“How’s she doing?” Phoebe asked. She pictured her mother, so small in the big chair, powerful medicine running down a tube to the port in her chest. It would either save her or kill her. This was her third round of chemo. Her diagnosis—stomach cancer—had come just after St. Patrick’s Day. Phoebe had gone along to her checkups thinking she would be needed to help translate her mother’s rough-around-the-edges English, but Umma was a far more effective communicator than Phoebe had given her credit for. She pressed her doctors to explain, repeatedly, why they couldn’t operate and when they could start the much-hyped immunotherapy, how soon, exactly, they would be able to determine whether the chemo was working and if they were really still sure that surgery wasn’t an option? When the schedulers mixed up the timing of her blood draws and infusion appointments, she cursed and moaned until they fixed it. Umma was as unconcerned with being nice and approachable now as she ever had been. And yet her nurses all adored her. She’s such a good person, a young woman with long twists had assured Phoebe. Your mom is hilarious, a guy with a gentle touch with the needle told Phoebe last week, when she took Umma in for a blood transfusion after the last blood draw showed she was dangerously anemic. How did they all know these things about her mother? Why didn’t Phoebe?

“She’s watching her show. She’s hooked!” Apa said, delighted by his wife’s enthusiasm. He and Phoebe did this now, traded triumphs like precious stones to collect. She ate a bit of jjigae! She sat outside in the sun for an hour! I told her a funny story and she laughed!

“Give her to me,” Umma demanded in Korean.

“Umma?” Phoebe said as the mouthpiece rebounded from palm to palm.

“It was all a dream!” Umma shouted in English, and Phoebe’s heart danced. Could it be true, that none of this was real, not the awful prognosis or the pain her mother was in or the worry etched into her father’s face? Could it be true that Phoebe was not losing, each day a little more, this ultimately unknowable woman who had somehow been her anchor all her life?

“Ten hours I’ve been watching this girl trapped in an old woman’s body, thinking yes, yes, that’s how I feel! Only to find out it’s all a dream. I feel tricked!”

“Oh, Umma, I’m sorry.”

Phoebe hadn’t watched The Light in Your Eyes first to check that it was suitable. She’d only known how popular it was and that unlike most of the series that featured young stars in silly romances, this drama centered around a woman Umma’s age. She should have known it would be tragic and sad.

“Eh. It’s still very suspenseful.”

“How’s Apa?”