were no doubt asleep in the main house of Solitude.
“No. There’s no one.”
I was on my own.
…
The scans began in the morning. I pulled a small notebook from my purse and began to jot down notes of what the doctors said, what tests were being run. I couldn’t seem to absorb it all. Or perhaps the enormity of it was simply too much to take in.
“Another test?” Colt asked, squeezing my hand as the doctors drew more blood from Maisie.
“Yep.” I forced a smile, but it didn’t fool him.
“We just need to see what’s going on with your sister, little man,” Dr. Anderson said from where he stood perched at Maisie’s bedside.
“You’ve already looked in her bones. What else do you want?” Colt snapped.
“Colt, why don’t we go grab some ice cream?” Ada asked from the corner. She’d arrived early this morning, determined that I not be alone.
I could have been in a room with a dozen people I knew—I still would have been alone.
“Come on, we’ll grab some for Maisie, too.” She held out her hand, and I nodded to Colt.
“Go ahead. We’re not going anywhere for a while.”
Colt looked to Maisie, who smiled. “Strawberry.”
He nodded, taking his duty with all seriousness, then gave Dr. Anderson another glare for good measure before leaving with Ada.
I held Maisie’s hand while they finished the draw. Then I curled up next to her on the bed and switched on cartoons, holding her small body against mine.
“Am I sick?” She looked up at me without fear or expectation.
“Yeah, baby. I think you might be. But it’s too early to worry, okay?”
She nodded and focused back on whatever show Disney Junior was airing.
“Then it’s good that I’m in a hospital. They make you better in hospitals.”
I kissed her forehead. “That, they do.”
…
“It’s not leukemia,” Dr. Anderson told me as we stood in the hallway later that night.
“It’s not?” Relief raced through me, the physical feeling palpable, like blood returning to a limb too long asleep.
“No. We don’t know what it is, though.”
“It could still be cancer?”
“It could. We’re not finding anything other than the elevated white counts, though.”
“But you’re going to keep looking.”
He nodded, but the sheen of certainty he’d had in his eyes when he’d thought it was leukemia was gone. He didn’t know what we were dealing with, and he obviously didn’t want to tell me that.
Day three and four passed with more tests. Less certainty.
Colt grew restless but refused to leave his sister’s side, and I didn’t have the heart to make him go. They’d never been separated for more than a day in their lives. I wasn’t sure they knew how to survive as individuals when they thought of themselves collectively.
Ada brought clean clothes, took Colt for walks, kept me up to date on the business. How odd it was that my obsession with Solitude had been my number three priority behind Colt and Maisie for the last five years, but at this moment felt utterly unimportant.
Days blended together, and my fingers were damn near raw from the internet searching I’d done since Dr. Anderson dropped the C word. Of course they’d told me to stay off the net.
Yeah, right.
I couldn’t remember a damn thing they said half the time. No matter how hard I tried to concentrate, it was as if my brain had shields up and was only taking in what it thought I could handle. Using the internet filled in the gaps that my memory and my notebook couldn’t.
On the fifth day, we gathered in the conference room once again, but this time I had Ada next to me.
“We still don’t know what’s causing it. We’ve tested for all the usual culprits, and they’ve come back negative.”
“Why doesn’t that sound like a good thing?” Ada asked. “You’re saying you haven’t found cancer, but you sound disappointed.”
“Because there’s something there. They just can’t find it,” I said, my voice turning sharp. “The same as Dr. Franklin. Maisie said she hurt, and she was sent home with a diagnosis of growing pains. Then they called it psychosomatic. Now you’re telling me that her blood says one thing, her bones say another, and you’re just out of ideas.”
The men had the good sense to look embarrassed. They should be. They’d gone to years and years of school for this very moment, and they were failing.
“Well, what are you going to do? Because there has to be something. You’re not going to send my little girl home.”