Chapter 28 Junie
Junie
Junie pushes the bedroom door shut after Eddie and Puds pass in. He pulls the chair out from her desk and sits.
“I don’t know what to do,” Junie says, pacing back and forth in front of him, jamming her hands through her hair.
Eddie pulls in a deep breath. “You have to look at the results. Whenever you’re ready.”
Junie continues pacing. He makes it sound so simple, which is probably easy being in the doctor seat as opposed to the patient
seat. And this time it’s not even just the patient seat; it’s whether Georgia missed it. Junie has thought about it, and if the results show that she has the breast cancer gene, she won’t be upset with her sister.
Georgia did her best, and to be fair, she was a high schooler at the time herself. In fact, if blame is to be parsed out,
it should probably be assigned to their father for not being more involved, for not waking himself up from his grief slumber
for long enough to be the grown-up in the room. Georgia had to fill that role so often back then. Now that Junie’s an adult,
she can’t believe half the things they did unsupervised while their dad floundered.
Still, none of this is about blame.
“What is this even about?” Junie demands. Eddie is the only other person in the room, but it’s clear she’s asking a greater
power. “These doctors care so much about figuring out where this comes from, and why? So it can rip my big sister and me apart?
I’ve already got the cancer. We’re well past ‘preventative measures.’” Junie throws aggressive air quotations around the two
words.
Eddie sits quietly and lets her rip.
When she finally slumps onto the bed, exhausted, Eddie says, “You don’t have to open it.”
Junie perks up, eyes wide at the presumed out.
“Georgia will ask, I’ll tell you that,” he says. “So if you don’t want to open it, you’ll have to be prepared to tell Georgia you’re unwilling
to revisit the results.”
Junie sits all the way up, swallows hard, and nods. There isn’t a possibility Georgia wouldn’t hunt down the results on her
own. Sure, there’s HIPAA, but Georgia would figure something out. Heck, there’s probably a box, now freshly dusted in Daddy’s
attic, with all their medical records.
Junie grabs her phone and silently opens her email. She looks to the heavens and then to Eddie, with fat tears in her eyes.
A shaky breath escapes her as her chest wavers.
“I’m right here, Junie,” Eddie says gently.
Junie nods. She freezes. “Can you . . . Will you read it?”
Eddie looks into her eyes for a long pause. “Are you sure that’s the right thing?”
It’s not. More than ever, it’s time for her to step up. Junie drops her gaze to the phone, opens the email, and taps on the
attachment. It’s the old test results from 2010, scanned from a printed form with the expected shading. Junie zooms in on
the opening lines, struck by how unofficial the sea of sentences strung together looks. She reads the first line in bold.
No variations for genes detected.
Junie’s heart leaps and she sucks in a breath. She holds out the phone to Eddie. “Look, look here, no variations were found
in the genes. Georgia read it right. It’s negative.”
Eddie takes the phone swiftly and looks. He stares into the screen, his hand shifting up and down slightly as he navigates.
Finally, he sighs and shakes his head. When his eyes meet Junie’s, they glisten with the promise of tears.
“I’m so sorry,” Eddie says. “This is not a negative test.” He jumps up and spikes the phone into Junie’s bed and growls.
Junie is frozen, and it’s like watching a photo finishing in reverse. She just made the same mistake Georgia did. Right here
in current day at thirty years old.
Eddie begins to pace. “They should be sued. This is malpractice. I’m sure there’s already a class action—”
“Eddie.” Junie’s tone stops him in his tracks. “Tell me what this means.”
Eddie shakes off his train of thought and settles back in the chair.
Junie sees the moment he clicks back into doctor mode.
“The form states that no variants were found in the genes, and although that’s true, if you continue reading, they go on to explain that this is not the same as a negative result.
It says they have reason to believe the sample may have been contaminated because of other aberrations in the controls.
Essentially, each sample is tested for multiple markers to make sure the blood being tested is clean and presenting an accurate result.
When the controls come back wrong, that tells us the sample isn’t right.
Sometimes it’s bacteria, mishandling in the lab, even slight errors in the lab tech’s steps.
” Eddie reaches out and squeezes Junie’s forearm.
“I’m so sorry, Junie. None of this is your fault.
Or Georgia’s. All the results paper should’ve said was that you needed to retest. Do it again for reliable results. ”
Dread wells inside Junie. They could’ve known. They could’ve prevented her illness if she’d had the same surgery as Georgia.
And it became serious so quickly. This is the answer to the doctors’ confusion because this aggressive type is more likely
to occur with the gene; they struggled to marry a negative result with this type of breast cancer in her family history.
Junie can’t tell Georgia now. Her sister does a whole lot of things well, but the thing she prides herself on most is how she does things
thoroughly and precisely—and how she protects her little sister. Georgia made an honest mistake, put in a position she shouldn’t
have been in at that age. If only Junie had just made the mistake herself, but of course she didn’t have the guts to open
her own results envelope.
Junie looks at Eddie. “We can’t tell her this.”
Eddie’s face squeezes in concern. “I know what you’re saying.” He pauses, his leg beginning to bounce up and down as he thinks.
“But can I be honest?”
Junie nods, even though she doesn’t really mean it. She doesn’t want honest. She wants him to agree with her assessment, no
questions asked.
“It will be impossible to hide this illness from Georgia, from any of the family, at a certain point—one that’s rapidly approaching.
And Georgia isn’t going to sit on the sidelines.
Hell, she’ll probably set up remote work and stay by your bedside.
But what I’m saying is that she’s going to involve herself in the details.
So when she finds out, you have two choices.
First, you can spend your treatment whispering to nurses not to mention the genetics, skirting around certain medical questions, and spending your energy on keeping up this lie—which will likely eventually come out anyway.
Or second, you can be honest. You can tell Georgia that you don’t blame her.
That you made the same mistake yourself on the second read, even.
It’ll hurt, a permanent wound I’m sure. But then you can let her love on you and care for you, exactly as you’ll need.
You need Georgia now more than ever in your life, Junie, but you have to let her all the way in. ”
Tears are rolling down Junie’s face by the time Eddie is finished talking. She hates all of this so much. The sickness, the
genes that won’t leave her family in peace, the mistake that she can’t undo. But mostly the fact that she knows Eddie is right.
Junie pulls in a breath. “You’re right, but I’m going to need some time to get used to the idea.”
Eddie nods. “Of course.”
The pair sit there in Junie’s room in silence, Junie sniffling. Eventually she looks over at him. “I think I’m going to take
a shower. Try to decompress a little.”
Eddie gets to his feet. “Hug?”
Junie drops into his chest and lets him hold her like a stand-in brother. It reminds her that soon she and Georgia will have
the same postrevelation hug, and she has to stop herself from shuddering. She pulls away.
“I’m here, ok?” Eddie says.
Junie nods, and together they walk from her room to the front door. It’s a quiet goodbye, and when Eddie is gone, Junie makes
a change to her plan. On second thought, she doesn’t much like the sound of soaking in her misery, so she calls out, “Puds?”
The sound of nails clicking on hardwood announces the golden retriever’s arrival as he emerges from her room where he had
settled, his tail wagging in blond excitement.
Junie scratches his head and cups his face. “Wanna head to the garden, my best boy?”
She crosses the house to the back door, which she pops open as she slips into her clogs.
Puds hops out with delight, and Junie pulls on her gardening gloves.
She might be terribly sick, and she might have double the bad news to drop on Georgia, but for now, she can make something good out of the day.
She looks up to the sky, covered in light gray clouds, and it begins to drizzle. Junie closes her eyes against it.
Maybe she’ll see a rainbow.