On New Year’s Eve, she found a life coach online and spent three hours messaging about her cyst and her nightmare. The life coach told Bianca that she suffered from a classic case of “survivor’s guilt,” and that she needed to start calling the cyst what it really was: her brother.
“Have you even named him?” the life coach asked. “Because you need to give him a name.”
Bianca thought about this. She thought about what sort of name went with Bianca. Bianca and Ben? Bianca and Brian? Bianca and Bill? “Bjorn,” Bianca said at last. “Bianca and Bjorn.”
The life coach was quiet for a pause, and Bianca could tell this choice pleased her. “Excellent,” the coach said. “Now. Go and write your brother’s story. Start a journal. Get to know Bjorn. Learn to love him.”
Getting to know Bjorn was harder than the life coach had made it sound. Bianca tried to think of what her brother might have looked like and what he might have been able to do. She gave him red hair and green eyes and put him in a cowboy outfit. She tried to imagine him firing two cap guns and wearing a coonskin cap. She gave him a toy drum and a bullwhip and other things she had seen little boys use on old-fashioned television shows, but as soon as she’d written these things down, she scribbled through them. Bianca knew the truth. She knew Bjorn was weak, terribly so, because she had overcome him in the womb. Bianca could barely open a new jar of strawberry jelly, so what did that say about her brother? It said that if her brother had been born, he would have worn thick glasses and hearing aids and braces on his legs. He would have been unable to control his saliva, his bowels. He would have garnered the pity of her parents even more than he did now.
Bianca filled two notebooks on this predicament—on Bjorn’s endless doctors’ appointments and the exorbitant medical bills and the tears her parents shed for him and only him. She wrote all of this at her bedroom window and allowed herself to crack the blinds while she did so. Through the aluminum slit, Bianca could see into the neighbors’ backyard. They had a rusted, metal seesaw with faded red-and-white candy stripes, and as she wrote about her brother’s condition, she saw herself, and him, on the seesaw. She saw him on one end of it, tiny and malformed and high in the air. And she saw herself on the other end of it, staring up at her brother, his fate in her weight. Every time she looked at the seesaw, Bianca saw this, and then she saw herself getting up and off the seesaw and walking into the woods, while Bjorn crashed and fell.
The cyst began to grow. It grew so much that Bianca had to order a wig and undress at certain angles for her webcam customers. She lost a dozen subscribers because she wouldn’t lay back and moan like she once had. If she did, her bangs fell to one side and she could feel the stale apartment air wafting over her cyst. She knew the men weren’t looking at her forehead, but stilclass="underline" knowing it was exposed made her self-conscious and she couldn’t do what she had once done as well as she once had.
The nightmare also grew worse. Now it was no longer a baby that hatched right from her temple. Now it was a full-grown man dressed as a Navy pilot. He stepped out of Bianca’s head in his shined shoes, and her mother and father ran, tear-stained and rejoicing, to embrace him.
Bianca knew the time had come for action. But action meant leaving the apartment, so she found someone on the internet who would come to her and do what needed to be done.
Bianca didn’t know if he was a real doctor or not, but he arrived when he said he would and he gave the secret knock that Bianca had insisted he use. More importantly, he carried a black leather bag that looked expensive and he didn’t smell like an Italian sub. In Bianca’s living room, the doctor put on surgical gloves and a headlamp and asked Bianca to lay on the couch. Then he brought out five giant needles, two Valium, a scalpel, and a CD player. “Vivaldi,” he said. “Four Seasons.” He handed Bianca a blindfold and she put it on and the doctor did what she had paid him to do. When it was over, he helped Bianca to a seated position and held up a mirror so she could look at herself.
“I look like Frankenstein,” she said of the stitches.
The doctor snapped off his gloves and smiled. “He’s my favorite monster.”
At Bianca’s request, the doctor let her keep the cyst. He handed her an opaque jar filled with formaldehyde and suggested she not open it. “Dermoid cysts aren’t much to look at,” he said. “Just put the jar on your bookshelf and use it as a bookend.” Bianca nodded and pretended she would. Then she wrote the doctor a check for all the money she had.
That night Bianca slept better than she’d ever slept. She dreamed there was a hole in her head and that a white dove flew into the hole and then the hole closed up like it had never even been there.
In the first week after the surgery, Bianca went around her apartment and opened all the blinds. She lay on her bedroom floor in a square of sunshine and smiled as her skin turned from skim milk to heavy cream. In the second week, Bianca went and stood on the front stoop and waved at passing cars. In the third week, she put on a hat to cover her bandage and walked two blocks to the gas station. She bought Fig Newtons and beer and made small talk with the cashier about the weather. When she returned to her apartment, she went inside to put five beers in the refrigerator, then she promptly came back out with one beer and the cookies. She went into the neighbor’s backyard and sat on one end of the rusted seesaw. She sat there in the yellow, late-winter grass and drank her beer and ate her cookies and looked up at the empty end of the seesaw in the blue sky and was happy.
In the fourth week, Bianca opened the jar in the kitchen sink. She rinsed the cyst under running water and set it out to dry on a tea towel. It looked like a raw chicken breast but darker—maybe a duck breast—and when Bianca cut into it, she could see the red hair she’d assigned Bjorn, plus a row of tiny teeth, a weak attempt at a smile she’d taken away. When she was done looking at it, she put the cyst back in the jar and put the jar back on her bookshelf so it could go back to doing its job.
Bianca ordered a half dozen Royal Verano pears for herself. When they arrived, she held them up to her face in the mirror and compared them to her new forehead. They were like six little twins and she loved them so much that she ate five in one sitting. Afterward, she slept for a long time and dreamed the dream of the dove. When she woke, she went and got the jar from the bookshelf. She opened it in the sink and poured off the formaldehyde and rinsed the cyst as she had before. Then she wrapped it in a tea towel and packed it in the padded Royal Verano crate and drove to her local veterinarian.
“He was born the same day I was,” she told the vet, handing him the crate.
The vet was solemn. “You must be devastated.”
“I don’t know how I feel,” said Bianca.
The doctor took the crate gently. “Give yourself time,” he said.
Bianca said she would. She went back to her apartment and looked at herself in the mirror. She arranged her bangs to hide her stitches, then she turned on her webcam.
When Bianca went to pick up the ashes from the vet, she realized the urn she’d bought was too big. The ashes only filled a small envelope, but Bianca took the envelope home anyway and folded it into the urn and glued the urn’s lid shut. The urn was painted blue and white and featured a girl and a boy at a wishing well. The boy was just standing there while the girl brought up the pail. Bianca tested the urn’s lid to make sure it was secure, then she went to the kitchen and boiled an egg. When it was cool, she placed it on her forehead where the cyst had been. She wrapped a scarf over the egg and around her head, but she wasn’t satisfied with how she looked. She wanted the cyst to be bigger. She wanted her mother to be horrified, more defeated than ever. So, Bianca rummaged through the kitchen until she came across the last Royal Verano pear in the back of the refrigerator. She placed the cold twin against her head and wrapped her head with the scarf. Bianca looked in the mirror and approved.