I cannot be bothered to worry about my mother because my heart is clenched like a fist for my sister. After silently resenting her sudden chaotic appearance in the otherwise fairly peaceful life I had created back at home, after fuming at her refusal to listen to me regarding Julian, after being so dismissive of her, now, now I am feeling a kind of terror—not for Julian, although I cannot think of the implications if this is a late-term miscarriage, but the kind of terror that reminds me how desperately I need my sister to be all right.

Even when we are sitting in the waiting room while Elizabeth is taken for tests, with the dark falling softly out the windows like black snow and the gentle hum of air circulating through the building’s vents, my mother clenches the armrests of her chair, her eyes closed and her face pinched like one fighting their way through the nausea of a roller coaster.

There isn’t anything I can do, I think to myself. I have tried to take her hand from its death grip on the chair, but she refused to let go, swatting me away with her elbow, and I have tried to pat her on the shoulder, feeling ridiculous even as I did, but she shuddered away from the touch as if my hand burned with ice.

Her breath hums, wheezes in and out of her throat.

“Everything is going to be okay.”

“I don’t need you to tell me that,” she says, struggling for air as if she were running a marathon.

“Then calm down. Just breathe.”

“Don’t you tell me what to do,” she barks.

I almost laugh. As if she would stop breathing just to spite me.

“You’re making me anxious,” I tell her, wishing she would stop behaving like this and knowing it is unfair of me to wish such a thing.

“Ask them how much longer.”

“I just asked them five minutes ago. They’ll call us up when she’s done.”

My mother shakes her head. “This is ridiculous. I can’t just sit here forever. I can’t even breathe.”

“Of course you can,” I snap, despising the sharpness in my voice. I ball my hands into fists and dig the nails into my palms. A few other people are in the waiting room, and they aren’t looking at us yet, but they might be, out of the corners of their eyes, for all I can tell, and I just want to keep it that way. “You breathe every second of your life.”

She lets go of the chair and bends over, hands on her stomach, and I grab her shoulder to pull her back up, to stop her from these hysterics, but she twists out of my grip, swaying, unstable, gasping, and dry-heaves twice before vomit comes up her convulsing throat.

When she straightens up again, she wipes the back of her hand over her mouth and fixes me with a glare that reminds me of my childhood. “You don’t know,” she says with a scratchy voice, and that is all she says.