When someone becomes ill in the movies, it’s dramatic, but in real life it is incredibly boring. Even the guilt and the fear and the sadness become things you live with, such constant weights that, after a while, you stop feeling anything. I guess because of the way my mother and I lived together and apart, it was easier to forget that she was sick, or maybe I just didn’t want to remember. Sometimes I didn’t think of it until the afternoon. Sometimes I didn’t think of it at all, and I’d jerk awake the next morning with the breath knocked out of me. When I called the hospital, it seemed like Lillian was asleep or getting treatment half the time, and the other half she’d ask about school and I’d ask about her blood cells, and then we’d both dumbly sit there holding the phone. Visiting the hospital after work was out because that meant riding the subway at night, so I’d wait for Saturday to take the train up to Sixty-third in Manhattan, then walk toward the river. It was weirdly clean and quiet up there. Old ladies in fur coats and pinched faces held small dogs and fancy-looking shopping bags as they teetered in and out of stupid-looking stores. I knew I didn’t belong, and the old ladies knew that I knew it. I kept hoping one of them would ask what I was doing there so I could yell back that I was going to the hospital to visit my mother who had leukemia, and would they like me better if I was shopping for jeweled hairpins and miniature fruit? Except that none of them ever said anything to me, so each time I had to walk to the hospital without yelling at anyone.

Other than the IV that was feeding good blood cells into her arm, my mother just seemed pale and tired. At first I couldn’t help wondering if the doctors were wrong and maybe she only had mono. Then she got a fever. The next time I visited, she told me they needed to put her on antibiotics. She hadn’t told my grandparents that she was sick, but now she thought it was time. As she said it, I saw the dullness of her hair and eyes and how the skin of her face looked waxy and weird. I saw the boniness of her finger as it slowly turned the phone dial. I realized everything I’d been telling myself—that she was slowly getting better; that the doctors might have made a mistake—was wrong. Mama, she said in a voice I’d never heard before, speaking a name into the phone that she’d never used. Mama, I have bad news.