Tell Me Something Real (13 page)

“You're going to feel some burning,” the doctor says in perfect English. His accent is as slight as his build. He is barely an inch taller than Adrienne, who stands in the background. He grasps my arm and inserts the needle into my skin. I gasp at the pain.

“That will help,” the doctor says. He pulls a strip of gauze from the pile and unravels it like a rattlesnake unknots itself before an attack. He focuses on my leg. “I am Dr. Alvarez. I work with the children. The pain will be gone in a moment.”

Dr. Alvarez is right. I feel my eyelids droop as I listen to Barb's reassuring voice. I know Adrienne and Marie are in the room, but I'm not sure where. It's hard to focus. The doctor dips the gauze into the cool plaster, wraps it around my ankle, and smoothes out each strip. I try to concentrate on his seamless motions and guess he is someone who can peel an orange in one long ribbon. Slowly, the pile disappears and he pours the remaining plaster up and down my shin.

“She will sleep now,” I hear him say. “Stay with her and make sure she doesn't move her foot. She cannot walk on it. No weight. Understand?”

I hear footsteps and voices as people leave the room. Someone cradles my hand, someone smaller than me. Marie. When I wake up, she's gone.

Dad's voice fills my ear and I feel his sturdy hand on my shoulder. “Vanessa, Vanessa, wake up.”

I try to adjust my eyes, to see if he is there or if I'm dreaming. There he is, still in his suit but without his tie. “Hey, kiddo, I'm going to take you home.”

Pressure radiates up and down my leg, but I barely feel the pain—it still throbs, but from somewhere strange and distant. I barely feel my body. I look around the room. Kitten and rainbow posters line the walls. “Where's everyone?” I ask.

“Your sisters are waiting in the lobby.” Carefully, he slides his arms under me. “I'm going to carry you now, okay?”

I nod. “She was screaming,” I say. “Something's wrong with Mom.”

“You were dreaming, honey. Let's get you into the car.”

He lifts me off the gurney, holding me with great care, and I close my eyes again, wanting nothing more than to believe him.

I didn't begin with the piano. Vivaldi introduced me to classical music, with his urgent melodies and passionate arrangements. Everything deep inside me, everything I was scared to feel, much less express, exploded in his music.
The Four Seasons.
Winter. I'd never seen snow, but if a blizzard felt like his violin, I would have welcomed frostbite and exposure.

When I started violin lessons, the bow felt long and awkward in my hand, and when I moved it across the strings, I made a keening sound, high and screeching, the sound of something wild and close to death.

As the painkillers loosen their hold, my leg, from knee to ankle, embodies that sound. Long, taut, and completely dissonant. I clench my jaw and fists. Adrienne strokes my hair. We are in the backseat of the car. She senses pain—Mom taught us that.

“We're almost home,” she says.

Dad talks over his shoulder. “I'm dropping off you and Marie. I'll take Vanessa to the emergency room before I go back to the clinic.”

Marie snores in the front seat. She rests her head against the window, and her breath creates a circle of fog on the glass.

“But she has a cast,” Adrienne says. “Why do you need to go to the hospital?”

“Did they take an X-ray?” Dad looks at her in the rearview mirror.

Adrienne shakes her head.

“Did they even examine her?”

“I don't know,” she says. “Kind of.”

“That's why we're going to the emergency room.”

I stay in the car as Dad carries in Marie, who can sleep through anything. I can't move from the backseat, can't block out the searing pain. I want to curl up, to hide from it, but I'm not that strong. Dad speeds through the neighborhood, taking shortcuts and blowing through stop signs.

The hospital seems quiet and organized, nothing like the clinic. Dad fills out a thick stack of forms and hands them to a woman sitting at the desk.

The nurse takes one look at me and says, “Let's bring you back.”

Dad helps me through the giant double doors to an exam room with a bed. I notice the shiny equipment and realize how outdated the clinic's rooms are in comparison. Both share the same sterile odors, but this hospital has
machines with blinking lights, an intercom paging doctors, and posters about poison and choking hazards.

A doctor enters, bald, grandfatherly, somewhat stern. He flips through the chart and assesses my cast. He extends his hand to Dad. “Dr. Sato.”

“Tell him what happened,” Dad says.

Complete sentences elude me. I do my best to describe the skateboard and the way my contortionist's leg bent in the wrong direction. I tell him about Dr. Alvarez and the shot as powerful as a horse tranquilizer.

“Where did this happen?”

“
Enfermería de Paz y Salud
in Ensenada,” Dad says.

“You can't be serious. Are you sick?” The doctor examines our faces.

“No, my wife. Leukemia.”

Dr. Sato turns away and reaches for tools lined on a tray. He selects a pair of pliers and a small saw. He looks at me. “I'm going to remove the cast. It'll be loud, but it won't hurt. Tell me if you need me to stop.”

I nod and turn my head, attempting to ignore the high-pitched buzzing sound. The doctor cuts a straight line down the inside of my thigh, bisecting the cast. When he liberates my leg, it's swollen twice its normal size, and the skin is blue and purple. He squeezes my leg and instructs me to wiggle my toes, praising me when I do, as if this is an accomplishment.

“Now,” he says, “move your ankle back and forth.”

But I can't.

He turns to Dad. “We're going to get some film of that leg.”

An older man with pale skin enters the room. I guess he's worked the graveyard shift for at least a decade.

“Are you ready for the X-ray?”

I nod and he pushes the gurney into a small room. After bashfully asking if there is a possibility I could be pregnant, he drapes a metal apron over my virgin body and instructs me to stay still.

He asks too many questions:
Does that hurt? Are you okay? Can you turn your leg to the left? Can you turn it more?
I wish he would stop talking. Just take the X-ray and let me rest. Please. I'm not sick like Mom.

If I squint and examine the wall closely, I suspect I'll see something disgusting. Some small fleck of something human. But the paint looks new and smells of disinfectant, a pungent scent of something pretending to be clean. I rest for a while, sometimes closing my eyes, sometimes examining the wall.

Just as I nod off, he returns me to Dad.

Not long after my hazy journey to the X-ray room, the doctor turns on the light box and places the X-rays on the surface, smoothing the edges like he's hanging new wallpaper. He traces the image of my leg, following the tibia bone. My leg is fine—not broken—a straightforward ankle sprain and a pulled ligament. The majority of the pain came from the irresponsible casting, which was compressing the
nerve.
Entrapment neuropathy.
If Dad hadn't brought me in, I probably would have needed surgery. I may have had a limp for the rest of my life. Dr. Sato explains my simple recovery. I'll be spared a cast and crutches. Just a few days of ice packs and elevation. A thick Ace bandage. A blessing.

“I'd like to speak to you about your wife,” he says to Dad. “I'm sure you're aware of the controversy surrounding Laetrile.”

The doctor closes the curtain, shielding me from their conversation. I try to listen to their low and hushed voices, but I can't make out their words. The curtain gapes open, leaving a view of the other patients. A young boy, maybe five or six, cries as his skin is stitched. The nurse with the sewing kit coos at him, pausing to wipe away his tears. An older man, bloated from grease or alcohol, rubs his stomach. Careful of my ankle, I turn away from the door.

They take a few steps closer. I hear the rustle of paper and the quick sound of a pen.

“She said it was too late for chemo and now we're at the end,” Dad says.

“It's a mistake to pursue this course,” Dr. Sato says. “I can't emphasize that enough. Does she have nausea, vomiting, headaches, dizziness, difficulty walking?”

“Yes, everything.”

“Those are the symptoms of cyanide poisoning,” the doctor says. He enunciates each word, stressing the severity. “These people offer false hope, and they profit from patients
and families when they're most vulnerable. There's a reason why it's illegal here. Here's the name of an oncologist. Tell him I referred you and you need an appointment immediately.” I hear the rip of paper. “He'll be able to give you a realistic prognosis. They can't treat your wife at that clinic. Those are not legitimate hospitals. There are plenty of capable physicians in Mexico, but not the Laetrile peddlers.”

“She's dying.” I haven't heard that much anguish in Dad's voice since the diagnosis. “We're at the end. I'm going to get her as soon as we're done here.”

“Let the oncologist run some tests,” Dr. Sato says.

The doctor's words, clearer by the second, flood my mind. Dad said it is over—we are at the end.

Yet Mom can sit up and hold a conversation.

She isn't unconscious.

And she can scream.

I know some people think Laetrile is too experimental, but a hoax? This doctor has to be wrong.

They leave me cocooned until Dad signs the remaining forms. He wheels me to the car in silence. The morning air is crisp and clear; wisps of clouds streak the sky. It is five-thirty and the city is quiet, the freeway empty before the morning commute.

We drive west, away from the sun, which fills the sky by the time we reach home.

He clings to my hand the entire way.

Adrienne poaches extra pillows from Mom and Dad's bed to create a nest for me, “the cripple.” I can't convince her otherwise, even when I hand her the discharge papers with my anticlimactic diagnosis.

She is stunned—not her usual self. She waited all night to tell me what happened at the clinic. After she tucked Marie in bed and Dad headed back to the clinic, she was alone with the news. Adrienne doesn't wear stillness well, and as she talks, I want her to gesture and tilt her head and grimace or smile. Anything to remind me that she is three-dimensional. That she isn't scared shitless.

While I was out cold from Dr. Alvarez's shot, Adrienne was busy learning about what happened to Mom. I
had
heard her scream. It wasn't a dream. Adrienne explains how the new doctor, the one Mom calls a sadist, insisted on examining her. Something happened with the IV and she was left punctured and bleeding. He said he needed more blood, another sample. Something was wrong with the other, the one he had forced from her before. He wouldn't leave, despite her injured arm and screams for help. The doctor removed Lupe from the room and brought in another nurse, also new to the clinic. They gave Mom a massive sedative. He threatened restraints, which he eventually used, tying her down to draw from her good arm.

Adrienne calls him a motherfucking vampire.

On the ride back from the hospital, Dad insisted that our clinic days are over. He is furious and talked of lawsuits
and medical licenses. Of our limited time together. Quality of life. Family time. A countdown to life without her.

I tell Adrienne about Dr. Sato's damning words. When I finish, I look up, straight into her eyes, almost as familiar as my own.

“It could be true after all, right?” I ask. “Maybe Laetrile is killing her?”

A race between leukemia and cyanide.

She shakes her head back and forth. “All I know is that something bad is happening. When I got a chance to see her, she looked almost dead. Her head was slumped forward and her lips were gray. I couldn't believe it.”

Exhausted and breathless, Adrienne and I curl up next to each other. When we were little, before my hair darkened to barely blond, we were confused for twins. An unlikely compliment made long ago, but there is some truth to it. Adrienne and I fit together. We make sense as a pair. Maybe that is why we rarely fight—it's absurd for anyone to consider us rivals.