Yolk(97)

Kids from class cornered me, wanting to know if I’d heard. The friends whose demeanors had cooled after the Holland Hint debacle flooded my phone. All day people had been throwing tampons at my sister and sticking maxi pads on her locker. They’d printed out Japanese flags and taped them on her back, on her bag, even on Mom’s car, that she’d borrowed. They told me gleefully, telegraphing what until then I hadn’t known was common knowledge, that they’d witnessed my shame about my sister and presumed us enemies.

It’s true that since my first week, I’d memorized her schedule, bobbing and weaving to avoid her flight patterns, but other than rolling my eyes and writing in my journal, I never told anyone.

Stomach in knots, I hid in the library at lunch. My cheeks burned as I made my way to fifth period, shuffling, eyes downcast, until a huddle of senior girls I barely knew but certainly knew of beckoned me over in the hall. “I just had to tell you,” said the most beautiful one as I held my breath, “that you’re nothing like her.” She smiled at me, as if she’d provided clean drinking water to countless future generations of my third-world family. And honestly, that’s how I’d felt. It was as if my tattered reputation, my indiscretions were pardoned in that moment.

I chose not to defend her. Craven gratitude suffusing my body with loose-limbed relief as I loped away. She’d brought it on herself, I reasoned. I didn’t choose to be related with June, besides which she’d thrown me away. I was furious at her for getting accepted to school in New York and clearly planning to leave.

All day, I’d steered clear of the bathroom, afraid of what I’d overhear, but between fourth and fifth period I couldn’t hold it any longer. I’d run into the ladies’ room, when moments later June came in after me. I saw her through the crack of the stall, face pale with blotches the color of live coals high on her cheeks, and held my breath. I gathered my feet up so she wouldn’t recognize my shoes and watched as she looked at herself in the mirror for a while. Her eyes seemed hollow, unseeing; she seemed genuinely bewildered.

She got in the stall next to mine. The one I was always careful to avoid. The one that called me names on the left-side partition. I prayed that she hadn’t seen me, that she couldn’t sense me, and barring that, I hoped she would not speak. I told myself that it was for her benefit, to save her the humiliation, but so much more of it was that I wanted no part of her anguish. She cried so hard, the dragging, chest-racking sobs seeming to rise from some elemental, rooted pain. I sat there, eyes glued shut, feeling as though my body were trembling along with the bathroom stall doors, tears streaming down my cheeks.

Mom was gone. It was just the two of us. And still I’d forsaken her.

I rinse her hair out. Apply conditioner, working through the knots carefully.

“At least this part will be over after the surgery,” she says. “The bleeding.”

“Yeah.”

“And then I can move on to the next part,” she says, wiping her eyes with the backs of her hand. “The menopause, the fatigue, the shitting, and the vomiting.”

I hand her a towel for her face. “If I had to, I would probably wipe your ass.”

She laughs. “I’ve wiped your ass so many times. That’s all I did for two years.”

“I’ll give you two weeks.”

June flicks me with water. “I’m taking two months, whether or not I need it. I’ll get a bell.”

I strip June’s bed, remake it, give her a fat white prescription pill of ibuprofen, and tuck her in. I clean the bathroom, scrub the grout, throw the towels and bath mat in the machine. I spend an unknowable amount of time on my knees, crouched low, blotting at the blood in the hallway rug with a Tide stain stick and paper towels, crying so hard I feel wrung out.

She’s going to die.

I grind the paper towel into the carpet.

Get it out get it out get it out.

I can’t fight the roaring in my ears.

The familiar galloping in my chest.





chapter 45


I call Gina Lombardi’s office. They fit me in for an emergency session. I walk in meandering circles, to kill time. She’ll fix this, I tell myself as my fingernails bite small red smiles into my palms. The familiar whir of the noise machines in her waiting alcove is so soothing that I run my fingertips over the textured eggshell wallpaper, lulling myself into a trance.

I don’t know what I was thinking, canceling my last appointment. I force myself not to hug her when she opens the door.

“How have you been?” she asks, taking her place in the cream velvet club chair closest to the window. In a starched white blouse, open at the neck, and pleated woolen slacks, this is a woman who will tell me what to do. Her honeyed hair has been trimmed, no longer brushing her clasped hands when she leans toward me.

“I’m fine,” I tell her. It’s true enough. Enclosed as I am in her dome of good feeling, her force field of hardy mental health and cognitive clarity. “Did you know…,” I begin, trawling my memory for anything interesting, “that Germans have a word for when you’re longing for a place you’ve never even been?” I’d written it down in my notes from June’s encyclopedia when I snooped in her apartment that first time. It’s inconceivable how long ago that was. We were different people then.

“Fernweh,” she says. “The Germans have words for a lot of things. Are you experiencing that right now?”