Saving Charlotte

by Pia de Jong

  It’s warm in the room; my hands are sticky. I lift Charlotte up and leave the office. In the hallway I look around. Where am I? How did I end up here on a Tuesday afternoon with my sick baby daughter?

  I want to retrace my path, return to the beginning. To the hospital room with the cot with iron bars where I spent that frightening night with Charlotte. I take the stairs to the floor with the children’s ward, then I walk down a long corridor whose doors all look similar. Once in a while I think I recognize something—a painting, a child’s drawing—but I don’t find a landmark. All the rooms look alike; they are painted in the same colors, furnished with similar single beds next to identical stretchers.

  It dawns upon me that if I cannot find the room where it all started, I can’t find the room where the small boy died either. The beautiful child with his dark eyes and black curls, who left his life ever so quietly. How can I claim my past if I cannot find this anchor?

  Then I remember a poem hanging by a pin stuck to the wall near our room. A short poem, only a few lines. They were about stillness, about the magic of a single moment just before it passes. I wish I could remember the words, since they consoled me somehow. I wander around looking for it but don’t see it. My mouth is dry. If someone has removed it, then there must be a vacant space. A pinhole, for that matter. Where is it?

  I go through another door, and then, to my relief, I finally find myself in front of the children’s ward.

  I look inside. Children, so many children, everywhere. They stand, lie down, sit. On beds, on benches, on the floor. New children, with faces I have not seen before. They wear sweaters, T-shirts, pajamas. They walk barefoot, in thick socks, in fuzzy slippers with animal faces. There are so many. Too many to see them all, to ever be able to hear all their stories. I can’t comprehend so much suffering. I wonder what happened to the children I saw before. The girl with the halo of hair who sat at the window—what about the air she so carefully kneaded with her bare hands? Now a different child sits on that same bed against the window. A boy of about five whose head is bald. I have to restrain myself from picking him up and taking him home with me. Perhaps he is here by mistake.

  In the evening there’s a fight outside between Mackie and a bunch of guys. It starts with shouting, but soon it gets out of control. Mackie is even angrier than usual. He puffs himself up to look tall and clenches his fists. But the men don’t let themselves be intimidated, nor are they put off by his threats to call the police. He is so vulnerable. He knows I watch him, he knows I hear his cries, but what can I do? I am powerless with my little kids around me.

  “Leave the police out of this!” a fellow in a motorcycle jacket shouts as Mackie dials a number on his phone, and then gives him a punch in the stomach. Mackie doubles over and falls on the asphalt. There he is, my faithful sentinel, rolling on the ground, in pain. I put down Charlotte and call the police. I tell them to hurry.

  Meanwhile Mackie pulls himself together and grabs the boy by his hair, forcefully, with both hands. The others now jump in and begin to pummel Mackie. I find it painful to watch. To my relief, two officers arrive and pull everyone apart. The shouting continues for a while.

  Only then do I see the blond girl sitting on the sidewalk. Draped on her shoulders is a transparent rain poncho, which seems to have floated down from the sky. Underneath it she is wearing only her underwear and shiny black heels. She puffs rapidly on a cigarette, with long pulls in quick succession. Butts smeared with lipstick lie around her.

  After the police have sent the men away, she throws her half-smoked cigarette on the street, steps on it with her thin heel, and enters her window again. She closes the curtain and dims the red lamp.

  A little later, when she steps out, she looks like any other girl walking down the street. A sweater, baggy trousers, ankle boots. She has her hair twisted into a bun. There is a grim look on her face.

  A slim man of about fifty is waiting for her next to a sports car. He keeps both hands in the pockets of his beige trench coat. When she walks up, he opens the door for her. Before she sits down, he quickly kisses her cheek. She puts her purse on her lap while he walks to the driver’s seat. Then he looks in both mirrors and drives away.

  It’s finally quiet. I cradle Charlotte while I sing to her unsteadily. I tell her how scared I once was as a young girl running over the fields behind the house. Often a mean boy named Leon stood behind the neighbors’ houses. Leon was nearly two meters tall, with huge hands. He had a double crown in his hair, which my mother believed to be a mark from above.

  “Leon has a hole in his heart,” my friend Anne had told me. She should know, since his mother had told her mother. Because of his damaged heart we felt sorry for him. But he had no compassion for me. He would hit me or grab my head. Once he gave a hard kick to my new bike. It broke the wheel, much to my father’s irritation. But my father did not dare to speak to Leon’s parents. “God has already punished them enough,” he said.

  It’s almost midnight when a man with a green hat and a long coat walks briskly along the canal and turns into the alley. He stops by the girl’s door and tries to look in through the closed curtain. He glances impatiently at his watch and knocks on her door. After a while he disappears.

  “Did they hurt you?” I ask Mackie the next day as I close the door behind me. As so often, he steps outside his house at the same time I leave mine. He must keep a constant eye on my door.

  He is wearing shorts, and on his thigh a purplish bruise fans out to his groin. He looks away from me.

  “Please be careful,” I say. “Do not put your life on the line for this alley.”

  “Someone must monitor things here,” he says, spitting out his words.

  “That’s the task of the police,” I say.

  “The police are never here when calamity strikes,” he says. “I am.”

  “I cannot stand it when you get hurt,” I say.

  “Well, I got him,” he replies with a smile. “An old trick—grab someone by the hair.” Blood is smeared on his right cheek.

  “These arguments frighten me,” I say.

  “I can’t help myself,” he says. “I have to fight for the things that matter the most.”

  “Mama, look, a caterpillar!”

  Jurriaan and I are crossing the street on a bright fall afternoon. He points at something green between the cobblestones. It could be a weed, or a curled-up leaf. I pull on his hand to make him keep walking, but he breaks away. In the middle of the busy street, he crouches down and picks up a caterpillar, which immediately rolls up into a little ball.

  “See?” Jurriaan says.

  When a car lurches around the bend toward us, I snatch him up and hurry him to the sidewalk. Together we inspect the fluffy green ball in the palm of his hand.

  “This is a special visitor,” says Jurriaan. “All the way from the tropical rainforest.”

  The creature now extends itself, almost yawning as it stretches out.

  “How did he end up here, Mama?” Jurriaan asks. “Do you think he was looking for us?”

  We slowly walk home while he cups the caterpillar in his hand. When I open the three locks of our house, he stands still on the stairs. His hand slowly unfolds. “Mama,” he then asks, “does each caterpillar turn into a butterfly?”

  Fall is everywhere, washing the canals in red and gold. For months Rutger sat outside on his doorstep in the sun, but nowadays he retreats indoors from the chill. I sometimes see his silhouette behind the brocade curtain that hangs gracefully in a bow in his window. He has told me that around this time of the day he often sits down to think. He wonders whether the few nice moments still outweigh the painful ones. Every day he becomes sicker and sicker. Each day more things are taken away from him and his difficulties get worse. There is no more time for new things. The end is nearing. I imagine him sitting down and pouring a glass of red wine, remembering the beautiful days of his past. The friendships he cherished, the women he loved, the babies he held.

 
The sick children I encountered in the hospital flicker through my mind like shadows. At night they swim in the canal and then they lift themselves up onto the quay with their skinny arms. They knock on my bedroom door with their fists. One by one, as in a parade, they walk inside. They point to their legs, their eyes, their stomachs—to all the places where disease affects them. They do not allow me to look away. They grab my chin and yank my face toward them. Look! Look!

  I’m sorry, so sorry! I shout. As if it is my fault that they are ill. In the middle of all of them, on the floor of my bedroom, sits the father with his laptop. His clothes are disheveled; his long hair hangs over his shoulders. Between piles of paper, calendars, and business cards lies his son, motionless, like a cold-blooded animal without sunshine to warm him. “If I’m not working, I go crazy,” the man says as he angrily taps on the keys with two fingers. He keeps repeating that phrase, as if he thinks I would not understand him. I crawl under the sheets and cover my ears with my hands.

  It unsettles us that there is no change in Charlotte’s health. She is still such a fragile baby, tired and listless. Sometimes she seems worse, when the blue tumors on her body multiply and I find them in new places. How long is this going to take? The uncertainty frightens me. I am scared that death will be too rough for my butterfly girl. I am afraid to see her slowly slip away. To be left with her still body, which will no longer cling to mine. But mostly I’m afraid of what comes after that. My empty arms.

  “This is crazy,” I say to Robbert. “Someone must know what is going on.” I tell him that I will take her to America. Maybe the doctors over there can tell what’s the matter with her. And while I am there, I can ask them about Sammy. Sammy—you know, that boy who broke his arm when he was eight. Do you happen to know where he lives? He has brown curls, and he smells of grass and candy. Oh, and my name is written in red letters on his plaster cast. Not really legibly, because the pen was empty, but still. Yes, that Sammy. I need to talk to him.

  I speak louder and faster. Robbert takes me in his arms and lets me blow off steam.

  “Do you think the boys will also get this leukemia?” I ask. “Is it hereditary?” There, I said it. Robbert and I, together, we produced a genetic accident. If we did it once, why not again?

  “The boys are okay,” he says. “They are healthy. You can see how strong they are.”

  I’m not convinced. He says this only to calm me down. And furthermore, it could still happen. And even if it does not happen, there are so many other threats. Life is full of dangers. Look at traffic. Each car is capable of destroying everything I love in an instant. Even a bicycle can kill a human being. A tile falling off a roof can do it. There is no safe place anywhere. I start to cry. “Please always be careful when you leave the house,” I say. “How often do you cross the street on any given day?”

  It’s 4 a.m. Robbert knows it’s useless to argue with me. He strokes my back as he did during childbirth. Long strokes from my neck down. My skin feels raw.

  Later that night I walk through every room in the house, again and again. You’re here, Sammy. I know you hide somewhere. I cannot see you, but that does not mean you’re not around. I want to see you kick your ball. You can smash it against every windowpane. The more broken windows, the better. And yes, you can have as much candy as you want, and scream until my ears tingle. But whatever you have been up to, give me a sign. Prove that you are still alive.

  Frantically I look for the medical article that the doctor gave us. Where did I put it? I finally find it on the bottom of a pile on my desk. I flip through it, pausing at a tangle of bar graphs and charts. The children are grouped by the name of their disease, their age at diagnosis, and their months of survival. I try to trace the lines of the chart with my finger, from the x-axis to the y-axis, each of them being the life of a child. But my finger is too thick for the lines.

  As I stare at them, the charts turn into cobwebs, a snarl of T-cells, leukocytes, blasts, nodules, neutrophils, chemotherapies, and ages. These children can be saved, I think. If I only knew how to find out their names, they would come back to life. But the harder I pull away the cobwebs, the more they stick to my fingers. Finally I give up. I will never know their names, and I am unable to bring them back to life. Their struggle has been completed. Only those who loved them know where to find them.

  The front doorbell rings. From the window next to the living room door I see Hans standing on my doorstep. I do not feel like opening the door, but he keeps on ringing the bell, impatiently walking back and forth. He looks like he always looked when we went to business appointments. Dressed in a custom-tailored suit, his shoes shined.

  What’s he doing here? I’ve not seen him for a while. I hide behind the curtain, since I am not up to seeing anyone, but he continues to ring the bell. When I can’t stand it any longer, I open the door.

  “I knew you were home,” he says sternly. “What took you so long?”

  “Why are you here?” I ask.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” he says. “Are you going to let me in or what? It’s cold out here.”

  “I look terrible,” I say, closing the zipper of a felt vest covered with oatmeal stains. It’s five in the afternoon and I still have not showered.

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” he says.

  I cannot deal with his presence in my living room. He is this hyper-organized micromanager who always has everything under control, and I am at the busiest hour of my day, facing a domestic traffic jam of whining kids and a baby who needs to nurse. The room is cluttered with toys. Hans clears some wooden puzzle pieces from my couch and is about to sit down in his light gray trousers exactly where Matthijs just spilled a bottle of syrup.

  “Not there!” I call out, just in time for him to jump up. He breaks into his familiar loud laugh.

  “Now, tell me, why did you come?” I ask.

  “To see how you are, of course,” he says.

  I wonder why Hans would want to see me. I am a wounded animal who is better off hiding in her cave.

  “You look like you are not taking care of yourself,” he says. “When was the last time you went out to dinner or to the movies? You used to love the opera. Why don’t you arrange for a babysitter? Then I’ll take you out.”

  “I can’t go,” I say. “I need to be with my children.”

  “You see them all day,” he replies. “You should let them go once in a while. You need some time for yourself. It’s good for you.”

  The boys cling to my leg. He looks at them, frowning. “When will you come back to work?” he asks. He picks at a hangnail with his thumb. There is a spot of blood that he tries to lick off without my noticing.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “You can’t go on like this,” he says. “Putting your life on hold. When this is over, you will have to go back to work anyway.”

  “I cannot think of work now,” I say. “In a little while, maybe.”

  “Then it’s too late,” he says.

  We sit together silently, something we never did before. My head spins. I find it difficult to concentrate.

  “Where is the woman I used to know?” he asks after a while.

  His question catches me off-guard. My old life is light-years away. The woman who every morning used to put on a suit and high heels, always traveling from one client to another client, has become a stranger to me. Someone who is vaguely familiar. A woman who looks like me but is not me.

  Hans looks at his watch. “I have to go,” he says. “But I’ll be back soon. I hope you won’t make me wait so long then.”

  I watch as he walks out and drives off.

  “Who was that?” asks Jurriaan, picking up the business card Hans has left on the table.

  “Someone from the past,” I say. “From a long, long time ago.”

  After Hans leaves, my life resumes, with its now familiar new routine. Garbage collectors scream at a drunk who staggers across the street. A man with a pink face leaves the brothel, and the
blond girl takes her place on her chair behind the window. She tidies up her hair, twists open a lipstick tube, and paints her lips scarlet again.

  My house feels cavernous. I roam through it like a restless dog unable to curl up in its favorite place. I sit on the stairs, under the niche that holds the fairy doll in her blue dress, trying to find a way to talk to her. If I tell her what happened, maybe she can help me. But I don’t find any words at all. When I look out the small round window, the house appears to be bobbing like a boat on the canal. I try to focus on the horizon, but that makes me even dizzier. I move on to the attic, where I stretch myself out on the empty wooden floor. The old roof beams form a dome above me.

  With my eyes closed, the house still seems to move, but my nausea subsides. I imagine that I have become taller, so I fit better in the house. Wider, so I fill up the room. Pigeons coo in the rafters of the roof, where they build their nests. I am afraid, of what will come and what will not come. I say my name over and over. I hope for the sound to linger, if only for a moment, but it disappears through the cracks in the roof.

  I’ve fallen through the floor of my existence into a lake of freezing water. I look up at the ice above my head. Frozen jellyfish stare back at me with vacant eyes. My shape is blurred. I have become a watercolor.

  Before Charlotte, I drew myself with crayons, bold thick strokes in bright colors. The scenes in my life changed every day, decorated with different people, different settings, different images. I was careless with my time. Spent it without thinking twice. I did not protect my dearest self. I did not even know what that was, or how to do that.

  Now my world has shriveled to a cocoon, in which I hide with Charlotte. Time has shrunk as well. I think in minutes, live in details. I count the beads of sweat on the forehead of my child. I measure her sighs between naps. I know by heart the number of T-cells in her blood.