Apple Tree

Julia Motyka

Word Count 1460

The cat dug up the tree again. I’m not sure whether she’s trying to eat it or kill it. Its tiny leaves are punctured where her teeth have tried to pull them off. They look like green swiss cheese. It’s a very small tree; just a seedling. My mother planted it. Last winter she and my daughter shared a day together and shared an apple and my mother, in an uncustomarily sentimental move, pocketed the core and planted three seeds. One died. Two grew. She kept one and gave me the other.  

“Mama,” this same child—four years old— says in the middle of her bath while playing with a small plastic sailboat, “I will miss you when you die.” She says this apropos of nothing. “I will miss you, too,” I say simply, and smile at her, “but I will always be with you in your heart.” “Yes,” she says, “and you will go back to the earth.” “Yes,” I say. There is a long pause while she slowly pours the water out of the tiny sailboat. “Now it can float again.” “Yes, bug,” I say. “Now it can float.” 

A couple of hours ago I sat on the phone with a geneticist who explained that—like my mother, who found out just a week after giving me the tree—I have a single anomalous gene that raises my probability of developing uterine cancer to 48%. If I were three seeds, one of me would be dead, too.  

I’m not sure why the cat keeps uprooting my tree. Maybe it’s a cry for attention. She will leave it alone for several days at a time and then suddenly I will walk into the room and find it yanked violently two-thirds of the way out of the pot. If I put it where she cannot reach it, it doesn’t receive enough sunlight and I forget to water it. If I put it by the window, it thrives but she eats it.

Since I got off the phone, visions of my precipitous and painful demise have been playing on a loop in my mind. “Feelings of darkness or obsession are normal after this diagnosis,” I was told by the geneticist during our conversation, “for most women though, they subside after about three weeks because, I mean, you just can’t spend your life imagining you’re dying,” I briefly wonder if my daughter talked about my death because she knows something I don’t; then I wash her hair and cuddle her up in a towel before sending her off to put on pyjamas. 

I bought the cat catgrass, but she only wants the tree.

We’ve crawled into bed and are about to read a story when my daughter looks at me and says, with admiration, “Mama, your boobies have really grown.” Then she cuddles up to me and smells my chest and says, “You smell like baba.” It’s her word for breast milk. 

That’s actually not true, about the catgrass. She uprooted it completely in the middle of the night and dragged it around the living room, making crop circles with the soil. So maybe it’s not even specific to the tree. Maybe the cat just destroys plants. 

Before I took the pregnancy test, I thought my missed period was early menopause. I’m almost forty-one, I have one working fallopian tube, and severe stage-four endometriosis. This uterus is not fertile ground. And yet, here I am almost 10 weeks pregnant. My boobies have grown and they probably do smell like baba.

When I texted my mom to let her know I also had the gene, she texted back a sad face and then, “Well, your uterus is sure going out with a bang.” 

My daughter and I planted the tree together. We sat in the yard and put the apple tree in a tiny pot where we could watch over it and keep it safe. We massaged the roots and mixed the dirt to be one-third compost and two-thirds topsoil. We patted the tree into place, gave it a little water, and set it on the porch. We both felt the dirt under our fingernails all day. 

The standard of care for someone with this genetic variation is biannual monitoring and then, when the woman is done having babies—usually in their early to mid-forties— a radical hysterectomy. But uterine cancer has a misleading name. It is most common cancer of the uterine tissue—technically called endometrial tissue— not the uterus itself and, because of the endometriosis, my uterine tissue is not confined to my uterus. It grows all over my body. So, even after inducing surgical menopause by removing my uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, and cervix, there will likely be tissue remnants in my body the locations of which will be unknown and untrackable; small floating cancer seeds—waiting to take root. 

My mother handed me the little seedling in its tiny pot and assured me that there was absolutely no pressure to keep the thing alive. She then spent the next several days of her visit scouting locations for its transplanting and musing on the kind of apples it might produce (she no longer remembers the type of apple they shared) and how old my daughter might be when the first ripe apple falls to the ground.

At eighteen, my daughter will send a saliva sample to a lab and wait for the results. 

Apple trees have about a 60% germination rate and I have about a 60% chance of bringing this baby to term. My mom asked me recently what it felt like, to be surprisingly pregnant after having been told that another pregnancy was a physical impossibility. I said, “It feels like whoever is in here is an old tree. Sturdy.” So I’ve taken to calling the group of cells in my body rapidly multiplying and becoming human the tiny tree. 

When the pregnancy test showed up positive, I assumed it was a mistake. At the doctor’s office, however, the sonogram showed a healthy embryo implanted strongly in a healthy uterus. I was certain that when we checked again two weeks later, there would be no heartbeat. I had been so convinced that this body could not sustain any more life.  Two weeks later, there was a heartbeat. And now here we are. The baby and me. Together. Both growing strong. 

At this point, the apple tree and the tiny tree both have about the same odds. 

You can’t expose a baby apple tree directly to the elements as it cannot withstand the wind and rain, but every time you water it brush your fingers gently across the leaves like a gentle breeze. The plant will grow strong only if you give it some small hardship to survive. 

The women in my mother’s family die young. My mother is the only one in generations to live past the age of 60 and she’s done so without her uterus, which was removed at 46 due to fibroids. So, while there is no history of uterine cancer in my mother’s family, there is no history of aging women in my mother’s family either. I’ve spent most of my life looking over my shoulder at the specter of mental illness and checking my mind to make sure it was sound. I’ve been so worried about suicide I’ve never considered cancer. 

It is bedtime in our house and I haven’t had time to replant the tree, which currently sits in its little pot at an angle incompatible with survival.

When I hold my daughter and sing her to sleep, I am almost paralyzed with the possible grief of losing her, of her losing me. I imagine all the moments I will miss with her; all the ways I will not be there. I memorize her scent and let her chat on and on once the lights are off for far longer than usual just to imprint her voice on my brain. 

The geneticist may be right that you cannot spend too much time imagining your own death, but imagining your child’s life without you is not a tolerable pain.

Better to leave now, I think, while I can still control my own departure.

I lie there and briefly envision uprooting everything to move to Morocco where I will learn Arabic and deliver this second baby in the sand under the stars of the Sahara before leaving it to be raised by Bedouins while I walk, however many or few years I have left on this earth alone, carrying only the memory of my daughter’s tiny voice. 

Instead, I gently pat my belly as I watch her sleep, then kiss her sweaty head and walk into the living room to re-pot the tree and wait to see what will grow.

Julia is a writer, performer, and yoga teacher. She lives in NYC with her husband, two kids, and an ever-growing menagerie of animals. She has a piece forthcoming at The Manifest Station and is working on a memoir and an essay collection. Occasionally she posts things @juliamotyka_me. Maybe she will tweet someday. That day is not today.