Yolk

by Mary H. K. Choi

  I hop on the subway, surprised that it’s as full as it is. It’s strangely tranquil, populated mostly by people rousted from bed by jobs that require uniforms. The collective reluctance and resignation remind me of our school bus in high school. I want to see my sister. I’m excited to see her, curious about her evening, ready to laugh at her stories.

  I up-nod the security guard in the lobby, halfway tempted to ask if he’d seen June’s sperm donor depart.

  I turn the corner on her floor, wondering if I’ll tell her my story about Patrick, less about the sex and so much more about how I like him, when my smile fades at the sliver of light at her door.

  It’s open.

  I push it slightly with my fingertips, listen, and then push it all the way.

  “June?” I say quietly. Too quietly for anyone to hear. My heart hammers. It was a mistake to go with Patrick. I had no business leaving her with some Wall Street pervert ax murderer. I recall his name. Salim. Salim what? I can’t conjure the rest of it. Fuck.

  Fuckfuckfuck.

  I sense the atmosphere for any movement. My shoulders coil inward. I inch forward slowly, not taking my shoes or jacket off in case I have to leg it to safety.

  “June?” I try again. This time louder.

  I turn on the kitchen light. An awful foreboding washes over me.

  My sister’s dead.

  If she died while I was having sex with Patrick, I’ll never forgive myself.

  “Hello?”

  I see the spots first. Dark droplets. Four inky bread crumbs foretelling her passage, splotched on the ivory hall rug from her bedroom door, leading to the bathroom. I soundlessly make my way over. I feel as though I can hear the walls breathe.

  “June?” I push the bathroom door open, knocking quietly just once as I enter.

  “Fuck!” she screeches, eyes wide and then indignant, arms wrapping around her boobs. “What the fuck?” She splashes the water with her palms when she sees who it is. “You scared the shit out of me!”

  It’s a horror movie. I’m astonished by the blood blooming around her in the water. For a heart-juddering, all-consuming moment, I’m convinced she’s been stabbed.

  “Is he here?” I turn my head toward the bedroom.

  “Is who here? What the fuck?” she shrieks.

  I’d read somewhere that there are only nine pints of blood in a human body. I try not to stare, but I need to know if I’m looking at enough blood to overflow one of those plastic-handled milk jugs. There’s so much of it ribboning around her in the water. The coppery tang, the sediment, I can almost taste it.

  “It’s just me,” she says, and then sighs. “He left. We were going at it until we both realized I was perioding all over the place. It was gnarly. You should have seen him—his dick looked like Carrie, and I thought he was gonna pass out.”

  “You scared me!” I tell her. “You left the door open.”

  “He probably did. You should have seen him break out.”

  “Jesus.”

  I push open the door to the bedroom and check out the crime scene. June’s mattress looks like an abattoir.

  “Never trust anything that bleeds for seven days and doesn’t die,” she says ruefully. “I thought I might be having cramps. But I’ve also been in such consistent pain, it’s hard to tell.”

  I watch my sister let the old water out and refill the tub. As the water runs clean, I see her naked body for the first time in years. She’s sitting with her knees tented. From above I can see that her abdomen is swollen, but her limbs are thinner. Spindly. “I can’t wait for all this shit to be over,” she says.

  “Is this a cancer thing?” I inch into the bathroom from the hallway.

  “No,” she says. “My period. It’s gotten so much worse. It comes every three to four months and arrives like some plague.”

  There was always an Old Testament quality to June’s periods growing up. Mom’s was the same way. Mom never gave us the Talk as it related to sex, presuming that someone at school had it handled. But she did pull us both aside when our periods came to remind us that a woman’s body was a burden and that nice underpants were a waste of money.

  “Jesus, it’s fucking metal.” There’s a silty ring of scarlet around the tub. “You look like you’ve been making kimchi in here.”

  She chuckles and then groans. “Stop,” she says. “I feel horrible. I can’t even tell you how many blood transfusions I’ve had this year.”

  I had no idea it had become this bad.

  She lifts her hand out of the water and stares at her fingers. “I think I’m still drunk.”

  I tiptoe through the blood droplets and sit next to the tub on the bathmat.

  “I refuse to buy adult diapers.” She closes her eyes dopily. “It’s like a miracle if I don’t soak through a super-plus tampon and a pad in between subway stops.”

  “Yeah, but”—I gather my legs in my arms—“when’s the last time you took the subway?”

  “Fuck you,” says June, smiling through gritted teeth. “God, you should have seen me at work. Trapped on the toilet in between meetings. I went to the bathroom so much, this analyst had the nerve to intervention me. She thought I was a cokehead, which, let me tell you, everyone would have been way more okay with.”

  June runs more hot water, and when her hand rests on the lip of the tub, the dewdrops from her fingertips are pink. My sister’s insides are outside of her, and a flutter of panic takes hold of my heart.

  She closes her eyes, grimacing.

  I can’t tell if the dampness of her face is sweat, condensation, or tears. She looks a bit like Mom then. I didn’t think either of us looked like her, but I see it now. I shouldn’t have left her alone.

  “Wait,” she slurs, leering at me. “Did you and Patrick bone?”

  “June.” I roll my eyes, but I can tell I’m smiling.

  “Oh my God.” She splashes her hand excitedly. “Does his girlfriend know?”

  “They broke up.”

  “Suuuuuure,” she says, shaking her head before exhaling noisily. I’m touched that she’d ask about it when she’s clearly in pain.

  “Want me to wash your hair?”

  My sister doesn’t say anything. I hold my breath, embarrassed suddenly to have asked.

  “Yeah, okay,” she says, finally opening her eyes.

  We clear out the dark water and fill it again. I detach the shower nozzle, testing the temperature as she leans, tilting her head back. Her black hair tendrils out. My sister wipes the water away from her eyes with the heels of her palms. I grab the good shampoo. The Frédéric Fekkai travel bottle that I brought over. I lather her head with the tips of my fingers, with enough pressure that it feels good but carefully so I don’t get soap in her eyes. When her face crumples and she starts crying noiselessly, I keep going without another word.

  My sister and I have been tormented by our bodies in different ways. A few weeks before the end of June’s last year of high school—one random Thursday—she leaked all through her leggings. Most of the semester was over. Senioritis had settled in for the upperclassmen; finals were a week out—the days were protracted and dull. It was almost as if people were waiting for something to happen. And this was particularly inviting.

  A disparate number of factions—the popular kids, her advanced-placement adversaries, the kids who owed her money for snacks, even Holland and the burnouts—joined forces against my sister. For someone playing such a minor role at school, she incited so much collective cruelty. She’d been sitting in some genius IB course, and when she stood up, it was a Saw movie on her ass.

  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?”

  I shake my head. “I had it when I lived in Texas. For here, for New York. I would picture the buildings and try to hear the sounds and focus until I felt like I could teleport myself here.”

  “Do you feel more grounded now that you are here?”

  I consider lying to her, but the vision of June’s swollen body in the scarlet bathtub stops me. I know how to be good. How not to test a God I don’t trust.

  I shake my head. “It’s not at all what I thought it would be. Nothing is. No matter how much I love it, it doesn’t love me back. If I weren’t so broken, it would fit. I feel like I don’t have a home.” My voice breaks. Hearing myself say it strikes me as so sad, so pathetic, so lonesome that I burst into tears.

  “I’m just wrong,” I tell her raggedly. “I have, like, fernweh for myself. Or something.”

  I feel the weight of Gina’s gaze even as I avert her eyes.

  “Fernweh is rooted in pain, or sickness and sadness,” says Gina. “It’s directly translated as ‘far pain’ or ‘far sickness’ as opposed to ‘heimweh’ or ‘homesickness.’ But it’s also longing for the unknown, since the familiar is stifling or challenging. The foreign can seem fantastic, exalted, since its possibilities are infinite. We have no data or experience around it. But once we arrive and the faraway is known and becomes familiar, then what? You’ve got all that energy and longing and possibility that no longer has anywhere to go. It’s got nowhere to be invested, nowhere to live. Have you ever considered that it isn’t a place that will improve your life? That there is no such thing as a geographic cure?”

  “Jesus.” I cry harder, thinking about my sorry, extortionately expensive apartment and my perverse relationship with Jeremy. “Then what is it all for?”

  She stands, her slacks are wrinkled, and her belt is Hermes, and I hate that I notice it even before registering the box of Kleenex held out in front of me. I take it in both hands, fighting the urge to crush it. “So, this is it? Nothing will help me?”

  “Is that what you’re hearing?”

  I roll my eyes. Why can’t anyone ever give me a straight answer? A flicker of irritation juts my chin and I find myself staring combatively. I despise her suddenly. Her imperious, ice-queen exterior goading me with its impenetrability.

  I pluck two Kleenex and blow my nose noisily at her.

  “I feel like I’m out of control.” I state it plainly as possible. Make the cry for help explicit.

  “On a scale of one to ten—with ten being extremely hopeless and out of control—where are you?”

  I continue to stare. I can’t locate any of myself to make the assessment.

  “Jayne,” she says evenly, writing something in her yellow notepad, which I always take as an indication that I’ve done something wrong. “Can you name five things that you can see around you, four things you can touch, three that you can hear, two you can smell….”

  I didn’t remember there being more parts to this, the smelling portion and the rest of it, but of course I’m remembering now.

  �
�I’m sick,” I tell the blond woman in front of me whose life I know nothing about.

  I stare at my palms and flip them over. They’re strangely mottled and hideous.

  Gina waits.

  For some reason I’m reminded of June holding the cancer book and tapping it against her leg. The one with the doctor, Where Breath Becomes Air.

  I wonder if I’ll ever escape the cinematic irony of that exact moment once she’s dead.

  “What if I told you I had cancer?”

  She stills.

  “Do you have cancer?” It’s uttered in such a placid tone that I half expect her to yawn.

  “It would explain the depression.”

  “It would.” She holds my gaze.

  I know it’s spoiled and reckless, but for a moment I’m jealous of June’s cancer. There’s such powerful recognition in the diagnosis. Everybody respects cancer. Being sick with cancer would explain my sadness, my sickness, my anxiety, and the horrible suspicion that everyone in the world was born with a user’s manual or a guide to personal happiness but me.

  If I had cancer, Gina Lombardi would help me.

  I have fernweh for cancer. I’m disgusting.

  “Jayne,” she says patiently. “We’re just about out of time.”

  Of course we are. I rise out of my chair as if guided by strings. “Fine.”

  “Would you like to meet this time next week, or go back to our usual day?”

  “Whatever.”

  Gina retreats to the chair behind her desk and clicks on her mouse. She picks up her silver wire-framed glasses and puts them on, her mouth easing open slightly in concentration. She glances at me and clears her throat.

  “I’m sorry, Jayne.”

  Something in her tone makes me sit back down.

  She comes around from her desk and joins me. “I should have informed you before, but this marks our eighth session. If you want to keep meeting, you’d be responsible for a seventy-five-dollar copay.”