Still Running 

Tepid water falls onto my naked body.  I stand here.  I wait.  I lean forward and budge the spigot to the left.  Drops press into my scalp and then run down the curve of my back, taking with them grime, sweat, germs.  I stand here in the white bathtub between a thin yellow curtain and a glistening tile wall and let the water assail my body.  I reach for the bottle of shampoo and squeeze a drop the size of a quarter onto my pruned palm.  It feels cool, and I hurry to rub my hands together to create white suds that I massage into my long strands.  I look down at myself, at the rise of my breasts, the sharp angle of my hips, the bulge of my calves, my peach-colored toenails.  Steam makes my wet flesh shine.  I tap the pink point of my right breast, and then graze the circumference with my index finger.  The thin skin is smooth like the inside of a cantaloupe.  I take it all into my hand.  My fingers dig into the soft flesh, searching. 

I.

            Until last March, my dad was the only person I knew who had lost his mother.  A toxic combination of asthma and cataract medicines killed Grandmother Maxine shortly after I turned ten.  I grew up attending wakes and funerals for my distant great aunts and uncles, but my grandmother’s is the first I can locate among the snapshots of my memory—sucking hard candy in the family’s grieving room, the scent of lilac that still conjures images of her powdered face and folded hands, reading the headstones of relatives I never met in a suburban Chicago cemetery, the soft drizzle that turned my mom’s pink handkerchief red.

            Calendars suggest that my parents conceived Abigail only days before my grandmother collapsed at the local Super Clean car wash.  Whether the reincarnation of Grandmother Maxine’s spirit or an excuse for Dad to push the pain out of his eyes, flames flickered in my young heart when my parents told my brother and me that God was going to give our family another child for Christmas.  I wanted my grandmother back.  I could not imagine losing the touch of her soft hands as she weaved my hair into thick braids and the warmth of her breath against my cheek as she whispered in my ear as well as my spot on Dad’s lap and the afternoons Mom and I spent turning our kitchen into a powdery haven as we baked bread.  Life as my ten-year-old mind knew it was over.             

As I squeezed a map of the United States, my baby blanket, ten one dollar bills, and my favorite seashell into my hot pink backpack, a little girl across the country on the Flathead Indian Reservation was also preparing to leave her home.  Mikayla’s sixteen-year-old brother Gene had been decapitated when he slammed his Ford Escort into a telephone pole.  This was only the most recent in a long list of tragedies that characterized her family’s history; death, disease, disorder, and dysfunction visited their Montana ranch like a plague.  Exhausted, Mikayla secured her mother’s compass around her neck with a shoelace, filled a deserted Budweiser bottle with water, and set out for the bright lights of Missoula.            

Neither of us got far.  The minister of the local Methodist church brought Mikayla back to her parents after he found her fast asleep on the side of Highway 93.  I didn’t even make it out the front door before my mom looped her arm around my waist and reeled me back into the house.  Where did I think I was going?  Wasn’t I old enough to realize that things won’t always go my way?              

I climbed into the darkness of my closet to listen to waves and read Nancy Drew books by the light of my flashlight.  Mikayla sequestered herself in her mom’s musty pantry, eating cucumbers and playing jacks.  There are many ways to run away.   

II

            If our respective attempts to leave home had been successful, perhaps Mikayla and I would have run into each other on some dusty road.  Joining forces to scavenge for food and dodge the authorities, we could have been some team—the pubescent Thelma and Louise.  Our lives didn’t actually collide until I found her making out with my boyfriend in the backseat of his Tahoe.  I informed her that he was my—now ex—boyfriend, and she promptly slapped him across the face.  We became fast friends.  When I was finally fed up with finding vomit in the stairwell and listening to my suitemate’s eclectic mix of Eminem, Madonna, and Phil Collins at three o’clock in the morning, Mikayla and I decided to get an apartment far away from the drunken absurdity that is the University of Idaho dormitories.  No one tried to stop us from leaving this time.              

I only met Mikayla’s mother Elaine once, but through phone messages and the stories Mikayla told me over burnt Hamburger Helper and cheap wine, I had come to know her the way you know secondary characters in a novel.  Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, she sought to cleanse her body of the rapidly reproducing cancer cells with prayer and through her tribe’s ritual of sweating.  Mikayla traveled from our apartment on the outskirts of Moscow over Lolo Pass to her home in Polson, Montana to smudge herself with sweet grass and ask the Creator for a miracle.  Unable to fathom life without a mother, she did not believe death would come until she sprinkled dirt on the lowered casket. 

After trudging through several months of reclusion, Mikayla sought out an explanation, a reason for her suffering.  She learned from online articles and her biology textbook that it was not atypical that her mother died two months after developing jaundice and experiencing violent episodes of vomiting; cancer of the pancreas has usually progressed to a fatal stage by the time symptoms emerge.  She would also find that the minor defect, which provoked the normal growth and division of cells in her mother’s pancreas to spiral out of control, was most likely caused by tobacco.  When an individual’s DNA—comprised of thousands of genes located in the nucleus of all cells and responsible for directing the production of new, identical cells—is damaged, abnormal cells can result, multiplying more quickly than they destroy themselves, spreading throughout the body, taking over tissues, bones, and organs like an imperialistic superpower.  Since over sixty-five percent of pancreatic cancer cases are directly linked to smoking, Mikayla’s fear that the cigarettes her mother claimed to find refuge in would kill her was realized in her mind.  Can you blame your mother for her own death?   

III.

            I cannot blame my mom for the cancer that entered her body and our lives nine years after my grandmother’s death and nine months before Elaine’s.  A healthy, forty-three-year-old woman diagnosed with aggressive, estrogen-receptor negative breast cancer, the culprit was probably a faulty BRCA-1 gene on chromosome 17q21 inherited from one of her parents.  With over seventy thousand genes in every cell, the probability that an individual will receive a mutated BRCA-1 gene is miniscule—less than guessing the ten winning numbers for the multimillion-dollar jackpot.  For the daughter of a parent with this flaw, though, her chances shoot up to fifty percent with up to an eighty-five percent likelihood of developing breast cancer before the age of fifty.  It’s like the story scout leaders tell their young hikers—if you step off the path, you will squash some seemingly irrelevant plant or insect, setting off a long chain of events, leading to the destruction of the world.  One mistake and everything goes to hell. 

            The scientific explanation came after the long hours of waiting that filled the summer before my junior year in college.  A fog like dirty cotton candy hung over our lives, making everything look like its shadow. 

            I went back to a house I no longer felt I belonged in after doctors found a scattering of cancer cells surrounding the benign lump they removed from my mom’s right breast.  Speeding down grades and twisting around canyons as darkness cooled the dry landscape from Moscow to Meridian, I found my way to a family and a life I thought I had grown out of.  I turned right on North Summerfield Way and spotted my brother’s pickup parked in the driveway of the third bay—my spot.  I would soon find that the goldfish I had won at the Ada County Fair so many years ago had been flushed down the toilet and replaced with two Siamese fighting fish, and the placemat marking my spot at the table had been put away.  I had no older brothers or sisters, no example of how one should leave home and no one to tell me what to say to my dying mother.           

I said nothing.  After parking behind Mom’s minivan, I dug out my key and went in through the side door.  I slipped off my Birkenstocks and made my way through the family room, past the kitchen and the purple glow of the aquarium to the landing of the staircase, enjoying the plush carpet between my toes.  The murmur of the nightly news grew louder as I climbed the stairs, swinging my gym bag from my right shoulder to my left and then back to my right before reaching the top.  I went to the master bedroom at the end of the hallway and rested against the oak doorframe.  My parents were engrossed in a story about grade inflation at Ivy League schools.  I studied my mom’s soft and slightly bluish face from the reflection of the television screen and quietly said, “Maybe I should transfer.” 

            “Jessie!  You’re home,” Dad exclaimed, tightening his robe as he stood up

.            “I’m home.”

             As he walked to my post at the door and gave me four firm pats on the back, Mom pressed her palms against the mattress and propped herself up.  I went to her.  I held her in my arms as carefully as I had cradled my newborn sister.  Fear consumes all emotion.  There were no tears. 

            If doctors had not removed the Mickey Mouse-shaped clump of dysfunctional cells from my mom’s right breast, the cancer would have conquered the surrounding tissue, quickly spread to the lymph nodes, and then to the bones, and on and on until the circles under my dad’s eyes sank his spirit as he looked at his three motherless children.  We would have found ways to manage our grief and cut our losses.  After moving back home to make breakfast for Dad, put Abby on the bus, and nag Michael to do his homework, I would have sorted her letters, knick-knacks, and spoon collection into shoeboxes and folded her sweatshirts and jeans into garbage bags for GoodWill.  I would have read the annotations filling the margins of the yellow-edged books stacked in her closet and worn her perfume to try to learn the secrets she carried with her, to see if she had given me more than an unusual shade of hair and a respect for language.   

            Cancer did not kill my mom.  After extracting the colonizing cells from her breast, the doctors recommended a rigorous course of chemotherapy followed by weekly radiation treatments, just for good measure.  I returned to Moscow and quickly resumed my busy routine of classes, work, and friends, trying to avoid the “How was your summer?” question.  I did not stay to help my dad shop for groceries.  I did not stay to answer my sister’s questions about death.  I did not stay to stop my brother from skipping school.  I did not stay to watch my mom collect her hair in oversized Ziploc bags as she watched Days of Our Lives and Oprah between naps because the poisons they injected into her body did not discriminate between healthy and harmful cells and she was too tired even to read.  I did not stay.  

IV.

            The water turns cold, but I do not move.  Each bead pounds my body—the crown of my head, the base of my neck, the summit of my breasts, the curve of my buttocks, and the length of my feet simultaneously—shocking my flesh into consciousness. 

 It has been one year since cancer invaded my mind and my mother’s right breast.  My life has changed in subtle but significant ways.  I bite the inside of my cheek when I see a pink ribbon, my mom and I end our phone conversations with “I love you,” and I refuse to buy sexy bras; my awareness of international health crises has heightened, my understanding of family has broadened, and I look at my body differently.   

My body temperature plummets.  The water feels as icy as glacial runoff. 

This past year has not been like the made-for-tv specials on Lifetime; cancer has not brought my family closer together.  I still debate foreign policy with my mom over squeezed lemonade, barter with my dad for gas money, teach my sister Spanish verb conjugations, and bitch at my brother for rattling Tic-Tacs during Communion.  In truth, the disease has given me new reasons not to go home.  The threat of not being able to escape suburban America with its Wednesday afternoon playgroups and water sprinklers that cycle on every six hours as well as a family desperate for stability keeps me away; cancer and all of its baggage has transformed my fear of rejection into a dread of dependency.   

The water runs clear; I am clean.  I push the spigot down with my left foot.  My body is numb.  Water particles hide in the crevices of my skin and stick to my goose bumps like crystals on freezer-burned ice cream.   

Mikayla returned to her family’s Montana ranch to take care of the animals and build fences with her father for the summer.  She called me the other night, frantic and almost incomprehensible.   

“This ranch is cursed, Jessie.  I swear it is.” 

“Mikayla?  What—” 

“I’m coming back.  I went outside.  This morning and the goat.  My mother’s little goat.  I’m coming back.  This ranch.  I just can’t stay here.” 

“I’m confu—” 

“It died.  It was just there, next to the creek.  Dead.  Everything dies here.  And the blood—bright red like a clown’s nose—tricking down its fur.  I don’t—”   

“Mikayla—” 

“It was horrible.  Sprawled out with blood ruining its fur.  Dead.” 

“But what about—” 

“My dad.  I know.  Shit, my water is boiling over.  I’ll call you next week.” 

“Will you be—?” 

“I gotta run.” 

In the days before Mikayla left, I often saw her tending the plants on our patio, pouring the water deliberately, several inches above the highest branch—performing a kind of ceremony, a baptism.  She would stick her hands into the wet soil, like she was trying to feel life under her fingernails.   

Water runs out of my hair, forming streams like the tributaries of the Mississippi River down my back.  

I choose to bathe in innocence and swim in denial.  Today I am twenty-one years old, and my heart is too strong to slow over the possibility of death, my ambition too great to imagine a life cut short, my mind too immature to accept what I do not like.   

I wrap the thick towel tightly around my body.  The warmth of the absorbent cloth embraces me and the memory of the almost unbearably cold shower melts into the potpourri of touches, tastes, smells, and images that is my past.   

Today I am still my mother’s child.