Allie

At a party last night, I found myself sharing about how my "balloon-making" skills (or lack there of) made me a popular volunteer with the kids in the UNC pediatric unit.

Afterward I was thinking about my dear Allie (her last name is changed in the story) and felt prompted to share a story I wrote in honor of her precious life. At her funeral, the preacher shared how he led Allie to Christ shortly after the doctors became aware of her tumor. I am confident, and await the day, that I will see her completely healthy and happy in heaven.

Spring 2007

Seven-year-old Allie walks in front of me, wearing a pink pajama set. Her thin arms are visible; the sleeveless top stretches around her swollen belly (a tumor inside refuses to shrink, making a grave for itself). Her bald head is soft with the hair struggling to grow back. She is using both of her hands to hold six pink and red cards, so I wheel her I.V. It is twice her size.

Often, on the bus ride over to the children’s hospital, some homework assignment or broken relationship or sense of loneliness would leave me leaning against the window, eyes closed to the smile of the friendly bus-driver in the mirror. But as the hospital elevator rose, my problems became small and selfish. It was wonderful to leave them, to step through the doors of the elevator, opening at the sixth floor.

I have on my Carolina blue polo (“UNC hospital volunteer” stitched in maroon thread over my heart) and photo I.D., clipped to my collar, in the corner, a glittering flower sticker that Allie gave me. These allow me to be here, to draw closer to Allie and her family with each visit—however unprepared and inadequate I feel.

Allie looks over her shoulder at me—that big smile on her wan face, bright as the afternoon sun that gleams through the windows and those life-filled eyes, blue, completing the smile: “C’mon, Lizzie! You’ll pull out my I.V. if you can’t keep up!” (A frightening thought. I laugh with her but match my step to her shuffling slippers.)

We’re on a mission to deliver special valentines that Allie has made from the new packs of Crayola markers and multi-colored construction paper her mom Ruth bought her at Wal-Mart. As we walk down the hallway, Allie waves to the small boy in the room next to hers (his door is opened and the T.V. is on; his parents are gone); he’s “sick too.” We round the corner, approaching the reception desk where young nurses in colorful scrubs—pink, green, and blue; floral or polka-dot patterned—pull and replace charts, chat a moment before darting to answer a patient’s call, and laugh at the two of us “rolling up.”

“What have you been up to Miss Allie? What’s that in your hands?” The nurse’s name is hidden by the long, brunette pony-tail that has fallen around her shoulder after bending to grab Allie’s hand and smile into her face.

“I made a card for you; well, actually I forgot to make one for you, but I’ve brought some for a few of the nurses…and I can make some more.” It was the truth, so she said it.

Allie loved honesty and animals and arts and crafts. We strung beads, colored, and made ornaments on the tray that folded up from the side of her bed where she also ate the cafeteria food she mostly disliked (and the McDonalds and Chinese she begged for when her appetite returned after chemotherapy) and where she finished her homework, assigned by the hospital teacher (whom Allie also mostly disliked). She’d sit upright with her covers around her waist like the large skirt of Mother Ginger in the Nutcracker.

After a few months of visiting Allie in the hospital, I brought in a balloon animal-making kit. She pumped air into the flimsy balloons that looked like oversized tadpoles and passed the sausage-like result to me to tie its end. Two twists, maybe three, and “Pop!” We’d laugh until she held her stomach and moaned a little behind her smile. At the end of our time together that day, we gazed in pride at the pink dog, neon-green rabbit, and the white swan which we were most proud of. As I left the hospital room, on Allie’s strict orders, I placed the swan by the sink to prevent it from meeting its end like the other rubber creatures we had spent the afternoon making. The next day when I returned the swan was gone, but I didn’t ask what had happened to it.

Summer 2007

When I arrived at the Jones’ trailer home, Ruth hugged me, longer and tighter than usual, as if to say, “We made it. She’s getting better…for good this time. Can’t hardly believe it, but I’ll sure try!” I stood in the kitchen tying grass skirts on Allie’s fourth-grade friends (she wanted a Luau for her 8^th birthday party), cutting Allie’s birthday cake, laughing with her mother, sister, aunts, and grandmothers before Allie tugged me out the back door into her huge yard. Seeing Allie run over the grass, short and yellow from the summer drought but lovely when trampled under her bare feet, was surreal, she: no longer bound to some iron pole or machine or the fear of death.

The trips around the children’s cancer unit or down to the hospital’s basement for chemotherapy were as far as we had gone together; and now, she was grabbing my hand, running towards the shed to show me her hatched chicks, laughing and yelling, “C’mon Lizzie! Keep up!” Her face was softening, her cheekbones hidden under full and flushed skin; her hair looked like she had buzzed it, but it would be just under her chin in a year’s time.

The party was over but the leis still hung around my neck where Allie’s arms had been. Allie drove away from me in her “big surprise,” the golf cart her father and brothers had painted Giotto blue with “Allie Cat” in black on the front. Allie wanted to drive a tractor and help her dad on the farm when she grew up. I backed out of her gravel driveway, puffs of white emerging in front and behind me from wheels crushing the rocks as if they were in a crucible. We had said goodbye for the last time without knowing it. One evening, a year later, my thoughts were on applying enough sunscreen to avoid my annual “bad burn,” whether tacos or pesto pasta was for dinner, and how blue the sky and ocean were, when I listened, through static, to a voicemail from Ruth:

“Allie passed away Monday….”

I climbed the stairs to the top deck of my grandparent’s beach house to find my mom; she was dozing in a porch chair. I wanted to tell her what had happened, but the crash of the waves—the waves breaking on the sand drown everything out—those waves roar and say it all.

June 26, 2008

My mom had driven with me from the beach to Allie’s funeral. After the graveside service, we found a gas station near Allie’s home. The sun and air must have conspired together: the humidity made the heat almost unbearable. We left the car running so we could have the cool blasts of the air-conditioner while I finished pasting pictures that I took at Allie’s eighth birthday party into a Carolina-blue photo album.

After about ten minutes, an older man with a worn cap and overalls approached us, smiling (a few teeth missing). We rolled down the window, only catching the end of his question: “…all right?”

“Oh, yes. My daughter’s just finishing up something for the Joneses…. Did you know Allie?” She asked the question with an ease I couldn’t understand—I didn’t look up; instead, I picked up the pictures that had slid onto the carpeted floor.

That scuff of his shoe against the pavement, that clank as he tugged on his overall strap, that pause—I had to make sure—that look past us into the fields across the road—he had known her.

“She used to come down here just a-sittin’ in’er daddy’s lap, drivin’ that tractor-a his—or she was a-thinkin’ she was drivin’. Mr. Jones, now he mows that field just over there for me. She’d buy candy from ma-store. Just the brightest little thing you ever laid eyes on—never stopped talkin’ for a minute; that is, once you got’er started with some question ‘bout Tom ‘er dog or that cow-a hers. I’d take’er favorite candy up to’er when she couldn’t make the trip down the road no more. Sure is gonna miss’er, that Miss Allie—me and everybody….”

Ruth and I are standing in the kitchen of the trailer home as she turns and fingers each page of the album. She speaks of the party as if Allie were playing with her friends in the next room, planning her ninth birthday. Somehow we are both able to laugh when we remember how Allie chased everyone around the yard with a can of pink silly string.

I don’t know anything about Allie’s last few months, days—her final moments—and how can I ask Ruth now; she’s smiling. The last picture in the album is of her squatting by the picnic table, hugging Allie—it makes us both choose silence over some comment that will lift, flutter, and fall through the air.

Ruth has a quiet strength; Allie had it too—head bent, her bangs covering her eyes, tears and words finally come:

“When it got real bad and we knew we couldn’t hide it from her anymore, I went into her room—we’d spend all day and night with’er, you know, she couldn’t get out of bed; she’s in so much pain. I said, ‘Allie, Jesus needs you up in heaven; he needs another angel.’ She didn’t say a-thing, just shut her eyes real tight, and asked if she could have a minute to herself. I says, ‘Sure you can, honey.’ When I came back a little while later, she acted like nothing had changed. She said she was ready to die when the pain got real bad but she never said nothing else about it right up to the end.”