Читать книгу All the Wild Hungers - Karen Babine - Страница 22

14

THE YELLOW OF MY vintage four-quart Le Creuset Dutch oven named Estelle is the faded sunshine of summer lemonade, as viewed through a screen door from the distance of November. She is the first Dutch oven I found, the second of my cast iron collection, vintage Le Creuset like Agnes I could never afford in real life, sunny on a thrift store shelf for $4.99. I don’t know why I felt like she needed a name or why I thought she had a Count Basie vibe, a blues personality with a sassy grin, the weight of her so spectacularly solid and comforting, but she was perfect to attempt bone broth for my mother at a point in my culinary experience where I knew nothing about such things. I hadn’t made a soup from scratch, ever. The idea of a bone broth is to simmer a stock long enough—even up to twenty-four hours—to pull all the nutrients from the bones, the gelatin and collagen that can be drawn out only by time. Some consider bone broth the cure for everything and I was willing to try.

In these early days of chemotherapy where my mother’s bones malfunction, where we come to terms with how many children are afflicted with this particular cancer, my elfin nephew shows me that his shoes light up when he runs, when he stomps, double-footed, around the kitchen to make them pulse. He is three years old. His shoes contain tiny blue orthotics the same color as the glasses he wears that turn dark in the sun. He has finally been diagnosed with a growth hormone deficiency that has kept him in the single-digit percentiles of growth and he begins daily injections he will need until he turns eighteen. The growth hormones will catch him up to his genetics, to help his bones grow to the height he was always destined to be. There will come a point where this is normal, that H. will not need both of his parents to hold him still while the plunger pierces his tiny leg, but we have not yet reached that stage. At some point, we expect that adult bodies will break down; there is something specifically awful about the malfunctioning of a child’s body, which should be perfect in its newness.

The majority of research on my mother’s cancer is on children, not adults. I have found only five studies of adults with embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma in the last thirty years, which estimate the number of adults with this cancer at four hundred, total. I look at my nephew, still small enough that I can perch him on the red stool on the kitchen counter so he can watch the earthmovers tear up the street in front of our house while my father takes my mother to chemo, and I just watch H. and wonder. The shots are working; he is growing. But he is still so small.