4: 4
Before Sabrina came back, my mother wiped her tears dry.
She slipped back into the cold, elegant composure of a doctor, her voice flat.
"Fake it all you want. Either way, Sabrina's transplant is happening tonight."
The clock on the wall read July 15, 2026.
I remembered, all at once, that half a year ago my mother had said I could hold on four more months at most.
That was why she'd quit her old job and come to this hospital, for me.
I smiled and said to her, "I lasted two whole months longer than you guessed, Mommy. Aren't I amazing?"
She didn't hear a word of it. She turned and walked out of the ward.
The moment she was gone, Sabrina came back in, my Baba plush hugged in her arms. She'd been hiding behind the door.
That cute little face twisted.
She flung my precious Baba to the floor and stomped on it, hard, over and over.
"A simpleton like you. What makes you good enough to be Dr. Fox's daughter?"
Seeing the ward empty, Sabrina scrambled up onto the bed and beat me the way she always had, throwing her whole weight into it.
I couldn't feel any of it, but her twisted, snarling face frightened me until I cried.
She used to beat me like this before too. I told my mother.
But my mother said Sabrina had heart failure and was a year younger than me, that there was no way she could hurt me, that it was just ordinary roughhousing.
I showed the bruises on my body. The nurse said I was the most rambunctious of them all, that cuts and marks on me were nothing unusual.
All Sabrina had to do was lower her head and sigh. "Big sister Norma isn't stupid, her memory's just bad. She probably remembered wrong. I'm happy to apologize."
And when she said that, my mother would always look at her with such tenderness.
I cried and made a scene, trying to make my mother believe me.
Only when I cried myself all the way into the emergency room did my mother finally make Sabrina apologize to me.
But when Sabrina apologized, her eyes were smiling, curved like orange segments.
After enough times, I stopped daring to tell my mother anything. All I could do was kneel and beg Sabrina to leave me alone.
She'd grin and yank my hair and kick me in the stomach.
I wasn't allowed to cry. I wasn't allowed to make a sound.
Or she'd tell my mother that I was the one bullying her.
So now, even with Sabrina straddling me and kicking as hard as she could, I made no sound at all, and she noticed nothing wrong.
If anything, she was smug. "You little brat. Why are you so obedient today?"
"Is it because your mom doesn't want you anymore, so you're too scared to cry?"
"Dr. Fox is going to be my mommy soon. A simpleton like you only deserves to be an orphan!"
She pulled out a discarded needle she'd fished from the trash. "This one's the biggest, thickest one there is. If you can hold it in and not make a sound, I'll let you off."
"No!"
Even though I couldn't feel the pain anymore, I still shook all over with fear.
The clean white blanket was thrown back, and Sabrina drove the needle into my head, my body, my arms, again and again.
In an instant my body was full of little pits of blood, and still I made not a single sound.
Then all at once she went rigid and snatched the blanket back up.
She lay back down in her own bed without a flicker on her face.
Footsteps came from the hall, and Sabrina kept pretending to sleep.
Until my mother said, "Sabrina, open your eyes now. It's time to get ready for the operating room."
Nurse Chavez, who'd been shadowing my mother, turned her head and saw that my blanket was still pulled all the way up.
"Dr. Fox, is Norma still sulking at you?"
My mother's face went cold at once.
"Sulking won't get her anywhere. In this hospital I'm a doctor, not somebody's mother. I can't hand her special privileges!"
"I've lived my whole life aboveboard, always the best at what I do. How did I ever raise a low, ill-natured simpleton like that."
The angrier she got, the uglier her words. "Just like that scumbag father of hers who divorced me for his mistress. Selfishness runs in her blood!"
I looked at my mother, the tears not stopping.
I wasn't sulking. I was really, truly dead.
Nurse Chavez knew there was no talking my mother out of it, so she only shook her head and stepped forward.
"All right, Norma, if you sleep with the blanket over your face like this you won't be able to breathe. Once the right donor heart comes—"
The blanket lifted, and Nurse Chavez's words cut off. She shook, unable to force out a single word.
It was a long moment before she turned stiffly around. "Something's wrong. Dr. Fox....."
