My father finds me when I have put the book aside and started searching for
Vega. “Can't see much tonight, huh?” he asks, taking a seat beside
me. It is a night wrapped in clouds; even the moon seems covered with cotton.
“Nope,” I say. “Everything's fuzzy.”
“You try the telescope?”
I watch him fiddle with the scope for a while, and then decide that it's
just not worth it tonight. I suddenly remember being about seven, riding beside
him in the car, and asking him how grown-ups found their way to places. After
all, I had never seen him pull out a map.
“I guess we just get used to taking the same turns,” he said, but
I wasn't satisfied.
“Then what about the first time you go somewhere?”
“Well,” he said, “we get directions.”
But what I want to know is who got them the very first time? What if no one's
ever been where you're going? “Dad?” I ask, “is it true that you
can use stars like a map?”
“Yeah, if you understand celestial navigation.”
“Is it hard?” I'm thinking maybe I should learn. A backup plan,
for all those times I feel like I'm just wandering in circles.
“It's pretty jazzy math—you have to measure the altitude of a star,
figure out its position using a nautical almanac, figure out what you think
the altitude should be and what direction the star should be in based on where
you think you are, and compare the altitude you measured with the one you
calculated. Then you plot this on a chart, as a (line of position. You get
several lines of position to cross, and that's where you go.” My father
takes one look at my face and smiles. “Exactly,” he laughs.
“Never leave home without your GPS.”
But I bet I could figure it out; it isn't really all that confusing. You
head toward the place where all those different positions cross, and you hope
for the best.
If there was a religion of Annaism, and I had to tell you how humans made
their way to Earth, it would go like this: in the beginning, there was nothing
at all but the moon and the sun. And the moon wanted to come out during the
day, but there was something so much brighter that seemed to fill up all those
hours. The moon grew hungry, thinner and thinner, until she was just a slice of
herself, and her tips were as sharp as a knife. By accident, because that is
the way most things happen, she poked a hole in the night and out spilled a
million stars, like a fountain of tears.
Horrified, the moon tried to swallow them up. And sometimes this worked,
because she got fatter and rounder. But mostly it didn't, because there were
just so many. The stars kept coming, until they made the sky so bright that the
sun got jealous. He invited the stars to his side of the world, where it was
always bright. What he didn't tell them, though, was that in the daytime,
they'd never be seen. So the stupid ones leaped from the sky to the ground, and
they froze under the weight of their own foolishness.
The moon did her best. She carved each of these blocks of sorrow into a man
or a woman. She spent the rest of her time watching out so that her other stars
wouldn't fall. She spent the rest of her time holding on to whatever scraps she
had left.
BRIAN
JUST BEFORE SEVEN A.M. on Sunday, an octopus walks into the station. Well,
it is actually a woman dressed like an octopus, but when you see
something like that, distinctions hardly matter. She has tears running down her
face and holds a Pekingese dog in her multiple arms. “You have to help
me,” she says, and that's when I remember: this is Mrs. Zegna, whose house
was gutted by a kitchen fire a few days ago.
She plucks at her tentacles. 'This is the only clothing I have left. A Halloween
costume. Ursula. It's been rotting in a U-Store-lt locker in Taunton with my
Peter Paul and Mary album collection."
I gently sit her down in the chair across from my desk. “Mrs. Zegna, I
know your house is uninhabitable-”
“Uninhabitable? It's wrecked!”
“I can put you in touch with a shelter. And if you like, I can speak to
your insurance company to expedite things.”
She lifts one arm to wipe her eyes, and eight others, drawn by strings, rise
in unison. “I don't have home insurance. I don't believe in living my life
expecting the worst.”
I stare at her for a moment. I try to remember what it is like to be taken
aback by the very possibility of disaster.
When I get to the hospital, Kate is lying on her back, holding tight to a
stuffed bear she's had since she was seven. She's hooked up to one of those
patient-managed morphine drips, and her thumb pushes down on the button every
now and then, although she is fast asleep.
One of the chairs in the room folds out into a cot with a mattress thin as a
wafer; this is where Sara is curled. “Hey,” she says, pushing her
hair out of her eyes. “Where's Anna?”
“Still sleeping like only a kid can. How was Kate's night?”
“Not bad. She was in a little pain between two and four.”
I sit down on the edge of her cot. “It meant a lot to Anna, you calling
last night.”
When I look into Sara's eyes, I see Jesse-they have the same coloring, the
same features. I wonder if Sara looks at me and thinks of Kate. I wonder if
that hurts.
It is hard to believe that once, this woman and I sat in a car and drove the
entire length of Route 66, and never ran out of things to say. Our
conversations now are an economy of facts, full of blue chip details and
insider information.
“Do you remember that fortune-teller?” I ask. When she looks at me
blankly, I keep talking. “We were out in the middle of Nevada, and the
Chevy ran out of gas… and you wouldn't let me leave you in the car while I
looked for a service station?”
Ten days from now, when you're still walking in circles, they're going
to find me with vultures eating out my insides, Sara had said, and she'd
fallen into step beside me. We hiked back four miles to the shanty we'd passed,
a gas station. It was run by an old guy and his sister, who advertised herself
as a psychic. Let's do it, Sara begged, but a reading cost five bucks
and I only had ten. Then we'll get half the gas, and ask the psychic when
we can expect to run out the next time, Sara said, and like always, she
convinced me. Madame Agnes was the kind of blind that scares children, with
cataract eyes that looked like an empty blue sky. She put her knobby hands on
Sara's face to read her bones, and said that she saw three babies and a long
life, but that it wouldn't be good enough. What's that supposed to mean?
Sara asked, incensed, and Madame Agnes explained that fortunes were like clay,
and could be reshaped at any time. But you could only remake your own future,
not anyone else's, and for some people that just wasn't good enough.
She put her hands on my face and said only one thing: Save yourself.
She told us we would run out of gas again just over the Colorado border, and
we did.
Now, in the hospital room, Sara looks at me blankly. “When did we go to
Nevada?” she asks. Then she shakes her head. “We need to talk. If
Anna is really going through with this hearing on Monday, then I need to review
your testimony.”
“Actually.” I look down at my hands. “I'm going to speak on
Anna's behalf.”
“What?”
With a quick glance over my shoulder to make sure Kate is still sleeping, I
do my best to explain. “Sara, believe me, I've thought long and hard about
this one. And if Anna's through being a donor for Kate, we've got to respect
that.”
“If you testify for Anna, the judge is going to say that at least one
of her parents is capable of supporting this petition, and he's going to rule
in her favor.”
“I know that,” I say. “Why else would I do it?”
We stare at each other, speechless, unwilling to admit what lies at the end
of each of these roads.
“Sara,” I ask finally, “what do you want from me?”
“I want to look at you and remember what it used to be like,” she
says thickly. “I want to go back, Brian. I want you to take me back.”
But she is not the woman I used to know, the woman who traveled a
countryside counting prairie dog holes, who read aloud the classifieds of
lonely cowboys seeking women and told me, in the darkest crease of the night,
that she would love me until the moon lost its footing in the sky.
To be fair, I am not the same man. The one who listened. The one who
believed her.
SARA
BRIAN AND I ARE SITTING ON THE COUCH, sharing sections of the newspaper,
when Anna walks into the living room. “If I mow the lawn, like, until I
get married,” she asks, “can I have $614.96 right now?”
“Why?” we say simultaneously.
She rubs her sneaker into the carpet. “I need a little cash.”
Brian folds the national news section. “I didn't think Gap jeans had
gotten quite that expensive.”
“I knew you'd be like this,” she says, ready to huff
away.
“Hang on.” I sit up, rest my elbows on my knees. “What is it
you want to buy?”
“What difference does it make?”
“Anna,” Brian responds, “we're not forking over six hundred
bucks without knowing what it's for.”
She weighs this for a minute. “It's something on eBay.”
My ten-year-old surfs eBay?
“Okay,” she sighs. “It's goaltender leg pads.”
I look at Brian, but he doesn't seem to understand, either. “For
hockey?” he says.
“Well, duh.”
“Anna, you don't play hockey,” I point out, and when she blushes,
I realize this may not be the case at all.
Brian presses her into an explanation. “A couple of months ago, the
chain fell off my bike right in front of the hockey rink. A bunch of guys were
practicing, but their goalie had mono, and the coach said he'd pay me five
bucks to stand in net and block shots. I borrowed the sick kid's equipment, and
the thing is… I wasn't that bad at it. I liked it. So I kept coming
back.” Anna smiles shyly. “The coach asked me to join the team for
real, before the tournament. I'm the first girl on it, ever. But I have to have
my own equipment.”
“Which costs $614?”
“And ninety-six cents. That's just the leg pads, though. I still need a
chest protector and catcher and a glove and a mask.” She stares at us
expectantly.
“We have to talk about it,” I tell her.
Anna mutters something that sounds like Figures, and walks out of
the room.
“Did you know she was playing hockey?” Brian asks me, and I shake
my head. I wonder what else my daughter has been hiding from us.
We are about to leave the house to watch Anna playing hockey for the first
time when Kate announces she isn't going. “Please Mom,” she begs.
“Not when I look like this.”
She has an angry red rash all over her cheeks, palms, soles, and chest, and
a moon face, courtesy of the steroids she takes to treat it. Her skin is rough
and thickened.
These are the calling cards of graft-versus-host disease, which Kate
developed after her bone marrow transplant. For the past four years, it's come
and gone, flaring up when we least expect it. Bone marrow is an organ, and like
a heart or a liver, a body can reject it. But sometimes, instead, the
transplanted marrow begins to reject the body it's been put in.
The good news is that if that happens, all the cancer cells are under siege,
too—something Dr. Chance calls graft-versus-leukemia disease. The bad news is
the symptomology: the chronic diarrhea, the jaundice, the loss of range of
motion in her joints. The scarring and sclerosis wherever there's connective
tissue. I am so accustomed to this that it doesn't phase me, but when the
graft-versus-host disease flares up this badly, I let Kate stay home from
school. She is thirteen, and appearance is paramount. I respect her vanity,
because there is so little of it.
But I cannot leave her alone in the house, and we have promised Anna we'll
come watch her play. “This is really important to your sister.”
In response, Kate flops onto the couch and pulls a throw pillow over her
face.
Without saying another word I walk to the hall closet and pull a variety of
items from drawers. I hand the gloves to Kate, then jam the hat on her head and
wind the scarf around her nose and mouth so that only her eyes are visible.
“It'll be cold in the rink,” I say, in a voice that leaves no room
for anything but acceptance.
I barely recognize Anna, stuffed and trussed and tied into equipment that,
eventually, we wound up borrowing from the coach's nephew. You cannot tell, for
example, that she is the only girl on the ice. You cannot tell that she is two
years younger than every other player out there.
I wonder if Anna can hear the cheering through her helmet, or if she's so
focused on what's coming toward her that she blocks it all out, concentrating
instead on the scrape of the puck and the smack of the sticks.
Jesse and Brian sit on the edge of their seats; even Kate—so reluctant to
come—is getting into the game. The opposing goalie, compared to Anna, moves in
slow motion. The action switches like a current, the play moving from the far
goal toward Anna's. The center passes to the right wing, who skates for broke,
his blades slicing through the roar of the cheering crowd. Anna steps forward,
sure of where the puck is going a moment before it arrives, her knees bent in,
her elbows pointed out.
“Unbelievable,” Brian says to me after the second period.
“She's got natural talent as a goalie.”
That much, I could have told him. Anna saves, every time.
That night Kate wakes up with blood streaming out of her nose, her rectum,
and the sockets of her eyes. I have never seen so much blood, and even as I try
to stanch the flow I wonder how much of it she can stand to lose. By the time
we reach the hospital, she is disoriented and agitated, finally slipping into
unconsciousness. The staff pump her full of plasma, blood, and platelets to
replace the lost blood, which seems to leak out of her just as quickly. They
give her IV fluids to prevent hypovolemic shock, and intubate her. They take CT
scans of her brain and her lungs to see how far the bleeding has spread.
In spite of all the times we have run to the ER in the middle of the night,
all the times Kate's relapsed with sudden symptoms, Brian and I know it has
never been quite this bad. A nosebleed is one thing; system failure is another.
Twice now, she's had cardiac arrhythmias. The hemorrhaging keeps her brain,
heart, liver, lungs, and kidneys from receiving the flow they need to work.
Dr. Chance takes us into the little lounge at the end of the pediatric ICU
floor. It is painted with smiley-face daisies. On one wall is a growth chart, a
four-foot-tall inchworm: How Big Can I Grow?
Brian and I sit very still, as if we will be rewarded for good behavior.
“Arsenic?” Brian repeats. “Poison?”
“It's a very new therapy,” Dr. Chance explains. “You get it
intravenously, for twenty-five to sixty days. To date, we haven't
effected a cure with it. That's not to say it might not happen in the future,
but at the moment, we don't even have five-year survival curves—that's how new
the drug is. As it is, Kate's exhausted cord blood, allogeneic transplant,
radiation, chemo, and ATRA. She's lived ten years past what any of us would
have expected.”
I find myself nodding already. “Do it,” I say, and Brian looks
down at his boots.
“We can try it. But in all likelihood, the hemorrhaging will still beat
out the arsenic,” Dr. Chance tells us.
I stare at the growth chart on the wall. Did I tell Kate I loved her before
I put her to bed last night? I cannot remember. I cannot remember at all.
Shortly after two A.M., I lose Brian. He slips out when I am falling asleep
beside Kate's bed and doesn't come back for over an hour. I ask for him at the
nurse's desk; I search the cafeteria and the men's room, all empty. Finally I
locate him at the end of the hallway, in a tiny atrium that was named in some
poor dead child's honor, a room of light and air and plastic plants that a
neutropenic patient could enjoy. He sits on an ugly brown corduroy couch,
writing furiously with a blue crayon on a piece of scrap paper.
“Hey,” I say quietly, remembering how the kids would color
together on the floor of the kitchen, crayons spilled like wildflowers between
them. “Trade you a yellow for your blue.” Brian glances up, startled.
“Is—”
“Kate's fine. Well, she's the same.” Steph, the nurse, has already
given her the first induction of arsenic. She has also given her two blood
transfusions, to make up for what she's losing. “Maybe we should bring
Kate home,” Brian says. “Well, of course we—”
“I mean now.” He steeples his hands. “I think she'd want to
die in her own bed.”
That word, between us, explodes like a grenade. “She isn't going
to—”
“Yes, she is.” He looks at me, his face carved by pain. “She
is dying, Sara. She will die, either tonight or tomorrow or maybe a
year from now if we're really lucky. You heard what Dr. Chance said. Arsenic's
not a cure. It just postpones what's coming.”
My eyes fill up with tears. “But I love her,” I say, because that
is reason enough.
“So do I. Too much to keep doing this.” The paper he has been
scribbling on falls out of his hands and lands at my feet; before he can reach
it I pick it up. It is full of tearstains, of cross-outs. She loved the way
it smelled in Spring, I read. She could beat anyone at gin rummy. She
could dance even if there wasn't music playing. There are notes on the
side, too: Favorite color: pink. Favorite time of day: twilight. Used to
read Where the Wild Things Are, over and over, and still knows it by
heart.
All the hair stands up on the back of my neck. “Is this… a eulogy?”
By now, Brian is crying, too. “If I don't do it now, I won't be able to
when it's really time.”
I shake my head. “It's not time.”
I call my sister at three-thirty in the morning. “I woke you,” I
say, realizing the minute Zanne gets on the phone that for her, for everyone
normal, it is the middle of the night.
“Is it Kate?”
I nod, even though she cannot hear that. “Zanne?”
“Yeah?”
I close my eyes, feel the tears squeeze out.
“Sara, what's the matter? Do you want me to come down there?”
It is hard to speak around the enormous pressure in my throat; truth expands
until it can choke you. As kids, Zanne's bedroom and mine shared a hallway, and
we used to fight about leaving the light on through the night. I wanted it
burning; she didn't. Put a pillow over your head, I used to tell her. You
can make it dark, but I can't make it light.
“Yes,” I say, sobbing freely now. “Please.”
Against all odds, Kate survives for ten days on intense transfusions and
arsenic therapy. On the eleventh day of her hospitalization, she slips into a
coma. I decide I will keep a bedside vigil until she wakes up. And I do this
for exactly forty-five minutes, until I receive a phone call from the principal
of Jesse's school.
Apparently, the metal sodium is stored in the high school science laboratory
in small containers of oil, because of its volatile reaction with air.
Apparently, it is water-reactive, too, creating hydrogen and heat. Apparently,
my ninth-grader was bright enough to realize this, which is why he stole the
sample, flushed it down the toilet, and exploded the school's septic tank.
After he is expelled for three weeks by the principal, a man who has the
decency to ask after Kate while basically telling me that my eldest is destined
for the State Penitentiary, Jesse and I drive back to the hospital.
“Needless to say, you're grounded.”
“Whatever.”
“Until you're forty.”
Jesse slouches, and if it is possible, his brows knit even more closely
together. I wonder when, exactly, I gave up on him. I wonder why, when Jesse's
history is not by any stretch as disappointing as his sister's.
“The principal's a dick.”
“You know what, Jess? The world's full of them. You will always be up
against someone. Something.”
He glares at me. “You could take a conversation about the frigging Red
Sox and somehow turn it back to Kate.”
We pull into the hospital parking lot, but I make no move to shut off the
car. Rain pelts the windshield. “We're all pretty gifted at that. Or were
you blowing up the septic tank for some other reason?”
“You don't know what it's like being the kid whose sister is dying of
cancer.”
“I have a fairly good idea. Since I'm the mother of the kid
who is dying of cancer. You're absolutely right, it does suck. And sometimes I
feel like blowing something up, too, just to get rid of that feeling that I'm
going to explode any minute.” I glance down and notice a bruise the size
of a half-dollar, right in the crook of his arm. There's a matching one on the
other side. It is telling, I suppose, that my mind immediately races to heroin,
instead of leukemia, as it would with his sisters. “What's that?”
He folds his arms. “Nothing.”
“What is it?”
“None of your business.”
“It is my business.” I pull down his forearm. “Is that from a
needle?”
He lifts his head, eyes blazing. “Yeah, Ma. I shoot up every three
days. Except I'm not doing smack, I'm getting blood taken out of me on the
third floor here.” He stares at me. “Didn't you wonder who else was keeping
Kate in platelets?”
He gets out the car before I can stop him, leaving me staring out a
windshield where nothing is clear anymore.
Two weeks after Kate is admitted to the hospital, the nurses convince me to
take a day off. I come home and shower in my own bathroom, instead of the one
used by the medical staff. I pay overdue bills. Zanne, who is still with us,
makes me a cup of coffee; it is fresh and ready when I come down with my hair
wet and combed. “Anyone call?”
“If by anyone you mean the hospital, then no.” She flips
the page of the cookbook she's reading. “This is such bullshit,”
Zanne says. “There is no joy in cooking.”
The front door opens and slams shut. Anna comes racing into the kitchen and
stops abruptly at the sight of me. “What are you doing
here?”
“I live here,” I say.
Zanne clears her throat. “Contrary to appearances.”
But Anna doesn't hear her, or doesn't want to. She has a smile as wide as a
canyon on her face, and brandishes a note in front of me. “It was sent to
Coach Urlicht. Read it read it read it!”
Dear Anna Fitzgerald,
Congratulations on being accepted into the Girls in Goal Summer Hockey
Camp. This year camp will be held in Minneapolis, from July 3-17. Please fill
out the attached paperwork and medical history and return by 4/30/01. See you
on the ice!
Coach Sarah Tenting
I finish scanning the letter. “You let Kate go to that sleep-away camp
when she was my age, the one for kids with leukemia,” Anna says. “Do
you have any idea who Sarah Teuting is? The goalie on Team USA, and I don't
just get to meet her, I get to have her tell me what I'm doing wrong.
Coach got a full scholarship for me, so you don't even have to pay a dime.
They’ll fly me out on a plane and give me a dorm room to stay in and everything
and nobody gets a chance like this, ever—”
“Honey,” I say carefully, “you can't do this.”
She shakes her head, as if she's trying to make my words fit. “But it's
not now, or anything. It's not till next summer.”
And Kate might be dead by then.
It is the first time I can remember Anna ever indicating that she sees an
end to this time line, a moment when she might finally be free of obligation to
her sister. Until that point, going to Minnesota is not an option. Not because
I am afraid of what might happen to Anna there, but because I am afraid of what
might happen to Kate while her sister is gone. If Kate survives this latest
relapse, who knows how long it will be before another crisis happens? And when
it does, we will need Anna—her blood, her stem cells, her tissue—right here.
The facts hang between us like a filmy curtain. Zanne gets up and puts her
arm around Anna. “You know what, bud? Maybe we should talk about this with
your mom some other time—”
“No.” Anna refuses to budge. “I want to know why I can't
go.” I run a hand down my face. "Anna, don't make me do this.”
“Do what, Mom,“ she says hotly. ”I don't make you
do anything.“ She crumples the letter and runs out of the kitchen. Zanne
smiles weakly at me. ”Welcome back," she says.