I raise my head and stare out to a sea that, with the sun moving to the horizon, has turned silver. The air is chilly, and I shiver. My aunt wraps her arm around my shoulders.
“What I’m saying,” she continues, “is, yes, you’ve suffered, but she’s suffered even more. Your dad’s been sick for such a long time. You can’t blame her for being terrified she’ll lose this person who, she’ll tell you, shares her heart.”
Finally, I look at Aunt Frannie. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? There’s simply no room in her heart for me.” I can feel tears hot against my eyelids and I’m immediately transported back to my awkward, preteen self: powerless, sad, angry, forgotten.
“It seems that way, I know,” my aunt says. “But she loves you so much and always has. She did the best she could under the circumstances, but here’s something about your mother you need to understand. She’s fragile, Claire, and she always has been. Even when I met her, when I moved into town and we were in the same eighth-grade class, you could tell there was something, oh, I don’t know, otherworldly about her. It wasn’t only her psychic abilities. It was like she was almost transparent.” Aunt Frannie gives a chuckle. “Or like an amoeba. Not a sharp edge anywhere on her. Life flows in and out of her, and it’s as if she has no ability to filter it. Like that time some butterflies got trapped in the garage during a heat wave and they all died. Remember, she collapsed in a heap on the floor, wailing?”
I nod.
Aunt Frannie turns my face toward her. A brown curl whips across her cheek. She yanks it away and gathers her hair into a sloppy bun at the back of her neck. “See, she’s not nearly as strong as you are. You’re tough, probably because of how you were forced to grow up fast. And you’re independent, and those are both great qualities. But sometimes, those traits . . . well, they can take over. And that’s not good.”
I sniff and she reaches into the pocket of her sweatshirt and hands me a few crumbled tissues.
I press them to my eyes and whisper, “I’m not sure what I can do to help.”
“Here’s what I think. I want you to continue to be strong, but I also want you to soften your heart,” says my aunt. “I know I’m asking a lot, but you need to find a way to forgive her for whatever she did or didn’t do in the past. Do what you can to help her through this. Your mom probably doesn’t even know what she needs, but, see, as the stronger one, this means it’s up to you to try to figure out a way to help her, however you can and in whatever way she’ll let you.”
I put my head back down on my knees, close my eyes, and remember: the dance recitals with the empty seat where she wasn’t; the time I broke a glass and she threw a broom at me, shouting, “Like I don’t have enough to worry about around here”; me in the emergency room with the school nurse, my arm broken after a fall from the monkey bars, while she tries to reach my mother to get permission to have the doctor put on the cast. Picture after picture of me, alone, facing what had to be faced, good or bad, by myself. It wasn’t that I didn’t know where she was: it was always one of two places, either at home helping my father or working in the shop. But that didn’t make the absences any easier to handle.
The disconnect between my mother and me eventually became intractable, the bricks in her barricade laid so close, mortar filling every crack, that there was no way to break through—for either of us—and, over the years, I feel like I’ve lost the ability to even guess how to try. And, worse, like I’ve lost the desire to even want to try. I’ve been pushed so far away for so long that I’m not sure, even if I wanted to, how to bridge the gap.
My aunt stands, looks down at me and says, “Listen, I know you’re still mad and upset about what you had to take on as a kid, and I don’t blame you at all. But, Claire, you’re not that child anymore. You can’t continue to blame her for what she couldn’t help.” She stretches out her hand.
Grabbing it, I stand.
“How?” I ask, trying to stop tears that have soaked through the tissues. “How do I do this?”
Aunt Frannie pulls me in for a hug. Her words are muffled by the wind, which has shifted and strengthened, pummeling our ankles with sparks of sand.
“Forgive her for what she wasn’t able to give you and forgive yourself for what you think you didn’t or couldn’t do right.”
I lean away from her and say, “Who are you, Dr. Phil?”
We start to giggle and she says, “Learn to love her so you can love yourself and can then truly give your heart to someone else.”
“Got any more clichés in there I need to hear?” I say, laughing and grabbing her arm to run to the car, sand pelting our backs.
Aunt Frannie stops and stares at me. “No kidding, Claire. Maybe take the first step and the rest will come? You’ll figure it out. I know you will.”
I look at my aunt whose face I’ve known my whole life, who, to my knowledge, has never told me anything but the truth. I’m almost a foot taller than the twelve-year-old of that long-ago summer, so I need to bend down a bit to kiss her cheek, and as I do, I can feel the first sliver of brick begin to chip and fall away.
“I’ll try,” I say.
12
Rena
STEPHANIE’S BATTLE BLOG
Posted on July 18 by Stephanie’s Mommy
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU GUYS FOR THE PRAYERS!!!
THEY WORKED!
It’s true! Stephanie will finally be coming home . . . but not for too long. Me and her will be out of here SOON to go to the doctor I know/pray can help her. YAYYYYYYYY!
Of course, I’l keep everyone unformed on my journey to cure my little girl.
Keep those prayers coming. Really—this makes miracles happen.
I’m sure of it!!!!!!!
Rena’s Way to Well: Feed Your Kid Right
You all know I believe in making your childs gut bacteria better.
Probiotics are good but for a more natural way, try sauerkraut.
I got three 24-ounce bottles of Orley’s Organic Kraut for Steph—the best!
She’s not crazy about the taste but its soooooo good for her tummy.
And, so is playing in the dirt, specialy in bare feet!
13
Claire
When we arrive at the hospital my father is asleep.
From above the stiff white hospital sheets, my father’s face looks waxy, like plastic fruit. His eyelids flutter slightly when I touch his cheek and whisper, “Daddy?”
“I’ll give you some time,” says Aunt Frannie.
“Okay. Where do you think Mom is?”
“Don’t know. Maybe the cafeteria? I’ll check and come back.”
Left alone with the beeps and clicks and whines of the ICU machines pushing in or taking out whatever’s necessary, I can’t think of anything to say to my father. I’d watched enough made-for-TV movies to know what you’re supposed to say in this kind of situation (You are strong, Dad. I know you can pull through this. I love you very much. Please don’t leave me and Mom. Dad, please don’t die. Please don’t die. Please don’t die.), but they all seem too pat, these reheated lines.
Instead, I start to simply talk to him, the way I used to, when I lived at home, when he wasn’t too sick or weak to listen. Back then, even when his eyelids would drift shut and I knew he’d been carried gently into some medicated half slumber, I would continue talking to him because always, I could imagine what his responses would be. It wasn’t the same as a real conversation, but it was close enough.
“So, Dad,” I say now. “This is quite a pickle you’ve got yourself in, right? I come all this way to see you and what are you doing . . . sleeping?” I smooth the blanket over his arm, running my hand down the length of it. The covering can’t hide the boniness of what’s beneath.
“Hey, remember when you taught me how to use a compass? Remember that day when we went hiking and got lost in the forest and you had me use the compass all by myself to get us home? Wow, that was something, wasn’t it? How old was I? Eight? No, maybe nine. Yeah,
I think I was nine.”
His chest rises and falls, and a gentle whoosh of air escapes his lips, and one of the machines switches from short beeps to an extended high tone.
“Dad? You okay?”
A nurse rustles into the room, gives me a small smile, adjusts one of the clear bags above the bed, and says, “Sorry, but ten more minutes until visiting hours are over.”
I nod and she leaves, closing the door quietly behind her.
“Anyway, Dad. That was some day. Being lost and then you trusting me to get us home. And I did it.” I reach under the blanket and the sheet and squeeze his hand, which feels artificially warm, as if the heat is generated only from outside his body.
I lean toward his ear. “I’m scared, Daddy. See, if you go, I’m not sure . . . I don’t know what she’ll do . . . what I’ll do . . . I’ll be lost, for sure.”
I kiss him on the cheek, my tears dampening his skin.
I find my mother and Aunt Frannie in the hospital chapel, huddled together in the pew behind the only other occupant, an older man who is sobbing openly, a white hankie smashed against his mouth.
I slide next to my mother, who looks up with red-rimmed eyes but doesn’t immediately seem to recognize me. Then she pats my hand, mumbles “Claire,” and collapses forward, weeping.
I say, “I saw Dad.”
My mother straightens and stares at me, her eyes raw and pleading. “What do you think? How do you think he’s doing? Do you think he’ll be able to handle the surgery?”
“I don’t know, Mom.” She begins to cry again.
“But this is a great hospital. And the doctors here are supposed to be excellent. Right, Aunt Frannie?”
Placing her arm around my mother’s trembling shoulders, Aunt Frannie says, “The best.”
My mother calms slightly, and we’re quiet for a moment, listening to the man, whose sobs have now downgraded to sniffles.
The chapel is small, a blank space that could just as well have been a conference area or an employee break room. The ceiling lights are dimmed, which only adds to the gloom but does nothing to impart any sense of serenity or warmth. The room feels stark and clinical, an extraction of its environment. Electric candles burn from within the musty silk flower arrangements placed throughout. Even with the faint nondenominational music pumping through speakers set high on the beige walls, I can feel the hum of the medical system, an undercurrent of machines, blood labs, fear, and grief.
“Mom, let’s go home, okay? Visiting hours are over, and there’s nothing else we can do here tonight. What do you say?”
She nods weakly, and Aunt Frannie and I help her stand.
After I transfer my carry-on bag from her car, Aunt Frannie hugs my mother and then me and says she’ll meet us at the hospital tomorrow morning before the surgery.
“What time’s the operation?” I ask my mother as she maneuvers the car out of the parking lot.
Adjusting the rearview mirror, she says, “As long as he remains stable during the night, they’re planning for eight thirty.”
“Early. That’s good.”
She nods and asks, “Flight okay?”
“Slept most of the way.”
“That’s good.”
When did this stiltedness between us become entrenched? Unless my mother is unloading her anxiety on me via psychic vision or through nutritional advice—more of a monologue on her part than a two-way exchange—our conversations are mostly superficial and perfunctory. It feels like we both have to carefully consider what we’re going to say, as if we were strangers who’d met in the grocery line, marking time until our turns at the register by discussing the pros and cons of firm or extra-firm tofu.
After that day at the beach when my father had his first stroke, we were all hopeful it was a one-time terrible event, that if he followed a regimen of basic good living and took the multiple medications the doctors recommended, he would be fine. After all, nobody, certainly not us, believed a man in his early forties—especially someone like my father, who played tennis weekly, ate with enthusiasm the vegan meals my mother prepared, and didn’t smoke or drink—should worry needlessly about death. He looked good, and all of his doctors praised him as their model patient, the poster boy of stroke recovery. Our naïveté took on a whiff of hubris that first year.
Over the next six years, both pride and hope diminished as we experienced the unbridled vengeance of genetics.
My father’s father, a bitter man who had vigorously disapproved of his son—a promising medical student at the time—becoming involved with a “woo-woo nutcase,” and who demanded a paternity test before he would even see me, was as ill as he was nasty. After multiple strokes, he eventually died of a final one when I was nine. Even so, when we compared my grandfather’s lifestyle of cigars, booze, and nearly constant acts of venomous retribution, we refused to believe that my clean-living, gentle father could have been splashed with even a drop from that particularly fetid DNA pool.
It wasn’t until after Dad’s third stroke in as many years, where his right arm hung limply at his side and when it took him fifteen minutes to remember the names of the bones in the wrist (something he could once do in seconds without using the mnemonic “She Looks Too Pretty Try To Catch Her”) that we began to imagine a future that was more drearily realistic and less optimistically rosy. The following year, yet another stroke left him unable to do more than release the occasional incoherent garble and, then too, the humiliation of incontinency.
It was too much for him. It was too much for everyone.
Using her own vast knowledge of alternative treatments, and tapping the collective wisdom of her far-flung holistic community, my mother tried everything: bilberry to lower his cholesterol, ginkgo to improve the blood flow to his brain, and a series of exercises she performed on his mostly lifeless limbs with the rigor and consistency of a drill sergeant, straining along with him as they attempted to uncurl toes spastically frozen in pain.
Besides caring for my father, my mother also shouldered the sole financial burden for the family. As his health deteriorated, Dad could no longer work and the other doctors in his practice absorbed his patient load. Mom began working extra hours, taking on private holistic care clients in the evenings and weekends. In desperation, she even began to offer group psychic readings at birthday and bachelorette parties. I’d heard her once tell Aunt Frannie she felt she was prostituting herself but simply did not know what else to do. She’d come home late in the evening, her eyes sunken with fatigue, ask me how my father had been, and then go to his room to check for herself.
We were shift nurses exchanging information about a particularly difficult patient. There was no time, no energy to trade familial niceties or to even inquire about the routine matters of each other’s day. We knew what they were: I went to school and she worked and we both took care of my father. Once we lost that sense of ease, of effortlessly chatting back and forth about the most mundane of matters, we couldn’t seem to find it again.
As we drive home from the hospital, I look across at my mother, her face a jigsaw of light from oncoming traffic. It’s begun to mist outside, and she doesn’t seem to notice that the inside of the windshield has fogged in the humidity.
“Mom, can you see okay?” I ask. She doesn’t answer, so I reach over and flip on the front defroster.
It’s as if I’ve slipped back in time, that I’ve again donned my cloak of super responsibility. I’m the one who’s supposed to watch over things and make sure everything’s okay. It’s worse than that—again, I’m the one who has to save my mother from drowning in the murk of her fear and grief. But here’s the question: Who will help me?
I think about the talk on the beach with Aunt Frannie and what she said about me taking the first step and wonder how I can even begin.
14
Rena
STEPHANIE’S BATTLE BLOG
Posted on July 20 by Stephanie’s Mommy
SHE’S HOME!
Finally—my b
aby is back where she belongs. Of course, she was pretty droopy at first. But I gave her a lot of good organic food and she sleeped in her own cozy bed (she really missed her stufed animals). She looks so much better now. The first night she was home, I sleeped on the floor next to her bed. I just had to be near her. I know all you mommies understand that!
Ginny P: We’re with you, Stephanie’s Mommy. Keep up the good fight. Get your baby where she can have the treatment she needs. Ur in our thoughts and prayers . . . always.
Yolandathegreat: Stay strong. She’s lucky to have you as her mama. Pls keep us posted on this.
Krisiblue: we mums have quite the job, don’t we? Consider using wheat germ. I swear by it and my little guy has never been healthier
MartinaQ: Let us know where you are when you get settled and could you please post that recipe again for the quinoa pancakes? They were terrific!
It takes forever for my mother to answer the door. I ring the bell and knock again.
The house hasn’t changed a bit since I was here the last time, about six months ago. The lawn is all brown spots, weeds, and dandelions. The Cape Cod is falling down on both sides so it looks like a melting birthday cake. Brown grocery bags cover the two front windows and taped to the front door is a ripped piece of cardboard. My mother wrote on it: I AIN’T BUYING WHATEVER YOUR SELLING SO GET LOST.
Finally, the television shuts off. I can hear her mumbling. “Give me a second, will ya?”
When Mom answers the door, Stephanie runs up the steps and grabs her around the waist.
“Gram, Gram,” she says.
“How you feeling, bunny girl?” Mom asks.
Stephanie looks at me and then back at my mom. She says, “Good.”
“Speak up, Stephanie. Gram can hardly hear you,” I say.
“Well, you look tip-top,” my mom says. Turning to me, she repeats, “Tip-top. Hardly would know she’s been sick at all,” and motions for us to get in the house.
The Perfect Fraud Page 7