Warm Wuinter's Garden (15 page)

Sitting in the large green room with its
supposedly warm and upbeat orange furniture drinking lukewarm tea
that tasted mostly like the white plastic foam of the cup holding
it was wonderful if only because she was the one who had submerged
the teabag and decided when the steeping should stop. Sitting at a
small square table of wood-grained brown plastic along the back
wall, ignoring the pamphlet open before her, Bett welcomed the
transfusion of unknown faces and voices which were momentarily
forcing out the well-worn thoughts of self that had filled her mind
for three days. After more than a half hour of watching various
displays of the edgy heartiness that she guessed would only be
found in hospitals and courts, she picked up the unread pamphlet,
disposed of her trash and slowly walked from the cafeteria.

Bett wandered the corridors trying to draw
off some of the electricity which had built-up inside her. Her
right shoulder ached, her chest burned, the skin of her stomach,
just at the edge of the bandage, itched, but her physical
discomfort was exceeded by her agitation. One nurse had told her
that the agitation and restlessness were common post-operative
symptoms; however the fact that she knew the cause did not
alleviate the effects. She noticed a sign for physical therapy at a
crossroad in the corridors. She followed directions until she came
to a medium-sized room with a number of chrome-plated machines of
which she only recognized the stationary bicycles and a rower. The
room was empty. It took Bett a long minute to figure out how to
adjust the height of the bike seat. She groaned aloud as she put
too much weight on her right arm when she mounted the bike. It took
three attempts before she correctly interpreted the cryptic
messages of lighted red dots that gleamed on the control screen
between the yoke of the handlebars. Finally, she managed to enter
her weight, selected a program called, she thought appropriately,
Rockies Ride, and set a low level of resistance for a ten minute
interval.

The recovering patient found that to pedal
without pain to her chest or right shoulder that she had to list to
the left. She barked a sharp, wheeze-shortened laugh at a flashing
memory of Dilly riding her bike lop-sided, the effect of having a
large boil on her bottom.

Bett abruptly stopped pedaling when she felt
droplets of sweat roll down across her furrowed brow before being
caught in the tangle of her eyebrows. It felt so healthy to have
her calves and thighs push through the resistance of the pedals. It
felt useful to be churning her legs. She would have liked to pedal
until her muscles were so fatigued that they would quiver when she
climbed down, but the trail of sweat reminded her of her wound. If
she began to sweat under her bandages, she could drive herself
crazy with itching. A disappointed Bett gingerly dismounted the
bike, slowly reached down to pick up her wallet from the floor,
then, took time to study the collection of unidentifiable machines
before wandering out of the room and back to her exploration of the
hospital.

Although her cheeks still felt flushed,
Bett’s breathing had returned to normal by the time she walked into
the dimly lighted chapel. She couldn’t remember ever seeing a
tinier place of worship. The room was no bigger than the linen
closet where she had put away the sleeping bags just before
entering the hospital. The two maroon-covered straight back chairs,
one along each wall, the thick gray carpet, the cottony quiet and
the dim yellow lighting from the two wall sconces combined to
remind her of a funeral parlor. On the windowless front wall was a
backlit stained glass window of Christ tending his flock. Three
feet in front of the stained glass was a blond wood prie-dieu.

Bett pulled a chair out from the wall and
turned it so that she could face the figure of Christ. She had been
told the very first day by Dr. Maurer that if her lump were
cancerous there might be a post-surgical need for either radiation
or chemotherapy or both, or even a hysterectomy or oophorectomy.
She had heard the words, but as she had been overwhelmed by too
many others things, the words hadn’t really registered. She had
been sure that her lump would be benign. When Dr. Falconi had
stopped by that morning to check her drains and review her
medication, he had told her that the pathologist’s report indicated
that cancer had been present in some of the nodes which they had
removed. After a period of silence while each waited for the other
to speak, Bett had asked what the implications were. Dr. Falconi
had said that the size of her tumor and the fact that her underarm
was involved meant that her cancer was considered to be a Stage II
situation. The most common treatment for Stage II patients was to
follow up surgery with five or six weeks of radiation therapy.
Twice, he repeated that even though her cancer had spread beyond
her breast, Stage II was considered to be early stage breast
cancer. The recovery rates were high. He had offered her the names
of three radiation therapists whom he thought did good work. He had
told her that he and Dr. Maurer, who also had her pathology report,
were willing to answer any questions that she had. He had left her
the pamphlet on radiation therapy.

Bett looked down from the figure of the
bronze-haired Christ to the teal-colored guide to radiation in her
hand. She wanted help, but she felt she had taken too much help in
the last several days to be able to take anymore. She wanted to
return to that lifelong feeling of competency which had been
missing for a week longer than her breast. She wanted to pull some
strength down from the figure of Christ, but she found she could
not. Her faith, though strong, had been little used. Her religion
had tended to be a one-way conduit. She gave her energy, her love,
her worship, her pies and cakes, her flowers, and her voice to God.
On those few occasions in her life when she had had a need, rather
than reaching out to God for help, she had turned to herself to
find some untapped inner reserve, some heretofore unrealized
increment of will. Or, she had turned to Neil.

Bett stared at the pamphlet in her hands. She
didn’t want to open it. It seemed strange to her not to want
knowledge. In her pregnancies, especially during her series of
miscarriages, during Nita’s problems with DES, after Peter had come
home from Viet Nam, she had read everything she could find to help
her to understand the situation and, thus, to be of use. She
thumbed the sharp edges of the glossy paper. She didn’t want to
know. She did not want to know what was going to happen. She wasn’t
even sure that she would allow anything else to be done to her. She
put her hand on the bandage over where her breast had been. She
moved her fingertips up to her armpit. Maybe that was all that she
was willing to give to this disease. It seemed so powerful. She had
known that it wasn’t cancer, but it was. In the small doubtful
corner of her mind where she had thought that what she was growing
might be malignant, that small place had known with surety that the
tumor would be contained. But that intuition had been wrong; the
tumor hadn’t been in situ. The cancer was invasive. Like burdock
and crab grass. Termites and earwigs. She had chosen the one-stage
operation rather than the two-stage. She had chosen to have a
mastectomy rather than a lumpectomy. She had reached beyond the
recommended procedure twice because she wanted it done with. There
were limits. She wasn’t sure what they were, but she felt herself
to be very close to them.

Bett looked back up at the sapphire and ruby
colors outlining the pearlescent figure of Christ. Drs. Falconi and
Maurer were shepherding her through this business, but, although
she trusted in their good intentions, she had growing doubts if
they knew where they or the cancer itself was going. Either they
were one step behind the disease, or they were on top of it but
chose to hold back the information from her—either because the path
to recovery was so terrible or because it led to nowhere but to her
death.

Bett’s eyes drifted from the shepherd to the
sheep. There were four sheep hovering around the legs of Christ.
She wished she could find the simple faith of sheep. She wished she
knew more about how to follow. For most of her life, she had been
the one in front. It hadn’t been since the days of hoeing down the
rows with Opa that she had been a follower. Bett longed for a
simple faith. She tightened her hand into a fist and gently knocked
it against her wound. Looking at the figure of Christ she prayed,
“Please, God, give me the faith to go where I’m supposed to go and
do what I’m supposed to do. I am very lost and very afraid and
filled with doubts. Please give me strength and guide me.”

Bett sat still for many minutes. As she sat,
she stared at the luminescent colors of the stained glass. Her eyes
traced the lead bead around the fragments of colored glass as if
she were tracing a map. She softened her focus so that the scene
became a jigsaw puzzle of colored glass. She tightened her focus to
scrutinize what message might be contained within the picture. The
longer Bett sat, the more difficult it became to remain still. She
could feel the heat of anger spread down out of her head, across
her shoulders and down into the tips of her fingers. The anger
added fire to the heat of her wound. It added more itch to the skin
that she couldn’t scratch. Its boiling heat surged down her thighs,
and little impeded by the bent blood vessels, rounded the corners
of her knees. It began to fill up her calves, ankles and feet with
a vibrant energy. She sat and seethed and forgot that she had
prayed. The agitation of the anger passed into the atoms of her
flesh. Although she remained seated, Bett felt as though every cell
of her body was poised to break away. Finally, the anger
overwhelmed her. Bett jumped up from the chair. She broke off her
stare of the flock at Christ’s feet. She wouldn’t be a sheep. She
wouldn’t just follow. She would fight.

* * *

The woman at the administration office, whose
tag said Eunice, was surprised at Bett’s request.

“Usually, it’s the opposite. People want to
transfer into a private room.”

“I’ve been in there for almost four days. I
feel pretty good. I seem to be healing fine. I want some company.
I’m tired of reading.”

“I hear you. I go on vacation. After three
days I’m ready to come back. I’m going to put you in 218. That’s
upstairs in the Bellscomb wing. Do you know where it is?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to wait a little until I can
round up an orderly to move you.”

“That’s okay. I don’t have too much. I can do
it myself.”

“House rules.”

“All right. Thank you. Should I call my
doctor?”

“No, we’ll take care of that.”

“Thank you, again.”

“You’re welcome. I hope you like your
roommate.”

“I’m sure I will.”

When she stepped through the light blue
doorway of room 218, Bett was shocked. In a bed surrounded by
machines was a small lump. At one end of the lump, just above the
edge of the covers, was a small jaundiced face. Clear plastic tubes
were going up into the nostrils of a nose which was much too large
for the face. The head was slightly elevated. The decisiveness with
which the nose split the face and the tilt of the head made the
woman’s face look as if it were trying to wedge its way deeper into
the atmosphere. Although the eyes were shut in apparent sleep and
the breathing, though raspy, was regular, Bett thought the woman
looked desperate for oxygen.

On each side of the bed were tall machines
with tubes running from them to under the bed covers. On the right
side of the bed, nearer the door, were a wheeled patient table and
a night stand filled with flowers. She counted four four-inch pots
of cyclamen, each topped with pale pink blossoms, each pot wrapped
in gold foil. She wondered if everyone knew the patient loved pink
cyclamen, or if one visitor had brought all four plants, or if
there were a sale on cyclamen at the floral shop in the nearby
grocery. Making these exotic members of the primrose family look
plebian was an arrangement that held several orange and blue
crane-shaped blooms of a bird of paradise, the ripening red pine
cone-like bracts of a ginger blossom and some type of purple orchid
she didn’t recognize. Another arrangement, the one she liked best,
was a jar filled with black-eyed Susans, Peter Pan zinnias, Shasta
daisies and spikes of blue salvia and statice.

The tubes in the woman’s nose made a gurgling
sound that drew Bett’s attention away from the flowers. The
patient’s cheek muscles moved and the breathing grew more guttural.
Bett was unsure whether to go into the room to lie down or whether
she should continue her travels, then, check back later to see if
the woman had awakened. She thought it would be a breach of privacy
to move in next to a stranger without first having been introduced,
but she knew that the etiquette of a hospital was not that of the
outside world. In the last few days total strangers had seen and
touched more of her body than Neil or any member of her family ever
had.

As Bett was wrestling with her decision, the
woman’s nasal drain made a sound reminiscent of pulling the plug on
a sink full of dish water. Her face tilted farther forward in its
search for sustenance and she opened her eyes. Once opened, the
eyes stared straight ahead. Bett waited to be noticed for at least
a minute before she tapped the doorway with her knuckles.

“Hello. How are you? I’m Bett Koster. I’m
going to be joining you.”

Bett nodded toward the empty bed.

The woman looked to where Bett had nodded and
seemed surprised to see a bed there. She moved her mouth several
times before wetting her cracked lips with her milk-colored
tongue.

“Ellen. Mordeck. Hello.”