The Office of Historical Corrections(2)

Lyssa saw the opening. She had been here all her life. She could tell him where a good bar was. She did not. In the hotel bathroom she scrubbed off the stubborn lingering bits of the green makeup and tried to look as respectable as a woman about to fuck a stranger could. When she came out, he had poured them drinks and didn’t seem to notice she was fully human colored again. She took a sip and put the drink down and he reached for her hand, turned her palm over, and began to trace something in it.

“Are you trying to tell my fortune?” she asked.

“I wasn’t,” he said. “But I have a lucky guess that you’re about to make a man very happy.”

It was so gross it was almost endearing.

The first time, they used the condom in the hotel’s romance kit, which consisted of a single condom and a package of after-dinner mints in a tin adorned with a rose sticker. The second time he pulled out, and the third time he didn’t.

“Was that OK? I mean I know I’m safe,” he said, a sentence that in her experience, men who were in any capacity actually safe never had to say out loud. “But are you on something?”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” she said. “I don’t have ovaries.”

“Hmm?”

“My mom died of cancer. So they took mine out. To be safe. See the scar?”

She turned onto her back and pointed to the faint line across her abdomen.

“I’m sorry,” he said, placing a palm on her stomach.

“It’s fine,” she said.

“You don’t have to pretend it’s OK,” he said.

“We don’t have to be friends,” she said.



* * *



—

She did, in fact, have ovaries, but she also had a period you could set a watch by and an app that told her which weeks not to worry about carelessness. The scar on her belly was from an appendectomy she’d had as a teenager, and was the wrong direction for what it would have been if she’d had the other surgery. She was not supposed to still have the ovaries. A year and a half ago, her mother had gone to the hospital with what the intake doctor called textbook appendicitis symptoms and died of cancer eleven months later.

Because hospice was for people who intended to die, and Lyssa’s mother didn’t, she had refused to go. She died in the regular hospital, admitted through the ER, which meant even though she’d been remanded to the comfort care team, the doctor on rounds was officially required to come in once a day and report to Lyssa that her mother was still dying. He was kind about it, if not particularly attentive. Her mother was too drugged up to take the message herself, and the doctor was young and seemed embarrassed to be there, which was fair, Lyssa supposed—she too had stopped acting like this moment was anything but private. In the very beginning, when they’d still thought something could be done, Lyssa had gone to every new doctor’s appointment dressed like it would be a photo shoot. She had bought clothes she couldn’t afford, taken off early from work to press her hair, never met a new doctor without a full face of makeup.

There was always something they wouldn’t tell everybody, and she wanted to be told, which meant she had to look like a real person to them, like a person whose mother deserved to live, like someone who loved somebody. Whatever information they weren’t going to give her, whatever medicine they didn’t bother trying on Black women, she would have to ask to get, would have to ask for directly so that it went in the file if they refused, but ask for without seeming stupid or aggressive or cold. She would have to be poised and polite through her frustration, which, thankfully, retail had prepared her for. Tell me what you would tell a white woman, her face said. A white woman with money, her clothes said. Please, her tone said. But eventually all the doctors told her the same thing, and Lyssa accepted there was nothing left to ask for. In the hospital at the end, she wore the same clothes for days and didn’t bother combing her hair. A night janitor asked Lyssa if she was the patient’s granddaughter; at first she was offended on her mother’s behalf—illness hadn’t aged her that much—but when she saw herself in the mirror, she realized it was not how old her mother looked, but how young she looked in her unmade state, how creaturely and unable to fend for herself. In the hospital bed, her mother looked alive and vital, only sleeping. They often go as soon as you do, a nurse said three days after they’d taken her mother off food, and Lyssa realized only much later that she had taken the wrong message, that the nurse hadn’t meant Lyssa had to stay put or she might miss it. The same nurse pointed out on day five when her mother’s urine bag had gone from yellow to brown, told her everything else would follow the kidneys and shut down soon.

Death would mean new logistics—administrators and insurance people. Lyssa showered in the hospital room bathroom, using the stinging antibacterial soap in the dispenser. She plugged in her blow-dryer and styled her hair. She put on a change of clothes, a muted-berry lipstick, and a sweep of mascara. When the doctor in charge of rounds came back, he looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. He asked her if anyone had talked to her about her own preventative options. No one had. He wrote on a prescription pad the name and number of the doctor he wanted her to call.

Lyssa thought she would talk to her mother about it, and then she remembered. She had to keep remembering, even after she’d seen the body and signed the paperwork and arranged a funeral. Somehow she’d expected the dying to be the worst part, that after it was over she could go home and tell some healthy living version of her mother about the terrible thing that had just happened to her. Lyssa felt cheated: out of a mother, out of a textbook diagnosis where they could have lifted the bad thing out of her mother and sent her home to recover. She was not ready to be cheated out of anything else. It took her months to call the doctor on the referral slip. She went to the appointment as her regular self, washed and neat, but otherwise unadorned.