Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [35]
“We don’t have this disease,” I wanted to scream that day as the doctor gave us—rather, gave my uncle—our directives.
“Even though they’re not infectious, we can’t be too careful,” the doctor said. “They must now use their own utensils. No sharing with others.”
Since we all shared meals and utensils at home, this would be a constant reminder both to us and everyone else that our bodies were hosting a potentially deadly contagion.
“They have to follow the treatment closely,” the doctor continued. “They must take the pills every day or the virus will get stronger and will move to other parts of their bodies. Unless their X-rays read differently in six months, they won’t be able to travel.”
He wrote two prescriptions, which he handed to my uncle.
“Don’t forget,” he told us, looking into our faces at last. “Every morning when you take your pills, you’re closer to New York.”
My uncle stopped by a pharmacy on Grand Rue, where his youngest sister, Tante Zi, had a stationery stand. Surrounded by mounds of pens and notebooks, Tante Zi jumped out of her chair and instantly scooped Bob up in her arms.
Of my father’s sisters, Tante Zi was the most playful. Short and plump, and at her roundest looking and feeling like a feather pillow, she liked to pull Bob and me into her arms whenever she saw us and bury her face in our necks, tickling us with the tip of her nose.
She and Bob were caught in just such an embrace when I blurted out, “You can’t do that anymore.”
“Why not?” She released Bob, handing him a brand-new pen and notebook to scribble in as he sat on the footstool in front of her.
“Because we have TB,” I said.
She seemed stunned, looking up at my uncle for confirmation. My uncle shrugged, then slapped one hand on top of the other as if to say, “What are you going to do?”
As if to answer, Tante Zi motioned for me to come to her, and just as she always had, wrapped her arms around my neck and sweetly buried her nose in my neck.
From that day on, every morning before school, even as other children walked by and stared, my uncle would line Bob, Nick and me up on the front gallery and as Tante Denise held our ceramic cups of water—our own, which we were not allowed to share with anyone else—handed us the aspirin-like pills that were meant to cure us. Nick, it turned out, also “failed” his precautionary X-rays and had to be treated along with us. Liline, however, had tested negative.
Once the pill was in our mouths, my uncle would hand us each a large spoonful of cod-liver oil, which we were to swallow before Tante Denise would surrender the water.
Perhaps fearing that we might gag, Tante Denise would always cry out, “Fè vit, fè vit,” urging us to hurry up and wash the pills down, before she took the cups back.
During our treatment, Bob developed a palm-sized rash on his back that alternately bled and scabbed over. At first the doctor, whom during our monthly checkups I began to think of as Dr. TB, told us that Bob’s rash was unrelated to his medication, but then I developed an even larger lesion on my right buttock, and he was forced to admit some connection. Nick, on the other hand, completely lost his appetite, dropped eight pounds, and constantly complained of cold feet.
Thankfully the rashes, coldness and loss of appetite went away when our treatment ended six months later. After another series of X-rays, Dr. TB gave Bob and me our medical clearance to travel to the United States.
But a new problem emerged. During the six months that we were being treated, my father was laid off from the glass factory where he was working, and because both my parents and Kelly and Karl were now surviving on my mother’s modest income as a textile factory worker, our application was placed on hold until my father could prove that he and my mother had enough income to provide for all of us. Just when my uncle needed them most, my father stopped writing us letters around this time. In his final note, he proposed that we try the now much cheaper call centers run by Teleco, the national telephone company.
As we waited