After meeting with Leah once, I knew I wanted to see her regularly. Each time I entered her ‘studio,’ my eye would catch something new, and off we would venture into conversations I never intended to have. It was an artist’s dream, a place to unwind, dig deep, and create. Even on the days I left a wastebasket full of tears, I would somehow leave unburdened—my heart and hands having been set free to roam in that safe place.
She had a project in mind for me one afternoon as I shuffled in, weary from tending to Andrew as he endured so much pain. Without a word, she handed me a white pastel board before opening a box of oil pastels resembling fat tubes of lipstick.
“These are Sennilier Pastels. Picasso had them especially made for him in Paris. He wanted them to be as smooth and pliable as women’s make-up.”
I smiled to myself, remembering from my art history classes how Picasso liked his women—smooth and pliable.
I reverently picked up a luminescent blue that looked like a perfect Parisian sky. The oil, made warm by my hands, smeared onto my fingers—slick, greasy, smooth—nothing like any medium I had used before.
Leah got up to turn on some music, then turned back to me with her kind, soft grey eyes. “I want you to let your hands create something beautiful. Fill the entire space. No mind.”
No mind? I tried to grasp what she was asking.
“Let’s say… about ten minutes,” she said, checking her watch.
Ten minutes? Not a chance. I had to think of something to draw first.
“No mind,” she repeated when she saw me struggling to start. “Don’t try to think what you should draw,” she insisted. “What color grabs your eye?”
“Blue,” I said, reaching for the Parisian sky.
“Mmmm…” A soft hum of agreement came from Leah. I glanced up to see a Mona Lisa smile on her face.
Her gentle presence helped me to free up my hands. I pulled the crayon along the length of the board, pushing pigment into the tiny pores. Then I chose another, and another, filling the board with soft oily pigment before using my fingers to smear the colors into shapes. And then we talked. Me with my face down, Leah with her eyes on me. I don’t remember what we talked about, but a lifetime went by.
“It looks like you’re nearly done,” she said, breaking me from my trance. Seeing me pause, she asked, “Do you want more time?”
I shook my head.
“All that in ten minutes,” she mused.
I couldn’t believe it. Only ten minutes? The ecstasy of not having to bring the burden of my thoughts with me had freed me from time. That was the very first time I understood what true meditation must be like.
“What do you think that is?” she asked after we both looked at the image in my lap for several minutes.
I looked at the drawing thoughtfully. “It looks like a mother holding two children, keeping them close. See the curve of the arms?” I pointed to the drawing where vivid colors were broken by a black line fading into a deep violet. “Where the two lines join at the top, makes me think of the head of a mother.”
“Yes,” she said, “I see it, too.” Leah’s smile reached her eyes, and back out to her fingertips. “May I show you the image from my vantage point?” she asked.
Carefully taking the drawing from my hands, she held it upside down—the way she saw it.
“It’s a heart,” I whispered to the woman who was holding my secret. It was my heart. Two uneven, rounded swells at the top, culminating in a point at the base. I stared hard at the image.
“It looks like the entire left side is on fire,” I gasped, recoiling from the red and gold flames that seemed to come from the left side of the image. The right side was colorful, cool, like watery pools. Like a lake, I thought. My lake.
I had frequent dreams about a lake, but it was always shrouded in a heavy, moving mist, until one night just before my appointment with Leah, I saw it clearly.
I was operating a floating coffee shop in the middle of a very deep lake. The lake was its own world, filled with trees and other living plant-like things that grew from the bottom up to the surface. Light penetrated all the way to the bottom of the lake. When the coffee shop closed, I would sit on the edge of the raft with my feet dangling in the water. At night, I would de-pressurize it and go to my home in the deep. The next day I would come back to the surface, my coffee shop restocked with coffee and the typical goodies. People would come from all over to buy my coffee and visit a little. One day at closing time, I had two friends with me. I invited them to de-pressurize with me. We went down the same as usual, but I could feel the ropes getting tighter and tighter until they snapped. We were too heavy. My shop jerked to a halt, and we had to work fast to try and re-pressurize it. I tried everything, but it was too deep now and it wouldn’t move. We were desperate for air and pushed off from the roof of my shop towards the surface. It felt like I had to go hundreds of feet. I sucked in a lungful of water right before the surface…
I woke up in a sweat, gasping for air. I remember pulling back the blinds in our hospital room to see the glow of streetlights, a soft apricot darkness. It felt like I had been away for days. Trembling, I stripped off my damp t-shirt and wriggled into my sweater from the day before as I went in search of something hot to drink. I carried that dream around with me all day and the next. It refused to fade like most dreams in the waking hours, when the mind sets itself on sorting the tasks of the day. Something about the lake forced me to pay attention to it. It was the way light passed through it, moving in such a way that it felt alive. When I walked to the parking garage later that night, I caught the scent of it on the breeze.
Here it was again, that same lake.
“Hmmm,” Leah said, looking thoughtfully at my pastel image. “Fire is purifying. It cleanses with heat to allow something new to take its place. A forest is renewed and transformed after it has been burned.”
I gulped down tears. She read my face with her eyes, a mere ticker tape of my anxieties flashing in front of her.
“Fire is necessary for its survival,” she said to the top of my bowed head.
“And what about water?” I asked.
“Water quenches the soul.”
I couldn’t meet her eyes. I was too afraid to believe her. It was just ten minutes of a coloring lesson. My heart was just fine. I didn’t want to be purified. I was working so hard to cling to life as I imagined it, that I couldn’t fathom what would happen if I were to let go. Would I be destroyed? And what about the lake in my dream? It had lulled me into its depths and soothed me—then turned on me and tried to drown me. I crossed my arms across my chest, a shield to protect me from those unsettling thoughts.
Leah handed the picture back to me. “This is strikingly beautiful,” she said in her gentle voice. “I knew it was inside of you.”
Chapter 14
Frightful was perched on the handlebars of Andrew’s bicycle when I pulled into the garage. On the way home from visiting Leah, an idea had been running around in my mind, and it was confirmed the moment she tilted her head to the side, and our eyes met.
“What secrets do you keep in that bird-brain of yours?” I asked, slamming the door.
She two-stepped on her perch, sensing my approach.
“You really are a beautiful girl,” I said, stroking her back.
A few downy feathers fell off in my hands. It seemed unusual for her to molt in November. Was it possible she felt the stress? Could she sense our worry? Our dogs were responding to the stress in our lives, but I found it hard to believe a chicken could sense the emotion.
Frightful allowed me to scoop her off the bicycle without protest, placing her on the grass next to the rest of the hens. She was constantly underfoot now, determined to make us notice her. She had all but abandoned her usual perch on the green wicker chair, opting for more unusual places like ogling at me from a low branch outside the kitchen window, pacing the dining room deck as we ate dinner, and more recently, taking up residence in the garage as we trudged to and f
rom the hospital.
Andrew had been asking about Frightful nearly every day and we had been placating him with vague answers. I didn’t know when he would get to see her again, and I knew that truth would crush him. Instead of a direct answer, I delivered Hannah’s hand-drawn pictures and notes from Frightful to the hospital, where he was becoming less and less enthralled by the poor substitute for his friend.
After one brutally long day where it seemed that no matter what we did, Andrew could not get comfortable, I came home to find Hannah squatting in the pen, in the middle of a one-way monologue. “You know Brother will be coming home soon. You have to be patient, Frightful.”
She reached out to catch the hen, but Frightful slipped from her grasp, circling the perimeter of the coop.
“Krrillll…Chirp. CHIRP! Bah-bah-bah-GAWK!”
Where are you Andrew? I can’t find you!
Frightful jumped onto a cedar branch Jon had slipped through the chicken wire and regarded Hannah with a fixed stare.
“But I said he will come back! Won’t he?”
Frightful continued her complaint, punctuated by a loud, insistent chirp!, while she paced the branch.
“Why does everybody act so mean all the time? No one even notices I’m here!” Hannah’s voice became desperate, rising in pitch, ending in a sob. In that moment, my fourteen-year-old daughter was a child again, her words a heartfelt longing to understand all that scared her. “You have magic in you, Frightful. I’ve seen it! You can help him. Won’t you please help him?”
I felt like an intruder, watching my daughter implore a chicken to save her brother. I also knew her desperation for her world to be righted, to be made whole, to feel safe. God must be swayed by the cry of a little girl to save her brother…wouldn’t He?
Without disturbing Hannah, I walked back to the house and wandered around until she entered the kitchen. I didn’t mention I had seen her in the coop.
“I had an idea on the way home and thought you could help me,” I said. “I was thinking we could video Frightful in the chicken coop. Andrew could play it back on the iPad, and then maybe he won’t miss her so much.” When she didn’t respond, I added, “You could be in charge of the whole project and teach the rest of us how to do it.”
Hannah concentrated on screwing the lid back on a jar of peanut butter. Then she began slicing an apple.
“What do you think?” I asked.
She tossed the apple, peel, and core into the garbage and glared at me. I eased myself onto a bar stool, knowing I had crossed some unforeseen line.
“You want to talk about it?”
“You’re never home! And then when you do come home, all you do is talk about Andrew. Have you ever thought about how I feel?”
I winced. She was right. Hannah had been shuttled between grandparents, neighbors, and unfamiliar people from the church for so long that she had developed a hard shell around her usual bubbly personality. I couldn’t blame her. Her brother’s condition had become all-consuming, and there was little room left for her.
“I’m sorry, Hannah. I wish I could change things. I really do. I guess I thought this would be something we could do together.”
Her face crumpled. “It’s just so hard. I don’t know what to do.”
I led her to the family room where we collapsed on the sofa. Seeing an opportunity to be pet, Charlie wandered over, easing his ample body into her lap. Hannah’s hands automatically stroked his ears, and I saw an immediate softening of her face.
“I’ve got a better idea,” she said over the purring feline. “How about FaceTime? We could wire Dad’s iPad to the side of the outdoor coop. Then Andrew can see her in real time instead of having to watch her in a video. Maybe he can even talk to her through the speaker? Stranger things have happened.”
* * *
It was true. We were never sure what Andrew might do. When he got an electric bike for his sixteenth birthday, Jon and I hoped it would give him some independence. He liked to ride to the neighborhood market to buy Lay’s potato chips in the yellow and red bag. He wouldn’t touch any other brand. Soon after he got the bike, I received a phone call from the King County Sheriff.
“Is this Andrew’s mom?”
I heard traffic in the background, Andrew’s voice, and my heart gave a lurch.
“Is he okay?” I blurted into the phone.
“Yes. Just fine, but I wanted to let you know that I pulled him over.”
“For what?! Where was he riding?”
I was becoming more panicked by the second. He didn’t have a license, but the bicycle didn’t require one in order to ride in the bike lane.
“Well. It seems he’s riding with a chicken,” he said.
I heard Andrew’s frightened protests in the background, saying, “I told you they don’t make helmets for chickens!”
Knowing this was heading in a bad direction, I asked to talk to him.
“Do you understand what the officer is saying?” I asked.
“Frightful wanted ice cream,” he told me. “What else was I supposed to do?”
I groaned, wanting to wring his neck. At the time, I was infuriated that it never occurred to him how dangerous it was to ride on the street—especially with a chicken. All it would take was her fluttering into traffic, and she’d cause an accident.
Remembering that afternoon, and sharing it with Hannah, made us both laugh. It all seemed so normal, or what we knew to be normal. The warmth of a good laugh spread throughout my body, shedding some of the eternal weight I seemed to carry around all the time. I felt lighter. And wiring up Jon’s iPad to the chicken coop so Andrew could talk to his best friend was our brand of normal.
When I arrived at the hospital later that afternoon, Andrew was in the middle of an animated conversation with Sue—something that had to do with Shadow and Katniss Everdeen nuking the Capitol with AK-47 rifles. His fantasies had become more and more aggressive over the last few weeks, and I wondered if that had anything to do with him feeling more and more powerless.
A quick glance at the IV pump told me he had just received a dose of his favorite narcotic. This always brought out his chatty side, a side only Frightful saw at home. I knew it would only last for a short time until his body greedily used up the effects of the liquid pain relief, so I let them talk, slipping unnoticed into the conference room down the hall. It was by far the best room on the floor, boasting a huge picture window and an upholstered window seat that stretched the entire length of the room. I stretched out flat on my back and watched the world outside carry on without me. Displayed on the far wall was an elaborate artist sketch of their new building. I studied it, praying we would be long gone by then.
“Excuse me, are you Andrew’s mom?” a familiar voice came from behind.
I was startled to see Dr. Torgerson, the immunologist who discovered Andrew’s Trisomy 8 when he was in the third grade. It was thrilling to see him, but at the same time, I held the resentment of being passed along to rheumatology when he had run out of ideas.
“I saw Andrew’s name on the chart this morning and wanted to come by to say hello. Things don’t look to be going very well,” he said.
“They aren’t.”
“I had no idea he was still sick. May I visit him?”
“Sure,” I said, but the crazed thoughts that were zipping through my mind were: Yes! Yes! Hell yes! Please be the genie I always hoped you were! Grant me my deepest wish and heal my son!
Dr. Torgerson followed me down the hall to our room where we found Sue, now silent, in the chair next to Andrew. He was in a drugged sleep, moans of pain escaping his blistered lips. His red cheeks were chapped from a continuous fever, and his eyes sunk in to their purplish sockets. Sue reached out to still his bony legs that were in constant motion under the sheets. I watched for Dr. Torgerson’s reaction. A widening of his eyes, and a catch of his breath told me everything I needed to know.
That day, Dr. Torgerson stepped back into our lives, taking the lead in a qu
est for answers. And that same day, I somehow knew it hadn’t been mere chance that he walked by and noticed Andrew’s name on the wall. It brought to mind Hannah’s request for Frightful to use magic, and in that instant, I pretended that she did. While I waited for Dr. Torgerson to review Andrew’s chart, I wondered if he remembered the first words Andrew said to him when he was only eight: I think my body is trying to kill me. It was obvious now that he had been right all along.
Dr. Torgerson immediately set a team of research analysts to work behind the scenes on our behalf. When he had exhausted all possible tests that could be done in Seattle, Andrew’s blood was shipped to labs out of the country. A paper trail was laid throughout the big research hospitals in the region: Had anyone ever had a patient who presented a group of symptoms like this? Does anyone know of a person with Trisomy 8 Mosaicism who suffers from ulcerations, fevers and unstoppable inflammation seeming to come from no known source?
They were met by dead ends.
Some days, the gentle mannered immunologist would slip into our room and talk to Andrew. Mostly, he dropped by at strange hours with his gold-rimmed glasses and signature bow tie, flashing a handful of research studies he’d been analyzing.
“I’m still looking,” he’d say. Then, just as quickly, he’d shake my hand and disappear.
During that time, we fell into the habit of using FaceTime to connect with Frightful. True to Hannah’s plan, we successfully wired Jon’s iPad to the side of the chicken coop where Frightful liked to dust herself. The first time we tried it, I set my iPad in the bed next to Andrew and listened for the electronic ‘vrruuumm’ of the line making a connection.
“Fright-FEE!!” he called out when he saw her.
The chicken stood up. Clucked. Andrew caressed the screen with his finger. I was overcome with tears and turned away, pretending to look for something in my purse
“I want out of this place,” he said, talking to her.
The Chicken Who Saved Us Page 11