My phone starts to vibrate in my pocket and I move to stand near the window before answering it. It’s no surprise that it’s my mom.
“Hey, Momma.”
“Hey, Lawrence. How is she?”
“She’s…” I look over at my sister. Her thin body is swamped by the bed. Deep purple semi-circles hang under her eyes and her light brown skin is sallow. Her chest heaves as each breath comes with some level of struggle. Finally, I check the monitor again, understanding instantly. “She’s stable.”
“You need me to come down there?”
“No. You’ve been working all night and half the day. You need some rest. I’ll call you if anything changes here, but hopefully, if her PFTs come back okay, we’ll be able to go home once these antibiotics are done.”
Mom sighs. “I appreciate you, Lawrence.”
My jaw hardens. “I appreciate you too, Mom. But we’ve got to talk about what happened. She should not have been at that festival.”
“I know, I know. But she was so desperate to go. I wanted her to go, to be like a normal twenty-six-year-old for once. Taylor promised me she’d look after her and—”
I turn my head to peer out of the window, not wanting the nurse or Jessica to hear what I say next as I interrupt through gritted teeth. “The fact you both chose to keep it from me speaks volumes.”
“I know. It was wrong. But you know, Taylor did look after her.”
“As she should. She’s her best friend!” Unable to keep my voice low, I grab a quick peek at Jessica, who doesn’t seem to have moved, her eyes still closed.
“We don’t even know if she got this infection from the festival yesterday or from something else.”
“Really?Really?” I say, making my disbelief very audible.
“Lawrence, baby, don’t give me a hard time. Or your sister. Let’s just get her better, get her home and we’ll talk.”
“Fine.”
“Thank you again,” Mom says, her voice softer. “I mean that.”
“I know. I’ll call you when I have an update.”
After hanging up the phone, I glance out of the window again. There’s no view. I’m just looking into another hospital room in another wing of the vast medical center we’re in. I count the windows of the building directly opposite and realize we’ve been in this room before. It shouldn’t surprise me – we average two or three hospital visits a year with my sister’s mutation of cystic fibrosis – but it gets to me nonetheless. I wish this wasn’t her reality. I wish this wasn’t her life.
“I’m fine.” Jessica’s voice makes me turn around. The nurse is in the same position, but she’s now taking Jessica’s pulsethe old-fashioned way, which is pointless considering all the machines Jessica’s hooked up to. I’m starting to wonder whether she’s hanging around for me rather than Jess. Maybe I should just offer to sign her scrubs or something.
As I walk toward my sister, I cock my eyebrow at her. She reacts exactly how I expect; a quick tut and an eye-roll that has her gaze leaving me and looking out of the window.
“I am,” she insists.
“We wouldn’t be here if you were fine,” I mumble, and when the words leave a bitter taste in my mouth, I’m almost pleased. I shouldn’t have said it. It’s a misplaced comment at best and downright insensitive at worst.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll just go back in time and magically make sure my mother doesn’t have sex with a waste-of-space white man who unknowingly carried a mutated gene.”
Itskher sullen sarcasm and sit back in my chair, folding my arms across my chest. “Well, while you’re there, try and stop her doing the same thing with my so-called father. Thanks to his mutated genes and aversion to responsibility,thatman has added nothing to my life but a whole lot of stress.”
That gets a small smile of solidarity out of my sister, and then we both look at the nurse, who is trying to manage the alarmed expression on her face but failing.
“Sorry,” I say to her. She is a subscriber, after all. “We’ll save our childhood trauma for a family therapy session.”
It’s Jessica’s turn to tut. “They’re bullshitting you,” she says. “We don’t do family therapy. We bottle it up like normal people.”
What Jessica is saying isn’t strictly true, at all. I’ve been in and out of therapy for years to come to terms with an absent father among other things, and she’s had a lot of counseling over the years to help her manage her CF. Our mother has read more spiritual awakening and self-help books than anyone I know, and she has done more than a few training courses on perinatalmaternal health for her job as a doula-midwife. But have we ever all sat down in the same room and aired our dirty laundry? No, we haven’t.
And honestly, I don’t feel like we have to. We do okay, Jessica, our mother, and me. In fact, we do better than okay.
