When I enter room 306, there is a neatly folded pale blue hospital gown on my mother’s side table instead of a breakfast tray. An hour remains before her mastectomy. I sit on a stool and lean forward, reaching out to hold her hand. But before I can, she crosses her arms and asks me, “Where’s Sachi?”

“With a babysitter,” I tell her. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”

“Haven’t you heard the news?” She looks at me as if I were a murderer and goes on about a babysitter who was arrested for mixing sleeping pill powder into baby food so she could watch TikTok and play video games.

“Well, she’s behind bars, so we’re in the clear,” I say.

She furrows her brow, shaking her head. I should know better. She reads a tabloid from cover to cover and worries about a one-in-a-million chance of misfortune striking my daughter and me. An Osprey helicopter crashing into us while we wait for a bus. Radioactive waste contaminating our drinking water. A meteorite smashing through our roof. Whenever her sixth sense warns her of an impending calamity coming our way, she phones me and talks a mile a minute about the precautions I should take, giving me only a second to chime in ‘uh-huh’ until she’s assured that everything is fine on my end.

So much for her self-proclaimed psychic vision, though. She didn’t sense mutants invading her lobes, dividing and multiplying, turning into jagged stone. After the diagnosis, she made me touch it. “A real object lesson,” she scoffed, pressing my hand against her breast.

When the nurse comes to get her, she tells me to go home and walks away, waving her hand like a Carnival Queen. Without turning to look at me, she says, “No worries. You’ll get a call if anything goes wrong. Right?” She pats the nurse’s arm and disappears down the corridor.

By noon, my one-breasted mother is in a recovery room. An IV bag hangs from a pole, and the solution drips down a tube, flowing into my mother’s body through a needle taped to her outer forearm. I freeze as I remember what I had disremembered.

Was I six or seven?

Like missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle found under a carpet, silence and chocolate and hugs that my aunt turned to when I asked about my mother’s whereabouts resurface along with what she whispered on the phone—sleeping pills, critical, despair. I remember rolling those words around on my tongue, believing that practice would help me understand their meaning.

Why didn’t I cry when my aunt finally took me to the hospital and saw my mother lying there? Unsmiling and wordless. So different from the mother I knew. The whiteness of her room smothered me. And I hated my aunt for making me hold my mother’s hand.

This veiny hand, so wrinkled and dry.

Gently, I hold her fingers and rub them, knuckle by knuckle. Like counting the knots on a rope that mark the years. She tilts her head toward me, her mind drifting between unconscious and conscious.

A teardrop slides down her bony cheek.

“I’m sorry, Chibi,” she breathes out.

Hearing my childhood pet name, I grasp her hand and pull us back to the present, where we are safe—at least for now.