by Justina Chen
“Another time,” I tell Grace, and mean it. “Really, another time. Thank you, Grace.” As I close the passenger door, I worry that I’m shutting more than a car door, but a golden opportunity to have a real sister.
I shouldn’t have worried. Grace rolls down the passenger window a crack, enough for her to say and me to hear, “I told your parents you were feeling sick so I’’d drive you home.” That’s when I know for sure that something, what or how I have no idea, but something has thawed between us. Grace doesn’t leave until I’m inside the house.
20
Valentine’s Day starts with me nearly colliding with Lillian, who’s standing statue-still and transfixed, contemplating the heart-shaped pastries at the end of the salad bar. I’m about to tell Lillian just to choose one already—her perfect-size toothpick figure can take the calories—but that’s when I realize she’s not ogling the high-fat, high-calorie baked goods, but the ultra-thin anorexic girl, staring, staring, staring at those overflowing baskets as if she were Mama at a jewelry store, weighing the worth of every bauble before her. How can jeans in a size I haven’t worn since fifth grade possibly look baggy on a girl who’s got to be around my age? Her shoulder blades poke out of her sweater more than her nonexistent chest does. Suddenly, her clawlike hand darts out and breaks off a tiny section of a blueberry bran muffin. Skeletal Girl retreats with her stolen crumbs to the grab-and-go refrigerator. As she stands there, eyeing one sandwich after another, she furtively slips a piece of muffin into her mouth, sucking on the crumbs like Baba tasting a rare vintage.
“Who is she?” I ask Lillian.
“Some prospective student who’s perfectly healthy,” Lillian says in a fierce undertone, glaring at the girl. “I mean, nothing is wrong with her, and she’s killing herself by not eating. God, it makes me sick.”
I place a hand on Lillian’s arm. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” she says, studying me like she knows about my own whacked-out relationship with food. I look away guiltily. As if she’s proved a point, Lillian nudges me past the salad bar and leads me to the grill, where she surprises me again. “So I’ve been meaning to tell you, thanks for that manga on the Groundhog Day party. I mean, you could have made me out to be some kind of do-gooder dork.”
“Well, I still have a lot of work to do on it,” I tell her. “You know, I wasn’t planning on publishing it.”
After she orders a hamburger, Lillian asks me, “So you want to go to Children’s after school today?”
“Valentine’s party?”
“Something like that.” The way she’s looking at me, I know it’s a test. Will I or won’t I take this small step to friendship? Lillian adds, “But only if you don’t already have plans.”
My parents do tonight, but I don’t. And I don’t want to see Mama yet, not when I’m still processing last night’s revelation that she is the Mother Teresa of the Northwest homeless.
Without hesitating, I say, “Sure.”
“Bring your manga-journal, will you?” she adds with a look of pure relief.
And that’s how I find myself back on the giraffe elevator at Children’s Hospital, this time thankfully without clowns. Only today, Lillian pushes the button for the third floor. With a shiver, I recall how that little kid, Frank, introduced me to Derek of the third floor, as though being a patient on the oncology ward made him someone to revere or fear.
“What are we doing here?” I ask Lillian.
“My sister’s a patient,” she tells me.
“She is?” Again, I hear the inflection in Frank’s little voice: third floor.
“When all the kids brought back the manga drawings you drew of them, Amanda promised she’d actually eat every day for a week if she got one.”
The elevator door opens, and down the hall is a large sign that reads SCCA, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.
“It’s all right,” Lillian says, following my gaze to the tall STOP sign that warns against entering the oncology ward if you’re sick or have diarrhea, but it doesn’t mention anything about the anxiety attack I’m experiencing. “If you don’t want to go in…”
Don’t want to go in? Try wanting to sprint out of here, but I clamp down on my urge to flee and with a smile, I say, “Are you kidding? My fan awaits.”
“No cell phones,” Lillian says softly.
After we both switch off our phones, Lillian hands me an inpatient visitor badge, and I sign my name on the pink sheet, swearing that I don’t have a sore throat, runny nose, cough, fever, chills, or general aches.
“Ready?” she asks, but doesn’t wait for my answer, as if I’ve passed the buddy test, one that jettisons me from acquaintance to friend she can count on.
A bald-headed boy with puffy cheeks zooms down the hall on a bike, narrowly missing a head-on collision with me and Lillian. His father gives us a weak apologetic smile and reprimands his kid halfheartedly, “Hey, speed racer, watch out for the girls!”
“Are they allowed to ride bikes in here?” I ask Lillian quietly.
“Oh, yeah, definitely.” She points to the fleet of plastic cars and scooters around the corner. “And those, too.”
Rooms line the hall, most with their shades pulled. Through one set of open windows, I see some parents sitting beside a crib. In another, a girl is lying on her back, TV on but she’s staring up at her ceiling. A large Seattle Mariners banner stretches across another door, its windows plastered with pennants and a manga of a kid in a baseball uniform.
“Hey, Derek,” I call through the open door.
“Syrah!” Derek waves shyly at me from his bed. At my name, his mom’s head lifts, and I wonder as she rushes to the threshold where I’m standing whether she’s going to “Syrah Cheng!” me, but instead she says quietly, “Your drawing changed his attitude.” Her hazel eyes shine. “Your parents must be so proud of you.”
“Mom!” comes the anguished, embarrassed cry from the bed.
I smile back at his mom and then look over her shoulder to Derek. “You going to be around in a bit?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says, chin thrust out, denying that anything could possibly cheer him up. But when I tell him, “Cool, I’ll catch you later,” his droll “yeah, sure” belies the hint of a smile.
“Amanda’s over this way,” says Lillian as we continue around a corner, past a nurses’ station littered with medical charts.
In my mind, I’ve pictured Amanda a couple of years younger than we are, so I’m not prepared for the little girl, a mini-Lillian, on the poster board tacked to her window. In the photograph, Mrs. Fujimoro and Lillian encircle Amanda protectively, her thick brown hair pulled into a high ponytail, and her cheeks so rounded, she could be stashing her entire Halloween haul in them.
“How old is she?” I ask, studying the portrait of childhood plumpness grinning at me from the center photograph.
“Three now. She was diagnosed with leukemia when she was just eighteen months old.” Lillian squirts more cleanser into her hand from the vial attached to the wall, rubbing quickly. “We thought she had this beat until about a week ago. She came down with a fever, and then I saw the bruises on her arms.”
A week ago. A week ago, I was whining about having to go to Baba’s birthday party instead of snowboarding and feeling sorry for myself because of my busted-up knee. Now, even the rejection from RhamiWare seems so trivial compared to this.
Tossing back her hair, Lillian grins widely, as if that will mask her sadness, but the fake smile only heightens it. “Why don’t you wait out here for a second? She’s a little shy with strangers.” She straightens, girding for battle before pushing through the door into the dim room, and part of me wants to yank Lillian back from visiting adulthood way too soon.
Immediately, Amanda spins around on the bed, hands outstretched. Mrs. Fujimoro doesn’t stir, an unmoving lump on the pull-out sofa bed by the drawn windows.
Feeling like an intruder, I focus on the poster board. Amanda’s World. Every brushstroke of
her name painted on the collage is capped with a large happy dot. Snapshots from Christmas, birthday parties, Disneyland decorate the board. All the normal activities of a family. Even mine. Compared to this third floor, Hong Kong doesn’t seem like such an awful place to be exiled.
A nurse wearing scrubs decorated with Disney characters pumps cleanser into her chapped hands as she stands beside me, both of us watching Amanda talk earnestly with Lillian, their heads together so they don’t wake up their mom.
“Amazing people,” says the nurse. “Not many families would go to the lengths that the Fujimoros have. Picking up and moving. The pregnancy.”
I nod as if I know what she’s talking about.
“Now, a lot of people might not agree with what they’re doing, but I say, what wouldn’t you do for your own kid, right? We’re all praying that the baby will be a great tissue match.”
According to The Ethan Cheng Way, if you want information, you have to ask. “What do you mean?”
“Unless that little girl finds a bone marrow match, most likely from another biracial person…” the nurse’s voice trails off but her meaning is obvious even to a third floor neophyte like me. “It’s really too bad that most of the volunteers on the bone marrow registry are Caucasian. Autologous transplants are just not as effective.” With one hand on the door, the nurse says, “Now, let’s see if Lillian can sweet-talk her into taking a couple of bites.”
I stare at Mrs. Fujimoro’s large belly as the nurse’s information sinks in. The real reason for Mrs. Fujimoro’s pregnancy is a last-ditch effort to save her daughter. An awful niggling thought sneaks into my head; under no circumstances can I imagine Mama willingly gaining thirty pounds for me.
Lillian peeks her head out of the room and says, “Amanda would really love a picture of herself as a snowboard girl.”
“Really?” I ask, surprised.
“Yeah, who knew? It must be all the ESPN my dad’s been watching. Come on in.”
Reluctantly, I follow Lillian inside Amanda’s room where Mrs. Fujimoro is awkwardly easing herself into a sitting position, patting her hair back into place self-consciously when she spies me. Looking away to give her some semblance of privacy, I focus on Amanda, who’s grinning at me from her bed, bouncing up and down, unmindful of her IV.
No sooner do I park myself in one of the chairs beside her bed than Amanda begins to art direct me. “Pigtails!” she demands.
“Amanda,” reprimands Lillian.
So much for shyness with strangers. Oddly, I feel pleased and smile back at Amanda.
“With pom-poms.” Amanda looks at me so steadily, there is no question that she might be bald now, but in no time, she’ll be sporting short, stubby, and pom-pommed pigtails.
“All the cool snowboard girls are rocking helmets with speakers in them,” I tell her. “So what’s on your helmet?”
“A hummingbird. Red and green,” she says decisively. “And I want a red snowsuit. Not pink. And goggles. Definitely goggles.”
“How old are you?” I ask, laughing as I begin to draw her on top of a mountain.
“Big enough to snowboard,” says Amanda.
Mrs. Fujimoro smiles tremulously at her. “Maybe next year.”
The nurse’s words—unless that little girl finds a match—hang in my head, dark clouds portending a storm. I press down hard on my journal, as if the heavy lines will make my image come true: Amanda, a fearless grom with luscious pigtails, the picture of health and serious attitude, soaring sky-high over Bold Mountain.
When I hand the finished page to her, I say, “Now what are you going to eat?”
“Everything,” Amanda breathes and holds the manga in her chubby little hands like it’s the ultimate pass to Paradise, one I’d give to her for free if I could.
As Amanda wanes between bites number three and number four, I ask her, “Do you want to see me as a snowboard girl?”
She nods eagerly.
“Another bite then,” negotiates Lillian, smiling her thanks to me.
As Lillian shovels another spoonful into Amanda’s mouth, I open my manga-journal to Shiraz.
“That doesn’t look like you,” says Amanda, frowning.
“What do you mean?” I flatten the page with my palm, but as I do, I study my manga alter ego under the bars of my fingers, and suddenly see Shiraz with absolute clarity. She’s a stick figure in a parka. A stick figure with an ample chest, if I have to be totally honest. Boobs on a board, that’s how I’ve drawn Shiraz. Suddenly I remember how once, after I had moaned to Age about how fat I was, he said, “You’re compact, Syrah. You’re the prototype for the perfect snowboarding body.”
“You’re right,” I tell Amanda softly. “That doesn’t look like me at all.”
Later, near the main entry of the Children’s Hospital, Lillian points at the statue of a mother elephant, her trunk wrapped protectively around her baby. “Guess what Amanda’s favorite part is.”
I tap the mother’s trunk, which ends in a pale pink heart. “This?”
“Nope, their toes.”
“Are you kidding?” I have to laugh, because both mother and child have red toenails, as if they made a pit stop at Spa Safari for a pedicure before hoofing it over to the hospital. “Your sister is something else.”
“I know.”
“You know, you should write about your Groundhog Day party, what it means to make a difference. That’d make a great column.”
“Nah, I’d be a one-sentence story: girl with sick sister throws party. Big whoopee.”
“Better a great one-sentence life than a boring book-length journal. At least, for me,” I tell her as we walk outside past the purple hippo crouched in front of the fountain shaped like a watering hole. It’s already dark. I check my watch, surprised that it’s eight. After drawing Amanda and then visiting Derek, a couple of other kids wanted manga-portraits, too. So did a few siblings. And two nurses.
In silence we walk to the parking garage, and I finally ask the question that’s been bugging me since I met Amanda. “How come you don’t talk about your sister? I had no idea she was sick.”
It could be that Lillian is ignoring me, she’s walking fast enough to outdistance my question. But her first “oh” after my question had sounded more surprised that someone would ask, than offended. Not until we’re safe inside the minivan does Lillian answer, “Probably for the same reason that you never talk about your dad. You never mention him or your airplane or your gazillion cars. There aren’t that many people who don’t get all freaked out that my little sister may be dying.”
Who would have known that it would be Lillian Fujimoro, the star of Viewridge, who would understand me so perfectly? “Yeah” is all I say.
It must be all I need to say, because as Lillian drives out of the garage and we approach the traffic light that changes from red to green, she asks, “How does pizza sound? Pagliacci makes a mean pepperoni.”
I sink all the way back in my seat happily and tell her, “Pepperoni sounds perfect.”
21
After dinner, when Lillian pulls down the driveway to my house, I’m in such a food coma, I can barely move. What’s weird is that I don’t feel (too) guilty about my two slices of pizza, and I haven’t calculated how much time I’ll need to spend on the treadmill tomorrow morning to ward off the ill effects of cheese, pepperoni, and grease on my belly pooch. After seeing Amanda and that anorexic girl at my school and my Shiraz alter ego, Lillian has it right. It’s just so stupid to obsess about weight and calories when my body is perfectly healthy, even my knee.
“Okay,” says Lillian, turning her head to me.
“Okay, what?” I ask.
“Okay, here’s the deal. Since you did your manga on me, I get to do a feature on you.”
“But I’m not doing anything.…” My voice trails off as an inkling of an idea starts to form. Amanda, snowboarding, charity benefit, bone marrow transplants. But the sight of Baba’s BMW haphazardly parked in front of the house instead o
f inside the garage stops my brainstorming. It’s not yet ten, way too early for them to return home from their Valentine’s dinner.
Instead of a “Syrah, where were you after school?” or a “Syrah, how dare you leave an event early,” when I walk inside the house, I hear a keening wail, so pained, my instant thought is that Baba has died. God, did he have a heart attack? Immediately, I rush, mouth dry and heart pounding, toward the anguished sound, coming from my parents’ wing. The crying turns into a single-note shriek. I stop in the hallway, scared now that an intruder has breeched our state-of-the-art security system and attacked my parents on their way in. No wonder Baba’s car was parked so carelessly. My heart thuds as another ragged cry tears through the house. Why hadn’t my parents taken that retired FBI agent’s advice and employed a couple of bodyguards to roam the grounds, twenty-four seven?
I’m fumbling with my cell phone, ready to dial 911, when I hear Mama wailing over and over, first in Cantonese, then in her British English made unrefined in its raggedness, “My Mama is dead, Mama is dead.”
I don’t understand and hasten to my parents’ bedroom, where the crying is coming from. My grandmother, Weipou, has already passed away, dead when I turned seven. I have a vague recollection of standing in front of her coffin, too scared to look in, so I closed my eyes. The lit incense in my hand made me want to gag, its smell so pungent, but I kowtowed three times the way my Hong Kong cousins did, while needing to go to the bathroom desperately. Mama tch-ed at me and made me wait so long that I wet my pants. “Shameful,” I overheard a guest muttering, and I wanted to drown in the tiny pool under my billowing white dress.
Then, on the day Weipou’s coffin was carried to the cemetery, her friends grumbled that for as few tears that were shed by the family, we should have hired professional mourners to rip their hair out and weep the way they did in olden days, as a sign of respect.
Whoever this unknown Mama is needs no professional mourners, not the way my mother is crying inconsolably. Before tonight, I’ve never heard her so much as sniffle.