What Remains

The fluorescent lights hummed. Elena sat in the plastic chair, her daughter's juice box leaking onto her beige slacks—an orange stain spreading like a careless sun.

She'd been here three hours. The water cooler bubbled periodically, a small domestic sound in a place that felt nothing like home. Her mother was in surgery. Again.

Three years ago, they'd been in Costa Rica. The last family vacation before everything fell apart—before the diagnosis, before her father left, before her mother started forgetting which daughter was which. Elena remembered sitting on the hotel balcony, her feet up on the railing, eating papaya for breakfast.

Her mother had laughed then, really laughed, head thrown back, her dark hair still thick and lustrous, not yet thinned by chemotherapy. "You know what your father said about papaya?" she'd asked, eyes crinkling.

Elena had shaken her head, juice running down her chin. She was thirty-two and still somehow sticky-faced in her mother's presence.

"He said it tastes like musk and perfume, like eating something you shouldn't." Her mother's voice dropped conspiratorially. "Your father was always finding sin in the most innocent places."

Now, her mother's sin was a tumor wrapped around her temporal lobe. Elena's father was remarried to a woman who didn't eat papaya, who probably didn't even know what it tasted like.

The water cooler bubbled again.

Elena's daughter tugged her sleeve. "Grandma's going to be okay, right?"

The orange stain on Elena's pants had set. She thought about papaya, about her mother's laugh, about the way her father had looked at them both—like they were mysteries he'd never quite solve. Some sins weren't in the fruit. Some sins were in the leaving, in the not-staying, in the way love could curdle into something unrecognizable while you were busy making breakfast.

"The doctors are doing their best," Elena said, which was the truth, which was also a lie.

She thought about papaya, how it tasted like summer and loss, how some flavors you can never quite forget.

The OR doors opened.