Cynthia Hawkins

Day 198: Down the Lane

Cynthia Hawkins — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 22:45:12 +0000

I take the Firecracker and Hannah to a Greek restaurant up the street the day I learn my grandfather’s dying. Really dying. He’d been joking about dying for a long time, joking about never buying green bananas, that sort of thing. My mom tells me that if I want to call to say goodbye, the nurse at the veteran’s home will hold the phone to grandpa’s ear.

“He can’t respond,” mom explains, “but they say he’ll hear you. The mind is the last thing to shut down.”

I sit in my kitchen after this, phone in my hands. The Firecracker fills in the pages of a blank book made of stapled construction paper. “Pinky 9985 is Moving,” she titles this one. Pinky 9985 is an imaginary penguin. Sometimes Pinky 9985 is ice fishing in front of the Taj Mahal. Sometimes Pinky 9985 is hidden inside a storm of ink spirals or juggling pink igloos or moving to New York on a plane with wings like tucked arms, bent elbows, a sleek dolphin fin of a tail in a blue scribble sky. Pinky 9985 peers out the airplane window with oversized penguin eyes and a “what the hell is going on” kind of crumple to her beak. Hannah sits on a kitchen bar stool, her own phone in her own hands, thumbs tapping. I look at the hanging pots, the sun catching the rims.

“Let’s go out to eat,” I finally say.

The Firecracker brings her book-in-progress and a sandwich bag of colored pencils angling to poke a hole in the corner. Hannah forces her phone down into the back pocket of her denim shorts.

I’m wearing a scarf tied around my head because the girls are still embarrassed by the baby-bird feathers of my post-chemo stubble. In the Greek restaurant, two women in maxi dresses and sandals stand in line, ordering gyros and Coronas, their matching expressions of sympathy sliding away from me as they wait for their total.

“But I’m not sick anymore!” I want to explain to them.

It’s true that the post-lumpectomy pathology report indicated total annihilation. Just like my daily meditations since last November have painstakingly envisioned. So now I think I can levitate the dog bowl and pull rainbows out of my ears and conquer all of Westeros.

Or at least walk two miles in under thirty minutes. The other thing I used to envision in those daily meditations was me in the summertime looking like Jean Seberg. I’m not quite there yet, though. I lunge for the Firecracker, who is making two hanging panels of the restaurant’s menu display clang. I tuck the tail of the headwrap even tighter.

I’d never told my grandparents about my breast cancer. My grandfather was starting to decline, and the family decided it would weigh on them both too much at the worst possible time. So I never told them. And when I missed a trip to see them for the holidays, I couldn’t explain that it was because of the chemotherapy treatments. I keep thinking of that, the way grandpa might have thought that I’d simply forgotten.

The knot of the headwrap, just over my temple, the whole tangled scarf cocked and rebelling against looking like the full-on cancer turban it was months ago, the knot is giving me a headache. I order carefully, no meat, no dairy, but as I slide into the booth beside the girls I see feta sprinkled on my lentil soup. I try to spoon it out, but it melts across the broth.

After the diagnosis, after researching all the ways to keep cancer from coming back, I decided to be vegan. And I’d been vigilant about it through chemotherapy along with drinking five cups of green tea every day and meditating and stretching into yoga poses recommended for breast cancer patients. Now, post-chemo, post-cancer, now that I’m on my own, it matters even more because it’s all I have in defense. I eat the soup anyway, feta and all, and I think, Someday if the cancer comes back I’ll know it was because I sat here eating feta on my lentil soup in the Greek restaurant while my grandfather was dying and I couldn’t even call to say goodbye. Grim as he ever was.

In the car, I set my Pandora station to Lawrence Welk while the girls balk.

“It’s my grandpa’s music,” I scold.

All those times I’d sat on his sofa with my legs folded aside as I held my socked toes and pleaded for him to change the channel. Once he’d learned how to record Lawrence Welk reruns, there was no stopping him. It was like being trapped in an elevator in the sixties, sitting in that living room while he fumbled with the remote to turn the volume up higher.

As “Swingin’ Down the Lane” plays, I imagine the television glow reflecting off grandpa’s glasses and his fingertips playing notes across the armrests of his recliner.

“Maybe we can watch this later,” I say.

“What?” his voice booms over the music.

Grandma always said that even though grandpa was almost deaf he could hear when he wanted to hear.

When I pack for grandpa’s funeral, I can’t decide whether to wear the wig sitting on its metal stand in my closet or one of the scarves I’ve collected or neither. I wrap the wig in a scarf and pack both with a plan to decide later, and when my parents pick me up for the drive to Missouri, I ask, “What should I tell grandma when she sees me?”

“She won’t notice,” my dad says. “She’ll be too upset.”

But I’m thinking upset or not, she doesn’t miss much.

Hannah insists on going too. She sits between my mom and my little sister Alicia in the back seat, pops her earbuds in, slides her shoes off, stretches her legs between dad and me up front, stretches her legs out on the center console.

“Hey,” I turn to tell her, “your grandpa doesn’t want your stinky feet up here.”

“It’s alright,” my dad says.

“Oh really?” I say. “You never let me do that when I was her age.”

“I’m nicer now,” he says with a shrug. “And your feet smelled worse than hers. In fact, I don’t smell hers at all.”

“She only packed one pair of socks,” I warn. “Just give it a day.”

Hannah smiles at me without showing her teeth.

Though I offer a few times, dad won’t let me drive. Maybe because I mention the afternoon sleepies. That’s what my radiation oncologist calls it anyway, the sense of tiredness that takes over in the afternoons during treatment.

“Like when you’ve spent the morning in the sun on vacation and a little later you just feel drained,” she said.

When I first met the radiation oncologist, she showed me the pinpoint blue tattoo between her finger and thumb.

“I had this done so patients could see what it was like before they get their own,” she said.

The dots are used to center the patient on the machine. Mine are on either side of my ribcage up high and another right in the middle of the chest. Like blue freckles.

“I always wanted tattoos!” I said.

Really, I did. I’d wanted one of an abstract black sun on my outer right ankle (you can probably guess this was in the ’90s). I’d walked into the tattoo parlor in downtown Dallas, heard the buzz of needles, and walked out again. Before breast cancer I was squeamish. Now there’s nothing I can’t do. I have three tattoos.

We stay overnight in a hotel halfway there, my sister in a room with my parents, Hannah in mine. I change into pajamas, and while I’m pulling my nightshirt on Hannah says, “Are those lines from your breast cancer?”

I pause with the shirt overhead so she can see. “This one,” I say, pointing to the pink rim of skin under my collarbone, “is where the mediport was. And this one was where the tumor was. And this one,” I crane my arm up so she can see the other slash of a scar just below my arm pit, “is where they took out two lymph nodes.”

“Oh,” she says with a matter-of-fact tilt to her head.

Once, she burned her finger on a pan she’d grabbed without oven mitts from the oven. She passed out cold when her dad wrapped it in ointment and gauze. We took her to the hospital for the concussion she got when the back of her head met the tile in the fall. The burn was fine.

Once, she passed out in health class when a visiting nurse who had diabetes showed the class her port. Hannah slumped all the way out of her desk and onto the floor. Her friends crowded around her and cried. They thought she had died. “It’s the best day of my life!” Hannah declared when I picked her up, everyone out front, teary-eyed and waving goodbye, Hannah waving back.

Once, she recoiled from my hug after she’d grazed the mediport.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” she said.

Now, though, as she notes my scars with a studious nod, she’s just fine. She slips into her own queen bed across the room and turns out the light. In the dark, we talk about my grandpa, the way he laughed at his jokes, the way his laughter sprawled out big and swallowed your own, the way he’d smile so his eyes crinkled up smaller behind his glasses, the way he combed his hair aside with Brylcreem, the way he’d get up in the middle of the night to shave and then go buy raisin bread.

“I loved his stories,” she says.

“He always had a story,” I say.

Grandma notices. When we finally arrive in Joplin, grandma sits across the room from me at a gathering with the preacher the afternoon before the funeral, sits with her hands in her lap, her shoulder’s slack.

“Cindy? What have you done to your hair?” she asks me.

I’m wearing a red bandana tied at my forehead in Rosie the Riveter fashion.

“Oh,” I begin, “I did some treatment that thinned it out, so I’m waiting for it to grow back in.” Then I ham it up with my palm behind my ear and ask, “Don’t you like my bandana?”

“Well yes,” she says, “I do.”

She doesn’t mention it again, not even when, at the end of the meeting, I hug her close enough she can surely feel the stubble through the cloth against her temple. She squeezes back, her face plaintive and dry. She’s a strong woman, I’m thinking, and I decide the next morning that since grandma isn’t phased I can go to grandpa’s funeral as myself.

*photo by Debbie Whitlock

I haven’t worn a wig or scarf since, and it’s a good thing too because when I get home from Missouri I accidentally melt the Tennille wig. I reach into my overnight bag for all the clothes I’d packed, shove them in the wash, transfer them to the dryer, and pull a hot scarf out with a magician’s tug and find the ratty knot of the wig at the end of it. The hair had shrunk to the cap and fused together at the ends. I slip it on to see if maybe I can still make it work. The answer is “no.”

Previous “Box of Monsters” blog posts:

Day 3

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Day 132: The Copy

Cynthia Hawkins — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 15:34:13 +0000

If it weren’t for a running tally on my calendar, I’d lose track of the days since diagnosis. That’s where I am now – ready to be done marking time. And this morning I got the girls on their buses, walked two miles, drank a green smoothie, did some yoga, checked emails, and logged on to see the NaPoWriMo prompt. That’s National Poetry Writing Month, for those who are unfamiliar. I’ve never done it before, and I usually make fun of National Novel Writing Month every November (because, seriously, one month!? The novel I’m re-revising now has taken me something like three years). But the new, energetic post-chemo dynamo that is my current self wanted to tackle NaPoWriMo, despite the fact that I typically write prose. So I cheated a little and wrote a prose-poem, and cheated even more by using NaPoWriMo’s “get ready” prompt from yesterday. Yesterday, the prompt was to write an ekphrastic poem, or a poem about a work of art. If wall art in home decorating catalogues isn’t really art, then I cheated all around. Nevertheless, here’s the result:

Minding the IV I shift in my seat to see the home decorating catalogue my sister unfolds. She’s driven roughly 300 miles to sit beside me, chemo snaking through the loose plastic loop pinched between my fingers. It’s like talking to a drunk, I’ve warned her, and the mass-produced paintings on canvases in the catalogue drift one into the other like liquid beads. Blues and grays. I can do that, I tell her. I’d been an art student just long enough to learn to copy.

And after my last treatment, the toxins having done their work, sixteen weeks of squeezing the tumor down so small fingertips can no longer find it, I stand in my studio, a bead-board room in the back of the detached garage, stand by the drafting table that takes up half the space and holds three crates of vinyl records on its crossbar underneath, stand and paint the same squares of color from the catalogue. Blues and grays. I add only a touch of sunrise orange, a nod to George, it’s been a long cold lonely winter. Brush to canvas, bristles dragging, long strokes like drawn breath.

Some nights I’d curl around my little girl and teach her how to breathe deep. In, out. Ocean sounds. Can you feel the waves chasing after your toes in the sand? Can you hear them wiping the bad dreams away?

I paint the squares. I paint over the squares. I wipe color on and off again with a rag dipped into the mud-colored water of a plastic tumbler that reads in scratched, black print: Eskimo Joe’s – Stillwater, Oklahoma. I let the canvas dry. I remember why I’d changed my major. My copy is like a slurred version of the original, like me trying to tell a story while the chemo slips along the IV. But it’s the end, too. It’s the first morning I spend post chemo listening to the raking of the brush bristles while I hum “Here Comes the Sun.”

And here’s the copy of a copy itself (see what I did there? I just copied Trent Reznor):

Day 113 Monster

Cynthia Hawkins — Sat, 15 Mar 2014 02:13:56 +0000

This blog began with a monster, a Day One Monster that was cancer, the Firecracker, and me at different turns. My breast cancer journey has been that way all along, monsters morphing into other monsters, some benevolent, some bad, if I may borrow the language of Frankenstein. On Day One, my New York friend Carlos started making papercraft monsters, one per day, to photograph and post to cheer me up. And they did, like the many gifts I’ve been given by everyone from my dear friends and family to supporters I’ve yet to have the pleasure of meeting in person. A handmade table, a hand-sewn hat, a Star Trek blanket, a hand-knit night cap, poems and photographs, tea, candy, potted herbs, lotions, yoga DVDs, magazines, rodeo tickets, gift cards, dried fruits, a bonsai tree. A bonsai tree!

These are just a few of the wonderful, thoughtful things I’ve received with endless gratitude. Did I say bonsai tree?! And in Carlos’ lot, there was one papercraft monster that seemed to say it all. The F-You Cancer Vampire:

And while I’d thought there were only twenty of these little monsters, I learn on Day 113, on the eve of my very last chemo treatment, that there’s one more.

After my little sister’s birthday celebration, Joe drives us home and announces he has to go back to work. He has an email he still needs to send or something or other. I shrug it off, go to bed. Then sometime around midnight, he fast-tip-toes into our room like his sleeves were on fire and asks, “Are you awake?”

“I am now!”

“I wasn’t working,” he says. “I was getting your ‘last chemo’ gift ready, and I think you should open it right now.”

As I’m following him down the hall, into the living room, toward the powder room where he says the gift is stashed because he “didn’t have time to wrap it,” he’s trying to convince me he made a papercraft monster of his own with some guidance from Carlos. Let me tell you, Joe isn’t crafty. About as close he gets to a crayon is when he finds them chewed up on the rug while the dog is outside pooping rainbows. So I’m thinking it’s either a sloth or a room full of puppies. One or the other. And, well, here. Watch for yourself. Fair warning: I am wearing sexy flannel cancer pajamas and ye ol’ sleeping hat and it was filmed by a twelve-year-old on her phone.

That’s right. Carlos himself arrived in San Antonio, all the way from the big apple, dressed like the “F-You Cancer Vampire”:

After the excitement I go into mom mode. My job, anyway, during one of the last occasions that Carlos paid us a visit was “official mouth wiper” when he took the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse ghost pepper challenge:

“Where can you sleep?” I ask Carlos. “Oh! We have a blow-up mattress,” and, “Are you hungry? What do you want to eat? Something vegan?”

“I’ll take a grass-fed vegan, thanks,” Carlos said.

“Maybe I can find one. I can definitely find a free-range vegan at Whole Foods.”

This is the kind of banter we’ve had in the chemo lounge on Day 114, and as I type, Joe, Carlos, and I are watching the very last of the Taxol drip down from the bag.

Previous “Box of Monsters” blog posts:

Day 3

Day 89: Here Comes the Sun

Cynthia Hawkins — Tue, 18 Feb 2014 17:37:23 +0000

Three a.m. on Day 89 and I’m sitting on the side of the Firecracker’s bed while she howls over my many reasons why we can’t turn the clock radio on high in the middle of the night. INXS is playing. “What You Need.” I turn it off. She balls her fists over her eyes, begs to go to my bed, squirms under the new Minnie Mouse sheet set and blanket we’d bought to lure her to her room to sleep in the first place. The clock radio had been part of that package. Along with one plush penguin with a flashlight tummy and a zebra-striped beanbag chair she’d pushed into her inflatable igloo in the middle of the room.

On Day 17, after my first round of adriamycin and cytoxan, I’d stuffed myself full of anti-nausea meds, curled up under my blue blanket, and found the Firecracker beside me. “I want to sleep in mama’s bed,” she said, and we held fingertips and whisper-sang her usual bedtime songs and somewhere in the middle of “When the Red, Red, Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along” I drifted off. That’s okay, I thought. Her mom has cancer. She needs comforting. And hadn’t it been a comfort to me too, to roll over and find her softly snoring away on her dad’s pillow. She’s pretty much been there ever since because it would seem the corners of her room at night yawn wide with terrible monsters, like the one she met in the Whole Foods fish case earlier on Day 89, the red wide-eyed dead fish which sent her into a blood-curdling scream-run toward the bulk bins.

The problem is, she’s a restless sleeper unless she’s in her own bed. She’s been staggering off the school bus in the afternoons, wild-haired and half-awake, having slumped to sleep on the ten-minute ride to our front door. She’s been in a bad mood. She’s told her best friend she’s not her best friend anymore forever and ever, sparking a meltdown worthy of a call from her teacher. The problem is, an overtired Firecracker is even more fervently firecracker-like. So I turn INXS off, though the song keeps playing in my head. All night.

When I was first diagnosed with breast cancer and given the treatment plan back in November, the first thing I did was research. I learned what to expect on chemo, what to do to curb side-effects, what to eat, and so on, but nothing explained that while I was on chemo the kids would take over like kudzu vine through window gaps. One reason is ease. It’s so much easier from under the throw blanket on the sofa to wave a hand and let them play video games for hours on end and eat all the snack packs meant for their lunch boxes and gather every cushion and pillow in the house to make a fort and scatter uncapped markers across the wood floors and accumulate laundry. It’s so much easier to shrug off a sibling shoving match with something like, “Just ignore each other for awhile, please,” than to actually bring down the hammer of discipline.

The even bigger thing is the cancer guilt that functions in at least two ways. For one, I never want to be the reason why they can’t do something – have friends over, go to a movie, stay after school, play outside – whatever it is they often ask to do that requires a little more effort, a little more planning than playing video games and inhaling Oreos at home does. I don’t want to be the reason, or, more to the point, I don’t want cancer to be the reason. And when they want something – a shopping spree, skinny pants, a second Instagram account, another dozen stuffed penguins, a spot in mommy’s bed forever and ever – my default reaction is to think, That’s okay. Their mom has cancer.

Maybe few have written about managing the family on chemo because there aren’t any easy answers, no right or wrong under the circumstances. Maybe there’s only pushing through to the other side of treatment and reorganizing in the aftermath. And we’re almost there. Two more chemo sessions to go. Four more weeks.

I assure the Firecracker that daddy told the people at Whole Foods to take the red fish to the polar bears at the zoo. “They ate them up, and they’re gone,” I say. “The red fish aren’t coming to our house tonight.” Then I try to convince her again that she doesn’t need her radio to go back to sleep. She’s only quiet under her Minnie sheets when I tell her I’ll sing the song that was my favorite when I was her age:

Previous “Box of Monsters” blog posts:

Day 3

Day 51: Gaps

Cynthia Hawkins — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 15:47:20 +0000

A belated welcome to 2014, everyone! ‘Tis the season for fitspiration overload on Pinterest and gym promos and twenty ways to trim your waistline while eating chia seeds and lawn clippings and so on and so on.

It’s everywhere! I turn on the television, open a magazine, click on my little safari icon and boom – everyone wants me to be Lea Michele in a thong or, rather, a tangle of toothpicks in a rubber band. Just now, for example, as I was eating broccoli soup off a flaxseed cracker, which really does look exactly like shit on a shingle, one of these belly-buster magic pill commercials came on between news segments and my Janeane Garofalo-voiced inner monologue interrupted with, “You know what’s super for a quick slim down? Chemo.”

It’s strange watching the usual January deluge while on treatment, when, for the first time ever, it has no bearing on me. I’m trying not to slim down, in fact. I’m just trying to polish off some broccoli soup and a flaxseed cracker that has been rendered by chemo’s strange appetite-suppressing ways as rich as a cheesecake the size of a Mini Cooper. This is the kind of detachment from the unattainable body ideal I’d always tried for, pretended to have, and never really achieved. Until now. So I’m thinking of the ripple effects of past and present.

A week before the holiday break, my twelve-year-old daughter Hannah crossed the street and made her way under the oaks to our porch as I watched from the front windows with a cup of green tea. She’s tall and lanky like I was at her age, and I noticed as she stepped onto our lawn that she did so with my same long-stride giraffe’s gate. Then she shut the front door after herself, dropped her bag, put her feet together, and said, happier than I’d heard her in days, “Look! I have a thigh gap!”

The thigh gap. This, in case you’re unfamiliar, would be one of many eating-disorder-inducing obsessions plaguing girls of late.

Yeah, I had the thigh gap too when I was her age, and it was the source of ridicule. Like “hey spaghetti legs, you could drive a Mack truck through that gap” kind of ridicule. My obsession was in closing the gap, doing hundreds of leg lifts with ankle weights every night until I gave myself stretch marks down my hips and shuffled into gym class like a zombie John Wayne. You just can’t win in any era, girls, can you?

“That doesn’t even matter. You being healthy matters,” I told Hannah.

The other day, when it was nineteen degrees outside and she was headed to the bus stop without a coat or a hat or gloves, I told her she was going to get frostbite. She shrugged. So I added, “You know what frostbite is? That’s when your skin freezes and dies and turns black and they have to cut it off at the hospital to save the rest of you.” She shrugged again and left without her coat or hat or gloves. Point is, whatever I say has so little gravity right now. My words flitter past her like delicate, tiny butterflies, and poof. They’re gone. So chances are, she’s probably still measuring the thigh gap. And now there’s the bikini bridge. Which was a meme-plant. Which doesn’t matter. Because girls like Hannah are so primed to body-obsess that the number of inches your stomach sinks between your pelvic bones when you lie flat on the floor suddenly seems as reasonable a thing to measure as the space between your thighs.

Since my thigh gap closed of its own accord some time around 1994, I’ve followed practically every New Year’s-resolution variety diet. Five hours into the South Beach program, for example, I was once craving sugar so voraciously that I downed two packages of sugar-free peanut butter cups to keep from derailing and then went to a Spurs game. Have you ever read the fine print on those sugar-free candy wrappers? Afterwards, in my journal, I made a collage of the numerous wrappers I’d emptied in the shape of an explosion so I’d never forget. May have a laxative effect. Spurs lost that night, by the way, and it might have been because of the tenor of my atomic stomach gurgles. Oh the absurdity! Every single year. Until breast cancer.

Which brings us back to that bowl of broccoli soup. So, I was eating broccoli because it has cancer fighting phytochemicals and sulforaphane, which studies have shown may inhibit the growth of breast cancer cells in particular. Those wholegrain flaxseed crackers are full of protein, complex carbohydrates (as opposed to simple carbs known to fuel cancer cells), cancer-fighting lignans, and omega-3 fats which some studies suggest prime cancer cells for the effects of chemotherapy. You see? The 110% overachiever me has been studying up, and for the first time I am focusing on what I eat for what certain foods can do to heal and support my body as it is right now. Nothing else matters. Me being healthy matters. Detachment achieved.

So instead of attempting to whittle myself into some semblance of a Hollywood bikini body this year while telling Hannah not to, My New Year’s resolution is to model for Hannah what it took getting cancer for me to finally, truly learn – bald head, pallid complexion, bulging mediport implant and all – that what you look like, that how people judge you, that how you judge yourself by some freakishly impossible set of standards, is so very trivial, so miniscule, and so utterly devoid of power compared to keeping your body, just as it is, healthy and disease free.

Previous “Box of Monsters” blog posts:

Day 3

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Day 28: Outbreak

Cynthia Hawkins — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 16:47:10 +0000

I once stood in front of a British Literature class of sixty and told them, after a long swig of water and a pop of a fresh cough drop on my tongue, that we call the Firecracker “Outbreak Monkey,” as in the monkey in the film Outbreak who unleashes a pandemic. This was my way of explaining my waning voice and the magician tissue-rope poised to stream from my pocket for the rest of the lecture. Three of the sixty offered an obligatory chuckle. The rest – nothing. Seats creaked as a few students shifted. I coughed in the silence. Then one front-row student, resting his pencil eraser on his temple, said, “Oh. That’s cruel. You call your little girl Outbreak Monkey? That’s awful.”

“Well, not to her face,” I said, which didn’t sound any better.

But the gist of the joke remains true – the Firecracker must surely spend her time at school licking the bottoms of every child’s shoe, and the doorknobs for good measure, because she regularly comes down with raging colds she often passes on to the rest of us. In the last three months alone, she’s had pink eye, mono, and pneumonia. It’s the reason I find Ted McCagg’s Day Care Tasting comic so apropos. The problem is the Firecracker’s adorable.

Those eyes, those rosy cheeks, she lures you toward the germs like a chump. The bigger problem is, since Day 16 chemo has been depleting my white cell count to the degree that even the slightest of colds, as my oncologist’s nurse told me with her brows raised, could kill me. “Literally,” the nurse said with a nod at each syllable, “kill you.”

“You know we have a five-year-old,” I said, “who is probably coming down with a cold as we speak.”

She handed me a stack of surgical masks, the kind that loop around the ears, and said, “Well, we can’t exactly tell you to not be around your child, but … don’t be around your child.”

During that three-week stretch in which the Firecracker had pink eye, mono, and pneumonia pretty much at the same time, the Firecracker thought it’d be best for her to sleep in my bed. She’d wake in the middle of the night, inchworm over to the scoop of my bent knees and ribs, hold my hands, breathe songs across my knuckles as we’d sing in whispers – Doris Day, Big Star, The Cure, Ella Fitzgerald. And somewhere in the middle of, I see your face in every flower, we’d fall asleep again. My first chemo night, she was still there. She insisted.

But when she stepped off the bus on Day 26, dragging her tote bag, telling me how cold she was, her eyes bleary, her nose stopped up, we had to fast-track-phase her back to her own bed. And on the mask went every time I was in a five-foot radius of her. A friend, also just starting chemo, told me about Hibiclens soap, which is apparently better than antibacterial soap, so I started showering in Hibiclens and making everyone wash up to the elbows in Hibiclens and buying enough Hibiclens for a lifetime supply of Hibliclens dipping. And every time I took the Firecracker’s temperature with the thermal-scan thermometer, I twisted it in a Clorox wipe and then took my own. If mine ever reaches precisely 100.5, I’m to phone the oncologist’s office on a special line. I’m not sure what happens after that. Maybe it’ll be like that scene in E.T. when armored men descend en masse to encase the house in plastic and exit in a giant hamster tube unfurling down the walkway.

Or maybe I’ll just get to crack open the emergency bottle of antibiotics in my medicine bin the oncologist prescribed for me the first day I met with her. One second my temperature will be 97.4. And then thirty minutes later 99.1. And then thirty minutes later 98.6. The Firecracker’s, though, had been consistently 100.7.

After the Firecracker first walked in sick, I explained the mask to her. “It’s so I don’t breathe any germs. It won’t scare you if I wear it, will it?” I took it out of my sweater dress pocket to show her as we stood in the entryway. The barrette that had pinned her overgrown bangs back at school had moved to the very center, guiding them between her eyebrows. She squinted, considered the mask for a second, and said no. She just wanted to play computer games. Usually, I’d set the timer for her to play up to an hour and no more, but I figured she could play as much as she wanted in order to keep her occupied. Otherwise, she’d want to sit on my lap and watch Cinderella and sip apple juice from a box in my hand and ask me to wipe her nose every two minutes. This is what we usually do. This is why I usually catch anything the Firecracker has. So I put on the mask.

“I’m cold,” she said.

“It’s your fever. I’ll get your medicine.”

She sat on her knees on the dining chair she’d pulled to the computer hutch and shook her bangs out of her eyes. The barrette finally flopped off with a pop against the keyboard as she logged herself on.

“Don’t give me the medicine that makes your hair fall out,” she said.

I paused at the kitchen cabinet where we keep a separate bin full of children’s medicine.

“Don’t worry about that. Only mommy takes that.”

“Your medicine says: not for children — only for grown-ups? Is that right?”

“Sort of.”

“I don’t want that medicine when I’m a grown-up.”

“You won’t ever have to take that medicine. It’s something just mommy has to do.”

It wasn’t the right answer, but it was the thing that came out first, my breath in my mask heating my cheeks as I said it.

Day 1

Day 3

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