“I’ll get a number for you.”
“Thank you,” says June, putting her folder away. “So, I just have one more question.”
“Ask whatever you’d like.”
“How much is this going to hurt?”
The question stops my heart.
Dr. Ramirez studies my sister carefully before continuing. “Patients have reported discomfort in the abdomen and shoulder—”
“Hold it right there.” June closes her eyes. “Why is it ‘discomfort in the abdomen’？ It’s pain. Do me a favor and just call it pain if it’s pain?” Her voice cracks on the final “pain.” She opens her eyes.
“Women have reported pain.”
June exhales.
“We’re basically creating an air pocket in you so that we have room to move around. You’re going to feel the effects of that in your abdomen and shoulder. It feels like a soreness in your muscles. You’re not used to having air caught in different regions of your body, and that’s how it may register. I can’t tell you how uncomfor—how much pain you’ll experience.” She pauses for a moment and takes a deep breath. “You know, we’re trained not to use the word ‘pain,’ but I can see how discrediting that can be.”
“It scares the shit out of me,” says June. “It makes me feel like you’re going to downplay everything because of some malpractice lawsuit and I’m going to be in fucking agony.”
“I get that,” says Dr. Ramirez, nodding slowly. “So, I’ll call it pain.”
“It’d make me feel better if you called it fucking agony,” says June petulantly.
“Okay,” she says. “Patients have reported fucking agony, but honestly”—Dr. Ramirez’s shoulders drop—“if you experience what you would characterize as fucking agony, please tell me immediately. You shouldn’t be in actual fucking agony, all right?” A tiny hint of a Bronx accent peers out from her doctorial veneer.
That’s the moment when I realize that Dr. Ramirez is chill.
“But think about counseling?” Her brown eyes soften. “At least give Steph a call so that if you need her, she’s right there. This is a lot.”
“I like her,” June says as we walk out, tucking her folder under her jacket so it doesn’t get wet. “You can tell she kills at poker or something.”
“Yeah, she seems cool,” I tell her. “She probably drinks whiskey.”
“Whiskey neat,” she says. “She definitely also cusses like a sailor.”
“Definitely.”
I don’t know what else to say. I root around my brain to see if I can summon any anger at June. I can’t.
“Do you still need to grab your stuff?” she asks me when her car arrives. I nod, and she lets me in.
chapter 27
I pull my suitcase out from behind the love seat and fling it open. I can’t believe I’m packing again.
June kicks off her shoes, unhooks her overall straps, and leaves the pants in a puddle on the living room floor. She sits heavily on her couch with her eyes closed.
I grab my laundry from her dryer and sit on the floor with my legs crossed, dumping it out in front of me. The last twenty-four hours have felt like a year. I can barely keep my eyes open. I do socks first because they’re easiest.
“I got fired,” she says. Eyes still closed. “I didn’t get laid off. I found out in an office-wide email an hour before they told me.”
I stop folding.
She balls her hands and cracks her thumbs under her forefingers the way she always does.
At my eye level, there’s a book on her coffee table. It’s not an encyclopedia. It’s a small hardback. The spine reads When Breath Becomes Air. The title is familiar to me.
“They called security while I packed up my desk.”
I imagine her being frog-marched out of the building.
June leans over and picks up the book from the table. There’s a 30-percent-off sticker on the front, and the back shows a black-and-white author photo of a doctor in hospital scrubs. She starts tapping the hardback against her bare knee.
“They said I displayed a lack of understanding of the company culture,” she says, and then sneers. “Code for: my boss hated me.”
I hold my tongue. There’s no shortage of people getting laid off all over the world, but of course June’s firing is about a personal grudge.
“Believe me,” she says, bitterly. “It wasn’t about my performance history, that’s for damned sure. He was just mad that I wouldn’t suck his dick. Shit was fucking high school all over again.”
I don’t have the energy for this.
June’s voice shakes. “People hate me for no reason,” she says, doing that nodding thing again, as if she’s convincing herself.
Tap, tap, tap. She keeps knocking the book harder and harder on her kneecap. I remember it now, how the man who wrote it died. He was a cancer doctor who died of cancer. I want to grab it from her and fling it across the room. It’s maddening that she’d rather read about it than talk to anyone.
I make myself take a moment before I respond. “That sounds tough,” I tell her evenly. I’ve been hearing some version of this refrain my entire life. June’s always right. It doesn’t matter what it is—daylight savings, parking restrictions, the neighbor’s newspaper—everyone else is a chump and she’s right. It’s as if she can’t concede the statistical improbability of being correct 100 percent of the time. I peel my T-shirt off her towel, the static electricity crackling. I remind myself to get dryer sheets before remembering that it’s not my problem anymore.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she balks, voice strangled, agog. She flops her hands against her naked thighs.
“What?”
“That sounds tough? The fuck am I supposed to do with that? I confide in you about the greatest humiliation of my life and it sounds tough? Are you even listening to me?”
“Fuck, June. God.” I hurl a sock ball at the large window, where it thunks feebly.
She sits up, openmouthed, head swiveling to the window, then back at me as if I’d tossed a brick through it.
I roll my eyes. “What do you want? It’s always the same fucking story with you. What did you do? You definitely did something.”
“Just be on my side!” she yells, face purpling. “Just once.”
“No. You’re delusional!” I uncross my legs, ready to pounce if this escalates. “You did something! Just like you did something to me.” It feels good to say it out loud.
“Oh my God, what do you want?” she says, throwing back her head. She looks like her stupid avatar.
“Fuck you, June.” The gall makes me want to knock that smug expression off her face.
“Two grand.” Her gaze locks onto mine. “Just let me pay you. Two thousand dollars or however much the fuck it takes you to stop crying when I have way bigger things to worry about. Empathy? Ever heard of it? If you could just think of someone else for one fucking second, you’d see that this has nothing to do with you. I don’t have a job, asshole. And I have cancer. For once there’s something you can do for somebody else and you’re bitching and whining about it. Nothing’s changed. You don’t have to lift a finger, no one has to know, and you’re still being a little bitch.”