“So, your doctors think it might not be cancer.”
“They’ve been telling me it’s not cancer since I was eighteen. We thought it was polyps or fibroids or—”
“But they think it’s cancer now?”
“They’re looking into whether it’s cancer.”
I sit back down. She does the same. “Um. Is it, like, I had a weird pap smear, or are there clusters of shadows all over the X-ray or whatever—the scans?” I’m running through every episode of Grey’s Anatomy I’ve ever seen.
“There are masses,” she says.
“The fuck does that mean?”
“They won’t tell me,” she finishes. “They want me to see an oncologist first. But it’s cancer. I can tell.”
The thing to remember is that my sister is a known psycho. Her convictions are stigmata level. Her palms would bleed at will to win a fight. For a week in third grade, she decided that daylight savings was bullshit and showed up an hour late to everything. She took it all the way to the principal, saying the administration was infringing on her First Amendment rights and her freedom to exercise her beliefs. She served a full week of detention before they threatened her grades, which is when she finally gave up.
My sister stares me straight in the eye. “I swear on Mom’s dead baby I have cancer.”
That shuts me up.
It’s been a long time since June’s sworn on Mom’s dead baby. Since either of us have, as a matter of fact. When we were really little, we used to do it several times a day. Instead of I’ll bet you a billion dollars, it was I bet you Mom’s dead baby. We’d swear on it like the Bible. It was the biggest deal we could think of. We did it until the time we accidentally did it in front of Mom. She stiffened visibly even though we never think she’s listening when we’re talking in English.
The baby was a girl. Older than me, younger than June. I’ve often thought she was the missing link. The middle bit of the Venn diagram that made me and June make sense. That almond shape, the eye, is called a vesica piscis. I think about her all the time. I imagine her being everything that June isn’t.
“Don’t tell Mom,” she says. “About any of this.”
I flinch.
“Promise me.”
“Jesus, I would never.” I’m insulted. “Why would I start calling her now?” I haven’t talked to Mom in over a month. And I know better than to drum up a whole boondoggle that’ll send her straight to church, lighting candles and browbeating every Korean Catholic in the hundred-mile radius into a prayer circle.
“Okay.”
“So, what do you know?”
“I had a pelvic exam, a transvaginal ultrasound, and a biopsy. They shove this insane bendy stick in you and scrape…”
The other thing about June is that there isn’t a surgery reality TV show that she doesn’t love. Me, not so much. I let out a shaky breath.
“So, it’s in your uterus?”
“Or my ovaries,” she says. “Or both, I guess.”
I imagine the goat head that is the female reproductive system in all the diagrams I’ve ever seen. It’s hugely embarrassing, but I couldn’t tell you if the ovaries are inside the uterus or around it. Probably around like those behind-the-head earphones that asshole runners mostly wear. I’ll google it later. That and what a womb even refers to.
“What happens now?”
“A bunch more doctor’s appointments.” She seems eerily calm. I try to imagine what my sister would look like with cancer. I wonder whether she’ll lose her hair. She’s always had a better face than me. With an aquiline nose that came out of nowhere. She’d look good with a pixie, which means she’d probably look good bald. You have to have very specific bone structure for that. I feel an old twinge of jealousy followed by a large transfusion of self-loathing. I’m not allowed to be jealous of my sister’s cancer.
She’s staring about middle distance into her own living room. Her eyes are like a shark’s, her hands clasped together between her knees.
A searing sensation rises into my chest as I stand. My heart is liable to burst out of my sternum. I grab my phone.
“So, you’ll let me know when you know more?”
She nods. “I’ll walk you out.”
We don’t say anything in the elevator.
I almost pat her arm but don’t. I breathe through the rolling panic, watching the elevator display change as we hurtle toward the ground, trying to exhale without making a noise.
chapter 5
“I’ll just take the subway; it’s faster,” I tell June in a stage whisper. I’m keen to let the people in the lobby know I’m with a resident. In the same way I always make sure I have my purse if I’m carrying a plastic bag so that no one mistakes me for a delivery person.
“Okay,” she says. June’s thrown her trench over her robe. If she had curlers in her hair, she’d look every part the suburban mom in a sitcom waiting for the school bus, and the visual churns my guts. I wonder what womb surgery means for having kids. June’s an asshole sister, but she’d be a good mom. At least she wouldn’t be worse than ours.
“Okay.” I give her a little wave.
“Okay,” she says.
I don’t move. I don’t even know what I’m waiting for. It’s not as if we’re going to hug. “Thanks,” I tell her, which is entirely the wrong thing. “Um, keep me posted.”
“Thanks for coming by,” she says, and just as I nod stiffly and turn around, I almost bodycheck a woman with an enormous clear trash bag filled with recycling slung on her back.
“Whoa,” I yelp. She’s tiny, a hundred years old, and bent over to boot. The dimensions are surreal. It’s mostly plastic bottles and cans, but the load is twice her size. She’s like old-lady Asian Santa. Or Atlas. With veins purpling the hand clutching the neck of the sack. She smiles and extends her other palm. She’s holding a piece of paper. She’s closer to me but dismisses me to talk to June.
“Kalambosewko,” she says, extending the note and nodding. Everyone asks June for directions. It’s a thing. The woman’s eyes disappear when she grins, and her mouth is so puckered she looks like she’s missing all her teeth. Her hair’s pulled back into a bun.
“I don’t read Chinese,” says June, enunciating as if volume is helpful. Mom made us take Mandarin because it was the “language of the future,” according to Korean Christian radio. We took it for three years before she gave up. We retained astonishingly little.
“She’s probably going to East Broadway, right?” June asks me.
“I’m sorry.” I shrug, smile apologetically, and show her my palms in the universal sign for total uselessness. The woman bobs her head a few times, still smiling, and turns to leave.
“Wait!” June holds out her phone. “I have this app for real-time translation. Say again?”
The woman tries again. Also louder this time.
“Oh my God.” I urge June out of the way. “She’s going to Columbus Circle. She’s speaking English. We’re such morons.”
I give her directions to the R and W, showing her the map on my phone.