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How To Cut a Lemon

How To Cut a Lemon

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Vector seamless watercolor pattern withhand drawn lemons. Different type of pieces. Ideal for food packaging design

By Joelyn Suarez

In the days after I gave birth to my son, Mosley, we spent most of our time skin-to-skin. I lay on the hospital bed, surrounded by pillows, my hospital gown untied and opened so that my chest was exposed to the crisp air-conditioned room. Mosley’s mouth suckled on my breast until he tired from the motions and he dozed off in my arms. I propped him up so I could examine his face while he slept. His lids were puffy with lashes. barely visible, his nose tiny and nostrils wide, his perfect cupid’s bow and puckered lips sucked in by chubby cheeks. He was born with a full head of hair, straight and black like mine, and peach fuzz from the nape of his neck to the top of his thighs. I spent hours watching him sleep, brushing his hair back with the palm of my hand, kissing him in the sweet spot under his chin. In those moments, I thought: I could spend all my days doing just this. Three months later, I still feel that way. Sometimes I lay awake in the late hours, Mosley in his sleeper beside my bed, and I watch him in the dim light of the television. I notice his wispy lashes slightly curling at the tips, his brows thickening, and his cheeks growing more full every day. He has lost some of the baby hairs framing his face, though much of it has stayed, and lengthened past his small ears. He has Jonathan’s ears, mouth, and chin some of my favorite attributes of his. Most nights I doze off with my glasses on, so the moment that my eyes open in the morning, I can see him clearly.

***

When my sister and I were too young for school, we lived in a townhouse with my parents on the south end of San Diego. I remember the homes were crowded together. Our driveway curved around a corner, and winded down a small hill, like a maze outlining our neighbors’ outer walls. We lived next door to a couple, in their 60s, who loved to garden in their tiny front lawn. They had pots of plants lined up with various fruits and vegetables. On one of the sunny afternoons that my parents slept in, coming down hard from a high, my sister and I decided to venture out. We found our elderly neighbors tending to their mini-garden, and went over to explore the scene.

“What’re you doing?” My sister asked the wife.

“Just watering these plants here,” she responded.

My sister and I hovered over her to watch.

“Where are your parents?” The wife asked.

I wonder if the wife had noticed the swarm of people buzzing in and out of our house late into the night. I wonder if she ever bumped into a face of a fiend at our front door when she was approaching or exiting her own. I wonder if she caught Mom or Dad for neighborly conversation while they were coked out and fidgety. Or, perhaps, she was just wondering what two very young girls were doing outside alone.

“They’re asleep,” my sister, answered, “Can we have some lemons?”

“Sure.” The wife handed over two lemons.

My sister collected them with both palms and we ran back towards our house.

“Let’s cut these!” She said to me. Her face was small and round with eyes that overwhelmed her other features. Her pointy, crooked teeth hid behind an innocent smile; and her straight, tame hair was tucked neatly behind her ears.

She dragged one of the bar stools to the other end of the kitchen counter and we sat opposite of each other. I remember we didn’t bother to turn on any lights; all we had was the light of the sun creeping in from the slanted blinds. The kitchen had an L-shaped counter covered with white tile and grout in between. My sister grabbed two butter knives and handed one to me.

My parents had recently discovered I was left-handed, but I still didn’t know right from left. I knew I couldn’t cut a straight line, no matter how much I pressed my tongue to my top lip for focus. Mom and Dad decided it was because most things were made for righty’s, including the basic hand-eye coordination that I didn’t possess.

I was shaky with the butter knife. It made me nervous sitting across from my sister and having to mirror her motions. I watched as she held the lemon steady with her left hand and the knife with her right. She touched the knife to the center of the lemon and began to cut down slowly. The peel was hard, too tough for her little fingers. She brought the knife up and out a few times to repeat the motion over again. Her movements were precise and her lemon cut cleanly in half.

***

At three months old, Mosley has learned to recognize Jonathan and me. When he gets sleepy in the afternoons, I put him in his bouncer that sits close to the floor, and I rock it with my foot from the couch. Sometimes I hum him a lullaby, and other times, I just watch his eyes glaze over. I see him fighting his tired feeling by trying not to blink. He’ll keep his eyes on me for as long as he can. His lids get heavier, until he can no longer carry them, and his eyes finally surrender to sleep. Mosley does this when we are out as well; he looks for my face for focus when the scene is overstimulating. Recently we were at a birthday party with my siblings and a bunch of other unfamiliar faces. The music was blaring from an outdoor speaker and children ran laps around the backyard. I carried Mosley in his Baby Bjorn and rocked him back and forth. I kept the top clasps unhooked and held his head in my hands, so that he could see all around. My older brother hovered over my shoulder and snuck kisses from him when he could, but Mosley kept his eyes on me.

“He’s staring right at you! Does he always do that?” My brother asked.

“Yeah, when he gets tired, he just stares at me.”

“He must love you so much.”

***

I never took my eyes off of her. I held the lemon in my right hand and the knife in my left. I didn’t look down to see if my initial incision was at the center of the lemon, like my sister’s. When she brought her knife up, I followed, and when she sliced down, I did too. I watched the strain in her face and fingers when the knife hit the hard peel. I felt it too, but eventually it subsided. I moved my knife in a sawing motion. I fixated on my sister’s movements. Soon, I was no longer imitating her. I sawed back and forth without lifting the knife.

By this time my sister had cut her lemon into quarters. Her eyes met mine with a proud grin, and I returned a giddy smile. She looked down at my lemon and her smile faded into shock. I watched her eyes widen and her shoulders shoot back. I was still smiling.

“Joelyn, there’s blood! There’s blood everywhere!” She screamed. Her words didn’t register at first.

***

In the middle of the day, I remember my parents telling my sister and me that they were going to take a nap. Maybe one of us would object and plead for a few moments of playtime, but we never won. The two of them went to their room and shut the door behind them, while my sister and I were left to entertain ourselves. Maybe they napped for an hour, perhaps less, but as a child, it felt like an eternity. I brought out my stack of white printer paper and my special pen the one with the multicolored ink that changed colors when you pushed down different levers. I tried to draw the perfect girl, a mix of Princess Jasmine, Esmeralda from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and my mom. I always started with the eyes. I drew one almond-shaped eye on the left center of the page. If it wasn’t perfect, maybe too small or the lines were shaky, I started over—and over and over again. Sometimes I went through a whole stack of papers before I had an entire face drawn.

“What was wrong with this one, Joelyn?” My dad lifted one of the sheets with a single curved line near the middle of the page.

“I don’t know. It didn’t look nice.”

“My daughter, the number one paper waster.”

I made sure not to look at him or even crack a smile. You don’t even know how to do art, I thought to myself.

“I don’t care. I have a lot of paper,” I said, pointing to the stack.

“You should. You know how many trees you’re wasting?”

I rolled my eyes: What do trees have to do with it? The tip of my tongue pressed my top lip and I held the pen firmly on the page. The first eye was good, the second too, but this time it was the nose that sucked. I tossed aside the umpteenth failed attempt, and looked to another clean blank page in front of me. I swiped my hand across the sheet and could feel indents from the last drawing. I held the sheet up into the light and saw the two eyes and sucky nose engraved into the paper, and the one behind that, and behind that. I balled up these blank sheets and tossed them aside too. My dad laughed and shook his head at me. I wanted to tear up every single piece of paper I had. Go back to sleep.

***

“You’re bleeding!” My sister screamed from across the table.

I looked down and saw that the lemon had been sliced in nearly the same spot multiple times, while my middle finger lay mangled beneath it. The grout between the tiles was stained red and there was blood pooling off the edge of the counter. My breaths became short and panicked. I lifted my hand and the middle finger dangled. A sliver of bone peeked out from the open skin. I could feel my entire body tremble with fear.

“I’m gonna die! I’m gonna die! I’M GONNA DIE!” My voice got louder each time.

***

Jonathan and I moved into our new apartment three months before Mosley was born. It’s a cheaply renovated two bedroom, two bathroom in an undesirable neighborhood of San Diego known as El Cajon. The complex is small with 12 units total. We get two assigned parking spots and the rent is manageable. Jonathan wasn’t entirely convinced by the place, but I pushed for it. I think he would have preferred a room in his dad’s cozy, upscale track home in Carlsbad. However, I wasn’t willing to live under anyone else’s roof when the baby arrived. Jonathan’s family was kind; I just didn’t know what to expect with motherhood, and I didn’t want anyone witnessing a meltdown. Besides, I relatively like our place. The fresh coat of paint may be peeling, but it’s a thousand square feet of our very own space. When I was pregnant, it was the best feeling to come home, take off my clothes, and blast the air conditioning. I loved getting off from an early shift and napping on the couch when the complex was quiet, because the neighbor kids were still at school or daycare. At the time, I don’t know if I felt safe or was too pregnant to care.

It wasn’t until Mosley was born that I gained a heightened cautiousness. I began to think differently about the sweet old man that lives a few doors down. I see him throughout the day, crouched by the dumpster, smoking cigarettes. He wears plaid pajama pants and a sport coat. Sometimes when I pull into the complex at night, I find him walking in the middle of the parking lot, unaware of my headlights or the sound of my car behind him. I inch forward, with each slow step he takes, to get to my assigned spot in the front. A part of me grows impatient, while the other part wants to wait for him to shut the door of his apartment before Mosley and I get out of the car.

At night before we all go to bed, I’ve picked up a new routine. I open the front door to check that the security gate is locked, then I lock and chain the front door, and stare at it for approximately five seconds. I walk to the kitchen and look at the stove and say “OFF” aloud,five times for each knob linked to the burners and oven. I touch the freezer and fridge with one hand, then shut off the lights, and go to the bedroom. Jonathan thinks it’s silly, but we’ve been safe so far.

***

I was too afraid of the sting that cleaning the wound might cause, so I hardly ever let Mom or Dad come near me. I kept it covered until the puss was putrid to any nearby nose. Nonetheless, my finger healed within a few weeks, and a thick scar took the place of the cut. Every morning, a voice came over the loudspeaker and instructed everyone to put their right hand over their heart and stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. I rubbed my thumbs over the inside of my middle fingers. One side was smooth, while the other had a sliver of raised skin where my scar was—I knew this was my right hand. I finally had a way of distinguishing right from left.

The scar served other purposes as time went on. It became a trigger for my OCD as a child. I rubbed my thumb over it once, then twice, then 29 times until it felt right. If I had to overcome a fear, like walking into another classroom to deliver something from my teacher to another, I touched the scar to remind myself that I would survive. I had survived my first major injury and I would survive twenty unfamiliar fifth-grade students staring at my unfamiliar face when I entered their classroom. I worried those students might find all my faults in our twenty-second encounter; they might notice my pigeon-toed walk and whisper to each other about it through recess. I rubbed my scar and faced my fears. The worry never left, but the anxiety subsided just enough to get the task done.

Today the scar still remains on my right middle finger. It never faded or flattened. It has become less about what I thought, as a child, to be a “near-death experience by a butter knife” and more so a lesson in parenthood. A lesson about the kind of parent I do not want to be, as well as a realization that mistakes are inevitable. I used to look back on my childhood and pinpoint our parents’ faults. Although many of their mishaps were avoidable, as a new mother, I have a better understanding of the struggle to make the ‘right’ decisions. I look at my scar now and can laugh. I know that kids get hurt. If Mosley is anything like Jonathan or me, he’s going to take some tumbles. Sure, I have urges to be the overprotective mom, breathing down his neck with hand sanitizer and hugs, but that’s just not realistic or healthy. I have to blink every once in awhile. I have to look away. I have to work; and I have to show him that his mom is strong and independent. I want to teach him to be strong and independent. I want to teach him how to cut lemons.

 

Joelyn Suarez lives in San Diego, CA with her fiancé and son. She will be receiving her MFA in Creative Writing from UCR Palm Desert this month. Her essay “Home” was featured in NoiseMedium magazine as a part of their premier contest. She is the Nonfiction Editor for The Coachella Review.

Sister Act

Sister Act

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Back view of two little girls on caribbean vacation

By Maryanne Curran

The hostess seats the two of us at a booth. The restaurant is fairly quiet – just a handful of other diners are there.   We are late for lunch, but early for dinner. I’m not sure what to call a meal at this time of day.

My dining partner is Gail, my sister and best friend. We are not Foodies. Our tastes run to simple fare like the type of meals you can find at chain restaurants. I suppose that makes us Chainies. Give us a good burger, chicken teriyaki, or the like, and we’re happy.

As soon as I tell Gail that we are going out to eat, she starts smiling.   She loves going out to eat.

Strangers often mistake us for mother and daughter. Although, there is only an eight-year difference in our ages, Gail looks considerably younger. Gail is developmentally disabled and functions at about the level of a six-year-old. She has a sweetness and simplicity to her face that makes her look far younger than she is. That coupled with the fact that I speak for Gail and order her meal along with mine, would make any new acquaintances assume this is a maternal relationship, and not a sisterly one.

Eating out with Gail is a fun activity for both of us. But it does require me to serve up an extra helping of patience, because Gail uses the time to pose an endless litany of questions and comments before, during, and after our meal.

Sometimes, it feels like Gail is Perry Mason cross-examining me on the witness stand asking me one question after another.

I answer her questions as best I can. Sometimes my answers are not completely truthful – but I have to phrase my responses in ways that Gail can easily comprehend. Because of our relationship, Gail trusts me and what I say to her. To Gail, I am a fountain of all knowledge, and I do my best to provide the information.

Once we have placed our order is when the questions begin. “What’s her name?” asks Gail about our server.

I can’t remember what the server said. “I’ll find out when she comes back,” is my response.

When our server returns in a few minutes, I check her badge. After she leaves, I say, “Her name is Diane.”

“That’s a good name,” says Gail. “Where does she live?”

I’ve just met this woman. I’m not going to ask her where she lives like some kind of creepy stalker. I always tell Gail that the server lives in the same town as the restaurant is. It’s a guess. But it’s probably a good one.

“How old is she?” asks Gail. That question is a little easier.

“Thirty-four,” I guess.

I could say that our server was 16 or 66. The actual number is unimportant, as Gail doesn’t have a clear understanding of what various numbers mean. When asked how old she is, Gail often says the wrong number.

For the most part, Gail’s questions are simple ones. Occasionally, she poses a question that is not so black-and-white. It’s the gray questions that stretch my sisterly caregiving skills thin.

In particular, Gail’s questions about the whereabouts of our parents are an going exercise in patience for me. Our mother passed away in 2008; dad followed a few years. Gail knows that our parents are gone and now reside in a place called heaven.

Gail thinks heaven is like the mall and wonders why her mom and dad can’t drive back to see her. I try to provide consistency when answering these particular questions and choose words that are easy for her to understand. But it can be difficult to explain a spiritual concept to someone who sees things as simply as Gail does.

Thankfully, today’s questions are her standard ones and easy enough to answer to satisfy Gail. When our meals arrive, Gail starts eating and enjoying her meal. As I watch her, I’m struck by how lucky I am to have Gail in my life.

Lucky? You? (I can almost hear the disbelief as you read these words.) Yes, I’m lucky to have Gail in my life.

I’m not pretending that there aren’t challenges to caring for an adult with special needs. Every day, there are issues that cause me concern. I worry about her safety. I worry that she is healthy. I worry that others will be kind to her. Most of all, I worry that she is happy. I try to make sure she has a good life.

My friends sometimes wonder about how I handle caring for Gail, 24/7. It’s easy. When you love someone as much as I love my sister Gail. The joyous moments that we share together outweigh any challenges that we may face.

Occasionally, I wonder what my life may have been like if Gail was not in it. I would have been a very different person, most certainly. Because of our relationship, the positive attributes that make up my character make me a better person.

Because of Gail, Santa Claus lives, rainbows make me smile, and I know what unconditional love is.

Maryanne Curran is a freelance writer from Lexington, Mass.  When not exploring new places to walk with her sister, Maryanne enjoys reading, traveling, and spending time with family and friends.

Sitting with the Loss of My Daughter’s Sisters

Sitting with the Loss of My Daughter’s Sisters

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By Melissa Hart

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My mother lost custody of me in the homophobic 1970s when she left my father for a woman. My daughter lost her mother to addiction at birth.

 

At nine, I read a novel in which a boy’s beloved hound dog got mauled by a cougar—ripped open from breastbone to pelvis so that her entrails spilled out and festooned a nearby bush like Christmas tinsel as she attempted to follow her master home. That’s how I felt when my mother and her girlfriend left me on my father’s front porch Sunday nights, and I watched their VW bus disappear down the street for 10 days—like my entrails were cascading from my gashed abdomen, pooling in a pile around my white Keds.

And that’s how I felt 35 years later, watching my nine-year-old daughter say goodbye to her older sisters on our front porch after 24 hours of let’s pretend and coloring books and hiking trails while I wished their adoptive mother a safe journey two and a half hours back down the highway.

My mother lost custody of me in the homophobic 1970s when she left my father for a woman. My daughter lost her mother to addiction at birth. She didn’t miss the parent she’d hardly met. But her sisters with their identical timbre and diction, their shared love for dollhouses and hip hop, their shared trauma—these girls, she missed.

My husband and I adopted her from Oregon’s foster care system. Another family had adopted her sisters—one of them developmentally delayed—and couldn’t parent a third infant with significant medical needs. We agreed to an open adoption, to visits with them when time and schedules permitted. For several years, our meetings consisted of tentative hours at shopping mall playgrounds and children’s museums as we got to know each other, gradually lengthening into daylong playdates and this season, a sleepover.

They tell you that as a parent, you’ll experience all the ages and stages of childhood again vicariously through your kid. I never found this to be true until the moment my daughter stood out on our winter porch with the kitchen vent emanating smells of her favorite macaroni and cheese, and she told her sisters goodbye.

All at once, memory walloped me. The girls clung to each other with goosebumps raised on their skinny arms, called “I love you, Sissy!” with their breath creating smoke flowers in the crisp air. Then, two of them walked to their car and one of them stayed behind, and my insides spilled out.

 *   *   *

Every other Sunday in the eighties, when I stepped through my father’s door, I paused for a moment to take the temperature of the house. Almost always, he sat in his bedroom upstairs paying bills and listening to Vin Scully recap Dodger games on the radio. My stepmother stood in the kitchen describing for my younger siblings the new dessert she’d concocted from crushed Oreos and vanilla pudding or fresh Meyer lemons and cream cheese or bottles of stout poured into chocolate cake batter.

Alone, I sat on the carpet in my room and pillowed my head on the bed. No one came in. If I missed dinner those Sunday nights, if I shook my head at my stepmother, mute with sorrow, she returned to the dining room explaining my absence as “hormones.” I listened to my father’s overloud laughter and pressed my hands against my sternum, wondering how on earth to hold myself together for ten days before I could see my mother again.

Losing a family member over and over becomes a Sisyphean series of cruel small deaths. It would have been easier not to visit my mother every other weekend all the years of my adolescence. It would be easier not to see my daughter’s sisters, to let the girls get on with their lives 100 miles apart. But easy isn’t always optimal.

*   *   *

This winter on our porch, I left my daughter waving goodbye to her sisters in the car disappearing down the road. I went into the house and sat at one end of our big green couch, legs splayed inelegantly across the cushions, and reached for the warmest, softest blanket I could find. Then, I waited.

How do you help a child through grief and loss? The first few years, I met the moment of the sisters’ parting with a barrage of what I believed to be comforting distractions.

“Let’s go see a movie!” I told my daughter. “Let’s go to the trampoline park! Get ice cream! Go roller skating!”

She took my suggestions, mute, eyes wide and glittering as an animal’s when it’s in pain, and I congratulated myself for avoiding the chilly disregard of my father and stepmother. But last summer, after a playground visit with the sisters ended much too quickly, she hurled these words in my face: “Mommy, I don’t want to do anything!”

I heard her, and thought with a spinning head, what now?

The Buddhists tell us to sit with our pain, to make friends with it. Three decades ago, I sat with the loss of my mother surrounding me until I fell into bed exhausted. I think about what I wanted from the two parents with whom I lived—not space to process the transition as some obtuse child psychologist had counseled my father. Not even the whimsical desserts that my stepmother presented on her silver cake tray and I failed to recognize as reparation. I would have said no to a trip at the cinema or a game of Monopoly. I longed only for someone to say, “You hurt,” so that I could nod and push my insides back in and soldier on.

So this winter, I sat on the couch with a soft plaid blanket on my lap, and I waited. My daughter walked into the living room without looking at me. She closed the door against the 34-degree wind rattling our front yard cedar and wandered into her room.

I’ve failed, I thought. But she returned. Eyes downcast, she walked over to me and sat on the couch, straddling one of my outstretched legs. Then she crawled between them and lay against my chest. I covered her with the blanket and put my arms around her.

I couldn’t tell her it would be okay. Because it isn’t okay.

But if we can acknowledge that, not okay becomes more bearable.

My daughter and I sat there together on the couch for an hour and just breathed. She dozed a little in the warmth from the baseboard heater. I closed my eyes, as well.

For once, maybe I got it right. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t say anything. I just sat there with her, the slippery tangle of our entrails surrounding us, and held on.

Sky Pony Press will publish Melissa Hart’s debut middle-grade novel, Avenging the Owl, in April. She teaches for Whidbey Island’s MFA program in Creative Writing.

Photo: Andrew Pons/unsplash.com

Awake 

Awake 

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Something about that quiet companionship in the dark was a comfort to us as children, and again as mothers, too.

 

When you stop sleeping, really stop sleeping except for forty-five minutes or an hour at a time, your eyes have to work harder to focus. Your muscles feel like gelatin. Your hands shake. And when you haven’t slept, and the small vulnerable thing that is your few-weeks-old child settles on your chest, radiating warmth into your sore muscles, whispering tiny warm breaths onto your tired skin, it is really, really hard to stay awake.

Night after night, for Liddy’s first months, my husband and I took shifts holding her up straight and still, to minimize her reflux and let her digest the calories she so desperately needed. When my turn came, I would sit on the couch with my knees pulled to my chest and cradle her there against me, keeping her body, and mine, upright, trying to stay awake, praying she wouldn’t slide off onto the floor or press her tiny nose and mouth into me and stop breathing.

My sister Megan had diagnosed Liddy’s reflux before the doctors, hearing her pained gulps and grunts through the phone. Megan’s own daughter, Corinne, was born just ten weeks before Liddy; Corinne’s reflux was confirmed when she stopped breathing in her car seat and went to the hospital in an ambulance. So the girls shared the same illness, the same long nights. And Megan and I were on similar schedules, up every hour or two to feed, hold, and soothe. We held them for thirty minutes, an hour, or sometimes, for the rest of the night.

This was in the time before texting and smartphones, so first Megan and I tried keeping each other company through email. But it was difficult to keep Liddy upright and still while I typed, and the keyboard’s clicking and the blue glow of the screen made her restless. The murmurs of my voice relaxed her, though, so Megan and I developed a system. We set our cell phones to vibrate and kept them beside us through the night. We could call each other without the risk of disrupting our rare opportunities for sleep.

Our late-night phone calls came to resemble our childhood sharing a bedroom, whispering to pass the time when we should have been asleep. Even after our older siblings moved out, leaving us with our own bedrooms, Megan continued to stay in my room at night. Something about that quiet companionship in the dark was a comfort to us as children, and again as mothers, too.

When Liddy did sleep, I’d sometimes wake to a missed call message, then check my email to find a hastily written message right in the subject line: “HELP. Up all night no sleep.” Or, “To Liddy from Corinne. You up?” OR, “WAIT WAIT do not call. Cannot find cell phone and ringer is on.”

“Daylight savings time is going to screw us,” Megan said once. “We’re not frigging farmers.”

I burst out laughing.

“Stop!” she said. “You are going to shake her.”

We talked about the girls’ health, about our toddler boys’ antics, but mostly we spoke about mundane, silly things. But often, we just relaxed into silence punctuated by the girls’ shallow breathing as they relaxed into sleep.

“Is she asleep?” One of us would say, eventually.

“Yeah. I think I’ll try to lay her down.”

“Bye,” we’d whisper, and hang up. We’d release our finally-settled babies from our tired arms, and fall into our own brief sleep before it was time to start again.

Karen Dempsey is a Brain, Child contributing blogger. She has written for the New York Times Motherlode blog, Babble, and Brain, Child. She lives in Massachusetts. Read her work at www.kdempseycreative.com. or follow her on Twitter.

Photo: Megan Dempsey

Pancakes

Pancakes

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By Nancy Townsley

We had pancakes at the diner down the street from dad’s house two Sundays before we put mom in the nursing home. That’s what mom had, anyway. I had oatmeal with raisins and walnuts. My sisters probably had waffles or yogurt parfaits, I can’t remember. Our dad had two eggs sunny side up, crisp bacon, wheat toast with margarine, and coffee.

Dad cut mom’s pancakes for her because she had forgotten how to do it. She used a fork to stir three packets of sugar into her first cup of decaf. Dad shook them in there himself. It was way too many, but no one said anything.

We didn’t say anything to the waitress, either, when she asked us how our morning was going and wished all the women at the table a Happy Mother’s Day. Her voice was cheery and she wore a fake pink carnation behind the pinned-on plastic badge that said Stacey. We pretended everything was OK, but I wondered whether our guilty faces gave us away. We smiled and ordered our breakfasts. When Stacey circled back around to refill our coffees, we smiled again and watched mom dump more sugar into the hot black liquid.

That’s the way my heart felt on that day. Hot. Black. Liquid.

***

We all had it written down on our calendars, the day we’d take mom to the home. Twelve days from now. Every time dad wondered out loud whether he could keep on taking care of mom by himself, we’d insist she was not going to get better. It’s not practical, my sisters and I would say. Remember how it’s hurting your back to get her in and out of the shower? How you have to wrestle her into her clothes every few days when you finally cajole her into getting out of her bathrobe? How crazy it makes you that she keeps you up half the night either laughing or crying, and you never know which it will be? How you wonder if you’ll ever get any rest ever again?

You’re almost 80, dad. This is not working. We know the two of you have lived together for more than five decades, since you were married in the Immanuel Lutheran Church in Algona, Iowa, the weekend after Thanksgiving in 1954. We know it’s hard for you to imagine yourself here in your cozy, familiar house, and her there in a sterile, silent room without you by her side. We’re so sorry it’s breaking your heart. But you really have to let go.

It was the only time I can remember, in all the years we’ve been dad’s daughters, that we were so adamant and unrelenting. All our lives we had lined up, like little tin soldiers, whenever dad exhorted us. Our family was not a democracy—we marched unflinchingly to dad’s drummer—so it surprised me when he acquiesced. But there was a sinister secret in the deal. We agreed not to tell mom we were planning to move her out of their house because her needs were too big for dad to manage. She would not have wanted to discuss it even if she could understand, dad said, which she most definitely could not. It seemed deceitful and Machiavellian and downright wrong, but still we did not tell mom she was going. Or when. Or to where. Instead, we plotted behind her back and convinced ourselves it was all right to keep her in the dark because our decision, cloaked in whispered conversations, was what was best for her.

And also for us, though we couldn’t bear to think about that.

***

The day before mom was supposed to go to the dementia care facility—a clean, well-appointed place we’d all toured and approved of—she had a heart attack. Not a serious one, the emergency room doctor said, though she’d have to stay overnight for observation. It felt like synchronicity to me, as if her body had ginned up a cardiac event in order to foil our plans. Lying there in her hospital bed, the crisp white sheets tucked up to her neck making her look so small and frail, mom blinked and her wide eyes leaked—a sure sign, I thought, that she knew something was up. That everything was going to change, and she couldn’t do anything about it. Drip, drip, drip went her IV. Beep, beep, beep went her heart monitor. Dab, dab, dab went the handkerchief I used to catch her tears.

***

It was a mistake not to bring mom to the care home in an ambulance. That would have been much more official and tidy. She went in a car sent by Cedar Crest Alzheimer’s Special Care Center. Emerging from the hospital in a wheelchair, mom complied when the orderlies started to fold her rag-doll body into the front seat of the sedan, taking care to place her fuzzy sock-covered feet just so and guide her shaking hands into her lap, one over the other. My younger sister and I scrambled into the back and told the driver to follow our dad, up ahead in the navy blue Volvo. It was funny because of course the man in the sedan knew exactly where to go, but dad was going to lead the whole sad caravan 10 miles up the road to our destination nonetheless. With dad ceremony was important, even when the mission felt impossible.

Two other cars, my older sister’s and my husband’s, followed behind.

It took us much longer than it should have to get there. Felt like it, anyway. We passed a McDonald’s, a Taco Bell and a Long John Silver’s on the way. Also a 7-Eleven, Jo-Ann Fabrics and a Shell gas station. When we finally arrived, dad looked somber, stoic, fearful and ashen, all at the same time. My sister and I popped out of the back seat just as our driver, whose name was Travis, came to a stop under the covered area leading to the care center’s foyer. Mom stayed put. She stared straight ahead. This was a bad sign.

Like an earnest hotel valet, Travis sprinted around the rear of the car and opened the passenger-side door for my mom. He smiled a nervous smile and disappeared into the building, leaving us to our private moment of transition. Like a battlefield blueprint, we had our next move figured out. We’d walk mom to the reception desk, sign her in, memorize the week’s keypad code to gain entrance to the locked common area, then find a nice alcove for the family to hunker down in. We’d get mom a cup of coffee, maybe, and reassure her everything was fine. That she’d like it here, and we’d visit as often as we could. Dad would promise to come every morning and every afternoon, which I knew he would do, because his word was his bond.

***

All of this was running through my mind as mom just sat there, eyes fixed on the windshield or the car’s hood or god knows what, maybe a robin in one of the maple trees lining the walkway, and she didn’t budge. Not an inch, not a twitch. We noticed she was crying. With mom we could always tell when the waterworks were under way because her heart-shaped face would scrunch up and get all red, just like it was right then, and she’d make low, soft, guttural noises, the kind a wounded animal might make if it were all alone and suffering. And I thought: she knows. She knows what’s happening and that she can’t control it. She knows that if she gets out of the car and walks through that door, she’s not coming out. She knows we’re betraying her.

I’d never felt more helpless. Dad took mom’s hands in his and tried to lift her from the bucket seat. “Here we go, Lucile,” he coaxed, “I’ve got you, I’ve got you.” He’d take a break, rub his aching back and try again. She cried harder and stared at him with pleading eyes. He broke down. He walked to his car, got in and drove off, “to pick up her prescriptions,” he called out the window. It was our turn to convince mom everything was all right, to convince ourselves it was. How do you do that when it isn’t? She wept hot, bitter tears. They rolled down her cheeks and dripped from her chin onto her pale blue cotton blouse, the one with two miniature Schnauzers embroidered on the pocket, just like the dog she had at home, her home, the one she was leaving for good. Her nose ran, and mucus mingled with the tears, making a mess we tried to clean up with tissues and platitudes and frantic murmured prayer. Things were that dire and intractable and confusing and dreadful—until Ann, the center administrator, came to our rescue.

***

She was wearing a long, white cardigan over a tailored red dress, and her hair was done up in a breezy French knot. As she approached our mother I thought she resembled Florence Nightingale, or even Joan of Arc. It was that important for someone, anyone, to do something to fix this. Ann crouched down beside the car door. She cupped mom’s forehead in the palm of one hand and swept a soft cloth across her soggy face with the other, chatting her up with stories about the people she’d meet inside. There was Marilyn, her roommate, who was very quiet but friendly, too. Judy, who loved to wear colorful bracelets and had taken a fancy to Marty, who clapped his hands a lot. And Joyce, who could be crotchety and sometimes swore in German, but danced gracefully around the dining hall with imaginary partners whenever they played Frank Sinatra.

 

Mom sniffed and stopped crying. She looked at Ann through the swollen slits of her eyes and saw the same thing we did: salvation. Ann put her arm around mom’s shoulders and mom leaned into her, enough that her body slowly rose from the car, and together they shuffled over the threshold into Cedar Crest, mom’s new and forever home. In almost a single deft motion, Ann had bound up our hearts and our spirits, not with gauze or liniment but with confidence and empathy and kindness, doses measured in magic and love. We were floored and amazed and thankful. We slumped down on a sofa in the TV room with mom until dad reappeared, a white paper bag carrying a half dozen vials of pills tucked under his arm. “You all right, ‘Cile?” he asked, brushing her sticky bangs aside. “I love you,” he soothed. “I’m here.”

And he was, morning and afternoon, for exactly three years and nine days, until mom stopped eating and drinking and the hospice nurse said she was “actively dying,” so we all gathered around her bed to kiss her cooling brow, sing to her, read to her from her bible and tell her it was all right to go.

***

Later, when we returned to dad’s house, 50 years of memories hung in the air as conspicuously as the walnut-framed wedding picture on their bedroom wall—she in her beaded tulle gown, he in his handsome white suit—and I noticed a new addition. A large calendar, with artwork by Renoir and oversize spaces for recording significant dates and appointments, sat on the kitchen table, open to the month of May.

Two squares were outlined in magenta marker.

“Lucile to Cedar Crest, 2010,” read a notation on May 21, accompanied by a sad face drawn by dad.

Under May 30, the day mom went to the peace, he’d scrawled a tribute to the span of their marriage—”58 years, 190 days”—and added a bright pink heart.

Author’s Note: Since my mother died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease in 2013, my heart has lurched every time I’m unable to conjure up a word in conversation. I wonder if succumbing to the ravages of plaques and tangles is my destiny, too. But mostly, I reflect on the meaning of her life, its serendipitous connections with mine—and I smile at the memories.

Nancy Townsley grew up as a Navy “junior” and rode horses bareback in the Puerto Rican sun. Since moving to the Pacific Northwest in 1973, she has forged a career in community journalism. Her fiction, nonfiction and essays have appeared in Brave On The Page: Oregon Writers on Craft and the Creative Life (Forest Avenue Press), NAILED Magazine, Role Reboot, runnersworld.com and BLEED, a literary blog by Jaded Ibis Productions. She lives, writes and runs in St. Helens, Oregon.

Wings

Wings

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WO Wings ARTBy Elizabeth Knapp

This is a story about the one who was brushed aside, the cancer child’s sister…

Four years ago on Valentine’s Day, my four-month-old daughter Molly was diagnosed with infant leukemia.

Four years ago on Valentine’s Day, my older daughter, then four years old, came home from preschool with her first bag of Valentine’s Day cards, brimming with happiness. She kicked off her boots, shrugged out of her puffy winter coat and before I could remind her to hang it up she spilled her many, lovely valentine cards out onto the hardwood floor, rifling through them to show me certain ones.

Then she noticed that her aunt and cousins were there. She noticed her baby sister was sleeping, her head lolling on my shoulder, instead of watching her with wide-awake eyes. She noticed that I wasn’t smiling.

“What’s wrong, Mommy? Look at this one! It’s made from a doily and it has my name on it! And why are my cousins here?” She fired questions at me.

I passed Molly to my sister-in-law and knelt down to be at her level, my heart breaking as I stuffed the cards back into their paper bag without looking at them. “Something’s wrong with Molly. She’s very sick and Daddy and I need to take her to the hospital. We might be gone all night. But you get to have a sleepover with your cousins tonight! Won’t that be fun? You can bring your rolling bag.”

She looked at me dubiously. “Can I at least show you my valentines before you go?”

Tears welled up, threatened to drip down my cheeks. I pushed them away and told her that I couldn’t look at them right now because Daddy and I had to leave right away, but I knew her cousins would be thrilled to sort through them with her. That I would look at them as soon as I could.

We went upstairs together to pack pajamas and a change of clothes. Her special stuffed lamb, Little Lamby, was to ride in the bag with the valentines. We packed her toothbrush and no-pull hairbrush. I took Molly back into my arms, kissed my reluctant and teary older daughter goodbye and watched from the window as she trudged out to the car with her cousins.

This could be a story about my baby who had cancer, but it’s not. There are other stories about that, stories about her scars, about how she almost died twice and then didn’t. Stories still to be written about the days, weeks and months during which we vacillated between fear and hope, dread and desire, boredom and anxiety. Stories that are so filled with horror I wish they were not mine to tell. I wish no one ever had to tell them.

This is a story about the one who was brushed aside, the cancer child’s sister, the one who went to preschool one sunny Valentine’s Day filled with the promise of a party and came home to have all her beautiful cards stuffed back into their drab paper bag. At least it had her name on it, looped in fancy letters: Amelia.

Amelia: my first born, my copper-haired firecracker. Amelia, who threw me into motherhood, introducing me to depths of patience, rage, love and joy I never knew existed. Amelia, who cried for ten months straight until she could crawl. Then, finally able to explore her world on her own terms, stopped crying and began to speak.

At the time Molly was diagnosed with cancer, Amelia was obsessed with fairies. She begged me to read books about fairies again and again and again. She drew fairies and wanted me to cut them out, demanded I talk for them so she could ask them questions. After being in the hospital with Molly for two days and two nights, I knew I had to go home to Amelia. But how do you explain leukemia to a four-year-old? How do you tell your daughter that her sister is just about as ill as a person can get and still be alive?

I made up a story about the fairies. Once upon a time, I told Amelia, there was a family of fairies: a mom, a dad and two sister fairies. One day, the baby sister fairy became very sick. Something happened and her body couldn’t make healthy blood anymore, and all fairies know that if a fairy can’t make healthy blood she gets very, very ill. The baby fairy had to go to the fairy hospital. The doctors at the hospital had to give her special medicine that seemed to make her even sicker but actually, they hoped, would make her better. It was red, and they had to put it directly into her blood.

The baby fairy sister, stuck in the hospital with all this medicine that was supposed to make her better but made her body feel terrible, lay around all day with her wings drooping. The mom and dad fairy were always fluttering over to the hospital, worried about the drooping wings and also worried that their big girl fairy would think they didn’t love her anymore when, in fact, they loved her so much their hearts ached every time they had to leave her. It turned out that the only time the baby fairy’s wings didn’t droop was when her sister fairy was visiting. So it was very, very important that the big sister visit her as much as possible, because all fairies know that you can’t get better if you have constantly drooping wings.

I had to stop here because I was crying too hard to continue.

The weeks that followed developed into a pattern. My husband stayed at the hospital Thursday to Sunday, and I was there Sunday to Thursday. Here is what Amelia remembers about that time. When I was home, we slept together at night, she and I. I had to wake in the middle of the night because, as a breastfeeding mother away from her baby, I needed to pump milk for Molly. Amelia, so in tune with my rhythms, would wake with me and follow me downstairs, the steady whoosh-pop sound of the pump lulling her back to sleep, slumped next to me on the couch.

On switch days, when John and I swapped duties, Amelia would usually come to the hospital, too. Molly’s eyes would light up when her older sister came into the room. Amelia learned quickly to be mindful of the IV lines. She got to know the nurses and the child life specialists, where the art supplies were kept and that the patient kitchen was always stocked with popsicles and ice cream. Sometimes the two of us would explore the hospital, tunneling through dark hallways and popping out in unexpected places. One cloudy spring day, we found our way a secret garden surrounded by towering hospital walls. On warm days, when Molly was well enough to leave her room, we took her with us, her IV pole bumping over the walkway.

After Molly came home, Amelia learned to live with uncertainty. Any fever in a cancer child is cause for a trip to the emergency room. Which also means trips to the emergency room for the sibling. Bringing Amelia with us meant that we loved her just as much as Molly, that she was an integral part of our family, too important to be left behind. Trips to the ER were an adventure for her and she was a distraction for us. As a cancer child, Molly had top priority in the ER but once we were in a room, there was lots of waiting and wondering and sitting around. Amelia’s presence cheered up Molly and made it impossible for us to sink into our own gray worlds of worry and fear.

Once, Amelia received a trophy from an organization that supports siblings of kids with cancer. It still sits in the center of her bureau. “AMELIA,” it reads, “SUPER SIB TO A CANCER KID.” And even now, four years later, when asked what makes her special she replies, “My sister had cancer.”

I have to believe that my thoughtful, serious firstborn baby has learned things—about compassion, about rolling with the punches, about finding your place when the world is not about you—that she may not have learned had her sister not had cancer. She played with kids in the playrooms with smooth, shiny heads like her sister’s, kids in wheelchairs whose cheeks were swollen from long-term steroid use, kids whose IV poles clattered after them wherever they went.

This story began with the cancer child because when you have a child with cancer their sibling, heartbreakingly, comes second. Their valentines will sit unappreciated in their bag. Their own plans for the day will be swept aside when their sister wakes in the night with a fever.

The year Molly had cancer, I recycled Amelia’s crumpled, forgotten valentine bag without ever looking at the cards inside. This year, four years later, Molly went to her own Valentine’s Day party and came home with her own paper bag, a fancy “Molly” scrawled across the top. She turned her bag upside down and the cards fluttered out on the floor. My two girls sat together, admiring the cards, their heads touching, blond hair mingling with orange. Watching them, I could see their wings humming happily behind them.

Author’s note: Molly is almost three years off treatment and remains cancer-free. She delights in provoking her big sister in a myriad of ways. Amelia is a curious and thriving second grader who, despite said provoking, continues to champion her little sister in every way.

Elizabeth Knapp lives with her family in a small town in Vermont. When not enjoying the antics of her two young daughters, she can be found writing, gardening and wandering the woods and fields around her house.

Don’t Speak

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By Liam Callanan

My youngest daughter, almost two, won’t speak.

It’s a problem, but not much of one, the pediatrician tells us—or rather, that’s what her mouth tells us. Her eyes betray a little more—I’m not worried now, but will be the next time we meet.

I don’t have to wait. I’m worried now. Maybe it’s perfectly normal for one’s child not to be a fluent communicator by eighteen months, but in our house it’s not. She has two older sisters who said more sooner, and worse yet, my baby girl’s father—me—is a fiction writer. If she makes it age two or twenty or beyond unable to catch a fly ball, fine. But she has to speak.

Right now, though, only the doctor’s speaking, and she says: Be patient.

***

Patience is a precious commodity in our house—Jane is the fourth of four girls. It may be that she’s not spoken yet because she’s not been able to get a word in edgewise.

And if the math is tripping you up at this point (1 baby + 2 older sisters = 4?), don’t worry—arithmetic is another problem area for us. Jane is our fourth child, but only the third we brought home from the hospital. She was born in 2007, her sister Honor in 2002, and Mary in 2000. Lucy was born February 19, 1998, and by the time I got to hold her in the hospital, she was already still and quiet. You have no idea how beautiful she was—or how quiet that room was. Up and down the hall, babies cried, mothers shouted, doctors and nurses called to each other. Anyone entering our room quickly fell quiet as soon as they saw the yellow rose a cautious nurse had taped to our door: hospital code for what had happened within.

We couldn’t be so oblique with our daughters. Instead, we followed the advice of experts and told them about Lucy directly. Just the minimum, we were told: Don’t overwhelm them. So we didn’t. But our girls occasionally overwhelm us. Every February, Mary, our oldest, reminds us that it’s time to buy the crib we purchase and donate each year on Lucy’s birthday. Honor, who inspires her teachers to ever-more elaborate euphemisms—”spirited,” “lively,” and, my favorite, “capable of extreme leadership”—will sometimes tell strangers in line at the grocery store about her “stone sister” (as in gravestone?) “who doesn’t speak.”

On the other hand, Honor will sometimes try to egg Jane into speaking in various public situations—which Jane never does. She smiles shyly, giggles or points, but she doesn’t otherwise greet the cashier or, say, the person behind her at church, or the other child on the playground.

***

At home, Jane’s a bit more loquacious. We’ve assured the doctor that we do hear “Mommy” and “Daddy,” and for a while, we were quite certain that her first official word would be “cheese,” which was fine with me. A word’s a word, and Jane was our first child to be born in Wisconsin. It would make a good story. But then cheese retreated, and Daddy melted into “Diddy” and then I started noticing that both I and Dora the Explorer went by “Diddy.” Then Dora’s friend Boots the Monkey, too. That’s not a good sign, I thought, but couldn’t think of a way to share that with the pediatrician: My daughter confuses me for a small lavender monkey.

***

Be patient, the doctor says, and we are, even though these are the months of the “language explosion” when other children—especially, it seems, the children of parents who blog—are learning a hundred words a day, and in multiple languages. That our doctor isn’t concerned yet is frustrating, but also reassuring. One of the things I like about her is her slowness to panic. When she asked Honor at age five to draw a self-portrait on her clipboard (I confess I don’t remember this diagnostic test from when I was a kid), and Honor instead drew a thigh-high stiletto boot and went to the other side of the form and marked “yes” beside all the “Abnormal Mental Health Symptoms” before we could get the pen away from her, our doctor did not commit Honor—or her parents—to an asylum. She smiled and said Honor was precocious and that she’d see her next year. She did, and Honor brought her a beautiful, full-length self-portrait—ponytail, crown, stiletto boots and all.

***

But the girls have always been good with doctors. Once, when the pediatrician finally did hit the panic button and send us to the Children’s Hospital emergency room—it was midnight, and Mary, seven, had been throwing up for twenty-four hours straight—we found ourselves in an exam room with a nurse practitioner who was going through her triage sheet. Midnight, and my daughter hadn’t kept anything down for more than a day, and had never been up this late in her life: “Would you say she’s acting … playful?” the NPT said. Mary’s head lolled against my chest. I didn’t answer. Two hours later, when the IV saline solution drip had miraculously restored her, the NPT returned to check on us. She whispered to me over the tubes and beeping: “How’s she feeling?” Before I could answer, Mary opened her eyes from her two a.m. nap and said just one word: “playful.”

***

In short, Mary and Honor are not shy—nor ever at a loss for words. When I told them I was reading at a local bookstore, they both asked what their role would be—they couldn’t imagine not having one. Since I’m still learning what it is to be a writer, and parent, and writer-parent, I said they could do whatever they wanted. Honor spun like a ballerina, fell, rose, and then curtsied to broad applause. Mary read a story that consisted of two lines: “I like chocolate. If you like chocolate, raise your hand.” When the entire audience did, she smiled and both girls gave me a look that very clearly said, Top that, Dad.

Of course, I’ve learned there is no topping them. What do you say when your six-year-old wakes you just before dawn, whispering at your bedside in the cold dark, Dad, I need a stapler? Or, when you’re invited to your daughter’s third-grade class to talk about “what writers do,” and after answering polite questions like Do you have a limousine? and Do you think of the words or pictures first?, Mary asks, “Dad, why are you so wild at home, and normal here?”
Speechless.

***

What could I say? That at home, I like plugging my iPod into the stereo and blasting whatever comes out so my girls and I can dance like popcorn in a kettle, because I spend all day very, very quietly sitting at a desk and talking to no one? That I’m wild with them—talking, tickling, tackling—because they’re so funny and so fun? That I will, and have, taken them to New York or Chicago or a random city some Saturday because life is short, and I’ve never been patient enough to wait for the adventures to come to me?

Or that I love talking a wild blue streak with them, dancing until we drop, because there was a day—a lonely cold one in February—that I thought I would never know a noisy life, that I thought my first daughter, so pretty, so silent, would also be my last.

Jane is our last.

Every milestone of hers that passes—smiling, sitting up, crawling, walking—is bittersweet. I already dread the day I dismantle the crib—the one we bought for Lucy, the one we’ve used for each girl since—and take it to Goodwill instead of storage.

And maybe Jane senses this in me. I wouldn’t be surprised if she understands everything we say. Maybe Jane knows that that first word will also be a last hallmark. Maybe she’s waiting.

Her sisters aren’t, of course. Honor has decided we’re aiming too low—she sits Jane down with chapter books, tries to get her to repeat words like “conversation” and “tiara.” Mary, meanwhile, recently completed a worksheet that asked her to predict the future. She came up with a list that included “boys will like Barbies,” “people will drive plastic cars,” and—”your first word will be fiction.”

Fiction?

Author’s Note: Jane loves fiction, loves cuddling with a book any time of day. And sometimes afterward, she will speak—low, steady, earnest, but absolutely unintelligible whispers that she sometimes punctuates by patting my cheek or nose. I want to ask Mary what she’s saying. Or, for that matter, Honor. I want to ask Jane. I want to ask Lucy. I want to ask all my girls if what I do all day as a writer is so different from what I do as a parent—imagine what might be, what could have been, and patiently, quietly, wait for the words to come.

Brain, Child (Winter 2010)

About the Author: Liam Callanan’s novels include All Saints and The Cloud Atlas. He coordinates the Ph.D. program in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He’s on the web at liamcallanan.com.