I stack the last of the washed dishes onto the drying rack and peel off my rubber gloves, shaking them out in the sink. The clock’s loud ticking runs syncopated against the hum of the landlady’s running dryer as I discard my apron. I glance over the kitchen to make sure nothing’s amiss. Then I head up the stairs to the room I now share with my mother. My parents’ bedroom is downstairs—the only real room in the remodeled garage that’s being illegally rented out to us—but my mother hasn’t slept there for over a month now. It’s too small and has no windows. She moved upstairs with me when she first began having trouble sleeping.
I pause at the top of the stairway and wait for my father to finish the last of his prayers over my mother. Without looking, I know he is sitting on the bed next to her where she is lying back against a stack of pillows. Their eyes are closed, their hands clasped together. I sit on the second step from the top and stare at my toes.
My father’s prayers are in fervent Korean, laced with scripture throughout. “Father Almighty, you are the ultimate healer, more powerful than any doctor. You are a God of miracles. When your son walked the earth, the blind saw, the lame walked, the dead rose out of the grave. In the same way, I pray that you would give your daughter victory over this sickness. And protect us from the evil spirits that discourage us from having faith, ‘for we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness.’ Lord, be glorified through our faith. I pray all this in the name of your son, our savior Jesus Christ, amen.”
I stand up in the pause that follows, and with a final pat of her hand my father says goodnight to both of us. He goes downstairs to watch the news. Afterward, his snoring rumbles through the closed door of his bedroom, reaching us all the way up the stairs.
There was a time when it was just the snoring that kept my mother from sleep, which was half the reason she moved upstairs. Now it’s the pain.
“Umma, it’s time for your medication,” I say, pouring a cup of warm water out of a Thermos on her bedside table. Cold water sets her teeth on edge.
She turns her tortured eyes up to my face, away from the pills in my hand. There are three different medications she needs to take tonight. One is a clinical trial drug that’s part of her chemotherapy, the second is a dose of Vicodine to ease the pain, and the third is a sleeping pill we both know is not going to work tonight, because it didn’t work last night, nor the night before that.
I don’t remember the last time she really slept. Was it before she started chemo? Maybe before we found out that it was cancer? Or when we thought it was only a stomach ulcer? It’s hard to imagine that two short months ago, she was still the one cooking and cleaning and doing the laundry, not me. She used to pack me lunch for work. Brought up midnight snacks like pound cake from Shilla Bakery and apple juice while I labored over my grad school applications.
Now she’s almost completely bedridden. She’s on her fourth round of chemo, and the next time we take her in they’ll tell us if the drug Xeloda has been doing its job. The chemical that’s been coursing through her system, destroying perfectly healthy cells along with the cancer cells. The little white pill in my hand that is making my mother cry.
Her words are difficult. “I don’t want to.”
“I know, Umma.” I sit down on the bed and gently grasp the motionless hand by her side. Her cuticles are raw and bloody, peeling back involuntarily from the nails. Side effects include—the Xeloda brochure had read—nausea, constipation, thickening of hair—I’d always thought chemotherapy caused hair loss—dry skin, dry cuticles, and sensitivity to cold. “After you take your medication, we’ll bandage up your fingers again.” It’s what we do at night to keep her raggedy cuticles from catching on the sheets, tearing further. During the day, we air out her fingertips with just Neosporin on them.
My mother wipes her eyes with a tissue and reaches for the water, for the pills in my hand. In three small gulps, she downs them and sits back against the pillows. She holds out one hand and then the other as I inspect each fingertip, gingerly clipping off any stray cuticles and brushing the ointment on before covering one finger at a time with a Band-Aid.
“How was work today?” she asks.
“Busy. The hiring freeze is driving us all crazy. I don’t know what they’re going to do if it’s still on when I leave for grad school—I guess Rocio and Dave will have to fill in for me.”
“Dave is the handsome boy who sits next to you?”
“That’s him. Mr. I’m-a-reformed-bad-boy-from-UPenn-on-my-way-to-med-school.”
My mother smiles when I roll my eyes.
“He’s just bad news. Rocio and Allie have stopped talking to each other over him, some incident I don’t even remember.”
She holds out the index finger I just bandaged. “This one feels too tight.”
I carefully snip off the bandage with a pair of steel scissors. There’s a small pocket of tender flesh jutting out over the side of the nail which has begun to ooze a bit.
She says, “I think they should make Band-Aids with a longer middle.”
“Me, too.” My turn to smile. “Maybe I should write them.” She’s referring to the white gauzy space between the two adhesive tips. A standard Band-Aid might be ideal for a scrape on the knee, but we can’t have the sticky ends brushing against the sore, swollen areas where nail meets skin. I unwrap a new one, and—holding it by the middle—snip off one of the sides. Then, taking another one from which I’ve already peeled off the plastic strips, I fuse the two together into a long band with an extra-long middle.
I give the index finger another go and make sure that the only part touching the encircling Band Aid’s gummy ends is the meaty underside of her finger.
By the time all ten fingers have been covered and I’ve checked on her toes as well, the drugs are beginning to kick in. My mother’s breaths grow shorter and more labored. She’s no longer watching me work but slumped back against the pillows with her eyes on the ceiling. She keeps her eyes open because she is willing them to stay dry, even as her pupils are wildly groping, unfocused.
I put the Band-Aid box away and gently pull the pillows from behind my mother’s head until she is lying down. She turns on her side, faces the wall with her arms and legs curled.
“Umma, do you want another drink of water?”
“Mmm.”
I pour another cup of water, and she takes a small sip before resuming her fetal position. She barely notices as I pull the covers over her, her eyes closed now.
Turning out the lights, all except for one lamp, I climb under the covers next to my mother. I put my arms around her, hug her quivering back. The pillow smells of unwashed hair, unruly strands greasy and matted against my face as I hold her—as tightly as I dare—because it’s the only thing I can do for her now, in this particular moment.
I begin to sing in a quiet half-mutter, “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine…” My mind lingers on the irony of Fanny Crosby’s lifelong blindness as I sing her words, “visions of rapture now burst in my sight.” Toward the end of the second verse, I start humming because I don’t remember the words. Then I switch to another hymn, and then another. My father’s snoring floats up the stairs, the buzzing rhythm keeps time with the songs.
“Go sleep,” whispers my mother after a while. Her wheezing still has not abated, becomes a groan every few exhales.
“I’ll go soon.”
After a few more hymns, “Go sleep,” she says again. “You have work tomorrow.”
“Okay.” I give her a tiny last squeeze and roll off the bed, tucking the covers in around her.
As I go downstairs to brush my teeth, check the locks on the front door, tiptoe back upstairs, turn off the last lamp, and finally fumble my way to the mattress across the room, my mother’s muffled gasps are a raw reminder of how very awake she is. How she is trying to suppress her moans because she doesn’t want to keep me awake. How the intensity of her pain will only begin to subside—and even then, only the slightest bit—in the third or fourth hour, or perhaps not at all. The only thing keeping her company through the ticking seconds in the darkness will be the steady snoring from downstairs. We will have to do this all over again in six hours when she takes her next dose.
We both know with sickening certainty that tomorrow will be just like today, and the only way to make it there is to escape into the oblivion of sleep. Those precious few hours of the night when we are supposed to find relief, which come so readily to me yet are denied to my mother. My insides are already aching with guilt as I let my eyelids droop, my mind lingering on the thought that the first thing I’ll see in the morning will be my mother’s drawn, sallow face.
~
At dawn, I pad down to the kitchen and check on the pot of uncooked rice I left in water overnight. The grains are bloated, promising to be gooey and starchy when cooked. I stand over the stove and stir it at a simmer until it makes enough porridge to last for the day. Once it’s done, I knock softly on my father’s door.
“I made some jook,” I tell him when he comes out. “You have to drain it, like this.”
I put a strainer over a large bowl and ladle the porridge over it. The watery drippings collect slowly at the bottom.
My father nods, silent.
“You have to scrape it with a spoon to break it up a bit. And I’ll leave the soy sauce here, but don’t let her have too much. Just a few drops.”
It’s one of very few things she can keep down on her good days. Despite all our efforts, she still drops another pound or two on her rougher days, so I’m hoping the whole pot will be gone by the time I come home.
My daily commute is a gray and traffic-ridden ordeal—the mindless hour drive across L.A. dodging angry drivers who weave through the lanes on the I-10. The sky grows lighter in degrees in my rearview mirror as I drive westward, from gray to orange to whitish blue. On the radio, “Ryan’s Roses” confronts yet another unfaithful boyfriend, and I reach over to flip the station to KUSC, which is playing Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” I’m still in a dazed stupor as I pull into the parking structure to the closing notes of the “Autumn” Adagio movement, not quite fully awake until I’ve walked into the office and am sitting stiffly at my desk with a cup of coffee.
“Mmmm, how about that brain juice, huh?” says Rocio as she walks by with her own mugful. Her cubicle is on the other side of the steel-colored partition I face. “Did you see that e-mail from Dr. Kaufmann?” she asks, now behind the wall. Her chair squeaks with the weight of her plump frame as she swivels toward her desk.
“No, I’m still looking through the gazillion e-mails Dr. Farah sent me last night.” I click through the bolded subject lines in my inbox that read, “Re: JAMA Membership Renewal,” “Avelar article on 2-D ECHO,” “Re: Fw: Re: Fresno Ped Cardio Project.”
“I still can’t believe she e-mails you after five. What a bitch. God, if Dr. Saunders did that to me…”
I don’t say anything, but Rocio knows I don’t disagree. My boss is a nationally-recognized UCLA researcher and cardiologist. I don’t mind the work I do for her—drafting grant proposals, maintaining spreadsheets of research data, scheduling board meetings and trips—because it’s stuff I can do on autopilot for much of my eight-hour day, five days a week. But on the mornings I click open my Outlook to ten, twenty e-mails labeled “high priority” that were sent overnight, I want to march into her empty office and fling my coffee across the aerodynamic meshing of her overpriced Aeron chair. She’s one of those people who are super nice but only as long as she’s not doing you any favors.
For example, she thinks that just because I’ll be gone for the day tomorrow to take my mother to a doctor’s appointment, she has to make sure I do double the work today. As if I weren’t using my accrued holiday hours to be legally paid for my day off, as if I don’t already get everything done days before the deadlines. When I was being hired for the job and told her about my family situation, about how I might have to take a day off here and there, she’d nodded with a sympathetic smile, saying, “Yes, of course, it’s fine.” Then as soon as I left, she turned to my supervisor Diane and asked her if it was too late to retract the formal job offer—a fact I heard from Diane later, but by that point it came as no great surprise.
“Good morning, Dave,” Rocio says when he saunters in through the suite door. The bottom right corner of my computer screen reads 8:25AM. Late like always but never in trouble.
“Hey,” he says, yawning. He deposits himself in the cubicle next to mine, ours the only two decently clean cubicles in the entire suite. Like me, Dave is only keeping this filler job until he heads off to more schooling. The office is comprised mainly of administrative assistants providing clerical and research support to UCLA doctors, our small building located just off the Medical Plaza where Michael Jackson was declared dead. “Looks like Kaufmann wants someone to walk some papers over to the Wilshire office,” Dave says. He’s rolled his chair over and is peering out beyond the partition that runs between us. “Want to go and double it as a coffee break later?”
“Sorry, today’s going to be crazy for me.” I reach for a file folder in my bottom right drawer and add it to a growing pile next to my keyboard—my to-dos for the day. “I’m off tomorrow.”
“You working through lunch, too?”
“Probably,” Rocio replies for me from the other side of the wall. “You know Nina’s boss. That bruja probably gave her a week’s worth of work for today.” They call her bruja behind her back because she wears mostly black on her short, stodgy, raven-haired frame, glides everywhere instead of walking.
Dave glances back at the dark doorway of Dr. Farah’s office, just beyond his cubicle.
“She’s in Atlanta for a conference,” I say in answer to this gesture.
“Dave,” Rocio calls out, “I can go with you later.”
“Sounds good,” he says. “Let’s plan on leaving around ten.” Then, to me, “Want us to get anything for you?”
“I’m good.” I indicate my mug which is sitting atop my folder stack.
“You need any help?”
“No, thanks. I think I’ll be okay.”
“If you want, at lunch, I could pick up a sandwich or something.”
“I’m good. I’ll figure something out later.”
“Cool, just let me know,” he says and rolls his chair back to his computer.
I’m clearly being less than friendly, but this has become our way of interacting lately. Dave asking, me saying no. And this guy just doesn’t give up, hasn’t since he first started working here two months ago. He knows he’s attractive and hard to refuse—one of those frat boy types who’s just begun to settle down with concrete plans for the future. A titillating future in medicine, maybe with a joint MBA degree. He’s also one of very few guys in the entire office, which makes him a prime target for well-advertised crushes. I’d rather not be caught in any of them; work is just bearable, even without enemies.
Except Dave catches me on my way out to deliver an IRB packet.
“I have one, too.” He waves a binder that looks just like the one I’m holding.
“I can take it for you.”
“Nah, I could use some fresh air. It’s my afternoon break.” He holds the door open, follows me outside. “Want to grab coffee on the way back?” he asks as we start walking.
“Would that be like your third coffee break today?”
He laughs. A jarringly happy sound that catches me by surprise. It’s too bright and sunny out and I’m tempted to go back inside.
“So I’m not the hardest working person in the office,” he says. “But hey, I get all my work done. Besides,” he pauses, looking straight ahead and continuing in a carefully light tone, “You know why I keep asking. It’s not because I love coffee. I mean I do, but that’s not why… you know.”
I already know what I’m going to say, because I’ve thought about this. I’ve had days when I wished I could just say yes to Dave, go out to a movie and a nice dinner in Culver City like I would have done a year ago. I’ve wondered how I would explain that I don’t have time for any of that. That I have more important things to do, someone who needs me even more than I need me.
It’s the last part that always gets me, the part that makes me cringe inside now as I say, “Listen. My mother’s really sick, she has cancer. My family’s going through a lot right now. And I just don’t have room for… this.” It’s not you, it’s me. Like bad lines from a movie.
“I know,” Dave says.
“What?”
“Rocio told me about your mother. I’m really sorry.”
“You knew?”
“Well, I figured there had to be a reason why you kept turning down coffee dates with the best-looking guy in the office.”
A snort of laughter escapes my mouth. “I’m not sure Justin and Art would agree.”
“Look. I’m not asking you to do anything crazy. It’s just coffee. It can’t be that bad.”
“Just coffee,” I say slowly.
“Yup. Think about it. And don’t hate on coffee.”
So at the end of the day, just before five, when I’ve slipped out of the office before anyone else, speed-walked back to my car, and joined the snailing cars on the freeway, I think about coffee.
~
By the time I get home, it’s as dark as when I left in the morning. As if there has been no passage of time, one darkness meeting another in a perpetual chain of dimly lit nights.
The pot of porridge I left on the stove is still half full.
“I’m home,” I call out, dumping my purse on the couch. The bedroom door opens and my father steps out, bleary-eyed from a nap. He leans against the side of the kitchen sink where I’m washing my hands.
“She threw up everything today,” he says in a low tone. “Ate twice this morning, threw up both times. The third time, I couldn’t get her to eat anymore.” He rubs his eyes, which are wet and bloodshot.
“What about her medication?”
“I think she threw that up, too. But I was scared to give her another dose.”
“Did you try giving her the anti-nausea stuff?” I dry my hands on a towel.
“I did. It didn’t work.”
I sigh and turn around to face him. “Appa, I told you not to leave her alone. Is she alone upstairs right now?”
His face is grim, guilty. “I’ve been up since you left, and you know I snore.”
“Just try not to leave her alone for too long.” I can see the sleep still lingering on his drooping frame, so I tell him, “Go back to your nap. I’ll wake you up when dinner’s ready.”
At the creaking of steps, my mother turns on the bed to see me coming up the stairs. She makes room for me to sit and smiles weakly as I bend down to kiss her cheek. I can see that she’s not in pain, but her cheeks are thin, her eyes drawn tightly against the hollows of her skull. It’s scary how just one day of starvation and dehydration can do this to her. I stroke a gaunt hand, finger the flattened blood vessels branching out beneath her pale skin.
“Appa says you didn’t eat much today.”
“I felt nauseous all morning. Couldn’t keep anything down.” She says this with a trace of shame and guilt, as if this were her fault.
“What about now?” I ask, trying to keep my voice tender. It is not her fault, and I really need her to know that. “Are you feeling better?”
“I think so.” She looks down at her hands, her raw fingertips.
“If I made that squash soup, do you think you’ll be able to eat some?”
She considers this for a moment then nods.
“Okay, let me put on some music first. How about the Three Tenors or Maria Callas?” My mother likes opera.
Back downstairs after changing out of my work clothes, I reach into the fridge for the Ziploc bag of squash I steamed yesterday. Jose Carreras’ hearty voice drifts down to the kitchen from upstairs. I puree the squash until it becomes a soft mush, then start dinner for my father and me while the soup simmers on the stove.
I wake my father to tell him his dinner is on the table, which he’ll eat while watching TV. Then I take my mother’s soup and my own dinner upstairs to where she sits listening with her eyes closed to Domingo’s last dramatic notes of “Granada.”
“I think he’s my favorite out of the three,” I say as I set down the tray and prop her up with pillows. “Such a rich, sweet voice.”
She wrinkles her nose. “It’s too buttery. Don’t you think Jose Carreras’ voice has more... color?”
“His vibrato’s a bit much when he gets up high.” I spoon the warm soup into her mouth.
She looks thoughtful. “Maybe when you get older, you’ll appreciate him more.”
“Everyone else thinks Pavarotti’s the best, though.”
“Oh, he’s marvelous. Makes everything sound so effortless. Did you know that his favorite food was garlic? He would chew mouthfuls of it then go on stage to sing his arias into the face of some poor soprano.”
We stop eating to laugh for a while, and I use the remote to skip ahead to Pavarotti’s rendition of “Nessun Dorma.”
When we resume with the soup, my mother swallows each spoonful dutifully, like a child forcing down peas. But she does not gag, does not throw up. She is able to eat most of what’s in the bowl and sits back when she’s finished, her eyes clearer than when I first got home. I know she should probably take her medication now, but I also know she wants a bath. It’s been a week since her last one.
I leave her to finish listening to the rest of the live concert recording and start the bathwater, doing the dishes and cleaning up while it draws. When the bathtub is filled with carefully tested water—just shy of warm—I help my mother down the stairs to the bathroom, tie her hair up in a bun. She steps out of her clothes and into the scoured tub. A faint gasp escapes her lips as she lowers herself down into the water.
I sprinkle ground oatmeal into my hands and begin to rub it carefully over my mother’s cratered collarbones, down her pale, thinning arms. The oatmeal is a trick I picked up online when I saw what soap was doing to her skin, already so dry and brittle. I scoop out goops of the powder onto my fingertips, massage the fine grain against the underside of her arm where it feels almost spongy. She rubs the oatmeal onto her drooping chest and down her front while I cover her back. There was a time when bathing my mother used to embarrass me, to see her naked body, to feel its sagging weight. Now it’s all familiar. Familiar enough for me to know each thin blue vein that stretches across her shoulder blades, just beneath the surface of her otherwise yellow skin. Enough for me to know that her shoulder bones have grown sharper, more angular. The spinal nubs that poke out in a neat row down her back have also become more pronounced. We move slowly. Down to her protruding hipbones, and finally to her legs, rubbing around the ankles, the heels, between her delicate toes. We will wash her hair separately on another day. Maybe tomorrow.
When she’s back in bed, dry and in a fresh set of pajamas, my mother looks almost happy. She is able to eat another half bowl of soup and smiles at my father when he comes upstairs with the thermos refilled with hot water. I leave them alone as he begins to pray over her, his hand gripping hers and his tone rising and falling earnestly. Prayer for a full recovery, for my mother to wake up cancer-free tomorrow. Prayer for God’s will to be done, on earth as it is in heaven—as if he knew what that meant.
I don’t know what gives my father the courage or the inanity to pray like that. I myself haven’t prayed in a long time, forgotten what to pray for, wouldn’t know what to pray for at this point. My father doesn’t feel the ticking seconds of the night the way we do, my mother and I. He doesn’t seem to be aware that each small white pill she swallows either increases or decreases the chances of her living longer than her forecasted six months. That the pain it causes her is greater than anything felt by her tumor-riddled liver. That it’s a difficult choice she must make every time she chooses the pill, knowing sleep will elude her yet again tonight, tomorrow. She’ll choose it only because it’s the only thing that might work.
So when my father finishes praying and I pour out a cup of warm water for her medication, she will swallow first the sleeping pill, then the Vicodine, then finally the Xeloda tablet. She will sit back and watch as I bandage her fingertips, begin to convulse with pain in my arms when the drugs kick in, still be in agony as I settle down on my own mattress across the room with her dry wheezing in my ears.
But tonight, as I sit on the second step from the top and listen to my father’s words, I close my eyes and whisper my own. Dear God, please grant her sleep tonight. I’m not asking for much, and I don’t need anything else. I just want her to sleep. Please.