Dreaming water

by Tsukiyama, Gail

  "Just the opposite," Miles answered her. "I expect you to live for a long, long time."

  His voice trailed off at the lie. But Hana is an old pro — she quickly picked up the ball before it bounced again in the wrong direction. "I plan to live a long time eating what I always do; nothing but pepperoni pizzas and strawberry milk shakes!"

  Miles laughed. "Just follow the doctor's orders and keep up the good work."

  "You know I will." Hana winked.

  I can't help but think how much Hana and I resemble each other — not so much physically but in those invisible traits that show themselves at the most unexpected times. While her Japanese blood has always been obvious in her coloring and eyes, her quick retorts and infectious laughter come from me. It's then I see Hana is still my young and beautiful child, not this frail old woman. Even our smiles have grown more alike — the same deepening lines that spread outward from the corners of our eyes like rays from the sun.

  * * *

  Every morning when Hana eats her breakfast, she has to take a handful of pills. She knows the routine and follows it, if only to keep me happy. There's no pepperoni pizza, which would upset her stomach, and no milk shakes, which would clog her already thickened arteries. The pills range from round to oblongs small as a pea to large as a dime, in chalky whites, deep red, and two shades of green. This morning I have them ready at the side of her bowl and I watch Hana unconsciously play with them, fingering each one and stopping at the oval-shaped, bright yellow new one. She's restless, maybe because I've overslept and she wasn't able to get up earlier. Every day counts now, I tell myself.

  Last week, after Hana's checkup, Miles and I left her alone to finish dressing. I could tell by the concerned look on his face he wasn't happy to see that along with wetting her bed and the tremors I'd begun to notice in her hands, she'd also lost weight. We both knew Hana had reached another, more debilitating stage of Werner's syndrome. The thought of it made me want to cry out loud. We had just stepped back into his office when I stopped biting my lower lip and suddenly found the courage to ask, "How long?" The words slipped out with the clear, fluid ease of water. In the beginning it was out of nervous habit that I'd ask him every time Hana had her monthly checkups but as she began to age, I couldn't bring myself to ask anymore. I've known Miles so long he has become part of our family. He knows I'm not the type to beat around the bush when I need to know something. Until that very moment, I'd taken Hana's life one day at a time, believing that somehow time moved slower that way. But now, with her growing frailty, I needed to know. I needed to plan. If I could no longer slow time down, then I meant to make the most of every minute Hana had left.

  As we stood by the door, he cleared his throat and gave it to me straight in his concerned, doctor's voice. "A year, maybe two, really functional years left. Then they become increasingly difficult. The body shuts down, as it does for all of us as we age, only faster — you know what it's been like for the past fifteen years, the cataract surgery, breaking her hip, the ulcers on her feet and legs. Now we have to be on the lookout for osteoporosis accelerating, along with diabetes, heart disease, and even tumors.

  About the only thing she's not troubled by is high blood pressure." Miles smiled sadly.

  "What about Alzheimer's?" There it was, my greatest fear, out in the open, hanging thick in the air between us.

  He shook his head. "Not a trace of it in Werner's syndrome patients."

  I was so relieved I took a deep breath. Hana has a brilliant mind, and to lose it along with everything else seemed too unfair. Yet the irony also stabbed at me: her body would deteriorate while her mind remained active and alive. The image she carried of herself would never resemble the person she saw in the mirror. My little girl, my shining star, I thought, buried in the body of an old woman. My throat felt parched and scratchy. "So this old age disease doesn't carry all the old age diseases?"

  Miles walked over to his sink and poured me a glass of water. "No,1 guess not."

  "It's a small gift," I said, my voice barely audible. I sipped the tepid water from the paper cup, really needing something stronger.

  "I'm sorry. Gate, I wish I could give you better news." He wrote out a new prescription and tore it off the pad.

  When I heard an outer door open, I rose quickly and reached for the prescription.

  "Thank you, Miles. You've always been a wonderful friend. We've been so lucky to have you."

  "What's this yellow pill for again?" Hana asks me now.

  "For your liver, according to Dr. Truman." I knew he was concerned about her loss of appetite. I hand her the warm milk for her oatmeal, still feeling groggy myself. My daughter looks tired and ancient as she drowns her oatmeal in milk.

  "Why do you think it's bright yellow?" she asks. Her voice is high and surprisingly strong. When she was a little girl, yellow was always her favorite color.

  I shrug but begin listing reasons, spooning in mouthfuls of oatmeal to buy myself time and to hide the fact that I'm not up for games this morning. "So you won't confuse them with other pills? So it's not so easy to misplace them? So they'll brighten up your day?"

  Hana smiles to herself and nods. "Yes, I think it has to do with how it makes you feel. If I take this bright yellow pill, I'll feel better — the ulcers on my feet and legs will heal, my hair will suddenly darken, and the wrinkles on my face will disappear along with the age spots. I'll be young again, and a handsome prince will sweep me off my feet, just like in the fairy tales." She twists a strand of snow white hair around her finger.

  I pause a moment to see what Hana is really feeling. It could be anger or irony or just plain fear, but when I see the gleam in her eyes, I know that she's only teasing.

  So I smile and reach over to her. "I'll take a couple of those yellow pills. I could use a good 'happily ever after.'"

  Hana remains quiet. She stirs her oatmeal, her spoon click-clacking against the side of the bowl. "At least you've had your handsome prince," she finally says. "It's something I don't expect in this lifetime."

  This time she isn't teasing. I can hear it in her voice, and see it by the way her eyes avoid mine. As a teenager, Hana had friends who were boys. She has been kissed, that much I know. I still remember the night she came in the door from her junior prom, flushed and happy. Barely four feet, eight inches tall, she was petite and still so pretty. No one would ever believe that less than seven years later she'd suffer from severe cataracts and her beautiful dark hair would begin to turn gray. Later, Hana told me she'd been kissed good night by Kenny Howe, and I kept thinking that maybe my daughter was just like any other sixteen-year-old girl going to the prom. Only she wasn't. She never made it to her senior ball because of a bout of pneumonia.

  After graduating from high school, Hana went to Brandon College for a year, then to the University of California down in Berkeley. She seemed so fragile. I worried incessantly, while Max stayed focused and reassuring. "We have to let her go if we want her to come back," he said. "She has to have her fresh start. She needs to live a normal life, remember? And so do we," he added. Up until then, we were constantly watching for any signs of Werner's — the cataracts, the thinning and wrinkling of her skin, and the graying of her hair. I knew Max was right.

  We visited Hana every month, and she saw doctors regularly at the medical center in San Francisco where we had first taken her. She and her childhood best friend, Laura, were roommates those almost four years, and had friends who came in and out of their apartment at all hours. Hana enjoyed being a college coed, and we tried hard to keep our distance. Whatever her life was like then, we knew it was important that it belonged to her. But she graduated and returned home to stay just after her twenty-third birthday, as the first outward signs of aging suddenly and mercilessly accelerated.

  * * *

  "Fairy tales aren't always as good as they sound," I say lightly, tentatively. "Maybe the prince loses his looks, and then his job, and ends up overweight and mean-spirited!"

  Hana's s
udden high laughter pierces the air. "A prince can't lose his job, he inherits the throne from the king!"

  I let out a small laugh and decide then and there that we need to get out of this house and go somewhere, if only for an hour. Again, I feel something hard caught at the base of my throat as I struggle for an ending to this silliness. "It's my fairy tale, and if a prince can be changed into a frog, he can certainly get fat and lose his throne!"

  Hana shakes her head and leans across the table. "Here," she says, dropping the yellow pill into my hand. "You need this more than I do."

  HANA

  Werner

  The moments of restlessness are always the worsts those quiet pockets during the day when my mind wants to soar to faraway places but my body remains stagnant. For the past week, my swollen ankles and the ulcers on my legs have kept me immobile. I'm confined to sitting with my feet elevated, or moving around in a wheelchair. I look at the bright-eyed, dark-haired little girl in the photos on the piano in our living room and I can't believe she was once me. I sometimes close my eyes and I'm that little girl again, running down the beach, playing tag with the waves, my parents strolling behind. And I can almost feel the first startling contact with the cold water across my toes, how it surprised me, then drew me running into the waves. The more I lose control of my body, the more I need to remember what it was like to have had command of it.

  * * *

  While Cate does the breakfast dishes, I roll down the hall to my bedroom, trying to help out by at least picking up after myself and making my bed. I lean forward in the wheelchair to give a quick flip to the sheet and blanket. After they balloon up and fall over my pillow, I smooth them down and tuck in the sides, making perfect hospital corners. That's when I catch a glimpse of something shiny on the rug just underneath my bed. I push the wheelchair back just enough to bend over and pick it up; the gold earring Cate thought she had lost at Dr. Truman's office last week.

  Dr. Truman has been taking care of me ever since I can remember. Along with a host of other doctors, he has watched the progress of Werner's syndrome from the time it was first suspected. Werner is what I'd rather call it. Personalizing the condition makes me feel as if Werner is something going through life with me, not against me.

  I see Dr. Truman at least once a month for "preventive medicine," as he calls it, because Werner can affect multiple organ systems, everything from the immune to the connective tissue to the cardiovascular system. Miles Truman is a nice man, with the tall, gray-haired, well-scrubbed looks of someone you could entrust your life to. Born and raised in Daring, he left for college and medical school in Chicago, then returned with his wife. He wanted a smalltown, hands-on practice, while his wife preferred life in the big city. Dr. Truman has one son, who lives with his family in Denver, and has been divorced for the past fifteen years. He's the kind of man every mother in Daring would want her daughter to meet and marry. But ever since my father passed away, it's my mother Dr. Truman pines for. I see it in every smile and gesture, even if he never says a word. He's like a schoolboy around her sometimes, exhibiting all the classic signs — from the awkward pauses to the avoiding of her eyes. And even if Cate seems oblivious to his attentions, I think it makes perfect sense that she should marry him. This way, after I'm gone she won't be so alone.

  What I haven't told Dr. Truman or Cate is that I've been having bouts of insomnia lately, short spurts of sleep interrupted by hours of wakefulness in the dense quiet. I read, and when my eyes become too tired, I've replayed entire movies in my head, from Breakfast at Tiffany's to Doctor Zhivago, or listened to the all-night radio programs From Midnight On and In the Wee Hours. I've felt strangely close to all the low, whispery voices coming from the radio, as if we'd become intimate strangers who have found the same light in the darkness.

  But I've decided the less said the better. The last thing I want is to take another pill to make me sleep. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I just stopped taking all the pills. Would I dissolve like the witch at the end of The Wizard of Oz? Turn to ash and blow away? Anyway, they say the older you get, the less sleep you need. Though it's not sleeping I worry about but losing my memory or the ability to reason.

  I'd seen it firsthand when I did volunteer work at the Evergreen Retirement Home. I'll never forget the vacant stares and the startled look of animal fear when I was first introduced to some of the residents. They appeared so lost and childlike. While my parents tried to talk me out of working there, worrying that it might be too depressing for me, I was adamant about finding out what the future had in store for me. The more they insisted I think it over, the more I resisted, even though I knew they were just concerned about my well-being.

  It was Cate's best friend, Lily Polanski, who first suggested I do some volunteer work after I returned from Berkeley and had my cataracts removed. Cate has known Lily for over thirty years, ever since she returned to Brandon College for her teaching credential after I started kindergarten. Lily taught English at Redwood High, where Cate began substituting in the English department. So it was Lily who came to the house one afternoon with a handful of colorful index cards she'd taken off the bulletin board at the high school. "Pick a card, any card." She fanned them out before me. One pink card asked for a volunteer at the Children's Center. A blue card needed help at an elementary school. And still another, green card looked for a reader at the Evergreen Retirement Home. I held on to the green card; the idea of reading to others seemed appropriate after my cataract surgery. My mother, on the other hand, looked at the chosen card and had to be convinced.

  "But you've always wanted to work with kids," Cate said that evening as she stood up and began stacking our dinner plates. "Why not volunteer at the Children's Center?"

  "I'd still like to work with them sometime. I just think I'd rather volunteer at Evergreen for a while."

  But why? I knew Cate wanted to say out loud. Why spend your precious days of youth with the elderly? Why stare the inevitable in the face? I could see the questions in her dark eyes as her lips pressed tightly together, the words balanced on the tip of her tongue. I avoided her eyes and didn't have an answer. I only knew that I needed to do this.

  She cleared her throat. "Okay," she finally said, knowing I had already made my mind up.

  My father rubbed the back of his neck and sighed softly. "Just as long as you know you can leave any time you want. You don't have to stay if it doesn't feel right."

  I nodded, then stood up to help Cate clear the table, wondering myself just how long I would last at Evergreen.

  I'll always be grateful to Dr. Truman for rallying to my defense one evening when they thought I was upstairs. "Hana's a fighter," he told them. "The worst thing you could do now is not let her deal with her life on her own terms."

  If Cate were to ask me now, "Why volunteer at the Evergreen Retirement Home?" I wouldn't look away. I'd have my answer as clear as glass. Because of wonderful people like Howard Rice and Mrs. Mary Ellen Gravis, who both gave me those defining moments when I knew there was a reason God had put me on this earth.

  I first stepped into the Evergreen Retirement Home, a large Victorian just off Main Street, fifteen years ago. It was a warm day in early summer, three months after the bilateral senile cataracts sent me home from University of California, Berkeley, and three weeks after my surgery to remove them. I remember the clarity of the light that morning, the beautiful brightness that made my eyes water. On the front porch of the grand, old house dripping with purple wisteria, I saw a group of elderly women and men sitting on benches and wheelchairs talking, while a few others sat with their eyes closed, their faces tilted toward the sun. There was something about the way they looked, so fragile and wise, both beautiful and sad at the same time, that attracted me. I felt my heart beating against my chest as I watched them, trying to imagine myself in ten or fifteen years.

  I'll admit, I was frightened at the beginning. Some of the residents on the second floor were so old they just sat and stared, or lay i
n bed day after day, the nurses having to turn them from side to side to relieve their bedsores. Emanating from certain rooms I passed were the indescribable smells of rubbing alcohol and urine and, occasionally, something like the too sweet smell of rotting fruit. "Evergreen is simply a waiting room before we make our final journey," I heard one lady say. I almost walked out right there and then, thinking that I'd seen enough. Thank God I stayed, almost six years on and off, finding balance in the strength and vitality of other residents.

  Evergreen was run by Gretchen Dodd. She was thin, sharp-featured, and in her late forties, neatly dressed in a blue skirt and sweater with a tightly wound personality, talking a mile a minute on the phone when I knocked lightly on her half-opened door. After she hung up, the interview took all of five minutes. I was hired on the spot as a volunteer reader, the one thing I knew I'd be good at. I was to come in two or three times a week for a couple of hours and read to one or more of the residents. "For some of our residents," she said, "it's all they have left to look forward to."

  I nodded at the importance of my position. I had just gotten up to leave when Gretchen asked, "Oh, Hana, how old are you anyway?"

  "Twenty-three," I answered. Other than the cataracts, Werner had kept his appearance to a minimum of a few gray hairs and the barely visible fine lines that had begun to spread from the corners of my eyes.

  She looked again. "You're so petite, I thought you were younger," she said, turning quickly around when her phone rang again.

  "It's a short enough life," I had said lightly to Dr. Truman during my monthly checkup last week. "So I want to remember it."

  Dr. Truman thinks memory loss is the least of my worries. "Your mind is as sharp as a tack. Let's take care of your body so that everything stays in working order." Then he smiled and told me about yet another prescription for some yellow pill to help me digest.