The Elementals (25 page)

*   *   *

Six weeks after her surgery I went with my mom to a consultation about chemo. The handsome Persian doctor didn’t look much older than I was. He was the one who had treated her before. My mom shook her head at everything. When we left she said, “I don’t want it!”

She’d had it before, lost her hair and whatever curves she’d had left on her body. Now her hair had just begun to reach the length it had been before she’d started.

“No one wants it,” my dad said.

“Yes!” Her voice was thin as ice. “Yes, some people do. He said so. They go right into it after their surgery.”

“They don’t want it,” I said. “They want to live.”

My mom sat very still in the front seat. I could only see the back of her head.

“I want you to live,” I said. “I’m not letting go of you again.”

“Me neither,” said my dad. He reached for her hand and at first she stayed stiff but then I saw her shoulders slump.

“We’re going to help you through this,” I said. “I’m going to be here this time. It’s going to be different.”

*   *   *

A week later she came into my room and sat on my bed, where I was reading one of my books of fairy tales.

“May I talk to you?” she asked, and I put my arm around her waist and leaned my head on her shoulder. She stroked my hair.

“I’m not sure I can go through it again,” she said.

“I know. But I know you can do it.”

“I don’t want to lose my hair. I know it sounds vain but…”

“It’ll grow back, though.”

“The treatments aren’t even guaranteed.”

“But the chances are better if you try it. Can you just try it? Please.” I didn’t want to cry in front of her again. I didn’t want to scream at her but I could feel emotions seething inside of me.

“Your dad wants me to do it.”

“Of course he does. He wants you to live.” For a second I had a sickening flash of my dad standing at my mom’s gravesite with his arm around Elise Ronan. “I’m going to shave my head, too,” I said. “Just so you know.”

She took my face in her hands and I struggled not to pull away. “No you’re not.”

“Yes I am. I want to. It’s no big deal for me. I want to support you. And we’ll get you some medical marijuana this time. We’ll get all toasty. It really helps.”

She smiled. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

I wrinkled my nose at her and shrugged. “I’m your daughter,” I said. “And it’s going to stay that way.”

*   *   *

So my mom agreed to the treatments and over the next few months I made her miso soup and smoothies and helped her with the bong. When my dad was out we put on
This Is Spinal Tap
and smoked and giggled until she fell asleep. I knelt with her on the bathroom floor and held her forehead while she vomited. I drove her to her doctor’s appointments. Every time I got tired or depressed I told myself that the only thing that mattered was that I was spending time with her, getting her through this to the other side.

When her hair started to fall out again I asked her if she wanted me to take her to a salon to get it cut short.

“I can’t handle going to one of those places,” she said. “Will you do it for me?”

We smoked some weed and I cut her hair close to the scalp, the soft tufts falling to the ground.

“Shave it,” she said.

“What?”

“Shave it off. Then we don’t have to watch it fall out all over the place.”

So I cut the hair even shorter, got the razor and wet and lathered her head and held the razor up. What if I cut her? But I couldn’t let her feel my fear. I took a deep breath, the kind I’d learned in yoga class, and steadied my shaky hand. I thought of all the times my mom had washed, cut and braided my hair for me. One day I might take care of a little girl. I thought of shaving myself, how sometimes I nicked my shins and little lines of blood appeared on my skin. But that was when I wasn’t concentrating. And now all of me was going to be focused inside the blade I held until there was nothing left of Ariel but eyes and a hand with a purpose.

I didn’t cut my mom. When I was finished I put mascara, blush and lip gloss on her, then held the mirror up for her to see. That part was even harder than the shaving; her eyes filled with tears, as if I
had
cut her. I suppose I had.

“Wait,” I said.

I left her and went into the bathroom. My hair was in a braid down my back and I held it at the nape of my neck and dug the scissors into it—they made a dull, sick, saw sound—and cut it off. I threw the braid to the ground, suddenly a dead thing. Then I chopped around my face—these sounds were light and sharp and free. And then I took a razor to my head; my hand didn’t shake at all this time.

Baldness didn’t bother me. I didn’t care about looking attractive to anyone; it was the last thing on my mind. I just wanted my mom to see, every time she looked at me, how much I loved her. Perhaps, too, it was a sort of penance. For Jeni.

I got in bed next to my mother.

“Ta-da!” I said.

Even though I’d warned her, it made her cry once more, much to my dismay, to see my tiny naked head, my crazy, looming eyes. When she could tell I was okay with it she kissed my face again and again and I placed my head on her chest and closed my eyes and slept to the sound of her heart.

*   *   *

As she recovered I enrolled for the spring semester at UCLA. I rode the bus there from Ventura Boulevard, over the 405 pass. But I wasn’t really there in the smog and traffic. I was tripping out to Björk on my iPod—the music I’d been listening to when John came to campus to find me; I might as well still have been at Berkeley, walking among thousands of rosebushes in the amphitheater-shaped garden on top of the hill or in the park with its volcanic outcroppings at Indian Rock. That was where I imagined myself to be until I was disturbed from my reverie.

There was a boy at my bus stop with large angry pustules on his face and a precarious walk. He stared at my head, the hair just beginning to grow back—I’d continued to shave it until my mom stopped her treatments—pointed and said, “Ugly. Bald.”

This would have mortified me even a few months ago. Now I smiled and told him, “My mom was very sick. I wanted to show solidarity with her. I’m sorry if you don’t like it but it really has nothing to do with you.”

He stared at me (as did some other bystanders), patting his lips with his fingers, but he never said anything about it again.

If I’d been a ghost at Berkeley now I was even more invisible, even with my bald head. It was easier to be a ghost here. I was more invisible in the bright sunlight, and no one was on the lookout for ghosts in West Los Angeles. I went to the lectures, alone. At lunch I escaped the crowds and the heat of the open brick courtyards into the sanctuary of the sculpture garden and ate under the purple shade of jacaranda trees with Maillol, Matisse, Moore and Rodin as my only company. I never hung out at the restaurants, shops and movie theaters at the edge of the campus in Westwood. I came home as soon as my classes were over, did homework, took a run, helped my mom with dinner, read and went to bed early. I didn’t have any friends at all, not counting Jeni, whom I talked to all the time in my head.

*   *   *

I was baking loaves of bread. The dough was soft and alive-feeling in my hands as I kneaded it, cool but with the potential for warmth, quiet but, I thought, perhaps with the potential for song. I hadn’t baked bread in years, not since my mom had let me help her when I was little, forming the dough into funny fat bunnies and birds, but in the dream it felt natural and familiar. After I had baked the loaves I took them out of the oven and put them on a table with a blue-and-white checked cloth where they began to sing. Then I picked up the phone to call my boyfriend but I couldn’t remember his number or his name. So I went out searching for him. I was on Melrose Avenue where all the hipster shops are and I was walking along past all the beautiful people but none of them seemed to notice me. I was embarrassed by the pimples on my chin and my hair looked bad. I kept walking, looking and looking for this man I loved whose name I could not remember.

At last I found him.

“I made you bread,” I said and he put his hands on my hips and kneaded his fingers into my flesh.

“You are my bread,” he said.

When I woke from the dream my hands were gripping my abdomen, my fingers pressing into the spot where John’s marks still lingered.

That spot. It was always a little tender, though I hardly noticed the feeling anymore. I believed John had marked me. But maybe, all this time, I had been marking myself.

After that, slowly, over months, those marks, made my him or by me, or first by him and then, again and again, by my own fingers, faded all the way away.

28. A man happened by

People usually change in small, incremental ways over time. You don’t see it overnight, even after a trauma, not usually. People fall apart or fall in love or grow up or die slowly, most of the time. Children’s brains take years to develop and diseases usually do, too. That was what was happening to me for all those months living with my parents, taking care of my mom, separated from John. I was changing. When I went away to school I had thought I was a grown-up but now I realized that even at twenty I was still a child who was just learning who she was and how to take care of herself.

Change comes in the way you serve food and water, administer medications, clean up messes, do errands, read the words of masters—prophets and poets—listen to music, listen to each other. It comes in the way you say
I love you
over and over again, as if you won’t be able to say it in the morning, and the way you say
I’m sorry
as soon as possible after you have hurt the person you love. I hadn’t said either of those things enough times in my life but now I said them to my mom a lot as her cancer went into remission. And I said them to Jeni because I had not gone to Berkeley with her, because I had neglected my search, because even though Kragen was in jail there was no solid evidence linking him to her.

*   *   *

It had been nine months since I had been with John in the house in Berkeley. I was ensconced in the window seat staring out at the night. My parents were asleep in their room. My mom had gained the weight back, her hair had grown back thicker and curlier this time. Most days we didn’t even think the word cancer.

I thought the word John, though, still, and Jeni.

As I came downstairs I looked at her photograph, the two of us smiling goofily at the camera. In the background was her house. Her mom had taken the picture of us. I had been there only once since it happened. I had meant to go again. I had never gone.

Go now,
a voice inside me said. What are those voices? Shall we call them intuition? Shall we call them angels? Shall we call them ghosts?

*   *   *

Jeni’s mother, Joanne, answered the door that night. She took a step back when she saw me and I wondered if I’d made a mistake.

“I was driving by,” I said.

“Do you want to come in, Ariel?”

We sat on the couch and she made tea. I remembered the mugs from when I used to come over after school on rainy days to drink hot chocolate and eat cinnamon toast with Jeni. I could still feel the slight burn of the spiced sugar on my tongue.

“I almost didn’t recognize you,” she said.

I smiled, a little stiffly, and ran my fingers over my scalp. My hair still felt prickly, growing back.

“How are your mom and dad? I haven’t seen them.”

I realized she didn’t know that my mom was sick. “Oh, they’re okay. How’s Mike?”

“Fine, thanks.”

There were lines carved around her eyes, like with a knife, and I wondered if, and how, she ever slept at all.

“I’m so sorry.” These were the words I’d been dreading. They sounded so cliché and trite. But what else were you supposed to say? I loved language but not in moments like this when you couldn’t use poetry to explain how you really felt.

“Thank you,” she said, kindly. She probably knew that no one thought the words sufficed at all. But that we were all trying our best, even if it was ineffectual, and much too late.

But then I did something I had wanted to do for two years. I reached out and hugged her.

Joanne Benson was a runner, she’d always been in great shape; now she was bony and hunched, like a tiny old woman. Like when I hugged my mom, I wished my body was softer for Joanne, too, comforting in some way. She pulled away first.

But at least I had touched her, finally.

“What do you think about Fritz Kragen?” I asked.

“The teacher? I heard about that. They said it isn’t connected. Why?”

I didn’t want to push; the strain showed on her face—more questions, more visions of her daughter in pain. It was enough.

“I’m sure the police are on top of things,” I said.

There was an awkward silence. I could hear the hall clock tick. Joanne adjusted her thin frame on the couch as if her tailbone hurt her.

“Well, I’m glad you came by. There’s something I’ve been meaning to give you for a long time.”

She went upstairs and came back holding something.

“This was hers, you may remember? I think she would have wanted you to have it. I couldn’t part with it before but I think it’s time now.”

My hands tingled and I didn’t want to touch it. But I took it anyway.

“Thank you so much,” I said.

I had heard that Blythe dolls were discontinued because they frightened children too much with their big heads and eyes that changed colors. This one’s were amber; reflecting the color of the sofa cushions they looked almost red, like blood.

I showed my mom the doll the next day. She examined it closely, smoothing out the long brown hair and straightening the blue-and-white gingham dress.

“You still think of her. Jennifer. All the time.”

“Yes,” I said. “Can you call her Jeni?” I tried a yoga breath, sipping air from the base of my throat, to keep from crying.

“Sorry—Jeni. You know, Ariel, I think of her, too. It’s hard for me to talk about but I do. You know you can speak to me about it.”