“She’s resting,” said the doctor. “I don’t want to alarm you, but she had several minor seizures after we admitted her, and sedation was necessary to break the cycle and allow us to find out what’s going on.”
“Do you know?”
The doctor looked at the chart she was carrying, though she didn’t open it. “We have some early indications, but first I want to talk to you about some things we didn’t have time to discuss while we were getting Mrs. Callahan admitted. Has she been having any physical problems lately?”
“Physical problems—”
“Double vision, or problems with her sight? Headaches? Any trouble with coordination—a little more clumsiness than usual, perhaps?”
“She’s been saying she needed to get reading glasses,” Dairine said softly.
Nita looked at her dad. “Daddy, she’s been taking a lot of aspirin lately. I didn’t realize until just now.”
Their father looked stricken. “She hadn’t mentioned anything to me,” he said to the doctor. “The hours I’ve been working lately, sometimes the kids have been seeing more of her than I have.”
Dr. Kashiwabara nodded. “All right. I’ll be going over these issues with Mrs. Callahan myself when she’s more lucid. But what you’ve told me makes sense in terms of what we’ve found so far. The MRI and the X ray both show a small abnormal growth at the base of one of the frontal lobes of her brain.”
Nita swallowed.
“What kind of growth?” her dad said.
“We’re not absolutely certain yet,” said Dr. Kashiwabara. “I’ve scheduled her for an additional scan, a PET scan, later this evening, to help us with the diagnosis.”
“This is a brain tumor we’re talking about,” said Nita’s father, his voice shaking. “Isn’t it?”
Dr. Kashiwabara looked at him, then nodded. “What we need to do is find out what kind,” she said, “so that we can work out how best to treat it. What we do know at this point is that the tumor seems to have grown large enough to put pressure on some nearby areas of Mrs. Callahan’s brain. That’s what caused the seizures. We’ve medicated her to prevent any more. She’s going to be pretty woozy when you see her; please don’t be concerned about that by itself. For the time being, while we run the tests, she’s going to have to stay very quiet to keep excess pressure from building up in her skull and brain. It means she needs to stay flat on her back in bed, even if she feels like she’s able to get up.”
“For how long?” Dairine said.
“Depending on how the tests go, it may be only a couple of days,” Dr. Kashiwabara said. “We’ll do the additional scan that I mentioned, and then there’ll have to be a biopsy of the growth itself—we’ll remove a tiny bit of tissue and test it to see what kind it is. After that, we’ll know what our next move needs to be.”
The doctor folded her hands and rubbed them together a little, then looked up. “I’ll be doing that procedure myself,” she said. “I don’t want to trouble your wife about signing the permissions, Mr. Callahan. Maybe we can take care of that before you leave.”
“Yes,” Nita’s dad said, hardly above a whisper, “of course.”
“I want you to call me if you have any questions at all,” Dr. Kashiwabara said, “or any concerns. I may not be able to get back to you immediately—I have a lot of other people to take care of—but I promise you I will always call you back. Okay?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“All right,” said the doctor, and got up. “Why don’t you go see her now? But, please, keep it brief. The seizures will have been very fatiguing and confusing for her, and she won’t be fully recovered from them until tomorrow. Come with me; I’ll show you the way.”
They walked down the corridor together, and Dr. Kashiwabara led them into a room where there were four of those steel beds: two of them empty, the third with a cloth curtain pulled partway around it, under which they could see a nurse in white shoes and pink nursing sweats doing something or other. In the fourth bed, beyond the partway-pulled curtain, their mom lay under light covers, with one arm strapped to a board, and an IV running into that arm. She was in a hospital gown, and someone had tied her hair back and put it up under a paper cap. Her eyes suddenly looked sunken to Nita; it was the same tired look she had been wearing this morning, but much worse. Why didn’t I notice? Nita’s heart cried. Why didn’t I see something was wrong?!
“Mrs. Callahan?” said Dr. Kashiwabara.
It took Nita’s mom’s eyes a few moments to open, and then they seemed to have trouble focusing. “What? Oh.” She moistened her lips. “Harry?”
It was as if she couldn’t see him properly. “I’m here, honey,” he said, and Nita was astonished at how strong he sounded. He took her hand and sat in the chair by the bed. “And the girls are here, too. How’re you feeling?”
There was a long pause. “Like… bats.”
Nita and Dairine looked at each other in poorly concealed panic. “Baseball bats,” their mother said. “Very sore.”
“Like somebody was hitting you with baseball bats, you mean?” Nita said.
“Yeah.”
From the seizures, Nita thought. Her mother turned her head toward her, across from her dad. “Oh, honey,” she said, “I’m sorry…”
“What’re you sorry for, Mom? This isn’t your fault!” Nita said. And even as she said it, she knew exactly whose fault it was.
There was only one Power among the many Powers that Be who at the beginning of things had insisted on inventing something never contemplated before in the universe: entropy, disease… death. That Lone Power had been her enemy more than once, but suddenly it seemed to Nita that she hadn’t done It nearly as much damage as she should have.
Dairine, next to Nita, leaned over the bed. “Mom, why didn’t you tell us your head was hurting you?”
“Honey, I did.” She shook her head on the pillow, and actually shrugged a little. “I thought… I thought it was stress.” She smiled. “Seems I miscalculated…”
She drifted off then, her eyes closing. Nita and Dairine exchanged a glance. Nita took her mom’s hand and closed her eyes, trying something she had never tried with her mother. She slipped her consciousness a little way into her mother’s body, gingerly, carefully. Without a wizardry specifically built to the purpose, she could get nothing clear—just a fuzzy, muzzy feeling, a faint vague pain at the edge of things, an odd sense of dislocation…
…and one other thing. A small something. A lot of small somethings that were not her mom. They were all gathered together into something little and hot and strange, burning against the cooler, “normal” background: something alien … and malevolent.
Nita gulped, and opened her eyes. I could be wrong. I didn’t do that exactly by the book. But boy, will I later.
Her mother opened her eyes. “I don’t want you to worry,” she said, very clearly.
Her dad actually managed to laugh. “Listen to you,” he said. “Worrying about us, as usual. You concentrate on getting rested up, and help these people do whatever they need to do.”
“Don’t have much choice,” Nita’s mother said. “Got me outnumbered.” She closed her eyes again.
Nita met her dad’s eyes across the bed. “We should go,” he said softly. “Sleep’s probably the best thing for her.”
“Mom,” Dairine said, “we’ll see you tomorrow, okay? You have a nap.”
“Went to extremes to get one,” her mother whispered. “Sorry.”
They sat there for a few minutes more, saying nothing. Finally one of the nurses looked in the door at them, put his finger to his lips, then gestured out into the hall with his head and raised his eyebrows.
Nita got up, bringing Dairine with her. “Dad,” she said.
His eyes had been only for their mother’s face. Now he turned, saw the nurse, who looked at their dad and tapped his watch. Nita’s father nodded, got up. It was hard for him to let go of their mom’s hand. Nita had to look away from that, as she felt the tears we
lling up in her. I’m not going to cry here, she thought. The whole world can hear me, and Dad—
She headed for the door. Behind her came her dad and Dairine, and they stood lost for a moment in the hall. There was nothing they could do but go home.
***
It was dark, it was late, when they got back. Where did the evening go! Nita thought as her dad locked the back door. Somehow hours had fleeted by as if in a few minutes, leaving only pain and a feeling of having been cheated of time, somehow—not that Nita wanted that particular slice of time back. Going through it once was enough. Dairine apparently agreed; she went upstairs to her room, and Nita heard the door shut.
“Daddy,” Nita said.
He was sitting in his chair in the living room, with only one lamp on, everything else in shadow, his face rigid and stunned-looking in the dim light. “What?”
“Daddy, what they told us,” Nita said softly, “it’s scary, yeah. But maybe it’s not what you were thinking.”
He didn’t ask how she knew. “Nita,” her father said, reluctant, “you didn’t see them when they first brought her in, after the X ray, before I came back. I saw the doctor looking at the X ray. I saw her face…”
Nita swallowed. Her dad put his face in his hands, then raised it again. His cheeks were wet. “They’re being careful,” he said. “They’re right to be: they have to do the tests. But I saw the doctor’s face.” He shook his head. “It’s not… it’s not good.”
Then he clenched his fists. “I shouldn’t be frightening you,” he said. “I could be wrong.”
“You always say we have to tell each other when we’re scared,” she said. “You have to take your own advice, Dad.”
He was silent for a long time. “It’s stupid,” he said. “I keep thinking, ‘If I hadn’t been working so hard, this wouldn’t have happened. If she hadn’t been working so hard on the accounts, this wouldn’t have happened.’ It’s like it has to be all my fault, somehow. As if that would help.” He laughed, a short, bitter sound. “And even when I know it’s not, I feel like it is. Stupid.”
Nita swallowed. “I keep thinking,” she said, “I should have seen it, that she wasn’t feeling okay.”
“So do I.”
Nita shook her head. “But I guess that, when someone’s been there forever, you stop looking at them, some ways. It’s dumb, but it’s what we do.”
Her father wiped his hands on his pants and looked up at her with an expression that was considering, and full of pain. “You know,” he said, “you sound a lot like your mom sometimes.”
It was the best thing he could have said to her. It was the worst thing he could have said to her. When the shock wore off, all that Nita could say was, “You should try to get some sleep.”
Her father gave her a look that said, You must be kidding. But aloud he said, “You’re right.”
He got up, gave her a hug. “Good night, honey,” he said. “Make sure I’m up at eight.” He went off to the back bedroom and closed the door.
***
Nita went to bed, too, but there was nothing good about her night at all. She lay awake for hours, rerunning in her mind all kinds of things that had happened the previous week, especially conversations with her mother—trying to see what had gone wrong, what could have gone differently, how she could have predicted what had happened today, how she could have prevented it somehow. It was torment, and she didn’t seem able to stop doing it, but it was better than going on to the next set of thoughts that Nita knew was lying in wait for her. The past, at least, was fixed. The only alternative was the future, in which any horrible thing could happen.
The sound of a hand turning the knob of her bedroom door brought Nita sitting up straight in bed in absolute terror. Of what? she thought a second later, scornful and angry with herself, while also trying to breathe deeply and slow down her pounding heart, which seemed to be shaking her whole body. But she knew what she was afraid of. Of hearing the phone ring downstairs in the middle of the night, of having her father come in and tell her, tell her—
Nita gulped and struggled for control. In the darkness, she heard a couple of steps on the floor. “Neets,” said a small voice. Then the bedsprings creaked a little.
Dairine crept into Nita’s bed, threw her arms around Nita, buried her face against her chest, and began to sob.
Nita suddenly found herself looking at a moment long ago: a small Dairine, maybe five years old, running down the sidewalk outside the house, oblivious—then tripping and falling. Dairine had pushed herself up on her hands and, after a long pause, started to cry. But then came the laughter of the kids down the street, the ones toward whom she’d been running. Nita had been struck then by the sight of Dairine’s face working, puckering, as she tried to decide what to do, then steadying into a downturned mouth and thunderous frown, a scowl of furious determination. Dairine got up, and said just one thing: “No.” Knees bleeding, she wiped her face, and walked slowly back to the house, shoulders hunched, her whole body clenched like a small fist with resolve.
I;m not sure she’s ever cried since, Nita thought. And so Dairine had gone on, for so long, expressing herself almost entirely through that toughness. But now the shell had cracked, and who would have ever known that there was such pain and fear contained inside it? But Nita knew now, and there was nothing she could do but hang on to her sister and let Dairine sob herself silent. It’s not fair, Nita thought, the tears leaking out as she hugged Dairine to her.Who do I get to cry on? Who’s going to be strong for me?
If any Power listened, It gave her no answer.
8: Sunday Morning
Before dawn Nita found herself awake and sitting up in bed, looking at the faint blue light outside her window. There had been no transition from sleeping to waking: just that unsettling consciousness, and a feeling that the world was wrong, that everything was wrong. She had no idea how long it had taken her to get to sleep last night after Dairine, silent and drained, had finally slipped away.
Drained. That was the word for how Nita felt, too. But some energy was beginning to coil back into that void as the shock wore off. Nita looked at her manual, and saw the words in front of her eyes without even having to touch it: I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; I will not change any creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened—
She swallowed. I am a wizard. And if my mom’s life isn’t “threatened” right now, I don’t know when it will be. There has to be another way to fight this than just what they’ve got in the hospital.
And I’m going to find out what it is.
She got up, dressed, grabbed the manual, and took it back to bed with her. Its covers were fizzing. Nita settled herself up against the wall at the head of the bed and flipped the book open to read the message waiting for her, then glanced out the window at the bleak predawn light. I’ll get in touch with him later. No point in waking him up early just to get him upset. I’ve done enough stupid stuff to him lately.
She paged through the manual to the section with information on the medical and healing-related wizardries. That section was much larger this morning than she had ever found it before. Nita began reading what was there with intensity and with a concentration she could hardly remember having expended since she first found this book and understood what it meant. She had a couple of hours to spare before the time her dad had told her to wake him up.
She used them — pausing only once to go to the bathroom, taking the book with her when she did. To say that the subject was complex was understating badly. There was just too much information. She had the manual stop displaying everything that had to do with injuries and trauma, chronic diseases and afflictions; and though she narrowed and narrowed her focus, the section she was reading didn’t get any thinner. Finally there was almost nothing between the covers except pages and pages of material concerning abnormal growths and lesions, and still she found more every time she targeted a specific cond
ition. Nita also saw a lot of a word in the Speech that she didn’t much like—a word that translated into English as intractable. There was a lot of discussion of theory here, but not many spells. Nita got nervous when she noticed that, but she didn’t stop reading. There had to be a way. There was always a way, if you could just push through to the core of the matter….
The light grew in her room; she hardly noticed. Birds began singing the restrained songs of early autumn, but Nita shut their voices out. She read and read… and suddenly the alarm on her smartphone went off, at five minutes to eight.
Nita grabbed the noisy thing, shut it off, and went to see if her dad was up yet. Pausing outside the master bedroom, listening, she couldn’t hear any sound of anyone stirring in there.
She knocked softly on the door. No answer. “Dad…”
Still nothing. Nita eased the door softly open and peeked in.
Her father was asleep in the reading chair in the corner between the two bedroom windows. He sat slumped over, his mouth hanging open a little, a slight snore emitting from him—almost the same sound Ponch made when he lay on his back with his feet in the air and snored; the thought almost made her smile. But smiling about anything right now seemed like some kind of betrayal.
She glanced at the bed, which had not been slept in, and let out an unhappy breath, then went over to her dad and crouched down beside the chair. “Daddy,” she said.
His eyes opened slowly; he looked at her as if he couldn’t understand what he was doing here.
Then it all came back to him. She saw the pain fill his eyes. Nita clenched her jaw and managed to keep from getting any weepier than she already felt. “It’s just eight, Dad,” she said. “You said we should go to the hospital around nine thirty.”
“Yeah.” He slowly sat upright and rubbed his face. “Yeah.” He looked at her then. “How are you doing, honey?”
“Better. Maybe better,” she said. “Daddy, I guess I was so scared, I forgot for a minute.”
“Forgot what?”
“Maybe I can do something.”