Roses for Therese By Prospero Pulma Jr.

Philippines Graphic
October 10, 2011
Vol. 22, No. 19.

Roses for Therese

By Prospero Pulma Jr.

Except for his white coat and stethoscope, Therese saw the doctor as Grandpa Jose. Even his countenance mirrored her grandfather’s sorrow when he told her that he would be leaving on a journey, one that would never bring him home again. Her grandfather did return but inside a glass-topped bed ringed by candles and wreaths. He slumbered through her intermittent bawling and pleas for him to play with her. He did not stir even when they were lowering him to the ground and piling dirt on him.
“Therese,” said Dr. Luis San Gabriel, forcing himself to smile when he noticed Therese studying him. He abandoned the laboratory reports he was reading for his new patient, instantly noticing shimmering stars on her left hand. “Oh, three stars!” Therese arrived at seven-thirty for her eight o’clock kindergarten class, stayed in her seat while her classmates were wrecking the room, and answered all of Teacher Nancy’s questions about Cinderella that she read to them. For that, Teacher Nancy stamped the three stars on her hand. Finished with admiring the stars, he inspected her head, visualizing the insidious entity that brought her to his clinic.
Therese’s path to Dr. San Gabriel started at the village health center. Her mother complained to the general practitioner that headaches had become her daughter’s alarm clock, adding that she would have missed her kindergarten class were it not for acetaminophen. Just headaches, he concluded after a few queries. Nothing that acetaminophen could handle. He scribbled acetaminophen on the prescription pad while looking over Marianne’s shoulder and counting fifteen more patients behind them. Before the queue could grow to sixteen indigents, he dug out a handful of acetaminophen tablets from a box and handed the samples together with the prescription.
Marianne eagerly pocketed the samples, asking why her daughter’s seizures continued even with acetaminophen. He shot up in alarm and asked her about the seizures. Twice last week alone, she said. He yelled at Therese to get on the examination table. Using his eyes, hands, and instruments, he probed for any gross evidence of disease in her, devoting more minutes examining her neck and head than the rest of her body, leaving the eye untouched for lack of an ophthalmoscope. In the end, he saw an apparently healthy young girl.
The general practitioner glanced furtively at Marianne. By his gross examination, her daughter was healthy. But they were from Pag-Asa, a small city of shacks, where most of his patients sink back after consulting him and stuffing their pockets with prescriptions and drug samples. Some had resurfaced on the appointment lists stricken by new maladies and vanishing again from followup with a fresh prescription and free medicines. After weighing their chances of returning for a followup with the diagnostic test results as low to nil, he added phenytoin to the acetaminophen, just a prescription and no laboratory slip.
Days later, Marianne and her husband barged into a public pediatrician’s clinic. Therese, fatigued from a seizure episode and cradled by her father, listened as her mother tremulously described the headaches, seizures, and the phenytoin. The doctor asked about fevers. Marianne shook her head. He queried further, gradually moving the discussion away from the headaches and seizures to their administration of phenytoin. The girl’s neck and head drew most of his attention when he put her on the exam table, nodding somberly as he scrutinized her eyes with an ophthalmoscope. He nudged Mike to take her off the table. The doctor read his notes before grimly penning a referral to Dr. San Gabriel.
“Dr. San Gabriel,” Mike said urgently, remembering the wall clock in the hallway read 10:00 when the secretary called them inside. Half of the day off for Therese’s hospital appointment was all that his foreman gave him. Arriving even a minute late for the second half of his shift would mean losing the whole shift.
Luis rose and shook her father’s hand, feeling the calluses thriving on the young man’s hands. A construction worker, he remembered the young man confiding his profession to him as if he was confessing to marital infidelity. “Mike. Ma’am,” he smiled at Marianne, calculating how many ferrous sulfate samples he would give her to erase the pallor on her lips. “I have the results.” Therese saw his parents tense when the doctor’s tone shifted from cherry to somber.
The doctor laid the CT scan and MRI reports on the table, piled more laboratory papers, and topped it with a detailed illustration of the brain. That they performed the basic laboratory tests a week after the consultation did not tax his patience even a bit. Letting another week pass for the Healing Samaritans Foundation to shoulder the cost of the CT and MRI of her head did not send his blood pressure soaring. Waiting for patients and their kin to forage for funds for healthcare or pray for Samaritans to tend to them was his price for picking service over profit.
Aided by technology, he and his peers scrutinized the neoplasm thriving beneath the skin, hair, muscles, and bones that encased Therese’s brain. If her parents were receiving six-figure salaries, they would have prescribed surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy for her condition. Her father’s humble occupation and her mother’s convenience store dictated the adoption of their well-used triad of basic medicines, faith, and burying hope with the patient. Luis would discuss all options with her parents, offering the cheapest treatment last - their most likely choice. Mike and Marianne could pray for a philanthropist and pray more fervently that another indigent patient would not partake of their little alms box.
“Tere, play outside.” Marianne followed her request by presenting potbellied and cottony Chubby to her. Therese grabbed the toy and looked up at her mother. Concern clouded her joy and a query replaced the saccharine thank you that was about to leave her lips. “Your eyes are red, ma.”
“Something’s gotten into her eyes,” Mike said, pressing Chubby closer to Therese when she stood on her toes to see why her mother suddenly became teary. Young voices, some in pain, mingled with the occasional chirping of the PA system and the hubbub of adults. “There are kids outside. Take Chubby. Play with them.”
Chubby was with her and there were children outside. She did not wait for another order from her parents. She had not gone far from the door when a sharp cry rose from the clinic. The voice was familiar. She tiptoed back, stopping at the door when she saw her mother weeping on her father’s shoulders while he was sniffling and wiping his eyes. She searched the room for the culprit and found the medical secretary updating the patients’ database, tapping the keyboard as gently as she could. Her gaze returned to Dr. San Gabriel, wondering if he could hurt them with the drawing of the brain and laboratory reports in his hands. No, she said to herself, puzzled why the doctor had become as gloomy as when they arrived for the followup.
Therese fell back to the hallway, her parents’ tearfulness erasing Chubby and playtime erased from her plans. A woman and a boy occupied half of the bench outside the clinic. She clambered on the free spot and slept with Chubby as her bedmate. A man from the adjacent clinic called the woman and the boy and they followed him, leaving the bench entirely to Therese.
“Tere, Tere,” her mother whispered.
Therese opened her eyes and shrieked. Staring at her was her mother, her eyes red and eyelids puffy.
“We’re going home,” Marianne spoke with a slight quiver, taking Chubby from Therese and stepping back for her husband to lift her from the hospital bench. She squirmed and jumped from his arms when she saw his bloodshot eyes.
“The thing that got into mama’s eyes jumped into my eyes,” said her father. Mike plucked her from the bench and carried her, absentmindedly listening to her story of a woman who reeked of roses and promised her that she would return when all had turned to night for Therese.

xxxxx

Challenged merely by steroids and phenytoin, the neoplasm encroached into healthy tissue. From headaches and seizures, the tumor fouled Therese’s sight and flayed her strength and sense of balance, humbling a girl twice as spirited as most girls into a feeble doll with dead eyesight. That doll had been listening to rumbling vehicles, counting them by the noise of their engines, and their neighbors’ fevered conversations. Daytime, she thought. As to what day, she could not tell even if telling dates for her meant distinguishing Sunday from Monday.
Her mother was in her little store and her father at work, embracing the double-shift that his equally penurious friends spurned. What he earned from the first shift went to their sustenance and the money from the second shift for Therese’s medicines bought in numbers so pitiful that he could work all day and all night and still not buy the prescribed quantity. Trapped in her blindness, she settled to telling stories to Chubby, the only game that would not end with her calling her mother to pick her toy from the floor. A breeze suddenly blew from the door, flooding the house with the scent of roses as if someone had spilled a jug of perfume near her.
“Therese.”
Therese, her nose twitching from the powerful scent, dropped Chubby when she heard the voice. Her mother did not advice her of any visitors. Scream and run, her mind told her. Stay was her heart’s command.
A fairy, she thought. She regularly garnered most of Teacher Nancy’s stars and made her mother feel grateful that she had her as a daughter. For that, Nancy told her that she deserved a visit by a fairy.
“Greg beseeched me to help you and others like you,” she paused to eavesdrop to the girl’s thoughts. “I am not a fairy, child.” Reveling in the overwhelming fragrance, Therese missed her visitor’s disappointing answer to her thoughts about fairies.
“I visited you before. Do you remember me at the clinic?” She sensed Therese vacillating between answering no and yes. Wishing not to tax her young memory any further, she touched the girl’s temple.
“Fairy!” Therese squealed.
Her visitor giggled. Even she as a girl had heard of fairies. “Remember my promise to return when all has turned to night for you?”
Therese, certain that it was daytime from the cacophony in the streets, looked at her, puzzled.
“Day for most people but sadly night for you.” She clasped the girl’s hands and touched her temple again.
“Wow!” In Therese’s mind, she was holding a white rose about the length of her forearm. She brought it close to her nose, inhaling the becalming scent it exuded, and touched its stem, feeling her skin brush by a thorn.
Sometime after Therese stopped attending kindergarten, Nancy knocked on their store and had Marianne usher her inside. Sitting on a chair was Therese, staring at the door. She snapped rigidly when Nancy called her as if her mentor was calling the roll. The teacher pulled out the first of many tissues to wipe her eyes when the girl started walking like a drunk towards her, extending her arms forward like someone treading in darkness.
Fearing that she would fall, Nancy dropped her bag on the plastic bench by the door and carried Therese to the seat. She pulled a book from her bag and gently pressed Therese’s fingers on the embossed letters. Fairies, princesses, she heard the girl giggle with delight. Then, the Teacher Nancy who could bend her voice into the unearthly voices of villains and ethereal voices of heroes emerged when she opened The Book of Fairies and Princesses and started sharing the tale of an orphaned girl from a distant kingdom. With her box of tissues emptied and the last word in the book read, Nancy hugged and peppered the girl’s forehead with kisses before thrusting the book into her arms.
The Book of Fairies and Princesses was atop the rolled mat, its lively cover calling all to open it again after its contents last came to life at Nancy’s visit months before. Marianne could read, but she stumbled over difficult words and her tone stayed straight from beginning to end. Therese’s frustration from missing her fairytales came like a low, steady keening to her visitor. “Do you want to hear a story?”
“Cinderella!” Therese chirped.
“David and Goliath.”
Her excitement sagged when she heard the title. “A prince?
“David became king.”
“King? I want to hear it.”
“I know you would.” The woman touched her temple again and sunlight surged into Therese’s eyes, forcibly shutting her eyelids. A thousand voices speaking an unfamiliar tongue jolted her ears. Curious to see where her new friend had taken her, she opened her eyes and gasped. Men loaded with armor, swords, spears and shields were all around her, but none noticed the ponytailed girl in red shorts, pink shirt, and slippers. Her visitor was speaking, and Therese glanced to her front, sides, and back and saw no sign of her, yet she could hear her guiding her through the story, telling her to follow a boy.
A man and a boy with a sling shortly appeared. She followed them through the assemblage of warriors and into a field. His escort advanced a few steps before halting, letting the youth advance alone. She pushed past the man and realized why he stopped. Standing on the other side was a man built like a giant and dressed in metal. He was screaming, brandishing a sword that was taller than his diminutive foe. Treading calmly and reciting verses, the boy loaded his sling and started swinging it. She closed her eyes when he flung the projectile in his sling. The shepherd had grown into a king when she opened her eyes again. Her visitor lifted her hand and Therese was back in their house.
Therese slumped on the chair, facing the door, wondering if Teacher Nancy with a magical wand could bring damsels, princes, and witches to speak and move as if they were breathing right beside her. Teacher Nancy fled her thoughts when a shaft of light appeared on where she believed was the fully-opened door. More light poured from the small beam, consuming the surrounding darkness until the ray became an upright rectangular block channeling sunlight into the house. She glanced sideways and saw floating luminous boxes, confidently guessing that they were the wide-open windows. She dropped her sight and sighed. A pink box was all that she could see of her pink cabinet splattered with stickers of princesses and fairies and with little doors that she used to playfully open and shut. At her foot, she saw purple Chubby. She ran her eyes throughout the house. Their red table was a bright disk standing on slender metal legs. Cabinets resembled drab boxes, and the unlighted kitchen was a dim world.
“My eyes…”
“Are healing. For now, you can only see in the stories. Have faith that they will soon be a child’s eyes again.”
“Tere.” Her mother yelled from the store.
“I am Marie Frances,” her visitor declared before the scent of roses left the house and the rose that she was mentally clasping vanished.
“Stop playing. You might get hurt.” Marianne yelled from the store, instantly flogging herself for admonishing her daughter against seeking life’s little joys. A little scratch and a slight bruise would never weigh heavier than the tumor.
“Tere, would you like a lollipop? Orange? Mango?”
“Orange and mango,” Therese replied excitedly.
“Okay.” She picked the last of the orange lollipops and one of three of the mango-flavored variety. “Stay there. I’ll bring it to you.”
Therese was on the floor, retrieving Chubby, when Marianne entered.
“Mama.” Therese, with arms on her sides, sluggishly ambled towards her mother. Her mother was clinching the lollipops. Marianne, unsure if her daughter really walked without extending her arms forward, easily yielded the sweets in her fist.
The next morning, Therese saw the threshold glow briefly before returning to its normal daytime luminosity. Her hair rippled from a sudden gust of air before a thick roseate smell invaded the room.
“Therese,” Marie Frances greeted her. She took Therese’s hands, and a white rose burst in the girl’s mind. Therese held the flower beside her forearm, admiring its petals were fuller than its predecessor.
“It is a different rose from the same garden. They are growing because Greg believes.”
“I can see mama.” Therese put down the rose and looked up at where she thought her visitor was, unperturbed when she did not see the hazy figure of a woman. “But…”
“You wish that you would see her completely again,” she paused, feeling the thoughts pulsating in the girl’s mind and her desires whispering from her heart. “Believe that that day will come very soon, my child. Are you interested in lions?”
Tere nodded vigorously. “L for lion. Big cats that roar.” Therese crawled on all fours, roaring and prowling the spot where Marie’s voice emanated.
Marie Frances laughed. “They are big and they roar but not all the time and to everyone. Have you heard of Daniel and the Lions?”
“A king like David?”
“He was a powerful king’s counselor.”
Therese climbed the chair, shutting her eyes and covering her ears as a smiling Marie gently touched her temple. No din startled her and the air was cool. Her feet shifted and coarse soil grated under her slippers. A new story had begun, and Marie had spirited her into a cave.
Sunlight floated through gaps in the boulder blocking the entrance, giving Therese a patchy view of the cave. She thought that several men could stand shoulder to shoulder at the entrance without stooping. The ceiling gradually dropped, leaving a short void between her fingertips and the roof when she stretched her arms overhead, and the walls slowly funneled that several full strides could bring her to the opposite wall.
Occupying the mouth of the cavern was a man kneeling in prayer. Three lionesses were sprawled beside him. Roar, roar, she silently egged them, sighing when one yawned and growled softly. Therese’s heart leapt when a deeper growl came from the den’s dark recesses. The beast emerged from the darkness, and she held her breathe. Hearing Marie ordering her to yield, she stepped back to the rock wall, evading its wide mane by inches. When she saw the lion’s thick limbs, she wished that she would merge with the rock wall. The predator circled Daniel twice before plopping down between two lionesses, playfully snapping at a female.
Marie flashed the days preceding Daniel’s banishment into the den in Therese’s mind. A man anxiously shouted outside, breaking Marie’s narration of Daniel’s life. Daniel replied, and the man shouted in great relief. The man spoke tersely, but not to Daniel. Therese heard more voices and men grunting as the earth began grinding against stone. She blinked against the increasing brightness as a gang of servants and warriors started rolling the rock away. When they have freed ample space, a man in regal finery jumped inside, embracing Daniel like a brother. Then, Marie pulled her back into their house.
Therese’s lazy posture straightened the second she opened her eyes. The upright block of light that was the open door was more radiant. On turning her head, she discerned the faint outlines of curtains crossing windows, and the blotches on her pink cabinet as stickers of damsels and fairies.
“See what faith can do,” Marie said softly. “You will be in the sea tomorrow.” With that, the rose in Therese’s hands vanished and their house regained its familiar odor.
Jonah and the leviathan were still swirling in Therese’s mind that she simply stared at the rose from Marie. It was dark inside the creature, but through some celestial gift, Marie let Therese see Jonah’s prostrate body racked with remorse. While Marie had barred seawater from touching the tips of Therese’s toes and turned the odor of the sea and the monster’s meals of krill and fish into perfume for her nose, she could not completely mask the beast’s movements that Therese shortly adapted the color of a landsman facing her first sea storm. Marie abruptly stopped her narration and lifted her from the leviathan.
“Tere.”
“You will have a milder journey tomorrow,” Marie said apologetically. She fell silent and the rose vanished along with the scent of roses. Marie was gone.
“Lunch will be in a minute.”
Marianne appeared at the threshold, wiping her hands on her shorts. Therese identified the black crown on her mother’s head as hair and the dark, thick lines on her forehead as her eyebrows when Marianne entered. From a few feet away, she assumed the buttons below her mother’s brows to be her eyes, the line in the middle of her face her nose, and the pale line above her chin her lips. Marianne had never looked so beautiful to Therese.
“Mama,” Therese jumped from the chair, took two quick steps, and stopped. Mother and daughter stared at Therese’s legs, perplexed that her limbs really carried her in that short sprint.
The stem was as thick as her middle finger and extended from her fingertips to her elbow when she put it beside her forearm. Crowning the stem were petals of an immaculate white shade. By far, it was the most exquisite of Marie’s floral gifts. The rose was competing with the story of the father and his worldly son for her attention. The story of the prodigal son had no shepherd boy fighting a gigantic warrior, a man praying amidst lions, or a prophet in a leviathan’s belly. Marie was true to her promise.
“The son was bad, very bad. Father was good like papa,” said Therese, her eyes still on the rose.
“Like the father,” Marie replied, her heart aflutter from hearing the comment. Therese was at her calmest in the fourth tale, giving Marie little forewarning of an impending breakthrough. In the first story, David and his crown claimed her interest, the docile lions in the second, and the leviathan’s innards in the third.
“My eyes are good today and will be better tomorrow.”
“Because you believe, it will come true. Tomorrow, Therese. Tomorrow.”
When the rose vanished and the stench of litter in the streets drifted inside, Therese knew that Marie had left. She was thirsty but her mother was in the store and her eyes could pick out the kerosene stove on the sink and the red dish tray and pitcher on the table. She towed her chair to the table, climbed on top, and reached for a glass in the tray. An image of broken plates and glasses littering their tiny kitchen because Therese fended for herself poked Marianne the second she heard the clatter of utensils. Catching Therese standing erect on the chair, securely holding a glass, and gulping water took more of Marianne’s breath away than her expected vision of collecting their shattered utensils.
Two roses, their stems stretching from the tip of her middle finger to her upper, were the latest of Marie’s gifts. One had petals the color of her blood that syringes and lancets pried from her body for testing. The other had white petals as immaculate as the wool of the lost sheep that the shepherd sought in Marie’s last story.
“Shepherd left many sheep for one sheep,” said Therese, her bewilderment clear even to mortals.
“Because he loves all his sheep, even the lost ones.”
“You think so?”
“Your heart is whispering the answer, Therese.”
Therese playfully pressed her left chest. “I hear it,” she said earnestly after a moment, addressing the void that she believed Marie occupied. Her sight had enabled her to spot cockroaches playing on the floor but Marie was still beyond her eyes’ power of perception.
“You do not see me, yet you believe that I am in this house. That is faith, Therese. The doctors said you would never see again. You believed you would and your sight has healed. Your body has healed. That, again, is faith.”
A fresh wave of roseate fragrance flooded the house, but the roses in Therese’s hands dissolved into oblivion. “Why grasp something when you can carry it in your heart? The roses are in you, Therese, so I do not have to come this way again. Now, go to your mother. Let her see how faith has brought you home again.”
Therese leapt from the chair and rushed to the store, her footfalls sure and the path so clear to her eyes. Marie heard Marianne shout in utter surprise. The fragrance ebbed and Marie vanished.

xxxxx

“We…do not know what happened. Dr. Paterno did not see anything on CT and MRI,” Dr. San Gabriel flashed two sets of images of Therese’s brain that could have been mistaken to be that of a very ill girl and a healthy one. “The other doctors and the laboratory did not pick up anything on your daughter now. I have read the results,” he shrugged in resignation. “I agree a hundred percent with them.”
Healthy tissue had retaken the patch of brain where malignant cells once flourished, producing CT scan and MRI results that clashed with the previous results, sending the radiologist to recheck her earlier CT and MRI images. The team ran other laboratory tests and examined her physically. All revealed a robust girl.
Therese’s father whispered to Marianne who nodded. “We’ve seen Tere play like she used to, Doc San Gabriel. Just tell us if she’s really healed,” said Marianne, looking like someone who had just dreamed that she had won the lottery and begging everyone to tell her that it was true.
“We call it spontaneous remission. One day, a tumor is there. Weeks, months, years later, the patient returns healthy.” Luis hoped that they would not ask him to expound the inexplicable. “Your child is healed, by what or by whom, we will never know.” He reclined on his chair, expecting the couple to breathe out their anxiety and murmur prayers of thanksgiving.
Marianne and Mike, instantly tearful, took Therese her into their arms so tightly that Luis feared they would break her bones. Behind them was his secretary, standing like a witness to a tearful homecoming. He indulged her for salvation rarely bloomed for those brought at death’s door by cancer.
Spontaneous remission, Luis said to himself, spontaneous remission. Therese spoke of roses and her visitor, Marie Frances. He asked her again. Roses and Marie Frances was her steady reply. He thought of asking her that she probably smelled her neighbor’s broken perfume bottles, but stopped when the fragrance of roses filled every inch of his clinic, creating the impression that someone had dumped a truckload of roses in the room. The overwhelming fragrance did not break the family’s revelry and his secretary was not sneezing. When their ecstasy ebbed, he shook the couple’s hands, congratulating them on their extremely good fortune, and gave Therese a pat on the head and a wish to see more stars on her hands.
From the door, he observed patients and healthcare staff turn to the jovial racket the family was creating, stirring the floor more as they waited for the elevator. The lift opened. Before jumping inside, Therese turned and waved vigorously at him, smiling as if Teacher Nancy had stamped a dozen stars on her hands. He waved back, strangely confident that should he see her again, it would not be to put her on the exam table and run tests on her body.
When the elevator shut, he retreated inside, shadowed by his secretary’s curious stare as he roamed the clinic, sniffing the furniture, cabinets, and the air con vent. Any fragrance stronger than the air freshener’s pine scent would send his secretary into a frenzy of sneezing and blowing her nose. Roses and Marie Frances, he thought. Only one person could clear his bewilderment. He went to his laptop and logged into his email, picking his brother’s email from the contact list. Midway through asking him about his life as a missionary in Africa, he pressed the delete button. He picked his mobile and selected his sibling’s number.
Luis saw the hour hand hovering near eleven on his wristwatch. He counted back several hours, concluding that it was about dawn in Africa. His story of a tumor vanishing as if excised by a magical scalpel and the overwhelming scent of roses that accompanied Marie Frances’s visits could not wait for the brothers to communicate at a mutually ideal time.
“Hi, Greg!” He hollered into the phone, snickering as he imagined Greg jumping out of his blankets from his greeting.
Greg grunted.
“Tell me again about a saintly nun and her roses.”


- END -