Chapter 9 - The Core Sample
The procedural room on the third floor smelled of Betadine and the cold, sweetish gas they used for conscious sedation.
Ethan lay on his stomach on the narrow examination table, his face turned toward the wall where someone had painted a mural of sea turtles swimming through green kelp. His hands were clasped around James’s right index finger—the thick, scarred knuckle that had been broken by an AK-47 recoil in Helmand twelve years ago.
Mark stood at the head of the bed, his thumbs stroking Ethan’s temples in slow, rhythmic circles.
"Breathe the sweet air, buddy," Mark muttered. "Just like the tire swing. Nice and easy."
Dr. Chen worked with a heavy, stainless-steel Jamshidi needle at the posterior iliac crest—the back of the hip bone. The sound of the needle entering the cortical bone was a dry, hollow crunch that always made my teeth ache, but Ethan didn't flinch. The propofol had smoothed his features into the slack, peaceful mask of deep sleep, his breathing regular and deep through his small nose.
"Core is out," Chen said, his voice muffled by his surgical mask.
He held up the glass slide.
In the center lay a three-centimeter cylinder of marrow tissue, dark red, dense, looking like a piece of wet yarn. He handed it to the technician from the hematopathology lab who was waiting by the door with a transport container of liquid nitrogen.
"How does it look to the eye, Robert?" Mark asked.
Chen stripped off his sterile gloves with a sharp snap. He didn't answer immediately. He looked at Ethan’s back—at the small, pale ribs that were beginning to show the first thin layer of new muscle between the bones, at the clear, pink skin where the chemotherapy rash had faded into memory.
"It looks cellular," Chen said softly. "It doesn't look like fat. It doesn't look like fibrous replacement. But the flow cytometry will tell us the truth by four this afternoon."
We waited in the cafeteria on the ground floor.
We didn't sit in the corner by the vending machines. We sat by the tall glass windows that looked out over the courtyard where three maple trees were dropping their last red leaves onto the grass.
James had bought three chicken salad sandwiches on white bread. He had cut them into neat, military quarters with the small pocket knife he kept in his watch pocket, lining them up on the paper plates with the edges aligned.
Mark didn't eat. He drank black coffee from a styrofoam cup, his fingers slowly turning the cup around and around until the white rim was shredded into small, jagged teeth.
"You have six days left on the pass, Jim," Mark said.
"Seven," James corrected, his eyes fixed on the traffic on Mint Street. "The battalion commander gave me forty-eight hours of travel time on the back end. I don't have to report to Pope Field until twenty-three-hundred on Sunday."
"Can you extend?"
"No," James said quietly. "The company is moving north to the training area in Poland. I’m the first sergeant, Mark. I can't let eighty boys get on a transport without me."
Mark nodded once. He understood duty; he had spent thirty years working for men who didn't care about his back, but he had never left a trench open overnight when a rainstorm was coming.
The elevator doors across the cafeteria lobby chimed.
Dr. Chen was walking toward us.
He had his blue folder. He was holding it with both hands against his chest, but he wasn't tapping the metal clasp. He was walking slowly, his shoulders back, his running shoes making no sound at all on the linoleum.
He stopped at the edge of our round laminate table.
He didn't open the folder. He laid it flat between the paper plates with the chicken salad and Mark’s shredded coffee cup.
"Zero point two percent," Chen said.
The cafeteria noise—the hum of the ice machine, the clatter of plastic trays, the distant beep of an order pager—seemed to drop through the floor into the basement.
Mark’s hand stopped moving around the cup. "Zero point two?"
"Morphologically negative," Chen said. His voice was thick, cracking slightly at the edges like old timber. "Cytogenetically negative. The molecular assay shows the original clone is below the limit of detection. The marrow is eighty percent cellular with full trilineage hematopoiesis. He’s making red cells, Mark. He’s making platelets. He’s making his own blood."
I didn't stand up.
I couldn't.
My knees simply had no bone left in them. I leaned forward until my forehead was resting on the cold laminate of the table, right beside the blue folder with my son’s name printed on the white adhesive label: MILLER, ETHAN R. — DOB 04/12/2014.
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Mark’s hands came down over my head, broad and heavy, his thumbs pressing into the base of my skull, while his brother reached across the table and took both of our wrists into his large, calloused palms.
We stayed like that for five minutes in the middle of a hospital cafeteria, while the nurses walked past with their diet sodas and the autumn sun moved across the red leaves outside, three adults who had walked all the way to the edge of the pit and found that the ground had held.
