In Sickness and In Health

Upon entering her bedroom, I see my mom holding a mirror up to her chest, examining the lavender scars left by her double mastectomy. “I’m hideous, Raven,” she says. She looks to me, begging me to argue. I grab the mirror from her hand. “Where did you get this?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer my question; she clenches her teeth and rubs her palm on her chemo-scalped skull. I bring the mirror out to our backyard’s tool shed where I’ve brought all the other confiscated mirrors over the last six months. I struggle to find a place for it—the tool shed is drenched in Ravens with mirrors propped up against all four walls. I shift the mirror eclipsing my dad’s power tools to make a few inches available on the workbench. As I walk back towards the house, I see her stood at the window.

My dad left my mom for a nineteen-year-old girl from their congregation named Lydia, two months to date after my mom got her double mastectomy. I’m not really sure what my dad sees in Lydia—her mouth is permanently half an inch agape, highlighting the crowding of her two front teeth; she straightens her hair, but never gets the back or the top of her head; her greatest accomplishment is having authority over the slides at the 9am Sunday sermon. She’s five years younger than me, and we look vaguely alike—vaguely. Not enough to be confused as sisters, but enough that we could pass as cousins and I find the whole ordeal perverted. Her hair is one-and-a-half blonde sessions lighter than mine and all of her features are a bit more rounded. She has the same cheekbones as me and my mother, though, and the same narrow hips, same fair skin.

When my dad left, my mom called me sobbing. She said that she needed me, that she had nobody else left; granted, she didn’t have me, either. We hadn’t spoken for the three years leading up to the call because of my biannual stints in rehab. Still, I took the flight she booked to MSP, leaving behind St. Louis and my promising career as a BP cashier.

I had only intended to stay in Minnesota for a few days, then a few weeks, then a few months to support her while she underwent the chemotherapy, but then, the tone of the doctor’s visits changed. I was cupping my mom’s frailed hands in my own when she got the news that it was terminal. When we got to the car, she said “I would’ve kept the boobs if I knew the cancer was going to kill me anyways. Maybe then your dad would’ve stayed.”

I said nothing in return. We sat in silence until I was pulling into the driveway; then, she said, “please don’t leave me. I don’t want to die alone.”

It’s impossible to find where my mom got the mirror from. Every room in this house has boxes lining its perimeter, except for the basement—the basement has boxes stacked from floor to ceiling. Still, I test my luck, flicking the lids off boxes to see if I can find the source. The first box is one of my dad’s dozen just-in-case scrap paper boxes. The second, the contents of a
year-long subscription to a greens supplement brand that my dad signed up for when he decided he was “getting serious” about his weight loss journey. All the containers still have their tamper seals on. In the third box, expired makeup: archeological evidence documenting my mom’s time as a Walgreens extreme couponer. The fourth box I open is photo albums. They document from the time my mom was six months pregnant with me to when I was twelve years old. In the first picture of the oldest album, her hands are clasped around her belly. I see why her sisters used to say I was her clone—in the photo, her face looks identical to mine now. I pull the photo out of its sleeve and carry it to her room.

“Look, mom,” I say, handing her the photo. “We’re twins.”

She takes off her glasses and squints to see the picture. “I was so beautiful. I should’ve gotten more botox, or killed myself, so I could’ve died young and pretty.” I frown. “Let’s get you ready for bed.”

I run the tub for her. When it’s full, I help her hobble into the bathroom. I sit on the ground with my back towards her as she removes her bathrobe, lowers herself into the water, and scrubs herself clean. She has me stay during her baths because she doesn’t want to be left alone, but she makes me turn around because the idea of someone watching her bathe makes her feel like a nursing home resident. To occupy my mind, I count the chips of paint missing from the wall above the sink, where the bathroom mirror used to be. She pokes my shoulder to let me know she’s done. Still facing the wall, I reach my arm back to help her up. She robes herself, and we hobble back down the hall—her left arm around my neck, my right hand around her waist.

I help her onto her side of the bed, and climb under the covers on the right side—my father’s side. Per our nightly tradition, I turn on Desperate Housewives. We used to watch Hallmark movies every night, but after the stage four diagnosis, my mom went from laughing at the recycled plots to crying because she would never experience the unconditional love shared between small-town cowboys and NYC-bound career women.

When I’m sure she’s asleep, I reach over to her nightstand where she keeps her oxycodone prescription. I pop two of the white pills into my mouth, and drift off to the hum of Gaby telling Carlos that she’s leaving him.

I wake up to wet sheets and my mom sobbing. Her cries are wailless and full of breath-catching gasps; she shakes the bed with every search for oxygen. The shaking is rhythmic, waves hitting a shore. I roll over towards her.

“Did you have an accident?” I ask.

“You make it sound so pathetic,” she says.

I get out of the bed and reach my hand out to hoist her up. I strip the sheets and bring them to the laundry room. When I come back, she’s sat on the edge of her side of the bed, staring out the window towards the lake.

“Ready to go back to bed?” I ask.

She meets my gaze. “Do you think your dad’s coming back?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t have the time or boobs left to make another man love me. I don’t want to die unloved.”

“I love you.”

She shakes her head and turns away from me, back towards the lake.

“Let’s go back to bed,” I say. I hoist her legs onto the mattress and climb back onto my father’s side. We lay with our bodies turned towards each other, analyzing each other’s faces. In the moonlight, her cheeks are completely hollow. I can almost see the outline of her teeth. “I’m going to die, Raven,” she says, breaking the silence.

“I know.”

She turns her body away from mine, towards the lake.

My dad and I have only seen each other twice since I’ve been back in Minnesota. The first time, we ran into each other at Walgreens while I was filling my mom’s oxycodone prescription.

“No Lydia?” I asked.

“She’s at church. Duty calls,” he said.

“Right.”

“You should give her a chance. I get that you want me to be with your mother, really, I do, but she’s changed. I can’t look at her the same anymore. She’s not the woman I fell in love with.”

“I can’t imagine why.”

“I really want you to meet Lydia. Please, Raven?”

A week later, I was sat in Caribou Coffee watching as my dad walked in with Lydia. He was walking ahead of her with his right hand outstretched behind him, holding hers. He looked like he was walking his dog, which wasn’t helped by Lydia falling into every step she took—the same way our old beagle, Biscuit, used to if someone held a piece of food above his head. The set up alone was enough for me to pop the just in case oxycodone I kept in my pocket.

When they got to the table, I asked Lydia what she did with her time outside of church. “Actually,” she said, looking at my dad with nauseating adoration. “I’m working on a novel.”

“What’s it about?” I asked.

“It’s still a rough concept, but basically it’s about this boy who discovers he has supernatural abilities and goes to a school with other people who also have supernatural abilities.”

“Like Harry Potter? X-Men?” I asked.

She stared at me with wide eyes and took a long blink. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I think it’s genius,” my dad said. “Let’s all toast to Lydia’s novel.” He raised his coffee cup into the air.

My dad always looked forward to his firm parties because he could remind his coworkers of how beautiful my mom was.

“Can you believe she married me?” he’d say, nudging his partners with his elbow. He’d look to her, begging for her to argue.

“I’m the lucky one,” she’d say, which would be met with his head nodding. I don’t think he ever actually thought she was too good for him, but she was. Before the cancer, she had a head of thick, blonde hair that glowed gold under sunlight, which she blew out after every shower. She only allowed herself crumbs of her favorite pastries. My father was a battler—he battled a receding hairline, compulsion for scratch-offs, prediabetic diagnosis, and stubborn gut—he was not a warrior; he lost all four fights.

One time, for a sixth grade health class assignment, I had to interview my parents about their relationship. When I asked my mom why she loved my dad, she said “your father is a good man, Raven.” I didn’t think this was a good answer—no woman should marry a man for being a good man; a good man is good for fighting the nazis, joining the PTA, donations to St. Jude’s. When I asked my father why he loved my mother, he said, “your mother is a beautiful woman.” I didn’t think that was a good answer, either—that’s all he let her be.

When I wake up, the left side of the mattress is empty.

“Mom?” I call out. No answer. I reach over to her nightstand and grab the oxycodone bottle. It’s empty.

“Mom?” I shout, louder than before. I walk to the bathroom to look for her; she’s not there. On my way back down the hall, I see her out of my peripheral vision—she’s out on the lawn walking towards the lake. The sun is high, painting the crests of the waves white. She drops her bathrobe when she reaches the water, and crouches on the shoreline, looking down at her sea-casted reflection.

I open the window. “Mom, what are you doing?” I shout through the screen. She doesn’t respond. She doesn’t acknowledge my voice; she keeps her eyes locked on the water at her toes, on her reflection. Under the sun, I can see every vertebrae of her spine, every rib of her chest. Her skin wraps around her skeleton the way vinyl gloves wrap around hands, highlighting every vein; it looks like her skin is suffocating her. She cranes her neck and meets my gaze. We stay like that for a moment. From this distance, I can’t tell if she’s blinking, but I can tell her eyes aren’t absorbing any of the light igniting the waves. She’s translucent under the sun. I watch her lips, waiting for her to mouth sorry or you understand, but they don’t move. Her mouth is a flat line. No sighs, no catching breaths. Nothing. She turns her head back towards the water.

Slowly, she lowers herself into the lake, inch by inch, breaking when the water meets her mastectomy scars. For a moment, she embraces herself, wrapping her palms around her scapulas and letting them rise and fall in rhythm with the waves. The only cloud in the sky rolls by eclipsing the sun. When the sun reemerges, she resumes her journey into the light of the crests, lowering herself until only the top of her skull is visible.