“‘Transition’? Mom, that’s an extremely poor euphemism if I’ve ever heard one.” She was a nurse who dealt with life and death every day, but she still couldn’t accept her sister’s mortality. Could I?
Aunt Karine had been independent, feisty, had lived all over—even on a houseboat in a Mexican lake. All my life she’d sent me letters and postcards chronicling her extensive travels. She’d been an adventurer and an iconoclast and even knew how to hula-hoop with fire.
Then she’d died in hospice care in the spare bedroom across from mine.
My aunt was only thirty-three when she succumbed to multiple sclerosis. And we never had time to get used to the idea of her dying. She was Mom’s kid sister and had been in exemplary health her entire life. She’d been living in an apartment in San Francisco, thriving at her job as a community organizer and moonlighting as a street performer, visiting us at least twice a year in a whirlwind of pure energy and eccentric gifts like sock puppets and glow-in-the-dark models of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Then, last spring, her vision started to blur. Her legs got shaky. Maybe because she was this fetching, vibrant, positive person, the doctors were reluctant to run the serious tests. They didn’t see the red flags. Instead, when she mentioned spinal pain and lumbar soreness, they thought she might have slipped a disk. But they wised up eventually.
It’s not that an earlier diagnosis would necessarily have prolonged Karine’s life. MS is incurable, and my aunt had an extremely acute, accelerated form. She was wheelchair bound within a month. Wheelchair bound, the woman who seemed to live half her waking hours dancing on air. The woman who could compel a crowd of total strangers to attend to her movements on the sidewalk. The woman who had first taught me how to hear music with my whole body. The woman who sounded to me like a symphony.
Not long after the diagnosis, it became clear that Aunt Karine couldn’t care for herself or remain in her San Francisco apartment, so my parents flew her to Santa Fe and moved her in with us. Karine tried to insist that we turn her over to a nursing facility, but my mother wasn’t entertaining that idea for a second. She seemed to think that only under her own personal supervision would her little sister get better. Mom is a nurse, after all. She had faith in her medicine, and she had faith in the healing powers of Santa Fe.
Karine had lots of friends in the area, as she seemed to have in every area—a gaggle of cowgirls and artists and dancers and buskers and Indians from four surrounding states. They would stream in and out of our house to say hello. Then, when Karine’s medical situation became more dire, people began streaming in to say goodbye.
Which was more than I could do.
Mom grew quiet at the kitchen table, and I immediately felt bad for reprimanding her. She took a sip from her can of ginger ale, then cleared her throat and brushed the oily crumbs from the front of her dress.
“My point is, I know it helped Karine to keep her lines of communication open, to talk to her friends.”
“Maybe,” I said. But I’d now told two people besides my parents and the doctor about my symptoms—Jay and Thomas—and I didn’t feel much better, physically anyway. My head still throbbed. I still felt pins and needles on my arms at random moments. Like this one, for instance.
“Do you ever talk to Kaya Johnson anymore?” Mom said. “Maybe she would have some insight into what you’re going through since she also has a . . . condition.”
Kaya! Of course! The most obvious person ever. Due to her rare form of congenital analgesia—an inability to experience pain—Kaya literally could not feel a knife cut into her skin. She would be perfect for Jay’s ritual. Her condition informed her entire existence, and not in a good way. I knew in my heart—and from long association—that she would give anything to feel something. In addition to that, she was Pueblo on her mom’s side and Navajo on her dad’s (who lived with his second family on the rez). I couldn’t help thinking that her Native American heritage might make her more receptive to my proposal.
“You’re absolutely right, Mom,” I said. “You’re a wise woman. Maybe even a saint. Kaya is exactly the person I need right now.”
Maybe I was overdoing the gratitude a little, because Mom seemed astonished that I’d taken her advice. “Oh,” she said, seeming self-conscious. “Okay. Well, please give her my love. I haven’t seen her in so long. She’s such an exceptional person.” She balled up the potato chip bag in one hand and clasped my hand with the other. I gave her a kiss and dashed out the door.
• • •
I drove to Kaya’s house, which was on the outskirts of town—not far from Fernando’s Pharmacy, in fact. Even though it was a warm Friday evening, I knew that Kaya would be home. With the exception of school hours and doctors’ appointments, she could pretty much always be found at 57 Crockett Way. Mrs. Johnson had outlawed any hobbies or after-school activities, deeming them too risky for her daughter’s fragile state. After all, a stray projectile at a football game had the potential to give Kaya lasting organ damage. And Mrs. Johnson didn’t trust other people to monitor Kaya. Which wasn’t so paranoid of her, really, considering kids used to stick paper clips and sharpened pencils through Kaya’s skin in the back of the elementary school classroom to see if they could get her to cry. (They never could.)
I should explain something about Kaya’s condition. When she was three, her mother, oblivious, sent her to preschool with a broken arm. After a few days, a classroom aide thought the arm looked a little wonky and took Kaya to the school nurse, who immediately sent her to the hospital for X-rays. For a full week, little Kaya had been playing, sleeping, and eating breakfast cereal with a compound radial fracture. The pain would have leveled any other kid, but Kaya hadn’t complained once, so her mother had no idea the arm was broken. A few weeks later Kaya almost bit her tongue clean off, never feeling a thing. You could still see the stripe of scar tissue whenever she licked an ice cream cone.
By the time her rare condition was identified and precautions were put in place, Kaya had experienced the full range of covert injuries. She’d stepped on rusty nails, dipped her hands in boiling water, scratched her soft spots during nightmares until she stained her sheets with blood, and had at least one emergency eye surgery for an infection caused by a foreign ocular object she couldn’t feel.
I never saw Kaya cry. Not at sleepovers when other girls began teasing her about the gloves she had to sleep in so she wouldn’t scratch herself raw. Not on the playground when she fell over—and once knocked out a tooth after jumping off the swing set into a concrete barrier. Blood poured out of her mouth, and she just kept playing as if nothing was wrong. At the time I was more upset than she was—I started weeping and then got a sympathy toothache that lasted days.
When Kaya was five or six, Mrs. Johnson became hypervigilant. For instance, she was the first one to rush to Kaya on the playground that day and scrabble around the sand pit looking for the lost tooth. I still remember the way the silver rings on her fingers flashed in the sun as she dug frantically through the sand.
But her overprotective single mom couldn’t shield Kaya from getting a reputation as a Grade A weirdo. Kaya was the white buffalo of our town. To most people, she was sort of creepy, but also sort of sacred. Locals were proud to claim her, in a queer way—she’d even been featured in a People magazine story about teenagers who can’t feel pain—but they kept their distance because she was taboo. No one wanted to be the white buffalo. Or even party with the white buffalo. Better to corral her off, keep her as offbeat eye candy.
Mrs. Johnson was portrayed in the People article as a sort of beleaguered, woe-is-me single mother who was both gifted and cursed with this special-needs daughter. She struck me as the type who was always aiming for the sympathy vote. I didn’t entirely trust her, and I didn’t think Kaya did either. Unfortunately, when I rang the doorbell, it was Mrs. Johnson who answered.
“Hi!” I said, trying not to betray the unk
ind nature of my thoughts.
“Consuelo McDonough. It’s been a long time.” Kaya’s mom paused, maybe waiting for me to give an explanation, but I said nothing. “What brings you here?”
Over the past few weeks, I’d realized that certain people made my symptoms flare up. Mrs. Johnson, for instance, made my middle finger twitch ever so slightly on my right hand. But she was Kaya’s maternal security detail, and I had to be civil.
“Oh, I’m just here to see Kaya,” I said politely. “We’re . . . working on a school project together. Is she home?”
Mrs. Johnson eyed my backpack, as if to check it for sharp objects. Like I was going to smuggle in a chainsaw to hack her daughter to pieces. “Kaya,” she yelled up the stairs. “Your old”—emphasis on the “old”—“friend Consuelo is here.” The trepidation in her tone made me wonder if she secretly wished to keep Kaya in one of those giant sterile bubbles.
“Thanks,” I said, still trying my utmost to contain my frustration at having a bodyguard between me and my oldest friend in Santa Fe. “Okay if I just go up?” Before Mrs. Johnson could answer I was rocking the stairs two at a time, like I used to.
“Be my guest,” Mrs. Johnson murmured as she retreated toward the kitchen. “But bedtime is promptly at ten. And I don’t want her leaving the house.”
I pushed Kaya’s bedroom door open after a cautious knock, and she started. Apparently she hadn’t heard her mother announce me, due to the headphones in her ears.
“Lo?” she said timidly. “What are you doing here?”
I plopped down on Kaya’s purple beanbag—no hard edges in her bedroom, obviously.
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
We probably hadn’t spoken more than twenty words to each other in a year and a half, and now I was in her bedroom, where we used to play with plastic show horses and magic kits for hours on end. Then, when we were a little older, where we tried to summon the spirits of the dead with a Ouija board and predict our futures with tarot cards. I’d still never met anyone else with a similar lust for paranormal experiences. But it had been years since I’d even read my horoscope in the newspaper.
“Whoa,” she said. “Is there a blue moon this month that commanded you to come here or something? Is everything all right?”
I’d forgotten how pretty Kaya was. I used to tell her that all the time—how I wished I had her high cheekbones, fawn-colored skin, and intense cat eyes. Though I felt pretty good about my physical appearance, sometimes I still coveted her looks. My strawberry blond hair and green eyes often drove me nuts—I was a freak Irish girl in the midst of the Southwest. But the same shy body language that Kaya enlisted to protect her fragile person—head lowered, arms crossed over chest, shoulders hunched, et cetera—also served to camouflage her finer features. Now, swiveling around in her desk chair, she brushed her black bangs from her face as if she wanted me to notice those cat eyes once more, as if she wanted to show me that she was still the same pretty person I used to compliment. Then her hand shot nervously back into her lap.
“Listen, Kaya,” I said. “I’m sorry to barge in here like this. I know that we’ve . . . drifted apart. But there are only a few people I can trust at this point, and you’re one of them.”
Kaya had never been judgmental. I used to open up to her about every crazy thought and feeling that passed through my brain, and she’d just roll with all of it even when she couldn’t relate. I tried to do the same for her. I missed that about us. But standing here in front of her now, I suddenly felt as if my success with Thomas had been pure luck. I was supposed to pitch Kaya some story about a magical coyote and a mesmerizing forest gypsy and a five-person sacred ritual, and she was supposed to jump on board without asking too many questions. None of which I could answer, of course. I was about to call to order a wing-and-a-prayer sort of meeting, and I didn’t have any words. Where to begin exactly? So this coyote . . . ? I decided to skip the preliminaries.
“I’ve got a major problem.”
Kaya looked at me skeptically. I didn’t blame her. How could she know anything was wrong behind the shiny veneer of Agua wishing-well happiness I usually exuded at school?
“That makes two of us,” Kaya said. Touché. And it was true. Kaya had problems that even her mother didn’t know about. I knew from personal experience that she could be . . . reckless with her anesthetized body. Years ago, right around the time Kaya and I stopped hanging out every day, she told me that sometimes she cut herself at night, hoping that she’d find out what pain was. I all but freaked out when she showed me the fresh lacerations, all jagged from the serrated steak knife she’d used.
I shuddered involuntarily at the memory. I couldn’t handle any more knife imagery that evening. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment and breathed deeply. TranquiLo. For an extended second the perfume of Kaya’s bedroom brought back memories of sleepovers, late-night psychic readings, intimate secrets, and laughter that erupted volcanically whenever we were together.
“It sucks that we’re not friends anymore,” I said suddenly.
“We’re not friends anymore?” said Kaya innocently. “Then what am I supposed to do with all the bracelets I made you at summer camp?”
We both smiled. We had always shared a borderline cheesy sense of humor.
“I’m serious,” I said.
Kaya shrugged. “My current lifestyle doesn’t exactly support a wide social circle. By the way, did my mom happen to frisk you when you came in?”
“Nah,” I said. “She only asked to neutralize the three grenades I was packing.”
At that moment Kaya’s mom knocked on the door, and we both started giggling. Mrs. Johnson had obviously been creeping because we hadn’t heard her approach across the aged floorboards.
“Kaya?” she said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Mom,” Kaya said. Then, quietly to me, “Ugh.” We heard footsteps retreat reluctantly down the hall.
“Man,” I said. “You’d think one of us would’ve sensed her presence. Aren’t we supposed to have psychic powers?”
Kaya and I used to visit a psychic once a week. Santa Fe was full of people eager to read our palms, predict our rosy futures, and above all take our allowance money. Kaya liked all that pseudo-mystical stuff. And for my part, I just found what psychics had to say more interesting than what Mom’s favorite Catholic priest intoned on Sunday mornings. (For-give the sacrilege.)
“What?” said Kaya. “You didn’t know she was out there? I did.”
“I was too busy, um, reading your next-door neighbor’s mind. Chester isn’t sure how to tell his wife that he’s leaving her for his llama trainer.”
“Makes sense,” said Kaya. Her tone was flat, and I got the feeling she was done joking around.
“So you’ve got a problem, huh?” she said. Maybe I was psychic after all. “Not that you don’t deserve every happiness,” she continued, “but most girls, as you must know, would kill for your problems. Which span the spectrum of midfielder to point guard to quarterback.” I wasn’t sure if I deserved all that, but Kaya was allowed to be hurt that I hadn’t been around. I hadn’t tried hard enough to hold on to my friend.
“I wish,” I said, ruing the lack of boyfriends I’d actually had, despite appearances. Boys and I always seemed to break off at the friend mark. Or at least at first base. “I don’t think my life was ever that idyllic. In any event, it’s kind of a shitshow now.”
“Yeah, well, like I said before, I can relate,” Kaya said. She shuffled some oversized tarot cards on her desk, and I decided to change the subject.
“So I take it your mom is as . . . involved as ever,” I said.
“Actually, she’s been trying to give me a looser rein. I talked to her about it. She’s even letting me have a birthday party next Friday night, out at Shell Rock? You know, the picnic area out there? A band is going to play and everything. I�
��m really excited.” I must have looked hurt, because then Kaya backtracked. “I hadn’t invited you because. . . . Well, you’re invited now. If you want to come.”
“Sure,” I said. Kaya smiled. She hadn’t had a birthday party in years. I guess you could only be so festive when you were essentially isolated from anyone with nails and teeth. “I’d love to come,” I said. “You should be celebrated, Kaya.”
She shrugged her shoulders again and nervously began tapping the tarot cards on her desk.
“Let’s read each other’s fortunes,” I said. “Like old times.”
Kaya smiled. “Okay,” she said, nostalgia overcoming us both.
“You first.” I took the tarot deck from her and began shuffling the cards.
“Don’t cut them like you used to,” Kaya said. “I mean, I’m older now. I don’t need you to baby me.”
“You knew about that?” I said. In junior high I used to hand-pick the cards so Kaya always got feel-good images like the Magician and the High Priestess. Then I’d interpret them as positively as possible. I shouldn’t have cheated, but she was already feeling gloomy about her life and her future, and I’d wanted to give her something to look forward to.
People should always play tarot with friends. You get better fortunes that way.
“Ask your question,” I said. “But don’t tell me what it is.” Kaya closed her eyes, trying to commune spiritually with the cards as I spread them on the desk. This time I didn’t cheat, and I drew Death first.
“See?” I said, troubled but trying to hide it. “This is precisely why I’m bad at this game.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Kaya said. “Sometimes the Death card can mean something positive. You know, like transformation, regeneration, et cetera. Or, I’ll get run over by a steamroller tomorrow. Hard to say.”
“Let’s stick with transformation,” I said. “Next.” I drew another card. The Hanged Man in reverse. “Okay, granted I’m a little rusty, but I think this means you’re about to let go of something you’ve been clinging to, like maybe a feeling or a relationship. Orrr . . . ,” I said, “in the spiritual realm, I think it means something like beliefs from your childhood are going to come back to . . . sort of . . . haunt you. Also, you should eat more vegetables.”
The Way We Bared Our Souls Page 6