We stood in the bathroom, side by side, a foot away from the sink counter. My head three inches above hers. I watched her reflection in the mirror, her sad eyes slowly gazing over the distorted image she saw, over the thick blue stitches that zigzagged around her breast, across the middle of her stomach. Her pale, bedridden skin. Her bald head. 

I lifted her arms above her head, slowly, gently. Gently removed her shirt.

"Don’t look at me." 

"Stop," I said back. 

She started to laugh. 

"Remember when you got in your accident, and you were in the body cast?" My mom always referred to the car accident that left me with a broken femur as "my accident," as if I’d fallen down the stairs. She was driving the car that morning. She froze when she saw the other car cross the center divider and plow right into her. It was her fucking accident. 

But I told her I remembered. She laughed as tears rolled down her cheeks. "You used to cry and say ‘I’m ugly! I’m ugly!’" I laughed with her. 

"See," I said, "and I got over it."

She looked back at her reflection and stopped laughing.

I lay on the bed, eyes counting the whooshing of the ceiling fan, and waited while my mom attempted to wash herself. She refused my help at first, not ashamed by her dependence on another, but completely embarrassed by her vanity. She was disfigured, difficult to look at. I stared straight into her eyes the way men stare at me when I wear a low cut shirt and show any kind of upper breast area. It takes focus, the way you tell yourself not to stare at the cold sore on the grocer’s mouth, or the poorly covered bruise welting on your domestically abused neighbor.

I waited for about five minutes, three hundred rotations of the fan, and then I heard her. Whimpering at first. Fighting back tears. 

"Are you still there?"

Of course I was. 

"Can you come help me?" 

Of course. That’s why I’m fucking here. 

I said the last part under my breath. I put my game face on. Don’t cry. Out of any single person in the entire universe, my mom can make me cry just by crying on her own. Her sadness is absolute grief manifested into my own emotions, and once the floodgates are fucking open, I will cry an entire months worth. Don’t cry, I told myself. Keep it together. 

I washed my mother for the first time that day while she quietly sobbed into the steaming downpour. 

My mother had a mastectomy after her doctor found cancerous cells in her right breast. She was diagnosed a stage 0 cancer level, or so she told me. I never asked for documentation. She didn’t need radiology. But three separate oncology experts advised her that chemotherapy was necessary, if only for precaution. I told her not to do it. I told her about the girl I work with and how her grandmother had breast cancer like ten years ago and she got radiation and chemotherapy and withered away into a shell of a woman, old and achy and bare, and she still fucking got cancer again after that. So what’s the point, I said, reacting as I do when things get tough and I naturally say, give in to it. Fuck it. If it’s going to happen it will. It’s my fatalist teenage goth move I pull every once in a while. But with chemo. I couldn’t bring myself to look up any of this on the Internet. Self diagnoses are not a good idea. Ever. I pinched a nerve in my back during a Felicity marathon and lost all feeling in my left leg below the knee. According to the Internet, I had MS. But my doctor thought I was fine. I had normal reflexes, fine circulation. No discoloration. I asked her if it could be deeper? Something to do with my nerves? And she said maybe, like it was nothing, like she was answering whether or not they’d serve cocktails at the party. Maybe. But if the feeling didn’t come back in a few weeks, then to come back in for further testing. I didn’t go back in. The feeling came back. I didn’t have MS. I didn’t want to look up “breast cancer chemo survival” on the Internet. My mother was going to survive.