by Pia de Jong
My mother is now older than my father was when he died. Her hair is white, her face wrinkled. I can envision her sitting in her living room, among all the precious items she gathered during her long life. Lost in thought, she gazes through the window at the blue sky, thinking of her children and grandchildren, of me and Charlotte.
She is the last of the people who stood over my crib and could not stop watching me. She is the only one who remembers all my thousand baby faces.
When I go back to Amsterdam, I always walk into the alley to greet my old house. As I stand on my toes and peek inside the window, Mackie’s door invariably opens and he steps outside. Then we talk as we used to. I tell him about the children and how they are growing up. He is concerned about me, the same way my father used to be. Between us, nothing and everything has changed. It comforts me that the last picture of his mother, with my newborn Jurriaan on her lap, is still taped to his kitchen wall.
Lots of children now play in the alley. It has turned into a safe pedestrian walkway. The whores are gone, and with them the needy men. The brothel has now become a private residence. A young couple who hope to start a family one day soon live there. The place where the queen-sized bed once stood is now a cozy dining area. The bulb dangling from the ceiling has been replaced by a designer chandelier, and all that remains of the red light on the front of the house is a pair of rusty bolts.
The children’s playground has stayed the same over the years. The swing, the sandpit, the old oak—they are all still there. New kids scamper by, watched by mothers I have never met. Sometimes on quiet afternoons, when I rest on the bench, I see a child cycling by whom I think I knew back then. I remember red cheeks glowing in the autumn light, a high-pitched voice, a scraped knee.
Louis died a few years ago, in his sleep. I like to think that his last dream was about the little children on his square. I am sure he died with a smile on his face.
We regularly have Charlotte’s blood tested. The results have always been good. Nothing reminds us of her illness except for the fading scar on her thigh. I realize every day how blessed we are.
Once a year we take her for checkups to her Amsterdam oncologist. Again we find ourselves waiting in the room with the model ship, the floor with the painted seashells. It’s always full of kids, their faces pale or bloated. Often there is a soft bandage in the crook of an elbow, and always there is a child fidgeting with a tube in his nose. Their parents invariably sit on the bench, at an appropriate distance from each other, their bodies stiff with desperation.
When the doctor calls her name, Charlotte jumps up. He beams when he sees her. I know he is glad we decided to let her do it her way.
“I often tell young doctors about Charlotte,” he told me the last time, stroking his now gray beard. “Whenever possible, we want to be cautious with aggressive treatments.”
Sammy, the boy who one day appeared in my life, has never really left me. They could not be more different, he and Charlotte. A black boy, a white girl, an ocean between them. Yet the stories of these two children, who both survived this leukemia, became intertwined.
Once in a while I am startled by the sound of a bouncing ball. Every time it hits the floor it becomes fainter, until it is silent again. Then I wonder whether I really heard it or whether it was merely the sound of the hopes I have held for so long.
Sammy is now in his early twenties, but for me he will always be eight, the age at which we both broke our arms. Sometimes, somewhere in a city in America, I think I see him walking on the street. His faded red baseball cap, his dark curls peeping out by his ears, and most of all his undaunted look. But how will I ever know?
Charlotte is standing in front of the gilded mirror in our hallway. A girl of sixteen in a miniskirt that flutters above her knees. She flips her long hair over her shoulders. When I give a kiss on the nape of her neck, I inhale the scent of spring.
Our eyes, meeting in the mirror, remain intertwined. I see myself and Charlotte at the same time. For just a moment we once again become one person. Time evaporates. I have ended up in the future I feared would not be granted to us.
Outside, a car pulls up, its back seat full of smiling girls.
“Bye, Mom,” she says as she walks out the door.
“Bye, Charlotte,” I say.
Through the window I watch her girlfriends greeting her. I wave, but she no longer sees me. It is chilly inside the house. I light the fire and stare at the flames. They dance before my eyes, changing from yellow to blue. I warm myself at the glowing embers. The wood crackles reassuringly, and I inhale the sweet odor of resin.
A painting of our old house on the canal in Amsterdam hangs above the fireplace. When I stand on my toes and look through the window, I see myself sitting in the bedroom, behind the walls of my medieval fortress, thick enough to keep out the plague. Me, a mother with her newborn baby in her arms. A petite infant wrapped in a blanket. The girl looks pale, the mother anxious. Softly she sings to her child.
Author’s Note
This book is an account of the year after my daughter, Charlotte, was born with leukemia in 2000. Specifically, she was diagnosed with congenital myeloid leukemia that manifested itself in her skin. The outcome for congenital leukemia is extremely poor, but a few spontaneous remissions have been described in literature. Based on the extreme rarity of the condition there is no specific guidance given by the learned societies. For any case of congenital leukemia it is of utmost importance to consult a board-certified pediatric hemato-oncology specialist with extensive experience in this field.
Copyright © 2016 by Pia de Jong
Translation copyright © 2017 by Pia de Jong
First published in Dutch by Prometheus (Amsterdam 2016)
under the title Charlotte.
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