Present Day

I lift my arms above my head and twirl around the kitchen, nearly knocking over a teapot. Edd hears my stomping feet and leaves his computer to investigate. I bow like a dancer and stretch my hands toward him. He catches them and pulls me against his chest. We circle and bend and leap together in a dance without music while stars gleam outside our mountain home and our children sleep in their beds.
Panting, we stop in front of the wallmirror. Edd stands behind me as I peer at my reflection. My pink flannel nightgown drapes down around my ankles like a gown. Its lace collar frames my neckline where a silver chain glitters in the electric light. My blonde hair curls around my face and past my shoulders. My skin looks rosy, almost flushed.

"You look good," Edd says, his hands on the nape of my neck.

"Yeah, not like four years ago."

"You looked good then too."

He draws me closer, but I can't help seeing another reflection in the mirror: my face pale and drawn, especially since I have no hair. Even my eyebrows and eyelashes are gone. My eyes, still blue, hold shadows under them like dark crescent moons. My collar bones slant, angular, toward my thin bare neck.

"Are you alright?" Edd asks, noticing the shadow pass through my eyes.

I turn and stare at him. He's wearing his red striped pajamas, his shoulders and back big as a football player's. I hug his solid frame, then pull back to look at his face. His chestnut hair is a little thinner than when we first met. His reddish beard, full as a Scotsman's, holds more grey. His blue-green eyes, under bushy eyebrows, narrow as he bends to kiss me.

After a few moments, Edd pulls away and leads me to the kitchen table. His teaching notes spread over one corner beside his red Bible. I pick it up and flip through its gold-edged pages while Edd makes me a cup of Earl Grey tea. My finger pauses at a familiar spot, Psalm 30:

"You have turned for me
my mourning into dancing;
You have put off my sackcloth
and clothed me with gladness."

"I see you're reading your favorite Psalm again," Edd says, smiling. He places a steaming mug in front of me and sits down.

"I still find it hard to believe that those words have come true," I whisper. Edd pours milk and honey into my mug.

While the night tilts toward day and our children sleep, we talk and remember.

I always wanted a normal life. You know, the kind with two parents and lots of siblings in a wooden house. You could even add a white picket fence. I would grow up in that same house, near cousins and aunts and uncles, in my secure, familiar American town. I would go to school and church down the street. I would marry the boy next door, have kids, and live near my parents and the rest of our large, happy family.

I always wanted to live in the mountains. Most of my life I have lived in lowlands, deserts, or valleys. But for a short time, when I was nine years old, I lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
My brother Kerry and I would explore upward paths bordered by blackberries and overshadowed by pines. We would find high meadows and streams flowing between gray boulders. Tadpoles swam in still pools carved into the granite. Kerry and I would catch the slippery creatures, admire their small legs, then let them go. We would climb as high as we could, sit on the edge of a cliff, and watch the sunset change distant peaks from misty blue to gold so bright we could hardly look at it.

I wondered how a person could cross the chasm between the clifftop and those peaks.

I cried when we left the mountains. I don't know why we had to go. I swore to myself that--someday--I would return to the summit--and live there and never leave.

After we left the mountains, my mother told me about my beginnings.

"You were born in a little hospital by a Florida beach. We were living in Sarasota at the time," she said. "The water tasted terrible, so I brushed my teeth in Coke. At night I could hear lions from the circus, crying."

My mother never told me how she met my father (I think it was in a bar). She was from an upper-class family, and he from a carnival. She had a college degree; he dropped out of school to work the rides. She rarely drank alcohol; he had been raised on it, like his father and grandfather before him. She was English; he was Irish.

My mother's parents were university professors and authors in a respectable old North Carolina town. They had a cook and a maid. They lived on a hill in a big, three-storey white house with wrap-around porches. It had a huge backyard filled with walnut trees, a stream, and guest houses. The main house had curved staircases with polished bannisters and long, intimidating rooms with slick wooden floors. The furniture was heavy mahogany with lions' feet. Ebony masks from Africa hung above the mantle. Tall cabinets held glassware like purple salt dishes with tiny spoons.

My mother grew up in that lovely home. She should have had a happy, carefree life. But she was beautiful and talented--two qualities sure to bring about a downfall. Even as a child she was a writer, like her parents and her great-great grandfather from England. She penned plays, poems, and stories on large yellow paper. The local newspaper published some of her articles. She attended the prestigious University of North Carolina, where her father had taught. She studied drama but graduated with a sensible degree in elementary education.

She never bought me coloring books. "Make up your own pictures--and color outside the lines," she said. She placed her long-fingered hand over mine as I tightly held the pencil that shaped my first letters and words. When I couldn't sleep, she would stroke my hair and tell me stories until the low sweet sound of her voice faded into dreams.

My hands were like my mothers, with long, graceful fingers. People told me I should play the piano. We never had a piano, but I learned to type on a computer keyboard, the sound of the keys tapping like music.

My grandfather died when my mother was seventeen. My grandmother stayed to help guide my mother's life. Grammy never approved of my carnival-life, drop-out father.
I never knew my father's family.

My father was an alcoholic, in and out of hospitals in search of a cure. I lived with him, my mother, and baby brother in a metal-walled trailer in a trailer park. The rooms were small and cluttered. They smelled of bacon grease and whiskey. Once I found a nest of baby mice in my sock drawer--tiny grey bodies with pink feet and ears. I wanted to keep them, but my father took them away.

My father died when I was almost five and my brother Kerry only a baby. My father's death was a mystery to me. When I was nine, my mother told me he died while cleaning his hunting gun, and it accidentally went off. When I was twelve, she told me he shot himself with a handgun and left a note saying "you'll be better off without me." She told me we were at a Christmas party on December 25, at my grandmother's house. My father stayed home alone in our trailer.

The sheriff found him.

I always imagined this scene at my grandmother's house: when the phone rang with the news, my mother dropped her wine glass. The glass shattered on the white tile floor, spilling red liquid as my mother's scream echoed against the crystal chandelier which dangled above her head.

When I was thirty-nine, my Aunt Ruth in Connecticut told me (during a long-distance phone call) that my father killed himself during the day that Christmas. My mother and I were home with him in the kitchen. There was no Christmas party at Grammy's house, no telephone call, no spilled wine. My father killed himself in front of my mother and me.

No wonder I hate guns.

"We were glad he didn't harm you or your mother," my aunt's sensible voice crackled over the telephone. I stared at the white receiver and wondered,

How much did I see that Christmas morning?

When they buried my father, did I watch them cover the casket with the red, suffocating earth? I dream of my father's burial, of his bones decaying and his voice calling out to me from under the ground.
No wonder I want to be cremated instead of buried.

I never dream of my father's death. I don't remember any images from that December 25.
Once I found a photo of my father's grave. The flat granite stone read "We loved you more than you knew."

As a child, I prayed for a father.

I have one thing that my father made me: a ceramic alligator with its tail and legs broken off. It sits on my dresser near my perfume bottles. When I see it, glazed and green and fragmented, I think of my father's life.

Recently, I found out I have an older brother I never knew. He's a police officer from Chicago who tracked me down. He sent me a simple, handwritten letter. When I stood by my post office box and held it in one hand; when I saw the name "Robert L. Lynch" on the return address, I knew he was my brother. He sent his photographs as e-mail attachments. He looks just like my father.

My father was married before he met my mother. That marriage failed due to alcoholism. My father left his firstborn son, a boy of five years old, to move down South and meet a my mother.

When Bob came out to meet me, I showed him the tiny alligator. We browsed over old photographs of our father, each of us having a few--like a puzzle we put together. We hugged each other and wished we had known each other while growing up.

I could have used a big brother.

After my father's death, my mother was haunted by memories. She dragged my brother and me across America, never staying long in one place. We moved every year--from Maine to Missouri, from North Dakota to Arizona. She became dependent on alcohol and tranquilizers. She would watch Billy Graham on T.V. and cry. I didn't understand how the T.V. preacher could do that to her.

My mother taught first grade off and on, but mostly we lived off my father's social security checks. People at various churches gave us clothing. We rented run-down houses and sometimes slept in our car. To escape, I read book after book--all the children's classics. Mom gave me only the best.

When I was twelve, she remarried--a man who also had a drinking problem (they met at an AA meeting). The next year we packed up and spent the summer traveling from Arizona to the East coast, living in our car or a canvas tent. In the desert my brother and I staged fights with cactus trees. We drank from a single spicket sticking up from the sand, doused our bodies with soaked facecloths, and used a portapotty.

The smell of alcohol permeated our bodies when mom and stepdad wore their pajamas all day and collected beer cans in the center of the tent floor. Once the local police arrested them and drove my brother and me to the police station too--in a separate squad car. Humiliated, I overheard one officer murmur, "white trash."

I held a gold crucifix in my hand, attached to the rosary my mother had given me. The metal almost cut me, but the sunlight glinted off it with a living color that made me stare and stare all the way to the station.

As usual, once released, my parents simply packed up and moved. My thirteenth summer, we stopped in New Mexico, Texas, Alabama, and Florida. In Florida, we camped by a lake. There, I sat against a tree trunk, the overhead branches trailing around me like a hideaway, and wrote my first epic adventure story (seventeen pages long). It was about a girl who fell into a hole and entered a strange new world. All the books I had read sank into my imagination--especially Alice in Wonderland.

I had great fun with my notebook, creating princes and elves and creatures who lived in slimy cave waters. I especially enjoyed killing off the bad guys (with a mere stroke of my pencil).

Wherever my mother took me, I would find a natural setting to wander in--mostly to escape the chaos of my home. An unexplored path became a lure for me, a challenge, an invitation to adventure.

When I was fourteen and a half, my brother, mother, and I landed in Virginia. My grandmother came to live with us in a big rented house. I entered high school--and discovered the simple gospel message of Christ's death and resurrection for me. This was different from the Christ I remembered from childhood, distant on the crucifix that hung high above me on a vaulted ceiling. This Jesus wanted to come into my life, to go with me to school where I felt so shy and self-conscious that my hands sweated and my face turned red when anyone talked to me. This Jesus wanted to come home with me to the house where my brother fought me, my grandmother nagged me, and my mother hid her wine bottles in her closet.

I heard His voice, "I stand at the door and knock."

So I knelt down on the living room floor of the modest house where a minister in tennis shoes and a tee-shirt read the Bible to bewildered teenagers. I prayed in unpolished but honest words for Jesus to come into my life and heart.

He did. I stepped through a door from one dimension to another. Like the Apostle Paul who so dramatically witnessed Christ's light, my eyes saw, for the first time, a new world. I truly felt as though I had been born again.

I became part of a local church's youth group. I found other Christian friends at school, and I lost my fear of people. I could actually stand in front of a congregation and speak in spite of my sweaty palms and flushed face.

Church became a refuge from my family. Perhaps I overdid it with Bible studies and choir rehearsals. One afternoon when I was sixteen, my mother sat on the car's hood to keep me from leaving her.

"l've got to go to church," I told her. She had been drinking and was still in her short pink nightgown (the one with see-through material over a satiny lining).

"Stay with me," she pleaded.

I hardened my heart and started the car's engine. She climbed off the hood and returned to her bedroom.

My brother didn't go to youth groups. He was too busy becoming a "juvenile delinquent," as my grandmother called him. When he was twelve and I sixteen, he wanted to play board games like Stratego with me. I was, of course, too busy with important things. When he drifted away from me and into car stealing and drugs, I wished I had sat down and played Stratego.

When I was seventeen, I volunteered as a counselor for a Billy Graham crusade. My mother attended and walked down the aisle during Graham's invitation, the familiar "Just As I Am" hymn sung round her by thousands of voices. I stood up front with the other counselors and watched her kneel by the podium, weeping.

After her public decision for Christ, my mother stopped drinking, and she took fewer pills. Still, as soon as I turned eighteen, I left for a New York Christian college where I stayed only one semester because my meagre scholarship and government aid were not enought to pay for a private college. I cleaned people's houses on the weekends, but even then I did not have enough.

So I came to California, to my first full-time job and first marriage. At the age of nineteen, I married a navy pilot named Jeff Smith, whom I had met in Virginia. We had two children, Kristen and Ryan, seventeen months apart. Shortly after Ryan's birth, Jeff was transferred to Florida.

My brother Kerry remained in Virginia to torment my mother and grandmother for awhile (they all shared the same small, rented house). Then he hitchhiked to Vancouver, Canada. Not long after he left, Grammy suffered a stroke and ended up paralyzed in the hospital ("Don't let me live like that," she had often pleaded with us).

A friend of my mother prayed with Grammy despite Grammy's lifelong protests that she didn't want a Christian visiting her if she lay dying (she was a dedicated agnostic). Nevertheless, Grammy seemed to repeat the prayer with her eyes, and she squeezed the Christian lady's hand before slipping away.

My mother wrote this information in a letter. She wrote often, called me on the phone, and visited me twice on the far side of the continent before she died when I was twenty-four. Suddenly, alone in her bedroom three thousand miles from me and further from Kerry, her spirit left her body.

I picture her in that small bedroom that she rented. Her closet was packed full of clothes ("I'm a clothes' horse," she used to say, buying new outfits on credit when she couldn't afford them). One gold-embroidered dress she used for dining out and dancing (I remember so many restaurants and truck stops as a child--but very few homecooked meals). Also in the closet rested a huge sea trunk that my great-grandmother Julia brought over when she emigrated from England in the late 19th century. In it hid yellowed photographs and faded letters written by my great, great aunt Kate who lived in India.
My mother, in her pink nightie, lay on the twin bed. Her arm was spread out, hand reaching for the telephone which sat undisturbed on the cluttered nightstand. The detectives found her and took off her gold engagement ring (she was planning to marry a retired navy Captain). It was January, two days after my brother's twentieth birthday. Outside, snow fell against shiny green holly leaves and red berries.

I didn't see my mother's body, but I do remember the simple funeral with my brother, my first husband, and a few friends--and my mother's ashes in a gold-toned ceramic urn. We buried her in North Carolina--on top of my father, on a snowy hillside, under a heavy-laden pine.

The last time I saw my brother Kerry, he was in Maximum Security at a Montana mental facility. He looked as I remembered him six years earlier at my mother's funeral, his blonde hair long and his beard stubbly. He told me he wasn't crazy, that he made up the visions to keep out of prison. I brought him a Bible. He prayed with me on his solitary bed in the claustrophobic cell with a toilet in the corner. When I stood to leave, a guard opened the barred door for me. I walked outside the high-walled complex. January air wiped away my tears. In the distance, patches of snow lay beneath twisted oak trees, and fields spread out toward mountains under a wide open sky.

A few months later, Kerry was released. He disappeared not long after that, leaving his personal belongings with a former roommate who later sent me the stuff in a beat-up cardboard box. I found Kerry's I.D. card, his social security card, the letters I had written him, and an old silk scarf my mother used to wear on her hair. He also left a photo of her at Roanoke Island. She was twenty, in a two-piece black bathing suit, looking like a Hollywood beauty. Her blonde hair curled around her oval face, her blue eyes glinted beneath long lashes, her straight white teeth shined inside a perfect smile.

Perhaps Kerry died while hitchhiking, stabbed at the side of a road, another John Doe, the scene most feared by my mother.

As you can see, I had the perfect childhood for a writer.

And, surely, God, I thought, after so much early tragedy, I can expect a normal life--maybe even in the mountains.

I followed my first husband across the country and across the world. Christmas in Hong Kong and spring in Germany seemed normal. I hiked, especially in foreign mountains, every chance I got.
Our marriage broke up after Jeff spent several deployments at sea on an aircraft carrier. A common navy joke is that if the navy wanted you to have a wife and children, it would have issued them to you in Boot Camp. It wasn't just the navy that came between us. We started out well, in church. We even walked down the long church aisle to dedicate Kristen and Ryan to God's service. But we got too materialistic, drifted apart, and stopped going to church together (or anywhere else). Neither one of us fulfilled our Christian responsibility as a husband and wife. It didn't help that we were so young, immature, and opposite in nature--the military man and the poet.

Our divorce wasn't exactly friendly, after nearly twelve years of marriage. Jeff hired a high-power ex-navy-officer lawyer who wrote up a divorce settlement. Jeff got primary custody of the children.
After all, I was the one who moved out to a friend's apartment with no room for children; I was the one with no job.

I didn't have the heart to fight the settlement by dragging Jeff and the children through court. At least I got to see the children every other weekend.

At the wise age of thirty-one, I met Edward (Edd) Williams in a poetry class at San Diego State. We were both finishing our Master's degrees. We were just friends at first, but that friendship became love as time passed, and we married in Canada on the eve of the last decade of the twentieth century.
Jeff remarried a few months later--to a practical, elementary-school teacher named Louise. They drove Volvos and bought a large, upscale house on the outskirts of San Diego County. Edd and I drove a Ford Escort and rented an 800-square-foot apartment in downtown San Diego.

Eventually, amazingly, Jeff and I apologized to each other for the failed marriage. Jeff and Louise, Edd and I (all Christians) made peace and became friends.

We finished our Master's degrees and got part-time teaching jobs at several different community colleges. In 1992, our baby Jessica was born with a pink mark, shaped like a baby's hand, on her left cheek. In 1993, we moved to the Temecula area--on two and a half dusty acres that we actually bought. Edd began his Battle of the Weeds, using our old Ford tractor to clear the fields. Piles of firewood collected on our property, as did broken lawnmowers and farm equipment. Our fence was chain link, not white picket. Our home, a "double-wide" manufactured mobile on a "permanent" foundation, had metal walls of unsure color (grey?). Our neighbors Rob and Lori probably winced when they saw our place (they were always improving their home and grounds). I'm sure we didn't help their property value increase.

Our house didn't look like much on the outside, especially since its entrance was through a cluttered patio and utility room complete with fully-used catbox. But inside lay green carpets like forest grass, bookcases full of classics, family photos in old wood frames, toys pouring out of red plastic buckets, and a small yellow kitchen with a window that overlooked wind-blown eucalyptus trees, hills, and the distant mountains.

Jessica learned to crawl and walk in that home. She'd toddle around the side yard while Edd added boulders to his ongoing rock walls. We found a small country church nearby. We were happily living a normal life. We wanted another child.

Then one September Sunday in 1995, Edd (a mystical man at times) had a kind of revelation. He stood beside me in church and told me we were going to have a baby boy, and he was going to be a handful (like Edd). I guess he got a revelation.

I went forward for prayer.

I needed to stop nursing Jessica (who was almost two). I figured I wouldn't conceive again until by breasts got a break. Linda Martin, Deacon Dan's wife, prayed with me in the back room by the stage.
That very night I rocked our two-year-old daughter and sang "Jesus Loves Me" while giving her a bottle. She fussed and resisted but finally fell asleep. I never nursed her again.

Two weeks later Edd's father C.P. had a heart attack while in the hospital for leg surgery. As he struggled for his life in Intensive Care, I hung family portraits on the wall, not knowing of my father-in-law's condition. The photo of him as a young man, in its cherrywood frame, would not hang straight like the others. It kept listing to one side.

"Odd," I remarked as I got down from the chair and stared at it.

Edd got the phone call as he was leaving to teach night class. He cut the class short and raced to the hospital. He spent the next ten days there, sometimes overnight by his father's side, along with his two half-sisters Carol and Barbara and his brother Perry. They all held hands and prayed for the dying man who could not speak to them. Lying on the hospital bed, nearly paralyzed, hooked up to numerous machines, C.P. welcomed the prayers with his eyes--as my Grammy had done.

C.P. had been a hard-working carpenter, alcoholic, distant to his family, a hard man. But Edd believes his father received God's peace at last, there on his death bed.

Why do we humans procrastinate about such important things?

On one of those vigil nights, when Edd came home late, he wept quietly and prayed that we might have that other child we both wanted. On that same night sometime late in September, our son was conceived.

At the funeral of October 12, I felt pale and tired. Afterward, the family--a large one with Edd's siblings and their children and even some grandchildren--went out to dinner at Red Lobster restaurant in San Diego.

Edd's mother, Ruth, who endured a rocky marriage to C.P. and then divorced him, did not attend.
As we all sat around a long table, catching up on news and discussing C.P.'s life, I glanced over my shoulder at the booth where C.P. had sat with us three years before. Tall and pale and softspoken, his suede hat resting beside his water glass, he had ordered wine and steak and told us how he'd like to see us more often.

"You're so lucky," he had said to Edd. "Your life is still ahead of you."

Was he now looking down on us, seeing his name tie us all together for one afternoon?

A week later, I found out I was pregnant, and my novel "Like A Tree Planted" was accepted for publication by a small publisher. I had wanted a big New York publisher who could produce thousands of cheap paperbacks, but, after scores of rejection slips, I settled for my only offer--an expensive, hardbound, limited edition.

I endured a difficult pregnancy, not devoting much time to my new literary career and not caring much either (my publisher expected me to promote my book--it showed up at very few bookstores). All I wanted was a healthy baby.

Thirty-eight isn't exactly young to have a baby, but new mothers have been older. Why did I feel like my body was falling apart? I would lay awake at night, crying from pain, praying for sleep, my knees swollen and all my joints aching. I started having lowgrade fevers, bladder problems, and leg infections. Three times I went to the emergency room. I would spend my days in a chair, my feet propped up, a pathetic invalid who no longer took walks beneath our eucalyptus trees. Sometimes I could barely pull myself out of my chair. When I got dressed for work, I covered my legs with support hose and ace bandages.

I knew something was wrong inside me. I expected to be diagnosed with a disease like multiple sclerosis, arthritis, or lupus.

For nearly a year, I hardly wrote in my journal. I prayed the baby would be born healthy and that my pain would end.

Then I went to visit Dr. Schinke on May 15, 1995.

Eight months pregnant, I waddled into the oncologist's office, taking my place in a mauve chair next to a thin elderly woman. She glanced sideways at me, so young and healthy-looking I must have seemed, burgeoning with life that spring morning. My flushed face and palms glowed with hormones and the extra blood coursing through my body. My huge belly shifted as the baby boy within me kicked my ribs.
The woman's skin looked almost translucent beneath her silver wig. She wore a pink nylon pantsuit that reached just above her delicate, sandaled feet.

She's a cancer patient, I told myself, unconsciously inching away from her, further into the chair.

Cancer. The big "C" word. Nobody likes to speak it. Why would it show up in my vocabulary?

The nurse called the pink-pantsuit lady. I watched her get out of her chair and meekly follow the white-clad nurse. I picked up People magazine and flipped through the pages, not focusing on the latest Hollywood gossip. After several magazines, I heard my name called: my turn to follow the nurse out of the lobby.

On the way to the exam room, we passed a large area full of green leather recliner chairs next to I.V. poles. Trays of syringes and needles punctuated the room. A T.V. occupied one corner, and against the far wall a plate glass window overlooked the Santa Rosa Plateau, where I used to hike, green from recent rains.

The Chemo Room, I realized. The elderly lady from the waiting room had just been hooked up to an I.V. She had propped up her feet and read a magazine. A nurse draped a white shawl over the lady's narrow shoulders and checked the I.V. line. A bright orange fluid drip, drip, dripped down a plastic tube.

I felt glad Edd stayed home with Jessica. I wouldn't want to bring her to The Chemo Room.
"Dr. Schinke will be right here," my nurse told me as she deposited me in the exam room. I undressed my top half, put on the required paper drape, and climbed awkwardly onto the exam table. I graded student essays (Edd and I were both still part-time teachers at several Southern California colleges).
Tall and thin, dark-haired, with silver-rimmed glasses above brown eyes, Dr. Schinke entered the exam room. He was my age. He sounded kind and concerned as he greeted me, for he probably didn't get many pregnant patients.

"Hello. I'm Dr. Schinke," he said, holding out his hand. I took his hand and gave him the reasons for my visit.

"I developed a strange lump in my mouth, next to my gum, that ached as I drove home from teaching night classes in San Diego. After an oral surgeon removed it, the biopsy showed abnormal cells that suggest lymphoma."

"Yes, I've got your chart here. The lab called it a 'lymphoid polyp' but couldn't rule out lymphoma. Very unusual for lymphoma to show up in a pregnant woman's mouth," he commented, looking over my paperwork.

Lymphoma. That sounded horrible, too--a cancer that spreads through the body's lymph nodes.

"But your blood tests showed nothing unusual," he informed me. He examined the lymph nodes in my throat and beneath my arms and found no swelling. "You don't seem to have any symptoms of lymphoma," he assured me. "Let's see if the growth stays away after you deliver. It may have been caused by pregnancy hormones. I'll check you in a few months."

He smiled shyly and asked if I knew the baby's sex. I told him it was a boy, and I mentioned Jessica, the big sister--and my husband Edd.

"Well, good luck," he said as he turned to leave. "I wouldn't worry about this. It would be very unusual for lymphoma to show up this way."

"Thanks, Dr. Schinke," I replied.

Rain bathed the car on the drive home. As I pulled into the driveway, a little sunlight peeked out of clouds and illumined the bottle brush tree that grew beside the carport. Light hit the droplets of water that hung from red bristles.

I sat in the car and thought about my unborn son still kicking inside me; about Edd and Jessica inside our double-wide; about Kristen and Ryan in their suburban San Diego home. I didn't want to leave them. I didn't want lymphoma.

A bird sang, interrupting my thoughts. Jessica spotted me from between the drapes and squealed. I pulled myself out of the car and headed down the inevitable path.

Jonathan Edward was born June 12, 1995, three weeks early, under a full moon. He entered the world bewildered, peeing all over my belly, a purple little guy who had trouble breathing. He recovered well, though, and left the hospital with me less than a day later.

Edd and I named and circumcised him on the eighth day in honor of the Jewish people (we have several Jewish friends--Edd grew up playing basketball at the San Diego Jewish Community Center).
We praised God for his birth. At the circumcision, Edd read from Psalm 127:

"Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD,
The fruit of the womb is His reward.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior,
So are the children of one's youth.
Happy is the man who has his quiver
Full of them."

I felt better after the birth--so much easier to carry Jonathan around on the outside. That summer I gained new strength and even walked the country roads around our house. Then came the end of August. Kristen and Ryan, now teenagers, were getting ready to move to Washington state with their dad and stepmom. Since their dad and I divorced, we had lived within driving distance and shared custody (75/25 in his favor). For the first time they would stay away from me. As summer came to an end, I wrote in my journal:

August 22, 1995

When Kristen and Ryan were babies, we landed in the Atlanta airport, following their Navy pilot father to Florida--the first of our many journeys. I juggled a diaper bag and suitcase, Ryan (still an infant) strapped to my chest and Kristen (not yet two) holding my hand. A busy traveler bumped into us, knocking Kristen to the cement floor. I felt too tired, after the long night flight, to pick her up. She sat there, tears in her eyes, looking up at me as if to say,

If you can't take care of me, why did you bring me here?

An airport security guard rescued us with his electric cart. We piled on, luggage mingling with our arms and legs.

When they were two and one, we followed their father again--this time to Texas. At that Texas home, when their father flew all the time and the humid heat kept us indoors, I'd lean over the bathtub to bathe them. I'd utter, "Endless," my aching back and legs emphasizing the word. At twenty-four, I felt too young for the slavery I called motherhood. I thought I wanted to run away and join the circus. Instead, I had my tubes tied. (Ten years later I paid $10,000--my divorce settlement--to reopen my tubes so that I could conceive children with Edd.)

Kristen and Ryan would follow me around the Texas air conditioned house, wearing Dad's big black Navy shoes--the patent leather kind. One shoe for each child, they clomped along, Kristen leading Ryan and interpreting his baby jabbering.

Ryan still needs her, I suppose.

Endless. Older women told me children grow up so fast. Sure, I thought.

When Kristen was five, I took her with me to Hong Kong, China, and the Philippines (I left little Ryan safely with his Nana). Kristen felt sick all across the China Sea to Macau, throwing up in her paper bag. Her pale face, the blue eyes and tears bigger than in Atlanta, seemed to ask again that question:

What am I doing here?

I asked that question myself.

Yet, she drank in the new worlds I showed her--the Chinese village marketplace with its mud and live chickens and the booths that sold tiny china tea sets--white with blue fish on them and grains of rice pressed into the molds. She held up one small cup, the Chinese sun shining on her blonde hair.
How can I fill her? I wondered.

I bought the tea set. She doesn't have it anymore, doesn't remember where it disappeared.

When Kristen was seven and Ryan six, I took the children to England. This time we followed no one. Their father was out to sea on an aircraft carrier for his third nine-month duty.

After my Shakespeare summer school course at Cambridge University ended, we rented a car and traveled northward. We found a village in North Yorkshire and moved into an old farmhouse which belonged to my friend Carol and her family (I had visited England before thanks to my English family ties).

I guess I was looking for a home.

As summer passed, I led Kristen and Ryan down many country miles, on lanes bordered by stone walls, ferns, and blackberry bushes. Sometimes we hiked over moortops, hills, and sheeplands, bouncing over green turf and purple heather. Kristen strapped her doll to her backpack, and Ryan slung our water canteen over his shoulder. The clouds and sunshine mixed above us, creating odd shadows on the earth, the cool wind blowing at our backs. The moors seemed like Heaven--endless pastures to walk on, tame and wild, cut by streams and boulders--pathways open to us, free of barbed wire or gates. The paths led on and upward to the sky. Only our bodies kept us from following them into the clouds.

When September cooled the air, we drove our rented car past Yorkshire and on to Scotland. On the grassy banks by Urquehart Castle, Ryan searched for the Loch Ness Monster. Behind him the golden castle stones, broken by hundreds of years, glistened in sunlight and whispered with the voices of people who walked among them centuries ago. Kristen and I wandered beneath towers and into a fireplace big enough to stand in. We raised our faces up to the chimney, light filtering dusty and ancient upon us. I pressed my finger into a rock crevice, the stone cold and solid and carved with a cross.

Later, by the loch, Kristen thought she heard the monster speak to her. Ryan searched across the waves, peering to the far shore. Nothing. That evening, as I drove our rented car out of the Scottish village, I passed a sign that read "To the Highlands"--the lure of the mountains and another unexplored path. But I had to return our car to the rental agency in Yorkshire. I couldn't afford to keep it any longer. I drove past.

Back in Yorkshire, we continued exploring the Dales by foot. We hiked through farmers' fields and fairy woods to reach the Druid's Temple with its odd grey stones. Ryan climbed up on the sacrificial rock, his lanky legs draping one side, his red sweater contrasting with the granite and the deep, glowing green of the misty ferns and fir trees that packed themselves together everywhere in England.

We prayed to Jesus in a cave at the Druid's Temple, lighting a candle against the deep medieval evening, remembering a Sacrifice already made.

The children's father flew us back to America as winter's first frost glazed the heather. I cried all the way across the Atlantic. Our marriage fell apart not long after our return.

I took my favorite photo of Kristen and Ryan in England, when they were seven and six. I had it enlarged and framed. In it, they both wear pageboy haircuts and matching, teal-colored windbreakers. They stretch their arms above the lake at Fountains Abbey, hemlock trees and an old stone bridge their momentary frame.

Over all these years, I've taken one or both of my oldest children to Oregon, Canada, New York, Mexico, Connecticut. Will our adventures now end?

Kristen's sixteen and a half now, tall, her dark blonde hair straight to her waist. Ryan's fifteen, taller than his sister, thin, awkward, with lanky arms. They're moving to Washington state tomorrow, with their stepmom and dad (he's a Commander now).

I take the kids shopping at Lucky's on this, our last outing. We traipse down food aisles as usual, Jonathan in his carseat attached to the cart, Jessica helping me push. I lead the way as so many times before, shopping list in hand, briskly walking and yelling over my shoulders, "Hurry up! Keep with me!"

Kristen follows a few steps behind, hoping I won't embarrass her by yelling again. Ryan, always the loiterer, lags. I call to him. Frustrated, I backtrack once more to discover him in the fruit section. Stretching on his big puppy's feet, he reaches up with gangly hands and pulls on a weighing machine. His curly brown hair dusts his pimpled forehead as his greenish-blue eyes watch the dial move crazily, his mouth half open in awe.

He's not ready to leave me for the wide world.

I'm not ready either . . . "Endless" came too soon.

We end our excursion at the Temecula duck pond by Tower Plaza, watch the white ducks swim--surrounded by lilies, lawns, and willow trees--and remember England.

We turn and walk beneath the Tower, tallest building in Temecula. The archway curves above us, wind blows through, and we recall castles we have climbed, each stone step worn almost flat by passing travelers.

The same day Kristen and Ryan left for Washington, the new semester began. I taught five English classes at three different colleges. Edd taught eight classes at the same three colleges (we had medical bills to pay). Jonathan, unused to the bottle since I nursed him regularly, had to adjust to a babysitter four days a week (and dad two nights).

The worst semester of my life wore me down. On November 20, 1995 I wrote in my journal about a typical scene from the Break Room at Riverside Community College:

In the Faculty Room, Josephine sits across the formica table from me. She slowly takes her lunch out of a paper bag, sets one item down, then another, staring at the food.

I've got my usual stack of essays to grade and not much time between classes, yet I watch her. She doesn't seem to notice me.

She's a big black woman, forty-five, with a pretty face and a mouth that doesn't smile as much as it could. She wears blue and purple dresses and round earrings. Her desk (with its brass nameplate) sits near the Faculty Room, in the Admissions Office.

She works full-time--has since she was a teenager. She sips her Diet Coke, staring past my head and through the window, toward sycamore trees and open sky. She stirs her Cup o'Soup but doesn't eat any.
"We should be able to take a year off halfway through our careers--a paid year, so we can travel, rest, and evaluate our life before we work the second half of it," she says.

I look around the room and realize I'm the only one she could be addressing.

"That's a good idea," I confirm, smiling. I feel separated from this college--part-time, adjunct. The college gives me no office, no desk, no nameplate, no medical benefits. I come and go almost invisibly, three days a week.

Perhaps Josephine thinks I've got it easy. She doesn't know I work at two other colleges, drive long distances, grade papers for hours, and take care of my home and two small children.

I'm tired, too, Josephine, I think, but say nothing.

We chat a little more about her plan. She eats; I grade papers. Diane, another adjunct English teacher, enters the Faculty Room, dragging her paisley suitcase she uses for a briefcase. She also works at other colleges.

"I'm too tired to think about being tired," she says, slouching at the formica table, her auburn hair hiding for a moment the stress lines around her green eyes.

"Wouldn't it be nice to get a full-time teaching job?" asks Krystyna who strides into the room as she speaks. She sits down next to me and gingerly opens a crushed breakfast bar. She's Polish, petite, and lovely with designer clothes, gold jewelry, and a spunky haircut. Her orangeish glasses match her hair color.

"I haven't got time to look for one," Diane mumbles as she opens her suitcase and hefts out papers. Diane is a little older than Krystyna and I, and she's been "adjunct" longer.

We're putting out fires, I think--no time to prevent them . . . no time to do anything other than keep up with our jobs.

Josephine heats some coffee in the microwave, then digs out a slice of leftover apple pie from the mini-fridge. I sip my lukewarm tea and munch on a Pop Tart.

I stare at my pile of essays and resist the urge to count the ungraded ones. Krystyna (who teaches math) checks off homework. Diane, her head propped on her folded arms as if she will fall asleep any second, squiggles red marks on typed pages. Her pen looks like a cat's tail whipping back and forth.

Josephine stares at the clock and sighs deeply. She gathers up her lunch remains. Lifting her heavy body with a grunt, she rises from the table.

I think of ditch-diggers and road-builders and people who lift boxes in warehouses or who carry stacks of books and papers. I think of all the Heavy Laden under their burdens.

The world won't give us a Josephine Year. It will work us until we can no longer move.

Josephine tosses her trash into the metal can, where it rings for a second before silence. She pauses to hear the sound like a note from a joyous hymn she remembers.

"Back to work," she says, turning to step slowly from the room.

I want to call her back and promise her a Josephine Year.

Krystyna pushes aside her homework pages and starts chatting brightly. Diane's pen droops lifelessly against her arm (I think she did fall asleep). I shove my essays into a folder and think of Matthew 11:28:
"Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

Such a semester caused my knees to flare up again. My joints ached once more, and even my skin hurt when I touched it, especially around my collarbones and shoulders. Clumps of my hair started falling out when I washed or brushed it. I found hair strands on my clothes, in the car, on my bedroom floor--more than usual.

"Stress," my hairdresser told me. She recommended more vitamins.

Nights became long bouts with pain again. Tylenol didn't work. I went through a bottle of five hundred in three months. Every once in a while, as when I was pregnant, I would get a mild fever at night, look flushed, sweat during my sleep, but wake up feeling better. Hormones, I concluded.

Jonathan turned five months old and already had two sharp teeth. In November, one night while I was nursing him to sleep, I felt my right breast, near the center. A lump. A large one, that wasn't there before (and since I was nursing, I often checked my breasts). A clogged milk duct, I thought, and continued nursing Jonathan.

The lump didn't go away. I read about clogged milk ducts in my What to Expect When You're Expecting book and applied heat and massage. The lump seemed so large--bigger than a quarter. It felt hard, numb--unlike the tissue around it--alien.

For awhile I forgot about it because I had to endure two orthoscopic knee surgeries before the end of December. When Edd and I decided to have children, we bought an expensive medical policy with high yearly deductibles--for me and the children, not Edd. My deductible was paid for 1995, since I gave birth to Jonathan, but on January 1, the deductible would begin all over again.

I hoped for a year without doctors.

I did manage, between knee surgeries, final exams, and Christmas, to visit my G.P. and have the breast lump examined. Dr. Silas, a statuesque black woman in an orange African turban and dress, said that it was no wonder I felt tired.

"You're getting older, and you had two babies in three years. Try exercising before you go to sleep. That should help," she prescribed. She also suggested a mammogram.

When I got that mammogram, the female X-ray technician could feel the obvious lump. But nothing suspicious showed up. The hospital even lost the actual mammogram film, so all I had was the radiologist's report.

I might have left things at that, figuring that if I had a real problem, a mammogram would find it. But I couldn't--a steady nag in the back of my mind urged me to pursue the lump further.

Something's wrong, the voice said.

On January 22, 1996, the day the spring semester started, I visited a gynecologist. Edd was working. While I lay on the exam table, a paper smock over my chest, Jonathan cried from his stroller, and Jessica tried to hush him from the corner of the room. Dr. Francis looked annoyed. With the nurse beside him, he picked up a long needle and held it momentarily above me. Looking down at my nervous eyes, he said,

"We could do this needle biopsy in a few months, if you like."

For a moment I hesitated, tempted to put off the unpleasant task. Then I considered all the trouble I'd gone to just to make the appointment and drag my children along with me (I didn't want to pay for a sitter).

Jonathan quieted. The needle tip glinted in the fluorescent lights.

"No. We'd better go ahead," I decided.

The doctor gently stuck my breast three times, pulling out cells with each jab. The procedure didn't require a local anesthesia and barely even hurt. He carefully handed the syringe to the nurse who prepared it for the pathologist.

January 26, 1996 (Friday)

Tonight I stare at our answering machine which announced two messages from my gynecologist's office--one from the doctor who sounded worried, and one from the nurse who repeated the need to call the office as soon as possible. We hadn't checked our answering machine until after the doctor's office closed, so now we must wait until Monday morning.

I want to replay those messages. But I can't. I accidentally erased them (darn machine). The machine sits there, black and silent, a red "O" indicating no further news.

They found something, both Edd and I think, though we say nothing now. We have the entire weekend to worry.

At the dining table across the room, Edd grades essays for one of his English classes. His brownish-red hair falls on his forehead a little as he bends forward. His bushy brows arch upward, coming together sometimes to frown at a student's mistake. His big shoulders slump slightly at his task. I can't see his eyes, but I know the blue holds a little green ring around the pupils.

Edd and I spent the entire afternoon reading the Bible and praying together.

I think about walking over to touch his beard or pick up my own pile of essays and grade them, but the answering machine pulls my eyes back to it.

I stare at it again, knowing it can tell me no more. The phone won't ring this late. I can only wait.
I wonder if Edd feels as scared as I do. He seems strong, his broad back like a treetrunk. He won't burden me with his fears. He'll do what he has to do, then climb into bed with me later and hold me against his chest . . .

The clock on the wall reads 10:35.

Jessica, age three, sleeps in her toddler bed. Jonathan, only seven months old, snuggles in the corner of his crib.

I lean back on the floral sofa next to the brass lamp, close my eyes, and slowly enter a world between remembrance and sleep. I wonder how the pieces of my life will weave together--an embroidered tapestry only partly visible.

Jonathan starts crying for his nightly "num-nums," and I pull myself out of the sofa. Before answering the baby's call, I hear Edd praying out loud from the back room where he's gone to work on the computer.

After nursing my baby back to sleep, I lie in the dark bedroom and think about my childhood again. I figure God allowed what happened for a reason, but surely He won't also give me cancer.

I pray, somewhat incoherently and restlessly, realizing the test results are already known to the doctor (yet God is not trapped by time):

Lord, please don't let it be cancer.

January 29, 1996

On Monday morning, Dr. Francis tells me the cells were "suspicious." The pathologist who called Dr. Francis (so concerned he didn't wait for the official, written lab report) even used the word "lymphoma." Dr. Francis recommends a surgeon to remove and biopsy the entire lump.

January 31, 1996

I will go to the surgeon's office today. Before he left for work, Edd gave me a long, worried kiss. He didn't want to leave, but we knew he had to go. Now, I feel somewhat free of my burden of worry--almost joyful, inevitable, as the doctor's secretary calls me in earlier than my appointment. I bathe with the kids and drive through the rain to the unfamiliar office--yet another doctor in glasses and lab coat, another to examine and counsel me for the worst.

"Let's assume it's a tumor," Dr. Aragoni says from the far side of his cluttered desk. I glance at his pewter golf bag statue next to his Sharp Healthcare glass filled with pens. He outlines possible treatment plans as he has done for other women (some of them dead already?). Jessica draws his eyes from me occasionally as she wiggles around his office.

I try to pin the missing lung back to his "visible man" statue as Dr. Aragoni mentions radiation and chemotherapy. I think of Jonathan sleeping in the receptionist's arms up front, of Edd standing in front of a classroom and lecturing about verbs . . .

Dr. Aragoni gives me a 50-50 chance of breast cancer. I'11 have the lump removed Monday morning. Two days later I'11 find out if it's malignant.

The doctor and I don't speak much of survival chances because my lump isn't labeled yet. I gather they are fairly good--early detection and all that. Surely, with the proper treatment, years could be added to my life. Of course, there is the chance of recurrence . . . .

How many years will I have? As the doctor speaks to me, they seem fewer than before--the naive plans of my youth departing like raindrops on the office window.

February 1, 1996

Edd's very sick with a sinus, ear, and throat infection. The kids may be catching it. I'm taking antibiotics myself.

I've got a headache--the right side of my scalp hurts. "Brain tumor" crosses my mind as I furiously scrub the kitchen floor while the children sleep and Edd teaches a night class. Why not throw a brain tumor in with the rest of my problems, God? I think, angry as David in one of his Psalms or as Job when he cursed the day of his birth. I wanted a year without doctors. Last year we spent over $6000.00 on private insurance and uncovered medical bills. I wanted a year of peace. Haven't I endured enough already? I want my dreams for the future intact, God--not threatened by a disease.

I pick up my blue-covered New King James Bible. It feels heavy yet flexible in my hands, its thin paper edged with silver. Needing comforting words, I open it and flip the pages. I'll be reading this book a lot in the next few months, I think. My fingers find the middle, Psalm 116:

"I love the LORD, because he
has heard my voice and my supplications.
Because he has inclined his ear to me,
therefore I will call
upon him as long as I live.
The pains of death encompassed me,
and the pangs of Sheol laid hold of me:
I found trouble and sorrow.

Then I called upon the name of the LORD;
O LORD, I implore You,
deliver my soul.
Gracious is the LORD, and righteous;
yes, our God is merciful.
The LORD preserves the simple:
I was brought low, and
He saved me.

Return to your rest, O my soul;
for the LORD has dealt
bountifully with you.
For You have delivered my soul
from death, my eyes from tears,
and my feet from falling.
I will walk before the LORD
in the land of the living."

Of course, none of us knows our measured life, I realize, as I close the book and place it near the microwave. I put away the mop and hunt for the sheepwool duster. Grandma Ruth (Edd's mom) has smoked for over fifty years and still lives--though her emphysema demands that she stop smoking or face disability and death sooner than she should. Edd could die in a car wreck one night after teaching late. Any one of us . . . .

These thoughts haunt me as I dust and vacuum the house, then pace the carpet until Edd comes home. He feels awful. He eats Oriental noodle soup then falls asleep, sprawled on the sofa, his Nyquil dose untouched on the T.V. tray.

I walk softly toward our bedroom, checking to see if both housedoors are locked, then glance at the smoldering fireplace. Would any sparks fly out between the screen holes?

Is it safe to sleep?

I glance back at Edd, in his red and white-striped Santa Claus nightshirt, curled up without a blanket on the sofa. Should I cover him? The room's still warm, and I may wake him if I do. So many classes . . he works hard. I figure he'll wake up and climb into bed when the room chills.

I place my hand on the cold bedroom doorknob. Once opened, the door sucks out cool air. I see Jonathan cuddled at the headboard of his crib that adjoins our queen-sized bed. He holds one small hand upward. What do babies dream? Jessica, hidden by her patchwork quilt, shows me only her tousled hair above the toddler bed at the foot of our bed (we like to sleep near our children--feel their life-force around us).

I stand in the doorway between two rooms--one warm and lit by the brass lamp and fireplace, one cool and illuminated only by the nightlight.

Colors--orange and yellow and green--mingle with grey and black and pale white.

I don't want to leave them, I think, as I stand between Edd and the children, as I hold them between two worlds.

God, you have shoved my future smack in my face--I cannot
help but think and write. Please let me see Your hand holding me--as Moses said, in his last blessing upon Israel,

"underneath are the everlasting arms."
The mother eagle flies beneath her young so that they cannot spiral downward.

February 5, 1996

Another outpatient surgery--no big deal. I breastfeed Jonathan at six a.m., before going to check in at Outpatient Surgery.

It's my third surgery in less than two months. I'm getting to know Sharp Hospital, Murrieta. I get the same "preop" stuff--no food or drink, a hospital gown that opens at the back, little blue slippers, and an I.V. I wait in the same room for the same anesthesiologist in his jungle print cap and wire rim glasses. He tells jokes as the male scrub nurse wheels me toward the operating room.

"Take good care of her," Edd says as we head toward the double doors marked "surgery." I tilt my head to see Edd's face, his eyes drawn at the corners, his mouth pulled downward.

"You bet," the nurse replies as he pushes me through the doors. They shut between Edd and me, and before I can think to worry about Edd worrying about me, I enter the operating room.

I see the same steel and plastic apparatus and the massive ceiling lights that look like an alien spaceship. The nurses help me scoot over to the cold operating table. I don't recognize Dr. Aragoni since everyone wears face masks. The anesthesiologist puts the breathing mask on me, and I enter the world of twilight sleep.

I awake feeling pretty good since I didn't have general anesthesia. There's a bandage and a drain on my right breast. The recovery nurse tells me how I should care for the wound.

"You know, you have to stop nursing," she tells me.

"No, I didn't know. Dr. Aragoni never told me. Why do I have to stop?"

The tall nurse, with sensibly short black hair, stares at me for a moment.

"Because we've put a drain in--your wound won't heal until the milk stops producing."

She doesn't say it, but I think she's wondering why I don't realize that I might start chemotherapy or radiation treatment soon. I wouldn't want to pass those things through breast milk to my baby.

"Oh," I say. I didn't know this morning as I nursed Jonathan who lay on the bed beside me (both of us half asleep)--that I would never nurse him again.

Knowing that I have eaten nothing since last night, the nurse brings me coffee and graham crackers. It's almost noon. Edd enters the room and tells me the surgeon said that my 3 X 5 centimeter lump (bigger than expected) didn't look like breast cancer.

We feel hopeful and return home.

February 7, 1996

Today, two days after the surgery, Dr. Aragoni calls while I'm at work. He talks to Edd about the lab results, mentioning something noncommittal about me needing to see Dr. Schinke. I get an appointment right away, thinking maybe I have some precancerous cells. I don't worry.

February 9, 1996 (Friday)

This time I take Jessica and Jonathan to Dr. Schinke's office (Edd isn't home from work yet). I want their young life forces surrounding me as the doctor tells me possible bad news.

Dr. Schinke gets right to the point as I hold a yelling Jonathan with one arm and dig my notebook and pen out of my purse with the other. Jessica sits demurely beside me, staring at Dr. Schinke.
"You know, the lump was intermediate grade lymphoma," he says.

I knew something suspicious had shown up, but I thought maybe it wasn't real cancer.

"No, I didn't know. Dr. Aragoni only said something about you being better able to interpret the lab results than he could," I reply.

Dr. Schinke looks uncomfortable for a second, almost sad. He must not enjoy this part of his practice. He stares at Jonathan and asks how he is doing, mentioning (proudly) his new son Derek. I notice the "New Dad" pin he wears on his tie. Then he forges ahead into discussing treatments and percentages. I write in my notebook: 50-70% cure rate, with standard chemotherapy.

I stare at the numbers for a moment, then quickly write down the mass of information he dictates to me.

"Your type of lymphoma (in the breast) is rare. Considering your age and all, I'd say you're one in a million."

I feel special.

He wants me to get a CAT-scan and a bone marrow biopsy Monday. He also wants me to start chemotherapy the following Friday. One week.

The "CHOP" chemo program (each letter stands for one of the drugs given) will last 20 weeks, one treatment every three weeks, on Friday afternoons so that I'll have the weekend to recover. It is a fairly strong chemo regimen--to kill the cancer, not just treat it, so I'll lose my hair. I'll also get anti-nausea pills that will make me sleepy, so I'll need help on Saturdays after treatment.

For a few days after each treatment, I'll have to take Prednisone, a steroid. It will make me hyper and hungry. Between my six treatments, I will get blood drawn and Neupogen shots (to boost my white blood cell count and ward off infection).

If the standard chemo treatment doesn't work, there is always a bone marrow transplant.
"Any questions?" Dr. Schinke asks as I finish writing.

"I can't think of any now, but I'm sure I'll have a million later," I reply.

I have a lot to tell Edd, I think, as I put my pen and notebook back in my purse and shepherd the children out of Dr. Schinke's office.

Edd knows the moment I pull into the driveway and look at him. He holds me in his arms and tells me that he's known in his heart for days--since before the surgery.

February 11, 1996

I'm waiting for my CAT-scan at Sharp Hospital. I just drank a thick white liquid that is making my stomach queasy. I stare at the off-white walls and reread the "side-effects and radiation disclosure" statement the radiology attendant gave me. After awhile she comes back to lead me out to the semitrailer filled with the CAT-scan machine and its computers. She makes me lie still on a thin metal slab that she slides into a tube like a submarine torpedo bay. I have to hold my breath when the machine starts, X-rays with a humming sound rotating around me. Red laser lights flash. A nurse begins an I.V. and puts metallic dye into my bloodstream.

After about an hour of lying still and intermittently holding my breath, the technician helps me off the slab. She takes me to the huge computer terminal and shows me one of the many monitors. There, in black and white, glows my left ovary.

"See the follicles?" she points to a round circle beside two smaller ones. "You'll be ovulating from this side soon." I place my finger on the cold glass above the image. These eggs will be fried by the chemotherapy. Why does the technician show them to me?

Edd and I have wanted a third child since Jessica was born. Surely God will protect one last egg . . . .
Next, I get the bone marrow biopsy. Edd is between classes, so he and the children come with me this time. Edd distracts the children as Dr. Schinke sticks a long, wide needle--more like a hollowed-out nail than a needle--into my hipbone and extracts the dark red marrow. I can feel the needle penetrate my bone with a popping sound. Nurse Ruth holds my hands, telling me in a firm voice to blow like I am in labor and hold perfectly still. I squeeze her knuckles white, staring at her balloon-design stethoscope cover: green, purple, yellow, red. She bends her head toward me, the short, greyish-black locks falling forward a bit. The lines around her brown eyes show concern and years of experience.

God, don't let me ever go through this again, I pray.

February 15, 1996 (6:35 p.m.)

Tomorrow, I start chemotherapy. Everything's happening too quickly. I sit at the kitchen table, Dr. Schinke's card in my hand, and stare at the telephone.

After reading the Chemotherapy and You pamphlet published by the American Cancer Society, I panic. So many possible side effects--which ones will I experience? I dial Dr. Schinke's office number, and his answering service takes my call. Amazingly, he calls back in ten minutes. I demand answers to several questions:

Will I get a second cancer later (the chemo drugs themselves being carcinogens)?
Will the drugs damage my heart or liver?
Will they destroy my reproductive system so that I have no chance of bearing another child?

Dr. Schinke answers my questions patiently. The drugs shouldn't cause lasting damage. And since my CAT-scan and bone marrow biopsy were negative (the cancer didn't spread measurably), my chances of recovery could be close to 100%.

"And," he continues, "though there aren't many studies of the effects of chemo on child-bearing women, your reproductive system should either go right to early menopause or return to normal."

"Thanks for calling me back, Dr. Schinke," I say, letting out the breath I have been holding.

After hanging up, I stare out the window at our citrus trees shadowed by the moonless night.

I still feel like I'm standing on the edge of a cliff, looking downward. That's how one cancer pamphlet put it. Even if you're "cured," the thought of a new lump appearing any moment stays in your mind.
As a teenager, I felt my days spread out unlimited before me. All paths lay open, unexplored. Now, at 38, I look back at the paths I should not have taken and the paths God blessed. In front of me that cliff dangles into mist and clouds. Perhaps God will lead me safely down it, to paths I cannot see below.
I've stood on cliffs before. In England, when I was twenty-nine and healthy, I hiked alone to the top of Mount Penn-y-ghent while my first husband was out to sea and my English friend Carol watched Kristen and Ryan. In the mist of an early Yorkshire morning, I tried to catch sight of the rocks, bracken, and yellow wildflowers far below. I got no clear view--a big-horned sheep sidled toward me menacingly, and for a moment I thought he'd ram me off the side with his wrap-around white horns.
I smelled the heather, the wet granite, the slate. On the far side of the mountain, I had to sit down and shimmy across broken grey stones. Wet rock caught at my clothing and boots, bruising the palms of my hands.

Four and a half years ago, Edd and I visited England, Scotland, and County Kerry, Ireland. My father's family came from there. We saw my maiden name, Lynch, on several signs.

Much of my storytelling comes from that Irish side.

Edd and I camped atop a seacliff one night, on Valentia Island. Our small orange tent contrasted with the green, short-cropped turf around it. White rocks tumbled to seawaves far below--we saw no foothold down. On the far east end of the island, we heard the great crash of waves beneath the highest cliff. We could not see the edge, guarded as it was by thorn bushes, boulders, and sheep. Still, we felt the wind whipped by salt water, surging up to our faces, through rock holes and darkness. Even the night sky seemed too dark though more stars than we had ever seen canopied above us.

Now, on this cliff caused by cancer, I see no stars.

February 16, 1996 (Friday)

I sit in a green recliner next to Edd, chemotherapy drugs coursing through my vein via an I.V. Elaine, a friend from church, is watching the children. We couldn't bring their fast-growing cells around anti-cancer drugs.

It took two nurses, one doctor, and four sticks to get a vein that would accept the needle (I squeezed Edd's hand really hard each time). One needle even bent against my mysterious vein wall. I figured my body didn't want the drugs. I might have gotten up and left if Dr. Schinke himself hadn't come in to the room and knelt down in front of me. In his calm and methodical manner, he found a vein into which the needle slipped painlessly.

The bright orange drug Adriamycin has just made its way down the clear plastic tube. It doesn't burn when it enters me, but it does feel cold. Kristi, a tall, thin nurse with blonde hair, sits beside me while the orange drug goes through. She watches carefully, since it would damage the surrounding tissue if it escaped my vein.

"This is the drug that kisses your hair goodbye," she tells me. I stare at her green velvet vest over her white pantsuit, then next to me at the metal tray that holds needles, tape, vials, and a tennis ball for squeezing. My eyes drift past steel I.V. poles, the nurses' station stacked with charts, and the other three patients in the room. I gaze through the plate glass window at the room's end, toward the green hills of the Santa Rosa Plateau. A few afternoon clouds hover above their granite-studded summits.

I must look like a scared rabbit, for one of the other patients stares intently at me. She was hooked up to her I.V. before I arrived, and I didn't notice her at first.

"My name's Lori," she starts chatting with me in a boisterous way, trying to cheer me up and make me comfortable. A big-boned, tall woman, she wears a red turban and a sleeveless red blouse. Her fair skin seems so pale, and I notice she penciled in her eyebrows.

"My hair fell out after the first treatment," she informs me, bravely pulling off her turban to reveal baldness with thin patches of blonde stubs. It looks like a three-year-old found mommy's electric shaver.
"My scalp kind of hurt before the hair fell out," she continues. "Some people at the support group said they felt the same way--others didn't. Maybe you could go with me some Wednesday night."

"Maybe so," I say.

"I thought it was just a bad cold," Lori jokes. "Then I felt so sick that I wanted my mother. They took a chest X-ray and found a mass. I smoked since I was a fifteen. I'm forty now. I've cut down . . . "

I watch regret pass over her eyes like a shadow.

"They're doing radiation next," she states. "Then they'll surgically remove part of my lung."

I listen to her rather loud voice, believing a frightened girl hides behind the bravado.

Lori's husband Jeff returns with soft drinks. He has long dark hair, arm tattoos, and a sweet smile. He chats with Edd and me, winking when Lori mentions smoking. We can see the fear in his brown eyes.

"I cried like a baby when my hair fell out," Lori says, laughing.

"She used to have long blonde hair," Jeff adds.

"My mom bought me this expensive wig, but I hardly ever wear it-- it's so uncomfortable and hot. I wore it the other night when we went out to dinner."

I imagine Jeff and Lori, dressed up, ordering wine and steak at the classiest place in Temecula, The Hungry Hunter. She might have worn makeup and gold earrings, the candle from the table glinting on her blonde wig and silvery blouse. He might have worn a navy blue jacket and maroon tie. Maybe he reached out his hand to her, his wedding ring catching the candlelight.

"I keep thinking God is trying to tell me something through all this," Lori declares, sweeping one hand across The Chemo Room.

"'Quit smoking,'" Jeff interjects.

Lori sticks her tongue out at him and then grins.

Edd watches them silently, unsure as I am of what to say.

"I have a nineteen-year-old daughter," she continues despite Jeff's observation. "She and her boyfriend keep trying to help me quit smoking."

Jeff sits next to Lori and hands her a Diet Coke. Edd passes my canned iced tea, but I refuse it, feeling a little nauseated. Silence covers The Chemo Room as I wonder why I'm here.

Lori's cancer has one clear cause--smoking. Mine remains a mystery. I have always eaten well (people call me a vegetarian, though I do sometimes eat meat), hiked in the mountains, gotten enough sleep, taken my vitamins . . .

Dr. Schinke told me that Agent Orange or high radiation exposure might cause lymphoma. I was never a soldier. Perhaps all those chest X-rays as a child did it (for asthma, bronchitis, and pneumonia--doctors probably didn't know the risks of so much radiation back then).

As a child, I dreamed of those chest X-rays, of finding something horrible on their black and white images of my lungs.

I've always been terrified of radiation--images of mushroom clouds and the tick, tick, tick of Geiger counters return from black and white, 1950's science fiction movies. I dream of sudden, unseen annihilation. My first poem, at age four, I dictated to my mother about the sky falling in a great blaze of light and eating up everything. My children's book Will the Sky Fall? tells the recurring story too.
I don't even notice that the orange liquid is finished going into my veins and that Kristi went to get another chemo drug for me. She enters the room in her protective blue smock, white surgical mask, and heavy rubber gloves. She hooks up my new bag and then delivers a bag to Lori, who continues to tell me her story:

"Some days I go without a cigarette. I just don't feel like having one. Other days I go out in the garage . . ."

I don't know what to say to Lori.

"Here's my Smurf," Lori proclaims, pointing at Kristi who attaches an orange bag to Lori's I.V. pole. We hear Kristi giggle behind her mask.

"We'll get you out of here before midnight," she informs Lori and Jeff. "You can go home, order pizza, and watch reruns of 'M.A.S.H.'"

"How did you know we like 'M.A.S.H.?'" Jeff asks.

"Just a guess," Kristi replies.

I get so caught up in Lori's drama that I forget again about my own I.V. situation. The clear drug Cytoxan is nearly finished dripping.

Beside me, Edd leans forward in his green recliner. He's silent, waiting with me, grading student essays and trying not to let The Chemo Room invade his thoughts.

"I had Crystal Light for lunch that looked that orange color," Kristi says, pointing at Lori's I.V. pole and grabbing my attention. Another nurse attends Lori, and Kristi sits next to me.

"Was that all you had?" I question (people must tease her for being so thin).

"No--that plus a couple of tacos."

"Oh."

We both watch the drug drip, drip, drip out of Lori's I.V. bag.

I spy Kristi's pin which reads "No, Oncology Nursing is NOT
Depressing."

While we wait for treatments to continue, Kristi gives Edd and I a long list of instructions. He carefully writes them in his journal. Good thing he's the one taking notes--I'm too lightheaded to focus on writing.
"Be sure to practice birth control," Kristi warns us. "This is not a good time to get pregnant. If a fetus survived, the drugs would cause severe birth defects."

No kidding.

It takes two hours for the three different chemo drugs (plus flushing liquid and anti-nausea medicine) to enter my veins. Edd waits with me the whole time. He grades papers and writes more instructions and the dates of all the shots and bloodwork I must get.

My first chemo treatment over, I thank Kristi and sit for awhile. Lori calls Kristi over to her recliner. I feel light-headed and in no rush to emerge from my padded chair. I wait while Edd finishes writing in his journal. He closes the small book, stands, lifts the white shawl from my shoulders, and places it on a table. We walk outside together. I lean a little on his arm.

March 5, 1996

I haul the kids with me to get my blood drawn at Dr. Schinke's office and notice Lori and her family in a waiting room.

"So I finally get to meet those kids," she calls out. I carry baby Jonathan to her, three-year-old Jessica hiding behind my skirts and playing shy.

We chat awhile like family members catching up on gossip. Lori introduces me to her pretty daughter Jackie, a sophomore in college. I tell Jackie I teach college English. The radiation doctor pops his head in the door and recommends he give us all a bigger room (assuming I am part of Lori's family, come to support her at the consultation). I assure him we're just chatting and that I have to get my blood drawn. Before turning to leave, I ask Lori how she is doing.

"They found a little tumor in my brain," she says, her face suddenly serious under her mauve-colored turban.

"Oh, no, I hope you'll be alright," I gasp. The doctor stands at the doorway to usher Lori into his conference room.

She reaches out and hugs me. I cling to her for a moment and whisper,

"I'll pray for you."

In that moment our souls touch, an almost palpable feeling like wind brushing against our faces.
We part. I lead the kids to an exam room where nurse Ruth draws my blood. Jessica shows Ruth her toy doctor's set, complete with a plastic syringe. I ask Ruth about brain tumors. She leans over the exam table and says,

"It's not uncommon, with lung cancer, for a tumor to metastasize to the brain. Sometimes radiation and more chemo get rid of brain tumors--if there's only one, and it's not very big. I knew a man who had several little ones, and they went away. Every Saturday morning he fishes with his grandson."

Several nurses enter the room to fuss over Jessica and Jonathan. Ruth and Kristi make a chicken by blowing up a surgical glove and marking it with a black pen. Even Dr. Schinke drops by and laughs at our little party.

I bring life with me to The Chemo Room.

On the way out of the doctor's office, I see Lori and her family in conference with the radiation doctor.
I'll call you later, Lori, I think.

Late tonight, I don't expect to wake up at two a.m., sleep fleeing even though I took two Viacodin tablets.

"Lori," I call in the darkness.
Please, Lord, don't let her die.

March 17, 1996 (Sunday)

I realize I haven't written much in the last month. So much has happened. I've been too busy to write.
After that first treatment February 16, I felt nauseated and sleepy, the worst being the first twenty-four hours. I couldn't stand the taste or smell of onions or spicy food. I ate bland casserole dishes that church members baked for me and brought to our house.

In the following days my skin grew brittle and dry, my fingernails chipped, my fingertips tingled, and my hair started falling out, strand by strand.

I now look like I've got male-pattern baldness, so I wear a turban or scarf.

Yet I'm not as tired or sick as I thought I'd be. I've done two chemo treatments so far--four to go. My legs tire if I carry Jonathan and stand a lot. But my knees feel better than they have for a long time; I can actually enjoy country walks again. I don't ache in my joints anymore. These chemo drugs are doing my body more good than I expected. Dr. Schinke says that some patients have improved arthritis and allergies, thanks to the chemotherapy.

This chemo experience is actually exciting--a strange kind of adventure.
But too far from an ordinary life--and too far from the mountains.

March 18, 1996

Edd drives me to Dr. Schinke's office for bloodwork. The afternoon sun slants down on newly green hills with rows of white honeybee hives stacked along their base. Wind bathes my face as I stare out the open window. My hair has been falling out in clumps. I run my fingers through it and let my tresses fly out the car window.

March 19, 1996

My hair has looked so funny lately with patches still clinging to my scalp. This evening while our children are sleeping, Edd gets out electric hair clippers and shaves what remains of it. I sit in a chair in the kitchen, quietly, as Edd gently lays my last tresses to rest on the yellow linoleum floor. When he's done, he gives me a handmirror. I stare into it as he peers over my shoulder.

"It doesn't look so bad," he says. "Besides, it will grow back."

I don't cry. I feel cold. Edd rubs the last tickley hairs off my neck and shoulders with a towel, then kisses the top of my bare head and wraps it with a scarf.

March 20, 1996

Today I arrive, half an hour late for my bloodwork, just as Lori and Jeff open the back office door. I follow them, but they've already ducked into the doctor's conference room. After hanging out in the waiting room for awhile (the nurses are busy this afternoon), I spy Lori chatting with the radiology technician by the radiation room.

I walk over, carrying Jonathan, Jessie hanging onto my skirt, and embrace Lori. Today she's wearing a powder blue turban, matching her cotton dress.

"How are you?" I ask.

"I'm at peace today," she replies. I never noticed that her eyes are green beneath blondish eyebrows or that her nose is pronounced, like a Roman's. "Yesterday we went to the funeral home and took care of business, the way I want things--picked out a casket and stuff."

I can't believe she's telling me this. She looks healthy enough.

"What do you mean?"

"They give me six months to a year."

Tears spring to my eyes, and I hold her tight. Why am I the one crying?

"Don't worry," Lori comforts me. "I have a good attitude. God is in control."

"But what happened?" I ask, still not understanding. Her case seemed so routine.

"The radiation and chemo haven't done much to decrease the size of the lung tumor, and the surgeon can't operate until it's smaller. Then they found another tumor in my brain."

I dab at my eyes as Jessica watches us, wondering why her mommy is crying. She hugs my leg.
"Can't they do anything for you?"

"They're giving more radiation to my brain and my lung. I can have more chemo too. I could go into the hospital and get real aggressive about this. But right now I'd like to be healthy. I want to see my family in Ohio. I want to enjoy my time left."

"But Lori . . . " I hug her again. I don't want to lose you, Lori.

The radiology tech hands me a Kleenex.

"Things can change, Lonna," Lori assures me. "The chemo can start working. God could just up and heal me. I believe that. If that happens, I'll be pounding on all the cigarette makers' doors and doing my best to get people to stop smoking. My cancer is because of choices I made. But yours--yours is a mystery."

But I'll probably recover, I think. And you, Lori . . . .

"We see miracles often in this business," the radiology tech, a short woman with red hair, promises me. She gives me a book called "Fighting Cancer."

It's time for Lori to enter the radiation room.

"I'll pray for you," I tell Lori as I watch her enter the doors marked with three yellow triangles.
The sign on the wall reads,

"Danger: Radiation."

Jessica skips past the sign and the yellow triangles, unknowing. I hold Jonathan closer in my arms and wonder how something that can cause cancer can cure it.

Tonight I will lie awake again, missing my ordinary life and thinking of Lori. She has helped me get my eyes off myself (and my own problems) and reach outward, to others. This must be a key to battling cancer--or any other monster in life.

God, let Lori live, I plead. I do not want to watch her die.

I fall asleep and dream of Lori caught in a smoke-filled room decorated by yellow triangles.