Pandora's Box--Preview of Chapter One

Greek Mythology tells the tale of a beautiful young maiden named Pandora. When formed by the Olympian gods, they each took a part in her creation. When they were through, she was gorgeous. She had grace, charm, and an unparalleled curiosity. Ultimately, it would be her curiosity that doomed mankind.

For the last gift Pandora received from the gods was a small box. The gods filled it with destructive contents—like malice, heartache, rage, and anger— and forbid Pandora from opening it. But her curiosity dwelled on the box. What did it contain? Why didn’t the Gods want her to open it? What would happen if she did? She had to know. So one day, Pandora hesitantly lifted the lid. In doing so, she unleashed death, disease, and every other misfortune mankind still experiences to this day.

The world suffers for one woman's mistakes.

This ancient myth takes on added relevance in our current society because everyone deals with pain on a daily basis. Frequently, we feel this pain is a result of someone else’s actions. In other words, everyone has a Pandora. In my life, Pandora was my mother.

♦ ♦ ♦
My lanky, six-foot body sprawled out in the basement in front of the blaring television set with a Playstation controller in my hands. A vampire burst into flames, lighting the room with a flash of emerald light. I wiggled the joystick to avoid an enemy as my family sat upstairs, red-faced and crying, crowded around my dying mother's bed.

She had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer four months earlier on Valentine’s Day. The doctors had given her only two weeks to live. Within the last couple of days—in the middle of June—her body started shutting down bit-by-bit, organ-by-organ. Her dying wish was that she live in the house for the duration of her life so she would be comfortable

I jumped a little when the basement door opened with a sickening jolt and a pair of socks crept down the steps. They belonged to my brother's girlfriend Kristina. She glared at me reproachfully through fierce green eyes. "How can you be playing video games at a time like this?" I imagined her screaming, pointing an accusing finger. "You're being so selfish. Quit avoiding your mom and spend some time with her before she dies!"

None of these comments escaped in her Minnesotan accent when she opened her mouth. She simply said, "Your mom’s fading fast. You might want to come up and say goodbye."

"Alright," I whispered, as I set down the controller with my sweaty hands.

She turned and walked upstairs.

I went to the bottom of the steps and clutched the railing to steady myself.

"So this is it," I thought.

I had climbed these steps at least a thousand times before, but one specific journey came to mind; it happened ten years before on a sweltering summer night.

♦ ♦ ♦
I sat on the couch watching a movie. During a commercial break a slippery chill crept down my spine and the hair on the back of my neck prickled. It was like creeping up the stairs in the darkness and expect one more step, but upon taking it, are only greeted with nothing.

"One day," I thought in terror, "my parents are going to die." The idea had never occurred to me before, but now that it did, it clutched my quickening heart. Though I had long abandoned the foolish idea of monsters lurking in the shadows, the phantom of death presented itself as a horrifying new fiend.

"What if I'm not here when it happens? Which one of my parents will be left alone in this house?" Leaping from the couch, I recklessly tripped and tumbled up the basement stairs as I ran to my parents' bedroom. "I'll just live here forever," I thought, rushing through the living room. "I won't let them die," I said, jumping three steps at a time up the carpeted stairs.

My parents' bedroom door was open. I looked inside as I caught my breath. They were lying in bed, reading books. My dad was thumbing through the pages of a novel about the Civil War, my mother absorbed in a Danielle Steele romance.

I knocked once and walked in. Reading my panicked face, my mother asked, "What's wrong Daniel?"

Hesitating a moment, I looked at my knees, embarrassed. "You're going to die someday. Both of you."

They exchanged knowing glances with one as my dad marked his page, and set down his book. "What brought this up?"

“I dunno. It just sort of hit me all of a sudden.” I plopped on their bed.

“We're not going to die for a long time,” my mom said, flashing a reassuring smile.

"But what if I'm not around when it happens?”

"You don't really have to worry about that right now, Daniel," my dad chimed in, with a firm pat on my shoulder.

"All the same," I said, trying to sound nonchalant, but failing miserably. "I'll just live with you guys forever. Or at least close by, so when," I paused, "you know. When you—die, I can be here real quick."

“If that’s what you want—”

“It is.”

“Okay. But, like we said—”

“I know, I know. I get it. You’re not going to die for a while,” I said with a smile. I jumped off their bed and was halfway through their doorway when I turned back. "G'night guys. I love you mom. I love you dad."

"We love you too," they said in unison.

They always had a way of making me feel safe and secure. After they had quieted my childish notions of death, I resumed my movie and pushed the thought from my mind. "How could I have been so stupid?" I thought. "They won't die for a long time.”

♦ ♦ ♦

I clutched the dull brass door handle, and shuffled through the kitchen, into the living room, where my mother lay dying. I couldn't help feeling that I'd been lied to.

My mom was in her hospital bed, frail and broken. Her gray skin was dry and papery, stretched across her bones, exposing the veins in her arms, and the spidery blood vessels along the sides of her forehead. She stared blankly at the ceiling through a shock of once brown hair—now white— with her clouded eyes. Ragged breaths burst sporadically through her thin, chapped lips, heaving her chest in convulsive movements. Yet, the blankets that lay on top of her hardly moved. For all that remained of my mother was her skeletal body. A mere suggestion of the person she once was.

As I walked in, Timothy, my older brother by two years, was saying goodbye to her.
He disappeared shortly after my mother had been diagnosed with cancer. He was around for the first two weeks, but when she didn’t die as quickly as planned, he started to withdraw. First, he didn’t come home one night for bed. That quickly turned to two, then three, until finally, he was sleeping at Kristina’s house every day of the week. In the mornings, he would creep into the house, get dressed, and leave for work. Secretly, I think my mother’s monstrous white hospital bed looming in the darkened living room scared him. Who really wanted to come home to the stench of sickness and death every night?

“I love you, mom,” he said as he stepped back, rubbing a hand in his disheveled, jet-black goatee. He squeezed his elephantine body by my fourteen-year-old sister Jennifer, and walked to the coach. He didn’t look at her body again. Instead he stared at the closed window shades.

My eyes shifted to Jennifer, who now loomed over the body as she pushed a lock of shoulder-length brown hair behind her ear. With one arm pressed against her stomach, she rested her elbow in the palm of her hand. Giant tears streamed down her cheeks. I expected her to say something, but she didn’t. She just hugged my mom’s body.
Was it my imagination or did my sister linger a moment as she embraced her? Maybe she was hoping for a hug in return. When my mother’s arms continued to hang limply at her side—the veins bulging from her skin, like mounds of dirt from freshly tilled molehills—she stood abruptly.

My dad motioned to me as my sister walked away. It was my turn. I crept up to her bedside. My eyes were red. "I love you, mom," I said brushing away a salty tear that had slid down my face. "I'll miss you." I bent down and hugged her gently; afraid she would break. My words sounded clichéd, but what was there left to say, that hadn’t been said? What was there left to do? I let her go and stepped back.

I watched as my dad moved to her side. When she was diagnosed with cancer in February, he took advantage of the sick leave he’d accumulated from his workplace for over thirty years—so he could support my mom. If she needed anything, he was never far away.

He took of his glasses and pinched the red marks at the bridge of his nose. After wiping his salt and pepper mustache with his bottom lip, he walked away and let my Grandma say her final words to her daughter. He didn’t say a word, and I couldn’t blame him. Our family had discovered my mother’s darkest secret months beforehand, making it extremely difficult to say goodbye.

As my dad sat down, my Grandma stood quietly, grasping the metal guardrails around my mother’s bed for support. She looked at my mom’s face, frozen in horror with her mouth half-open, eyes bulging. My Grandma moved her hand over my mother’s eyelids to close them, but they popped back open like a children’s doll.

“They won’t close,” she said with a trace of panic in her voice. “Why won’t they close—What are you doing?”

The question was directed at Kristina’s mom, Carol who had just walked into the living room with two pieces of scotch tape stuck to her fingers. She looked at my Grandma sympathetically. “This is so that her eyes will be closed when she goes. It can be kinda scary for the family, if her eyes stay open.”

My Grandma nodded and stepped aside. Carol then delicately placed the tape over my mother’s eyelids, blocking her haunting, deadened gaze.

I looked away from her corpse-like face in revulsion and saw my grandma now kneeling at the foot of the hospital bed. She was whispering something under her breath, but I couldn't make out what she was saying. Finally, when her elderly voice rose I distinctly heard the phrases, "Oh, Jesus" and “Lord, hear us now.” She was praying. I stalked to a chair at the foot of my mom's bedside and listened numbly to her fervent prayers.

"Give up!" I bellowed maliciously in my mind. "You can stop praying because God's not listening to you!" I glared at her, narrowing my bloodshot eyes. "Don't you remember? Everyone prayed a few months ago that God would heal her. Remember that? What happened to God's glorious intervention then? Are we going to pretend that this is all a part of God's master plan?” My mind was ready to burst. “I knew that God wouldn't answer your prayers. He'd given up on this family years ago!” I folded my arms with tears leaking from my crinkled eyes. Tilting my head, I looked up at the spot that my mom had watched with her blank stare before her eyelids were taped shut. “How many times do we have to change our prayer to cover your ass, God? Why don’t you do something! PLEASE!”

The room fell silent. "Did I say that out loud," I whispered to myself, nervously glancing at the faces of my family around me. After a tense moment, I realized the goodbyes were just over. Now, we waited for death. I began to count the seconds between each ragged breath.

She inhaled. "One, two, three, four—” She exhaled.

“Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen." She sighed once more and lay beneath her blanket looking more shrunken than ever.

I sat up from my chair, and looked at her face. "Was she dead?" I thought. "Would I know—”

"We should pray," Kristina said quietly.

"No more prayer," I fumed. "This family has wasted enough time on prayer."

Despite my silent objections, my grandma prayed aloud for several minutes. She talked about how my mother's pain would be over soon, and how she would be ushered into heaven, free of sickness and tears.

“Sickness you didn't heal," I said to God. “Tears that you caused.”

The prayer ended and an eerie silence crept across the room, punctuated only by my mother’s sickening gasps.

“Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three...”

Her chest lifted again, and then she paused, gulping for air. Her back arched, and her hands clenched a fistful of blankets; with a tremulous shiver, she let out a rattling breath and her body went limp and still. I waited a moment in vain. "Breathe!" I thought. "Why won't you breathe?"

The crashing realization hit me. She was dead.

“WHY?" I turned my rage at God. "Why won’t you let me have her, God? Why did you have to take her away from me!”

I looked at a small clock on the wall. It was eight-thirty. As the second hand continued to tick around the numbered face, I wondered why time hadn’t stood still.

"No!" I cried to myself. Why was my dad in the kitchen making telephone calls? My brother was in Kristina's arms; Carol was hugging my Grandma, and my sister stood by herself.

"This can't be happening," I thought.

When my brother broke away from Kristina, I looked at her and muttered, "Are—are we done here? Is she gone?”

She nodded.

A burst of chaotic colors swirled around me like a kaleidoscope. The room started to contract, and I felt that if I stayed inside any longer, I would suffocate.

I shuffled to the front door and muttered over my shoulder, “I'm going for a walk.” Bursting into the night, I stumbled down the front steps. Cicadas buzzed throughout the neighborhood as I walked down the hill my house was on until it leveled off. Reaching the bottom, I hopped the curb and passed through the damp grass until my shoes reached the sidewalk. A couple of children were playing at the end of the block. “Don’t you know what just happened up the street?” I wanted to shake them violently and slap their faces. Instead, I shuffled past them and moved in and out of the orange light cast from the street lamps and the dark, cloudy night.

Nothing registered as I took step after step. Not the passing headlights of the cars in the streets, or the whispering leaves on the branches. The only thing I noticed was the wind whipping against my tear-stained face.