Two years after Tina raised that severely ailing rooster from the dead, he took sick again, but this time through no fault of my own. I again took him to my mother, expecting another miracle. But this time she made no move to do anything other than close his eyes with a gentle touch. “Safe journey,” she said. And that, unfortunately, was that.
On the occasion of my birthday, I am weeding the garden when Tina and Sis drive up. They had sneaked off early in the morning without a word to me. A clearly shaken Sis approaches, followed by an equally distraught Tina. “Tina wanted to get an X-ray, so we did. The cancer in her lungs has spread drastically. The doctor says the macrobiotics are no longer working.”
Tina looks at me and shrugs her shoulders like she always did when the answer lay somewhere in the cosmos.
Within minutes, Sis, Garrett, and Tina are preparing an enormous breakfast of eggs, bacon, and burned cinnamon toast in defiance.
The four of us are gathered around the table, ogling the greasy food.
“Just goes to show you, Tinker Toy medicine from California,” Garrett says, shaking out his checkered napkin.
The daggers in my eyes stop Garrett cold.
Tina glares at me across the table. “I think I want some cheese. And some jam—no, make it syrup,” she says, speaking to Sis but still glaring at me. “No grace today, Bo Skeet.”
Sis passes the syrup directly in front of my face.
I decide not to look at anything but my plate. “You had to sneak out for the X-ray?” I say. Tina looks down at her plate. “You don’t think I would have approved?” I shove away from the table so fast it sounds like the glass cracks in the French door behind me. “I will not be made to feel like this is my fault. Because it’s not. You’re all acting like twelve-year-olds. And this is not my fault!”
I throw my napkin down on the table and try not to step on the wrapped birthday gift next to my chair as the real twelve-year-old leaves through the good French door.
* * *
The next day the terrorists bombed the World Trade Center. The day after that, Tina started a new brand of chemo. But first she had to endure a procedure to remove the fluid rapidly collecting around her lungs. During a thoracentesis, a needle long as a butcher knife would be inserted into Tina’s back and into her chest cavity, drawing out the mucus her lungs were now floating in.
On our way into the hospital, the front page of The Dixie screams, “Threat Of New Terror Is Serious.”
Rose O’Sharon meets us at the door. “Y’all come on back and have a seat,” she says over a stuck-pig grin. “We been expecting you.”
Entering the inner sanctum, it’s damned near impossible for the four of us not to take in the walls of the hallways already decorated for Halloween. Nothing like a cancer ward full of cardboard ghosts, goblins, and skeletons to remind you of your impending mortality.
A handsome technician who looks just like an African American Jesus kneels next to Tina in the waiting area of the radiology department. “Now, Mrs. Stalworth—”
“Call me Tina.”
“Tina. What we’re going to do is we’re going to stick a needle in your back to remove the fluid collecting around your lungs.”
Garrett looks away. Sis puts her head in her hands. Having banished the chief executive assistant in me to exile in light of recent events, I focus on a nearby potted plant in order to avoid eye contact with any of the more levelheaded decision-makers in the familial hierarchy.
“We can’t put you to sleep because you need to stay awake while we do this. That way you can take some deep breaths for me while I perform the procedure. Okay?”
Tina stands and follows the technician. I also stand, but my feet are frozen solid to the freshly buffed linoleum beneath them.
The technician turns and smiles. “Would you like to come with her? You can wait just outside her room.”
I wait while Tina sizes me up. With a nervous smile, she almost nods. I follow them in.
* * *
While I’m waiting, I notice that, unlike my travel alarm clock at home, the second hands of every single one of these titanic-sized hallway clocks appear to travel in the worst kind of slow motion.
“Now, Ms. Stalworth, how are we doing so far?” the technician asks Tina from inside the room.
“Good. I’m good.” She sounds more brave than scared, almost defiant, which raises my spirits higher than I would have thought possible.
Another technician, a woman, says, “Now how are we doing?”
A noise from Tina—a tiny cough, then a big one—“Oh, Jesus, oh, no. Oh, Jesus, you’re killing me!” she shrieks.
In seconds, my morale plummets. My mother is in serious trouble, and there’s nothing I can do to help. I want to climb the wall and tear the second hand off the clock with my bare hands.
“Please don’t—oh, my sweet Jesus you’re killing me—”
During this moment, the world I had created from the ground up with its food, its books, and its macrobiotic gurus forever capsized.
One of the technicians, not handsome Jesus, had punctured Tina’s lung with the needle, and it had collapsed. We learned this happens in about 30 percent of all cases.
As they roll Tina into the next room on the gurney, her face flushed from a lack of oxygen, the four of us surround her. Garrett holds a compress to her head, Sis massages her feet, and I hold her hand. After making a waving motion with her free hand, we are finally able to make out a faint whisper from Tina. “You are all suffocating me.”
The three of us look at each other in horror until we realize Tina is attempting, as best she can, to break the glacial frost in the room with humor. Garrett releases a big bass “Ha!” like somebody slapped him hard on the back. Tina even manages a smile at her quip. Sis and I finally join in, the laughter coming easier after this close brush with death.
Attempting to clear my head in the hallway, it occurs to me that while we’re so busy trying to control our destinies, maybe that’s the most we can hope for. That if someday we have to endure some god-awful, suffocating, physical torture, we’re surrounded by some sort of family, be they blood or not, to suffocate us with something else.
On our way home, Tina asks to stop by McDonald’s for fries and a shake. I place the order myself through the car window.
* * *
Two days later, Garrett begins construction on the camp house. From my bedroom window, I see Tina turn briefly from a blank easel as he blows her a kiss on his way out to his pickup with the blueprints.
Sis informs me Tina is no longer speaking to Justin and Marsala, or as Tina now refers to them, the shitasses. I, on the other hand, have dialed their number in the hopes they’ve forgotten some minute but invaluable detail.
“So, you guys didn’t notice anything the last time we came up? I mean, come on, y’all, that’s a lot of cancer not to have seen,” I say, practically daring them to come up with something.
“You know, I’ve always thought it would take Tina seven years to heal,” Marsala chirps. “I did the math, and what with her inability to assert herself in situations of—”
“Okay, you know what?” I’m not even sure what I’m going to say, so I finally settle on, “Blah.” There is silence from the other end. It almost feels good to quiet the constant cacophony of recipes for endless teas, baths, and compresses pledging miracles no one has proved since the dawn of man. “Okay?” I say, like there’s anything they can agree to. “Blaaah!” I hold the phone out in front of my face, barking like a dashboard bobbledog. “BLAH-BLAH-BLAH-BLAH-BLAH-BLAH-BLAH.”
I slam the phone down in the cradle, shaking with rage and disappointment.
* * *
In early October, my mother begins to lose her mind. When I return from my run one evening, a desperate Tina meets me at the door.
“There is bomb in the oven and a volcano erupting in the swimming pool.” She turns to Garrett and Sis, who are standing in the kitchen door. “The only place to hide is in the car.”
Radiation treatments would start the next day to kill the cancer cells in Tina’s brain, although I wondered if you were going to go, wouldn’t you want to be as unaware of the whole thing as possible?
“There is a Russian spy in the Little House,” Tina says. “I don’t know what he could possibly want with me.”
“You don’t worry about him,” I say, putting my arms around her protectively. “He’s as good as dead. Okay?”
Tina rests her head on my shoulder. “Okay,” she says, unconvincingly.