I throw my napkin down on the table and try not to step on the wrapped birthday gift next to my chair as the real twelve-year-old leaves through the good French door.
* * *
The next day the terrorists bombed the World Trade Center. The day after that, Tina started a new brand of chemo. But first she had to endure a procedure to remove the fluid rapidly collecting around her lungs. During a thoracentesis, a needle long as a butcher knife would be inserted into Tina’s back and into her chest cavity, drawing out the mucus her lungs were now floating in.
On our way into the hospital, the front page of The Dixie screams, “Threat Of New Terror Is Serious.”
Rose O’Sharon meets us at the door. “Y’all come on back and have a seat,” she says over a stuck-pig grin. “We been expecting you.”
Entering the inner sanctum, it’s damned near impossible for the four of us not to take in the walls of the hallways already decorated for Halloween. Nothing like a cancer ward full of cardboard ghosts, goblins, and skeletons to remind you of your impending mortality.
A handsome technician who looks just like an African American Jesus kneels next to Tina in the waiting area of the radiology department. “Now, Mrs. Stalworth—”
“Call me Tina.”
“Tina. What we’re going to do is we’re going to stick a needle in your back to remove the fluid collecting around your lungs.”
Garrett looks away. Sis puts her head in her hands. Having banished the chief executive assistant in me to exile in light of recent events, I focus on a nearby potted plant in order to avoid eye contact with any of the more levelheaded decision-makers in the familial hierarchy.
“We can’t put you to sleep because you need to stay awake while we do this. That way you can take some deep breaths for me while I perform the procedure. Okay?”
Tina stands and follows the technician. I also stand, but my feet are frozen solid to the freshly buffed linoleum beneath them.
The technician turns and smiles. “Would you like to come with her? You can wait just outside her room.”
I wait while Tina sizes me up. With a nervous smile, she almost nods. I follow them in.
* * *
While I’m waiting, I notice that, unlike my travel alarm clock at home, the second hands of every single one of these titanic-sized hallway clocks appear to travel in the worst kind of slow motion.
“Now, Ms. Stalworth, how are we doing so far?” the technician asks Tina from inside the room.
“Good. I’m good.” She sounds more brave than scared, almost defiant, which raises my spirits higher than I would have thought possible.
Another technician, a woman, says, “Now how are we doing?”
A noise from Tina—a tiny cough, then a big one—“Oh, Jesus, oh, no. Oh, Jesus, you’re killing me!” she shrieks.
In seconds, my morale plummets. My mother is in serious trouble, and there’s nothing I can do to help. I want to climb the wall and tear the second hand off the clock with my bare hands.
“Please don’t—oh, my sweet Jesus you’re killing me—”
During this moment, the world I had created from the ground up with its food, its books, and its macrobiotic gurus forever capsized.
One of the technicians, not handsome Jesus, had punctured Tina’s lung with the needle, and it had collapsed. We learned this happens in about 30 percent of all cases.
As they roll Tina into the next room on the gurney, her face flushed from a lack of oxygen, the four of us surround her. Garrett holds a compress to her head, Sis massages her feet, and I hold her hand. After making a waving motion with her free hand, we are finally able to make out a faint whisper from Tina. “You are all suffocating me.”
The three of us look at each other in horror until we realize Tina is attempting, as best she can, to break the glacial frost in the room with humor. Garrett releases a big bass “Ha!” like somebody slapped him hard on the back. Tina even manages a smile at her quip. Sis and I finally join in, the laughter coming easier after this close brush with death.
Attempting to clear my head in the hallway, it occurs to me that while we’re so busy trying to control our destinies, maybe that’s the most we can hope for. That if someday we have to endure some god-awful, suffocating, physical torture, we’re surrounded by some sort of family, be they blood or not, to suffocate us with something else.
On our way home, Tina asks to stop by McDonald’s for fries and a shake. I place the order myself through the car window.
* * *
Two days later, Garrett begins construction on the camp house. From my bedroom window, I see Tina turn briefly from a blank easel as he blows her a kiss on his way out to his pickup with the blueprints.
Sis informs me Tina is no longer speaking to Justin and Marsala, or as Tina now refers to them, the shitasses. I, on the other hand, have dialed their number in the hopes they’ve forgotten some minute but invaluable detail.
“So, you guys didn’t notice anything the last time we came up? I mean, come on, y’all, that’s a lot of cancer not to have seen,” I say, practically daring them to come up with something.
“You know, I’ve always thought it would take Tina seven years to heal,” Marsala chirps. “I did the math, and what with her inability to assert herself in situations of—”
“Okay, you know what?” I’m not even sure what I’m going to say, so I finally settle on, “Blah.” There is silence from the other end. It almost feels good to quiet the constant cacophony of recipes for endless teas, baths, and compresses pledging miracles no one has proved since the dawn of man. “Okay?” I say, like there’s anything they can agree to. “Blaaah!” I hold the phone out in front of my face, barking like a dashboard bobbledog. “BLAH-BLAH-BLAH-BLAH-BLAH-BLAH-BLAH.”
I slam the phone down in the cradle, shaking with rage and disappointment.
* * *
In early October, my mother begins to lose her mind. When I return from my run one evening, a desperate Tina meets me at the door.
“There is bomb in the oven and a volcano erupting in the swimming pool.” She turns to Garrett and Sis, who are standing in the kitchen door. “The only place to hide is in the car.”
Radiation treatments would start the next day to kill the cancer cells in Tina’s brain, although I wondered if you were going to go, wouldn’t you want to be as unaware of the whole thing as possible?
“There is a Russian spy in the Little House,” Tina says. “I don’t know what he could possibly want with me.”
“You don’t worry about him,” I say, putting my arms around her protectively. “He’s as good as dead. Okay?”
Tina rests her head on my shoulder. “Okay,” she says, unconvincingly.
35
After shopping in co-ops and health food stores for two years running, I noticed all “normal” grocery stores smelled like laundry soap, even the produce section. To this day, I still get queasy walking through the sliding glass doors of a supermarket.
Smuckers, Lay’s, French’s, Del Monte—the bright, colorful, squeaky-clean shelves call out names I haven’t heard in ages as I make a sorry-assed attempt to steer the wobbly-wheeled shopping cart behind Sis in the Jackson Super Delchamps.
Heading down the oral hygiene aisle, Sis looks to her left, then to her right, then stops, unable to move. Her posture founders as she stumbles back a step, abruptly pitching forward in the same beat as she catches herself on the shelf with the palms of her hands like a Mardi Gras drunk.
“Why am I looking for dental floss?” she grunts, squinting at me with a pained expression I’ve never seen. She makes a grand, sweeping gesture across the mouthwash and the Pearl Drops. “Thousands were killed in the Trade Center, we could all die of some horrible, senseless disease even if we don’t smoke,” she says, crying in quick, staccato spurts, combing the shelves like a mother looking for a lost child, “and here I am looking for dental floss. It’s no wonder we age, start to fall apart. It’s all just too much to take.”
I can see the butcher behind the meat counter halt his consultation with a sharply dressed businesswoman. Sis flails her hands about her sides like a demonic washing machine, her shrill voice croaking in the upper registers. “Shit, man,” she says, rubbing her forehead like she’s been attacked by some unseen swarm. “Happiness from clean teeth?” she asks no one in particular.
She takes a deep, weepy breath and tosses her head back. Thankfully appearing to pull herself together, she shambles down the aisle before her sandal catches on nothing, and she gives the floor a swift kick. “Fuck you, America,” she says in a voice too loud for her surroundings. “Fuck you, store.” She kicks the floor again.
I dare not move. I suppose to everyone else, this terribly theatrical playlet would portend nothing but angst and defeat. But if my own recent experience has taught me anything, it’s that the human animal can only stand so much of one emotion before it automatically goes the other way. It’s the way we’re wired. There’s even only so much joy we can take before we sabotage a good thing.
So, I take two steps over to the hand soaps and wait for the flip side.
At the end of the aisle, a mother holds back her little girl like Sis might be rabid. Sis looks at the woman and then to me with a half-aborted snort, something she’s always done when something terribly funny sneaks up on her from out of nowhere. I laugh out loud, something I’ve always done when she does it.
That night I fell asleep to the sounds of my mother and father softly singing from the confines of their pitch-black bedroom.
“Aaaand heeee walks with me
And he talks with me
And he tells me I am his own
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever knoooown—”
—from an old Baptist hymnal my great-grandmother had bequeathed us. It was the saddest, sweetest sound I had ever heard.
* * *
The next morning I find Garrett slumped at the patio table, crying softly over the unopened newspaper in front of him. “She said she’s ready to go. I said the days’ll fly like that,” he says, snapping his fingers hard, “before it’s time I come on myself.”
Taking a seat next to him, I stare at my hands folded in my lap. Since I hit thirty-five, the days have slipped far too quickly to suit me, and when I’ve hit sixty, as Garrett has, the years would surely pass like one of those time-lapse calendars from a silent movie.
“The lake is losing water.”
I’m not quite sure I’ve heard him right. “What?”
“The lake up at the camp house. I had it tested beforehand to make sure the soil had enough clay to support the water. But something went haywire. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to save the catfish.” He takes the newspaper, swats it hard at the side of the patio table, and turns away. “God knows I do love that woman.”
I decide not to say I told you so. He doesn’t need me or anyone else to remind him sometimes even the best-laid plans won’t hold water.
36
One night Tina and I sat on the ground in the garden, waiting for the promised rainstorm that would bring an end to the drought we’d endured for so long now. Our hopes were firmly in check since we’d been promised the storm many times over the last two years. Watching the last of the season’s fireflies float about the bluff, their dull green glow a polar opposite of the bright yellow mating dance of the early spring, I remembered collecting their magic in Mason jars as a kid. I wondered if it would be worth it. If someone said to me I would have to endure round after round of chemo and thoracenteses to see another season of fireflies on a balmy night, would I do it?
“A few months after I married your father, some doves nested outside our kitchen window. Only one of the babies had hatched. And one morning I went outside and a snake had gotten into that nest and killed that baby bird. The mother and father were still milling about in shock. Oh, I was furious!” she says, fingering the neck of her sweatshirt. “I sat next to that nest for hours with your daddy’s shotgun waiting for that snake to come back. But the funniest thing happened. Before that day was over, would you believe that pair of doves started moving what was left of that nest out to another tree across the way?” Tina pulls a shawl up over her shoulders. “I always wanted to believe in reincarnation, you know? Come back as a bird? Now, I don’t know.”
A clap of thunder peels across the Tombigbee in the distance.
Tina is suddenly galvanized. “You know, I used to be so scared of thunder, but then Mother taught me this game. See, if you count slowly from the first boom of thunder until you see the lightning flash, that’s how far away the lightning is. If you can count to three, the lightning is three miles away.”
Surveying the equation for the first time in eons, her childhood memory makes total sense until I do the math in my head. “That’s not it,” I say carefully.
Tina cocks her head, unsure where I’m going.
“The lightning comes first. You count from the lightning, you wait for the thunder.”
A moment of silence passes before Tina takes this in with a quick gasp. “So, you mean I’ve been doing it wrong my whole life?”
I keep quiet, as the way she scans the night sky tells me this revelation may be about a great deal more than storm warnings for her.
“Well,” she says after a few interminable moments. “I guess it’s too late for me to get all those years back.”
Another rumble tumbles from the heavens, this one closer. I think of Saturday mornings in L.A. and how I would awaken to the reverb of the dumpster as the garbage man wheeled it back into the subterranean garage underneath my apartment. During my first years in California, I would inevitably mistake the sound for rolling thunder, only to throw open my curtains to find yet another godforsaken, flawlessly sunny day.
A bright flash illuminates the hollow below the garden like a snapshot as a final clap of thunder tears across the creek, shaking the earth beneath us.
And then—my hand to God—it starts to rain. Anyone from the South knows that moment at the onset of a good rainstorm when all you hear is one really loud drop, then one more, then another, like some divine deity is leisurely pelting the earth with tiny lead weights.
“Well,” Tina says, her eyes shut tight. “I don’t even think I believe this.”
It rains buckets, it rains torrents, the tall pines bent in the wake of heaven’s grace. Neither of us makes any attempt to move from our places in the cold, wet dirt.
* * *
Two years after her diagnosis, Tina, Sis, and I climbed the highest point east of the Mississippi. The macrobiotic higher-ups had never seen anything like it. We planted a flag, picnicked on the ground, and asked a stranger to take a picture. In the picture I still have taped to my refrigerator door, we are tan, thin as hell, and healthy as horses. This, I believe, tells the story. However it all ended, we had this time. A time when most in her place would have been too sick from treatments to climb out of bed, much less climb a mountain. Tina thrived. As did we.
Tina adamantly refused any pain medication of any kind, including aspirin, until the last few weeks. I’d always thought of her as so fragile, but looking back, I know I could never have been that brave. Perhaps she wasn’t the wounded bird I’d always thought.
And did Tina die, I wondered, because she couldn’t speak up for herself, or did some microscopic by-product of mosquito-killing DDT lodge itself in her lung years ago, waiting to carry out its destiny?
I can remember a time when I’d have given anything to have the answer to that question. But the longer I’m on this earth, the fewer answers I seek. At a certain point you stop asking.
* * *
On Thanksgiving Eve, I was helping Tina brush her teeth, something she’d lately forgotten how to do.
“Okay, so now you just need to spit,” I say behind her shoulder.
Tina laughs and shakes her head.
“What do you mean?” I ask. “You don’t remember?”
&nb
sp; Tina looks out the window at nothing.
“No, look, Tina, that’s okay.” I gently turn her head in my direction, turning over in my mind how one actually demonstrates the task of spitting. Sidling up to the edge of the sink, I lean over and pretend to spit the biggest wad of toothpaste ever to hit porcelain. Wiping the imaginary spittle off my chin, I say, “Yeah?”
Tina nods obediently and pees on the floor. “Uh-oh,” she says, like a child.
I kiss her hard on the cheek, take her hand, and wait for the flip side.
* * *
That night, coming into the home stretch from a run, I see the ambulance leaving the house, passing me on its way out of the neighborhood, bouncing like a top on Blue Cove Road before it disappears around the wooded bend. I stop, petrified, hands on my knees, listening to the high-pitched wail of the fading siren.
At the hospital, Sis tells me that Tina had choked on some water and gone into a semiconscious state. “The doctors want to know how we feel about resuscitating her if it comes to that. I asked him what he would do if she was his mother, and he said he wouldn’t fight it.” She picks at the fabric on her chair. “I just keep thinking if I hadn’t given her the water.”
“Don’t think about that for a second,” I say, placing a hand on her shoulder, already certain that glass of water was the steady hand of providence.
* * *
I wasn’t quite sure how we found we’d been transferred to a hospital suite that resembled the digs of a decent hotel. I was unaware there were any rooms like this in any hospital. I wondered if all people were delivered to these oases just before they met their maker. I later found out Garrett had made the call. I had told him and Sis I would stay the night with Tina, and that they should go home and get some rest.
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