After a week of winter sun, the weather turns nasty on the day I drive a shitty rental car upstate. In the fall, the trees lining the highways heading north are showy with color: an impressive parade of red, orange, and yellow (or in trendspeak, scarlet, ochre, and flaxen gold). Now, the landscape is bleached and twisted. I dress down: boyfriend jeans, innocuous black booties, boxy wool sweater. Anything too “New York” invites an eye roll that’s more devastating than outright criticism. My anxiety ratchets up with every passing mile. It’s not as if I’m scared of my sister. We just . . . set each other off.
I’ve made up my mind to tell Mara about my diagnosis. I need that to be a mature conversation that doesn’t end in her winning the award for Most Passive Aggressive in a Sibling Relationship, an award she has held for a record number of years.
We’re supposed to meet at her place but on the way up she messages me to meet at the café: her shift’s running late. Mara lives in Boreal Springs, the kind of upstate town that’s not cute enough to be a verified tourist trap but not grim enough to drop off the map entirely. When she first moved here, I had fantasies of cozy upstate life: summers spent hiking and wine tasting, winters spent making s’mores and trying to understand poetry. The truth is, people move to economically depressed small towns like Boreal Springs because they’re broke AF or they want to be left the hell alone. In my sister’s case, both were true.
It was always my dream to spread my wings for New York. Mara told me she was moving there the day before she left, when I was still in college. A naturopathy school she wanted to attend, best of its kind. She lived in a prewar apartment in Crown Heights with four other roommates. It was small. The city was loud and expensive. She didn’t even last the year before meeting Storm’s father at a dive bar and moving upstate with him two weeks later. (The relationship as a whole was about as fleeting.) By the time I moved to the city, she was already gone.
The bell above the door to the Blue Onion Café dings as I enter. Two groups of customers: day-trippers escaping the weather and locals escaping their own four walls for an hour. You can tell them apart from their shoes.
My niece is sitting in the corner, drawing with crayons. She has smudges of something dark on her face. Her thin blond hair is pulled into uneven pigtails. Her outfit is bizarre: faded Bratz dolls T-shirt, skirt over pants, a zippered hoodie that’s way too big. Jesus, Mara, how hard is it to dress your own daughter—I catch myself. No. I’m not doing that.
And there she is. I still get a weird little jolt whenever I see her, half infatuation, half fear. Her shoulder-length hair is growing out from a dark red henna she used a couple of months ago, faded now to a cheap-looking copper. She’s in loose Thai fisherman’s pants and an old T-shirt. No bra. Tattoos she regrets mark her arms and collarbone. She’d look like a typical backpacker picking up a few shifts before heading off to Machu Picchu, if it wasn’t for her face. Even though Mara doesn’t wear makeup, my sister is striking. Not exactly beautiful, although she could be if she tried. I’m not sure if it’s her personality or her physicality that casts her as bold and unapologetic, but that is what she is. Wild eyebrows she doesn’t pluck and icy-clear skin, even though she’d sooner be on reality TV than have a facial. Her pièce de résistance: frighteningly sharp gray eyes that see into your soul and find it lacking.
She acknowledges my presence with a nod, gathering a half-eaten plate of carrot cake and empty coffee cups.
I make myself smile. “Hey, Sis.” I kiss her cheek. “Good to see you.”
“I’ll be done in ten.” No hello. No how was the drive? “Do you want the rest of this?” She offers me the leftover cake.
I wrinkle my nose. “Um, no thanks.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing.”
“So try it.” She’s taunting me.
“I’m not in the mood for other people’s garbage, Mar.”
She stares at me as if I am flat-out crazy. “It’s fine. If it was mine would you eat it?”
“It’s not yours. It’s a total stranger’s.”
“What exactly do you think you can catch from leftover cake?”
“I don’t want to eat trash!”
She rolls her eyes. “You are such a princess—”
“Auntie Lacey!” Storm wraps herself around my legs. “Did you bring me a present?”
I scoop her up. “Hi, princess.” I nuzzle her neck, and she squeals.
“Ten minutes.” Mara turns toward the kitchen.
“Perfect,” I singsong, rubbing noses with my niece. “Just enough time to fix your hair. Mommy lets you get so messy, doesn’t she?”
And, we’re off.
* * * *
Mara lives fifteen minutes out of town, off an overgrown, unpaved back road that feels spooky at night. The house is a decent size for the two of them, with a scrappy backyard that dips down to a creek. Charming when it’s warm, but the house is old and the windows are small. It’s dim, even in summer, and cluttered. Everything handmade, bought on Craigslist, needs fixing, weird. By the time we get there, the sun has set. I leave my overnight bag in my car. I only end up staying half the time.
Inside, Mara complains about a coworker, her ceramic studio’s new opening hours, the cost of gas. I alternate with Vivian’s request about H&M, domestic politics, the weather. This is good: the alternative is silence, which means she’s really pissed. Low-stakes whining is our girly gossip.
I play with Storm while Mara bubble-wraps a dozen mugs and bowls, readying them to mail. She has an Etsy store selling her ceramics. She’s really good, I think, even though she says what she actually likes doesn’t sell.
My niece’s new obsession is, disturbingly, weddings. All she wants to do is dress up in a white skirt and marry an array of stuffed animals. I play along, but after witnessing the fourth set of largely nonsensical vows, I pull her into my lap. “You know you don’t have to get married, darling.” I tuck a strand back into the expert French braid I did. “You can be completely happy on your own.”
Her head lolls back in my arms. She stares at me with sky-blue eyes. Her father’s DNA. Just a little weird. “Are you gonna getted married?”
“Get married,” I correct her. “Maybe. One day. But I don’t need to.” How can I explain to a little kid that marriage is not the golden ticket that opens the gateway to lifelong happiness? I have friends younger than me who are getting divorced, or who definitely should be. I’ll never admit that I’d like to get married myself. That’d be like announcing I want a housekeeper or monogrammed towels from Barneys: deeply uncool bordering on offensive.
She thinks for a few moments. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
I’m surprised she knows that word. “No.”
“Why not?”
The faces that pop into my head: Elan Behzadi and Cooper last-name-unknown: the dude options floating around my universe right now. But Elan never texted me back, and I don’t really know Cooper. I draw in a breath. “I haven’t met anyone who’s right for me.”
She scrambles out of my lap, and selects a threadbare teddy with one eye. “You can have Tony.” She hands him to me gravely.
“Thank you.” I kiss Tony on his red stitch mouth. “I have a feeling this love will be very, very sacred.”
She giggles. I kiss her head, inhaling her sweet, little-kid smell.
If I want to have kids who don’t inherit my mutation, I have a few options. I can do IVF and only implant an embryo that didn’t inherit the mutation. Or I can test a fetus I conceive naturally and terminate it if it inherited the BRCA1 mutated gene.
If my mother had done this, I wouldn’t be alive.
I honestly don’t know what I should do when it comes to kid stuff.
Storm gallops around the room on Bottom, the horse only she can see. I’m smiling, but a wave of sadness ebbs in my chest.
When I was creating my pro and con list in the loft with the girls, I think I gave not being able to breastfeed a score of three. I’m surprised to realize that was way too low.
* * * *
Dinner is meatless meatloaf that tastes like a lightly broiled boot. Top chef, Mar is not. Considering we grew up in a place where “salad” was canned pineapple, mini-marshmallows, and whipped cream, and every other meal was some version of steak and potatoes, it’s no great surprise.
My sister grills me about the app: download numbers, open rates, metrics. I’ve only explained the behind-the-scenes to her once, and she understands it better than I do. She could’ve been some kind of genius if she’d gone to college or stayed longer than a year in any job. She’s been somewhat supportive of Clean Clothes: “It’s not a bad idea,” which is her version of “certifiably brilliant.” She thinks the outfits are overpriced, but she’s in favor of ethical clothing. We agree sweatshops are “shameful and immoral” and most consumers are “selfish b-i-t-c-h-e-s,” which feels really nice.
I linger over the mush, not wanting the evening to unfold into the inevitable next step. But, of course, it does.
Today is the day, after all.
On the vegan chocolate cake, five candles and one carob drop. We turn out the lights and huddle around it, singing. Two generations of women, remembering a third.
I have never liked this.
“Happy birthday, dear Mommy. Happy birthday to you.”
“Blow out the candles, baby,” Mara says to Storm, and she does. “Well done!” Mara kisses her daughter, who beams at me, pleased. I’m not sure how much of this she truly understands. Mara’s smile fades. “Grandma June would’ve been fifty-one today.”
We do this every year. I don’t know why: it feels morbid, and it makes my sister noticeably depressed in the weeks that follow. But more so, it widens the gap that exists between us, the gap that, in our own dysfunctional way, we do try to bridge.
I never knew my mother. Not like Mara did. I never know who, exactly, I’m supposed to be remembering. We’re not on the same page.
Mara gets out the photo album emblazoned with Memories in curling pink script. She flicks through the mismatched sun-faded pictures stuck behind crinkly sheets of plastic. “Look, that’s me on the tricycle.” She shows Storm. “See? That’s Grandpa, and Mommy when she was your age.”
Dad’s the only one looking at the camera, sunburned, holding a tin of Budweiser up to his Tom Selleck mustache. Mara is impossibly small, tongue out, focusing. My mother is clapping, her hands and face slightly blurred.
Storm says, “Can I have a tricycle?”
“One day. There’s Grandma holding Auntie Lacey when she was a baby. Isn’t she beautiful?”
I know Mara isn’t talking about me. In the picture, my mother is unsmiling, holding me as if she’s not sure I’m hers, on the junky patio of the house I was born in but don’t remember. She’s about my age. I cannot comprehend how someone in their midtwenties could already have two children, but of course, that’s all of my high school friends now.
“That’s Grandma’s studio, where she painted.” My mother converted the studio herself from a garden shed: in the picture, it’s small, crowded with canvas and paint tins. Mara points to the portrait hanging on the wall opposite us: an unidentified woman, green-skinned and ghostly. “Grandma painted that.”
It’s a good painting, technically, but I wouldn’t want it in my own house. It’s melancholic, almost eerie. Storm stares at it in silence. Unease feathers in my stomach.
Mara points to another photograph. Her favorite, I think. It’s one taken of my mother without her knowing, a slightly unfocused long shot. She’s sitting by a large window, staring outside. She has Mara’s same fierce features. She looks beautiful, but also, sad.
What is my mother thinking about in this picture? Motherhood? My father?
Cancer?
“You know how Mommy has grump days?” Mara strokes Storm’s hair. “So did Grandma. See?”
I think for most women, photographs of their mothers before they were recognizably “Mom” create and complicate the portrait of the woman who raised them. They reveal their mothers were once dangerously young; hitchhiking or dancing or smoking a joint with a boy who’s not their father. This youth is a bridge and it is a chasm; she is Mom and she is a mystery. And holding these two truths in your hands and seeing them, really seeing them, that changes you. It’s the kind of epiphany you have in college, when the world seems to be pulling back layers on the daily, and everything is giving off a frequency of light you’ve only just learned to see. Sometimes I feel like that’s where Mara’s stuck. Forever sophomoric and serious, offended by everything, outraged at everyone. My sister stares at the photo in front of her. “There’s Grandma, doing the dishes. After she was gone, I did that.” With the right ears, you can hear the resentment.
I say nothing.
I’ve always felt like I am nothing like my mother. That was Mara’s connection. Moody, artistic, someone who didn’t exactly fit into the world, wincing at its brightness, its brashness. But I am connected to my mother. I am genetically programmed to meet her fate.
I want this to be over.
Mara turns the page. “That’s Granddad, dressed as Santa.”
“I’m pretty sure Dad’s d-r-u-n-k in this photo,” I mutter.
My sister’s gaze shoots to the glass in my hand, because, yes, I’ve usually polished off half a bottle of wine by now. But I have water. She notices it with a frown. Her eyes flit to mine. I see her conclusion appear, not so much judgmental as darkly matter-of-fact.
She closes the album, and announces it’s bath time.
* * * *
An hour later, we sit on the lumpy orange lounge chairs near the fire, which has reduced to a handful of glowing embers. My foot bounces into the old rug. I am nervous.
My sister thrusts a mug of ginger tea at me. “You’re getting an abortion, I assume.”
“I’m not pregnant.” The ceramic mug is too hot to hold comfortably. I close my fingers around it.
“No.” This catches me off guard. “Does he call you?”
She shrugs, pulling her cardigan around herself. “Sometimes he sends money. For Storm.”
I am shocked. Then angry. My father doesn’t send me money. Shit, he only sends Christmas cards every other year: the cheap kind you buy at the post office: Hey, kiddo! Happy Christmas, and all that jazz. I don’t even have a current address. Does Mara? She hates him as much as I do; why does she still stay in contact?
I can’t get sidetracked. Focus on the facts, Lace. Every individual has two copies of the BRCA1 gene, passed down from their parents. If I have the mutation, that meant Mom had it (no cancer on Dad’s side), which means Mara has a 50 percent chance of having it and if she does, then Storm has a 50 percent chance of having it too. My mouth is tacky. Tension cuts each breath short, slicing at my chest. “Do you remember that article I sent you at the beginning of last year? The one about the . . . test?”
“The test for cancer,” Mara says. “Of course I do.” An irritated huff. “I don’t think that’s a very good idea, Lace.”
“Why not?”
“I told you why not.”
“I want to talk about it again,” I mumble.
“Why?” Her back straightens. “You didn’t take it did you?” Her gaze whips to me like a spear, banging through me.
The hot, quick fear of my sister’s impending wrath trumps everything. I’m shoved back into our family home, reacting in the way I know best. I lie. “No! No, I was just thinking about it.” Fuck. Exactly the kind of lie Dad would tell: a stupid one.
Mara relaxes a little, her posture softening. She likes when I beg her opinion. “Think about it, Lace. You find out you have this mutation—if this test is even reliable, which I doubt—and then you’re thrown into an underfunded, unreliable medical system that has a history of misdiagnosing and mistreating everyone, especially women. Biopsies and mammograms and MRIs every month. Jesus, the stress of that alone would cause cancer, whether you have the mutation or not.”
I can’t bring myself to say I don’t think this is how cancer works. “Or there’s . . . the other option.”
“Oh what, a mastectomy?” She rolls her eyes. “That is truly the height of privileged hysteria. The article said there’d been an increase in them ever since what’s her name—Jolie—took hers off. I mean, can you imagine?” She tosses me a disgusted look.
I can imagine.
My sister can tell. Once again, I try to summon the courage to tell her the truth, but before I can, she puts down her tea. “Lacey. You are twenty-five years old. Your brain isn’t even fully formed yet. You are not old enough to make a decision like this: permanent, life-changing. It’s not like dying your hair pink or wearing a tutu to prom.”
It wasn’t a tutu. For some reason, my sister has never gotten over that. I bite my cheek.
She presses her fingers into her forehead. “Look. I love my daughter. She is the best thing that ever happened to me, she is. But if I could have my time again, would I get pregnant by a bipolar drug-addict who disappeared the second my water broke? Uh, no. That was a stupid decision, and it’s one she and I have to pay for the rest of our lives.” She’s welling up. Her chin trembles. “Look, maybe when you’re settled. You have two jobs, you don’t want to fuck that up.” She leans toward me. “You’re doing good, Lace. You know? You’re doing good down there.”
My sister has never said this to me. I start tearing up too. “Thank you, Mar.”
Mara threads her fingers into mine. The feeling of her calloused fingers undoes me. I have to close my eyes. My sister’s voice is soft and compassionate. “If you find out, you live life by its rules, its values,” she says. “Not yours. You’re not in charge. It is.”
I freeze. Can this be true?
Mara pulls her hand away and shifts back toward the fire. “Besides: you can’t stop fate. If either of us are destined to get it, it’ll happen.” We stare at the dying embers, one by one turning to ash. “It’ll just happen, and we won’t be able to stop it.”