull. Passing Eli to Ida Mae, I turn and bury my face in the paper covering the examination table. I pull the thin pillow up to my mouth and release the scream that has been building inside my chest since Dr. Vaughan stepped into the room wearing her white lab coat and her nervous smile.
For a long time, Ida Mae does not start the truck. She and I just sit, staring through the dirty windshield up at the multitiered hospital aglitter with mica. Eli babbles in the car seat between us, oblivious to the troubled maze of our thoughts. Ida Mae says, “A biopsy . . . I’m telling ya, that don’t mean a thing. I had one a few years back ’cause I had this lump in my breast, but here there was nothing to it. It just meant I was drinking too much coffee.”
Unforeseen terror stops up my throat. I wonder if I’ll be able to speak or fully breathe until the biopsy results are in my hands, until I know that all of this is actually nothing.
Ida Mae turns on the engine, and the radio flares to life, its jaunty tune grating against our shattered nerves. She snaps it off. “Where should I take ya? Home?” Ida Mae waits for my answer, then adds, “If ever you needed a mom and a sister, I say it’s now.”
“No.” My frustration is evident even in a fragment. “I told you. I can’t go back. Some people, they . . . they might try to stop me from getting Eli tested.”
“You mean his dad, huh?”
I look at Ida Mae sharply, but she is staring straight ahead. Her bitten fingernails gouge the steering wheel as she drives out of the parking lot. “But mostly my mamm,” I say. “She doesn’t believe in modern-day medicine.”
“Your mom’s one thing,” Ida Mae says. “But don’t you think Eli’s dad has to sign some kinda permission form before the tests can even be started?”
My stomach roils at the thought of that man’s signature being required to save my son’s life. “So far Eli’s father’s only been involved the night he was conceived,” I say, the words bitter granules on my tongue. “I’m not about to take the chance that, just because Eli might be sick, he would feel guilty and want to become involved now.”
“Welp,” Ida Mae says, merging into traffic, “if you’re not gonna tell Eli’s dad or your momma, you still might want to tell your twin.”
“Please.” I rest my temple against the window. Leftover tears smear the glass, although my hot eyes are dry. “I really don’t want to talk about this. Just take me home.”
“My home?”
I sigh. “What other home do I have?”
AMOS
On their way to the hospital the next morning, Ida Mae drives past a barbershop advertising a haircut and shave for ten dollars. “Actually—” Rachel turns and looks out the rear window—“I want to get my hair cut first.”
“Your hair cut?” Ida Mae repeats. “Like a trim?”
“No. Like a transformation. I want this—” Rachel indicates the beautiful hair coiled on the back of her head—“this whole thing gone.”
“But you’ve never had it cut.”
“I know. That’s why I want to.”
“Today?”
Flipping down the visor, Rachel uses the mirror to locate her bobby pins. “Yes. Today.” The pins begin filling Rachel’s lap, and her hair unravels like yarn. “I need to be in control of something—anything—and this is the only thing I can think of.”
Ida Mae bumps her truck over the yellow cement barriers slowing down traffic in front of the barbershop. “This is where guys get their hair cut. Not girls. You know that, right?”
“What’s that matter?” Rachel says. “Hair’s hair. It’s not like they can mess it up.”
Rachel is already smiling as she walks toward the glass door with its spinning candy-striped pole outside, and Ida Mae doesn’t have the heart to dissuade her.
But twenty minutes later, a mere hour before Eli’s surgery, Ida Mae wishes she had said something. Rachel is now leaning against the passenger’s side of the truck with a twenty-three-inch ponytail coiled in her lap. She doesn’t say anything, as she didn’t say anything when the man started hacking away at her virgin hair as if he were cutting wheat in a field.
“It’ll grow,” Ida Mae says, reaching over and touching the blunt strands of Rachel’s shoulder-length hair. “It’ll grow back in no time.”
Shrugging, Rachel continues to stare out the window.
Ida Mae glances over. “You all right?”
“I’m fine.”
The air is an orchestra of silence before Ida Mae makes the turn into the hospital. Rachel, staring at the cement building, drags fingernails
through her shorn hair like she is trying to scrape the remnants from her scalp. “I am not about to cry over my hair when my four-month-old son might have cancer.”
“But it’s okay to grieve, too,” Ida Mae says. “Sometimes it’s easier to grieve over something not related to your pain than it is over the pain itself.”
“And what do you know about pain?” Rachel snaps. “All you’ve ever done was cause pain by sending away the man who loves you.”
Ida Mae parks in front of the clinic and shuts off the engine. “Rachel-girl,” she says, her hand still wrapped around the keys, “I hope you never know my kinda pain. It’s the kinda pain that sneaks up on you and knocks you flat before you can even breathe. It’s the kinda pain that is the first thing on your mind when you get up, and the last thing on your mind before you start to dreaming. It’s everywhere and it’s everything, yet it’s nothing, too, ’cause nobody wants to hear it. Nobody has time for somebody’s grieving twenty years after that grieving’s supposed to be through.”
She looks over at Rachel. Tears pour down the face of the girl whose age is the same as the age of Ida Mae’s grief, tears that have been festering deep inside the cracks of Rachel’s wounded soul until their poison could be drained.
“I’m sorry,” Rachel whispers, wiping her forearm across her jaw. “I didn’t mean what I said about Russell. About you—you sending him away.”
“And it’s all right if you did,” Ida Mae says. “But I don’t think you were talking about Russell right then. I think you said that ’cause you’re feeling guilty for sending Judah away. The man who loves you.”
Rachel
My body thrums with adrenaline. After one week of gut-wrenching anxiety following Eli’s tests, we’re once again in Dr. Vaughan’s office. She points over to a table splashed with rays pouring down from a skylight. I do not want to sit there; I want to run. I want to run from the hospital and from the stark reality of what the pediatric hematologist has to say. As if sensing this, Dr. Vaughan presses fingertips to the steel bar of my spine and guides me into a chair. Taking the seat across from my own, she crosses her legs and moistens her lips. Her professional reserve is the same as it was at our first meeting, yet I can discern a troubled shadow now lurking behind Mandy Vaughan’s guarded eyes.
“Miss Stoltzfus . . . Rachel . . .” She squares her shoulders beneath the white lab coat. “Eli’s results have come back.”
Dropping my gaze, I trail my index finger over the gold threading the table’s faux marble surface, buying time until I can gather courage for what I’m about to learn. “And . . . ?”
“And it looks to be what we feared. Cancerous cells were found in both of the needle biopsies taken from Eli’s neck and groin, and the CAT lit up a solid mass within Eli’s chest about the size of a ping-pong ball, which explains his difficulty breathing.”
Dr. Vaughan reaches across the table to touch the top of my hand. But I am so shocked by this information, I cannot feel; I can’t even cry. The vibrations that started in my chest the morning of Eli’s first doctor’s appointment, then radiated throughout my body, have finally stopped. That sensation has been replaced by an odd numbness, like I am being baptized in a frozen pond and still haven’t been brought back to the surface. I wonder how long it will take for reality to come splintering in through this frozen tundra of my thoughts. How long until keening grief takes hold, even as the little one I am grieving hardly shows signs of this life-threatening disease.
“Rachel?” Dr. Vaughan says. “Do you understand what I’m saying? Do you have someone I should call?”
“It’s because of what I’ve done, isn’t it?” I ask, still staring at the table, whose pattern blurs from the tears filling my eyes. “My sin’s being carried down to the next generation. Just like in the Bible.”
Dr. Mandy Vaughan clutches my roughened fingers with her manicured ones. She is no longer an Englischer doktor, and I am no longer the distraught mother of her patient. Instead, we are two women sharing a burden before the full weight of it can be felt.
“We don’t know why things happen to innocent children such as Eli,” she whispers, “but they do. I’ve seen it time and time again. It helps no one to blame yourself for your son’s sickness, to become lackadaisical because you feel like nothing about this can be changed, that this is predestined because of something in your past. What you need to do, Rachel, is prepare yourself for a battle, make yourself strong. Eli’s going to need you now more than ever.”
I nod to convey my understanding. Inside, however, I can feel a fire wall of self-preservation erecting itself around my heart. I do not only blame myself. I also blame the man who continues to live beneath a facade of self-righteousness, even though his soul is marred with the same scarlet stain as mine, as malignant as our son’s cancer.
“Now, Rachel-girl,” Ida Mae says, “don’t wanna hear no fussing from you. I’m taking you home.”
“But I don’t have anything packed. Eli’s diapers—”
Ida Mae points to the floorboard of her truck. I look down, and my mouth goes dry. That bag is the one I took when Verna King forced me to leave Leah and Tobias’s home, the one Judah packed when he came to Blackbrier to ask for my hand in marriage. That single bag drags as many feelings to the surface as the cataclysmic information I have just gleaned.
“I’m not ready to go back,” I say.
Reaching over Eli’s car seat, Ida Mae pats my shoulder. “I know that. But I also know that when push comes to shove, family should band together and put differences behind them.”
“You don’t know my family,” I whisper.
“And, honey,” Ida Mae says, “you sure don’t know mine.”
I’m hoping my thoughts will return to the numbing void they fell into after meeting with Dr. Vaughan, but the longer I remain in the narrow twin bed shoved under the eaves of my parents’ dawdi haus, the more my mind spins out the worst possible scenarios. Keeping the top quilt around me, I slip out of bed and kneel in front of Eli’s pallet on the floor. I watch him slumber like the babe he is and find myself grateful that his young age doesn’t allow him to be exposed to the debilitating fear of the mature.
Kissing Eli’s cheek, which causes his mouth to start a sucking motion although he cannot be hungry, I lace up my shoes and tiptoe across the living room and open the front door. The night sky is heavy with the promise of snow, the stars and clouds shielded by the grayish fog preceding a winter storm. I glance over at the white farmhouse and see a light shining through the kitchen window, casting a pattern of blocks on the old snow and trampled grasses in the side yard. Leah became so distraught when I told her and my parents the news, I feared letting her walk the short distance back to her house. Now I imagine she is having the same difficulty sleeping as I.
The grass, sheathed in a veneer of ice, cracks beneath my feet as I shuffle toward the house while dragging the cloak of my quilt behind me. Climbing the porch steps, I expel a breath that becomes a puff of smoke in the cold. I don’t knock on the door, as I do not want to alert anyone of my presence except for my sister sitting in that dimly lit kitchen. Using a piece of quilt as a pad for my hand to turn the icy doorknob, I enter the house and call out, “Leah?”
The heavy tread across the floor in the next room tells me the person still up is not Leah. Tobias fills the kitchen doorway with his large hands fisted at his sides. I flinch, stepping backward as he moves toward me, but he only walks faster. Seizing my elbow, he drags me toward the door. I scramble to retain my footing, and the quilt becomes tangled beneath my shoes. It unravels from my body and drops to the floor.
Tobias opens the door and tosses me out. I think he is going to close the door and lock it, but after a second, he returns and throws the quilt at me. Stepping onto the porch and shutting the door behind him, he plods down the steps. I wrap the quilt around my nightgown and follow. The two of us hunker beneath the stripped branches of a sycamore tree, and though it is the most frightful night we’ve had all winter
, Tobias seems oblivious to its cold. He just stands there, staring at me, his eyes so dark they are impenetrable.
Tobias looks down, as do I. The grass and leftover ice have shattered beneath our combined weight. “Leah said he’s bad,” he rasps. “That true?”
“Yes. The cancer’s spread to more than just one lymph node.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Chemotherapy. Treatments start next week.”
The wind peels up a loosened piece of tin and smacks it against the roof of the barn.
“Do you need money?” he asks. “A driver?”
For the past year my brother-in-law has never offered me anything but rebuke. Now, when I just need someone who understands the full depth of my sorrow, I am certain that Bishop Tobias King is simply trying to manipulate me into silence.
“No. I don’t need your money or your driver.” I hurl the words at Tobias like shards of ice. “Who would you get to drive me—the fallen woman of Copper Creek—anyway? Surely not Gerald Martin. Didn’t you already pay him not to?”
Tobias clenches the tops of my arms and jerks me toward him. Peering down into my face, he brings his own closer. “You can’t keep this up, Rachel.” The anger in his voice is inconsistent with the sadness in his eyes. “Your bitterness will only destroy you.”
“I’m not bitter, Tobias. I am angry. I am angry that you live in your white farmhouse with your family the same as you’ve always done. While I—who have done nothing you haven’t—I have been cast out of the community and left to fend for myself and my fatherless child.”
“I never knew any of this would happen,” Tobias says. “I never dreamed—”
I shrug off his grasp and lower myself deeper inside the quilt. “We never do. It’s not until consequences are made visible that we understand what we’ve done.”
“I hope you know I would do anything for you and Eli . . . if I could.”
The Outcast Page 15