We walk hand in hand to the front door of my parents’ house, and after letting myself in, I continue to hold his hand as we walk down the marble hallway. The house is colder than ever today, and the light pouring in through the windows is gray, drab.
We find Priscilla in my dad’s room, where my dad’s hospital bed is starkly vacant. This room is the master bedroom of the house, and without my dad’s presence to fill it, it now feels ten times as large. Priscilla is organizing our dad’s medications into ziplock bags and boxes, and she gives no indication that she notices our presence. She looks awful. Her eyes are puffy, her skin sallow, and I think she’s lost weight since two weeks ago. She’s skeletal. I can even see wrinkles on her face. This is the first time that she’s looked the full fifteen years older than me, and I hate that.
So I swallow my pride and my own hurt, and I approach her. “Hi, Je je.”
“There’s a box of stuff you forgot here in your room,” she says in her harsh way.
“I’ll get it, thanks.”
Instead of responding, she continues organizing the medications, content to ignore me.
“Do you . . . need help with that?” I ask.
She gives me a stony look and says, “No,” before returning to her work. Only now, her hands are unsteady, and she drops a pill bottle to the ground.
I pick it up and put it on the table for her. “Can you look at me? So we can talk? Please?”
She lifts her chin and gives me her attention, but she doesn’t speak. She waits.
“I’m sorry.” It’s hard for me to logically conceptualize what I did that’s so wrong. I spoke the truth. I stood up for myself. Why is that bad? But if I hurt her, I regret that and I genuinely want to do better in the future. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just—”
“You accused me of torturing him because I couldn’t let go,” she says, pointing an angry finger at me as her eyes tear up. “You’re supposed to back me up. That’s what sisters do. Instead, you betrayed me and disrespected me. In front of everyone.”
She doesn’t touch me, but my whole body flinches with every jab of her finger. “I didn’t mean to betray you. I said all of us were torturing him.”
“It wasn’t my choice. I was just trying to do the right thing.” Priscilla covers her face with her hands as her thin body quakes, and it breaks me. “You were supposed to understand. We were supposed to be in this together.”
My heart wrenches, and I hug her, saying everything I can think of to make it better. “I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Eventually, she thaws and hugs me back, and I feel like I have a sister again. I feel like maybe everything’s going to be okay.
But when we finally pull apart, she wipes her tears away and acts like we’re finished. In her eyes, I did wrong, so I apologized. I love her. I don’t want to cause her pain. But something important is missing.
I wait, and still, it doesn’t happen. Turbulent feelings swell in my chest, raging to get out, and I can’t swallow them down.
I promised to draw a line. Around Quan. And around me. Because I matter, too.
If I don’t stand up for me, no one else will.
I have to do this.
“Aren’t you going to apologize to me?” I ask.
She narrows her eyes at me. “For what?”
“For hurting me. For treating me the way you did. I told you I was struggling. That being here was making me sick. But I stayed anyway. Who do you think I stayed for? And yet you looked down on me because I didn’t meet your standards. You didn’t care that I was doing the best that I could. You—”
“If your best job is a shitty job, it’s still shitty,” she yells.
“Why couldn’t we get help, then?” I ask, openly crying now. “He needed too much care, care that he didn’t even want. This was too much for us.”
“You mean it was too much for you,” Priscilla says through her teeth, pointing at me again. “It wasn’t too much for me.”
That hurts, but the truth of it sends an odd calm over me. I sense Quan coming toward me. No doubt he’s agitated by the things Priscilla’s saying and wants to defend me, but I motion for him to stay away. I need to handle this on my own.
“I’m different from you,” I tell Priscilla.
“Are you talking about your ‘diagnosis’?” she asks sarcastically, putting finger quotes around the word diagnosis.