Chapter 1 My Name Is Greta
My Name Is Greta
Sometimes I lie down in bed, close my eyes, and imagine the beginning of my life.
I see one sperm faster than the others, moving energetically toward the fallopian tubes.
He wiggles his tail and makes his way through the rest and manages to reach the egg, plasma membrane of which all his competitors are trying to penetrate.
And then, after fertilization, there I am.
I still have no eyes or mouth or extremities, but I exist.
And my existence has a purpose.
People I know always ask themselves why they’ve come into this world, what their purpose is or if their life has a meaning.
I can’t answer for them, but my fate was clear from the beginning, like the grass that grows to feed cattle or the bees with their urge to pollinate everything.
So when I was little and people in school would ask me to stand up and introduce myself or write a story about my family, I’d always start by saying:
“My name’s Greta Peterson, and I was born to save my sister.”
My grandfather used to say I came into the world with a superhero’s cape—a purple one, obviously.
Whether or not anyone else could see it, it was flapping behind my back.
Even the midwife who picked me up for the first time couldn’t because even though I was crying like crazy when I was born, everyone was paying attention to something else: the precious umbilical cord covered in blood with the stem cells that could be transplanted into Lucy to eradicate the myeloblastic leukemia she’d been diagnosed with a year and a half earlier.
While I was growing up, I never thought much about it, but I think it brought the two of us close together, though we couldn’t have been more different.
My sister was sweet and everyone always said her smile was genuine and contagious; the doctors adored her, Mama called her my sunshine, and when she was healthy enough to attend class, none of her schoolmates could get enough of her.
“Lucy, you just shine,” Dad would tell her. “You’re like a twinkling star.”
And who wouldn’t want to be compared to the stars, the moon, the galaxies and constellations, fascinating and infinite?
Me, obviously.
I’ve always been more of a black hole: No one really understands me, even if theoretically the things I do make sense, and I’m still a mystery, even to myself, with a gravitational field that won’t allow a single particle to escape.
Lacking Lucy’s glow, I have to constantly force myself to smile.
It’s like my lips were made of cardboard, I confessed to my grandfather one time.
And after tucking me into the bed, he responded, “You know cardboard gets soft when you sprinkle a little water on it? Try it and see what happens, Greta.” I’m ashamed to admit that I never did try too hard.
But I’ve got my reasons: The world is a hostile place.
I can’t manage to visualize life as a gift.
For me, it’s a rocky path full of pain, injustice, illness, and hardship.
I told Lucy that on a sleepless night in midwinter, when the snowflakes were whirling past the windows and she got up in the morning to go for a glass of water.
Our rooms were across from each other, so the contrast was evident: Her mattress was pink, mine purple; she still had her stuffed animals, while I’d put all mine up in the attic; she had framed, pastel-colored posters on her walls, while mine were full of Vivian Maier prints or Post-it Notes with random words that obsessed me.
“Lucy, I don’t understand life.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s overrated.”
She put the glass down on my nightstand, and I made room for her on the bed.
Her hands were cold. I could hardly make out her outline in the darkness, but I could imagine her red hair spread out over the pillow, her pale skin, the bags under her eyes and her face swollen from her medication, such a contrast with her flamingo-thin legs.
“Maybe the problem is that you’re trying to understand life.
It’s not a puzzle, Greta. Believe me, I’ve thought this over a million times.
I’ve tried to think of it as a game, but that’s pointless because there’s no instruction manual or tactics that can help you out.
All you do is throw the dice and see which numbers come up. ”
There was nothing Lucy liked as much as board games. That was normal: The hospital was her second home, and to keep herself entertained, she spent all her time on her deck of cards or the latest game someone had given her. In my family, we’re all expert players, but no one could ever rival her.
“I’ve got a really good memory and too much time to think,” she used to say when I asked her how it was possible that she could always guess my each and every move when we faced off at the game board. Instead of responding, I would just set out the pieces again.
Separating Lucy from her illness would be like taking a bunch of blobs of oil paint, mixing them together, and then trying to pull the original colors back out.
They were indivisible, like a flower and its thorns; sometimes spring won the battle and Lucy would shine for a while, but sooner or later, winter returned.
“She should have gotten better,” Dad used to say.
Technically speaking, she did. She was cured.
But a few months later, they diagnosed her with GvHD, graft versus host disease.
In other words, a grave complication following a transplant that meant my cells were locked in a life-or-death battle against Lucy’s immune system.
They started giving her corticosteroids and immunosuppressors to keep her from rejecting the transplant, but then her defenses grew so weak that anytime any opportunistic infection came along, she fell sick, whether it was pneumonia or one of her endless urinary infections.
When they talked about them, all I could think about was a handful of writhing worms.
The fascinating thing about Lucy was that despite everything, she wasn’t mad at the world for what was happening to her.
The more she accepted her illness, the angrier I got.
A gigantic question mark was always hovering around me: Why?
My grandfather says that even when I was little, you could tell this was going to be a problem because I lived so intensely through that period when children question everything.
Why can’t there be new colors? Why do cows have black spots and not purple ones?
Why do all the boys in class keep their hair short?
Why are cucumbers called cucumbers? Why is seawater salty?
Even now, the first Post-it I wrote is still hanging there inscribed with the word Why?
All the others have changed through the years; there was a time when I was obsessed with the word spirited and another when I couldn’t stop thinking about how pretty attar, beetle, and bougainvillea were.
My wall is a serpent constantly changing its skin.
And yet, the big question still remains. It doesn’t matter how much time passes, the rain never washes it away; the cold and the heat don’t perturb it. It’s immovable.
Why did Lucy have to be sick?
Anyone else would say, “Just because. Because life’s like that, because the world is a random, chaotic place. There are no rules or statistics that can help you. So stop thinking about it, take the damned Post-it off the damned wall, and accept it once and for all.”
But I’m not anyone else, so I dig in my heels.
Was it written? Is there a secret code for each of us in the immense universe as intricate as our own DNA?
Could we change our fate if we managed to guess what was coming in the future?
Is it really possible some superior divine being would decide a two-year-old girl deserved to get cancer or die in a flood or of hunger or some other disaster?
Mama told me once how everything started: with petechia. Little red spots appeared all over little Lucy’s belly, and then the hematomas came. “Did you fall?”
“No,” she replied.
“Did some other kid hit you at the park?”
She shook her head.
After a routine visit to the pediatrician, she wound up in the hospital, and that’s where they started running tests.
The diagnosis came quickly. Then the chemotherapy. And then my triumphant arrival in the world, with everyone’s hopes pinned on a couple of cells.
The happiness didn’t last long.
If I look back, I imagine I was born in an abandoned palace that collapsed and was left a pile of ruins.
My parents met at a party thrown by the company they worked for.
I’d guess at that time the palace was at its high point, with chandeliers and walls covered in hand-painted wallpaper and them dancing in the center: He was a very handsome man (the neighbor ladies and Mom’s friends always said so) and she was sharp as a tack.
Together, they were the perfect team. When they got together, they’d have barbecues in the yard and everyone said they were an “interesting couple.” It’s hard for me to imagine a more wonderful compliment than that: interesting.
Both my parents were real estate agents.
Dad would make buyers light up with his sympathy, his perfect, white-toothed smile, his self-assured bearing, and his effortless, 1950s-style seductiveness.
But she was better still. Mom got the nickname Rosie the Shark.
Customers turned to prey when they fell into her hands.
She managed to match every home with a potential buyer.
She’d sold places in ruins, supposed haunted houses, even a few where murders had been committed.
She was named best agent in the state two years in a row, and she always glowed at the Christmas galas they celebrated in town.