Chapter 26

chapter 26

Patrick walks me to the train.We’re huddled under his umbrella, and he’s tilting it to favor my side, his shoulder getting soaked in the process.

When we get to the subway, he pulls me under the marquee of the Mediterranean restaurant on the corner. He closes the umbrella and hands it to me.

I shake my head, like a child, leaving the umbrella to hang between us.

“I’m older than you,” he says, urging it forward. “You’re taking it.”

It’s a nice one, a real one, not even the five-dollar kind you buy off the street.

“Thank you.” I smile at him.

He pulls his hood up and smiles back.

We stand there, cheesing.

He grimaces right as I feel it, the rude flick of cold water spraying us both as we’re almost decapitated by an advancing golf umbrella to our left.

I wipe my face as Patrick ushers me close with a hand to my hip.

We resume grinning, this time for being so oblivious. I nod at the subway stairs behind me.

“Wait,” he says, taking my hand. “When do you leave for Texas?” His warm thumb brushes the length of mine.

“Friday.”

“Let’s hang out before you go.”

“Really?” The hopeful lilt in my voice is mortifying.

“Yeah, really.” He chuckles.

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

He leans in and kisses me.

“I’m glad you called,” he says, mouth inches from mine. I hug him hard. “You can keep the umbrella,” he says in my ear. “But I want my fucking sweats.”

I hug him tighter, my New Yorker tote stuffed with clothes mashing between us. I want to tell him I love him, but instead I say, “We’ll see,” and clatter down the stairs. I wave before disappearing around the corner.

I imagine Patrick talking to his friends. The dude group chat. Wondering if he’ll say we hooked up anyway. That I took him in my mouth. Or that I led him on. Calling me a prick tease. Immature. I close my eyes. Things seemed fine, but you can never know what anyone else is ever thinking. Or what they’ll say about you.

I dig for my MetroCard, hitching my bag onto my hip so I can feel through the different shapes for the right one. My fingers catch loose change and various hard crumbs native to the bottoms of purses before curling around the metal carabiner of June’s keys. I fish them out along with my wallet.

Instead of going to Brooklyn, I take the F uptown. On the train, seated across from me, is an older white guy with wire-frame glasses and an orange beanie pulled up high on his forehead. He has his notebook out. He’s doing line drawings of different passengers. Sketching quickly as if trying to capture everyone in New York. I want to take the seat next to him and flip through his book to look for Cruella.

The New Yorkiest New Yorkers aren’t exactly like Pokémon Go, but they also sort of are.

I wonder if Patrick has any favorite New Yorkers. I’ll bet he does. He loves details. I replay the last twelve hours in my head, plucking out different aspects of his apartment. The movie poster. His heavy art books. That goddamned avocado egg timer. The way his kitchen towel felt in my hands as he washed and I dried. I don’t know what this feeling is, this crawling, spreading sensation that feels at once joyful and like shame. Why didn’t I know before this that Patrick was perfect for me? I can’t believe he has that flower hair catcher thing in his tub. I picture us in London. In Paris. At Léon in front of Jeremy, who I can pretend not to recognize as I walk by. I hug myself, smiling.

“Jayne!”

I look up, stunned. Suddenly I’m at June’s building and I’m still smirking stupidly with my arms wrapped around my middle. June gets off the elevator with her eyes wide. I let the smile drop. I thought I’d have a few seconds to get my bitch-face situated.

“What are you doing here?” She’s wearing denim overalls and a raincoat with a hood. Meanwhile, I don’t remember the last time I saw her in jeans, let alone dungarees. She’s holding a neon-yellow plastic folder. Something about the color reminds me of a crossing guard.

She glances at my oversize sweatsuit. And then down to my clothes from last night, which are swinging in my bag. “Where were you?”

“I’m just gonna grab my stuff,” I tell her, sticking my foot in the elevator door before it shuts. “I’ll leave the key with the doorman.”

“Okay,” she says. Her expression’s unreadable. “I’ll get out of your way.”

“Wait, where are you going?”

A beat. “Uptown,” she says.

“Doctor’s appointment?” I nod at the folder in her hand. She’s always bitching about crosstown traffic when she’s headed over there.

She looks down at it and frowns.

“Nah, I’m just meeting with an old client,” she says with a penetrating gaze. “Are you still coming to Texas? At least tell me if I should cancel your ticket.”

I let the elevator doors close without answering her.

She didn’t blink once.

This time it’s my sister who looks up from her phone. Startled.

It takes seventeen minutes from June’s apartment to Fifty-Third Street and Madison if you take the F or M train. It’s right where the line arcs toward Queens. You pop out at Lexington. Easy peasy.

It’s different in a car.

June’s Uber spent eleven minutes just crossing over from Park Avenue on Fifty-Second and then flipping back around the block because Fifty-Third’s a one-way. I trailed her big mouth right to the medical pavilion. She’s been here twice this month.

I’m leaned up against the thick metal column with my arms crossed. She has every reason to feel unsettled and paranoid. I still can’t believe she thought she would pull this off without me knowing.

She gets out of the car, stalks straight up to me, and grabs my arm.

“What’s the matter, Jayne?” I ask her. Her eyes flit over to the security guard by the revolving door. Then she pulls me toward a flank of plants away from the building. It’s still drizzling.

“What are you doing here?” she whispers angrily. “And don’t lie to me. I know you’re never in this part of town.” Her eyes slide down my outfit again. I’m still wearing Patrick’s sweatsuit since I’d never made it back to the apartment to change.

The truth is I’m not sure why I’m here beyond getting in a pissing match with my sister. “Me?” I ask innocently. “I have an appointment here. I thought you had to meet an old client.”

“Just once I’d love it if you didn’t make everything about you,” she says. Her nostrils flare. I can’t believe she’d have the nerve to be angry with me. “And where were you last night anyway?” She glares at my clothes bunched up in my tote and shoots me a knowing look. She rolls her eyes and turns on her heel.

I follow her into the building without answering.

I beat her to the counter. There are two brown-haired white guys in their midthirties at the desk. Their name tags read NICK and ADAM. I flash June’s ID, the one I’ve been using in bars. I smile at her. She flashes mine, the one she obviously picked up off the kitchen counter, where I left it.

Even standing side by side with identification displayed at the same time, we’re given sticky name tags with each other’s name and nobody notices.

Not that Nick and Adam don’t have the exact same face to me.

They take our pictures with a tiny round camera and hand us our sticky name tags. “All right, this one’s for… Is it Jay-eye Heyoon? Jee…”

“June’s fine,” I tell him, grabbing for it. Our IDs read Ji-young Jayne Baek. And Ji-hyun June Baek, respectively. It’s actually not that hard.

In the blown-out security photograph, I’m two little dark eyes in an expanse of white.

I hand June hers. He’s only managed to capture the top part of her head. My sister doesn’t even get eyes; she’s a hairline with a middle part.

We take the elevator, and I follow June into the labyrinthine corridors. It’s eerily quiet for how many people there are.

We’re silent on our walk. The linoleum floor is glossed to a high sheen. In the too-bright lounge in the waiting area, there’s a thin, drawn man with dyed black hair drinking a coconut Bai staring into middle distance. He’s propped with a striped cushion on the midcentury sofa and struck with a general air of incredulousness.

June pulls me toward a cluster of chairs as far away from him as possible. “Seriously, why are you here?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Jayne.”

“June,” I correct her. “My name is June. You can call me Ji-hyun if it makes you feel better.”

We watch back-to-back Property Brothers episodes without talking. Every single ad is for prescription drugs.

A woman in maroon scrubs calls my name. We both look up and follow her behind the door into a hallway.

We’re led to another room, where a tiny woman with hair parted down the middle gets up from behind a desk to greet us. “Hi, Jayne, come in.”

“This is June, my sister,” says June.

“Her older sister,” I tell the doctor, smiling. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be here sooner. I had work.” I know I’m overexplaining, but part of me is having trouble believing we’re doing this.

The doctor’s hand is cold when she shakes mine. “Dr. Ramirez.”

Dr. Ramirez has huge eyes, made larger by glasses, with a serious face and a tiny mouth. She looks like a friendly mouse. Her nude pantyhose wrinkle slightly at the knees and her severe foamy loafers give her the appearance of someone older, but I’d peg her in her midthirties. She has great eyebrows, full lips, and a reedy voice.

“So, Jayne, how was your week?” Dr. Ramirez takes a seat, gesturing to the leather-backed chairs across from her.

June sits. I sit beside her, reminding myself not to slouch.

“Fine, I guess.”

“Did you get a chance to speak to Steph?”

June shrugs insolently. I almost kick her shoes.

“Who’s Steph?” I pipe up.

June throws me a sharp look. “She wants me to talk to a counselor.”

Dr. Ramirez leans back in her chair. I can’t tell if she has eyebags or if she has one of those faces that come with eyebags. Silence settles around us.

“She thinks I need to talk about my feelings before having my uterus removed.”

“It’s a big decision,” says Dr. Ramirez, clasping her hands on her desk. “Of course it’s all up to you, but fertility preservation is an option if you wanted to explore it.”

My gaze trawls the beige walls around us. June seems to shrink in the seat next to me. I find myself staring at the innocuous Ansel Adams mountain print to Dr. Ramirez’s right. This office feels so set designed. None of this feels real. As if the walls will fall away to reveal stage lights and a live studio audience. Dr. Ramirez cannot possibly be a real doctor.

I hadn’t given enough thought to this. I presumed I’d come here, terrorize June about her idiot scam, scare her a little with the threat of her stupid baby sister spoiling everything, but this is horrible. I’m struck with self-disgust that I didn’t consider the terminal illness part of this whole equation. There’s got to be something wrong with me. June was right. I can’t actually handle any of this.

Dr. Ramirez turns to me. “Are there any questions you’d like to ask me? Or Jayne…” She smiles warmly. It’s a jolt to hear her refer to June as me. “It’s a lot of information to process at once,” she finishes.

I’m dumbfounded by how resigned June seems, how passive. I pull out my phone and hit the voice memo record button. My heart is pounding as I type Jayne as the file name. “I didn’t bring a notebook and I want to make sure I remember…”

I set it on her desk, with the screen up. Dr. Ramirez smiles. “If it’s all right with Jayne.”

June shifts beside me. “It’s fine.”

“Dr. Ramirez, what’s going to happen?” My voice is shaking. I have to sit on my hands to stop pulling on my bottom lip.

“The recommended treatment for uterine cancer is surgery. We’ve recommended a total hysterectomy and bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy.”

“Salpingo’s a weird word, isn’t it?” It’s the first thing June’s said unprompted since we arrived. “Sounds like a Filipino dessert.”

Dr. Ramirez removes her glasses and cleans them with the sleeve of her white coat. Without them her features suddenly recede. She puts them back on and becomes our doctor again.“Totally,” I tell her. I don’t know what else to say. “With ube or durian or something.”

“Totally,” echoes June.

I swallow hard.

“What’s a bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy?”

“It means they’re taking my ovaries,” interjects June. “And my uterus. If you didn’t know what a hysterectomy was.”

“Okay…” My knee’s shaking so bad, I uncross my legs. The surgery plays like a gory movie in my mind. I imagine the wetness of my sister’s organs sliding over each other for a brief second before my focus swings in a wide arc, out of the windows, hurtling away from this room and into outer space.

The black mirror of my phone screen flashes. I’m shocked that it’s been recording for seventeen minutes. I understand what June was talking about. How you can comprehend all the words but that the sentences themselves are inconceivable.

“Jayne,” says Dr. Ramirez, and I look up sharply, glancing away when I remember who Jayne is in this room. “It’s laparoscopic, so it’s minimally invasive.” Her small hands steady a laminated diagram. Pink. Peach. Red. It occurs to me that the female reproductive system looks like the flux capacitor from Back to the Future. There’s no way this drawing has anything to do with either of us. I breathe and count what I see.

One: my sister watching the doctor intently.

Two: my sister’s chest rising and falling.

Three: my sister in her overalls with her size-six sneaker jogging in place.

It is the foot of a child. For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Dr. Ramirez slices an area on the diagram with her capped pen. “Detaching the uterus…”

I’m pulling my lip so hard my eyes water. There’s a gummy buildup on the corners of my mouth that I scrape with my thumbnail. It’s harrowing. June will be giving birth to her own womb.

Poor June. Poor, poor June.

I wish there were adults present. A mom and dad other than ours.

My older sister is too young for this, but I see the wisdom in her decision not to tell. The only thing that would make this worse is for her to translate to our parents and watch the terror unfold on their faces.

“Wait,” I interrupt. June looks up at me dazed, as if she’d forgotten I was there. “Are you saying that the only treatment is to take everything out? Isn’t that… I don’t know, a little drastic? How bad is it? Do you have to do it now?”

“Uterine cancer in your early twenties is rare. There are options to preserve fertility with hormones, which is what we talked about, but that’s a deferment of surgery, not an alternative. Eventually Jayne will need the hysterectomy and oophorectomy.” Dr. Ramirez keeps referring to her patient by name. It’s jarring each time. Maybe it’s a med school thing. Maybe it’s a bedside manner thing, but it lends a surreal, automated quality to our talk. As if it’s prerecorded.

The thought flits into my mind that my sister is just another appointment among ten or fifteen Dr. Ramirez sees in a day.

“But with specialized care with her multidisciplinary team, Jayne could absolutely deliver a healthy baby before surgery.”

June laughs, a dry mirthless snort. “Thank you, but I’m not about to get knocked up in the immediate future,” says my sister. “I wouldn’t even know what to put on my dating profile to requisition sperm like that.”

“Jayne,” says Dr. Ramirez, this time looking right at me. My blood runs cold. It’s as if she knows. Then she turns to her patient.

“Thank you,” says June. I know this tone. Her mind’s made up. “But you said so yourself. I’m the one making the decisions. It took me forever and a mountain of literal faxes to even get a referral to see you. I’ll pass on risking my life for the next few years on the off chance I’ll get knocked up.” June shakes her head. “I’ve thought about it. Do the surgery. Just take everything.” June’s open palm brushes against her middle as if to scoop it out.

“Also.” June sighs. “Dr. Ramirez, I’m not trying to be difficult, but don’t you think egg freezing is kind of a scam? The actual percentage of live births is, like, maybe eight percent. For thirty grand of drugs and drama?”

“It’s about knowing that you have the choice if you want it,” says Dr. Ramirez.

“They throw your eggs out like on Storage Wars if you accidentally miss a bill.”

To her credit, Dr. Ramirez remains completely composed. She nods. “I see.”

June flips her neon folder open. It’s full of paperwork. Her narrow handwriting is scrawled all over the various bills. “I just want to set a date.”

“We can do that.”

“Terrific.” June riffles through some papers. “And another thing, don’t you think it’s, I don’t know, distasteful to demand the surgery deductible before you’ll cut me open?”

Dr. Ramirez places both hands on her desk. She’s instantly mouselike again. I imagine her tiny feet dangling in her chair behind her desk.

“You’ll have to speak with your insurance carrier and…”

“Well.” June flips through the reams of printouts until she pulls out what she’s looking for. Meanwhile I was convinced my sister wasn’t doing anything all day but watching garbage TV. The morass of logistics spread out in her lap is exactly June’s wheelhouse. Turns out being sick is a full-time job. “They told me to take it up with you. It’s based on hospital policy. I just talked to them”—June confirms it with her notes—“yesterday.”

“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.