American Girls(16)

“Are we allowed to talk like this around your sister?”

“Please,” Delia said. “She’s fifteen. It’s the new thirty-seven, in case you haven’t kept up.”

“I have heard of herpes.” I tried to be deadpan, and got a real smile from Dex.

“Speaking of,” she said. “Gotta get the children home.”

“I don’t wanna,” I whined. “Please, can I stay with you guys? Please, please, please?”

“I lied. Fifteen is the new two and a half. I haven’t seen my man in a month. Look homeward, little angel.” She pointed toward the door and Dex didn’t object.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Dex said. “We’re gonna be running buddies this summer.”

“But…”

Delia had already opened the door, but she waited for a moment. “But what?”

I wanted to say, But what about the note? What about the fact that you’re going to leave me in some house where someone’s branding you “Whore” in their shaky, serial-killer handwriting and taping it to your door? I am not a whore and would prefer not to be confused for one in your absence. I don’t know how to tell a sex maniac Sorry, come back later, because I’m pretty sure that sex maniacs are kind of like impulse shoppers—in a pinch, they’ll take whatever happens to be around.

But I wasn’t supposed to have seen the note, and I would have bet real money that Dex wasn’t supposed to know about it, so I was just going to have to double-lock the doors, sleep with a phone by my head, and accept my fate.

“But nothing,” I said.





5

When we got back to Delia’s house, my mom called. She still phoned me every night, mostly to remind me about something she’d left off her laundry list of complaints: to tell me that my dad was going to have my head when he got back from Mexico, to ask me if I had a job yet, to bore me with more Internet blather about the importance of taking responsibility for my actions. She always signed off by reminding me that I wasn’t on vacation, that she hoped I knew that I still had a paper to write. I was ready to tell her that I was going to be researching the Manson murders instead of working on my project, just to see if I could hear her overheat from Atlanta, but her voice sounded tired when Delia handed me the phone.

“Is your sister there? Could you put me on speakerphone?”

My sister was walking around her apartment, stuffing clothes into a gym bag, makeup, underwear from her special sexy drawer.

“You want to listen to the sound of Delia getting ready to go screw her boyfriend?”

Delia threw a pair of underwear at my head. So gross.

“Please, Anna. This really isn’t a good time.”

“For me either.”

I handed the phone to Delia, and after brief hellos, I could hear my mom take a deep breath from her bedroom. The air purifier rumbled in the background and Birch was saying, “Dis, dis, dis,” over and over again. He must have been rummaging through her jewelry or tearing books off the wall.

“Okay,” she said. “I want to start by saying that I don’t want either of you to panic, because this is going to sound like bad news, but it’s all going to be okay. A few weeks ago I had to go in for a mammogram, and they saw something that made them nervous. It should have made me nervous too, but I had other things on my mind.”

My sister looked at me. I kept looking at the phone. My mom continued. “I truly didn’t think anything of it, because I’m nursing and I’ve had clogged ducts before, but they wanted the area biopsied.”

I watched my sister while we listened. She wrapped her arms around herself and rocked slowly back and forth, silent.

“And it’s cancer. There’s no other way to say it. But they caught it early, and it’s very treatable. They won’t know for sure how to proceed until they’ve removed what they found, but the doctor assured me that we’d caught it early and treatment would…” Her voice wavered. “It should work. I have surgery next week and then some chemo to follow up, and it should all be gone by the end of the summer.”

After the word “cancer” it was like I didn’t hear anything else she said. A low, radio-static buzz starting to build in the back of my head, and my mouth felt sticky and walled off.

“Oh my god,” I said. “I want to come home. I can help with Birch.”

“Anna,” she said. Another long pause. Another deep breath.

“So what’s the prognosis,” my sister said, “long-term?”

“Long-term I should be great. I don’t have the gene. There’s no way of knowing why this happened, and I”—now she was starting to cry—“I’ll feel okay when it’s all taken care of. When they have it out. It’s hard knowing this is inside of me.”

For the first time, I hated myself for being so far away.

“And I’ve been able to breastfeed for over a year. I’m trying just to be grateful for that.”

“What about me? Can I come back?”

“Anna,” she said, and it was her no-nonsense voice all of a sudden. “I just—we don’t know how cancer works. I don’t know what caused this. I don’t know what would make it come back or make it spread, but I do know that I can’t have any more stress in my life than I already have.”