The Medicine Carrier

You’ve talked before, about the power that a medicine line could become. That, even while steeped in pain, it could also bring a kind of backhanded protection once you cross to the other side. That, even while it shouldn’t exist, it could still bring you closer to an idea of home, even if home was what you were leaving behind.

But you never talked about the medicine carriers—those that carried pieces of home across the border, ebbing and flowing with traffic despite the changes to policy, court cases, the regular political wounds of the every day. They tug family members in faded Toyotas, renew passports, drag covered couches and mattresses strapped to truck beds to serve as a reminder: you still deserve pieces of home, in all of this.

For the past eight months, only since last Thanksgiving, our medicine carrier, your stepfather, hasn’t just migrated pieces of furniture back and forth, or simply transported cousins and sisters—brothers and friends—to see you. Every month, sometimes even twice, he delivers your literal medicine to you. Two pills, taken each day at exactly the same time, usually with food—they are the great deciders of your physical movements, of living a day unattended by pain or gritting your teeth in spite of it. You both told me once how, before the diagnosis of childhood rheumatoid arthritis, the invisible illness would suddenly lock up your legs, your joints, your arms. As a kid, you could walk into a movie theater and, by the film’s end, you were practically mummified. This medicine carrier that your stepfather was, would gather you up in his arms, like always. He’d carry you from movie theaters to hospital wings, massaging every form of medicine into your skin until, finally, you aged enough for your body to handle medicine intended for late-stage adults. Whereas typical patients could finally find comfort as they entered the final stages of their lives, with your stepfather, you could finally start it.

That is what a medicine carrier is—a stepfather in scrubs, wearing black glasses, a goatee-framed smile that has long been salt-and-peppered by now. You both were so close that, when people squinted at you, said things like you look so much like your father, neither of you bothered to correct them.

We joked once that he was a human Balto, zigzagging endlessly to deliver your medicine almost exactly one hundred years later. This sled dog though—he’d only ever had to make the journey once. Your father has endlessly crossed and re-crossed, re-filling prescriptions, moving bookshelves from your bedroom, delivering a rare Dion’s pizza when he has the extra time. It makes sense, how he could be trusted to direct entire wings of hospital units, his eyes sharpened for care and hospitality. He doesn’t just stop because the twelve-hour shifts end; he keeps driving, always, to carry medicine to you, to make your life a little less painful, carrying you on the days your own body couldn’t.

Brianna G. Reed is a student at the Institute of American Indian Arts.