When we scheduled an IV drip to bolster her electrolytes, I volunteered to drive her to the appointment. Kye was reluctant to stay behind but I was firm about going with her alone.

“Please, take some time for yourself, Kye. You deserve it.”

I hadn’t driven my mother since I was fifteen and learning how to drive. Back then she was so nervous, constantly convinced I was veering over the line on her side. The two of us would screech at each other, exacerbating the situation, arguing over trivial things like how soon to utilize the turn signal and which route to take through town.

Now we were quiet. We held hands and it was nice for a moment to finally be alone together. I thought, We could do this without Kye. I could do this all myself.

At the infusion clinic a nurse took us to a private room that was quiet and dimly lit. It was in a building on the University of Oregon campus, across from a sub shop where I used to get soft serve in the summer before heading through a hole in the chain-link fence nearby that led to a section of the Willamette River banked by a rocky plateau. My friends and I used to jump off the slippery, jagged rocks and let the rapids pull our bodies downstream until we drifted a good quarter of a mile. Then we would kick our way to the shore, jump back in, and let it take us again.

I thought back to those easy summers. When my hands were sticky from soft serve topped with candy, the sun beating down on my neck as I unlocked the chain from my clunky Schwinn, eager to submerge in the cold, fresh water that waited. I had no idea what the building across the lot was. A hospital meant something different back then. Had I even known enough to identify it, I would have been incapable of imagining the people inside. What their suffering was like, both for the patients and the people who loved them, what exactly was at stake. There were so many people there with luck far worse than ours, some without families to help them, without insurance, some unable even to take time off while in treatment. Even with three of us there to labor, caretaking often felt like a herculean feat.

On the car ride home I thought better of bringing up my feelings toward Kye. Instead, I scanned through the discs loaded into my mother’s CD player. Slot one was my band’s first album; slot two belonged to my mom’s new favorite singer, “Bruno Mar”; and slot three was the Barbra Streisand album Higher Ground. My mother never seemed to listen to much music, but she loved Barbra Streisand, counting The Way We Were and Yentl as two of her favorite films. I remembered how we used to sing the song “Tell Him” together, and skipped through the album until I found it on track four.

“Remember this?”

I laughed, turning up the volume. It’s a duet between Babs and Celine Dion, two powerhouse divas joining together for one epic track. Celine plays the role of a young woman afraid to confess her feelings to the man she loves, and Barbra is her confidant, encouraging her to take the plunge.

“I’m scared, so afraid to show I care…Will he think me weak, if I tremble when I speak?” Celine begins.

When I was a kid my mother used to quiver her lower lip for dramatic effect when she sang the word “tremble.” We would trade verses in the living room. I was Barbra and she was Celine, the two of us adding interpretive dance and yearning facial expressions to really sell it.

“I’ve been there, with my heart out in my hand…” I’d join in, a trail of chimes punctuating my entrance. “But what you must understand, you can’t let the chance to love him pass you by!” I’d exclaim, prancing from side to side, raising my hand to urge my voice upward, showcasing my exaggerated vocal range.

Then, together, we’d join in triumphantly. “Tell him! Tell him that the sun and moon rise in his eyes! Reach out to him!” And we’d ballroom dance in a circle along the carpet, staring into each other’s eyes as we crooned along to the chorus.

My mom let out a soft giggle from the passenger seat and we sang quietly the rest of the way home. Driving out past the clearing just as the sun went down, the scalloped clouds flushed with a deep orange that made it look like magma.

By the time we got back, Kye was manic. She emerged from my parents’ bedroom to reveal she’d shaved her head to match my mother’s. She tipped a hip to the side, stretching her arms out, and rolled her eyes languidly as she struck a pose in the hall.

“What do you think?”

She batted her eyelashes and pushed her newly shaved head toward my mother, who reached out her hand and ran it along the stubble. I waited for my mother to scold her the way she would have if I had done such a thing, or recoil the way Eunmi had when I brought up the idea three years ago, but instead, she was moved.

“Oh, Unni,” she said, tears in her eyes as the two embraced and Kye brought her back to bed.

When her three weeks with us elapsed, Kye insisted she stay longer. Why have someone else fly in? She was up to speed and wanted to stay. My mother was relieved and grateful, but both my father and I had started to feel unsettled by her presence.

She was quite unlike the two of us—reserved and precise. She was raised in Ulsan, a city on the southeast coast of Korea, and after leaving the base in Japan, she and her husband, Woody, had spent the past twenty years in Georgia. I assumed that coming from a southern region in Korea and living in the southern part of the United States, she’d have a more forthcoming personality, but Kye was difficult to read. She was unlike most of the Korean women I’d grown up with, who were warm and maternal, referred to by the names of their children. Kye had no children of her own and interacted with my father and me at arm’s length. Her icy demeanor froze us over.

Kye had a habit of letting produce rot on the counter. Fruit flies started to gather in the kitchen, and with my mother’s immune system in peril, my father and I grew concerned that some of the ingredients Kye was using could spoil. When my father confronted her about some persimmons that had attracted a plume of gnats, she became irritated and mocked him for being overly cautious.

One night, at dinner, I set my place next to my mother’s. Kye moved my silverware across the table to take the seat herself. After we had eaten, she handed my mother a lengthy letter, handwritten in Korean, and asked her to read it silently while my father and I were still at the table. It was three pages long, and halfway through my mother began weeping and took her hand.

“Thank you, Unni,” she said. Kye smiled back solemnly.

“What does it say?” my father asked.

My mother was silent and continued to read. If it weren’t for the drug-induced haze, she’d have picked up on our discomfort, but in her current state, she was blind to our apprehension.

“It’s just for us,” Kye said.

Why was this woman here? Didn’t she miss her husband? Wasn’t it odd for a sixty-something-year-old woman to leave her home in Georgia to come live with us for more than a month without any compensation? I wasn’t sure if I was on to something or just being paranoid or, worse, jealous that this woman was a better caretaker for my mother than I was. How self-obsessed was I to begrudge a woman who had selflessly volunteered to help?

As her medication took ever greater hold, my mother became drowsy and colorless and it became increasingly difficult to communicate. She began to slip into her native tongue, which made my father especially crazy. She had spoken fluent English for nearly thirty years and it was shocking when she began to forget to translate, to exclude us. At times it even felt like Kye was taking advantage of it, responding back in Korean and ignoring my father’s pleas to speak in English.

When we visited with the pain doctor, I caught myself trying to haggle the numbers down, afraid that if they upped her dosage, she’d fade from us even more. Are you sure your breakthrough pain is really a six and not more of a four? With my spiral notebook pressed against my chest, part of me wanted to withhold the tallies I’d recorded, the number of times we’d had to administer liquid hydrocodone on top of her 25 mcg/day Fentanyl patch. It’s not as bad as it looks, I wanted to insist. I did not want her to be in pain, but I also did not want to lose her completely.

The doctor could sense my frustration and prescribed a small dosage of Adderall to help counteract the effects of the painkillers. The first time she took it, she was filled with so much energy we had to physically restrain her to keep her from cleaning the house. For a short while it felt like I had my mother back. The next time we were alone together, I took the opportunity to bring up how I was feeling about Kye.

“She does so much for me,” my mother said, her voice quivering. “No one has ever done for me what she has. Michelle-ah, she even wipes my ass.”

I want to wipe your ass, I wanted to say, realizing it was ridiculous.

“Kye had a very hard life,” she said. “Kye’s father was a playboy. When he left Kye’s mother for a new mistress, he made that mistress raise her. Then when he met even another woman, he abandoned both of them. That mistress woman raised Kye her whole life and never told her she wasn’t her real mother. But Kye knew, because she heard rumors from all of the peoples around town. So then, when the mistress woman got the cancer, Kye took care of her until she died. Even on her deathbed, she never told Kye she wasn’t her real mother, and Kye never told her she already knew.

“And you know she is Woody’s second wife, and his children never really accepted her because she was an affair,” my mother added. “Even though they’ve been married for over twenty years now, his children are still cruel to her because of what they feel she did to their mother. She told me one time they made her so upset she had to go to a mental hospital.”

The next morning, Kye prepared soft-boiled eggs for breakfast. She cracked open the top of a shell and held out the rest of the egg for my mother to eat with a spoon. The yellow yolk floated atop its silky, translucent membrane. It looked mostly raw.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I asked.

I’d always preferred my eggs with a runny yolk, but my mother’s illness had made me increasingly paranoid. Food poisoning was no longer a rite of passage. It was a gamble we couldn’t afford. Kye ignored me, her gaze focused on cracking the shell of her own egg.

“I’m just worried because her immune system is weak,” I added. “I don’t want her to get sick.”

Kye squinted at me like a smudge on a lens. She let out a soft scoff. “This is how we eat this one in Korea,” she said. My mother sat silently beside her like an obedient pet. I waited for her to come to my defense but she was silent, holding her egg in both hands, clouded over.

What a cruel twist of fate, I thought, my face reddening as I fought back the tears. I had spent my adolescence trying to blend in with my peers in suburban America, and had come of age feeling like my belonging was something to prove. Something that was always in the hands of other people to be given and never my own to take, to decide which side I was on, whom I was allowed to align with. I could never be of both worlds, only half in and half out, waiting to be ejected at will by someone with greater claim than me. Someone full. Someone whole. For a long time I had tried to belong in America, wanted and wished for it more than anything, but in that moment all I wanted was to be accepted as a Korean by two people who refused to claim me. You are not one of us, Kye seemed to say. And you will never really understand what it is she needs, no matter how perfect you try to be.