Once Upon a Wish

by Rachelle Sparks

  And she did.

  Tatum and her parents left the hospital nearly two months later, cancer-free, with hope they had never felt before. So grateful for what the foundation had given to her family, Sherry spoke to the Make-A-Wish Foundation board the day after their return home.

  “You’ve literally turned our girls’ lives into Wish trips,” she said, her voice heavy with threatening tears. “When they see bad in this world, we can point to you to remind them that there is still so much good. Your work and example is what brings it alive and makes it real for the kids. You guys are a light in the darkness. A city on the hill. We’re grateful for a wonderful wish come true for Tatum and thankful for all you’ve done for us.”

  She paused and finished with, “It’s our prayer that God makes our family useful to your cause.”

  Epilogue

  Seven years have passed since Tatum’s Wish trip, and her mother’s prayer is still being answered. After her bout with cancer, Tatum immediately became involved with the foundation, and David started to see the impact that one spunky, curly-haired little girl can make.

  That year, during the North Texas chapter’s Wish Night, a signature event that raises close to $1 million a year for the foundation, Tatum and Hannah, in fancy little dresses, felt like princesses mingling with guests in gowns and black tuxedos. The room around them, filled with music and twinkling lights, became their castle as they floated through a sea of millionaires.

  As the chapter’s largest annual fundraiser, the most dedicated donors and the city’s biggest moneymakers flood the event to become inspired by the stories they hear and the children they meet.

  When a Dallas businessman and millionaire shook hands with Tatum that evening and listened to her story, he pulled out his checkbook and her eyes grew wide as she watched the motion of his hand complete circle after circle on the small piece of paper, giving a total of $60,000.

  She looked up at him in silence. No words were needed to accompany her big eyes and wide smile.

  She had just made a difference.

  I wish for all the other children’s wishes to come true, she recalled whispering into that star seven years before, on the very first day of her Wish trip at Give Kids The World Village. The check in her hand was proof that she could make that wish come true on her own.

  She started attending local Wish parties, gathering with other Wish children to create mosaics, jewelry, pottery, and other art to donate for Wish Night. One painting that Tatum helped create was auctioned for $15,000.

  She started speaking at countless fundraising events and began selling Wish bears at Christmastime.

  “Talk to anybody you make eye contact with,” David told Tatum the very first time she volunteered to sell the bears.

  Tatum left with her arms full of bears and, chatting and laughing with every person she encountered, returned with fistfuls of money. She has helped every year since, raising thousands of dollars.

  Over the years, Tatum’s bubbly personality has had golfers laughing at tee time during fundraising golf tournaments. Her voice, promoting the foundation, has poured into home, car, and office radios throughout the Dallas area, and her ability to tell her Wish story has left audiences in tears.

  “My wish was like a true miracle to me. I felt like a princess,” the now 15-year-old said during a 2008 fundraising event. “After returning from my Wish trip, I was diagnosed with lymphoma and that was a hard and dark time in my life. While going through that in the hospital, I had my wish to think about and tell everyone about.”

  She continued, “When I think of the people at Make-A-Wish, I think of miracles, and love, and giving, because that is what they have shown me. I can’t imagine a life without them, and I am eternally grateful.”

  • STORY TWO •

  Katelyn Atwell

  “St. Jude healed Katelyn physically. Make-A-Wish healed her spiritually.”

  —Sharon Atwell

  1

  SHARON’S TEARS OF joy blurred the crisp, December morning—the bright blue sky dripped into the crowd of thousands lining the streets of downtown Memphis, Tennessee, bled into the streets and onto the buildings—as she watched for flames of orange and red turning the corner, dancing wildly.

  She blinked the world back into place when she saw her daughter proudly holding the Olympic flames aloft; her smile radiant as the flames, and her spirit fierce as fire.

  “Katelyn! Katelyn! Katelyn!” the crowd chanted, voices of soldiers in her battle against illness—her doctors, nurses, family, friends, church family, even strangers—marching victoriously alongside her wheelchair as she glided down Memphis’s famous Beale Street. She waved like a beauty queen, soaked in the praise, and lived in that moment, which stood still like a photograph for Sharon.

  A committee member wheeled Katelyn toward her mother, who waited on the corner of Beale and Third streets with a dark torch, untouched by her daughter’s light. Cheers and shouts slowly disappeared into that suspended moment, clapping hands froze, faces faded.

  In Sharon’s mental photo, there was Katelyn, smiling behind the dancing flame she was carrying as a 2002 Olympic torch bearer. Like a movie flashback, Sharon couldn’t help but think of the moment she and her husband, Ray, realized their daughter’s determination to one day compete as a swimmer in the Olympics.

  It was six years earlier, when Katelyn was ten, that she, her parents, and her older sister, Crystal, traveled from their Florida home to an early morning swim meet three hours away in Kings Bay, Georgia. It was 5:00 a.m. and the only other cars on the highway surrounding them were packed with sleeping kids from Katelyn’s swim club team, part of USA Swimming. Crystal, also a competitor, snored lightly beside her sister, who sat as stiff as someone wearing a back brace, eyes focused as if she were about to breaststroke through water. Ray could see the tip of her hot pink swimmer’s cap—the rest of the team wore gold—in the rearview mirror. He tilted his head up a few inches to see her eyes covered in goggles. It was hours before the meet, but she was ready. Katelyn stayed frozen in that position as Ray nudged Sharon with his elbow. She peeked from the passenger’s side mirror at their daughter and grinned proudly.

  Their swim coach greeted them when the team arrived. “If you guys were all as intense as Kate, you’d be undefeated!” her coach said.

  The coach had passed Katelyn and her family on the highway, seen her focus, smiled at her dedication, and admired her commitment.

  Voices of a chanting crowd seeped into Sharon’s mind, invaded her memory, snapping her back to the moment she was in—a moment that defined the new chapter in her family’s life. She knew that carrying a torch wasn’t the same as competing, but after everything Katelyn had been through, it was better than winning a gold medal. The fact that she could hear shouts from her family and friends, could see them as they cheered, and could carry a blazing torch in the cool, Tennessee air, was a far greater accomplishment—one worth more than gold.

  As Katelyn approached her mother, Sharon wiped her eyes and tried to keep past images in her mind alive—smiles that came from victorious swim meets, laughter on the lake where Katelyn grew up, Punky Brewster-style outfits she had put together as a kid—but when the reality, so fresh in her mind, of doctors’ words, hospital smells, and threats of death took over, Sharon cried again.

  But Katelyn was here and she was alive.

  As she was wheeled toward her mother, she looked up with a smile that Sharon could only have dreamed about just a few short months ago. Katelyn reached up and ignited her mother’s torch, uniting their spirits. Sharon continued with a jog, continued their journey, down the streets of Memphis, her daughter’s light leading the way.

  2

  The sky in all its rage swirled black and hovered, threatening Ray as he raced down the open highway, hoping and praying it wouldn’t rip loose, drenching the road and his spirits.

  “Dad, God gave us this storm to slow you down,” Crystal said a few hours later when the sky finally tore open, s
ending down blinding rain, exposing brutal thunder and lightning. At sixteen years old, Crystal had just started driving, but it didn’t take a license to understand the power of this storm, the advantage it had over her father’s determination to push through it. “So, please, slow down!”

  If Crystal had seen the way Ray had driven to catch up to the bus she was on just a few hours before, she would have been even more persistent.

  Katelyn has cancer.

  Ray had repeated those words in his mind as he made his way down Mississippi’s Highway 49 in an effort to stop the bus bringing Crystal home from a church camp in Panama City, Florida. They worked as the force behind his determination to track down his oldest daughter and get her to Jacksonville, Florida, where they could all be together as a family.

  Waiting around for a slow-moving bus to return his daughter had not been an option for Ray. He could not sit at home calmly with the word cancer stirring in his mind—the road, the changes of scenery, the chase, had given him something to do and allowed him to proactively deal with the situation.

  On his way out the door, scrambling for anything he might need on the road, Ray had grabbed the first thing he saw that would catch all the tears he knew he was about to cry—a dirty dishrag.

  Those tears drenched the road before the rain even had a chance. He looked through them to the other side of the blurred highway, eyes skipping between every northbound car he passed, ready to make a U-turn at the first sight of seven white charter buses.

  After a few hours, the wide, four-lane highway narrowed and a wall of pine trees suddenly crept between Ray’s lane and the other side of the road. He stiffened with panic and grabbed the steering wheel, leaning as close to the windshield as possible with false hope that it would somehow allow him to see through the trees.

  Great! he thought.

  The pines blurred to a solid line of green as his eyes searched desperately for a small gap, a miraculous break. And there it was. Through the trees was a sudden flash of white.

  Ray found an illegal turning point in the median and sped in the other direction. He punched the gas and zoomed up beside the first of the seven buses, honked his horn, and leaned against the passenger seat to make eye contact with the driver, who looked down at him as if he were a road-raged maniac.

  “Pull over!” Ray screamed, swinging his arm and pointing his finger toward the side of the road. “Pull over!”

  He swerved in front of the bus, touched his breaks, and pulled to the shoulder with hope that seven white charter buses would pull up neatly behind. Instead, they buzzed by, leaving Ray’s tiny Mazda rocking in their breeze.

  Unbelievable, he thought, and pulled back onto the highway. It was time to try another bus.

  Pulling up beside the second in line, Ray honked his horn once again, flashed his lights, and kept pace with the driver until the bus slowly pulled to the side of the road. Ray tossed his tear-soaked rag onto the floor and got out of his car. Crystal’s eyes were wide and terrified as she got off the bus and saw her father. He was the last person she expected to see on an empty highway in the middle of Mississippi. The youth pastor, who knew Ray was on his way but lost touch after hours of patchy cell phone reception, stepped off the bus as well.

  “I’ll say a prayer for you,” the youth pastor said kindly. “I’ll tell everyone on the bus what’s going on, and we’ll all be praying for you.”

  Ray smiled thankfully.

  “Come with me, sweetie,” he said.

  Crystal gave the pastor a weak, confused smile, followed her father to his car, and crawled inside.

  Ray looked down at the steering wheel, studied it, picked at its leather, as the buses pulled back onto the highway.

  “Sweetheart, Katelyn has cancer,” he said, choking over the last word as his daughter sat stiff in the silent car, waiting for more. “That’s all they know. We don’t know yet what kind of cancer we’re dealing with, but we’ll find out soon. We’ve gotta get to Jacksonville.”

  The next ten hours were spent in darkness that seeped from the black sky and pounded from their heavy hearts, but Crystal became Ray’s light.

  “Katelyn is going to be all right,” she said, over and over, of her twelve-year-old sister. “God is in control.”

  She had felt His strength, His presence, His will during church camp, and her faith stopped Ray’s tears. But thoughts of possibly losing his youngest daughter pulled selfishly at his hope, stripping away his faith.

  “Dad, we need to talk about something else,” Crystal said when he brought it up again, and after telling him about camp, she passed the time by reading Bible scriptures aloud and helping Ray find the highway’s lines through thick sheets of black rain.

  “I told Katelyn I would get there tonight,” Ray said, glancing at the clock on the dash. “It’s almost eleven.”

  They pulled into the hospital at midnight, and when Ray found Sharon in the halls, he broke down once again.

  “She stayed up to see you,” Sharon said. Ray buried his face in his wife’s neck and sobbed until there were no tears left to fall.

  “When you go in there, you can’t be crying,” Sharon said, almost warning. “You will scare her to death.”

  “I know, I know,” he said, wiping his face.

  “No matter what we’re dealing with, she’s gonna be fine,” Sharon reassured him, wiping away his tears.

  They had been each other’s strength for the past twenty-one years, but Ray had never needed Sharon the way he did now. The storm he had just maneuvered through was nothing like what they were about to face, and rather than black asphalt and white dotted lines, Sharon’s intuition, her mother’s instinct, would be leading the way.

  “From now on, I’m not gonna get upset until you tell me I need to get upset. I trust you completely,” Ray said, wiping his eyes before leaving Sharon’s side.

  3

  Two days earlier, Sharon had returned from a missionary trip in the Dominican Republic to Florida, where her mother lived. Katelyn had been staying with her grandmother for the past week and had complained of an aching back since before she arrived.

  “Don’t be picking her up, twirling her around when you see her,” Sharon had warned her mother, Veda, before dropping Katelyn off. “She pulled a muscle in her back lifting a heavy two-year-old little boy the other day.”

  “Darlin’, you need to be careful while I’m gone,” she told Katelyn when they arrived at her mother’s house. “You need to let that muscle heal.”

  During the week she was there, Veda took Katelyn twice to see Dr. Gary Soud, her pediatrician from the time she was born until a year before when she and her family moved from Florida to Tennessee. After ruling out a sore muscle, Katelyn’s doctor tried antibiotics for kidney or bladder infections, but by the time Sharon returned from the Dominican Republic, Katelyn was crawling on her hands and knees.

  The night Sharon arrived, Katelyn was asleep in the spare bedroom of Veda’s house, and Sharon curled up beside her.

  “I’m here, sweetie,” she whispered.

  Katelyn, lost in a dream, whispered, “No, you’re not. You’re not here.” She knew her mother was out of the country.

  “Yes, I am, baby. Mom’s right here,” Sharon said.

  In the darkness of the room, Katelyn reached out her hand to Sharon’s arm and caressed it gently, hopefully, letting her fingers drape over her mother’s, grabbing at the shape of her arm, its texture and warmth.

  “You are here!” she nearly yelled, sitting up straight, holding her mother tight.

  4

  When Sharon took Katelyn to see Dr. Soud the next day, Katelyn could not stand up straight and could hardly walk. He verified Sharon’s concern that there was more going on than some kind of infection—possibly a pinched nerve or an extended disc from lifting the heavy child. He ordered an MRI of her lower back for the following day.

  The standard twenty-minute MRI took an hour and a half, with the machine scanning much higher than Katelyn’s
lower back, crawling up her spine to the tip of her head.

  “Lord, hold me up and get me through whatever we have to face,” Sharon whispered toward the sky as she leaned against the wall, watching doctors come and go from the room where her daughter was stuck in a machine that would soon reveal their future. She knew something was very, very wrong.

  When Dr. Soud got the results that afternoon, he called Sharon on the phone.

  “I can’t get away from the office, so I’m sorry to have to tell you this over the phone, Sharon,” he said. “I’d be there with you if I could.”

  She knew this was serious. Dr. Soud had never diagnosed Katelyn with anything more than a cold, had never treated her with a single antibiotic until the week before when he thought her symptoms indicated a bladder or kidney infection. She had always been the picture of health.

  “Katelyn has cancer,” he said.

  Sharon needed answers.

  Immediately.

  She could remain calm in every storm as long as she knew exactly what was going on—as long as there was a plan. Dr. Soud’s brief hesitation silently told Sharon she’d better pay attention.

  He’s fixin’ to tell me something I need to hear, Sharon thought.

  “We aren’t sure what kind of cancer we’re dealing with yet,” Dr. Soud continued. “We need to admit her to Wolfson Children’s Hospital for blood draws and scans to see how her organs are doing.”

  That was the plan. There was a next step.

  Clarity.

  Direction.

  Any tears that might have threatened to fall in the midst of the word cancer hid behind the walls of Sharon’s strength, her confidence as a mother who knew that God would prepare her for His will, no matter what it was. To the center of her being, the core of everything she believed, she knew that if His will was to take Katelyn from them, she would know.