Chapter 8 - The Thirty Days
We didn't go back to the hospital that night.
Dr. Chen met us at the emergency entrance of St. Jude’s at seven-thirty, wearing an old fleece jacket over his scrubs. He looked at Ethan through the window of the Tahoe—the boy was fast asleep in the back seat, his head resting on his uncle’s camouflage shoulder, his fingers still locked around the laces of the signed game ball.
Chen took the stethoscope from his pocket, reached through the open door, and listened to Ethan’s chest for forty seconds while the car idled in the ambulance lane.
"Lungs are clear," Chen whispered, stepping back from the door. He looked at James, whose uniform was still wrinkled from eighteen hours in the jump seat of a military transport. "Sergeant."
"Doctor."
"His oral antibiotics are in this bag," Chen said, handing me a brown paper pharmacy sack. "The subcutaneous G-CSF pens are on ice in the cooler. You give him five micrograms per kilogram every evening at eight. If he runs a fever, you bring him in. But if he doesn't..."
He trailed off, looking at Ethan’s relaxed, unlined forehead.
"Go home," Chen said. "Go to Pineville. Cook him some chicken. Let him sleep in his own bed."
The house on rural Route 3 smelled of cedar mulch, old books, and the cold, sweetish scent of well water that had sat in the copper pipes while we were gone.
James moved into the spare bedroom across the hall from Ethan.
He didn't unpack his duffel bag. He kept his boots lined up against the baseboard with the laces tucked inside the collars, exactly as he had done in the barracks for twenty years. Every morning at six-fifteen, before the sun had cleared the top of the loblolly pines behind the shed, the back door would click open.
I would stand at the kitchen window with a mug of black coffee, watching the yard.
The frost was on the clover now—thin, white, crunchy beneath their soles. Ethan would be wearing his heavy winter coat over the blue jersey, two pairs of sweatpants, and a black wool beanie pulled down to his eyebrows to keep the heat from escaping his bare scalp.
He didn't run. His legs were too thin, the neuropathy from the vincristine making his toes drag slightly in the grass.
But he threw.
James would stand fifteen yards away near the old tire swing, his large, scarred hands held out at chest height like a catcher’s mitt.
"Don't drop the elbow, kid," James’s voice would drift across the frozen lawn. "Lead with the hip. Snap the fingers through the laces."
Thwip.
The brown leather ball would turn through the gray morning air, its rotation slow, slightly wobbly at first, but true. James would catch it with a soft, leather-on-leather pop, tuck it into his ribs, and fire it back with an underhand flip that landed right in Ethan’s breadbasket.
Ten throws.
Then fifteen.
By the second week, Ethan was throwing thirty-five passes before he had to sit on the overturned five-gallon bucket Mark had placed near the septic tank.
On the sixteenth of October, Dr. Chen called.
I was standing by the stove, browning onions for a stew, while Mark and James were on the back porch sharpening the teeth on an old two-man crosscut saw.
"Sarah," Chen said.
His voice didn't have the heavy, administrative defeat of September. It had that sharp, restless energy that doctors get when they’ve run an assay three times because they don't believe the calibration on the spectrophotometer.
"The peripheral smear from Tuesday," Chen said. "The one your home health nurse dropped off."
My hand froze around the wooden spoon. "Robert? What is it? Are the blasts up?"
"No," Chen said. He paused, and I heard the sound of paper rustling—the blue folder, the one with the metal clasp. "They’re down. They’re at four percent."
The wooden spoon hit the cast-iron skillet with a dull clatter.
"Four?" I whispered.
"The absolute neutrophil count is eight hundred," Chen said, his words coming faster now, tumbling over each other like water through an open sluice gate. "The platelets are up to eighty-four thousand. Spontaneous. No transfusion since the game."
May you like
"How?"
"I don't know," Chen said honestly. "The late-phase immune response to the clofrabine? A delayed graft-versus-host effect from the cord blood cells we infused in June that finally engrafted after the viral suppression cleared? Or maybe... maybe the boy just decided he had things to do in November. Sarah, bring him in tomorrow at eight. We need a bone marrow biopsy. A formal one. If the core sample confirms this... we might be looking at an operational remission."
