by Beth Kephart

She was a teen when the matter of her leg became the matter of a tumor and her future was, according to the surgeon who declared it, grim.

He must not have seen what I had seen in her eyes the first time I met her, years later, in Philadelphia. Call it audacious resolve. Call it a woman frail of arms and floppy in one foot who looked up at the two flights of mercenary stairs that led to my apartment and, leaving the trunk she’d hauled with her from El Salvador to her son and a friend, began to climb. She made an indecipherable sound when she crossed the threshold into the guileless rooms I then called home. I offered her a chair. She ceded. She took a good long look at the daughter-in-law I would become. I levied my gaze in return.

Would there be, I wondered, war?

There had already been the tumor, the surgery, the wall against which she’d dragged herself as she willed herself to walk. There had been, after that, four cesareans and four sons, though what she’d wanted was a daughter and though, when the second son died at three months—it was chickenpox, chickenpox—she named the third son for the second, and her eyes, already dark, devolved.

A shade between carob and umber.

I imagine. Who would not imagine?

The carpet on the stairs was red and pounded with the proof of many soles. In the guile of my place there were four chairs, a huddled wobble of spindles and stretchers. The towels and sheets and pillowcases in the trunk she’d hauled had been embroidered BS, for that was the daughter-in-law I was becoming, my initials as a Mrs. All those BSs, every last one, folded into the boundless well of her trunk.

I didn’t know she could speak English until several years more, when she lay on the couch in a new house in the outskirts of Philadelphia, reading the book I had written about her country. Her father. Her coffee farm. The actual terrifying bloody civil war. The earthquake that shook her

land and Santa Tecla to the covetous till of the ground. The story her son had told about the unbridled horse that had careened out control on the steepest pitch of dirt road and flung her, or did she fling herself, to the hard stop of a rut. A shattering of bones.

Also a divorce. Also, to come, an insidious infestation of pests—might have been leaf rust, might have been beetles, might have been nematodes, for honestly, at what point do you stop enumerating, quit counting when the coffee farm that had been her firmament is plaintively gnawed to the ground?

Here I insert the bladder cancer and the subsequent surgery and the afterward of radiation. Here I assert another serial to the comma and confess the stifling of the stroke, a stroke in slow-motion, discerned a day late, when an uneven paralysis of limb had already set in, and that stammering of words.

I’m not saying she didn’t fight. I’m just saying that there was a scattering of thieves—people who flocked about when her eyes were closed and hung their jaws in false surprise when her money came up short.

Though there was that one particular day when she was feeling the slightest lilt of lift, and why not get some fluff in her hair, some strong-boned fingers in her scalp, and so off she went to the hair salon. Picture her in the back seat of a car driven by a woman blind in one eye. Picture the car racing toward theirs at the intersection. A car toppled, the contents of that car topped. My mother-in-law took the blunt-most impact of the crash. She was crushed until she was rescued. A shattering, another shattering of bones.

I sent her orchids once—a procession of white blooms. I sent cards that were stolen before they made their way to her, and a minor photo book, and a beaded purse because I willed myself to believe she might enjoy a contraption such as that, a thing that wanted to be snapped open and then closed.

Open. Closed.

Who could blame her for staying where she now was put—in a wheelchair, in a bed. An aide lifting the soup spoon to her lips. Her thumbprint replacing the flourish of a pen. Two minutes each on the phone with the three living sons: El Salvador to London. El Salvador to Dallas. El Salvador to another house near Philadelphia. Hello. Goodbye. No news. The ongoingness of it becoming the par-for-the-course of it, the unremarkable, the wonted, the what just was until it was possible to stop imagining it. The wheelchair, the bed, the hand that would not move. The ongoing shellacking of her quiet. Making it possible to believe that my own troubles were true troubles, that my own disappointments were a notch in the hierarchy of hapless, that on rainy days when despair set in I—walking wherever I pleased, talking however I liked, living my version of luck—had a right to suggest my sadness to my son.

But for the fact that just the other day, in a photo on my husband’s phone, there Nora stood, on her own two feet, wearing a dress so bright I blinked. There she stood, in all the glory of her resolve, her dark eyes trained on the middle distance, toward a place I could not see.

Beth Kephart is the author of more than three-dozen books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and a book artist. Consequential Truths: On Writing the Lived Life is now available and My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera (Temple University Press) is forthcoming. More at bethkephartbooks.com and bind-arts.com.