“I’m going to ask you a few questions, okay?”
“Okay. Please do.” My sister put her hands in her lap. She was wearing long sleeves, I knew why. She had many scars, but she seemed better. Her face was no longer bruised purple and green, and she had put on some makeup. I think my mother had something done to Brooke’s face, too, maybe dermabrasion, because her complexion, which had been rough and pitted, was much clearer. The spa had done a great job on her auburn hair, and it appeared thicker. Brooke wore jeans and boots and a blousy pink shirt. Our styles did not differ that much.
“First is, why did you leave me?”
My sister’s eyes flooded again. I did not try to rescue her, or this conversation. I couldn’t see their relationship progressing without it. Sometimes you have to walk through the sludge and shattered glass to get to the other side of the marsh.
“Tate,” Brooke said. “I . . . I was a screwed-up person. I was on drugs.”
“Which ones?” Tate took another hunk of bread. Nothing could keep that kid from his food.
“At that time”—she took a ragged breath—“I was on cocaine, painkillers, heroin, alcohol, and I smoked.”
“Whoa!” Tate said. “That’s some bad stuff.”
“It was.”
“Why did you start taking them?”
“I was young, I was stupid, I wanted to fit in. A girl I knew was using them, and I started to, too.”
“Yeah. Peer pressure.”
“I was lost and became more and more messed up, then became addicted. I had friends, but they weren’t true friends.”
“Blew your mind, then?”
“Yes. They did.”
“And that’s why you left me in the hospital?”
I heard Brooke’s quick inhale. “Yes. I couldn’t think. My mind was a mess. I was coming off of . . . I’m embarrassed to say this. . . .” She made a whimpering sound. “I was coming off being high and I felt ill and desperate and . . . and I left.”
“Do you think your drug use is why my head grew so big?”
Whew.
My sister’s hands shook. “I don’t know.”
“I think it probably is.”
Whew.
My sister nodded, her guilt so heavy I could almost see it. “You could be right.”
“I think I am right.” Tate kept eating, but I did not miss the steel glint in his eye. Tate rarely grew angry, but when he did, he focused it to a laser point. I’d seen him in action with other kids, with teachers who weren’t treating him fairly, with others who made fun of him. I hadn’t expected less. Tate is a kind, compassionate, wise person who gives people a lot of latitude and a lot of forgiveness. But his mother was on drugs when she was pregnant with him, then she took off.
That’s a lot to get past. Maybe impossible to get past.
“I’m sorry, Tate.” My sister’s voice shook, up and down, a verbal roller coaster.
“I’m sorry, too.” He had another bite of salmon. “Do you know what it’s like to live with a head this size and with crooked eyes?”
“No,” she whispered.
“It’s hard. People have made fun of me forever. I’ve been teased and beaten up.”
“I’m sorry.” The tears were streaming down, onto the tablecloth. “Tate, I am sorry.”
“I’m sorry about the teasing, but it’s made me a lot better person. And I have to say I’m not sorry you left me at the hospital with Nana Bird and Boss Mom.”
“You’re not?” She wiped her tears with a napkin.
“No. You were shooting up drugs. Can you imagine the life I would have had with you? I would have had this huge head, all the medical problems I had when I was younger, and you would have been too drugged out to take care of me. I would have grown up poor, moving around all the time, running into your friends who were doing drugs. It would have been scary, it would have been dangerous, I probably would have been abused or I would have died. So, I’m glad you left.”
I took a deep, deep breath. My sister deserved it, but I saw the way her head moved back, as if Tate had slapped her.
“I would have made a lousy mother.” Her voice was small.
“Yep. You would have.” Tate took an apple and balanced it on his head. “I can eat when I’m balancing things on my head. General Noggin is pretty talented in that way.”
I didn’t laugh. Neither did Brooke.
“I wanted to meet you, Brooke, and I’m glad I did. I’m glad you’re okay.”
“I’m glad to meet you, too, Tate. I have been such a bad mom, I hope you can forgive me one day—”
“You haven’t been a mom at all.”
Oh, whew, again!
No one said anything into that slippery pit for long seconds. All we could hear were Brooke’s muffled, squeaking noises as she cried. I didn’t think Tate was trying, exactly, to be mean, but he wasn’t cutting her any slack, either.
“A mom is Boss Mom here, who is around all the time. She always hugs me and nags at me and feeds me and feeding me takes a long time, too. Five meals a day, that’s what I eat. Plus snacks. Last night I ate eight chicken pancakes. That’s a pancake that’s the size of a chicken. It’s a joke. But Boss Mom, she’s the one who was up with me all night when something was going wrong and who helped me figure out how to deal with all the mean people out there.
“She’s the one who bought me clothes and set up movie nights with popcorn and taught me all about herbs and plants and bought me all the books I wanted, especially ones about brains, and helped me set up my experiment room with all kinds of stuff, which I’ve only set on fire a few small times and maybe a couple of explosions. Boss Mom gave me all I needed to become me, do you know what I’m saying?”
“Yes, I do.” Brooke pulled her arms tight around herself.
“And she was nineteen when she became a mom, too, and she did all that. Nineteen.”
Brooke and I locked gazes, and I saw the shattered remains of the last seventeen years in her eyes. She knew what a failure she had been. She knew what she’d missed. She had missed out on being a mother. Can’t get that one back, no matter how hard you wish. “You’re right. I haven’t been a mom to you, Tate. Not at all. And I’m glad you had your mom.”
“That’s why I have to call you Brooke now that we’ve met. Are you going to visit now and then, are we going to see you again? Are you going to take drugs again?”
“I would love to stay and visit for a few days and to see you in the tournament, if it’s okay. I am not planning on taking drugs again. I would like to get to”—she sobbed, her mouth quivering—“get to know you, Tate, if that’s what you want, too.”
My sister was tiny. The drugs had wasted her to that sick-skinny appearance addicts get. It was pathetic. But she certainly seemed better than the first time I’d seen her in Hollywood.
Tate thought about that. “Okay. We can get to know each other, but it sort of hurts me in my heart, too. I mean, here you are, my mom, and I’m meeting you after seventeen years. You gave me up at a hospital and I get that you were on drugs, but you still made a choice to stay on drugs. You still chose drugs over me for all these years. You chose drugs over Nana Bird, Boss Mom, and Uncle Caden and his family. I’m not trying to make you feel bad. I’m telling you that it might be awhile before I can say, ‘I love you, Mom,’ you know what I mean?”
“Yes, I know. I do know, Tate.” My sister struggled to stop sobbing.
“You missed out on a lot, Brooke, but, okay, let’s shake on it.” He offered his hand across the table. “We’ll get to know each other.”
“I would love that.” Her gratefulness went to her core, I knew it. “Thank you.”
“Okay dokay. Hey! Do you want to throw Skittles in each other’s mouths? I love that. We can have a contest!”
So, when the tears were dried, and many were from Tate as he hugged my sister, the tough guy act had worn him down, we threw Skittles into each other’s mouths.
It was fun.
It was a s
tart.
Maybe the start of a new family, new relationships, new people to love.
I had a patient named Nikolai Burlachenko two years ago who saw dead relatives in the days before he died.
Nikolai’s parents had brought him to America when he was thirteen. They fled Russia. His father had spoken out against the government, and he’d been jailed and tortured, as had Nikolai’s mother. Nikolai remembered both his parents coming home when they were in Russia, beaten up, relatives carrying in their sagging, bloody bodies. He remembered the arrest warrant on his father and how they escaped from their home in the middle of the night.
The Burlachenko family was poverty-stricken. His parents had no money when they arrived in the United States. Both had been college professors. They ended up working as custodians, at first, until they put together their own custodial company and made some money.
“Once you’re in poverty, once you go to bed hungry for weeks at a time, you never forget it. Hard work is the only thing that will protect you, that’s what I taught my sons,” Nikolai told me. “Hard work. Save your money.”
He was dying of pancreatic cancer. I had known him for two months.
“Jaden, all I can tell you is that I have a party going on in my bedroom, and all my relatives who have passed are all waiting around until God’s ready to take me to heaven. I see people who have already died on one side of me, and on the other side I see my four boys.”
People talking to dead relatives is not, I would say, common. But it happens. This was not the first time I’d seen it.
“Who has died that you see?”
“I see my parents.” He smiled. “Igor and Nadia. They were tired all the time when I was a boy, scared witless, but now, they are not tired, not frightened for their lives. I see my grandfather who had been executed in Russia, my uncles, one of whom died in prison there, aunts, three cousins, one who disappeared in Siberia, we never saw him again, didn’t know what happened. . . . I see my friend, Shane, who died when we were seventeen in Illinois in a car accident. I see a bunch of my buddies . . . Howie, Blake, Peter.
“Most importantly, I see Helga, my wife. She’s smilin’ at me. Waiting for me. She’s waiting. Dying isn’t that bad.” He cracked a smile.
His sons and their families were there ’round the clock. Nikolai had done something not unusual with his money. When he heard he had less than a year to live, he took his four sons and their families on three vacations: Disney World, Maui, and Russia, to his home in his hometown, so the grandkids would know where they came from. He left each son $100,000, not to be touched until they retired. “I want to know I’m helping to take care of you when you’re old like me.”
“One more thing I want to tell you, sons,” Nicolai said to his sons, the last afternoon I was there. “I love you.”
“We love you, too, Dad,” they all said, so upset, acutely missing him already.
“All these relatives here, the ones who have passed, they’re here for me, waiting, but I have to tell you one thing, sons. I love you. You’ve been good to me.”
“We love you, too, Dad.” They held each other, and their father, tenderly.
“I love you, boys. Always have, always will. Your mother loved you, too. Don’t forget that we love you. Love your children, the same as we loved you, and I love you.”
Nikolai died the next day.
His relatives took him up.
As a hospice nurse, this is what I’ve noticed: At the end, for the vast majority of people, it’s about one thing.
Love.
That’s it. That’s all.
Love.
The next afternoon, Brooke and I drank Strawberry Berry Tea for Wild Women in my greenhouse, paper whites sprouting nearby, icicles hanging off the gutters. We talked about visiting Grandma Violet and Grandpa Pete during the summer, Grandma’s healing business for the townspeople complaining about aches in their heads and aches in their butts, the animals we used to have, the crafts we made, the herbs and spices we used with Grandma Violet for spells, for fun, and for meals.
We even talked about Faith and Grace and the stories Grandma Violet told us about their time on the Oregon Trail.
“Remember where we were when she told us that story the first time, Jaden?” Brooke was pouring potting soil into five red pots for more bulbs.
“No, where?” I studied my colorful Chinese lanterns hanging from the rafters. I had always liked them. I liked my climbing frogs, too, and my collection of birdhouses.
“You and I were sitting next to her at the kitchen table. She had just finished healing Mrs. Hillington, who thought she was possessed by the devil because she had warts on her pinkie finger, and after her was Mr. Akoba, who was having a heart attack. He sat for an hour, drinking one of Grandma Violet’s fruit blended drinks, not showing any signs, waiting for her to finish with Mrs. Hillington and her devil possession. Not a word of impatience out of him.
“Mr. Akoba told Grandma Violet later that his mother had taught him never to interrupt women, so he hadn’t, even though he was in grave pain. Thankfully, she called the ambulance and he lived. Came back two days later and said it was Grandma’s magic drink that fixed his engine and the engine was gunning again, all pistols firing, even the horn worked.”
We laughed, then pieced together the Oregon Trail story, which went like this:
Faith, Grace, Russ, and Jack pooled their money and bought a wagon, oxen, and two more horses. They packed hundreds of pounds of flour, sugar, bacon, fat, tea (who could live without tea?), coffee, rice and beans, other food supplies, and whiskey. The women liked it straight-up and in their tea. They brought tools, utensils, clothing, bedding, guns, scissors, ropes, candles, a pot to piss in, and fabrics that the women insisted on.
Most importantly, at least to Faith and Grace, they brought their velvet satchel.
Before they left, Faith and Jack, and Grace and Russ were married in a field on top of a hill with only a preacher and the sun. Simple wedding bands were exchanged, and they had a picnic, the four of them, laughing, delighted, in love, before both couples wandered off to consummate passions that had burst forth the second they’d met over raspberry pie at the town picnic, when the women were desperate to get outta town.
On the trail, they were all soon exhausted and filthy. They traveled for five endless months, through all types of weather. They walked twelve to fifteen miles a day. Food soon became scarce. Though both men were expert shots, clean water was often hard to find. They forded rivers on rickety rafts after helping to stabilize the wagon on top of the raft.
The wagon wheels broke. They guided stubborn oxen and calmed horses when they saw rattlesnakes. Both women became sick. One man in another wagon lost a leg under a wagon wheel. He lived. Barely. Other pioneers died of accidental gunshot wounds, disease, childbirth, one suicide, injury, and sickness, and one pioneer went mad, wandered off, and no one knew where he had gone. The wagon train could not wait around to find him. If they did, they could get stuck in the mountains during winter and everyone would freeze to death.
But there was one fortunate . . . thing.
Faith’s and Grace’s husbands proved they were true men. They had stuck with the women, protected them, cared for them, and been loyal the whole trip. In return, the cousins had not complained and worked beside their husbands. Faith had pulled Jack out of the river when the raft tilted. Grace had shot a rattlesnake clean out of the ground that was three feet from Russ’s feet. They had both nursed the men when they were hurt and sick.
Their bonds could not be tighter. Their laughs, when they came, more pure.
When they arrived in Oregon City, Oregon, the four were fatigued to the bone and half-starved. They settled in for two weeks to rest and rejuvenate.
They decided to move to Portland, a new town on the Willamette River, filled with fir and pine trees, rain, and gray skies. Faith and Grace were dismayed. It was dirty, unsanitary, undeveloped, and somewhat lawless in this Wild West town, but again, they di
d not complain. It was surely better than being in jail and a hundred times better than being married to the slave torturers, Dwight and John.
Jack and Russ went into the timber business. They bought land in town and built homes. The first homes were small, functional. The next homes, years later, were fancy, on a park in the middle of the city. In both places the cousins planted thyme, sage, rosemary, parsley, oregano, lavender, Canterbury bells, hollyhocks, lilies, irises, sweet peas, cosmos, red poppies, peonies, and rows of roses, out of respect and love of their witchly ancestors.
Faith and Grace started another store, but there were not that many women to cater to at first, so they catered mostly to men and sold food, supplies, tools, etc. They did not think it smart to name it Faith and Grace’s, as they knew they might well be hunted down by Dwight and John, therefore they named it The Portland Supply Store.
“And they did well,” Brooke said.
“They did. The store was huge. Their kids ran it later.”
“Remember how Grandma Violet told us the lesson in the Oregon Trail story is to keep forging ahead, through the deserts, storms, hardships, near-drownings, illnesses, rattlesnake bites, bad luck, and contaminated water of life? I noted the contaminated water of life part particularly as a kid. I remember I really didn’t want to drink messy, dirty water.”
“And she told us to keep the hope.” I tried to make my voice sound like Grandma Violet’s. “Never give up hope, girls, it’s what we all cling to to survive.” I linked my arm over Brooke’s shoulders and handed her a tissue when she teared all up.
“I miss them,” she said.
“I miss them, too.” I dropped a few tulip bulbs into the pots. “I’ve missed you, too, Brooke.”
She sniffled. I handed her another tissue.
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