King Tsin

I’d noticed when Karen had left Hemi and gone to sit on a bench under the rose arbor with her book, but she wasn’t reading now. The book was on the ground, and she was curled on her side in a fetal position with her arm over her head.

She might have been resting, but I somehow knew she wasn’t.

I dropped into a crouch at her side, put a hand on her shoulder, and asked, “Karen? You OK?”

“Just feeling…really sick,” I barely heard. “I’ll be OK. I just need to rest.”

Hemi appeared beside me. “What is it?”

“She’s sick,” I said.

“No,” Karen said. “I just need to…rest a minute. Go away. Please.”

“Honey, no,” I said. “We’re going to take you home.” I looked at Hemi. “I know you don’t want to, but…please. Could you help me get her home?”

“No,” he said.

I gasped, but before I could say anything, Karen was unwinding herself and stumbling past us. 

“I’m going to…” She stopped at the trash can, and before I could get there, was grabbing for its edges and being thoroughly sick, and all I could do was hold her and rub her back.

She finished shuddering and retching at last, but was still holding onto the filthy edges of the can, her arms shaking, tears running down her thin cheeks. “Go away,” she moaned. “Please take Hemi away. I’m so embarrassed. Please.”

I didn’t have to take Hemi away, because he’d already turned and walked off. Talking on his phone, and in another minute, he’d be gone. I’d have to get Karen home by myself. Taxi, I realized, and even in the midst of my concern for my sister, the fury and disappointment were rising. With Hemi, and with myself.

I was pulling out my own phone to call for that taxi when Hemi came over again. But he didn’t say goodbye. Instead, he said to Karen, “Let’s get you to the car.” And while she was still shaking her head, he was lifting her gently into his arms, looking back for me, and saying, “Let’s go.”

“No.” Karen’s voice was frantic. “Put me down. I’m going to…I’m going to…”

Hemi dropped to a knee and held her up as she leaned over and retched into the grass. When she was finished, he picked her up again without a word and set off. I couldn’t imagine how he could carry her all the way to the parking lot, but somehow, he was doing it.

“Have you been feeling sick all day?” I asked Karen, trotting to keep up.

“No,” she said. “It’s just the sun. I can walk. Put me down.”

Hemi didn’t put her down, though, and he didn’t say anything until we were at the parking lot and Charles had the car door open. Then he was sliding Karen into the back seat and telling me, “You sit there with her, and I’ll get in up front.”

“Thank you,” I said, because there was nothing else to say.

But when the car pulled to the curb, it wasn’t at our apartment. It was at an urgent care facility.

“No,” Karen said when Hemi would have lifted her out of the car again. “I can walk.”

“No,” I was saying at the same time. “She’s feeling better. Just give us a ride home, please.” 

“What?” Hemi said. “You aren’t going to get her checked out?”

“She’s better,” I said again. “She’s got a bug, or a touch of the sun or something. If she’s still this bad tomorrow, I’ll take her.”

Hemi ignored me, to my fury. He had an arm around Karen, was supporting her inside the building and taking her up to the front desk, talking to the woman there. She was handing him a clipboard, and I was fuming. 

When he helped Karen into a chair and gave the clipboard to me with a curt, “Fill that out,” I’d had enough. 

I walked a few paces away so Karen wouldn’t hear me before I turned on him. “What part of  “no” didn’t you understand?” I hissed. “I asked you to take us home. I didn’t ask you to take us here.”

“Thought you cared about your sister,” Hemi said, keeping his own voice low as well. “She’s ill. She was ill before she went to sit down. She told me she often feels ill in the mornings.”

“What? She never—“

“Yeh. She never told you that. Don’t you think, if you’ve got a teenage sister who’s sick in the mornings, you might want to find out why?”

“No,” I whispered. “No. She isn’t.”

“Could be you’re right. Could be it’s something else. That’s what you need to find out.”

“I’ll get a…kit or something.” Pregnant? Oh, no. No. I knew I wasn’t able to supervise Karen the way she should have been, but surely not. “She would have told me if she’d been…”

Some guys like girls who are, you know, kind of…small. At least, they don’t mind. Necessarily. That’s what my friend Sean says. 

I’d told myself to check out what she’d meant by that, and I hadn’t. I’d been wrapped up in my own problems, my own desires, and had failed my sister. Again. 

Hemi wasn’t making it any easier. “Would she?” he asked. “Would she really, knowing how you feel about it? Don’t you know that’s how it happens? That it’s the girls like her it happens to, the ones who don’t have enough care?”

I stepped back as if he’d slapped me. But this wasn’t about me. “I’ll get a kit,” I said again. “I’ll make her check.” 

“No,” Hemi said. “The doctor will check. Whether it’s that, or something else. We’re here to do it. Fill out the forms.”

“I can’t…” I said again, and then I put my head back, took a breath, and looked him in the eye. It was nothing to be ashamed of. “I can’t afford it. Not unless it’s absolutely necessary. It’ll be a hundred fifty dollars just for the visit, and if they do blood tests…I can’t, not unless we have to. If she’s not better tomorrow, I’ll take her. But I can’t do it now.”

“Don’t you have insurance?” 

I closed my eyes, then opened them again. “Yes. But not through the company yet, and it’s the highest-deductible policy. I’d have to pay all of this, and I can’t.”

“Ah.” He walked away, and I sat down beside Karen and put an arm around her. “How are you doing?” I asked her.

“Not too bad,” she said, but that wasn’t how she looked. She’d leaned back into the chair with an arm over her eyes against the light.

I hesitated. “OK if we go home?” I asked, battling the guilt. “See if this passes?” It was a reasonable decision. It had to be.

“Yeah,” she said. “Sure. I just want to lie down. I’m so embarrassed. I’m sorry I wrecked your day.”

I didn’t have a chance to answer that, because Hemi was back. “That’s sorted,” he said. “Fill out the form.” 

“What’s sorted?” I asked.

“You won’t pay the bill. Fill out the form.”

“I can’t let you—”

“No?” His voice was suddenly furious. “You’re going to let your sister be this ill for your pride? Because you don’t want to be obligated to me? A couple hundred dollars doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. I spend it on a tie. Fill out the bloody form.” 

I filled out the form. He was right. Obligation or no. Pride or no. He was right.

I cursed myself, during the hour that followed, for not following my first impulse and calling my own doctor. I hadn’t done it because I’d thought Hope wouldn’t want to be under that kind of obligation to me, and I’d been right. But in the end, it hadn’t mattered. I’d had to help her anyway, and she’d hated it as much as I’d known she would.

I stood up when they came out from the back at last. Hope looked a bit less fraught, but Karen just looked exhausted. 

“Migraines,” Hope said. “That’s what he says. She’s got a prescription.” She lifted a weary hand with the bit of white paper. “And a shot for the nausea, and a prescription for some pills for that, too.” 

I already had my phone out to ring Charles. “One moment,” I said, and went to the counter to take care of the bill. Hope had been right, I saw. Over three hundred dollars. 

Hope went next door and got the prescriptions filled while I sat with a silent Karen, and at last, we could leave.

Both of them were quiet on the drive back to the apartment, and when the car pulled to a stop, I got out to give Karen a hand. She stumbled a bit along the way, and I asked, “What floor are you on?”

“Fifth,” Hope said, and I nodded and picked Karen up again. 

“I don’t—” she said faintly, but I’d heard that enough today. Seemed it ran in the family. She didn’t have the strength to keep it up anyway. She relaxed against me with a sigh that got past every defense I possessed, and something twisted hard inside my chest.

I was a bit blown by the time we got up the shabby carpeted stairway and into the apartment, however hard I tried to conceal it, and Hope was casting me anxious looks as if I’d drop her sister. As if that were a possibility. At her direction, I carried Karen into a small bedroom and set her down on a double bed. 

“Could you wait for me?” Hope asked me, her voice low. “It could be a little while, though.”

“Course.” I left the two of them there, went out into the living room, and sat down on a faded green fabric couch.

Hope had tried, I guessed. The beige walls were hung with framed prints of the type I might have expected. The Impressionists: Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh. Flowers, mostly. Of course. There was a shawl thrown across the back of the couch, and everything was tidy. But Karen had been right. The bathtub was in the kitchen, and the only view was of an air shaft and the building across it.

It was, in fact, nearly half an hour before Hope came out of the bedroom again, shutting the door gently behind her. She looked so weary, and my earlier anger had evaporated. 

Don’t you get how close to the edge I am? she’d asked me at the restaurant. I hadn’t, but I got it now.

“You get her settled?” I asked her as she sank into a chair at right angles to me. “She feeling better?”

“Yeah. Asleep.” She ran a hand through her mass of fine blonde hair and sighed. “And now I need to settle with you. I’ll pay you back, of course. It just might take a while.”

“No,” I said. “You won’t.”

“I will. And there’s something else I need to say, too. Thank you for helping today, for everything you did. It was kind of you.”

The doorbell rang, and she sat up straight with an obvious effort. She was knackered. “Huh.”

“Ah,” I said. “That’ll be lunch.” I went to the intercom and pressed the button. “Yes?”

“Delivery from King Tsin,” I heard.

“Buzzing you up.” I did it, pulled out my wallet, and, when the fella puffed his way up the stairs, took a couple white plastic bags off him in exchange for a fair number of bills. 

“Forks and plates? Glasses?” I asked Hope, who’d been making some…noises behind me. Frustration, maybe. Maybe even anger again. I had to smile a bit. At least anger was better than worry and defeat. I’d always thought so, anyway. 

She lifted her arms out from her sides and let them fall. “Well, sure.” She went to the kitchen for them, which really meant that she stepped across the room for them, and I set the bags on the coffee table and followed her. 

“Wine glasses,” I said. “Corkscrew.”

“What? I’m sorry, I don’t have any wine. Let alone the kind you like.”

“But you see—I do.”

She pulled out a couple juice glasses and a corkscrew and handed them to me. “Sorry. I don’t buy enough wine to make the special glasses worth it.”

By the time she’d come back, I’d opened the bottle and poured. “Not as cold as it should be,” I said, “but we’ll pretend, eh. It’s a Riesling. Good with Chinese. See what you think.” When she hesitated, I added, “Don’t you think you’ve earned a bit of indulgence today?”

She smiled for the first time in hours. “You know what? I think I have. Our day out didn’t go so well, did it?”

“Oh, I dunno. It had its moments. The one where you almost slapped me again was pretty special.”

This time, she laughed. “You must be a glutton for punishment.”

“Mm. Not quite right. But go on. Try the wine.”

I waited and watched as she sipped, tasted, enjoyed, and, finally, sighed. “Really good,” she said. “Really, really good. But how did you get the guy to pick up your wine?” She caught herself, then, and laughed. “Oh. Duh. Money.”

“It has its uses. Can’t buy you, of course, but could be it can buy something I can watch you enjoy. That works for me.”

She looked a little flustered at that, got busy searching out a bowl and dumping ice into it to chill the wine. Then she was opening cartons, exclaiming as if I’d done something special, something luxurious, instead of just calling for Chinese takeout. Taking not a bit of it for granted. 

She went back to the topic, though, once we were eating, when she had her pretty legs tucked up under her in the big chair and her plate in her lap. She couldn’t resist closing her eyes at every sip of wine, though, and I couldn’t resist watching her. 

“Thank you for this,” she said. “I didn’t realize how hungry I was. And for what you did today. For helping Karen, and helping me. I know it didn’t turn out the way you expected, and still—you helped. You did so much. You did more than so much. Carrying Karen and everything? I wasn’t very…gracious about it, and I know it. So I need to be gracious now. Or at least…” She laughed under her breath. “I need to try.”

I shifted a little at that. “Nah. It was what anybody would have done.”

“No, it wasn’t. It was kind. And I have to say something else, too.” She was clearly steeling herself. “That you were right. The person who’s been wrong, who’s been offering mixed messages—it isn’t you. It’s me. If I hadn’t wanted to go out with you, all I had to say was no. I said yes, and then I…kept backing off, and blaming you for it. And I realize that isn’t fair.” 

Her eyes were steady on mine, and she wasn’t a butterfly now. But then, she never had been. 

“Of course it’s fair,” I found myself saying. “Of course you’re scared. You have too much to lose. Maybe I thought you were just…teasing, but you’re not. You’re scared, because you’re on the edge.”

Her eyes were shining a bit now, and she was taking another of those deep breaths. Keeping herself back from that edge, because there was nothing and nobody on the other side. 

“Why?” I asked. “Why is it you and Karen?”

She shook her head, her hair moving with her. “You don’t want to hear all this.”

“Yeh,” I said. “I do. Tell me.”