Their Warmth
By Rhonda Zimlich
Pause and breathe deeply the scent of home. Everything here smells of freshly upturned soil, not just the air, thick with the scent of loam and earth. The sweet decay of last year’s leaves dawdles in trace whiffs. Bleeding hearts and delphiniums stand taut as if they’ve just burst through the ground. Smell it all. Smell the gate even—it smells like freshly cut trees conveying the dark soil where cedars once grew—a newness to its essence, though this gate is twenty years old if it is a day. All of it is home. Carrie pauses with her nose nearly touching the cedar slats. The aroma is welcoming to her city-worn bones. But she fears she should not have come.
Carrie knows Afreen waits somewhere in the house, poised with an argument to convince her to move home. Afreen will try all the usual tactics: the local produce is good for Carrie’s health, the peace will maintain Carrie’s stress level, cool temperatures among the trees are ideal for the sensitive nature of her autoimmune system ravaged by chronic illness. She’ll be right on each count. It will be hard for Carrie to argue. Carrie will assuage Afreen with empty promises before ultimately returning to the city. As hard as it is for her to resist, Carrie enjoys this exchange, this dance with Afreen. She feels needed and wanted the way a child needs a mother. Only, Afreen is not her mother.
Afreen and her father married the year Carrie turned seventeen. Before then, they dated for five years. Afreen filled the role of Mother during the depths of Carrie’s adolescence, always reassuring her that she never intended to take Carrie’s mother’s place (though, when Carrie is honest, she often wishes Afreen would assume the role). Then, after her father’s heart attack, she and Afreen bond through the trauma of sudden loss before Carrie finally pulls up her roots from this dark soil and moves to Portland. She leaves holes for Afreen to fill, holes now stuffed with columbine, with sunflowers and peonies and camellias. Each time Carrie returns, the yard grows with more variety and color than her last visit.
Here is a camellia, bright red bursting from its glossy deep green. Carrie touches the waxy leaves, looks into the blossom’s center as her left eye moves in and out of focus. She knows that her pupils are different sized, feels the involuntary nature of it all, winks the left eye shut to gaze upon the flower.
At twenty-one, her first year in the city, Carrie receives her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. M.S. is the acronym they all use. Try the letters in a whisper. Yell them to an empty room. Hear them in the thousand voices of nurses, specialists, neurologists, physical therapists, Afreen.
She grips the head of her cane, its round handle smooth in her grasp. Feel her hand tingle with the stress of her commute and new job. She edits photos for a local magazine, no longer filling the financial gaps with freelance photography and editing services. She figures the long hours are why her feet now tingle, too. She takes small steps, pulls her sweater snug with her free hand.
She stops at the oak tree trunk near the house, long a friend, its main branches once lifting her to the sky where she climbed like a spider on a string. There, see it there! In the lower crown, the missing branch is conspicuous in scar and folded bark. This is the place where the branch exploded with a lightning strike years ago. The tree has healed its wound, but the dense fold around this scar remains.
Carrie’s scars remain. Lightning, too, inside her brain and spine, attacks her own cambium layer, the myelin surrounding her tender nerves, like the delicate branches of the uppermost canopy of this tree. She feels a constant tingling in her arms and legs. Feel the tingle like PopRocks under the skin.
Imagine telling a doctor about this sensation, how the vocabulary does not exist to describe the feeling, strange and new. The doctor sends her to a neurologist who orders the first MRI. After the lesions are found in her brain and spinal column, she climbs atop a cold gurney for a spinal tap—or ‘lumbar puncture,’ the official medical term used.
Afreen drives her to the procedure, waits in the waiting room. She offers her enduring presence, ever the pillar of assurance. She holds Carrie’s hand during recovery, a surrogate mother who promises to never take another’s place. She drives Carrie home to that small Portland apartment. She helps Carrie remain horizontal. Now she serves the role of both parents, offering the same one-liner jokes Carrie’s father would have spoken under these circumstances, lifting her head for a drink from the straw and sliding the bedpan under Carrie, the way her mother might have. The latter, Carrie cannot say because she has not known her mother. But she knows Afreen. Afreen shows up for everything: school plays, checkups, movie releases. She teaches Carrie about tampons and boys and applying for college.
Carrie must lie perfectly still, though her restlessness legs will not permit this, and so she is moved to the O.R. and sedated. In retrospect, Carrie is glad for the sedation. See the needle, a five-inch barb. She cannot help but imagine how it threads between her vertebrae as she drifts to oblivion. See the needle puncture her spine. See it sip the precious nectar there.
After the procedure, the doctor orders Carrie to remain still and horizontal for the rest of the day while her body makes up the missing spinal fluid. A whopping headache will come, they warn, if she does not remain horizontal. Her results are supposed to offer some relief, because the diagnosis could have been worse. M.S. is a best-case scenario, they say. Still, twenty-one years old with a sentence of chronic illness after suffering the loss of both parents during her young life does not fill Carrie with gratitude, even if the diagnosis is a best-case scenario.
The headache comes regardless of her perfectly horizontal stillness. The nurses release her to the care of Afreen.
Through her dazed stupor, Carrie can read Afreen’s expression, her desire to help Carrie through this newest development, the frustration at not having the words, at not being able to take this burden on instead. Afreen watches and waits. Afreen reads a journal article about autoimmune disease. The knowledge she learns about M.S. floats through her thoughts.
“Says here,” Afreen speaks slow, her finger pointing at the page, “that you should avoid stress.” Her glance says more than what she reads. Carrie already knows she disapproves of her workload, the long hours and low cash, the sporadic income. Afreen often urges Carrie to return to Canby, escape the city and get back to the ease and comforts of home.
Stress is a topic Afreen always discusses with Carrie. She will offer insights read from articles, persuasive bits she watches on YouTube. Afreen attends talks about M.S. delivered by neurologists who are at the cutting edge of modern research, delivers her new data to Carrie. Carrie never minds her knowledge of the disease. Afreen is more invested in the education of M.S. recovery than Carrie is, ever the worrier, the maternal figure she promises not to become, using knowledge to combat her fear of the unknown, to form the bond they both need but will not acknowledge.
Think about how long they have engaged in this dance. Carrie counts the years since her twelfth birthday. She counts the years in months since her M.S. diagnosis, one hundred twenty next month. She is now thirty-one and still walking. She steps gingerly up the path toward the house, careful to avoid the cobblestones loose in the center. She grips her cane.
Remember how amazed the doctors are at her mobility. They comment on how well she moves. Sometimes Carrie still gets around without the cane. She has read up on diet and exercise, and so spends a good deal of time at the local pool swimming laps. This is much easier than long walks, the miles when anything can happen. Carrie finds that, after just one mile, she clips the edge of a sidewalk slats, falls or stumbles, and mostly scares the hell out of herself. Be a thirty-one year old falling on concrete. See the gray hard slab rushing up to the impact.
She avoids walking long distances; she avoids cracks and cobble the way she now picks her way gingerly up the walk to Afreen’s front door.
“Is that you, Carrie?” A voice through the open window calls. Hear Afreen’s feet shuffle across the hardwood floor inside. See her form emerge at the screen, rumple but not unkempt. A smile dazzles like a beacon through the shadowy interior.
Afreen arrives at the doorway peering at Carrie through the dark mesh of the screen. She presses its wooden frame and the creak from the screen door startles a banditry of chickadees. They scatter away from the front porch zooming around Carrie as they escape. The sound of their flight rushes past her with a whoosh of wind, but Carrie cannot be certain she actually feels the air move with their flight—the sound gives her the illusion of wings brushing her hair and face. Assume a sound that is tactile as well as audible, such a visceral experience that the air moves with the whir. Afreen laughs in a chitter which sounds like the chickadee language. She steps out onto the porch holding the screen door open with her body. Carrie falls into her embrace.
Afreen ushers her into the warmth of the house. Carrie smells earthy incense and steeping tea, sees both arranged at the small table by the window. A bowl of dates stands at the ready. The tea, in mismatched cups, issues a curl of steam that mixes with the rising ribbon of smoke from the incense. A plate of cookies awaits them and they sit together still holding hands. Afreen’s eyes are joyous and sparkle with tears.
“Let’s have a look at you,” she says as she scans Carrie’s face. She gives her hand a light squeeze before letting go to pass Carrie the sugar bowl and spoon. Afreen will sweeten her tea by nibbling a cookie or date, but Carrie prefers to add sugar.
“Thank you,” Carrie says and the words echo a thousand times in her thoughts. Feel the gratitude she has for this woman rising up inside of her, washing her with happiness, a glancing touch more perceptible than chickadee wings. Carrie appreciates Afreen more than she has ever said, ever could say.
“How long can you stay?”
Carrie expects this question, knows it would come early.
“I’ve got to head back after supper,” she says. “But not before we’re all talked out. Wee hours, as you would say.”
“Morning’s the wee hours,” she says and winks at Carrie. “Maybe I’ll change your mind. I think my blueberry wine can be pretty convincing. And I’ve made up your room. For now, catch me up.”
Carrie swallows, avoids the argument, and reaches for the sugar bowl.
“There’s not much new,” Carrie says stirring a spoonful of sugar into her cup. “I’ve been busy with work. Took a job in Seattle for a week. It was nice to get up north before the rain. Not really much else.”
“Oh, now, how about your leisure time?” Afreen bites a small, brown date, places a spoon into her own tiny cup, stirs, sips. “Surely a girl your age is out with friends from time to time. Your best gal? A boyfriend, maybe?”
“No time, Afreen, seriously.” Carrie blows on the surface of her tea before sipping. The acid is palatable, an orange pekoe likely imported from Dubai.
“When I was your age, I kept quite the calendar. I did it all without the Facebook or Chatsnap.”
“SnapChat,” Carrie corrects.
“That, too.” She leans forward, fixes Carrie in her gaze. “You’ll go sad without social interaction. Real, in-person engagements.”
Look at Afreen. Grey hair piled atop her head and cinched in a bun with a jewel-tipped hair stick. Happy lines around her eyes and mouth, a mouth that always holds a smile. Her face is round and glows with a deep, Panglossian pink that lends her a constant flush. Carrie cannot remember a time when Afreen’s face was not washed in that same pink, a happy glow, sure of her world and love of it, too. She wears a grey cape-shawl, knit herself years ago; holes darned over time with various shades of grey. Her outfit below the shawl is a sturdy floral printed dress with denim pants beneath, a look she has kept as long as Carrie can remember. Not a tall woman, though not short or stout, Afreen is average in most regards—but not her posture. Her posture is and has always been upright, shoulders back, never a stoop to her stature even in these older years. A proud woman in both attitude and form. Carrie’s high school friends called Afreen a hippie.
And look at Afreen looking at Carrie, now. See how she scrutinizes the dark circles below Carrie’s eyes. See the way Carrie stoops, curled over her teacup like a wilting daisy. Watch her hands tremble to hold the tea to her mouth. Does she have the strength to rise up, sit straight, broaden her shoulders? Carrie thinks Afreen wonders this about her. She sits up.
“I’ve got plenty of social interaction at work.” Carrie says like a declaration. “I go out with the gang each Thursday for drinks.” She knows using words like ‘the gang’ sounds compulsory.
Afreen forgives the lie. “I’ve just planted some new kale, a winter variety that turns purple during the shortest days of sunlight.”
“Where?”
“Just there.” She points to the kitchen window. “Out back by the shed. Sunlight’s the best there in winter, you know.”
Carries knows.
Afreen leans to pluck a cookie from the plate, a pink glazed shortbread. “After dinner, let’s go out back and I’ll show you. I have so many new things to show you.”
“That would be nice,” Carrie says, though this sounds compulsory, too. Instead, she wants to tell Afreen her bad news, wants to share with her the fear that comes with the progression in her disease. Consider what it would be like to have a terrible diagnosis change into something worse. Carrie considers this as she sips her tea. She will not tell Afreen today, she decides. Better to wait until the time is right, or perhaps necessary. The doctors are still so impressed with her ability to get around as easily as she does.
Carrie also takes a cookie, brings it to her mouth, nibbles. The pink frosting tastes like pink, like a nondescript sugary-sweet glaze, exactly like she expects.
Hear the chittering of the chickadees return. Listen to them squabble somewhere near the open window. How fierce they sound, each proclaiming his love or claiming her territory or protecting its last bit of suet. Theirs is a sort of hunger that calls out in many longings.
It is Carrie who breaks the silence.
“What is for dinner, anyway.”
Look at Afreen trying to be coy; see her sly look. Carrie knows before she answers what Afreen has been busily preparing. In her mind, she says the dish in unison with Afreen: Manti. Carrie can smell its simmer now just over the incense, almost taste the pomegranate dressing, feel the small dumpling shapes on her imaginative pallet. Her mouth involuntarily waters at the thought of it.
“You shouldn’t have gone through the trouble,” Carrie says, though she deeply appreciates the gesture.
“It’s no trouble. I channel my grandmother as I press the dough. See my own mother as I stuff and boil. In a way, this connects me to my childhood. And so, it also connects me to your childhood.” Afreen sips her tea again. “Do you remember the first time I made them for you? You were a devil back then. Such a sassy thing at thirteen!”
“We don’t call girls ‘sassy’ anymore.” Carrie says this as she sets the half-eaten cookie on her saucer. Pink crumbs fall to the porcelain.
“Maybe we don’t now, but you were certainly sassy then. No other word for it. You knew everything. Everything!” Afreen leans back releasing a loud cackle from deep within her belly. It climbs out of her mouth and echoes through the house. The sound scatters the birds outside once more. They rattle the air. Hear their wings whir away again. How they startle and flee. How they love to return.
“I know what you meant. It’s just that—” She pauses. Carries thinks about her own mother, a two-dimensional rendition created from her own narrative, arising from the two-dimensional photographs she keeps in a shoebox. The shoebox, a three-dimensional object filled with flat things.
“That’s fine, dear. That’s just fine.” Afreen pats Carries leg. “You were always more assertive than sassy anyway. Not a subtle bone about you. Tell you what, let’s drop it. Why don’t you tell me what happened at your check-up last week?”
Now the birds share small chirps. Perhaps they ask one another about the safety of space. Perhaps they check the tepid garden for lurking dangers. The leaves rustle. The tree creaks. Hear the sounds out the window, sounds that surround the house, bathe it in nature’s music.
Afreen’s pat on Carrie’s leg causes a ripple effect. Feel the bones in Carrie’s legs, how they shift in her chair. She folds one leg atop the other. The chair squeaks with this motion; announces its age and its weakness. Carrie picks up the cookie once more. Stuffs the whole thing in her mouth and sips the tea. The crumbs dissolve in the hot liquid; she mixes them with her tongue and bites down. She nods at Afreen as the cookie melts into the tea, acknowledging the answer that must come after she chews. She reviews the prognosis in her thoughts.
M.S. Try the letters in a whisper. So many acronyms enter her vocabulary. Some she knows from the beginning. R.R.M.S. Relapse and Remitting M.S. This type, the doctors proclaim, is hers since the initial diagnosis. This type is quite treatable, quite manageable, quite livable. Carrie tries out the new letters against the old, such a small change. P.P.M.S. She thinks them as she clears the cookie from her tongue, swallows hard. No longer R.R. Like a railroad crossing, like a restroom in SnapChat speak. Like a nursery rhyme. P is for Primary, Primary Progressive. Her Relapse and Remitting M.S. is replaced by this new prognosis.
Primary.
Progressive.
In her mind, she asks the doctor “What does it mean?”
See her in the exam room. See her brain scans on the computer screen. See the doctor in her white coat, like a cliché. See Carrie wringing her hands. “What does it mean?” She asks a thousand times in her memory of last week. In her mind, she knows Afreen already knows what it means. She only has to tell her the new letters. Speak the new acronym in a whisper. Speak it and wait.
Instead, she uses all of her courage for what comes next.
“Afreen,” she says in a whisper like the touch of a wing.
“Afreen,” she speaks like the wind through the oak tree in the front yard that even then ferries the smell of loam in through the open window.
“Afreen,” she sits up straighter.
Hear the name, the name of her mother. Hear how she asks so much as she speaks that name. That simple name. A pleasure to say. The protection that name affords.
And see Afreen, reaching, fingers open, hands stretching, her entire body moving toward Carrie. See Afreen go to her knees, fold into the younger woman, curve into her almost-daughter to comfort and to hold her. See Afreen’s head in Carrie’s lap, arms around her mid-section as Carrie cries softly into Afreen’s grey hair. Smell her hair, her shawl, their warmth. Feel the way these women fuse their fear and courage at once, conveying everything they need to bear.
“My child,” Afreen says. “My dear child.”
Rhonda Zimlich (she/her) is a professorial lecturer at American University in Washington, DC. Her work has appeared in several literary journals, including Brevity, Past-Ten, and American Writer’s Review. Zimlich received the 2020 Literary Award in Nonfiction from Dogwood, a Journal of Poetry and Prose at Fairfield University and the 2021 Fiction Award from Please See Me. Her writing focuses on grief, intergenerational trauma, and occasional ghosts. Please follow her on Twitter @RhondaZimlich.