The nurse said, “You’re supposed to have changed, you have plenty of help now,” and left, closing the curtain behind her. I pulled at the hoodie’s hem. My mother didn’t speak. I wanted to go to her but didn’t. If she was faking, I was angry. If not, I was afraid. Either way, I wanted her to tell me how to be.

Her lips were little waves of skin, seamed together. The seam parted.

“What happened to you?” she asked. “Your lips.” She touched her own.

“What happened to you,” I said and went to the gurney. She stood, took my body in her body.

“Baby,” she said and for a moment, I wanted to stay always in her arms, warm where I needed nothing. But I couldn’t stay; I knew I couldn’t and tried to pull off first. “No,” she said, and held tighter. My breasts ached where they were hidden. She squeezed, then took a sudden step back and it was strange, how she reached for me, almost violent, like a groping man, her hands to my chest.

“Is this a bra?” she asked.

“Excuse me,” I said and jumped further away.

Her face went from startled to shamed and I wanted to both punish and console her.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, formal. She looked at the johnny, shower cap and yellow compression socks beside her on the mattress. I remembered them from my surgery, too.

“Don’t thank me.” I sat in a chair by the curtain and she stood to change.

“I want to know about LA,” she said. “That man.”

“Manager,” I said.

“Your manager,” she said.

“Isn’t there more important stuff going on?”

“Do me a favor.” She turned her back toward me, pulled off her top. “Be mindful of how they treat the pain. I need you to tell them what happened before.”

I said, “Okay,” and wondered for an anxious beat if drugs were what she wanted. Was the surgery an excuse to have them, even as she pretended it was not?

“It’s important,” she said. “We’ll discuss the rest of whatever’s going on here when I’m out the other side.” She said it like a threat, a promise. Then she bent to take off her jeans, and I noticed the winnow of her legs, her shrunken ass, and felt a deep, familiar fear. Of my helplessness, and hers. I thought of so many stories I’d grown up hearing, messages from the world, cautionary tales about unaccompanied women, women without men. Women walking and running along isolated paths; road tripping women, pulled over for a pee at the wrong truck stop. Women with lives, women who forgot there were conditions to how they should be lived. Stories like that always ended in death.