The first envelope she opened was from the Africa’s Children’s Fund, and from the enclosed brochure a malnourished brown toddler beseeched her with his eyes to send money. Ever since Marika had exhausted her granny’s inheritance, she’d been unable to send much to the agencies asking for help, but she always unfolded and read carefully the pages containing personalized letters, descriptions of famine victims, postcards of abandoned kittens, complimentary address stickers. Today she received the most horrifying depiction of cruelty she’d ever seen, a picture of a chimpanzee some hunters had illegally caught and were selling in an Asian marketplace. They’d stretched and pinned the body, as if for crucifixion. The accompanying letter explained that its body parts would be cut off and sold, some while the creature was alive, some as delicacies, some as folk remedies. Nobody was protecting the chimpanzees.
After reading the letter and brochure, Marika folded the pages back into the envelope and placed it on her animal pile. She also had a disease pile, a poverty pile, a refugee pile, and a pile for natural disasters. All the piles wiggled as her table rocked on the uneven floor, and though she considered sticking some of the envelopes under the table leg, she thought better of it and went to the kitchenette to find some cardboard from a cereal box to wedge there.
Marika’s mother was furious with her for squandering her inheritance on those damned causes. She said, “You’ve got nothing to show for that money.”
“I don’t need anything to show,” said Marika. “I just want to help.”
“The more you help, the more they’re going to want from you. There’s no end to need.”
Marika’s favorite cousin was spending her inheritance on her upcoming wedding, while her brother had bought a used minivan. Her older sister, who put her money into an emergency fund, said, just last weekend, that Marika had better lose some weight before being fitted for her pink bridesmaid’s dress. She added, “Or you’re going to look like a butter mint.”
Marika knew that this sort of meanness was just her sister’s habit and her sister loved her plenty. Her sister was going to help her with the makeup to cover up her acne, which had gotten worse recently, maybe because she was eating a lot of cheap sweet snacks.
Marika’s interest in worthy causes had begun seven years ago with her fund-raising drive for the Teen Testicular Cancer Foundation, promoting early detection of the disease that had afflicted her high school boyfriend, Anthony. They’d only hung out together a few times before he was diagnosed, but Marika stayed with him the whole two years of his treatment, sitting at his bedside, accompanying him to chemotherapy and radiation appointments, holding his hand whenever he would let her. After he was cured, he broke up with her, and that was when Marika had begun to learn about hundreds of other worthy organizations. With her current salary, she could send forty dollars to some group every week, but that was only if she ate dinners at the Good Works Kitchen and didn’t go to movies. (This Sunday she hadn’t been able to resist a matinee of A Begonia for Miss Applebaum, based on one of her favorite books.) She got her clothes from the mission store and had put nothing aside to buy a new TV—hers had fizzled to a gray blur months ago—and still the envelopes piled up, rustled and squawked around her like starved nestlings. She opened the last letter, from Pan American Disaster Relief, which said, among other things, that Microsoft mogul Bill Gates had earned more money last year than the GNP of a particular Central American country whose infrastructure had been devastated by a hurricane. Before Marika finished reading, a gust of warm air from the heating vent knocked the whole animal pile to the floor. As she sat cross-legged, gathering the envelopes, she lingered again over the chimpanzee picture, wondering what kind of people could treat a rare and noble creature that way. She resisted an impulse to ask God. She took the view, generally, that people ought to try to work out problems as best they could without putting so many additional demands on God.
The following morning at the hospital, where Marika worked as a phlebotomist, she couldn’t stop thinking about the animals, wild and domestic, whose hope for salvation had fluttered so easily to her floor. Marika was the only phlebotomist remaining after the hospital implemented ReDesign™. The consultants from New Jersey ordered the elimination of all phlebotomist positions, but the hospital kept Marika for the hard cases, for the old people with ruined veins, for the junkies who had to be drawn through scar tissue, for whisper-thin premature newborns who were poked through the bottoms of their heels and had their legs milked. Marika was steady enough and fast enough to draw blood from the people who needed to be restrained, such as Lightning Man and the lady with the red wig who accused the doctors and nurses of stealing the baby she always imagined she’d just given birth to. At four-foot-ten, Marika could sometimes slip in beside a nurse without even being noticed, but she always tried to make eye contact to reassure the patient she was there to help. She’d touch the inside of a person’s arm with two fingers to find a vein the way men in the wild countryside used to locate underground streams with a divining rod, and she often had a lavender vial full of blood, 0.5 ml, before the patient registered her poke.
“Oh, Marika,” moaned Mrs. Lockwood, her first draw of the day. “Thank God you’re here, dear. I told that nurse you were the only one who could take my blood, but she insisted on butchering me.” Marika looked over at Lucy the LPN, who stood by the sink with her arms crossed, looking both apologetic and annoyed. On Mrs. Lockwood’s right arm, there were three inflamed pokes, and one of Lucy’s attempts had gone through the vein and out the other side so that some blood had pooled under the old woman’s papery skin. Marika tightened her latex tourniquet as gently as possible on Mrs. Lockwood’s left arm before palpating the inside of her elbow and swiping the vein with alcohol. When Marika finished, the woman squeezed her hand and held it.
“You don’t think there’s anything in all this new year’s business, do you? I mean the trouble with the computers acting up?” Mrs. Lockwood whispered. “It’s been all over the TV.”
“Oh, no. Everything will be fine,” Marika said reassuringly. “And you should be able to see the downtown fireworks from your window if you’re awake at midnight.” All hospital staff had been directed to reassure patients that there was nothing to fear, to prevent any sort of panic. This memo caused some grumbling among certain employees who themselves had bought generators and windmills and were stockpiling rice and beans and gasoline for the coming apocalypse. One man in transport had started raising chickens. “The power could go out at midnight,” he’d told Marika, “and never come back on, never in our lives.”
“Thank you, dear,” said Mrs. Lockwood, finally letting go of her hand. “And Happy New Year.”
Marika felt a thrill move through her, as it always did when she was able to help or comfort someone, but it dissipated too quickly.
On the way out, Marika whispered to Lucy the LPN, “Her veins are fragile. It’s not your fault.”
Lucy absentmindedly rubbed the inside of her own elbow. Marika knew the nurses hadn’t wanted to start taking blood on top of their other duties, but they all had to go along with ReDesign™.
Marika wheeled her rattling cart down the hall and into the elevator beside an unfamiliar woman minding a four-tiered tray of breakfast dishes. Her name tag read Crissy. The skin of her face was chapped, and her mouth was set in a frown.
“Are you new?” Marika asked. She enjoyed making new staff members feel welcome.
“I been here three days, and I never seen so much food thrown away in my life,” the woman said. The way her gray hair was pulled back tightly made her narrow face look fierce. Marika studied the plates, which were nearly full. She’d noticed the waste every day and didn’t like it, but she hadn’t made a cause out of it.
“It’s a shame.” Marika shook her head. She wished there was some mitigating factor she could mention that would make the waste seem less awful to Crissy, something about healing being a complicated process, about how maybe turning away food might be par
t of healing. They didn’t have waste like this at the Good Works Kitchen, that was for sure—those people came in hungry and cleaned their plates.
The woman blinked bloodshot eyes and responded angrily. “It’s worse than a shame. For years my own children went hungry. We didn’t have enough to nourish body or soul. Some bad days I fed my babies nothing but dandelion greens. And we’re throwing away all this food, just tossing it in the garbage can.”
“I’m so sorry,” Marika said. She got off at the first floor, leaving Crissy to continue to the basement alone. The woman’s anger left Marika so shaken she forgot to say Happy New Year. She made a beeline to her locker in the lab and ate the two Little Debbie oatmeal cream cakes she’d brought in her lunch bag. If only someone could carry that wasted hospital food to the starving children everywhere, she thought. Next time she saw Crissy, she’d mention the Good Works Kitchen, just in case her family was threatened with hunger ever again. Though most of the patrons were men, a few tables were reserved for families.
Marika’s next mission was to gown up to draw blood on a patient who was newly transferred from a hospital a hundred miles away to the new Titus Bronson Burn Center. Beside the burn center’s main desk hung a fund-raising poster depicting a dark-eyed girl with fringed bangs whose pretty face was scarred; the line below her read, Help Us Heal, and below that, Into the year 2000. A drawing of a thermometer showed that the hospital had reached only forty percent of the fund-raising goal. Donations from the Kiwanis, the Shriners, and other organizations were largely responsible for opening this unit, but, according to the thermometer, at the turn of this new century, the need was as great as ever.
According to his chart, Marika’s new patient—or client, as the ReDesign™ people would call him—was eighteen years old. Though his mouth was exposed, much of his face was wrapped in gauze, and bandage pads had been fixed over his eyes. His neck and shoulders looked slender but strong under the gown and sheets—maybe he was a high school athlete, as Anthony had been before the testicular cancer. The boy’s hands were covered with white-gauze mitts, and someone had strapped his wrists to the bed with foam restraints so he could only shift his position slightly; perhaps he’d been tearing at his IV or sterile dressings. She read his bracelet to confirm he was indeed Terence Tuttle, born May 8, 1981. She saw that under his covers, his ankles were also strapped down.
“Good morning. My name’s Marika. I’m from the lab.” She knew he couldn’t see her, but hoped he could hear her. “How are you feeling?”
“They’ve tied me up, ma’am,” he said. “I’m a prisoner.”
“You’re not a prisoner, I promise, but they must need to restrain you for your own good,” she said. “Can I call you Terry?”
“My uncle is Terry. They call me Tiny.” He spoke with a southern accent as strong as any she’d heard outside of the movie Fried Green Tomatoes. His pronunciation made Tiny sound like a real name.
“Well, Tiny, the doctors need a little of your blood. It’ll take just a few seconds. You might feel a poke,” said Marika, grateful for once that her hands were cool as she massaged the inside of his elbow.
“They already took my blood,” he said. “How much blood do they need?”
“You’re in good hands at this hospital. The doctors and nurses here are the best.” She fixed the tourniquet on his arm.
“Your name is Marika?” he said. He didn’t flinch when the needle entered. “That’s an awful pretty name.”
“Thank you.”
“Would you touch me, Marika?” he whispered when she pulled the needle out. “Down there? Please.” He was asking politely, as a thirsty person might ask for a drink of water.
“I can call a nurse,” she suggested. “Maybe your catheter needs adjustment.”
“You sound pretty, Marika,” he said, speaking slowly, letting his words unroll. “I’ll bet you’re beautiful.”
“I’m not really,” she said, though she knew beauty was not just about looks, and she believed that somebody someday might find her beautiful, no matter how she might look in a pastel bridesmaid’s dress with cap sleeves.
“Please, Marika, put your hand on me, down there,” he whispered with more urgency, and she noticed the pads over his eyes were tinged yellow and soaked with tears. Maybe he would never see again.
“You know I can’t do that,” Marika said.
“Why not?” he asked. His mouth, she noticed, seemed crowded with teeth. “Why can’t you just touch me?”
“How did you get burned?” she asked.
“We were checking out the fireworks we got for New Year’s Eve,” he said, making fireworks into farworks. “My uncle says we’re all going to die tonight at midnight, so we spent our money on fireworks and brung them up from Indiana. And now everybody’s going to be at the party, and I’m going to die alone.”
“The world isn’t going to end,” she said.
“If you could just touch me, I’d feel better.”
She studied his little mound under the otherwise smooth sheet. She’d assisted nurses with catheters, had other times nudged away the dangling male organs the way she might nudge a hand or a fold of cloth that was in the way. She’d even drawn men through their penile veins at times when no other veins were usable. Maybe she would adjust him through the sheet and see if that helped. She reached out, but when a PCA ambled into the room with boxes of latex gloves for the dispensers, Marika pulled away. The boy moaned as her fingers brushed the sheet over his thigh.
“Oh, please, lady,” he pleaded. “Touch me.”
The PCA, a small gray-haired woman with dark bulging eyes, shook her head and said, “That boy’s been trying everybody’s patience. We had to tie his hands to keep him from yanking on himself, and all day he’s been trying to get somebody to grope his pud.”
Marika’s hand trembled as she stuck the label onto the boy’s vial of warm blood and settled it into her wire cage.
“Has he been tested for testicular cancer?” Marika asked. “It’s the most common form of cancer in teenage boys. He’s just eighteen, according to his chart.”
“Cancer ain’t that boy’s problem.”
As Marika left the room, she felt the PCA shaking her head, but that woman was wrong if she thought a victim of crippling burns couldn’t also have a deadly disease—that was like saying Bangladesh or Haiti was too poor to have devastating floods.
If Marika had touched him, she might possibly have found cancer, or she might’ve been fired.
At her ten o’clock break, Marika ate the sandwich she’d brought for lunch. She couldn’t focus on her novel, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, for thinking of the stretched-out chimpanzee in the brochure and the burned boy strapped to his bed. She could still hear him saying her name over and over, as though her name meant something special to him.
Feeding and soothing and protecting people and animals should be so much simpler than it was, and at the hospital somebody ought to find a way to provide comfort for a person in such pain as Tiny was in. Thinking about the suffering of others usually helped Marika forget her own problems, but lately Marika had been feeling sorry for herself for not having had a boyfriend in six years—longer, if radiation therapy appointments didn’t count as dates. Self-pity was the least pardonable of sins, but some days it was hard to remember to be grateful she didn’t have Lou Gehrig’s disease or leukemia or even an empty belly. Sometimes she tried to go hungry, tried to eat less, but her cravings for sweets could overpower her. She never could say no to a meal at the Good Works Kitchen, and once something was on her plate, she couldn’t waste it—especially now she wouldn’t be able to waste it after hearing about Crissy’s family eating nothing but dandelion greens. Being alone wasn’t nearly as bad as being a refugee or a victim of a famine or of debilitating burns, so what was the matter with her?
Though the rest of the morning was busier than usual, Marika kept hearing Tiny’s slow, sweet voice in her head. She weighed the pain of each person whose blood she drew and e
ach time felt pretty sure Tiny’s pain was greater. One man, who was laid out flat with a broken back, told her about his underground bunker in Allegan County. On the television in the man’s room the sound was off, but Marika saw people unloading long guns from a wooden box the size of a child’s casket and hanging them on hooks on the wall of a pole barn, alongside blue-plastic fifty-five-gallon drums labeled gas. While she applied the sticker to the vial of blood, the picture changed to a hawk-faced man in a wheelchair with two pistols in his lap. A stout woman stood behind him with her hand on his shoulder as he showed one of the pistols to the camera, but they never showed the woman’s face.
“The apocalypse is coming tonight, and I’m stuck here,” the man with the broken back said, with tears running down the sides of his face. This could not go on, Marika told herself, all this suffering. But what could a person do?
On her lunch break she walked to the bank to cash her check, and she asked the teller how a person might take out a loan. She was directed to a customer service representative, a woman about the age of Marika’s mother. When the woman stood up to shake hands across her desk, Marika saw she was over six feet tall.
“I’d like to take out a loan,” Marika said as she lowered herself into the chair. She’d often cashed her hospital checks here, but she’d never noticed how high the ceilings were—this room must be expensive to heat, she thought.
Mothers, Tell Your Daughters Page 15