Daughters for a Time (19 page)

My mother was in and out of the hospital for nearly a year. The cancer ward, where she spent weeks of her life, was a quiet story of rooms on the third floor. Family members floated in and out like ghosts, tiptoeing through the halls with their flowers and books and balloons. Nurses and doctors slipped in and out, their heads down, scribbling on charts. The whole place just seemed dark and gray, and breathing the air was like trying to get a good breath with a plastic bag over your head. I remember how restless I felt back then, like I just wanted to open all of the curtains and windows, and play something upbeat on my Walkman, like Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” I imagined my mom and all of the other patients miraculously hopping to their feet and dancing in circles like it was all just a mistake that they were there.

The nurses ran the show. They were the ones who worked around the clock, taking vitals, making sure Mom was comfortable, sneaking me sodas from the nurses’ lounge. One nurse, Tammy, always had Hershey miniatures in her pocket. She’d see me sitting next to Mom’s bed and she’d open her pocket for me. Sometimes Tammy would let me fool with her stethoscope, anything to make the time go by. There was always so much waiting—waiting for the doctor to come, waiting for the next meal, waiting for Mom to get her next chemo treatment. Waiting for it all to be over. One way or another.

My mother’s doctor, Dr. Sam Goldberg, checked in once in the morning and once in the afternoon. He had kind eyes, and his bedside manner was so good that there were times when I wondered whether he had a thing for Mom. He’d sit on the edge of her bed and put his hand over hers, and talk to her
about the options that were left, the course of treatment he recommended. Mom was such an agreeable patient, the type who accepted her fate as if it were predetermined and any fight or fuss she waged would just be a silly attempt to move mountains. He’d say that there was still hope, and Mom would nod and smile, saying that she knew he was doing his best, that she felt that she was getting excellent care. I remember feeling sick every time she let him off the hook like that, thinking,
Shut up, Mom, let him talk, let him explore every possible option.

I was a brat back then, thirteen years old and all attitude and self-pity. Claire was so involved in Mom’s treatment that she could recite the significance of every blood test and blood count; she could tell you why the chemo wasn’t working, why radiation wasn’t an option, how it was basically just management of the disease at this point. I knew “management” was just a euphemism for keeping her comfortable until she died.

“Come sit with me,” I remember Mom saying, patting the side of the bed.

“I’m fine,” I said, slumped in the hard corner chair, my legs hanging over the side.

“Gin rummy?” She pulled the deck of cards from her end table and waved them at me.

“Not in the mood.”

“What’s new at school?”

“The same.”

“What’s new with Lisa? Ellen?” she listed my best friends’ names.

“They’re not my friends anymore,” I said in a pitiful voice. “They said it’s no fun hanging out with me because I’m always gloomy. You know, because of you.” It was a lie; Lisa and Ellen never said that. A shudder of betrayal sent a chill down my back.

“Oh, honey,” she said, seeing right through me. “I know you’re sad. And I know you’re mad, but this is just the way it is. It’s just part of life. No one’s to blame—not me, not God,” she said, defending her one true love.

“How could there be a God?” I said, almost too quietly for her to hear, though I knew that she had heard my defamation. Then I looked out the window that overlooked the parking lot, put on my earphones, and started my music, wondering why I was worrying Mom so. Like she didn’t have
enough
to deal with. Maybe I thought that if she had something other than cancer to worry about, she’d fight harder. Maybe the idea of her daughter having no friends was just the fuel she needed to kick herself into remission. Maybe Claire was making it too
easy
for her to let go, with all her proclamations of responsibility and accountability. Her to-do lists. Mom knew Claire would look after me, she knew she’d make me go to college, she knew Claire wouldn’t let me end up in the gutter.
Fight, Mom!
I thought.
It’s not Claire I want. It’s you.

You don’t get back those moments, that’s what I know now. I think of what it would have meant to her if I had just crawled into bed and hugged her, cried on her chest, looked her in the eyes and told her how much I loved her. I didn’t, though, and she died without having heard the words come from me. My withholding must have caused her great pain. And now I had a daughter of my own, and even though I had only known her for a little more than a week, I already knew that I would be devastated if she ever treated me that way.

“Triage is ready for you,” Max said, and led us back. “The nurse will check your daughter.”

I looked into Sam’s charcoal eyes and cupped my hand around her porcelain face. “We’re going to see the nurse, okay?” Sam looked at me, coughed in my face, and then looked away.

We sat on the folding chair next to the triage nurse, who pulled the curtain behind us and wrote on her pad. She took Sam’s temperature, height, and weight, and then asked, “What’s wrong?”

“She’s coughing,” I said. “And has a fever.”

Max translated in Chinese, prattled on for minutes when it seemed like it shouldn’t have been taking that long to say that she had a cough. It made me wonder if he was giving the nurse information about Sam that I hadn’t been told. Maybe she had a condition that had not been disclosed to us.

The nurse listened to her chest, called for the doctor. He, too, listened. An X-ray was taken.

“Her lungs are filled with fluid,” Max said evenly. “The doctor wants her to stay the night.”

“How did her lungs get filled with fluid?” I wanted to know. “Has she had this problem before? Is there something wrong with her lungs?” Were her lungs even fully developed when she was born, a bruising four-pounder?

Max shook his head and the doctor shrugged. Neither knew what had happened or what we should expect. When the babies got sick at the orphanage, they were treated, but rarely was a report written.

I looked expectantly at Tim, and he shrugged as if this was our only option.

“Can we trust these doctors?” I asked Max. “Is this our best route to go?”

Max assured us that he had been here before with many babies, that this hospital was not modern like those in the States, but that the care was good.

The nurse administered the IV and Sam shrieked like she was being flayed. I pressed my entire body weight into her, turned my face in the opposite direction so that she wouldn’t see the tears pouring down my face, and held her still while
the nurse poked and prodded and taped her tender little arm. I whispered apologies into her ear and swore that it wouldn’t always be this bad.

Later, after Sam had forgotten about the IV and was used to the respirator, she twitched and kicked and whimpered until, finally, she gave in to sleep. Her swath of satin blanket was in one hand and mine was wrapped around her other. With Tim positioned at her side, I stepped out into the lobby and called Claire. I explained what was wrong with Sam: the fever, the congested lungs, her birth weight. She took down as much information as I had to give and then hung up to call her pediatrician, who now was also ours. When she called back, she requested Sam’s X-ray report and hospital input form, so I walked down the road to a storefront that advertised a fax machine. With a string of international codes, I sent the fax. An hour later, Claire called back. She and the pediatrician had discussed Sam’s case. The Chinese doctors were doing what would be done in the States. The course of treatment was good. By the time Claire and I hung up for our last time, it was three o’clock in the morning.

When I went back to Sam’s room, I found Tim asleep, his hand covering Sam’s.

Dear Max, in his Levi jeans and leather jacket, was still with us, punching on his BlackBerry, solving problems for all of his parents. He sat down next to me, handed me a Coke from the vending machine, and said, “There is an old folktale about a breed of wasps that was said to steal baby bollworms off the mulberry trees, take them to their own nests, and raise them as wasps.”

I listened, nodded.

“Sometimes these girls—Chinese girls who get adopted—are called that: children of the mulberry bug.”

“So us parents, we’re like
abductors
?”

“No, no,” he said. “You parents, you’re more like saviors. Saving these girls from an unpleasant life.”

“That’s nice of you, Max,” I said. “But I think most of us—well, at least speaking for myself—didn’t adopt out of pure benevolence. We just wanted what we couldn’t have, you know?”

“Perhaps,” Max said. “But there are unintended consequences to everything we do in life. And I happen to believe that parents who adopt not only gain a life, but save one.”

I considered his folktale, thought it through. In a way, each of us had been abducted or robbed of something precious. Sam had been taken from the life she’d known and enveloped in mine, through no choice of her own. My mother had been stolen from me when I was far too young. God, it broke my heart to recall all of my mother’s promises of forever: “You’ll always be mine,” “Forever, my love,” “‘til the end of time.” She’d meant them all; she’d believed it. There was no way for her to have known that promises made of gold could so easily melt to nothing. Everything that mattered, it seemed, was out of our control: whether we could bear a child, bestow upon that child a life; whether life, once given, ever truly belonged to us.

The following forty-eight hours passed with a disorienting sense of dislocation. The low light of the fluorescent bulbs gave no indication of whether it was morning or night. At some point, I had lifted Sam into my arms and positioned myself along the length of the hospital bed. When I woke, the light seemed more pronounced, a golden glow, and I was certain that it must be morning. I reached over Sam’s tender wing of an arm, still strapped to the IV, and pushed the button on my cell phone. It registered as five in the morning. Only a few hours had passed. Sam had since sunk lower in my lap. Her
legs curled between mine; her head rested atop my stomach. A pool of drool puddled around her mouth and through my pants.

Tim was asleep, slouched in the corner chair, his head pitched at an unnatural angle. He would hurt when he woke. I thought of the Advil in my purse.

I tried to close my eyes, to get a little more sleep, but my lids stung as if they were being forced against their will. I ran my finger down Sam’s arm. Indignation threaded up my back. Why was Sam sick, damn it? Was she sick
because
we adopted her? Because these days with us had proved to be too taxing for her tender constitution? The many long bus rides, the change in diet, the recirculated heat in the hotel room. Would she have been better off left alone? Or would she have gotten sick anyway? And if she had, who would have cared for her at the orphanage? What if I weren’t here yet? What if this bout of sickness had consumed her
last
month? Whose arms would she have snuggled in, Goddamn it? Who would have cared for her in my stead?

I wanted to kick my feet against the hospital bed’s metal railing, scream at the top of my lungs, and beat a pillow with my fists. The thought hit me hard: I almost wasn’t here for her! I almost missed being a mother to my sick daughter. No more, never again. Sam would never be alone again! As I wrapped this conviction in my fist, I thought of how loosely we all played with our relations. How we took for granted that they’d always be there. Look at Claire and me with our own father.
Estranged
. What were we all waiting for? Damn it all.

“When we get home, peanut,” I whispered to Sam, “we’re getting this family together once and for all. You and Daddy and me and Aunt Claire and Maura and Uncle Ross and Grandpa Larry.”

By the next morning, Sam’s fever had broken. As she drenched her sleeper suit and regained her strength, I swabbed her forehead with soft washcloths.

“Good girl,” I cried. “Good, strong girl. I knew you’d get better.”

The doctor examined her. Her lungs were clearing, her breathing had moderated, and some color had returned to her face. After I fed her a bowl of congee and a bottle of formula, I changed her diaper and held her in my arms.

“You’re okay, pumpkin,” I whispered in her ear. “You’re going to grow up big and strong, don’t you worry.”

“Look what I found,” Tim said, holding up a yellow paperback he had fished out of a basket in the lobby. It was
Curious George Goes to the Hospital
—in English! Tim scooted his chair next to mine and read the book aloud. When we got to the part where George passed out from sniffing ether, Tim and I laughed—real laughs—and hugged Sam tightly.

“When was this book
written
?” Tim asked as he wiped his eyes.

I looked at him and smiled, remembering my Norman Rockwell dream of a family just like this, a family with enough love to have fun even in a Chinese hospital. Enough love to pull the joy out of suffering.

After a while, Sam grew sleepy. Tim urged me to take a walk down the street, to get some fresh air.

“Fresh air?” I said with a smile.

“Well, air, anyway.”

I exited the hospital, made a visor with my hand, and looked around. This part of town didn’t look as seedy as it had in the middle of the night. There were businesses and storefronts with their doors open, groups of men huddled around a tree smoking cigarettes, mothers pushing strollers with heavily bundled babies. I stretched my arms above my head and
arched my back. All sorts of pops and cracks. I leaned over and touched my toes. I wandered down the road, swinging my arms, turning my neck, trying to loosen up.

I cut through a city park and wound my way down a path lined with benches and flowers. Nestled among trees backlit by sunlight, boulders glistening with their natural glitter, and gigantic pots of flowers was a Buddhist temple. Though apprehensive, I inched my way up to the ornately carved red wood door and peeked in. Near the door was a pile of shoes. I slipped mine off and quietly eased my way in. The incense, the candles—the scents of my childhood, only Buddhist, not Catholic; only in China, not the States. At once, the differences seemed irrelevant. The brown-robed monks were going through their prostrations. When they were finished, I kneeled down and put my hands together. The prayers and gongs and recitations and bells. A soothing calm warmed me, like swallowing a spoonful of butternut squash soup, feeling it coat my throat and slide down to my belly.