DAWN
No time for awkwardness the next morning. I had to get up bright and early to drive my mother to the hospital for her surgery.
I expected Victor to use this opportunity to slip away to the comfort of the Four Seasons. But over a breakfast of dakjuk, the Korean chicken porridge my mother made for us even though she was unable to eat, he asked for the keys to her car.
So that’s how he ended up driving us both to the hospital in my mom’s fourteen-year-old Kia Forte. And the surprises kept piling up from there.
I was planning to ask if they had any nurses on staff who spoke ASL so that my mother wouldn’t have to read lips to understand everyone when I wasn’t there. But no need. A representative appeared in the lobby shortly after we began the check-in process. She spoke sign language and assured Mom she’d be by her side until they put her under for the surgery. Then she escorted us herself to my mother’s hospital room.
I was a little confused as we followed her to the elevator bank. I mean, how had they even known that mom’s implant wasn’t working, and that she’d need further assistance?
“Is this the standard protocol for all hard of hearing patients?” I asked in the elevator, trying to get some clarity.
“I wish it was,” the translator answered carefully. Then she glanced at Victor.
And if that didn’t let me know he had something to do with his better than usual treatment, I figured it out when we walked into my mother’s room. What turned out to be a large, tranquil suite with dark bookshelves, several pieces of well-made furniture, fine art on the walls, and huge windows that displayed panoramic views of the Dallas skyline and the Trinity River.
My mom took one look at the space and demanded to see the bill.
“Insurance didn’t pay for this big room,” she insisted. “I’m not going to let you upcharge me! That’s not what I agreed to!”
Maybe because mom was getting so upset, Victor stepped forward and signed, “Not insurance. Me.”
My mom’s angry expression immediately collapsed into soft shock.
“Why did you do that for me?” she demanded. “You shouldn’t have done that! This is too much!”
Before he could answer, though, she turned to the translator and bragged, “This is my son-in-law! See how good he treats me!”
Victor once told me that he didn’t remember his mother. She had died when he was so young, and he only had a single picture of her, taken before her marriage to his father.
She wasn’t a model or actress like the wives of so many Chinese mafia bosses. His father had met her on a visit to his hometown in Macau. She’d been a freshly hired cigarette girl and twenty to her future husband’s forty-six. Before that, Raymond Zhang had no desire to settle down. Didn’t want kids or any of that, he’d told his son. But one look at the new cigarette girl had been all it took to change his mind.
Sadly, she had died less than four years after having Victor. But clearly, Victor still had a talent for handling mothers.
After we were settled in, the surgeon himself came down to visit. This wasn’t the same guy who had been listed on the paperwork my mother had given me. That guy had a long last name of Indian origin. This one’s last name was only three letters, Kim.
“You’re Korean!” my mother said, switching to her native language as soon as she saw his name tag. Luckily, she was still signing, or I might not have understood.
I surreptitiously looked him up online as they shared small talk about his parents, who had immigrated here back in the 80s. According to the internet, this guy was the best oncology surgeon in Texas. Not Dallas—the whole state of Texas. In fact, from what I could tell, he worked out of a hospital in Houston.
There were a bunch of sentimental stories online about how he’d saved one person or another from certain death by cutting out malicious tumors and cancerous tissues. Many of these grateful people had driven and flown in to Houston from other states and countries to have him perform their surgeries.
But here he was in Dallas. I wasn’t even sure how he’d gotten privileges at this hospital.
Actually, I was sure.
I looked over to where Victor stood on the other side of the bed, impassively watching my mother’s hands as she spoke with the doctor. With the view of Dallas framing him from behind, he looked like an all-powerful titan of the industry. Untouchable and cold.
Yet, here he was, going above and beyond to help someone I loved…again. Confused thoughts swirled around my head, trying to settle on how I should feel about all of this. And Victor.
Dr. Kim had a warm bedside manner, and my mother visibly calmed down as he went through the procedure with her. After he finished his explanation, he asked in English, “Do you have any questions?”
“Yes,” my mother answered, also in English. Her voice was gravely serious. “I noticed the rainbow flag pin on your lapel. Does that mean you’re gay? If so, I have a son. Very handsome police officer. And he dates men sometimes.”
“Mom…” I warned. But then, I made the mistake of glancing over at Victor. His shoulders were shaking with silent laughter, and I had to clamp my lips to keep from doing the same.
The doctor blushed. But then admitted, “I am gay. But I’m already dating someone.”
My mom looked legit disappointed. “That is too bad. I would forgive Byron for liking men, too, if he married a doctor like you. Are you happy with this other man? He’s probably not as handsome as my son. Here, I’ll show you a picture so you can see.”
“Wow. Mom, please stop,” I snatched her phone away before she could shove my brother’s picture in poor Dr. Kim’s face. I’m pretty sure he hadn’t come here from Houston to get bombarded with my mom’s dating schemes.
Dr. Kim laughed good-naturedly and told her that he’d see her upstairs for surgery.
“Mom, tell me you didn’t,” Byron signed-said when she FaceTimed with him about fifteen minutes before she was due to go upstairs.
I noticed that she was careful to keep the room beyond the hospital bed out of the frame as she spoke with my brother. That meant Byron couldn’t see Victor, who was sitting on the couch.
“I did!” she answered, her tone belligerent and self-righteous. “At this point, it’s the only way I’m going to get a doctor in this family!”
Byron took her ribbing with his usual good nature. And after they talked for a few minutes, he asked her to give the phone to me. I also made sure nothing beyond mom and me made it into her Android’s frame. Yep, we were still a family that kept everything from each other.
“Thanks for going down there to be with her,” Byron said. “I would be there if I could, too.”
“Seriously, it was no problem.” This lie slipped off my tongue easier than any of the other ones I’d told over the past few years. I glanced at Victor on the couch. “I’m just glad I could be here.”
“Me, too. Plus, you and Mom are good now, right?” he asked as if our nine-year silence had just been a ripple in our family pond.
Nonetheless, I answered, “Yes, I think so.”
After a few more moments of small talk, Byron made me promise to call him after the surgery and we hung up.
I was glad we got the chance to talk with him together. He’d sounded so relieved.
But the smile fell off my face when I saw how scared and small my mother looked in the hospital bed.
She had seemed relaxed and in a good mood when she was talking to Byron. But I guess that was just a mask she was putting on for her baby son.
“Mom, everything is going to be all right,” I said-signed to her.
She shook her head, her eyes shining with fear. “I haven’t been in a hospital since I got my implant. What if they put me under, and I don’t wake up? I’ll never see either of you again. Or your father.”
She sniffed and wiped at her eyes. “We got in a fight about his work the last time he was home. He has been promising to switch jobs ‘soon’ for years. So, I threatened to divorce him if he didn’t make a change. But he got so angry with me, he stormed out. And I haven’t seen him since. What if that’s the last thing he remembers about me? All my anger and none of the love?”
Her voice broke. And the tears that had only been trembling in her eyes beforehand began to roll down her face.
I cursed silently at my father for not being here with her. There wasn’t a big enough hospital room in the world to make up for not having her husband here when she was this scared.
I wanted so badly to hug her. But with her implant on the fritz, that would mean she wouldn’t be able to see my lips or hands as I assured her, “That won’t happen. You’ll see him again.”
“It could happen. It was in the paperwork you gave me. They said there was a chance I wouldn’t survive the surgery. And if they can’t cut out the cancer, I might not survive after that anyway.”
My heart squeezed painfully at the thought of my mom dying just a little while after we finally made up…. Nine years of silence. Why were we so stupid and stubborn? I’d never forgive myself if either of those hypothetical outcomes came to pass.
So, I insisted to both of us, “Mom, it’s going to be okay. It has to be.”
My fierce reassurance made even more tears roll out of her eyes.
“I wasted so much of my life waiting on him. Being angry at you.” She looked up at me mournfully. “Dawn, I was so sure you had failed me. But when I needed someone the most, you were the only one who showed up. Why was I so mean to you? Nine years…”
My chest cracked open at her question. “Mom, you were an immigrant who didn’t know she was about to lose all of her hearing when you moved to this country. You were an exceptional mother. Do you hear me? You raised me right. You made sure I got good grades and stayed on task, and you made my favorite meal every week. I loved—I still love you so much. Even nine years of silence can’t change that.”
My mom shook her head miserably. “But I made you think you weren’t beautiful. I watched all the YouTube videos, you know. I saw girls just like you talking about how much they hated their mothers because of how bad they made them feel. Just like I did with you. The truth is, I knew it was too much when I was doing it. Your dad said I needed to stop, but I couldn’t figure out how. Why couldn’t I make myself stop? I was so afraid for you. All I could do was criticize you. But you’re beautiful, Dawn. I don’t care how fat you are. You’re my fat, beautiful daughter.
Okay, now I was tearing up too. I gave up on talking and drew her into my arms. Not just because I never realized how much I needed to hear her say that, but also because I was crying now. And that wouldn’t exactly sell my “everything’s going to be okay, you’re definitely not going to die” argument.
We sniffled together for a few moments, and when we drew apart, we found Victor once again standing on the other side of my mother’s hospital bed.
“Do not cry. Everything will be OK,” he told her. The look on his face was both tender and stern. “I promise you.”
His words made my mother smile. Authentically, not falsely as she had for Byron.
“OK, Dawn’s Husband,” she said to Victor. “If you say everything is going to be OK, then I believe you. I’ll wake up from the surgery, and that handsome gay doctor will say, no more cancer for you! Then after that, I will set him up with Byron, and there will be nothing either of them can do about it.”
My mother actually rubbed her hands together with gleeful anticipation.
We all laughed, but I don’t think it was a joke. Victor had that way about him. If he said something was true, people believed him. Even my scared mom.
Attendants came to wheel her into surgery a few minutes later. And suddenly, the space between Victor and me was empty.
For the first time in fifteen years, I closed the distance between us, and I took him by the hand. I didn’t mean to do it. I think I was just upset. Not to mention weirdly grateful for all he’d done for us today.
He stilled at my touch, his entire body stiffening beside me.
“We can go back to hating each other tomorrow,” I whispered. “But right now, I need your strength.”
He stood there frozen, and I wondered if he’d pull away.
But no, in the end, he squeezed my hand. Holding it tight until my mom had disappeared from sight.
Only then did he let me go.
As it turned out, Victor was right. The news came down a few hours later. Mom made it through surgery. They still had to send some tissue samples in for further testing, and she’d need to do some chemo to be sure. But Dr. Kim was “fairly confident” that he had gotten it all.
Cue more tears when my mother woke up, and we got to tell her the news.
“You’re magic,” she insisted to Victor. “The next time I need luck, I’m going to fly to you in Rhode Island and rub the top of your head!”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Victor didn’t live in Rhode Island, and I guess Victor didn’t either. He didn’t correct her.
That wasn’t the last surprise he had in store for us.
Someone from the Audiology appeared with a knock on the door a couple of hours after mom woke up. “Is now a good time for your consultation?”
“What consultation?” Mom and I both asked at the same time.
That was how we found out that Victor had arranged for her to be fitted with a waterproof processing unit for her implant.
It had taken months of appointments to get my mother and brother outfitted with their first implants back in the aughts. But my mom’s was done by the time the nurses came through with mom’s first post-surgery meal.
Victor. This was all Victor.
My entire chest tightened with confusion as I stared at him. When did my monster morph into a prince?
And why.