Love from a to Z

MARVEL:
STUBBORNNESS OR, MAYBE, TENACITY
I think I’ve called it tenacity in my journal elsewhere. The not-letting-go of
something you believe in.
I’m pretty good with that. Once I believe something is worth not letting
go, I can hold on for years. Maybe even forever.
But it can also be seen as stubbornness, the unwillingness to see things in
a different way from what you believe.
Is my refusal to involve Dad in my illness tenacity or stubbornness?
I like to think it’s tenacity, because I have a strong reason for not telling
him.
He’s still having trouble dealing with Mom’s death.
It will send him spiraling if he finds out about this.
I’ve seen that happen once before. When Hanna got a high fever when
she was three and was lethargic and couldn’t hold up her head, and the
doctors said they couldn’t rule out meningitis.

---

Dad went almost comatose. He wouldn’t leave her side at the hospital.
He took a two-week leave from work, but that was just to sit by her hospital
cot, watching Hanna almost sleeplessly.
I, at eleven years old, kept things running at home until I couldn’t
anymore, and Marta, who’d come twice a week to clean since we’d moved
to Doha, began checking in on me every day.
I don’t even know if Dad realized that Marta had done that for me.
He can’t handle more grief. Why would I tell him something that’ll
shatter him further?
My reason is ironclad, something to believe in, to not involve Dad in my
MS for now.
But there’s a part of me that knows I have a stubborn streak.
That once I make up my mind about something, I refuse to budge, even if
it makes sense to do so.
Is it right that Ms. Raymond is being my guardian instead?
Is it right that Dad will be hurt when he finds out what I’ve kept from
him? That I didn’t want him to care about me?
I don’t know, but I do know this is me.
• • •
Ms. Raymond agreed to drive me to Connor’s house.
Before I left the hospital, I texted Dad that I would be staying over at
Connor’s, that he was having the guys over.
Then I told Connor the truth.
The long version of it.
He listened surprisingly well before saying, “Yeah, you’re chilling here.”
• • •
When we got to the car in the parking lot, with Ms. Raymond pushing me in
the wheelchair the hospital had lent, she broke the comfortable and safe
silence she’d granted me before.
“I need to know something, Adam. Before I drive you.” She opened the
front passenger door.
I reached for the edge of it, to get myself up. My legs were almost back
to normal, back to how I knew them, but my vision continued to be blurry.

---

Easing myself into the seat, I waited as Ms. Raymond folded up the
wheelchair and hoisted it into the trunk.
It was obvious she was going to ask about Dad, so I had to brace myself.
Then I remembered something. Two memories that I’d always tried to
push away.
Two memories that merged into one.
But now I needed them, so I let them flood my brain.
I let them collide.
• • •
Memory one:
We were at our house in Ottawa. We’d come back for the summer when I
was eight, would be going back to Doha at the end of it.
At our house in Ottawa, there was a door to go outdoors, and when you
went through it, it was . . . the outside. There were no concrete compound
walls that you had to further cross to get to the outside outside, like at our
apartment in Doha.
Here, the rest of the world was waiting right there when we stepped out
of our house.
That, to me, was freedom. And what made me feel great about being
back home when I was a kid.
My grandparents lived in our house, Mom’s parents. They kept our home
and garden and backyard waiting for us. They kept it the same, except for
the guest bedroom, permanently theirs, and the basement—where Grandpa
had built the best workroom, large, clean, and organized, with the biggest
table in the world (in the eyes of eight-year-old me) taking over the center,
ready for any projects I wanted to do with him.
On the day of my memory, I’d been working on making a castle while
Grandpa had been making something with bars on it.
“What’s that, Grandpa?” I put the gray Lego roof piece in my hand down.
“It’s a crib. For your sister.”
Watching him push the bars into the holes he’d made on a long rectangle
of wood was the moment I realized that Hanna was going to be a real
person, not just something inside Mom’s body, an unseen being that I was
told would be my sister.
“I’m hungry.” I attached the final piece to complete the roof of the castle.

---

“Go up and eat lunch then. Grandma went out, but she left some food on
the table for you.” Grandpa picked up a mallet and began banging the bars
in. “If you need help, ask me, okay? Your mom’s sleeping.”
I went upstairs and didn’t even look on the kitchen table, at what
Grandma had left for me, and just went straight up to Mom and Dad’s
room.
I wanted French fries. Mom’s French fries.
Which were the opposite of all the other French fries I’d ever eaten in my
life. They weren’t crispy, they weren’t straight, they weren’t thin.
They were soggy and lumpy and chunky and steamy.
They were so good, like a hug for your mouth.
“Mom?” I knocked lightly at first, then harder when I heard no reply.
“Mom?”
“Come in, sweetie.” She was sitting up in bed, under the bedspread, a
book resting on her round stomach. She patted the bed beside her.
I leaned forward at the foot of the mattress, put my elbows up on it, and
propped my face on the fists I’d made to cradle it. Someone, my sister, was
going to come out of that stomach and sleep in the crib Grandpa was
making downstairs.
“Can you make me French fries?”
“Grandma left lunch for you on the table.”
“But it’s not French fries.”
“Maybe it is. Did you check?”
“But it wouldn’t be your French fries.”
She closed her book. “Do you want to know the secret to my French
fries?”
I nodded. “Can you tell me when you make them?”
She smiled, took the bedspread off her stomach, climbed out of bed.
And almost fell to the floor, something red trickling under her.
Her face, distorted and scary, looked at me.
The moan that came from within her told me it was pain that twisted her
into a mother I didn’t recognize.
I sprang back, stricken, and then ran down two flights of stairs to get
Grandpa.
Hanna was born that evening.
Prematurely, after a lot of pain. Pain I saw through the bars on the stairs
I’d sat on while Mom and Grandpa waited for an ambulance.

---

I didn’t ask for French fries again for a long time.
Then Mom’s MS took a turn for the worse.
• • •
Memory two:
We were at our house in Ottawa. We’d come back for the summer when I
was nine, would be going back to Doha at the end of it.
At our house in Ottawa, the kitchen was tiny, just two counters running
parallel to each other, one bookended by a stove and a fridge, the other
housing a sink. A small round table stood at the entrance.
On the day of my memory, I was in this kitchen, opening the freezer to
get a Popsicle. When I closed it, Mom was standing there, leaning on her
walker, smiling.
“Guess what I feel like eating,” she said, opening her eyes wide, her way
to let me know it was something special.
“A Popsicle?”
“No. French fries. My French fries.” She turned the walker round and sat
on it. “So, Adam, can you make them for me? If I teach you?”
I stood there for a second, pretending to work hard at unwrapping the
banana Popsicle, picking at the wrapper like a scab. The seam on the plastic
tore at once, and the frozen bar almost slipped out of my hands—as the
image of Mom’s twisted, pained face the day Hanna was born invaded my
thoughts.
“Hello? Earth to Adam?” Mom tilted her head. “The best French fries in
the world?”
“Okay, just putting this away. I don’t need it anymore.” I opened the
freezer door and hid my face behind it. I twisted and wrapped the clear
plastic as tight as I could around the Popsicle. Then I left the door open, a
barrier between Mom and me, as I moved to the drawer beside the fridge to
get a rubber band to fasten the wrapper tighter, keep it secure.
She wasn’t allowed to see the tear rolling down my face.
Grandpa and Grandma had told me to make sure Mom knew I was going
to be okay. Even though Mom wasn’t going to be okay.
By the time I put that Popsicle, secured with three rubber bands, back in
freezer and closed the door, Mom saw me and my face ready to learn to
make the best French fries in the world.

---

“Before I teach you, you have to promise you’ll never make them by
yourself. Dad or Grandma or Grandpa or Marta has to be around.”
I didn’t ask her why she hadn’t said, Or I have to be around. “What about
Hanna?”
She tried to throw a dish towel at me, laughing. “Babies don’t count.”
“What about when I grow up and Hanna grows up and we’re really old.
Like ten and eighteen? I still can’t make them by myself?” I grinned and
picked up the towel and, with a hook shot, landed it back on the table where
Mom had picked it up from. “What about when we’re twenty and twenty-
eight? Or sixty-one and sixty-nine? An old lady, an old man? I still can’t
make them?”
Mom looked away for a moment but not before I saw the edge of her
mouth quiver and then turn down.
I dropped to my knees to open a cupboard door. The cupboard door that
hid the potatoes. And my face.
I didn’t want to make French fries. I just wanted to curl up beside Mom
like I was a little kid again, not caring if I cried or not. Me not caring,
nobody caring that I was crying. Nobody caring that I wasn’t going to be
okay.
I wasn’t.
One by one, I took potatoes out and put them on the counter above my
head, wordlessly.
“Okay, stop,” she said, her voice husky. “Five is more than enough.”
“For both of us?”
“For all of us.”
I closed the cupboard door and made a face at Mom. “But I’ll eat three
potatoes by myself.”
She was crying. But laughing, too. Tears and smiles. “All right, fries
monster, take out more, then.”
I reopened the cupboard and added five more potatoes, one by one, again.