After school, Carmen and I found Mom leaning back on the recliner with her legs outstretched on the footrest. This had been a first day for her, too. Her surgery had been about seven weeks ago, and now that she had healed, it was time to start radiation therapy. So I wasn’t surprised to find her resting, a pillow on her lap and a glass of water on the side table. Meanwhile, Jimmy, who had spent the day with Grandma, was on the floor breaking up his train track.
“I feel sapped,” Mom said.
Carmen and I kissed her. Then I sat on the floor with Jimmy while Carmen grabbed the laptop and surfed the Internet.
“According to this website,” she explained, “fatigue is the most common side effect of radiation therapy.”
“I believe it,” Mom said sleepily.
Carmen surfed the Net a little longer. Then she asked, “So what’s it like at the cancer center? How do they ‘nuke’ your cells?”
I wasn’t sure Mom wanted to discuss this, so I said, “You don’t have to tell us if you don’t want.”
“It’s okay,” Mom said. “I don’t mind talking about it.” She pointed at the afghan on the couch. I gave it to her, and she spread it over her lap. “The therapists take me to a room with a machine called a linear accelerator. They put me on a bed, only it’s not soft and comfy like a real bed. It’s more like a table. They position me, just so, making me lift my arm over my head, and they move the gantry, the part of the machine where the radiation beam comes out. They point it right where my breast used to be.”
“Can you see the beam?” Carmen asked.
“No, it’s invisible.”
“But doesn’t it scare you to know that something invisible is hitting your body?”
I wanted to tell Carmen to quit being nosy, but I was curious, too. I’d probably ask the same questions if my sister weren’t around.
“Yes,” Mom answered. “I was a bit scared because after they prepped me for treatment, they said, ‘Don’t move.’ And then they walked out. They can’t turn on the machine until they’re in another room behind a thick wall that protects them from radiation. There isn’t even a window. They’ve got cameras to see me, but I can’t see them. I just hear their voices when they tell me they’re turning on the beam now.” She paused a minute, and I mind-traveled to a spaceship filled with mad scientists doing experiments on people because that’s how I imagined the room Mom described. “When I sat up after my treatment,” Mom continued, “I noticed all the ‘caution’ signs with the symbol for radiation. One even said, ‘Danger! Radiation Treatment Area.’ The therapists wear these things called dosimeter badges that change color if they’re exposed. So I knew we were working with some very dangerous stuff, and I kept wondering if I was crazy for doing this. You may not realize, but I grew up during the Cold War.”
“We had a cold war?” I asked, imagining battlefields in Alaska with weapons that hurled sharp, lethal icicles.
“We called it the Cold War,” Mom explained, “because we fought with threats instead of weapons. The United States and the Soviet Union had made enough nuclear bombs to destroy the entire world, so we lived in fear of bombs falling from the sky, especially here in San Antonio, with all its military bases. We constantly heard about radiation sickness, how it made you burn from the inside out.”
Carmen and I squirmed. “That’s awful,” I said.
“You know what the funny thing is?” Mom said. “I grew up thinking that radiation caused cancer, not cured it. I mean, it does cause cancer, doesn’t it? Isn’t that why the therapists have to leave the room? I’m sure there’s a joke here somewhere.” She laughed to herself.
“So does it hurt?” Carmen wanted to know.
“A little,” Mom said. “Let me show you.” She lifted her shirt and her arm, showing us the side of her body. The skin there was red, like a bad sunburn.
“It itches,” Mom said. “But don’t worry. They tell me it’s perfectly normal to get a rash like this.”
She covered up again and placed the pillow behind her head.
Meanwhile Carmen returned to the laptop, probably looking for information about burned skin as a side effect. “It says you might get nausea, too,” she said. “You might lose weight or damage healthy tissue.”
Mom nodded, her eyes droopy now. “The doctors mentioned that.” She lifted the afghan to her chin and closed her eyes. I could tell Carmen wanted to say something else, so I lifted a finger to my lips and said, “Shhh.” Jimmy mimicked me, putting his finger to his lips and saying, “shhh,” too.
“It’s only five o’clock,” Carmen whispered, worriedly. “Are you sure Mom should sleep? She hasn’t eaten dinner.”
“It’s okay,” I assured her. “She might feel nauseated, remember?”
Carmen glanced at the computer again, clicked a few more times, then said, “Maybe I should go clean the bathroom.”
She was still cleaning for her promesa, and each time she cleaned, she also counted something. So far, she had counted the tiles around the bathtub, the stripes on all our towels, and the number of ingredients in toothpaste, deodorant, hairspray, mouthwash, and soap. She even took a roll of toilet paper one day and counted out each square. She was acting weird. She always acted weird, but all this counting was even weirder.
I shouldn’t complain, though. At least Carmen was doing her promesa. At least it was challenging, because no bathroom stayed clean forever. I was working on mine too, but it wasn’t as challenging as Carmen’s.
Soon, Jimmy wanted cartoons, so I switched the TV to Nickelodeon, and he and I danced when some funny-looking aliens started to sing. That’s when Dad came home. As soon as he saw Mom sleeping on the recliner while Jimmy and I jumped around, he grabbed the remote and turned off the TV. Immediately, Jimmy said, “Gimme cartoon! Gimme cartoon!”
Dad shook his head, so Jimmy started to cry.
“Take him to your room,” Dad told me.
I wanted to say that we were having fun, that Jimmy was being good, but Dad didn’t give me a chance.
“Take him before he wakes up Mom.”
I obeyed and picked up Jimmy. He didn’t want to go to my room, so he started to bawl.
“Gimme cartoon!” he cried.
“Be quiet!” I said as I shut the bedroom door.
Poor Jimmy. As soon as the door closed, he gave up bawling and started to sob, his cheeks all wet with tears. He looked like one of those sad-eyed puppies on the Adopt-a-Pet commercial.
“Want to pillow fight?” I asked, hoping to cheer him up.
He stomped. “No!”
“Want to jump on the bed?”
“No!”
“Want to color? Want to take pictures with my iPhone? Want to play hide-and-seek?”
“No, no, no!”
I made one last effort. “Want to try on my shoes?”
He hushed, glanced at the closet door, then at me, and then at the closet again.
“Gimme shoes!” he announced as if it were his idea in the first place.
“Sure thing,” I said. “You can try on all my shoes if you want.”
We went to the closet. First he put on my tennis shoes, then my sandals, then the dress shoes I wore for special occasions, and after that, my boots. Of course, all of my shoes were too big, but he didn’t care. And when he tripped over himself, he laughed. After he got bored with matching pairs, he tried different combinations—one tennis shoe with a boot, one sandal with a dress shoe. He thought the oddball pairs were the funniest things he’d ever seen.
A while later, Carmen peeked in and said, “Dad wants to have a family meeting.”
I told Jimmy to pick his favorite pair, but he shook off the shoes and decided to go barefoot for a while.
We found Dad at the kitchen table. “Have a seat,” he said. “We need to talk.”
He sounded as serious as a strict principal. I just knew we were in trouble. I scanned my brain, trying to figure out what we had done wrong. Had I gotten in trouble at school already? Had Jimmy broken another Chia Pet? Had Carmen used Dad’s PayPal account for something as useless as the motorized solar system model she bought last year without his permission? Wait a minute! Maybe one of the guys from my Boyfriend Wish List had called. Maybe Derek had called! After all, he did talk to me today. He even asked me to sit by him. Dad probably wanted to set some ground rules now that he knew I was interested in boys. He probably wanted Carmen and Jimmy to spy on me. I was about to protest when Carmen spoke up.
“Where’s Mom?” she asked. “I thought this was a family meeting?”
“She’s resting,” Dad said. “And we are having a family meeting… but it’s about Mom. So let’s keep this between us, okay?”
Carmen and I nodded, but we glanced at each other, too. She looked as nervous as I felt. I wondered if something had gone wrong with the operation or with the radiation treatment.
“Is Mom okay?” I asked. “She seemed fine this afternoon. She was tired, but she was fine other than that.”
“She’s okay,” Dad said. “But like you mentioned, she’s tired. She needs to rest. And we need to let her rest.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. Mom looked very comfortable on the recliner earlier. She had her feet up. She had a pillow and a blanket. Sure, Jimmy and I were jumping around, but it didn’t seem to bother her.
“I’ve come up with a few quiet rules,” Dad said. “We need to make sure we follow them.” He turned to Jimmy. “That means you too, little buddy.”
“What do you mean by quiet rules?” Carmen asked. “You want us to whisper from now on?” She wasn’t being sarcastic, only curious.
“That would help,” Dad said. And then he stated the rules, counting them off with his fingers:
He paused, thought a minute, then said, “That should do for now, but if I think of any more, I’ll let you know.”
He pushed his chair away from the table so he could stand. It made a scraping sound against the floor. Dad thought a minute and said, “Instead of scooting your chair, lift it, so it doesn’t make any noise.”
Before leaving the room, he lifted the chair to set it back under the table. He was right. It didn’t make a sound.
If only cooking were as quiet. Dad tried to make dinner without a sound, but he couldn’t hush the vent over the stove or ask the meat to stop sizzling in the pan.
“Who knew tacos were so noisy?” he said. And when Mom woke up, he apologized over and over again.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I can’t be sleeping all the time.”
She didn’t have a big appetite, so she heated up a can of soup instead. All in all, it was a normal dinner. Carmen bragged about how many times she knew the answers in class and how the teachers were excited to work with such a smart girl this year. Jimmy kept asking for things like my taco and Carmen’s glass of water even though he had his own. Dad shared a story he’d heard on All Things Considered. And Mom didn’t seem sick at all. She asked questions about our first day at school and laughed at the funny things we said. Maybe she was lucky. Maybe Mom’s surgery was the worst part of her treatment. And it was over. She’d felt sick for a while, but besides being tired, she was okay. At least, that’s what I thought, until Mom grabbed her stomach and raced to the restroom. She stood up so fast, knocking over her chair. It startled Jimmy, so he began to cry. It startled Dad too, and he hurried after her.
“What happened?” Carmen asked, all scared.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Watch Jimmy. I’ll be right back.”
I found Mom in the bathroom, vomiting into the toilet. Dad stood beside her. He was gathering her long hair, holding it away from her face. He kept saying, “It’s okay. It’s okay,” but it wasn’t. Mom made awful heaving sounds, and she kept throwing up, even though all she’d eaten was a tiny bowl of soup.
I knew walking a 5K was too easy. After all, one guy ran a thousand miles. A 5K was only three miles. Should I be doing two 5Ks in a row? Three? How much is enough? How much to keep Mom from feeling sick?
I ran to my room, ignoring Carmen and Jimmy, who were still in the kitchen, both crying now. I shut the door, grabbed a notebook, and started to brainstorm. There must be something extra I could do. I jotted down ideas, my pen hard against the paper. “Extra prayers,” I wrote, “running a thousand miles, giving up chocolate, being nice to my sister.” These seemed impossible.
I wrote:
Ayúdame por favor. My mother has breast cancer and she is very ill. She already had surgery, but the doctors say she needs radiation therapy, too. The next couple of months will be very difficult, and she will need all the help she can get. I have been training for a 5K, but it’s not enough. What else can I do? If only I had a sign.