Yolk(6)

My scalp prickles. Everything else is numb.

Cancer.

My sister is going to die.

I wonder if in a few years this will have been the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. Or if things get worse. If this moment defines me as an adult, I need to know right now by how much. My sister died, I imagine myself saying. My sister died. Well, my sister died. I wonder if a sister dying is worse than a mother dying. I’m deciding it is.

I imagine the viewing. I’m dressed in a vintage Dior suit I don’t own. My sister’s gleaming casket on the pulpit above us, me turning to Mom, her unseeing face wild with grief as Korean hymns swell around us, the flower-perfumed air coating my throat.

Fuck.

My therapist, Gina Lombardi, says I need to name five things I can see, feel, and hear when I catch myself losing it.

My lungs expand with as much air as I can hold.

I tap the cool glass in my hand with a nail.

Black socks against cream carpet.

Fuck.

I make it as far as my sister’s lap. Her hands are gathered there. My gaze retreats, skittering to the window behind her.

Christ, this is unbearable.

I yank my attention and force it to land on her face. I’m trying not to blink. I’m momentarily terrified that I might yawn.

“I might have cancer,” she says crisply. “I’m pretty sure I have cancer.” My sister nods several times with grim finality. As if it’s settled. As if she decides what’s cancer. “I have cancer,” she tries again. “I just don’t know how much.”

“What?” I rise to my feet. She stands too.

I pound the rest of the wine, tilting my head way back. “So, do you have cancer or not?” I can’t feel my arms.

“Well,” she says. “We’re still hoping it’s something else. Like endo or PCOS.”

I don’t know what any of these words mean or who “we” refers to.

“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.