Illness Is a Tear in the Great Cosmic Pattern
Poppy by Hope Henderson
My first panic attack came from the brain. I don’t mean that it was the product of my neurons, though of course it was, but that it was triggered by the spectacle of a human brain, cut in thick, soft slices like triple-cream brie.
I was sitting in the auditorium of NS101: Brain Anatomy & Physiology. It was my freshman year at Brown, where I had been accepted into a premed fast track program. The professor called on a girl in the front row to come take a look at what was inside the white bucket near the lectern. I had assumed a janitor had left it there.
“Nooope,” the girl said after looking in, shaking her head and then exhaling loudly before sitting back down.
“Those are slices of a human brain,” the professor said. “I don’t always have brain samples on hand, so today is your lucky day. I want each of you to come up, two or three at a time, and take a look. Come, come, don’t be shy.”
There was a constriction in my ribs, a tickle traipsing up my throat, and I kept taking sips from my water bottle to wash it back down, not unlike the rain washing the itsy-bitsy spider down the waterspout. Then I stopped being able to swallow. I tried to look calm, like I was leaving to take an important phone call. I bumped past the rows of knees, walked up the aisle, out of the lecture hall, and then broke into a sprint, trying to outrun it.
I had applied to the premed program at my father’s urging. I liked the idea of being someone who could make things right. I imagined an office with piles of medical journals and thank-you cards, happy patients and their bright faces opening at me like so many sunflowers. But now the years of anatomy and physiology courses, of organs in formaldehyde and my hands slicing through them, became real. I dropped the neuroscience class, losing my spot in the program. To fill the hole in my schedule, I enrolled in PL130: The Evolution of Angiosperms. The Plant Sciences Building was next to my dorm and it was one of the few classes that still had open slots.
The professor was a petite woman who often wore brightly colored scarves and silk ascots around her throat. She looked like a hummingbird and sometimes when she talked, I imagined the first flowers opening tiny and yellow, lighting up the dark ground like stars in the sky.
When people asked why I was studying plant biology, I talked about plants as a foundation of animal life, about taking energy directly from the sun without violence, about the color green. It was all true but I never told them the other truth: that I didn’t want to know the body’s secrets. I preferred to think of human bodies as something like claymation. I couldn’t take the idea that we were wet and hot just under the skin. That we were spotted with organs like a Jell-O mold with grapes.
Most of all, I didn’t want to learn what the brain did: if I knew where it all came from, thoughts and movement, memory and math and dreams and speech and even love, then I would know, really know, that a human was just mud, briefly shot through with lightning and then extinguished back into the earth.
I was doing research in the campus greenhouse when I first saw Megan. She was pale, freckled, and lanky as a giraffe, and her silky brown hair fell over her face as she bent to water a large orchid. She looked like a young Jane Goodall and moved with a precision that suggested deep intelligence.
“Wanna buy me coffee?” she asked, catching me watching her.
It was a miracle that she fell in love with me. And when she put her hand over mine so I could get the touch just right, and when the blush rose up her chest and neck and into her cheeks, and when she looked me in the eye, and when she made that sound like something was being torn from her, that was a miracle too.
I couldn’t figure out what it was she liked about me but had the sense to know nothing would be more unappealing than my own lack of confidence, so I only asked her once, a few months in.
“I like your big nose,” she said, tracing down the bridge with the tip of a finger. “And your big dick,” she said, playfully squeezing my groin through my pajama bottoms.
We kissed for a moment, and then she got serious, looking at me with eyes the color of diner coffee. “I like how gentle you are with the plants,” she said. “When you need to move a pot, you get all nervous and serious. When they need water or fertilizer, you measure just the right amount. When you touch the leaves, it’s like the way you stroke my hair.”
I pulled her close, her head pressed against my chest. I wanted to believe everything she said.
It turned out Megan was only working in the greenhouse until she could find a research gig in an entomology lab, which she did soon enough. And so our lives took on a pleasant rhythm: classes in the first part of the day, research for our respective labs after, and then dinner together at the same corner table in the dining hall. We would always split a wretched little dessert: say, a pumpkin and cream cheese Swiss roll or strawberry sponge cake with frosting of a questionable gray color. This was followed by studying, sex, and sometimes sleep with her back pressed against me, the xylophone of her ribs palpable under the skin. Megan had an ability to create habit and routine, and in doing so, carve shape into my life.
I liked my classes and my research, but most of all I liked telling her about it, watching her mind go taut and dart around ideas, weaving threads between them. Through her, I could see that behind the seeming randomness of the world, an intricate, beautiful, and almost geometric pattern held everything up.
Sophomore year we got solo dorm rooms in the same building, allowing us to practically live together without the hanging of socks on doorknobs and other roommate negotiations. And then junior year we did live together, in an apartment off campus. Seeing Megan munch on nuts or granola I had picked up at the co-op gave me the same warm feeling as watching house sparrows and robins eat at our little suction-cup bird feeder. I started teaching myself to cook from online recipe blogs. Megan had no patience for cooking—“Following a recipe is like doing lab work”—so she was gracious and appreciative, even with my fumblings. When the chicken I roasted was still pink near the bone, she smiled, gently removed the carving knife from my hand, popped it back in the oven, and gave me a kiss on the cheek.
I kept at it, keeping a notebook to track my kitchen experiments. I got better and then I got good. I loved the way Megan would go quiet sometimes, taking obvious and almost sexual pleasure in a meal. I teased her about it once—“Babe, I’m not sure you heard what I just said.”
She gave me her most winning smile.
“Your fault, you know how I feel about your sirloin.”
Fall of our senior year, we applied to the same graduate schools. California was where the most exciting research was happening, most of it around climate change. “Climate disaster,” she would correct me, mildly annoyed by the euphemism. We fantasized about collaborating on projects that spanned our fields: how early blossoming in figs was affecting honeybees or how increasing atmospheric CO2 was changing the relationship between aphids and apple trees. We would know it all.
In April, Megan sat me down on the saggy yellow couch in our off-campus apartment.
“I am pregnant and I’m going to keep it,” she said. I didn’t understand. We were always careful. I didn’t understand her voice, clear and level, her face, blank, while the spider came back up my throat with its too-many legs. “You have a choice to make. I’m going to go stay with my mom for a few days to give you time to decide.” She squeezed my hands, grabbed her backpack, and walked out the door.
My ribs were starting to squeeze. I had never seriously considered parenthood, but I had considered losing her. Mainly that I couldn’t. When we were apart for more than a couple days, the pattern started to go faint and I had to close my eyes and smell her pillow to get it bright again.
I took a long gulp of water and sprinted down the hallway after her.
“Let’s get married.”
Pregnancy made it hard to avoid knowing what bodies were made of. Megan was badly nauseated in the first trimester. Cheese and garlic were verboten. She brought a white plastic CVS bag with her to finals, retching into it without embarrassment.
When we moved to California, she was twelve weeks pregnant and the nausea was finally lifting. In our apartment in Davis, she liked to lie on the IKEA couch and read pregnancy books while I read research articles or did sudoku at our Craigslist kitchen table.
“Did you know my blood volume has already doubled?“ She would say. “Did you know I’m probably going to shit myself during labor?“
There were also the facts of the baby itself.
“It’s still inside of me, it’s still a fetus,” she would say, furrowing her brow, and I would wince at the word. After the initial shock burned off, I had grown attached to the idea. The baby would add something new to the pattern, a splash of hexagons or an iridescent sheen. We came to call it the seedling.
Megan liked to tell me about the stages of the seedling’s development: the appearance and disappearance of a vestigial tail by week eight, fingerprints at week 14, meconium at week 22.
“Did you know the brainstem—”
“Let me make you a snack, babe,” I’d say, interrupting her flow. The same spider would come up when she talked about brain development, so I’d take a long drink of water and calm myself by peeling jicama and then using the chef’s knife to cut it into white half-moons, or making the anchovy toast she seemed to crave constantly now: a thick slice of crusty bread slathered with unsalted butter and then covered in arugula, chili flakes, and tiny, pungent fish.
That summer was the first time in my life I had a span of open time. As a child, summer vacations were always spent in some kind of edifying camp. Summers during college I had done double duty, working minimum wage research jobs at Brown and a slightly above-minimum wage job as a line cook at Louis’s diner near campus.
Megan and I had saved money, planning to travel to Burma and Thailand during the summer. I was privately relieved that was no longer possible, happy to trade adventure for the novelty of three months stretching open like a meadow.
We spent the time reading or playing Scrabble in our apartment in the heat of the day. On Sundays, we went to the farmers’ market and drank fresh grassy green juices. I baked bread late at night, the only time cool enough to turn the oven on. Sometimes in the early mornings we went for easy hikes. Once we got caught in a rare summer rainstorm and Megan tipped up her face, letting the water wash over her. Her slim frame was rounding out and I had a strange, erotic urge to suffocate myself between her breasts, her thighs, under the growing curve of her belly. Happy anticipation hummed between us, a rosy new thread in the pattern.
It was like my life had finally started. The scrapes and humiliations of childhood—the time my father had for his work but not for me; the acne so bad I’d needed Accutane; the varsity teams I was never quite good enough to make; the girls who turned me down; my failure to become a doctor; the hours frying eggs at Louis’s while my rich friends padded their resumes with unpaid internships; the anxiety that sometimes seized my throat—it was finally over. I had Megan, and the seedling, and it was my turn for happiness. Back then, I thought that was how things worked.
When Megan was about six months pregnant, my program started and I began my thesis work on adapting pome fruits to the hotter, drier climate that was coming. The plants breathed out oxygen and water through tiny apertures in the leaves. Under a microscope, an aperture looked like a frog mouth with two fat lips. I was changing the numbers and size of the apertures to make apples and pears that could grow in the desert California would soon be.
On campus, I fell deep into it, absorbed in my micrographs, or dissecting protoplasts, or tending to seedlings and plantlets and then graduating them to the greenhouse. At home, I worried my excitement would remind Megan that her own program had been deferred, though she had seemed very matter-of-fact about the decision.
“You’re sweet,” she said. “But I’m busy with the seedling.” She touched her belly. “The bugs can wait.”
Everything was growing, growing, green.
I was glad Megan chose an epidural and I was glad she wanted me up by her head, holding her hand, and not down near the blood and Jell-O. Megan was by turns determined, exhausted, laughing from the exhaustion, and then riding another wind. When the baby was finally in her arms, a girl we called Poppy, she cried silently.
“I miss feeling her inside me already,” she said. “I feel like something’s missing. Like she’s lost and I have to find her.”
“Smell her head,” I told her. Our OB/GYN had told me about the sweet, soft, clean-laundry scent of babies’ heads. “She’s there. She’s okay.”
Megan and Poppy were together in a world I didn’t understand.
I had always thought of it as we were having a baby. We were becoming parents. But Megan and Poppy were together in a world I didn’t understand. I was in awe and envy and there was nothing I could do those first weeks except change diapers, do laundry, and feed Megan so she could feed Poppy with breasts that were no longer for me. We had gotten a marriage certificate at City Hall planning to do the big wedding later, but it was in watching the delight in Megan, in my uselessness and need to feed her, to see her eat, to nourish her, and to watch her nourish Poppy, like I was Adam and she was Eve and Poppy was the first baby on the face of the earth and no one, no one, knew about this joy or this mystery, that I became a husband.
Poppy was happy and calm and her big eyes rolled around and around tracking me and Megan and birds, dogs, squirrels at the park. She laughed early and often, a short little giggle of delight at the world around her. I loved to watch her, and to watch Megan watching her: her eyes soft, love dripping off her like honey. Poppy slept well and for long stretches that allowed us our own sleep and sleepy sex. At night, Megan fed Poppy in bed and I did the overnight diaper changes. Even the changes had a pleasing rhythm: the front to back movement with the warm water wipe, the gentle pats dry, pulling the new diaper up, securing the left tab and then the right, bending over to kiss her forehead, left cheek, right cheek, perfect button nose.
In the mornings, I packed my lunch and made one for Megan. In the evenings, I read to the both of them: newspaper articles, contemporary fiction from the library, drafts of the fellowship proposal I was working on. We bathed Poppy together before bed, admiring her chubby thighs, her big dark eyes. “We should’ve called you Black-Eyed Susan,” Megan would say, gently working detangler through Poppy’s blond waves.
I knew where I needed to be every moment of the day. I knew what I needed to do. I had no free time and I was happy. The decisions—the big ones, anyway—were made and I didn’t have time to worry anymore anyway.
Maybe it wouldn’t have happened if I had worried. If I had said a prayer of thanks every night on my knees. If I had called every lonely friend on their birthday. If I had invited every orphan for Thanksgiving. If I had given money to St. Jude’s at every grocery counter and movie theater. Maybe the pattern needed my fear to hold it steady.
Poppy was two years-old when it started, just getting the hang of handles and doorknobs, just starting to practice balancing on one foot for fun, her arms out while she made a brrrrr-ing airplane noise, and then a burst of giggles when she would start to tip. Megan was substitute teaching in an elementary school and working on getting a certificate to teach science. On that particular day, she’d worked a half-day and spent the afternoon with Poppy.
“Something weird happened,” she said over our dinner of harissa-roasted chicken and vegetables. “She was asking to see the elephants again, so I took her to the zoo. She was in the stroller watching them and then I noticed she sort of wasn’t there for, I don’t know, maybe half a minute. Like, she wasn’t asleep and her eyes were open, but she just wasn’t really there.”
Poppy was here now, picking up chunks of roasted sweet potato with her small hands and happily gnawing on them, humming to herself.
“Maybe she was daydreaming,” I said. “Poppyseed, were you daydreaming? Do you have the biggest imagination ever?”
She giggled at me, reaching for another sweet potato chunk.
And then a week later, I saw it happen: we were on the floor with the wooden alphabet blocks and she went dreamy, slipping inside herself for 10 or 15 seconds. She was an imaginative kid: she loved stories about talking animals, mermaids, unicorns, and anything that could fly.
“Poppyseed has got her head in flowers again,” we’d say and wonder what she was daydreaming.
For a year, it was only the daydreaming. And then I got a call from the preschool while I was harvesting leaves from a plantlet.
“We tried your wife first?” The young teacher said. “There’s been an incident? Poppy is at the hospital?”
An incident? What did they mean, an incident?
“Poppy felt a little warm? We were going to take her temperature? Then something happened? I think it was a seizure?”
And I was groping the lab bench for my keys, I was sprinting to the car, I was ripping out of the parking lot without looking, I was calling Megan on repeat. The pattern had cracked open under my feet. The spider spread its arms and legs up the whole length of my throat, and I couldn’t fucking breathe.
When I got to the ER, Poppy seemed to be sleeping, an oxygen cannula positioned gently at her nostrils. The doctor, an older Black woman with tired eyes, said she had been seizing for at least 10 minutes by the time she got there. They had gotten it under control with two doses of lorazepam, administered through an injection into her tibia.
“It’s not unusual for a fever to trigger a seizure in a small child,” the doctor said. “Has this happened before?” The doctor asked.
“Of course not.”
“Have there been any other kinds of seizures? They don’t always look like what you expect,” she said. “Sometimes a seizure can show up as just a twitch or a repetitive motion. Sometimes they can show up as a brief loss of consciousness where the eyes stay open. Have you seen anything like that?”
So that was it. My baby girl had been seizing for a year and I was so fucking dumb, so doped up and myopic with happiness, that I thought she was dreaming. We left the ER with a referral to a pediatric neurologist. Around the fissure, the pattern was limp and wavy.
Our appointment was a few weeks out, and Megan and I had decided not to worry until we had to. A week after the incident, I was making dinner, stretching pizza dough I had been cold fermenting in the fridge for 3 days, folding it over itself to coax the gluten into networks. At the kitchen table, Poppy was working as a ventriloquist for two of her stuffed animals who were engaged in a lively debate. Suddenly she was at my leg, holding onto it, looking up at me with her coffee-brown eyes wide and fearful.
“No, no,” she said, sounding close to tears. I wiped my hands on a dish towel and picked her up, holding her small, warm body against me. Her legs were getting longer and she had been losing her baby fat over the previous few months. In the odd moment or movement, I could see a rotation of spirits: her kneecap in the shape of Megan’s, her wrists turning knobby like mine, the line of her chin my grandmother’s. Poppy was made of pieces of her relatives, like each had given just 1/8 of their soul, to recombine into something, someone, new.
“What’s wrong, Poppyseed?” I asked her, holding her close and stroking her back with my thumb. I kissed the top of her head. Her hair smelled sweet and clean, like fresh laundry. She bucked against me into a stiff line and then began jerking, like a snap bracelet going taut and then curling, taut and curling, the recoil, the inevitable motion, rhythm, and storm. We took her back to the emergency room.
“Seizures are not actually that uncommon in young kids,” the friendly young resident told us after treating her with lorazepam. “Most of the time it’s a one-time thing and we don’t really know why it happens, but it never happens again.”
“She had one two weeks ago,” said Megan. “And she’s been having absence seizures for longer.”
The resident’s mouth kept smiling while a wince passed over her eyes. She sent us home with a prescription for nasal diazepam.
The absence seizures—what we had thought was daydreaming—continued. And after pizza night, the big new addition, the tonic-clonic seizures, continued two or three times a week, going for up to 10 minutes at a time: her body would go rigid (tonic) and the right side of her body would jerk and shudder (clonic). These are the seizures that used to be called grand mal: French for “big bad.” It seemed like the right term for the thing trying to blow our house down.
“During a seizure, it’s like she’s underwater,” the neurologist said. “Her brain can’t get the oxygen it needs and that can lead to cognitive problems.” During the big bads Poppy would start to fade, her rosy cheeks desaturating, her lips going from posy pink to violet.
Of course, I had to learn about the brain after that. I took 30 mg of propranolol before every neurology visit to stop my blood pressure from rising and the spider from creeping up my throat. I dug my nails into my palms to steady myself while the doctor explained about the synapses and the physiology of seizures and the parade of drugs with polysyllabic names. During a big bad, it looked like her soul was trying to leave her body. But I knew that it was not soul that she had gotten from us, but only DNA, a minute ladder of chemical information twisting in on itself and wrapped in coils and knots so its implausible length could fit in each one of her cells. The seizures were just misfirings in her brain, and her brain was just a jiggly half-dome of cells connecting end to end, wet and electric, with fat red worms of vessels resting in the grooves. She was full of Jell-O. It was the worst thing I had ever learned.
The crack in the pattern had split into a hole, to the back and right, big enough to stick my fist through. The rest of the pattern had contracted around it and was throbbing with right angles. Most of the time I was too busy to think about how Poppy was just plain matter, and so was I, and so was Megan, and so was every other person that I had ever cared about, small and erasable as an ant before an aardvark’s tongue. But in the mornings, my head hurt in a specific pinpoint spot, to the back and right, where this new knowledge lived.
The seizures could be triggered by a cold or flu, a hot day, too much sunlight. Megan thought they could also be triggered by too much excitement, too much sugar, not enough sleep, though I wasn’t sure.
“Even if you could identify every trigger, she would still get seizures,” the neurologist told us. “The triggers don’t cause her seizure disorder. Her seizure disorder causes normal things to be triggers.”
This was meant to comfort us, but it only made Megan more vigilant. She’d arrived at the ER that first day 15 minutes after me and immediately started writing things down on the back of a lesson plan, the only paper in her purse: the names of the doctors, the medication given to Poppy, the times and doses, unfamiliar terms like status epilepticus and soodep(?). After the second seizure, she began tracking Poppy’s medications, attacks, and everything she ate in a spreadsheet, doing regression analyses after Poppy went to bed. She didn’t seem to notice as the sun set and the room grew dusky and then dark, the blue of the computer screen illuminating her face like frozen moonlight. Sometimes I tried to kiss her or rub her shoulders but she would dip away from me, her eyes never leaving the screen. I wanted to pull her back to me, but she belonged to Poppy now.
Megan and the neurologist decided that we should start Poppy on Depakote. She portioned it out into a sparkly pink pill organizer. But when the Depakote didn’t stop the seizures, even with Megan’s regime of sun hats that Poppy tried to pull off and cool baths that Poppy whimpered through and the low-sugar diet without cookies or juice or even fruit, we tried Clobozam. Then Topomax, and then Zonisamide. Diamomit. Keppra. Fintepla, after an appeal to insurance, and a second appeal, and on our third appeal, a decision from an independent medical review panel who was swayed by a letter—written by Megan but signed by the neurologist—explaining the risks of sudden death in uncontrolled epilepsy. The drugs sometimes didn’t work at all and sometimes gave us a reprieve and then in two weeks, three weeks, six weeks, Poppy was seizing again.
We got used to the big bads, in a manner of speaking. The way palm trees are used to bending in category four hurricanes; the way South Beach is used to breakers that leave a path of Portuguese man o’wars, blue-black, iridescent, and venomous. Poppy would typically get a scared look on her face before one came on and run to us for comfort. We would lay her on her side on her bed or any soft surface nearby—in the green grass under the Jacaranda tree on campus, grass that was watered every night and should’ve been illegal given the drought; the backseat of a car; the woodchip playground mulch once; the ball pit at Chucky Cheese. We would put a pillow, towel, sweatshirt under her head and make sure her little red rosebud mouth was pointed down. You cannot swallow your own tongue during a seizure, but you can aspirate saliva or vomit into your lungs and get pneumonia. I got used to my spider, in a manner of speaking, which would spin up my throat every time Poppy gave me that particular frightened look. When a seizure went on too long, we administered her rescue meds, a two-person effort that reminded me of trying to shove a rabid cat into a tube sock.
I woke up often during the night, the spot in my brain alight with pain, telling me we were nothing but matter.
By the time Poppy was four, she was losing words, her tongue aging in reverse. She began to navigate in perimeters, hand pressed to the wall like a blind man, or holding the edge of the table with each step to steady herself. We had taken her to the pool every Saturday since she was six months old and she could tread water, swim breaststroke, go the length of the pool five times freestyle. And then her stroke started unraveling. In her inflated swim training vest, she would arc one arm overhead while her legs hung down in the water motionless. When the arm was back by her side, she would lift her legs to the surface and kick. When the kicking finished, she would arc the other arm. She could no longer braid the motions together but had to give each strand her full attention. Megan and I looked at each other and though her eyes, so like Poppy’s, were wide and fearful, she tilted her head towards the exit, silently agreeing to let me wait this one out in the car. The pattern cinched in tighter, angles compressing into barbs around the sinkhole. I woke up often during the night, the spot in my brain alight with pain, telling me we were nothing but matter. I knew now that words and bones are the only things that can last.
Poppy’s MRI showed cortical dysplasia: a spot where the outer part of her brain hadn’t formed correctly. To the untrained eye, it looked like a blur in the images, a place where the brie had melted. Genetic testing revealed a mutation in the gene HCN1. HCN1 makes up part of a channel in the cell membrane, critical to propagating electric signals within the brain. The channel was like an aperture that can open and close, like the apertures that breathed for my apple plants. It was inordinately hard for me to retain this information; Megan would explain it to me and then it would slip through the hole and I would have to ask her again until finally she wrote it on an oversized Post-It that she stuck to my desk. The mutation was unknown, something Poppy had not inherited from either one of us but that had gone wrong early, when she was smaller than a seed. It was mentioned nowhere in the medical journals that Megan scoured on PubMed. Poppy was singular. The young doctors regarded her as an interesting challenge. The old doctors shook their heads imperceptibly, their faces long with knowing.
Megan and I attended a meeting of an online support group for parents of kids with Dravet syndrome, which was the closest thing to what Poppy had. I had imagined they might be possessive of the diagnosis and wouldn’t welcome interlopers, but they were too sad to care. As they spoke, it was like someone was putting layer after layer of wet newspaper over my mouth and nose. I was getting less and less air, but I was in some kind of trance, too. I was captivated by their suffering; literally, captured. When the meeting ended, I looked over at Megan. Her brown eyes were glossy and half-closed. She was shallow breathing under newspaper, too. We never went back.
I longed to fall into my work but I stumbled through it, making bad mistakes, wasting my own time for months on end. I avoided my advisor out of shame. Megan stayed home taking care of Poppy during the day. At night, she stayed up late sucking on Swedish fish and reading neurology textbooks and medical journals and making complicated treatment plans with dependencies: if, then. She didn’t eat much in those days, said she couldn’t. Her face had become drawn and her eyes were pale and hard, the color of watered-down coffee. We used our hands and knees to push our grief down, but sometimes it came up through the ground anyway, like sewage after a rainstorm.
I still cooked dinner most nights though I was embarrassed to eat much around Megan, like it meant my grief was smaller than hers. When I was apart from her, I would sometimes eat three fast food hamburgers at once, or an entire Styrofoam carton of fried rice and General Tsao’s chicken from the food court at the outdoor mall. When I was eating, I was just fingers and mouth, a monster reminiscent of the cortical homunculus from her textbooks.
I still read to Megan and Poppy in the evenings, too. It was the only time Megan would really take a break from taking care of Poppy and her reading and studying and planning around Poppy’s disease. We’d all snuggle up on the couch together, the IKEA number with a chaise lounge, and Megan would close her eyes and fall half asleep. Poppy had a particular fondness for Dr. Seuss. I recognized in his illustrations the California flora that was so new to me: bottlebrush, torch lily, orange clock vine. All my life I thought he had just dreamed up these strange plants, but they were depictions, barely exaggerated, of what was growing around us in Davis.
As Megan grew thinner, thinner than she was even at 19, my belly grew bigger, into the paunch I recognized from my father and grandfather. Where Megan had once carved meaning out of randomness, she was now simply trying to wrangle some small order from chaos. Megan had always been stronger and smarter than me, so I let her lead, relieved that someone else was in charge, that someone else was making the decisions, and therefore someone else was ultimately responsible for the outcome. My job was to help her, and I did my best to be good help, loyal, dedicated, hard-working.
But even on the Fintepla, the seizures were continuing to starve Poppy’s brain of oxygen. A year before, she had sentences. Now she would say, “Mama, apple,” leaving out the implied subject, verb, article. She had taken to getting around by sitting on her butt and then pulling herself forward with her hands. “Dada, up” she would say, motioning for me to carry her up the stairs. She began to have tantrums and rages. It was not clear what of this was attributable to brain damage, or to physical pain, or to frustration at a body that was failing her. She would scream and thrash, a sort of loud caricature of her body in seizure, and Megan would sit down next to her, cross-legged like a Buddha, until Poppy finally went still.
Megan said now that Poppy had failed all the medications, brain surgery was the only thing left to try. The idea was to get a detailed map of the spot in her brain where seizures started and then cut it out, like paring bruised spots off an apple. “Okay,” I said.
Megan said that Poppy would have to stay at the hospital for three days with a thin electrode grid stationed under her skull, on the surface of her brain, to map the melted spot in micrometer detail. “Okay,” I said.
At the hospital, while Megan sat vigil, I brought her coffee and sandwiches she didn’t eat and magazines she didn’t read. In the evenings, I took her home and made her toast and then pulled her into the shower with me. She was so exhausted she would lean against the wall while I gently shampooed her hair and ran soapy hands over her body. We hadn’t had sex in months and it was a shock to see her nude body, her skin almost translucent and pulled taut over her points and knobs, her nipples bigger than before the pregnancy but her breasts shrunk to a suggestion. I wanted to gather her up in my arms like she was a wounded animal and rock myself into her, sweet and soft and slow, until my semen made her well again, until pleasure brought her back to me.
The brain mapping revealed not only the precise topography of the spot we’d seen on MRI, but three more melted spots in Poppy’s brain which had been too small to see. The surgeon said he could operate on the large spot, but the small spots were too close to her language and motor function centers.
“Will that be enough to stop the seizures?” Megan asked.
“Stop, no. Reduce, yes,” the surgeon said. “And the medications may be a little more effective if we can reduce the seizure activity.”
“And her speech problem and movement problems, will they improve?” Megan asked.
“If the surgery reduces seizure frequency, we should see some improvement in her cognition and coordination. But without being able to reach the smaller spots, we expect that she will still have major deficits.”
“Okay,” I said.
Megan slouched in her seat. There was an angry set to her jaw and a wet mark on her cheek was just visible under the fluorescent lights. She didn’t talk the whole ride home.
I ran a bath for my girls, who were both tired and silent. I undressed them gently. Megan got in the tub. I put a shower cap on Poppy to keep her bandages dry, and then lifted her in, leaned her back against Megan’s abdomen. Megan held her close and I sat on the toilet lid, reading to them both softly from Roald Dahl. Periodically I checked the water temperature, letting some run out, and then adding more hot water, testing the temperature against my wrist like breastmilk, until Poppy was fully asleep, her limbs relaxed and her face peaceful.
Finally, I lifted Poppy off of Megan and over my shoulder. Megan wrapped a towel around herself and then we both patted Poppy dry as softly as we could, like we were dusting a china doll. She stirred a little but did not wake. I put her on her bed to nap and then Megan and I stood over her, shoulder to shoulder, watching her sleep. Her arms were covered in soft golden down. There were pale freckles across the bridge of her nose and she was snoring very gently, like a nursed kitten. Her eyelashes were fluttering and behind her eyelids, her eyeballs darted back-and-forth. She was dreaming.
I went to the kitchen and began to make dinner. I rubbed rosemary and salt into lamb chops. I scrubbed dirt off new potatoes. I made a vinaigrette for baby greens for Megan and I and prepped baby carrots with butter and brown sugar to roast for Poppy.
Megan sat at the kitchen table watching my hands as I worked. I put a bowl of grapes in front of her but she shook her head.
“We need to talk about Poppy,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. I rinsed my hands clean and then sat down across from her.
She was quiet, gazing into the grapes, worrying her wedding ring. I wasn’t sure if she was waiting for me to say more or just gathering her thoughts. Finally, she closed her eyes and said, slowly, with her face very still, “What are we going to do?”
“Well, the doctor said surgery is the next step,” I said.
“Even in the best-case scenario, she’s sick.”
She was speaking in a measured way, the effort of her calm showing in pinpoints of sweat on her brow.
“I know it’s hard,” I said, “But what else can we do?”
She looked up from the grapes and studied my face. “Maybe we need to stop waiting for her to get better.”
I didn’t know what she meant, but when in doubt, I went for supportive: “I know you’ll figure out the right thing to do,” I said.
“Jesus,” she said. Her face broke open and she was glowering at me. “I’m asking you to make a choice with me. Everyone thinks you’re dad of the year because you make dinner. But all the real shit is my fucking job.”
I woke up in the night. Cold air was coming in through the open window and the perfume of the yellow trumpet flower outside wafted in. My head hurt in the same spot and I put my arm out to pull Megan close, but she wasn’t there. I rolled over, yawning, and swung my legs out of bed. I would tell her I was sorry we fought. That she just had to name it and I would do it. And that she had to sleep. That we both needed sleep to take care of Poppy.
But she wasn’t on the living room couch with blue light illuminating the very beginnings of crows’ feet. She wasn’t standing at the stove, waiting for water to boil for tea. The bathroom door was open and it was dark inside; she wouldn’t be there either.
The door to Poppy’s room was closed. I opened it just a little, careful to lift the knob and then push to avoid the creaking sound. Megan was bent over Poppy’s bed, motionless. She was holding a pillow over Poppy’s face and Poppy was still as a board.
Quietly, I pulled the door shut. I got back in bed. I slept. I slept like I used to; like a teenager; like someone who is busy eating and growing, eating and growing, cells constantly in a state of division. Poppy was out of danger and I could finally sleep.
I don’t know when Megan came to bed. I didn’t feel the mattress dip or disturb. I woke up before her, hearing the early morning bird song and the circling guh-guh-guh of a sprinkler.
I made coffee. There were no words in my head, no feeling in my body except a deep humming calm and the heat of the cup in my hands. I sat on our tiny patio in a ladder-back IKEA chair and watched a dark-eyed junco make a nest, gathering each small twig, one by one.
Megan came out a couple hours later. She looked at me, hesitating. She said my name, her voice breaking in the middle.
“Okay,” I said.
I stood up and embraced her. She sobbed and her body against me was hot and fragile and bony as a bird. I could feel the pattern of her skeleton through her thin cotton T-shirt and jersey bottoms.
“Okay. Okay,” I said.
After Megan made the necessary phone calls to tell Poppy’s doctors that she had passed in her sleep, to arrange the burial, to tell her parents and sister, she got in bed and stayed there for a week. I slept 10 hours a night, waking without head pain. She slept 12 or 16. We were too tired to talk, so when she was awake, we watched old Cheers reruns from bed. People sent gift baskets of dried fruits and nuts or left ceramic dishes of mac and cheese or homemade garlic noodles, which she ate, suddenly voracious.
There would be no funeral. Megan had her buried in a plain pine box, unfinished. She couldn’t bear to go to the grave site, so I went by myself after it was done. It was an overcast morning. I scattered wildflower seeds on the fresh earth above her and left her favorite books in a stack. The rain would come down on them, soak the pages. The words would mold and mulch.
In public, people either avoided me or said, “But how are you?” They thought Poppy’s death was the tragedy, but every day the pattern was knitting itself back over the hole, the weave softening from wire to wool. We had grieved while she was alive, a dozen times over. Now we could rest. Now we could work: Megan began taking as many substitute shifts as she could get. I could think about growing things again; about creating things for people to plant and harvest and consume. I could breathe. I could sit in the greenhouse and close my eyes and pretend I was in a Korean bathhouse and let the heat work its way through my clothes and release me. Every day the new sunlight ran an iron over the pattern, smoothing it out.
As the news spread out in ripples, the cards began to come. Hallmark cards from people we knew in high school and college, family friends, cousins, in the cursive script of mourning, in silver and white and celestial blue. She was in a better place, at peace, at rest, with God now, we cannot begin to imagine, so sorry, praying for you, thinking of you, all part of a plan, happens for a reason, take comfort, if you need anything.
But she was not in the sky. The wild lightning was gone from her. She was in the ground. In the ground, with fat earthworms and tunneling beetles and fungal spores blooming green on her cheeks. Poppy was over and so was our suffering. Poppy had no soul, but her teeth, her skull, her long bones: I pictured them sometimes, white in the box six feet under fresh black earth. They would last at least the length of my own lifetime.
Megan and I stacked the cards on the kitchen table, not wanting to open them after the first dozen or so. And then one evening, drinking wine after dinner in companionable silence, she started idly building them into a house of cards. I joined, leaning and stacking them into a big Jenga dare on the kitchen table. When it finally toppled, Megan shrugged, pushed off from the table, and left the room. I gathered the cards up into a stack and then dropped them one after another into the blue recycling bin.
I held Megan close that night, and we kissed deeply for the first time in many months. Though so much had changed, her mouth tasted like it always had: apricots, honey, seawater. She was coming back to me and relief washed through me like a cold and rushing river. I let it pull me down, down into a dreamless sleep.
In the morning, I found Megan sleeping in Poppy’s bed, a pillow pressed to her breast like a baby.
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