Between Two Kingdoms

Chapter 30 opens in Detroit with Nitasha, who tells Suleika about her condition, dermatographism, which makes her itch all the time. Nitasha turned her suffering into art. She traces her ideas for drawings on her skin. Her body becomes an extension of her sketchbook. Suleika also notices how Detroit is rebuilding itself after a hard time.

Nitasha takes Suleika to a tarot card reader. The psychic tells her that a woman from her family visited him. Suleika suggests it’s her father’s sister, Gmar, who died young. The psychic tells her that Gmar has been watching out for her and keeping her safe during her illness. Now Suleika is on a new journey: “As he speaks, goosebumps erupt on my arms” (269). The psychic reads tarot cards for her and tells her how she will write a book and travel.

She leaves Detroit and heads to Chicago to see Bret, a friend she met on her first day of solo chemotherapy treatment, and his wife Aura. The next and last time she saw Bret, he received the news that he was stable enough to receive treatment closer to home. She thinks of Will as she drives and that last stay in the hospital. Remembering Aura and Bret makes Suleika wonder why she and Will didn’t work out.

She arrives at Bret’s home, an old Victorian house that he and his wife have been fixing up. He gives her a tour. Bret still experiences health scares and remains reliant on Aura for daily tasks, He says, “I’m two years out of treatment and I still feel like hell, […] My hands ache, my muscles and joints wake me up at five in the morning. And I can’t close the lid on my pillbox because there’s so much medication in there” (272-73). Suleika and Bret discuss how difficult it is to keep fighting: “In a way, setbacks were easier to deal with when we were still in treatment […] But when the body betrays you again and again, it obliterates whatever nascent trust you’ve restored in the universe and your place in it” (273). Suleika reflects that the boundary between sick and well is very porous.

Suleika obsesses about what happened between herself and Will. She travels to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and talks with a community leader and Oglala citizen named Nick. After talking, Nick and Suleika realize that they know of one another through Will, and she tells him that she and Will broke up. He says, “I had no idea you two split. Man, I’m so sorry.” She writes, “I mop my eyes with the back of my arm once hard before changing the topic” (278). At the hotel, she tries to sleep but thinks about Will. She recalls their first big fight. They planned to go to Santa Barbara to visit his parents and go to a wedding, but she was forced to stay home because of her health. All she can do now is remember and better understand what happened. She no longer talks to Will, but sometimes he sends a text or email with a photo of her during treatment. She feels angry when she receives these.

Suleika starts to drive again and imagines how she would have responded to Will if he had been the one sick, and she reflects, “I doubt I would be capable of doing a fraction of what Will did for me” (285). She apologizes to Will even though he isn’t there. She decides not to call him and says, “To love Will now is to appreciate memories of us, without allowing myself to be seduced by their siren call […] It’s to give him the space he needs to reclaim his life. It’s to do what’s hardest. To let him go” (286). It’s snowing, and she gets pulled over for speeding. The officer lets her off with a warning.

In Montana, she drives without seeing anyone for miles and lets a call from Jon go to voicemail. That night Suleika checks her email for the first time in over a week and sees an email from Max. His cancer is back, but she doesn’t have the energy to respond.

She arrives in Avon, Montana, to Salsa’s family ranch. Salsa met Suleika at “cancer camp” and sent her a care package. Suleika meets Salsa’s daughter Erin, and they give her a tour of the ranch. They are survivalists, living off the land. Afterward, they attend an aerobics class together. While they get ready for dinner Erin reveals that she has cervical cancer. When everyone arrives, Suleika stiffens when they hold hands and pray.

Erin and some of the women in the aerobics class joke that she should marry William’s brother. At dinner, Suleika finds she is attracted to him. They are eating elk that William has shot and beef stew from cows they raised. The men want Suleika to be able to defend herself and promise to teach Suleika to shoot a gun. When she prepares to leave, the family tells her that she can live with them if or whenever the world implodes. But everyone needs to contribute in some way to be a part of their community. She offers to be their scribe. Suleika observes, “In the fear of death, they have found a source, not of alienation, but of intimacy” (300). She drives toward Seattle and feels awed at their openness and generosity to someone so different from them.