Convalescence Triptych by Diana Cejas

1.

It’s not that I wanted to make her cry. It’s just that I could stand it before. My sister and I had terrible fights. They started as soon as she was old enough to talk. As soon as I was old enough to hit. The mission wasn’t to make each other cry. It was to wound. To leave a mark on my skin (on her skin) to let her know (let me know) who was in charge here. I am scarred to this day.

When we were little, we used our hands, her fists, my teeth, a pencil, a bottle, a rock. When we were bigger, we used our voices, her ridicule, my derision, indifference, a lie, the truth. It all hurt just the same.

There is a picture of us in our Sunday school dresses. My knees were ashy. Her belly poked against blue taffeta. I slung my broken, casted arm across her neck and she clung to it. She held my hand. We wouldn’t let go.

We are one year and nine months apart. Accident babies, the both of us. We are more alike than we care to admit. She is loud when I am quiet. Softer where I have hardened myself. We fit together. Even now.

When we were little, we packed picnics for each other and the dogs and the cats and the cows and we ate beneath the trees in the meadow. We stayed for hours. When we were bigger, we sang mostly Jon B but sometimes Dru Hill and sometimes Donny Hathaway and one time N’Sync and we laughed ourselves breathless when grandmother saw us. Sometimes I call her just to sing.

We fought each other and no one else and no one else could hurt us. She is my sister. She is my tormentor and my protector. I am her sister and I am hers. I am hers.

So. I told her first. Who else could it have been? I have known her all of her life. So. I said that I had cancer. It was my neck that had been strangled but it was her voice that faltered. It was her tears that fell. It was her heart that broke. It all hurt just the same.

2.

Sometimes I wonder who she’d be if I hadn’t come along. My Mama was going to be a pilot. She was going to be an accountant. She was going to be whatever she wanted somewhere far away from fields and tractors and plows. She went to college; went as far as her mama and scholarship money would let her. There, she met a boy, and then there was me, and that was that I suppose. Sometimes I wonder if she’d change things.

My Mama tells me baby stories but not often. She’s not one to reminisce. I picture her heavily pregnant with her big eyes and all of that hair and a glass of milk in her hands. She drank a gallon a week she says. It’s no wonder that I am so tall. I picture her in a desk in a lecture hall with a little me close by. She took me to class sometimes. She had two majors, two jobs, and two kids by twenty-two. She had to hustle sometimes. I can’t tell if my early memories are real or just watercolor versions of Mama’s stories. I picture KinderCare pickups and a polka dot dress, watching Charlie Brown but wanting her to watch me as I did cartwheels across our bedroom. I remember running down the driveway when she got home from work, wrapping sticky hands around her legs, putting dirty feet on top of her shoes and holding on and on.

You’re always your mama’s baby, people say. I know that to be true. I don’t remember how I told her. I didn’t want to worry her. I didn’t want to hurt her but I did. It did. I wanted her to comfort me, to strengthen me, to carry me. She did. I woke up from one surgery and there was Mama. I was told that it was a malignancy and there was Mama. Another surgery and then a stroke but I awoke and the first voice I heard was Mama’s. I couldn’t speak and then I could. I couldn’t move and then I could. I couldn’t swallow and my saliva leaked from my mouth, covered my chin, covered my cheeks. I tried to wipe it away. I couldn’t. She did.

“When you were a baby,” my Mama said, “you drooled so much that your cheeks got chapped.” She got a cloth and soap and the suction. Cleaned my face again and again and again. I pictured myself as a baby and saw my Mama in her youth. I looked at her. She smiled at me. Some things are the same.

3.

It didn’t occur to me that my grandmother was a woman until I was close to thirteen years old. She seemed less a person than a force: a spirit made of liniment and cotton, a devouring fire, a cyclone in house shoes. Her kindnesses, when they do come, are microbursts of affection. Soft words and scant embraces all prefaced by a thunderous fuss.

It shouldn’t surprise me, the way that she has with seedlings, but it does every time, every spring. I am not sure how someone so small and so calamitous can take a seed from anything, put it into the clay, and make it grow tall and lush and green. She eats apples, peaches, persimmons, spits the pits on the ground and somehow, weeks later, there’s new growth. The next summer it bears fruit. I cannot understand it. I can put my hands into dirt, into potting soil that I purchase, and try to coax tiny sprouts to blossom. I can water and I can nurture and I can buy organic fertilizer. I can wait and I can watch but still. Nothing.

I’d run away from the farm, from her, as soon as I’d gotten the chance. I’d wanted cities and lights and concrete. I’d forgotten about the blackness of the sky and the brightness of the stars on clear nights in the middle of January. I’d forgotten about forsythia budding green and yellow and gold in early March. I’d forgotten the smell of clover and mud, the prickle of sweat and straw, the feeling of standing beside my grandmother in the garden. I got sick. I got the chance to remember.

I braced myself when I returned home six weeks after everything. August sunlight showed every bit of my frailty. I hobbled through the house, pulled my weakened hand tight to my chest. My grandmother eyed me but, for once, said nothing. I walked to the fields and thought I’d fall, thought I’d faint, but I stood and let sun beat down upon me. She followed me. Of course she did. She stood beside me, looked at me, said nothing. She seized my hand, pulled it away from me, said nothing. She pinched it as hard as she could. I felt nothing. Only pressure, only numbness, no pain.

We stood, she scowled, sweat trickled down my scar. She leaned down and plucked a strawberry from its stem. She placed it in my palm and closed my fingers around it. “You’ll be alright,” she said. I held the strawberry. I couldn’t feel it. I tried to roll it in my hand. I couldn’t move it. “You’ll be alright,” she said. I believed her. I couldn’t help it. I was different. I had been hurt. But there she was, standing next to me, in the dirt, in the grass. She held my hand. She didn’t let go. She stood as steadfast as an oak, as stubborn as a bull. Unbothered, unmoving, ever the same.

Diana Cejas is a pediatric neurologist and writer in Durham, NC. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in medical and literary magazines including The Journal of the American Medical Association, The Iowa Review, and Catapult, among others. She is writing a memoir that describes life as a physician-patient.