Man, it's been SO hot here for the past twenty or so days! Wth! Anyways, nothing really big to say, other than thank you all for the reviews! Let's begin and end this chapter with a flashback...
Chapter 11
Michelle (1997)
At seven, Yami is a long tangle of arms and legs, sometimes resembling a creature made of sunlight and pipe cleaners more than he does a little boy. I stick my head into his room for the third time that morning, to find him in yet a different outfit. This one is jeans with a black shirt and a dragon playing on the front of it. "You're going to be late for your own birthday party," I tell him.
Thrashing his way out of the shirt, Yami strips off his jeans. "I look like a little kid."
"There are worse things," I point out.
"If you were me, would you wear the black shirt with the red dragon on it, or the white shirt with the blue dragon on it?"
I look at them both, puddles on the floor. "The blue dragon."
"You don't like the red dragon?"
"Then wear that one."
"I'm going with the one that has Pikachu on it," he decides, and he turns around to grab it off the ground. On the back of his arm is bruise the size of a half-dollar, a hole that has poked its way through the fabric.
"Yami," I ask, "what's that?"
Twisting his arm around, he looks at the spot where I point. "I guess I banged it."
For five years, Yami has been in remission. At first, when the cord blood transplant seemed to be working, I kept waiting for someone to tell me this was all a mistake. When Yami complained that his feet hurt, I rushed him to Dr. Taylor, certain this was the bony pain of recurrence, only to find out that he'd outgrown his sneakers. When he fell down, instead of kissing his scrapes, I'd ask him if his platelets were good.
A bruise is created when there is bleeding in tissues beneath the skin, usually-but not always-the result of a trauma.
It has been five whole years, did I mention that?
Yugi sticks his head into the room. "Daddy says the first car just pulled up and if Yami wants to come down wearing a flour sack he doesn't care. What's a flour sack?"
Yami finishes zipping up and buttoning his pants and rubs at the bruise. "Huh," he says.
Downstairs, there are twenty-three second-graders, a cake in the shape of a Pokemon-I can't remember which one it was, and a local college kid hired to make swords and bears and crowns out of balloons. Yami opens his presents-action figures, a new game for his gaming system, and a portable radio. He saves the biggest box for last-the one Darrell and I have gotten him. Inside a glass bowl swims a fantail goldfish.
Yami has wanted a pet forever. But Darrell is allergic to cats, and dogs need a lot of attention, which led us to this. Yami could not be happier. He carries him around for the rest of the party. He names him Mufasa.
After the party, when we are cleaning up, I find myself staring at the goldfish. Bright as a penny, he swims in circles, happy to be going nowhere.
It takes only thirty seconds to realize that you will be canceling all your plans, erasing whatever you had been cocky enough to schedule on your calender. It takes sixty seconds to understand that even if you'd been fooled into thinking so, you do not have an ordinary life.
A routine bone marrow aspiration-one we'd scheduled long before I ever saw that bruise-had come back with some abnormal promyelocytes floating around. Then a polymerase chain reaction test-one that allows the study of DNA-showed that in Yami, the 15 and 17 chromosomes were translocated.
All of this means that Yami is in molecular relapse now, and clinical symptoms can't be that far behind. Maybe he won't present with blasts for a month. Maybe we won't find blood in his urine or stools for a year. But inevitable, it will happen.
They sat that word, relapse, like they might say birthday or tax deadline, something that happens so routinely it has become part of your internal calendar, whether you want it to or not.
Dr. Taylor has explained that this is one of the great debates for oncologists-do you fix a wheel that isn't broken, or do you wait until the cart collapses? He recommends that we put Yami on ALL-TRANS Retinoic Acid. It comes in a pill half the size of my thumb, and was basically stolen from ancient Chinese medics who'd been using it for years. Unlike chemotherapies, which go in and kill everything in their path, ATRA heads right for chromosome 17. Since the translocation of chromosomes 15 and 17 is in part what keeps promyelocyte maturation from happening correctly, ATRA helps uncoil the genes that have bound themselves together...and stops the abnormalities from going further.
Dr. Taylor says the ATRA may put Yami back into remission.
Then again, he might develop a resistance to it.
"Mom?" Atemu comes into the living room, where I am sitting on the couch. I've been there for hours now. I can't seem to make myself get up and do any of the things I am supposed to, because what is the point of packing school lunches or hemming a pair of pants or even paying the heating bill?
"Mom," Atemu says again. "You didn't forget, did you?"
I look at him as if he is speaking Arabic. "What?"
"You said you'd take me to buy new cleats after we go to the orthodontist. You promised."
Yes, I did. Because little league baseball starts two days from now, and Atemu's outgrown his old pair. But now I do not know if I can drag myself to the orthodontist's, where the receptionist will smile at Yami and tell me, like she always does, how beautiful my children are. And there is something about the thought of going to Sporting Goods that seems downright obscene.
"I'm canceling the orthodontist appointment," I say.
"Cool!" He smiles, his silver mouth glinting. "Can we just go get the cleats?"
"Now is not a good time."
"But-"
"Atemu. Let. It. Go."
"I can't play if I don't get new shoes. And you're not even doing anything. You're just sitting here."
"Your brother," I say evenly, "is incredibly sick. I'm sorry if that interferes with your dentist's appointment or your plans to go buy a new pair of cleats. But those don't rate quite as high in the grand scheme of things right now. I'd think that since you're eleven, you might be able to grow up enough to realize that the whole world doesn't revolve around you."
Atemu looks out the window, where Yami straddles the arm of an oak tree, coaching Yugi in how to climb up. "Yeah, right, he's sick," he says. "Why don't you grow up? Why don't you figure out that the world doesn't revolve around him?"
For the first time in my life I began to understand how a parent might hit a child-it's because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you hadn't. Atemu runs upstairs and slam the door to his bedroom.
I close my eyes, take a few deep breaths. And it strikes me not everyone dies of old age. People get run over by cars. People crash in airplanes. People choke on nuts. There are no guarantees about anything, least of all one's future.
With a sigh I walk upstairs, knock on my son's door. He has just recently discovered music; it throbs through the thin line of light at the base of the door. As Atemu turns down the stereo the notes flatten abruptly. "What."
"I'd like to talk to you. I'd like to apologize."
There is a shuffle on the other side of the door, and then it swings open. Blood covers Atemu's mouth, a vampire's lipstick; bits of wire stick out like a seamstress's pins. I notice the fork he is holding, and realize this is what he has used to pull off his braces. "Now you never have to take me anywhere," he spits at me.
Two weeks go by with Yami on ATRA. "Did you know," Atemu says one day, while I am getting his pill ready, "a giant tortoise can live for 177 years?" He is on this Ripley's Believe It or Not kick. "An Arctic clam can live for 220 years."
Yugi sits at the counter, eating peanut butter with a spoon. "What's an Arctic clam?"
"Who cares?" Atemu says. "A parrot can live for eighty years. A cat can live for thirty."
"How about Mufasa?" Yami asks.
"It says in the book that with good care, a goldfish can life for seven years."
Atemu watches Yami put the pill on his tongue, take a swig of water to swallow it. "If you were Mufasa," he says, "you'd already be dead."
Darrell and I slide into our respective chairs in Dr. Taylor's office. Five years have passed, but the seats fit like an old baseball glove. Even the photographs on the oncologist's desk have not changed-his son is frozen at age six, holding a speckled trout, a picture of his and his friends in high school, a picture of his deceased wife is still there-contributing to the feeling that in spite of what I believed, we never really left here.
The ATRA worked. For a month, Yami reverted to molecular remission. And then a CBC turned up more promyelocytes in his blood.
"We can keep pulsing him with ATRA," Dr. Taylor says, "but I think its failure already tells us he's maxed out that course."
"What about a bone marrow transplant?"
"That's a risky call-particularly for a child who still isn't showing symptoms of a full-blown clinical relapse." Dr. Taylor looks at us. "There's something else we can try first. It's called a donor lymphocyte infusion-a DLI. Sometimes a transfusion of white blood cells from a matched donor can help the original clone of cord blood cells fight the leukemia cells. Think of them as a relief army, supporting the front line."
"Will it put him in remission?" Darrell asks.
Dr. Taylor shakes his head. "It's a stop-gap measure-Yami will, in all probability, have a full-fledged relapse-but it buys time to build up his defenses before we have to rush into a more aggressive treatment."
"And how long will it take to get the lymphocytes here?" I ask.
Dr. Taylor turns to me. "That depends. How soon can you bring in Yugi?"
To Yugi, it is a holiday. His mother and father are spending time with him, alone. He gets to hold both our hands the whole way across the parking lot. So what if we're going to a hospital?
I have explained to him that Yami isn't feeling food, and that the doctors need to take something from Yugi and give it to Yami to make him feel better. I figured that was more than enough information.
We wait in the examination room, coloring line drawings of pterodactyls and T-Rexes. "Today, at lunch, Steven said that the dinosaurs all died because they got a cold," Yugi says, "but no one believed him."
Darrell grins. "Why do you think they died?"
"Because, duh, they were a million years old." He looks up at him. "Did they have birthday parties back then?"
The door opens, and the hematologist comes in. "Hello, gang, Mom, you want to hold him on your lap?"
So I crawl onto the table and settle Yugi in my arms. Darrell gets stationed behind us, so that he can grab Yugi's shoulder and elbow and keep it immobilized. "You ready?" the doctor asks Yugi, who is still smiling.
And then she holds up a syringe.
"It's only a little stick," the doctor promises, exactly the wrong words, and Yugi starts thrashing. His arms clip me in the face, the belly. Darrell cannot grab hold of him. Over his screams, he yells at me. "I thought you told her!"
The doctor, who's left the room without me even noticing, returns with several nurses in tow. "Kids and phlebotomy never mix well," she says, as the nurses slide Yugi off my lap and soothe him with their soft hands and softer words. "Don't worry: we're pros."
It is a deja vu, just like the day Yami was diagnosed. Be careful what you wish for, I think. Yugi is just like his brother.
I'm vacuuming the boys' room when the handle of the Electrolux smacks Mufasa's bowl and sends the fish flying. No glass breaks, but it takes me a moment to find him, thrashing himself dry on the carpet beneath Yami's desk.
"Hang on, buddy," I whisper, and I flip him into the bowl. I fill it with water from the bathroom sink.
He floats to the top. Don't, I think. Please.
I sit down on the edge of the bed. How can I possibly tell Yami I've killed his fish? Will he notice if I run to the pet store and get a replacement?
Suddenly, Yugi is next to me, home from morning kindergarten. "Mommy? How come Mufasa isn't moving?"
I open my mouth, a confession melting on my tongue. But at that moment, the goldfish shudders sideways, dives, and starts swimming again. "There," I say. "He's fine."
One month later, we go back for a third lymphocyte donation. Yugi and I take our seats in the doctor's office, waiting to be called. After a few minutes, he tugs on my sleeve. "Mommy," he says.
I glance down at him. Yugi is swinging his feet. "What?"
He smiles at me. "In case I forgot to tell you after, it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be."
One day my sister arrives unannounced, and with Darrell's permission, spirits me away to a penthouse suite at the Ritz Hamilton in Frankfort. "We can do anything you want," she tells me. "Art museums, forest trail walks, dinners out on the river." But what I really want to do it just forget, and so three hours later I am sitting on the floor beside her, finishing our second $100 bottle of wine.
I lift the bottle by its neck. "I could have bough a dress with this."
Marianne snorts. "At Lynn's Basement, maybe." Her feet are on a brocade chair; her body is sprawled on the white carpet. On the TV, Oprah counsels us to minimize our lives. "Plus, when you zip up a great Pinot Noir, you never look fat."
I look over at her, suddenly feeling sorry for myself.
"No. You're not doing the crying thing. Crying is not included in the room rate."
But suddenly all I can think of is how stupid the women on Oprah sound, with their stuffed Filofaxes and crammed closets. I wonder what Darrell made for dinner. If Yami's all right. "I'm going to call home."
She comes up on an elbow. "You are allowed to take a break, you know. No one has to be a martyr twenty-four/seven."
But I hear her wrong. "I think once you sign on to be a mother, that's the only shift they offer."
"I said martyr," Marianne laughs. "Not mother."
I smile a little. "Is there a difference?"
She takes the telephone receiver out of my hand. "Did you want to get your crown of thorns out of the suitcase first? Listen to yourself, Michelle, and stop being such a drama queen. Yes, you drew a lot of bad fate. Yes, it sucks to be you."
Bright color rises on my cheeks. "You have no idea what my life is like."
"Neither do you," Marianne says. "You're not living, Michelle. You're waiting for Yami to die."
"I am not-" I begin, but then I stop. The thing is, I am.
Marianne strokes my hair and lets me cry. "It is so hard sometimes," I confess, words I have not said to anyone, not even Darrell.
"As long as it's not all the time," Mari says. "Honey, Yami is not going to die sooner because you have one more glass of wine, or because you stay overnight in a hotel, or because you let yourself crack up at a bad joke. So sit your ass down and turn up the volume and act like you're a normal person."
I look around at the opulence of the room, at our decadent sprawl of wine bottles and chocolate strawberries. "Mari," I say, wiping my eyes, "this is not what normal people do."
She follows my gaze. "You're absolutely right." She picks up the remote control, flipping channels until she finds Jerry Springer. "That better?"
I start to laugh, and then she starts to laugh, and soon the room is spinning around me and we are lying on our backs, staring up at the crown molding edging the ceiling. I suddenly remember how, when we were kids, Mari used to always walk ahead of me to the bus stop. I could have run and caught up-but I never did. I only wanted to follow her.
Laughter rises like steam, swims through the windows. After three days of a torrential downpour, the kids are delighted to be outside, hitting some baseballs with Darrell. When life is normal, it is so normal.
I duck into Atemu's room, trying to navigate strewn LEGO pieces and comic books so that I can set his clean clothes down on the bed. Then I go into Yami and Yugi's room, and separate their folded laundry.
When I place Yami's T-shirts on his dresser I see it: Mufasa is swimming upside down. I reach into the bowl and turn him, holding his tail; he wafts for a few strokes and then floats slowly to the surface, white-bellied and gasping.
I remember Atemu saying that with good care, a fish might live seven years. This has only been seven months.
After carrying the fishbowl into my bedroom, I pick up the phone and dial Information. "Petco," I say.
When I'm connected, I ask a clerk about Mufasa. "Do you, like, wanna buy a new fish?" He asks.
"No, I want to save this one."
"Miss," the boy says, "we're talking bout a goldfish, right?"
So I call three vets, none of whom treat fish. I watch Mufasa in his death throes for another minute, and then rung the oceanography department at URI, asking for any professor that is available.
Dr. McDaniel studies tide polls, she tells me. Mollusks and shellfish and sea urchins, not goldfish. But I find myself telling her about my son, who has APL. About Mufasa, who survived against all odds.
The marine biologist is silent for a moment. "Have you changed his water?"
"This morning."
"You get a lot of rain down there the past couple of days?"
"Yes."
"Got a well?"
What does that have to do with anything? "Yes..."
"It's just a hunch, but with runoff, your water might have too many minerals in it. Fill the bowl with bottled water, and maybe he'll perk up."
So I empty out Mufasa's bowl, scrub it, and add a half gallon of Pure Life. It takes twenty minutes, but then Mufasa begins to swim around. He navigates between the lobes of the fake plant. He nibbles at food.
Yami finds me watching him a half hour later. "You didn't have to change the water. I did it this morning."
"Oh, I didn't know," I lie.
He presses his face up to the glass bowl, his smile magnified. "Atemu says goldfish can only pay attention for nine seconds," Yami utters, "but I think Mufasa knows exactly who I am."
I touch his hair. And wonder if I have used up my miracle.
Man, I remember having braces. But I would never have done that. My mom would have murdered me. And don't you hate it that his parents played Yugi like that?
My mom told me when I was little, I had a goldfish. It died within a week. I don't even remember that I had a fish... Huh.
Don't forget to review and vote! It's getting interesting!
