At home my family slept. Soon I knew I would hear the anguished cries of “Mama!” as if they could not bear to be in bed without me. Usually it was Chan who called out first. No wonder of course; we had been so terrified for him for the past fourteen months. But back in our home after those long months away, close to a year, I was beginning to relax and think he might be getting well. He was happy to be home, laughing and playing and trying to run, bugging his dad every day to buy him a bike. He refused to ride the one he had because he said it wasn’t big enough. His ankle was still swollen from the infection he had in Bangkok, but without much pain, he said.
When Chan woke up, he hurried me downstairs to sit with him while he built the fire in the coal-bucket stove in the yard. Using a sharp machete to split kindling into tiny sticks, he laid one atop the other, crisscrossing them, log-cabin style, before starting the blaze. There was a chill in the air, not too cold, but in our house mornings meant standing naked in the bathroom first thing and pouring bowls of cold water from the hip-high jar over our bodies. I was happy to have such a skinny boy warm up in front of a fire. Often Mei Ya stepped through the gate as we sat, bringing a fish to roast or a stew to cook slowly over the coals.
In the garden around us, edible vines twisted around trunks of towering papaya trees that Dtaw, Chan, and Cody had planted when Tahn was born. Waking up to the thump of passion fruit on the clean-swept dirt meant that we could walk outside to pick up the shiny yellow-green balls for our breakfast. If we wanted to gather bounty from above rather than below, we could poke with a long bamboo stick at the papayas and star fruit hanging high.
That morning, when Mei Ya came to bring some chicken soup for breakfast, Chan told her he’d been wanting one of her special treats, banana and coconut milk sticky rice steamed in banana leaves. My mother-in-law, habitually cheerful, stout, and strong from raising six children and feeding her large extended family for most of her life, went into the lane and called over one of the neighborhood boys from where he sat with his friends. Pressing a silver coin into his hand, she told him to run to the market to buy some coconut. “Hurry, before Little Sister Nong rests from her morning work,” she urged him. It was nearing seven a.m. and the market would soon be closing. The coconut seller, like many of her comrades, often stayed by her stall, stretched out on an empty table for a morning nap in case a late riser came to shop. But waking them up never felt right.
The neighbor was back in less than ten minutes. He stepped through the gate and handed over the plastic bag bulging with its treasure of bright white coconut flesh, oily, freshly scraped from its rough brown shell. Mei Ya took it from him without a word, and dumped all of it onto the wide enamel tray she had waiting. Then from the fire, she lifted the huge aluminum tea kettle and poured some of the boiling water over the coconut. With the ends of her fingers, she blended the water and flakes together until the mixture was cool enough to begin squeezing over a sieve, a tin bowl with holes nailed through the bottom. Jew and Cody came running to help. They dutifully washed their hands as they were told, knowing the coconut cream would not keep if contaminated with too much bacteria. They leaned over the tray beside their grandmother, five hands lifting, squeezing, as Mei Ya held the sieve under the rain of milk, hua grati, literally head of the coconut milk or coconut cream. A second round of squeezing and straining would produce a less rich liquid to be used in cooking, but it was the cream that she would use for Chan’s treat.
Mei Ya went into the shed and returned lugging one of the family’s larger woks, four feet in diameter. She settled it, heavy and solid, over the dancing fire and poured the cream in, stirring without ceasing as it heated. Cody wanted to remember how to make this next time, so he recited the recipe as he watched, narrating her movements of pouring the stream of white sugar into the swirling milk, then spooning the wet sticky rice into the liquid. After the rice had absorbed the sweet cream and been left to cool, Chan, Cody, and I, under Mei Ya’s critical eye, spooned the rice into the centers of cut-up banana leaves. We then laid a quarter of a miniature banana on each little heap and folded the packet as instructed, skewering it tight together with toothpicks Mei Ya had split from a section of a hollow, jointed stem of bamboo. Finally, we placed the green pyramids carefully into the bamboo basket for steaming.
One bunch of bananas was the right amount for the rice and leaves she had prepared. A half hour later she took the lid off the basket and lifted the shiny dark treasures, covered in a sweat of condensed steam, out onto a plate. After they cooled enough to handle, we hurried to unwrap the packets and pop the warm treats into our mouths. Chan must have eaten ten packets over that day and the next morning. Nothing could have pleased me more.
In the coming days, I was busy as I had always been in our home, cooking, feeding, doling out vitamins and hugs, and being the referee when the boys fought. For the most part, they played well together with room to run around and neighbors to play games with in the lane. Dtaw kept the household running. In charge of the garden and trips to the market each day, he was always coming and going on the motorbike, bringing snacks of fresh-shaved coconut, pumpkin fudge, or toasted sticky rice. When he went on his errands, he called to Cody and Tahn to hop on the seat behind him, giving me short breaks from their needs. All of our energy and attention went into working to get Chan well. When we returned to Thailand, Dtaw had sold a piece of his family’s land. This provided money to cover our modest expenses of food and gas. The rice hut at the farm was full of the year’s harvest, the vines that twisted around the fence were abundant with leafy greens, and the trees were loaded with papayas and mangoes and passion fruit. We had enough.
We’d only been back a few days before I noticed that eight-year-old Cody was already a leader in the games of tag and dodgeball and soccer among the boys and girls on the street. Tahn played with them too, barefoot, as I could not get him to keep his shoes on in the dusty road despite the sticky black chicken droppings and flattened luckless lizards and large bugs. Even at two, he pointed out that all the big kids took their shoes off when they played. It was true. And flip-flops are not as good as bare feet for running. I didn’t worry about him, though. There were enough older children and grown-ups out that I could concentrate on cooking or unpacking or tending to Chan.
It pained me that Chan could not join in the children’s games because I had let the infection in his foot get out of control. If only I had gotten him the antibiotics sooner, he could have been running and playing too. So many decisions, so many points along this road where I took the wrong turn as his illness gained the advantage. It was natural for me to torture myself with regret, so I had to actively work not to dwell there. By then I had made it a habit to remind myself that the damage, whether from lingering infection or growing leukemia, would not be permanent. Nothing in the body is permanent. There is no inevitable downward slide as the doctors were so fond of believing. Every moment the body recreates itself. Cells are dying and renewing themselves all the time. The opportunity for health is unlimited, I kept telling myself.
So, not too long after we’d arrived, I gave in to Chan’s repeated requests that he accompany his brothers and friends to the river to play in the cool mud. Since his treatment had begun, he had been mostly in hospital rooms or at home, isolated from anyone outside the family. Now that the medical world had given up hope for his recovery, we were making our own decisions about his care. So at last, I let him play with friends despite the risk of infection.
As he dug in the sticky mud for the first time, I dutifully reminded him about the danger of bacteria. I didn’t have the heart to stand my ground when he argued that he was being careful.
Chan loved to go riding over the dirt roads in the 1966 Land Rover Dtaw had bought when Cody was a baby. One evening, Dtaw took the boys and they drove to a beautiful bend in the river where mountains rise up above the rapids that swirl around the rock formations disturbing the usually quiet surface of the water. When they came home, Chan ran to me and reported, wid
e-eyed and breathless, “Mama, we saw bats and the place in the river where the giant sleeps!”
As he spoke, I watched his pale lips, comparing his cousins’ cherry-red to his own sometimes gray mouth. Other times his mouth looked almost pink. He seemed to have plenty of energy. Energy level is the real indicator of red blood cell deficiency, not coloring, I told myself. He was hungry. He cried and complained as any six-year-old would who’d been through what he had. I chose to be pleased with his health, for the time being.
He was adamant that we hurry up and get the horse he’d been asking for.
Bruise
One morning roughly a week after our arrival back home, Dtaw asked, “Have you seen Chan’s chest?”
“No, what?”
Chan stood before me, his knobby knees and ankles revealing the voracious wasting of the leukemia. He lifted his mesh soccer shirt. There, toward the center of his chest and above the scar from where the rubber line for the chemo had emerged above his heart, was a faint green bruise the size of a quarter, a perfect circle, like a stain from a drop of ink on white cloth. Stretching away from the spot were two blue spidery veins, like highways from a capital heading northeast and northwest in bumpy lines. I closed my eyes and leaned back against the porch railing in an effort not to faint from the wave of terror I felt breaking over me.
When I’d recently spoken to the doctor in Seattle on the phone, he told me petechiae, the tiny red freckles that indicate broken capillaries from platelet deficiency, do not need to be taken care of immediately. Spontaneous bruising does.
At my insistence, because I felt we needed to know what we were getting into by taking Chan into the mountains, far from medical care, the doctor had described in detail what death from low platelets would look like. Hemorrhaging in the brain would end Chan’s life within a few minutes. A fatal nosebleed would go on for hours and be “uncomfortable” and “unpleasant” and “distressing” because of all the draining fluid. Bleeding in the bowels would be very painful.
I returned my attention to Chan. “Oh, it’s nothing. He probably got bonked. Did you get bonked, honey?” I said, trying so hard to sound relaxed. I fought off the rising dizziness with huge breaths of air.
“Nope,” he said, then noticed my breathing. “What’s wrong, Mom?”
“Are you sure you didn’t get hit yesterday? You’ve been running around a lot.”
“No! I hate it when you do this, when you worry.” His voice rose in agitation.
I held my head above the surface long enough to escape downstairs for a drink of water and a place to hide my worry from Chan. All our plans for a long life in the country with the horses he’d been dreaming of gave way to visions of hospital rooms, needles, blood tests.
Dtaw called down from upstairs to tell me that he was taking Tahn and Cody to the farm for the morning. This was so I could be left to concentrate on taking care of Chan. I opened the refrigerator and pulled out the pitcher of drinking water, poured a glass, and as I raised the cool liquid to my lips, I felt the relentless ghost of fear hovering at my side.
I saw my mind as a textbook example of Buddhist theory. Attachment is suffering. When the child she loves is sick, the mother suffers from the pain of his pain and the fear that he will die. When he’s well, she suffers from the fear that he will get sick and die. I lived always on the edge between desperate fear of his death on one side and joy and exultation at the thought of his getting well on the other. I could see the futility of always bouncing between these two points and always wondering if I’d be eternally happy or eternally brokenhearted. Of course, life never unfolds in such binary ways, good or bad, but I still couldn’t stop myself from dwelling there on that brink, all sense of equanimity I thought I had succeeded in cultivating before Chan got sick, gone.
I tried to escape into dishes and laundry, but I could not get away from the fear. I moved about the house, trying to run from this feeling that everything was falling around me, that Chan would really get sick and die this time. I prepared a snack for him, going over in my mind the mental checklist: if this was his last week with us, were we doing what we should? He was back at home. He played with his friends all week. He was enjoying life. He was eating well. Were there any unresolved issues with members of his family I’d feel bad about if he died? No. His horse was on its way. I couldn’t think of anything we should have been doing differently.
I was afraid the bruise meant that his platelets were so low that something was about to bleed uncontrollably. There was nowhere in Thailand to get platelets quickly. But more unsettling than the fear of imminent hemorrhage was the deeper fear that maybe we’d been completely wrong, that maybe the cancer really was growing wild, out of control. The ground I’d been standing on since our return home of, Chan is doing so much better, Chan is stronger and happier every day, Chan is getting well, dissolved under my feet.
Later, when Chan was asleep, I called my friend Maggie. She and I were part of a grassroots organization, a cocounseling community that encouraged connection and listening pairs in order to facilitate healing through emotional expression. In Seattle we met each week to share the struggles and joys of being mothers of young children. We had become efficient in talking to each other to get quickly to the meat of what was slowing us down, irritating us, making us feel stuck, as parents so often do. We split our time between being the listener and the speaker in a prescribed way that offered refreshing relief from the trials of mothering and engendered clearer thinking after our sessions.
“Maggie, this is just so damn hard. I’m so afraid he’s dying. What do I do?” I asked, shaking and weeping while I talked, posing the unanswerable questions, naming the otherwise unspeakable fears there was no way to soothe. Maggie, patient and quiet, knew what I needed. She didn’t answer my question. She listened without trying to fix. She let me release the thoughts I wasn’t able to voice with anyone else. With her I could be hopeless and scared because I trusted her to stay hopeful for me. I allowed her to hold the armor of my courage for me while I cried, so that when I stepped back into being the brave mother, I could put it back on, refreshed from having rested from the weight of my role for a little while.
After talking with Maggie I realized that if Chan’s death was imminent, he probably wouldn’t have been so strong, hungry, and energetic. And if the bruise was something bad, we could at least wait and see if the next day it was bigger or smaller. If it got bigger, we’d take him to the doctor. If the bruise was from low platelets, and he did need a transfusion, then we’d get the blood product required. If it wasn’t, we’d watch its progression, never analyzed or explained, another one of those things that his body did as it healed that we wouldn’t understand because medical care at that point could not provide answers.
Either way, we had to plod along as we had been, keeping up the fight. That was the main thing: continuing to fight, no matter what the setbacks, just keep going and never give up. And fulfill Chan’s biggest dream—to bring a horse to our home in the mountains and live there in our little cabin above the village.
* * *
Chan had fallen asleep on the wooden bridge under the thatch roof that rustled in the breezes between the sleeping and living buildings of our house on stilts. When he cried out in his sleep, I ran up to quiet him. I lay down next to him and he entwined his arms around me, pressing his face under my cheek, and locked me in with his thin leg thrown over my thigh. Soon he slept again. I resisted the urge to look at his chest. I had already examined Cody’s for a control, checking for those visible blue veins, and I’d asked Dtaw to look at mine, but neither of ours was like Chan’s. I told myself not to look again until the next day when he would undress for his shower.
Meanwhile, Dtaw had shared the news with me that not one, but five horses had made it to the village in Laos across the wide river. There they would rest a few days before swimming across to us. How did one horse become five? I asked myself. Dtaw figured Chan’s brothers would need to ride too, so unbeknownkst
to me, he had requested three. In the course of looking through the mountain villages where his friends had to beg the hill tribe people to part with one of the pack animals of their herd, they had found a black mare who had a six-month-old colt. Of course they couldn’t resist her. And finally, after completing their mission of procuring three adult horses, but not of finding the object of their search, they came across a beautiful young stallion with a long bushy mane, all black.
My horse book said it is out of the question for beginners to own stallions. None of us knew the first thing about owning or training horses.
Even male colts are unmanageable and dangerous because of their hormones. All but the most experienced trainers own only mares and geldings, the book said. And a beginner rider having a young horse to make friends with always ends in disaster.
I asked Dtaw when he came home how many of the horses were males. All but one. Were any of them castrated? None.
By the River
The next day Chan woke pale and wavering. The bruise seemed to be fading. His leg hurt. He limped down the stairs and at breakfast said his knee was in pain as well, but it felt to him like toxins releasing. In the evening, Chan and Tahn and I walked down to the river to look at the green trees of Laos on the other side. We sat on the steps and wondered where the horses were and if Daddy and his friends would bring them down to the water for a drink. “Laos is so pretty,” Chan said, “the trees and the mountains.” Cody came and joined us. The boys picked up rocks to throw in the water or, in Tahn’s case, at the cats by the water.
Now You See the Sky Page 10