But Teresa put a stop to all my questions about how my day was going to go.
As soon as I was taking my coat off, she was at my side. “Come in to my office,” she said.
I followed her quickly, wondering if this was something important or something like the shirt I’d left in the bathroom. The look on Teresa’s face was very solemn, and it was making me nervous.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s Ethan,” she said.
I held my breath. “What happened?”
“It’s not good, Natalie,” said Teresa. She sat down and faced me across her desk, fiddling with a pen. Teresa was not normally someone who fidgeted.
“Not good?” I repeated. I let out a tiny breath. “Is he… did we lose him?”
“They cancelled the bone marrow transplant,” said Teresa. “Well, postponed it. His fever is too high. They think he’s got pneumonia, too. Amy and Chris went over to the hospital late last night. Claudia spent the night here with Lillian.”
“They spent the night?” That was not a good sign.
“He’s in excellent hands,” said Teresa, trying to reassure me. “The top doctors are handling his case. This is just a setback for him. I talked to Amy earlier this morning and she said they’re going to try and reschedule the bone marrow transplant once his fever goes down. Maybe even later this week.”
“I hope so,” I said. “Does Lillian know?”
“Just that he’s sick,” said Teresa. “Claudia’s going to stay with her all day.”
Dominic would probably want to spend time with her today too, I thought. But I couldn’t handle telling him the news about Ethan. Not right now. “Could you, I know that I’m the one who has been working with him, but I have some follow up stuff from the party to work on today. Do you think you could tell Dominic about Ethan, too? I’m sure he would want to spend time with Lillian today. It would give Claudia a break too,” I added.
Teresa looked at me for a minute, then finally nodded. “Sure. I’ll tell him. You get to work. The party was great, by the way,” she called after me.
“Thanks,” I said, and headed to my closet-desk. I dug my headphones out of my desk drawer, plugged them in, and put them over my ears, but I didn’t turn on any music. I just wanted to be left alone.
I didn’t really have that much work to do. I had to send some follow-up thank you messages to the businesses who had worked with us for the party, but that wasn’t going to take all day. I had to check Hartley House’s social media pages and see what kind of reaction the pictures from the birthday party had received, but that wouldn’t take a long time either. I mostly wanted to sit quietly and think. And pray. Ethan and his family needed my prayers and I needed to do that for them.
The morning dragged on forever. I sat at my desk as much as I could, sneaking away once to get coffee and once to stick my head in Teresa’s office to ask if she had heard anything else from the Wachowskis. She had no news, so I went back to my computer where I could stare at the number of followers we had on each of our accounts.
I decided I should start a spreadsheet tracking how many followers we had on each of our accounts, so I could see how the number went up or down over time, and how many reactions we got to each of our posts. That took up most of my time, and as five o’clock drew closer I started to relax. Somehow I’d managed to go the whole day without seeing Dominic, and in my mind that cemented the thought that Libby was wrong, he didn’t like me, because if he did, he would have come to see what I was up to.
And in the middle of all those selfish thoughts, Teresa appeared at my desk yet again. She tapped my headphones so I would take them off, but I’d heard her approaching. I was expecting her to tell me about something Dominic had done, or some feedback she’d heard about the party, but when I turned around there were tears in her eyes.
I knew before she said anything. “Ethan?” I whispered.
Teresa nodded sadly. “Amy just called me. The pneumonia was just too much for his body to handle. Poor little thing, I hope he’s at peace now.” She blinked back a tear. “Amy and Chris are still at the hospital. I’m not sure when they’ll be back. I want to make sure they take all the time they need to deal with this. I was wondering if I could ask you a favor. Claudia stayed with Lillian last night, so I hate to ask her to stay again. I know this isn’t part of your job anymore, but would you mind helping out? I’m not sure it’ll be necessary, but if Amy and Chris need some time and peace we can take care of Lillian for them.”
“I don’t mind staying at all,” I said. “Poor Lillian. Has anybody told her?”
“Not yet,” said Teresa. “Her parents want to be the ones to tell her, so we’re just going to say that Ethan is sick and Mommy and Daddy will be back soon. I’ve told Claudia. Dominic is with Lillian right now, and he still doesn’t know. I told him that Ethan wasn’t doing well this morning, but not the latest news.” She looked away and wiped away another tear.
I didn’t want to, but I knew that I had to. “I’ll do it,” I said. I saved my spreadsheet and shut down my computer. Teresa went back to her office, and I went looking for Dominic.
The Wachowskis weren’t the first Hartley House family to lose a child. I’d been through this before, when I was a support worker here. It was always sad. But something about this time – maybe it was Lillian’s birthday party that had happened just yesterday, maybe it was how hopeful everyone had been that this bone marrow transplant would have helped Ethan live a long and healthy life – felt different than before.
Dominic and Lillian were in the living room, coloring together. I stood in the doorway for a minute, watching them. Their heads were bent towards each other, as they each colored a page in the book. They weren’t talking, but looked so relaxed and happy together that I didn’t want to ruin it. I didn’t want to go in the room and deliver the terrible bombshell that was going to change this sweet little girl’s life forever. Maybe if I just stayed out of the room, I would never have to tell. Maybe I could protect them both from this terrible news forever.
I sighed as I stood watching them not able to take a step forward.
15
Dominic reached for another crayon, and glanced up. His eyes met mine, and he smiled, but I couldn’t bring myself to smile back. His smile gradually faded, and as he read the expression on my face I watched as he slowly realized why I was standing there. He looked over at Lillian, whose small blonde head was still bent over the coloring book as she scribbled intently, then back at me. I nodded.
“Hey, Lilly,” he said, putting down his crayon and standing up. “You keep coloring. I’m just going to talk to Natalie for a minute, okay?”
“Uh-huh,” said Lillian, blissfully ignoring us.
We stepped outside the living room. “What’s up?” asked Dominic, but I knew he could tell what was going on. I could hear the fearful edge in his voice.
“It’s Ethan,” I said quietly. “He passed away a few hours ago. The pneumonia... it was too much for him.”
“That’s terrible,” said Dominic. He clenched his jaw and his face turned to stone.
“Amy and Chris are going to stay at the hospital for a while. Claudia was with Lillian overnight last night, so Teresa asked me to stay with her tonight. That’ll give the Wachowskis some time to figure things out without having to care for Lillian unless they want to. She doesn’t know. They want to be the ones to tell her, when they’re ready.”
Dominic looked at Lillian to avoid meeting my eyes. “That poor kid,” he said, and his voice rasped with emotion. I thought he was talking about Ethan, but he went on. “Everything she knows is going to change. When your sibling dies, it’s a whole different world.”
“It’s almost five, so you can go home if you want,” I said. “I’ll make her dinner and put her to bed.”
He shook his head. “No, I’ll stay. Let’s give her a happy evening, yeah? This is going to be hard for her and she’s going to have a hard time understanding it all. Let’s give he
r a few more hours to be carefree.”
“What should we do, then?” I asked.
“Are we allowed to take her anywhere?” he asked. “Out for pizza, or ice cream, or whatever she wants.”
“I guess so,” I said. “I’ll text Amy and double check, but as long as I’m there it should be okay to take her somewhere.”
I didn’t want to bother Amy as she was dealing with all this, but I hurried back to Teresa’s office and asked about taking Lillian off-site for a treat, and she okayed it. She offered me Hartley House’s bank card again, and I took it, but I knew that Dominic would insist on paying on his own.
Back in the living room, I nodded at him to let him know Teresa had given us the okay. “Hey, Lilly,” Dominic began, “do you want to go somewhere special for dinner?”
“Where?” Lillian demanded.
“Pizza?” Dominic suggested. “Wait, we just had pizza yesterday. McDonalds?”
“Yeah!” Lillian tried to jump up and down, but couldn’t, so she just waved her arms around and bent her knees. “Wet’s go!”
Hartley House had an extra car seat in the closet for emergencies, so Dominic cleared some of the junk out of his back seat and I installed it for Lillian. I buckled her in, then climbed into the front seat. I looked over at him as he slid in the driver’s seat. “You okay?” I asked quickly, before I chickened out.
He nodded tensely. Then, raising his voice and glancing over his shoulder so I couldn’t look him in the eye, he said “Hey Lilly, I think I’m going to get a cheeseburger. What do you want to get to eat?”
“Chicken nuggets!” Lillian squealed, and the two of them chatted away about their favorite foods the whole way there.
In the restaurant, Dominic ordered the food while I took Lillian to the bathroom and then found us a table while we waited for him. It was busy there at dinnertime, and when Dominic finally emerged through the crowd of people with a tray brimming with food I almost cheered, just like Lillian.
“Bon appétit,” said Dominic, setting the tray down.
I handed around the food and helped Lillian open her milk, and then we all dug in. I couldn’t help but glance around at the crowd to see if anybody was looking at us. We hardly stood out amongst the crowd of families and kids. In fact, we fit right in. I wondered if anybody else in the restaurant tonight thought we were a family, like the sales associate at Party Supply Outlet had. Certainly, nobody would have guessed that the little girl with us had lost her brother earlier that day.
We bowed our heads for a quick blessing and then dug in. Lillian was in paradise. She ate her whole meal except a handful of fries, and then waited impatiently, wriggling with excitement, until we finally told her that she could run off to the play area while we finished up our meal. I’d chosen a table near the entrance, so once she was happily running around Dominic and I could sit at our table in relative peace and watch her.
We didn’t say much at first, watching Lillian run around while we finished our food. I kept sneaking glances at him out of the corner of my eye, but he never took his eyes off her.
“Are you okay?” I asked him.
He shrugged.
“It’s hard when one of our families doesn’t get a happy ending,” I said. “Especially when it happens like this. They had a match for the transplant. We thought he was going to beat the odds.”
Dominic just nodded.
I waited. I had enough experience to know that when someone has something difficult to say, they need to get it out on their own time. I could practically see Dominic struggling to put his feelings into words. So I waited, sipping my drink, until I heard him sigh.
“I guess I should tell you something,” he said. “I feel sad for Amy and Chris, obviously, but it’s Lillian’s loss I can’t get over right now. She reminds me of myself. I had an older brother who was sick, too. In and out of hospitals, chemo, radiation, the whole works. It’s hard.”
He sighed and looked down at the few French fries left in front of him. I waited, knowing he needed to get it all out.
“I was a little bit older than her, but I was still only seven. You get that he’s sick, but you don’t understand how bad it is. You just know that your mom and dad never seem to have enough time for you, and even when they’re with you they aren’t fully there. That’s why I wanted to volunteer at Hartley House. I wanted to show these kids, the ones left at home worrying or being dragged to the hospital to play in the waiting room while their parents talk to doctors, that they matter too.”
He paused again and took a sip of his soda. I tilted my head to the side and looked at him as my heart broke for what he’d suffered as a child.
“You don’t see the truth of it all when you’re little. And if it goes on for a few years, you get a bit older and you realize that your brother really could die. That’s when you feel guilty for wanting your mom and dad to be with you more. Because you’re not sick.” His voice broke, and he turned away from me. “My brother was in the hospital on my seventh birthday. I got a cupcake in the hospital cafeteria. It’s stupid to complain about, because I’m alive and he’s not, but that kind of thing sticks with you. And the guilt. It eats you alive, you know? Like how dare I complain that I didn’t get a birthday party when my brother is going through chemo and gets hospitalized for a fever.”
That was why Lillian’s party mattered so much to him. “You don’t have to feel guilty,” I said. Instinctively, from all my years working at Hartley House, I put my hand over his. When I realized what I’d done I almost jerked it away, but then, tentatively, his thumb moved a fraction of an inch. Gently, he moved it back and forth against my fingers. I relaxed. “You can’t help how you feel. And you were a child. Sometimes memories are hard. You did a wonderful thing, making Lillian feel so special for a day.”
I wanted to say more, but I knew the right words weren’t really there. He only needed my understanding and he had that now. He needed to tell me about the burden and his motivation. I could see inside his heart and I liked what I saw.
“Her life is going to change,” he said, still staring through the clear glass to the play area. “Everything. It’s hard to describe. The way people see her. She’ll be the kid with the dead brother. That’s part of why I had to work so hard to make myself a separate identity. Now when I visit my parents in my hometown I’m the ballplayer, not the guy whose brother died. And who wants that? Nobody wants to be defined and judged by just one thing. I’m tired of everyone making assumptions about me.”
I cleared my throat. “Um. I need to apologize to you, I think.”
He glanced over at me. “For what?”
“I made assumptions about you. And then judged you on them. I’m sorry. I was just – I don’t even know. At first I might have been a little jealous. I Googled you and I saw your salary, and just couldn’t stop thinking about how many people we could help with that kind of money. We could get a whole second location and staff it to care for more families. You throw a ball a few times a week. Everyone was so excited and talking about you like you were so amazing just on the basis of the fact that you play baseball for the Tigers. It made me push back. I’m sorry.”
“Hmm.” Dominic nodded slowly. “I thought you hated me because I bumped your head and knocked you into Teresa’s desk to spill water all over you.”
“Well, yes, obviously!” I exclaimed. “But I walked in to that meeting already resentful towards you. Then you knocked me over, and that was that. I couldn’t figure out why you wanted to spend all of your time with us when you had only just signed with the Tigers the week before. I get it now,” I added. “It was personal for you.”
“It was. It is,” he said, nodding. “And I really need this to work. I know, you looked up my salary and it’s a lot, but I never thought I’d get here. I worked so hard for this. And I need to show the team that they need me, in the community and on the field. You make nothing in the minors. I’ve been working my way up through the minor leagues ever since I graduated coll
ege. I got a tryout with a team, but they cut me during training camp, and I’ve been working my way up ever since. My parents have put everything they had in to baseball for me. It wasn’t much, not after all the medical bills after Anthony died, but they gave me everything they had so I could be successful. I want to buy them a house, and I want to buy my dad a truck, and if I can stick around on this team for just a few years I can do the things for my family I need to do.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I judged you. A lot. And I judged wrong.” I looked down and we were still holding hands across the table. His thumb was still stroking the back of my hand. I blushed, then smiled. It felt really nice.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I probably was kind of annoying. I’ve been trying so hard to make a good impression on people, always being in a good mood. I shouldn’t have tried asking you out to the bakery that time. I could just tell that you were the only person at Hartley House who didn’t like me and I thought if I could just get you alone, then you could see that I’m fun, and you would like me too. And I wanted you to like me.”
“You did?”
“Well, yeah. Of course!” He turned away from the play area and smiled at me. “Why wouldn’t I?”
I looked down at our hands, still touching on the table. If I said something, if I moved closer, if my foot touched his under the table, what would happen? It felt like I was standing at the edge of a cliff, with water below, and if I jumped... well, maybe it would be a deep pool full of crystal clear water and something I’d remember for the rest of my life. Or maybe it would be full of hidden rocks. Maybe even a few crocodiles. The safe thing to do was take a step back, and go back to what I knew.
“We should probably get back to Hartley House,” I said, pulling my hand away. “Lillian’s going to have to go to bed.”
Good Works (Hero Hearts: Contemporary) Page 8