At McDonald’s, I’m asked if I want ketchup with my fries, but I can only stare at the worker dumbly because what I heard was It’s messed up when boats capsize, and I nod lamely because it is disastrous and sad, and yet so out of left field I can’t respond with words.
It’s only when he drops a stack of ketchup packets on my tray that my brain makes the translation, too late it seems because I hate ketchup. I dump them on the table when I go, the mother lode for someone who likes it. On the way out the door I trip, because coordination is also affected by a lack of sleep.
Two hours ago I dragged my heavy body from bed after another sleepless night, and now I stand in the center of Mom’s and my house, deciding which of our belongings to take and which to leave. I can’t stand to stay here much longer, a decision I’ve come to quickly over the last four days. I’ve spoken to a Realtor already, figured out next steps. First I’m to pack up what I want to keep, and then everything else will be sold in an estate sale before some junk removal service tosses the rest of our stuff in the trash.
Then some other family will move in to the only home I’ve ever known.
I’m eyeing the sofa, wondering if I should take it or leave it, when the phone rings. “Hello?” I ask.
A voice on the other end informs me that she’s calling from the financial aid office at the college. “There’s a problem with your application,” she says to me.
“What problem?” I ask the woman on the phone, afraid I’m about to be cited for tax evasion. It’s a likely possibility; I’d left blank every question on the FAFSA form that asked about adjusted gross income and tax returns. I might have lied on the application too. There was a question that asked if both of my parents were deceased. I said yes to that, though I don’t know if it’s true.
Is my father dead?
On the other end of the line, the woman asks me to verify my social security number for her and I do. “That’s what I have,” she says, and I ask, “Then what’s the problem? Has my application been denied?” My heart sinks. How can that be? It’s only a community college. It’s not like I registered for Yale or Harvard.
“I’m sure it’s just a weird mix-up with vital statistics,” she says.
“What mix-up?” I ask, feeling relieved for a mix-up as opposed to a denied application. A mix-up can be fixed.
“It’s the strangest thing,” she says. “There was a death certificate on file for a Jessica Sloane, from seventeen years ago. With your birth date and your social security number. By the looks of this, Ms. Sloane,” she says, and I amend Jessie, because Ms. Sloane is Mom. “By the looks of this, Jessie,” she says, and the words that follow punch me so hard in the gut they make it almost impossible to breathe. “By the looks of this, you’re already dead.”
And then she laughs as if somehow or other this is funny.
* * *
Today I’m looking for a new place to live. Staying in our old home is no longer a viable option because of the residual ghosts of Mom that remain in every corner of the home. The smell of her Crabtree & Evelyn hand cream that fills the bathroom. The feel of the velvet-lined compartments in the mahogany dresser. The chemo caps. The cartons of Ensure on the refrigerator shelf.
I perch in the back seat of a Kia Soul, trying hard not to think too much about the call from the financial aid office. This is easier said than done. Just thinking about it makes my stomach hurt. A mix-up, the woman claimed, but still, it’s hard to grapple with the words you and dead in the same sentence. Though I try to, I can’t push them from my mind. The way she and I left things, I’m to provide a copy of my social security card to the college before they’ll take another look at my application for a loan, which is a problem because I don’t have the first clue where the card is. But it’s more than that too. Because the woman also told me about some death index my name was found on. A death index. My name on a database maintained by the Social Security Administration of millions of people who have died, nullifying their social security numbers so that no one else can use them, so that I can’t use my own social security number. Because, according to the Social Security Administration, I’m dead.
You might want to look into that, she’d suggested before ending our call, and I couldn’t help but feel shaken up by it even now, hours later. My name on a death database. Though it’s a mistake, of course.
But still I pray this isn’t some sort of foresight. A prophecy of what’s to come.
I gaze out the window as some woman sits behind the wheel of the Kia, steering us through the streets of Chicago. Her name is Lily and she calls herself an apartment finder. The first I’d heard of Lily was days ago, when I’d come home from a cleaning job—hating the feeling of coming home to Mom’s and my empty house alone, wishing she was there but knowing she would never be again, making a flip decision to sell the home and leave. I came home, leaving my bike on the sidewalk, and there, hanging on the handle of our front door, was an ad for Lily’s efficient and cost-free services. An apartment finder. I’d never heard of such a thing, and yet she was just the thing I needed. The door hanger was in-your-face marketing, the kind I couldn’t recycle with the rest of the junk mail. And so I called Lily and we made an appointment to meet.
Lily’s parallel parking skills are second to none, though it seems easy enough for someone like me who’s never driven a car before. Growing up in an old brick bungalow in Albany Park, there was never a need to drive a car. We didn’t have one. The Brown Line or the bus took us everywhere we needed to go. Either that or our own two feet. I also have my Schwinn, Old Faithful, which is surprisingly resilient in even the worst weather, except for, of course, three feet of snow.
I was fifteen when Mom was diagnosed with cancer, which meant that for the time being, my life was on hold, anything that wasn’t essential set aside. I went to school. I worked. I helped with the mortgage and saved as much as I could. And I held Mom’s hair for her when she puked.
She found the lump herself, slim fingers palpating her own breast because she knew sooner or later this would happen. She didn’t tell me about the lump until after she’d been diagnosed with cancer, one mammogram and a biopsy later. She didn’t want to worry me. They removed the breast first, followed by months of chemotherapy. But it wasn’t long before the cancer returned, in the chest and in the bones this time. The lungs. Back for vengeance.
Jessie, I’m dying. I’m going to die, she had said to me then. We were sitting on the front porch, hand in hand, the day she learned the cancer was back. At that point, her five-year survival rate took a nosedive. She only lived for two more, and none of them great.
The cancer, it’s hereditary. Some aberrant gene that runs through our family line, red pegs lined up in my battleship already. Like Mom and her mom before her, it’s only a matter of time before I too will sink.
I claimed the back seat of the Kia after Lily dropped her purse into the passenger’s chair. She drives with one hand on the horn at all times, so she can scare pedestrians out of the way, those she hollers at from behind safety glass to shake a leg and scoot your boot. I have no credit history and no bank account, which I’ve confessed to Lily, and instead carry a pocketful of cash. Her eyes grew wide when I showed her my money, thirty hundred-dollar bills folded in half and stuck inside a wristlet.
“This might be a problem,” Lily said, shrugging her shoulders not at the cash but rather the shortage of credit, the absence of a bank account, “but we’ll see.”
She suggested I offer a landlord more up front to offset the fact that I’m one of those people who keeps all my money in a fireproof safe box beneath my bed. The checks I earn cleaning houses get cashed at Walmart for a three-dollar service fee, and then deposited into my trusty box. I considered signing on with a temp agency once, but thought better of it. There are perks to my job I won’t find anywhere else. Because