WHITE BIRDS

The bedroom has one window.  She never closes the blinds.  At night, darkness black as ink leaks into the room.  During the day, light spills through the slats.  She welcomes both.

     She peers in the dresser mirror, the muted summer light from the window makes her squint.  Her reflection tells the story.  Can it really be that one year ago she’d heard the news?  “You have cancer,” her doctor said.  “It’s aggressive.  Rare.  If there is any good news, it’s stage one.  We got it with the surgery.  But there’s a fifty percent chance cancer will recur without chemo.”  He’d stated the news all in one breath.  She remembers that when the doctor stopped talking, he bit his bottom lip.  Paused.  Crossed his arms, as if to protect himself against her malevolent reality.  She had broken eye contact and looked down at her lap, tucked a strand of dark hair behind her ear, then looked up into the doctor’s face.  “You’ll lose your hair during the chemo, but that’s not permanent,” he said. 

     She hadn’t thought of the embarrassment of being bald when she’d heard this.  Instead, she’d fleetingly thought that she wouldn’t need to spend a couple of hundred dollars each month coloring her long hair.  What was her original color anyway?   Then the doctor had glanced over at her husband.  “If it were my wife or sister, I’d recommend the chemo.  The odds of this kind of cancer coming back go down to eleven percent with treatment.”  Math and hair, she recollects.

     Her irises are still two round verdant circles, maybe even greener without eyelashes.  Google says after chemo it takes at least six weeks for the lashes to grow back.  She never got the hang of applying the fake lashes.  She runs her hand over the down on her head.  Red.  Bright.  She’d been ginger as a child, and the color had evolved into dark auburn.  She’d dyed her hair brunette in her thirties and stayed there.

     She chose curly wigs.  She loves wigs.  She still wears them to work.  She can hide behind a wig.  Withdraw.  No one can see what’s changing.  The regrowth underneath.   She’d purchased eyebrow wigs too.  They were easier to attach than false eyelashes.  She’d attained proficiency at positioning them above her eyes, two perfect arcs right where they were supposed to be.  Someone commented once that she had gorgeous eyebrows.  “Where do you wax?” they’d asked.  “What salon?”  She’d thought, “Why is someone asking me this?  Isn’t that too personal?  Isn’t that a really weird question?”  But she answered, “Oh, I do them myself.”  And she thought at the time, “I guess truthfully I do.  I glue them on each morning and hope they don’t start curling up at the edges by the end of the day.”  

     Now, after the chemo, the minute she gets home from work, she pulls off the wig and places it on the Styrofoam stand.  She gently peels off the eyebrow strips and puts each sliver of authentic dark brown human hair on the special paper she keeps by the bathroom sink, and then pulls on a soft cap to cover the semi-baldness.

     “Are you ready,” he calls to her.  “Don’t wear a wig.  I love your real hair.”  Her husband.  Her escort to all eight chemotherapy treatments.  The man who cleaned the picc line embedded in her left arm so that all the dreadful chemicals had a clear entryway to course through her body.  The man who never once tried to tell her what to think, or do, or feel after the diagnosis.  This man loves the carroty down and the eyes without a black fringe. “We are going to mass,” she thinks.  “My first time back after so many months. People will be merciful to me, even when they can tell, just by looking, that I’ve been sick.”

     She and her husband sit in the pew, waiting for the service to begin.  She hears people murmuring, bending to whisper in a loved one’s ear, the occasional sharp cry of a child, heels knocking on the lustrous wooden floors.  She holds her husband’s hand and rubs her fingers over the filigree of veins, like blue trumpet vines.  She’d envied those veins.  Hers invisible, unreachable.  Hidden inside her pale arms. 

     She would like to reach out and touch the blonde tendril that has strayed from the chignon of a woman who sits in front of her—gently lift the hair from the woman’s slender, vulnerable neck.   But no one does this—touches someone in that way.  What would she tell the woman when she felt her warmth, her wholeness?  “Awful things can happen to anyone.  At any time.  Out of nowhere.  You lose your bearings.  You fall.  Everything changes.  People don’t understand.  They feel afraid.  Isolate.  Don’t listen.”

     She’d tell her too.  “There can be peace where shadows exist.  Try to walk from the shadows toward the light.  The serenity you discover has nothing to do with circumstances.  It’s other-worldly, a confluence of grace.”

     She shakes her head to clear the memories of the mass and steps away from the mirror.  One year today.  The doctor says the cancer’s gone.  No more signs of it.  Remission.  People still make insensitive comments.  Maybe she hates this most of all.

       “Aren’t you afraid it’s coming back?” 

       “Make sure you’re taking lots of vitamin C.  I hear that cures cancer.”

       “Whatever you do, don’t eat white sugar.  You know cancer feeds on sugar.  My aunt went into remission, and then it returned because she ate so much ice cream.”

She stays off the internet.  So much fear and anxiety.  People on forums discuss every minute detail of their experiences, the negativity like barbed wire.  

     She walks.  Every day.  Down by the tidal creek.  Hardly anyone knows the location exists.  The geography is a sanctuary.  When she looks out her bedroom window, she can see the brackish waters in the distance.  And like the light pouring through the window, the water fluctuates—some days its surface is still and amber-colored—other days it is a territory of flowing, healing radiance.  She stands on the banks of the creek.  A breeze gusts and she feels its breath on her scalp.  The slight tang of salt fills her nostrils.  No one around.  Only the birds. 

     The congregation of white egrets is like a gathering of angels, comely necks bow to drink from green-blue tidal waters.  Do they see her, the woman with her face lifted to the sky?  Do they know they are her mentors—not fretful, not fearing, not filled with worry?  Trusting there will be food.  Daily abundance.   She lingers there a while, just a few moments more.