Laurelio, her new-ish boyfriend, has been known to be that reason a few times in the last couple of years.
“I miss you too. What happened now?” I ask, huddling up right beside the phone to peep the area around me.
Lena, Mari, and Quinn are all on calls too.
“Lo mismo.” The same. “But I miss you for real too. Wish you were here…” Her voice cracks at the end there, immediately plummeting my heart to the pit of my stomach.
That sound is never good.
My skin prickles with goose bumps. Shooting upright, I clench the phone cord for some sort of support as panic begins to slither in from the shadows. “Noely, don’t fuck with me right now. What the hell happened? Did that comemierda touch you?”
It wouldn’t surprise me if he did; that’s why I’m asking.
“It’s not Laurelio.” She’s definitely crying now, turning the blood in my veins to ice.
“K, not him this time, got it. What happened then?” I grit.
“She told me not to tell you.”
She? My head rears back so hard, it nearly slams into the heavily painted brick wall behind me. “Who? Tell me what?”
Nothing follows, just the seconds ticking away with no answer. The line actually goes so completely silent that I’m left wondering if the call dropped without warning. “Hello? Noely?”
“I’m here, I’m here.” She’s still crying, but her voice comes much softer, yet so much more pained.
“Who told you not to tell me what?” I’m pressing anxiously at this point, earning myself a few stares at the urgency in my tone.
More still, when the softest whimper meets my ear as though she were bent over, physically crippled at the thought of saying whatever it may be out loud.
What the fuck is happening right now? “Noely, spit it out, seriously.”
“It’s Ma... Mami told me not to tell you!”
Ma? The mention of her, in this particular moment, spikes my heart rate through the fucking roof. “She told you not to tell me what?”
“That she’s...” My sister inhales a deep breath, suffocating on what sounds like the beginnings of a guttural sob. “That she’s sick. She told me not to tell you she’s sick!”
She’s...what? Her words echo in my ears, jaw falling slack as everything around me comes to a screeching halt.
Literally everything is frozen except me and my racing heart.
She’s sick.
My mom’s sick, and she didn’t want me to know.
That’s all I can hear, all I can feel as I absorb the news, every single hair on my body stiff at attention.
There are very few times in my life when this has happened—the world just stopping—but what they share in common is how monumental each moment was and how they affected me after the fact.
When my dad fell off the raft and drowned in the Atlantic on our way to American land is one. My last arrest is another. Ángel’s visit hit me hard as hell, too, and my brother’s homicide just a few months after that? Brutal, one of my biggest heartbreaks to date. Tomás got himself killed because of me.
And now...now I’ll have this moment right here. Of all the things my sister could have said to me, that is not what I was expecting.
Obviously.
“She’s what?” The question comes so softly, I don’t think Noely even heard it.
But she did, sniffling into the phone as she repeats, “She’s sick, Benni. She’s been feeling off for a few weeks, so I finally took her to the doctor. They ran some tests and sent her on her way as normal. I honestly thought everything was going to be fine ‘cause, I mean, she’s getting older, right, and our bodies change and all that shit? But the results came in like three days ago…”
I’d say my heart plummets again, but it’s already lodged in the pit of my roiling stomach, cracked, barely holding all the pieces together. Tears burn the back of my eyes as this new reality settles in. Forget the cord, I’m clutching the phone in both hands like it’ll disappear at any moment, trying to keep my emotions in check. “What’s wrong with her?”
My sister falls silent again. It’s not done with purpose. She physically can’t speak, sobbing quietly in the background, the sound so muffled I can all but see her breaking down into her pillow.
Ma’s probably home…
“Noely, please.” I’m barely holding it together at this point. “I need you to be strong and tell me.”
“It’s c-cancer,” she stammers in grief. “Stage-four colon cancer and she’s refusing treatment, Benni. They said she has less than a year without it...”
Less than a year.
I zoned out after that, only heard bits and pieces of everything she said before the guards called time, and we had to hang up. Even walking back to the block was a blur. All I could think about was that my mom has cancer, and she’s refusing the treatment for it ‘cause she can’t afford it. Of course, she can’t—she’s still undocumented, which cancels out health insurance from the equation. Noely’s still trying to pay off all of Tommy’s funeral expenses, so she can’t afford it either, and I’m in here, helpless to do anything.
If you had told me this is what my Saturday was going to turn into, that this was the conversation I was going to have with my sister during my weekly call home, I wouldn’t have believed you. This whole thing came out of nowhere; at least, for me, it did. Noely said Ma’s been feeling off. Why hadn’t they told me anything?
“Whoa.” That’s Selena as she ambles
