Ask Me Why I Hurt (38 page)

“Hey, Randy,” Kim said. “I just met this nice young lady. I’ve been talking to her about finishing her education so she can join my nursing program.”

“Hello. I’m so glad to see you.” My voice was low with emotion.

Kim gave me a questioning look. I realized that she hadn’t spent enough time on the van to know Sugar. She held her baby almost as a shield. Her curly blond head was lowered so I could see the part. She was acting shy. Out of her element, Sugar didn’t know how to act.

“You did it,” I said. The overwhelming pride I felt for my patient prevented me from calling her by the name she had had on the streets. Now she wasn’t that name anymore. I had promised myself I would never use her street name, and I had not. But I didn’t know what to call her now.

There was a long silence as I looked at her. I felt an overwhelming sweep of emotion, and her sudden smile back showed me she felt the same. Kim was looking between the woman and me with concern. The newborn baby on the woman’s chest was small with long legs that moved restlessly. He had a narrow head with a coating of light brown hair. The baby was barely a few weeks old. Suddenly Sugar looked up at me. She still had eyes like a crystal white window. They were still so clear and bright. Maybe they would always be that way.

“What should I call you?” I asked.

She put a pacifier in her baby’s mouth and stroked his fine hair. “My name, I guess.”

I waited for a moment, and she told me her real name. And after so many years with so many visits between us, her name was like a private gift I didn’t want to share with anyone.

“That’s a nice name.” I sat with them for a few minutes. Obviously still confused about how I knew the young woman but too professional to show it, Kim told me about the nursing program.

“I think you’ll make a great nurse,” I told her.

“You think so?” She looked startled.

“Yes, I do. Really.”

She cuddled her baby. I wasn’t going to say anything to her about the past. It would be hard enough for her to deal with it. The last thing she would want was a reminder. It was enough that she was safe. The happiness I felt was deep and powerful, like a current that was pulling me to a brand-new place. The woman once called Sugar was finally off the streets.

I got up to leave. “All these smells of breakfast are driving me crazy,” I said.

“How’s Ginger?” she asked.

“She’s doing well,” I said warmly. “She really adores our kids.”

“Maybe someday I’ll have a dog too.”

“I’ll bet you will.”

The van was parked near the tall gates that led to the outside. The blue sides gleamed. The steps were down. Jan was already on board, stocking the van for the day.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Just about.” I went to fold up the steps.

“Dr. Randy?”

My old patient once called Sugar was standing at the bottom, as she had so many times before, though now she wouldn’t be climbing the steps to receive medical treatment.

“Yes?”

“My sister—do you think we can still find her?”

I saw the baby nestled on her chest. “I think we can,” I said.

My mother had continued to struggle with pain following her operation. She was often in the hospital having tests. As before, I felt split in different directions, helping my mother as well as my sister, but I felt I was handling it better now. I also was realizing that I could count on others, like Amy and Stephanie’s husband, Curtis, who remained a rock-solid support.

I was in my parents’ kitchen in Gilbert, over for Sunday supper, supposedly helping put leftover food away, but really just noshing on the food and hanging out with my mom. She sat on the tall barstool she kept in the middle of the kitchen. She liked to sit there and direct activity. “Stop,” she said, leaning forward and lightly smacking my hand away from the baked pasta. “We haven’t even had dessert yet.”

I started pulling down dessert plates and opened the cupboard drawer for forks. Mom sat on her stool. Beyond her I could see the wide green expanse of watered lawn behind the house; to one side I could see the neighbors’ horses. From the other room I could hear Dad playing with the kids. They were running around, laughing. I could also hear Stephanie. She was sitting in front of our parents’ computer, talking to Amy. Curtis was someplace out back with their boys. But the happy atmosphere was not to last. My mom had sad news to deliver.

“Randy, you know I had another biopsy. Well, it looks like the cancer is back.”

Stunned, I put the forks down.

We had a family meeting that night. Mom smiled for our kids and Stephanie’s sons. As always she was gentle and warm with the grandkids. But as soon as they ran to play out back while the sun was setting, she broke down a little. She cried while Dad held her on the couch. “The doctors say I can’t handle any more surgery.”

“What about more chemo?” Amy asked quietly.

Mom frowned. “I can try, but it doesn’t look good.”

Dad passed her a tissue. She wiped her face. There was silence in the room. I knew what this meant. My mom was not going to win this war.

Stephanie sat on the couch, holding in her lap a needlepoint pillow that Mom had made. Curtis had his hand on her knee. Amy was sitting on the other couch, absorbing everyone’s pain, ready to help. I took a breath. If the colon cancer had returned, the survival rate would be very low even with aggressive treatment. I wondered if my mother knew she would likely die. From outside Reed yelled something at Janie. It had to do with lizards.

Everyone looked at me. For once I didn’t want to be the doctor in the family. Was I supposed to speak the truth? Not here, in front of everyone. That was a conversation I would have to have with Mom in private. “We’ll do our best, Mom,” I said. I looked down and saw I was touching my own wedding ring.

I felt Amy’s compassionate gaze. Amy was also a doctor. She knew too.

On the way home from my parents’ I had prepared myself for a breakdown once I was alone. But I was OK. Maybe I wasn’t meant to break down on a regular basis, I thought. If I did, with my work, I would be breaking down all the time. Maybe I was made for this work after all, I thought. Maybe I was getting stronger. It didn’t mean the pain was less. Maybe it just meant I could handle it more.

“Randy?” It was Amy. “You’ve been sitting in front of your computer for hours. Come to bed.”

“I’m sorry. I meant to talk to you, I did.”

She came and stroked my head. “Honey, you don’t have to talk to me all the time. Some of the time is just fine.” She stroked my hair gently, caressing my scalp. When we went to bed, she curled against my back. I still didn’t break down. But the peace I felt gave me the same result.

It doesn’t matter how many times you say good-bye. It’s never enough. The day after Thanksgiving I stopped by a video rental and got a DVD of
Sleeping Beauty
. I took it to my mom in hospice. When I was small, growing up in the small town of Kremmling, Colorado, children’s movies rarely played in the town’s only theater. But one day a movie came to town. It was
Sleeping Beauty
. I begged my mom to take me. “It was the first movie you ever took me to see,” I told her as we watched it by her white hospital bed. “No wonder I’ve always believed in happy endings.” We both cried a little.

The holidays were coming, but our celebrations felt muted. I spent most of my time with Mom in hospice. On December 16, 2009, she passed away. My dad, Stephanie, and I were by her side at the hospice. She had grown smaller. In her arms, she held some family photos. Two were of her and Dad. The rest were of her grandkids. In one photo Janie and Charlotte and Reed were lying in the grass, laughing. Next to her on the bed stand was an old-fashioned book she had made in my childhood. I opened it. She had taped in every report card, every article about me as an adult. The thick yellow pages felt delicate under my fingers.

I felt we all were doing OK and handling the loss. At least it seemed so to me. Then, in the days following the funeral, I noticed Reed was taking his stuffed turtle with him everywhere he went. I couldn’t figure it out. “You didn’t take your turtle to school again today, did you?” I asked teasingly one night.

“Yeah,” he replied, clutching it tight. “We looked for lizards.”

Amy solved the mystery one night. She showed me a poster that Reed had made at school. “Everyone in his class made a poster about themselves,” Amy said. Reed had drawn his twin sister and Charlotte. There was a blue van, with me standing next to it. There was Amy with her curly hair. Up in the clouds was his grandma Maria. She had angel wings. At the bottom was a green turtle.

“He told the class his grandma gave him that turtle,” Amy said.

Not surprisingly, I was back at work within a few days. If there was anything in life that made me feel normal, I thought, it was doing the job I love. As hard as it was, I found solace in caring for the homeless kids.

Jan and I had had a long day. She hummed as she drove us back to the dock. It was hard to believe she was now sixty. Her teenage kids were now adults. She had recently told me that she wanted to spend her last years before retirement on the van working with the kids. When I thought about her eventually leaving, I felt sad. She and I had started this adventure together, and I couldn’t imagine continuing without her.

Jan was telling me about procedures for the new clinic at UMOM. “We’re getting it licensed,” she remarked.

“You’re the expert at licensing,” I said in a praising tone. “We always pass inspections thanks to you.”

We drove back to the dock in companionable silence. I thought of the dinner I was planning that night with Amy and our children. We were going to grill some hamburgers, and then I was hoping we all could go out together to walk Ginger and look at the stars.

I looked out the window and saw not street corners and alleys but places where homeless kids might be waiting. Around each corner, I thought, were more kids who needed our help. I was eager to find them.

“We’ve been down a long road together, Jan,” I said.

“Don’t get all sentimental on me,” she said.

“OK.”

She tossed me a quick grin. “You’re a good friend.”

“You too, Jan.”

T
he spring sun filled the bedroom, and I woke up thinking, This is why people live in Arizona. It’s a perfect seventy degrees while other parts of the country are blanketed in snow. It was spring 2010. Then, with a tingle of excitement and wonder, I remembered: It’s been ten years since I started the van. A decade.

My schedule quickly played through my mind: volunteer breakfast, then an important phone call at 11:00 A.M., then a meeting with the team, and taking the van out to a new location.

The other day Jan had given me the count. In the last decade, our van had seen close to seven thousand children. It seemed like a miracle. But as much as that was, it still felt like a fraction of the children I wanted to help. There were so many more in Arizona and across the country.
Seven thousand
, and it seemed I could remember them all, in a parade of smiles and souls and hearts. I thought of the ones I had helped and the ones I had never seen again: Mary, who had written from the university; the last card she said she was going for a master’s degree. Donald, still married and living in Pastor Richardson’s house, having taken over the drywall business. Sugar, moved out of UMOM and doing well on her own with her baby, reunited with her sister, who had grown up in foster
care after their mother had been committed. I thought of the ones who had moved on, whom I still longed to hear from. I thought of Nicole with a sharp pang. Part of me still expected to see her in my exam room, waiting for help, still needing help. My grief over her would never fully go away. But of course I couldn’t let it stop me from finding the kids like her, the desperate cases that I hoped I would be able to turn around.