As we got up to leave the steps by the river and head back home, I noticed in the bright sunlight how very yellow Chan’s skin was and how gray his lips were in comparison to his brothers. I felt another stab of panic looking at his pallor. I remembered the words of our neighbor as we passed her house on the way to the water: “Are you tired, Chan?” She used the Laotian word for fatigued, not sleepy, the word one would usually use with a child. I thought of how weak he had seemed recently. How he spent so much time lying down, how he napped of his own accord before noon, how weepy he was. And then the bruise, and I’d noticed a single red freckle on his jaw that morning, one of those tiny red spots the doctors called petechiae. He’d also started to complain of pain in his chin. The cough was hanging on, as was the cold. And now this yellowness.
That day it seemed so close at hand. That pallor, that weariness. Maybe he is dying. Maybe the cancer is growing out of control. These were the thoughts that plagued me all the next day when Dtaw was away. In the evening, I made Chan come stand out in the lane in front of the house where the children were playing some version of dodgeball. I wanted him to get up off the blanket on the floor where he had been resting all day. We stood in front of our gate, a safe distance from the children’s game, while I fed Chan his favorite fruit, chunks of orange papaya.
“My legs are tired,” he complained.
“I know. You seem tired today. I hope you don’t need any more red blood cells,” I mentioned in an offhand way.
He looked at me with familiar fear in his eyes. “You mean like by eating a lot of vegetables and drinking my juice, right?” His voice cracked as if he were holding back tears.
Oh, now what have I done? I’ve scared my child terribly.
“What do you mean, Mom?”
“No, I mean maybe you need a red blood cell transfusion to make you feel a little more energetic.”
“I think I’m just tired because all I do is lie around all day. I don’t play enough.” His voice was still cracking with the strain of holding back his tears. “I just need to get a little more exercise. Then I won’t be tired.”
For the umpteenth time that day, I tried not to break down with the sorrow of seeing his worry. I hadn’t realized the idea of going back to the cycle of doctors, hospitals, needles, and transfusions would be so upsetting. But of course it would. Why hadn’t I thought before speaking?
When it was time to drink his juice and eat his vegetables, he faced the task with renewed commitment. How badly he wanted to stay away from the hospital, stay at home with his friends, and ride his horses in the country. Every day he kept drinking bitter juice and eating steamed dark green leaves and fighting for his right to live.
For me it was a fight too, a fight to keep up the struggle, no matter how scared and hopeless I got, to keep going. Because of the yellow, I was worried that his liver was overtaxed. I tried to remember the big picture, not get scared by the momentary frights. So what if he’s yellow? He was a bad color a year and a half ago, and he’s been going strong since then. Some people just go through life looking sickly. He might grow up and still be yellow. That would be okay, as long as he grows up, I told myself.
I was ashamed of how spiritually backward I seemed to be, so attached to one outcome. I thought I should have had more equanimity, ready to accept whatever happened. But the fact that I was naturally drawn to letting things go and not fight was exactly what kept me fighting. I knew that there was something wrong with the way I was pulled to give up and I realized that was not how humans were meant to act. And because it was my child, who I had to fight for, I had no choice but to do the right, the hard thing, which meant plugging along, day after day, trying to use my mind and heart to figure out what was best for him, whether or not to let him have soy milk that wasn’t made of organic soy beans, whether to let him have dates when sugar was said to depress the immune system, vying with vitamin C for space in the cells. I had to not give up on figuring out how to get all his vitamins into him at the right time of day, how to make sure he got at least four glasses of freshly pressed, bitter juice a day, how to get the ginger and honey to him three times a day to fight the cough, to think about what else we could do to help him get over his cough, what else we could do to help him be healthy and live. It felt overwhelming so much of the time that I often did want to give up.
* * *
Cody asked me, whispering, that morning, “Can we eat doughnuts if we eat them at grandmother’s house?”
I had to think. Chan might show up and want them and that wouldn’t have been fair to him.
“I don’t know the answer to that question!” I yelled, pent up frustration bursting out at my innocent eight-year-old. Then I sat down and calmed a bit. “No. The answer is no. If you want to eat junk food, you can’t do it here. You’ll have to go out.”
Better
The next day when Dtaw drove off with Cody, Tahn, Cam, and Chan in the cab of the pickup truck, relief swept over me. Four whole hours to myself. No worries about getting Chan’s juice, getting Chan’s meds, making sure he had a nap, got enough to eat, got exercise and something to boost his spirits. Time just for me.
I was already pleased because Chan was looking so well. His face and lips were full. He was energetic and hadn’t cried or complained or seemed listless all day. He’d eaten all the food we gave him with so little variation: steamed green leafy vegetables, steamed squash (like a miniature green pumpkin), steamed brown rice, grilled fish, fresh papaya, and four glasses of bitter vegetable and fruit juice. I was glad to be in a place where this (except for the juice) was regular fare that we could enjoy with Dtaw’s mom and uncle, all eating together.
Chan was happy that morning because it was the day that he would finally go to the provincial capital, an hour drive away, to pick out a new bike. The one we’d bought six months before in Bangkok he still refused to ride because he said he’d outgrown it. Cody’s old one, the next size up, he wouldn’t ride because it didn’t have gears. His favorite nurse in Seattle, a young Taiwanese-born American woman at Children’s Hospital, gave him some red-envelope money for a going-away present, so he planned to use that for the new bike. He hadn’t been able to go before because I wanted him to get over the cough and cold that had been bothering him.
He was also happy because the five horses his dad’s friends had traveled to northern Laos to find for him had finally arrived at the village across the river. Tonight they would swim across the river to stay at Dtaw’s uncle’s farm before the journey to the mountains.
Dtaw had gone across the river to visit his friends and the horses after they returned from the north, and was pleased to discover the horses were gentle and well-trained (nobody had ridden them yet, but when Dtaw answered in the affirmative when I asked if he could walk up to them without them biting him, I was relieved). One man said that Mongolian horses were stronger than oxen or cows. He said during the war between the US and Vietnam, he had been a soldier for the Communist side. He had traveled through the high mountains in the roughest conditions with his small horse carrying loads of machine guns, ammunition, and supplies. A family who consented to sell one of their horses to our friends said it was used to pulling a cart carrying ten people over rough roads. And they all (except the colt, of course) had been used for plowing fields planted on steep hillsides.
So that chapter of our adventure would begin the next day. Chan was ecstatic, which delighted me.
The horses crossed the river, smuggled over by cousin Gai’s Laotian team and Dtaw’s friends on the Thai side of the Mekong. Fearing police and border patrol on both sides, they managed to lead the five skittish creatures across the wide and deep expanse of dark cold water to the bank on the Thai shore, a few miles up from the village. Legs swept out from under them by the current, two of the horses’ heads went under and a smuggler had to jump out of the slender, shallow-bottomed wooden boat and into the river. Pulling on the horses, dragging on the rope around their necks, they finally managed to get all f
ive across.
The only female horse was pregnant and nursing a young foal. Easier to get across than the rest, they swam quickly and scrambled up the bank on the Thai side. The youngest stallion, Dtaw’s friends told us later, blew like a drowning rhino, all the anxious way across, dogs barking, men sweating, outboard engine chugging. When he made it to shore, sides heaving, he rested there on the sandy bank before the men drove him up to the dark road.
The crossing took four hours and three trips back and forth across the wide river sweeping its dark path under the stars.
Creeping through town at two a.m., they worried that the neighing of the horses and barking of the village dogs would bring the police out of their roadside station, but they eventually made it to Gai’s house where the horses were “stabled” in the backyard till morning. At two a.m., the smugglers came to our house to report on the operation, and Dtaw zoomed off on his scooter to a late-night restaurant to pick up hot takeout dishes. He hosted his friends with plenty of rice whiskey before they rested, napping on mats on the front porch in the hours before dawn. When they woke up a couple of hours later, shrugging off their sleepiness, they left to walk the horses the next two miles to the farm under cover of darkness.
I promised Chan that after breakfast we would go to the farm to see the horses. He was lying on the sheepskin, soaking in the morning sun, between Dtaw and me, while I massaged his back. I noticed the bruise was gone. He told me he’d just take a little snooze and I was to wake him when it was time to go. He fell asleep for at least an hour, uncharacteristic so soon after breakfast, and we tiptoed and whispered until he woke up. The sun became hot as it climbed in the sky, so I rigged up a shade by leaning a grass mat on its side against the cement pillar next to Chan. I fanned away the flies from his skin while I fretted over him.
Then I went to the kitchen to wash dishes at our outdoor sink.
Not much later I heard Chan’s bare feet brush the smooth cement floor as he positioned himself to sit up. He immediately turned toward his dad. “I dreamed there was a huge mama horse and her baby and lots of elephants, one in back of the kitchen, some here, some in the garden.”
“How big were the horses?” I called to him, hoping to squeeze as much joy out of a rare moment of enthusiasm as I could.
“Huge!” he shouted. “I couldn’t even see their heads—they reached all the way to the sky! And the elephants were big too!”
Finally, a good dream.
Meeting the Horses
The family farm lay at the edge of town. A thirty-acre piece of land that, Dtaw often reminded me, was nothing compared to the vast tracts of lush riverside land his grandparents had once owned. Had his grandparents not given so much of it away to family and neighbors over the years, the land would have been worth millions of dollars now. His great-grandfather had been the village headman and Dtaw’s grandmother told stories of being a very young girl and playing jacks, tossing and rolling the nuggets of gold the people of the neighboring towns brought to her father.
What was left to Dtaw and his cousins on his mother’s side was this small piece by the road. We often escaped there for a quiet place to rest and pick mangoes or jackfruit or tamarinds. Farmers lived on the land to raise rice for his mother’s household and their own.
The day we rode the motorcycle out to see the horses, the sun beat down hot, and the sharp dead ends of the grass poked our legs. Dtaw instructed me not to let the children come close to the scruffy little horses cropping the grass by the barbed-wire fence. He wanted to know better how tame they were before we ventured near. I kept the children close by me as we watched the horses from twenty yards away. The boys were disappointed that they didn’t get to pet the horses right away.
“All we do is stand around and watch the grown-ups having fun,” Cody assessed the situation with his usual realism. Chan gave into his misery over his dreamed-of black stallions turning out to be small, ragged-looking creatures that he couldn’t even ride yet and began to cry.
At last I gathered my courage and picked him up to bring him close to the mare, giving her dangerous hind end a wide berth. We stepped forward and Chan stretched out his hand. She patiently endured his small fingers rubbing the short fur against the bone of her brow. He smiled.
We stayed long enough for each of the children to pet the mare and admire her colt, too skittish to let us touch him. When we got hungry, we laid a mat on the grass so we could slice and pound the green papaya Dtaw picked for us into a spicy sour salad to eat with the sticky rice we’d brought from home.
* * *
Later in the afternoon, back at the house, I was looking at the horse book Dtaw had brought home. Chan came to lie down next to me and decided it was time for a nap. I asked if he wouldn’t rather go downstairs where we usually rested as it would be cooler.
“No, just here,” he said, and was soon fast asleep. I watched the pulse in his neck as it seemed to beat wildly, and I thought about the risk of heart failure from low red blood cells because of the extra work required on the part of the heart to keep enough oxygen flowing throughout the body.
I went downstairs to find Cody’s stop watch, and with some difficulty located a regular pulse in Chan’s wrist. After I figured out that pressing the vein too hard against the bone caused a false rhythm, I was finally able to take a somewhat accurate reading: fifty-nine beats per thirty seconds. That’s okay, I thought. But later I called the hospital about getting a blood draw and red blood cells. I talked to the pediatrician who had been the first to tell me about the possibility of leukemia. It had been only a year since we’d last spoken, but it felt like so much longer. So much had changed.
I went back upstairs to lie next to Chan. I thought, Well, maybe now that his dream has come true, he’s gotten his horses, he’s going to die. He’s sleeping and sleeping and he’s never going to wake up. This is it. It’s over. I noticed how strange it was that I should feel so sad and afraid, yet so calm at the same time. Such a clear feeling of, Well, there’s nothing I can do. This is just happening. How relaxing. I supposed this was due to the chronically desperate and urgent state of my mind, always asking myself, What else can I be doing for him? What about his vitamins? Have I given them all—at the right time? His juice? Time for another? Some food. I need to make him something he likes that’s good for him, no salt, no sugar. What? He needs more exercise, more sleep, more play, more friends, more laughter, more cuddling. I need to do more . . . or he’ll die. So really, death sometimes looked like a welcome rest to a mind that was exhausting me with worry.
I walked downstairs in this state of frightened limbo, and I passed the back door where a tiny black-and-white bundle of fur, a kitten, lay mewing on the cement, a shot of its own excrement nearby. It must have slipped out of its mother’s mouth as she walked along on the roof.
Oh great, I thought, now a tiny creature, eyes not yet open, is going to die here in my home because of a careless mother. I don’t think I can stand any bad omens today.
I asked Dtaw if it would die.
“No. Don’t you hear its mom calling for it from over the fence? She will come for it when we’re out of the way. Cats don’t die easily.”
I certainly hoped it wouldn’t. I kept checking as I passed the window to see if it was still alive.
* * *
Late the next afternoon Chan looked up at me as I stood stacking the clean dry plates in the cabinet. “Mom, can we go for a bike ride?”
“Sure, honey, if you feel like it. Where do you want to go?” It was the cooling hour before sunset when going out under the sky became a possibility again after the long hot afternoon.
“I want to ride along the river to where Daddy’s friends have goats.”
Water buffalo, great big Brahman bulls, pigs, chickens; there was no shortage of livestock on the farms adjacent to the town, but goats were a novelty, something the children had never seen.
“Okay, sweetie. I’ll get things ready while you sit with Daddy.”
Settling Chan’s skinny body onto the cushion tied to the rear rack, I rolled the sturdy old Chinese bike out the gate and into the lane. We rode along the water, Chan’s warm hands holding my tummy as he chatted with me. He loved to see the darkening river and the shadows of the jungle on the opposite shore. He especially loved to spot bats flicking through the darkness searching for insects. I could almost never see them before they vanished, but he was an expert. He’d adored bats ever since that day, long before he got sick, when we biked down a wide path through golden rice fields to a cave temple, famous for the half a million bats that flew out of it at dusk each night. Later we often recalled the reticulated python, the world’s longest snake, yellow and brown and as big around as my thigh, that appeared out of the broken rice stalks and made its way, liquid solid, across the path just in front of us. Chan stood in the trailer behind watching intently as its twenty-foot-long body and tail disappeared on the other side. Awed and mesmerized by its immense presence so near to us, it didn’t occur to me, or him either I think, to feel frightened, only blessed.
At the place where the goats lived, we stopped our bikes and went to the fence. Chan timidly held out his hand, reaching for the thick tangle of rough fur between the bearded animal’s eyes. The other goats pressed in, and we petted all of them. Tahn pulled some of the long thick grass stems growing beyond their reach, and held them to the biggest goat’s mouth. The goat sniffed and declined. Once they realized we had nothing good to feed them, the animals lost interest and retreated.
Now You See the Sky Page 11