The Best Sister

The days had seemed like they would never pass, but they had passed all the same, and it was Tuesday. I was in the waiting room with Hemi beside me; the same place I’d been since I’d kissed Karen in a curtained cubicle in pre-op, had seen her with the IV in her arm. 

“Hey,” she’d told me. “I just thought of something. We totally should’ve asked Dr. Feingold to save my tumor for me. I could keep it in a jar. It could be like a little pet.” 

“You forget,” I’d said, doing my best to smile. “The building has a strict no-tumors policy. Besides, what if we have company over, and somebody thinks it’s gefilte fish?”

Her face had twisted at that. “Oh, man. Gag me. I have nausea, you know.”

I’d squeezed her hand and said, “See you soon. Minus the passenger.” 

“Yep. Because I need that like a hole in the head. Oh, wait.” 

I’d choked out a laugh and kissed her, and then they’d wheeled her away and I’d come out here and tried not to think about what was happening, and what was going to happen. What I was going to hear. But when I’d tried to go back into the neutral zone where I’d been living for so long, I couldn’t get there.

The minutes ticked by, one eternal second after another, until they’d turned into hours. I sat in an armchair that should have been comfortable, except that nothing could possibly be comfortable now, and waited. Because that was what you did in a waiting room.

My mind tried to skitter down into panic, and I began to count the petals on the flowers in the huge framed watercolor opposite in a desperate attempt to reverse it, or at least to stop it. That wasn’t going to help. I needed to stay calm. For myself, and for Karen. When Karen opened her eyes again, she was going to see a sister who was smiling, who was telling her that everything was going to be all right, and who could make her believe it.  

Surely it would be true. 

I yanked my mind back to the flowers again. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one.

“All right?”

I dragged my gaze to Hemi, and he must have seen what I was trying so hard to hide, because he was closing his laptop and setting it down beside him. 

“It’s going to be all right,” he told me gently. One big hand smoothed over my hair, his lips brushed my forehead, and that was almost worse. I was going to cry after all if he kept doing that. I was going to lose it.

I pushed myself back from him. “I know. I know, because Dr. Feingold is the best. I’m all right. Really.” My hands were cold. Shaking. I pressed them together for warmth, for stability, like a desperate prayer. 

How could two hours take this long? I looked at my watch. It hadn’t been two hours. It had been three. I battled the fear back once more, picked up a magazine, turned its pages without seeing a word, then set it down and went back to counting petals.

 “I’ll go get you a cup of coffee,” Hemi said, and I nodded. Not that I cared. 

That was why he was in the little anteroom, though, when Dr. Feingold came out at last, the green scrubs covering him from cap to toes. Not looking worried, and not smiling, either. Looking perfectly…neutral. But something in his face… 

My legs trembled as I stood up and forced myself to walk to him. And if the minutes I’d waited had been long, this walk was a hundred miles. 

“It went reasonably well,” he said, and my legs began shaking so badly, my knees were actually knocking together. My arms had gone around myself, and even my lips were trembling, my teeth wanting to chatter, the cold fear grabbing at my heart and lungs. I couldn’t get my breath. And still I waited.

“I’m still thinking we’re probably all right,” Dr. Feingold said. “But I’m sorry, Hope. It’s not quite as clear-cut as I could have wished. We’ll have to wait for the results.”

He was looking around now. Looking for Hemi, who was finally there, his arm going around me, holding me up. 

“The biopsy is on its way to the path lab,” Dr. Feingold said. “No point in talking until there’s something to talk about, except to say that we got it out.”

“How long?” Hemi asked.

“Tomorrow,” the doctor said. “If it’s fast.” He exchanged a look with Hemi, and I knew what that look meant. That Hemi would manage, somehow, for it to be fast. So I would know. So I could cope, and help Karen cope, too.

But for now, all we could do was wait.

It wasn’t good, that long morning waiting with Hope for Karen’s surgery to be over. And the day following it was worse. Waiting, and wondering. About what the outcome would be for Karen, and what it would do to Hope if it wasn’t good. 

If I’d thought my heart had been ripped out before, I hadn’t known the half of it, because now, that heart had been wrung out and squeezed dry. I did my best to work, to take my mind off it, but I still found myself with heaps of time to contemplate exactly why I’d always avoided getting emotionally involved. Because it hurt like hell. 

We waited, and then we waited some more. All night in the critical care unit, because Hope wouldn’t leave, other than for brief fifteen-minute visits with her sister, and a dinner and breakfast I managed to persuade her into in the hospital cafeteria. She didn’t want to talk, but she seemed to want me there, so I stayed and held her hand, just as Eugene had told me to do. And when she finally fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion—I held her then, too. The only thing worse than being there, helpless to do anything but that, would have been not being there. So I stayed.

On Wednesday, they moved Karen into a regular room, and Hope lost a little of her frozen rigidity once she could see her sister, could talk to her and touch her. I came to join them in the afternoon, sitting in the corner of the room while Hope sat next to Karen and held her hand. 

Hour after hour of Karen lying with her eyes closed, half in and half out of consciousness. The nurses had told Hope that touch helped, and a bit of quiet talk did, too, so that was what she did. And I sat and watched them and thought how little I knew about love.

Just now, Karen’s eyes were open, then closing again, and Hope was talking. 

“Remember Mrs. Lee?” she asked her sister, her voice quiet, so sweet. “Remember reading the magazines? You never liked the fashion ones. You said they were boring. You liked the women’s ones best, especially once you got to be eight or nine and could really read them. Your favorites were the advice columns. ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’ That was a good one. When the new Ladies’ Home Journal came out, you used to sit and read it to me while I stocked shelves. And you’d say, ‘No. This marriage cannot be saved. People are jerks.’ I remember how that used to make me laugh.”

Karen smiled, just a twitch of the mouth, and Hope smiled back, then broke off, because Dr. Feingold had come into the room. And just like that, all the rigidity was back. 

“Good,” he said when Karen opened her eyes. “You’re awake. How’re you feeling?”

“Pretty...good,” Karen managed to say, and I thought that Hope wasn’t the only woman in her family with courage to spare.

“We’re doing well here all the way around,” Dr. Feingold said. “You’re bouncing back just about as well as you could be. I’d like to say that’s me, but I’m afraid we’ve got to chalk at least a little bit of it up to you. Because you are one tough cookie, Miss Karen Sinclair.”

He got another little smile from Karen for that before her eyes drifted shut again.

“Yes,” Hope said. “She is. And thank you. The nurses all said that you were the best. I know we’re lucky. Thank you.”

“Always good to hear,” he said. “Remind me to pay them off later. And normally, I’d take you outside the room to talk about this next thing. But in this case, I think Karen gets to hear, too, because...” He did a little drumroll on the empty second bed. “We’ve got nothin’ but net here. The results are back, and we’ve got a big all-clear. ‘Benign’ all the way through. That bottle of champagne you’ve got under the bed? Time to haul that thing out and pop the cork.” 

Hope still had hold of Karen’s hand, and she was trying to stand up, and failing. “Oh,” she said. “Oh. Thank you. Thank you.” And then she was talking to Karen again, the tenderness on her face so devastating, it pierced the last fragile defenses around my heart. 

It happened just like that. Just like that, I was laid bare.

“You hear that, baby?” Hope asked her sister. “You hear that? You’re going to...” She had to stop and breathe. “Keep your tumor in...in a jar if you want. Because you needed that thing like a...a hole in your head.” 

Her voice was shaking, and she was looking around for me, but I was already there. Picking her up out of her chair and holding her. Holding on. 

“Hemi,” she said, wrapping her arms around me and burying her face in my chest. “Hemi. She’s going to be all right.” 

At last, the tears were coming. She was shaking again, but this time, it was with sobs. Hope was crying in my arms. Letting herself go, and letting me hold her while she did it.

“Yeh.” The hot tears were right there behind my own eyes, and my throat closed around the words, but I got them out anyway. “Yeh. I heard. She’s going to be all right. And you’re brilliant. You are the best sister in the world.”