“No X-ray,” K answered cheerfully. After two weeks of working together, K had grown amused by all Rosie requested as if she were asking if the clinic stocked mind readers.
Rosie eased the patient from wheelbarrow to bed. She remembered the night she’d accidentally X-rayed Poppy—well, Claude, almost-Claude, Claude-in-utero—all those years ago in the ER in Wisconsin. Here, she often found that absent being able to see entirely, insides included, it was better to see not at all. Until Thailand, closing her eyes was not a diagnostic technique she’d reverted to much, but it beat going to the grocery store. Especially since there was no grocery store. She held her hand above the patient’s leg to feel how hot it was. She pressed gently with her fingers, feeling for the break, feeling where it was twisted and misaligned. She pictured the X-ray sketched for her by her gently tracing fingers, the ghostly bones reaching for one another as if through time. It was remarkable, really, how well she could see without seeing. Later, she would detect fractures with the far more advanced technologies of a tuning fork and a stethoscope, but she was a couple weeks away from that trick yet. This first one, fortunately and unfortunately, was broken enough she could feel it easily, displaced enough, maybe from the wheelbarrow ride into the clinic rather than the break itself, that the patient was going to need something more than just a cast.
The art of bone setting is not a modern one. Rosie knew this. She knew that once upon a time, broken bones were treated by barbers and blacksmiths, that physicians felt fractures were beneath them. But she also knew why. You sought a blacksmith because you needed someone strong to realign the bone, to overcome the complete freakout the muscles around it were going to have when you started pulling. You sought a barber because you lived in the Middle Ages and were totally screwed.
K was tending to a patient who’d been carried in on a ladder, so Rosie was on her own. Her patient’s husband spoke no English at all. Rosie steered him by the shoulders and positioned him behind his wife’s head, his arms looped around her shoulders up to his own. Rosie went back to the other end of the wooden pallet and took the woman’s ankle gently into both hands. The patient gasped. This boded ill. She made the patient take five deep, slow breaths. She made the husband take five deep, slow breaths. She took five deep, slow breaths. Then she pulled like hell. The patient screamed. The husband screamed. But the bone realigned. And the baby stayed put. Lacking an intramedullary nail—she knew enough not to even ask for that one, not that she could have placed it without an X-ray anyway—she stabilized the leg with fabric wrap, a section of branch, and plates made of coconut shells. As long as the remedy required was something that grew on a palm tree, you were all set.
The patients in Thailand also knew what to do without what they never knew they were doing without. Absent antibiotic ointment, honey would stop a burn from getting infected. Dried papaya seeds crushed into powder would get rid of intestinal worms. Tea made from corn silk would reduce swelling. It was the way here. It was the only way. So it was this skill Rosie started employing, a few weeks into Thailand, a few weeks into Claude 2.0, not so much looking for remedies on palm trees as looking for them where she hadn’t been looking before.
She wasn’t so naïve as to imagine there was something she could crush up or stir in or scavenge from a plant to help her child live in the world. But if she could doctor without drugs, medical equipment, or sterilized bedding, surely there was another option besides the ones she and Penn had been considering so far. Surgeries, side effects, appropriated choices, and life interrupted on the one hand versus misery, failure to fit, and life disallowed on the other was not a choice any more than dying from dehydration or dying from an enema used to treat dehydration. The trick was neither to make peace with medical intervention nor to eschew it altogether. The trick was to doctor a palm frond to help Poppy and Claude find their way in the world. Rosie didn’t know what that trick was yet, but she was getting a crash course in looking for it.
Oral Tradition
After three weeks at the school, Claude’s hair was two and a half centimeters of pathetic brown fuzz, and his class had grown from three to seven to ten to twenty-five children. The woman in charge with the painted cheeks (principal? teacher? secretary? mayor?) who’d assured him on the first day, “You fine,” had evidently not believed it herself. It became gradually clear to Claude that Mya, Dao, and Zeya were sent over first because they were the easy ones. They were well behaved, and their English was strong, and they weren’t really in need of the dubious skills of a ten-year-old American tagalong. This meant they were the ones Claude most wanted to spend time teaching. It also meant, Naw Ga, the principal/teacher/secretary/mayor explained, they were the ones who needed it least. She’d sent them over in the first place so as not to overly traumatize the new teacher—who in addition to being not even a teenager yet had no training whatsoever—but she got over that quickly.
“I don’t know how to teach English.” Claude was mildly panicked as his class doubled in size then doubled again and again.
“You speak.” Naw Ga gave him international so-what’s-the-problem eyes.
“I speak it, yeah, but I don’t know how to, you know, teach it to someone else.”
“No one know.” Naw Ga waved her hand, already turning off toward other students, other lessons. “How you learn?”
“To teach?”
“To talk.”
“Oh. I don’t remember. I was a baby.”
“So be they mama,” Naw Ga advised. “You learn from listen, talk, read. They same.”
Whereas the original three had sat quietly and respectfully and listened, the twenty-some wiggled and giggled in a language Claude didn’t know while he tried to be serious with them in a language they were supposed to be learning but weren’t. Whereas the original three had been happy to have old books read to them, the new ones complained (at least that’s what he thought they were doing) that they’d read these books already many times before. As far as learning English went, Claude suspected they’d already expanded their vocabulary as much as it could be expanded from their dusting-into-dry-leaves copy of Mother Goose. He did not think terms like “tuffet,” “curds,” “cockleshells,” and “pease porridge” were likely to come up in everyday English language conversation anyway. At least they had yet to do so for him. And whereas the original three were little girls like he was, like he had been at any rate, at least half of the new kids were boys, and though once upon a time he’d been one of those too, it seemed like something his father had made up: long ago and far away and pretend. The little boys were scary because he didn’t know how to talk to them. And because what if they looked at him and realized he was one?
“You tell us new story,” one of the alarming little boys demanded.
“A story about what?”
“About new.”
“I don’t know any stories about new,” said Claude.
“Tell story about old,” suggested Zeya, who at this point felt like an old friend. “New story about old.”
“I don’t know any new stories about old.” Did telling them stories instead of reading them stories even count? Was that learning English?
“Tell us favorite story,” someone said, and even as Claude was about to say he didn’t know any stories, he realized that of course he did.
“Well, I do know one story. One long, big, long story about a prince named Grumwald and a night fairy named Princess Stephanie.”
“Oooh,” the kids all said, an apparently universal sound meaning “Do, please, continue.”
So he told them the beginnings of the adventures of Grumwald, beginnings he himself had gotten only by deduction, osmosis, the plot filling in slowly like holes in the sand when the tide is out. The beginning of the Grumwald story way predated him. He knew his father invented Grumwald so his mother would go out with him. That was as much a part of the fairy tale as the fairy tale itself. Grumwald was a decade older than Claude, so he had to make some parts up, fill in what he could
, guess at what he couldn’t. It was tiring to make stuff up. He had no idea all these years how hard his father was working when he wished he would just read them a book like everyone else’s dad.
The clinic children had questions. What “Grumwald” mean? What Grumwald was last life to come back as prince? Why he never look inside armor before? Why he no wanna be prince since he earn prince? Claude had no idea. He would have to ask his father and get back to them.
“In the meantime, you tell me a story,” he said to them. Storytelling was hard. He needed a break. Telling him a story was a good way to practice speaking English anyway, he thought.
“A new story?” said Dao.
“An old story,” said Claude. “A classic story. A fairy tale.”
That was how they started trading stories. Every day, Claude would tell his students an American fairy tale, and every day, his students would tell him a Thai or Burmese fairy tale. He told them about Beauty and the Beast, and they told him about two birds who were reincarnated as a princess and a farmer. He told them about the Little Mermaid, and they told him about a rabbit whose squirrel tail got bitten off by a crocodile with a long tongue. He told them Cinderella, and they had that one too, which he could not even believe, except in theirs the dead mom sent a fish instead of a fairy godmother, and the prince fell in love with her because of her trees instead of her shoes.
“Why he love her shoes?” they wondered.
“It’s not that he loved her shoes. He loved her whole outfit, and that’s why she really didn’t want him to see her in her dirty old clothes.”
“Why she forget her shoe?”
“She didn’t forget. It fell off, and she didn’t have time to go back and get it.”
“How long it take to stop and pick up drop shoe?”
This seemed a fair point to Claude. It made about as much sense, as far as he could figure, as their explanation, which involved a talking fish who got eaten then reincarnated as an eggplant and then as a matchmaking tree.
* * *
His father called early in the mornings, but sometimes his mother had already left for the clinic anyway. It wasn’t just that it was night in Seattle when it was day in Thailand, it’s that it was still yesterday in Seattle when it was today in Thailand. Sometimes they had cell service and sometimes they did not, so mostly they kept in touch over Wi-Fi. Claude could chat with his brothers easily enough because they were up all night, but his parents were having trouble connecting. He was glad, though, to have his father all to himself sometimes, an occurrence rare enough in his life it wasn’t surprising he had to go halfway around the world to find it.
Penn was sorry those mornings to have missed Rosie but also happy to have some time alone with his youngest. “How are you, baby?”
“Fine, Dad.”
“Really?”
“Really.” This was only sometimes true. Sometimes Claude considered that probably they were not going to stay in Thailand forever, and probably his parents were not going to think a fourth-and-a-half-grade education was sufficient, and probably he was going to have to go back to his old life except his old life was gone. Poppy had friends, but Claude had none. Poppy had talents, but Claude sucked at everything. Poppy was normal, but Claude would never, ever, ever, ever stop being a freak. He had been able to picture Poppy’s life next year in middle school and then high school after that and how Poppy and Aggie would go off to college together and how someday Poppy would have a job and be a mom and eventually an old lady like Carmy, smoking and swimming in lakes and drinking gin and tonics and making her grandchildren laugh. Poppy had futures, but Claude had nothing. He couldn’t even picture Claude’s life now, even while he was looking at it in the tiny picture in the corner of his computer screen.
But sometimes he really was fine because none of it was possible, and this was a comfort. Claude was impossible but so was Poppy, so was Aggie, so was fifth grade, so was Seattle, so was last month when her biggest worry was those stupid, embarrassing movies they showed in health class. Sometimes all there was in the world was the jungle and a school that was barely a building and little kids whose parents had been killed by bugs and the small, scant, desperate possibility that somehow maybe he could help them a little bit, and in that case, who he was didn’t matter, not even to him. “Really,” he told his father. “I’m okay.”
“I miss you, baby,” said Penn. “I wish I were there.”
“You do,” Claude agreed, “because you can’t even believe it, Dad. They have Cinderella in Thailand. It’s like the exact same story only completely different.”
“Of course.” Penn played nonchalance, but even over grainy, laggy Wi-Fi, he saw his child spark. His daughter spark. For the first time since what had happened, there was a glimmering there. Seeing it was like a benediction. Seeing it was like a laceration. There were too many miles in between them to reach across and cup his hands around this precious flame, his arms around this precious child. This precious girl.
So he settled for chalk talk. “That’s how fairy tales work.”
“It is?”
“They’re renewed and retold and reimagined everywhere forever. The oral tradition. That’s what makes them endless.”
“I thought it was magic that made them endless. I thought it was the magic armor.”
“Well, sure, that too.”
“I was telling them about Grumwald—”
“You were?”
“Yeah?”
“Oh. Poppy. Claude. Sweetheart. I’m so…” But then his voice broke, and he didn’t finish saying whatever it was he was saying.
“There’s a lot I don’t know about because I never heard the beginning of the story or I don’t remember.”
“It’s your story, sweetheart. Not just your story to pass on. Your story to make up as well. Over time, stories change; they shift; they become something new but with elements of the original and elements of what’s to come.”
“Oh.” Claude was suddenly sullen again. “Like me.”
“Exactly.” Penn panicked for the precious flame. “Exactly like you. What a wonderful thing. Why would change make you sad?”
“Because it doesn’t mean different,” said Claude. “It means ruined. Why can’t one thing just stay the same?”
“Some things do stay the same. Like how we love you no matter what.” Penn thought how much easier it was to say things from halfway around the world sometimes. It wasn’t because it was on a computer instead of in person. It was because remote love hurt but gave you clarity. Sending your child to a jungle seven thousand miles away was oddly elucidating. “And some things change because it’s good and natural that they do. Because it’s time. And you wouldn’t want to stop them.”
“I would.” Claude started crying, and then he was embarrassed because if he was a boy now he couldn’t cry anymore.
“And some things change exactly because we try to prevent their doing so.” Penn dropped his voice and then his eyes.
“What do you mean?”
“Oh baby, I think what happened was maybe my fault.” He’d been thinking about this since they left. He’d gone over it and over it. Marnie Alison was a nicer scapegoat and probably a more deserving one, but Penn recognized all that was at stake here. “I think maybe we waited too long to tell everyone how special you are. We tried to keep you a secret, but why would we keep anything as wonderful and remarkable as you a secret?”
“So everyone at school isn’t thinking about what’s in my pants.”
Penn had to admit this was a good reason. He remembered sitting in wet paint at recess once when he was in fifth grade and thinking he would die of embarrassment before the end of the school day, and then kids were just thinking about what was on his pants. And they probably weren’t even thinking about that. But Penn had realized something new. Something new about something old. Something important. “It’s funny you were telling stories with your students. I’ve been thinking about the same thing. You know what I like about fai
ry tales?”
“Everything?”
“No. Well, yes. But one of the things I like best is the magic is so simple. It’s painless. It doesn’t hurt Cinderella when she turns into a princess. It’s easy. It’s fast. A wand is waved, some pixie dust is strewn, and presto—perfect princess. The transformation is immediate and complete, and no one looks back. It erases all the pain of her past, and it guarantees her happily ever after going forward.”
This Is How It Always Is Page 31