Kye refused to take any breaks, despite our encouragement. She’d spend the whole day with my mother, massaging her feet and doting on her every need, never leaving her side even when I subtly hinted for a moment with my mother alone. It made me feel guilty, even when I was only leaving the house for an hour to run at the gym. The two of them were inseparable, and while I felt indebted to Kye for her support, I was beginning to feel edged out. Even though I had pushed fear of the worst to the furthest corners of my mind and tried to bury it with positive thinking, deep down I knew there was a possibility these could be my last moments with my mother, and I wanted to make sure to cherish our time together while I still could.

When we scheduled an IV drip to bolster her electrolytes, I volunteered to drive her to the appointment. Kye was reluctant to stay behind but I was firm about going with her alone.

“Please, take some time for yourself, Kye. You deserve it.”

I hadn’t driven my mother since I was fifteen and learning how to drive. Back then she was so nervous, constantly convinced I was veering over the line on her side. The two of us would screech at each other, exacerbating the situation, arguing over trivial things like how soon to utilize the turn signal and which route to take through town.

Now we were quiet. We held hands and it was nice for a moment to finally be alone together. I thought, We could do this without Kye. I could do this all myself.

At the infusion clinic a nurse took us to a private room that was quiet and dimly lit. It was in a building on the University of Oregon campus, across from a sub shop where I used to get soft serve in the summer before heading through a hole in the chain-link fence nearby that led to a section of the Willamette River banked by a rocky plateau. My friends and I used to jump off the slippery, jagged rocks and let the rapids pull our bodies downstream until we drifted a good quarter of a mile. Then we would kick our way to the shore, jump back in, and let it take us again.

I thought back to those easy summers. When my hands were sticky from soft serve topped with candy, the sun beating down on my neck as I unlocked the chain from my clunky Schwinn, eager to submerge in the cold, fresh water that waited. I had no idea what the building across the lot was. A hospital meant something different back then. Had I even known enough to identify it, I would have been incapable of imagining the people inside. What their suffering was like, both for the patients and the people who loved them, what exactly was at stake. There were so many people there with luck far worse than ours, some without families to help them, without insurance, some unable even to take time off while in treatment. Even with three of us there to labor, caretaking often felt like a herculean feat.

On the car ride home I thought better of bringing up my feelings toward Kye. Instead, I scanned through the discs loaded into my mother’s CD player. Slot one was my band’s first album; slot two belonged to my mom’s new favorite singer, “Bruno Mar”; and slot three was the Barbra Streisand album Higher Ground. My mother never seemed to listen to much music, but she loved Barbra Streisand, counting The Way We Were and Yentl as two of her favorite films. I remembered how we used to sing the song “Tell Him” together, and skipped through the album until I found it on track four.

“Remember this?”

I laughed, turning up the volume. It’s a duet between Babs and Celine Dion, two powerhouse divas joining together for one epic track. Celine plays the role of a young woman afraid to confess her feelings to the man she loves, and Barbra is her confidant, encouraging her to take the plunge.

“I’m scared, so afraid to show I care…Will he think me weak, if I tremble when I speak?” Celine begins.

When I was a kid my mother used to quiver her lower lip for dramatic effect when she sang the word “tremble.” We would trade verses in the living room. I was Barbra and she was Celine, the two of us adding interpretive dance and yearning facial expressions to really sell it.

“I’ve been there, with my heart out in my hand…” I’d join in, a trail of chimes punctuating my entrance. “But what you must understand, you can’t let the chance to love him pass you by!” I’d exclaim, prancing from side to side, raising my hand to urge my voice upward, showcasing my exaggerated vocal range.

Then, together, we’d join in triumphantly. “Tell him! Tell him that the sun and moon rise in his eyes! Reach out to him!” And we’d ballroom dance in a circle along the carpet, staring into each other’s eyes as we crooned along to the chorus.

My mom let out a soft giggle from the passenger seat and we sang quietly the rest of the way home. Driving out past the clearing just as the sun went down, the scalloped clouds flushed with a deep orange that made it look like magma.

* * *

—

BY THE TIME we got back, Kye was manic. She emerged from my parents’ bedroom to reveal she’d shaved her head to match my mother’s. She tipped a hip to the side, stretching her arms out, and rolled her eyes languidly as she struck a pose in the hall.

“What do you think?”

She batted her eyelashes and pushed her newly shaved head toward my mother, who reached out her hand and ran it along the stubble. I waited for my mother to scold her the way she would have if I had done such a thing, or recoil the way Eunmi had when I brought up the idea three years ago, but instead, she was moved.

“Oh, Unni,” she said, tears in her eyes as the two embraced and Kye brought her back to bed.

* * *

—

WHEN HER THREE WEEKS with us elapsed, Kye insisted she stay longer. Why have someone else fly in? She was up to speed and wanted to stay. My mother was relieved and grateful, but both my father and I had started to feel unsettled by her presence.

She was quite unlike the two of us—reserved and precise. She was raised in Ulsan, a city on the southeast coast of Korea, and after leaving the base in Japan, she and her husband, Woody, had spent the past twenty years in Georgia. I assumed that coming from a southern region in Korea and living in the southern part of the United States, she’d have a more forthcoming personality, but Kye was difficult to read. She was unlike most of the Korean women I’d grown up with, who were warm and maternal, referred to by the names of their children. Kye had no children of her own and interacted with my father and me at arm’s length. Her icy demeanor froze us over.

Kye had a habit of letting produce rot on the counter. Fruit flies started to gather in the kitchen, and with my mother’s immune system in peril, my father and I grew concerned that some of the ingredients Kye was using could spoil. When my father confronted her about some persimmons that had attracted a plume of gnats, she became irritated and mocked him for being overly cautious.

One night, at dinner, I set my place next to my mother’s. Kye moved my silverware across the table to take the seat herself. After we had eaten, she handed my mother a lengthy letter, handwritten in Korean, and asked her to read it silently while my father and I were still at the table. It was three pages long, and halfway through my mother began weeping and took her hand.

“Thank you, Unni,” she said. Kye smiled back solemnly.

“What does it say?” my father asked.

My mother was silent and continued to read. If it weren’t for the drug-induced haze, she’d have picked up on our discomfort, but in her current state, she was blind to our apprehension.