by Beverly Bird
Kim stared at her brother. The rest of the room had become smeared, out of focus. She had thought once, a lifetime ago, of her brother’s unborn child as a possible donor. It seemed so long ago now. It had been in a time when she had been selfishly clawing for answers. Before everything had changed. When had so much changed? When had she subconsciously but completely put this baby right out of her mind?
She had never asked that Bo be tested, either, regardless of the odds, though he had been when the Children’s Hospital technicians had come to draw blood from the settlement. Bo hadn’t matched. And Bo was Adam’s child. But Bo wasn’t Mariah’s biological child.
“Adam,” she said hoarsely. “I need...your help.” And suddenly, asking, needing and reaching out, was the easiest thing in the world.
His eyes jumped to her. “Here? Now? Anything. But later, Kimmie. Later.”
She ignored that and plowed on. “Susannah needs the, uh, umbilical cord, the placenta. This baby might be a match. Bo isn’t. No one else in the whole settlement is. I just got all the results.” She took a deep breath. “Please.”
He stared at her, frowning dazedly. “The umbilical cord?” he echoed.
Kim nodded, watching him. Necessities, practicalities, being needed, seemed to clear Adam’s head a bit.
“I was there when Bo was born,” he answered slowly. “Using the umbilical cord doesn’t involve any physical risk to anyone.”
“No,” she whispered. Then she realized something else. “I just don’t know if I would have asked if it did.”
“Yes,” Adam repeated.
Then to her shock, he lifted her off her feet.
“Yes!” he said again, spinning her around.
“Have you lost your mind?” she squealed.
“She’ll do this! Mariah will go to the hospital for you, for Susannah!” He dropped her suddenly. Kim staggered a little.
“She wanted one of the women to come help her,” he continued. “But now, for this, she’ll go to a hospital. This is it. This is the answer. Thank God.” He grabbed Kim again and kissed her hard. Then he charged for the door. “Bring your car around to my place!” he shouted back over his shoulder.
Kim stared after him. Her heart was thundering now. Two birds with one stone, she thought. Just like the favor she had asked Jake. Adam didn’t want Mariah to have their baby at home. She needed to test the baby’s blood. Somehow she knew, in a place so deep in her heart that she couldn’t fathom it, that this as-yet-unborn child was going to be a match.
She swayed a little. Joe caught her.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“I used your money for gas earlier,” she said inanely.
“Good thing. Then we won’t have to stop.”
They were at the front door before he thought to call back to Dinah. Kim was inordinately glad that he did, because she had ceased thinking in rational terms again. When had so much changed? When had she started leaning on him so completely, depending on him to pick up for her where her own strength left off? And his strength was always unswerving, always so steady.
“Dinah, don’t tell anyone,” he cautioned. “Maybe Nathaniel, but none of the others. Whatever you do, don’t tell Susannah until we’re sure if this is going to work out. No sense in getting her hopes up for nothing. She should be here any minute now, if Mariah is home from school.”
They went outside, and Kim remembered that the one thing Joe couldn’t do for her was drive.
Somehow, she did it. She drove to Adam’s first, collected him and Mariah and brought Bo back to stay with Dinah. She guided the Mazda back to Route 30. Somehow, she stopped at all the red lights on the way into Lancaster. She collided with no other cars, no pedestrians, no buggies.
Maybe there was a God watching Out for her after all.
She prayed. If You’ll just do this for me, I’ll never say a bad word about You again. Then she grew uncomfortable. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for always doubting. But, hey, You’ve got to admit that You haven’t always been hanging around with a helping hand. If He was here now, it wouldn’t matter. Her prayers turned to desperation, full and heartfelt and coming all the way up from her soul. Please let this work, please, please, please.
She came close to taking out an ambulance when she turned into the emergency lot at the hospital. But it backed up suddenly, and she narrowly missed its bumper. Mariah was puffing and groaning and gasping in the back seat.
“How many minutes apart?” Joe asked from the front passenger seat with that incredible, practical calm.
“Can’t tell,” Adam answered, his voice strained. “You guys took away my watch when you decided it was a worldly possession.”
Kim had hers on, but it didn’t have a second hand. “Three minutes,” she answered, “give or take. Judging from the sounds she’s making back there.”
Adam’s voice went a little accusing. Kim saw him look at his wife in the rearview mirror. “You felt this coming on this morning, didn’t you? And you went to school! You didn’t mention it because you thought you could just slide this baby out while I wasn’t looking!”
Kim remembered her own labor. “Men,” she muttered. “It should be so easy.”
Joe remembered Sarah’s labor. “God willing, that would be the case.”
“Not due...for another week,” Mariah explained, gasppuffing.
“You’re too smart to think that would matter!” Adam shouted.
“Adam. We’re here now. It all...worked out. Get me... inside.”
So they did, somehow they did, all of them together, until an orderly came out of nowhere, pushing a wheelchair like a Roman chariot. He popped Mariah into it. Adam chased off after them, and Kim and Joe stood in the lobby, watching them go.
Rebekkah Elizabeth Wallace was born at ten after nine that night. Kim was staring numbly at the television set in the waiting room when Adam came through the swinging doors at the end of the hall. Joe sat beside her. Neither of them noticed him immediately. They had been bickering on and off about the benefits of having advertisements, near-naked people and gunfights broadcast into one’s home.
Adam cleared his throat. They both looked up sharply.
“She’s a girl,” he said, his voice raw.
Joe grinned slowly. “Congratulations.”
Kim couldn’t find her voice. Her skin shrank on her body until it felt very tight, then it broke out in gooseflesh. Birth, she thought. A new life in the midst of all this craziness. It made her feel like crying. Again.
“Can I see her?” she asked finally, carefully.
Adam nodded. “She’ll be in the nursery in another five minutes or so.”
“All ten fingers?” Joe asked.
And Kim noticed that this time he didn’t quite grimace.
“All ten toes?”
Adam’s eyes widened. “Of course. I think so. Dear God, can they be born without them?”
Joe got to his feet and clapped him on the shoulder. “Not to worry. I’ve just been through this a time or five. You learn to ask.”
Then Adam swayed.
Kim jumped for him. “Dear God,” she gasped, “he’s going to pass out!”
But he didn’t. They got him to a chair in time. They sat there, the three of them, shell-shocked, shoulder to shoulder, Kim in the middle. She looked side to side, and thought they resembled the veterans of a very long, very difficult war. That was when a familiar face appeared in the waiting area. Kim stared at the woman for a long moment, trying to place her.
“I’m Kathy O’Malley,” the woman said. “From Children’s Hospital.”
One of the technicians, Kim realized, who had come to draw the blood from the settlement.
“Well,” Kathy O’Malley said. “I’ll be transporting the cord and the placenta back to Children’s now. We’ll run the necessary tests immediately. You can call at about midnight or so. We may have something by then.”
“Yes,” Kim managed to say. “All right.”
“Can’t you do that h
ere?” Adam roused enough to demand.
“If there’s a match,” Kathy O’Malley explained, “then it makes more sense to have everything there, ready to go.”
“It’s a long shot,” Kim whispered, trying to tell herself that.
“Long shots are what make miracles,” Kathy O’Malley said. “Otherwise they’d just be run-of-the-mill occurrences, right?” She moved off down the hall again.
Kim and Joe waited to peer at Rebekkah through the windows of the nursery before they headed home. The baby was long and scrawny and red. She had a lot of very dark hair. She was beautiful.
“That part is Mariah’s legacy,” Adam said hoarsely, touching a finger to the glass where her dark hair was reflected.
Kim cleared her throat. “Maybe not. Jake and I are dark. So were...our parents.”
“But I’m not. Bo’s not.”
“Your first wife was blond,” Joe remarked. At Kim’s startled look, he added, “Long story. I met her briefly.”
“I guess I was thinking...” Adam trailed off. “When I didn’t match Susannah at all, I’ve been telling myself that maybe...you know...”
Kim stared at him. “What? That you were adopted?”
He gave a short laugh. “Hardly. That would be too normal for our family. Maybe Mom conceived me with someone else before...” His face hardened. “I mean, I’m the eldest. Kimmie, every one of our closets was crammed with skeletons. What’s one more?”
“Oh, no, you don’t,” came another voice from behind them.
They all jerked away from the nursery window at the same time. Jake and Katya walked toward them.
“We decided to come back, to check things out. Besides, we knew Mariah was getting close,” Jake told them. “Dinah told us you were here.” He thrust a finger into Adam’s chest. “And I heard you. If you think you’re going to dump all those crazy Wallace genes on Kimmie and me, you’re out of your mind. You can’t weasel out of them that easily.”
“I guess we’ll know by midnight,” Kim said. Actually, the possibility had occurred to her, too, if only because she had thought more about genetics lately than she ever had before in her life.
She felt them all looking at her and she cleared her throat. “I just meant...I don’t suppose Rebekkah can be a good match unless Adam is...you know, a full sibling,” she explained, “unless there’s some Wallace scooting around in his system somewhere.”
“If Adam isn’t a full sibling,” Jake commented, stepping up to look through the glass at the baby, “then there’s still the same ten percent chance as the donor registries. Probably a little higher because of the ethnic match.” Suddenly, he frowned. “Do babies always come out looking that...uh, mushed up and wrinkled?”
“Watch yourself,” Adam warned. “That’s my daughter.”
“Just wondering. I have a staked interest.”
“Usually,” Katya said. “Think of what that poor little thing had to go through to get here.”
Jake paled. “I’d rather not.” He stepped back from the window fast. “Anyway, given that you’re as screwed up as the rest of us, bro, then this little one should probably be a match. She’s German, she’s Irish and she’s kin.”
Kim looked at both her brothers. “That’s what scares me.”
“What?” they asked in unison.
“Neither of you is all that screwed up anymore.”
They went back to the farm, then returned to the phone booth at twelve-thirty. Joe wanted to go at midnight. Before they had left, Adam had urged them to wait until one. The half hour seemed a good compromise.
Kim stepped into the booth on wobbly legs and picked up the phone with cold hands. They were all waiting for her in the car—Jake and Katya, Joe and Nathaniel. She felt their eyes boring through the wood, touching her. She put the phone down again and stepped outside.
Joe got out of the car immediately. “Did you call?”
“No.”
A million emotions crossed his face. “Why?”
“I don’t...I can’t do this alone.”
He thought about that, then nodded. “Want me to do it?”
Kim trembled harder. “Yes, please.”
He went into the phone booth. She waited outside. One by one the others got out of the car to flank her, even Nathaniel. She wasn’t sure which hand of hers was in whose. She jumped when the booth door creaked open again behind them.
Jake was the first to speak. “Well?” he demanded.
Kim’s eyes sought Joe’s. She could tell nothing from his face. “Tell me,” she whispered.
He nodded. He nodded.
“Five antigens. Dr. Coyle wanted six, but under the circumstances, he’ll take it. Rebekkah is a match.”
Chapter 20
The week passed in a blur—whirlwind images of hospital walls in soothing, muted tones, too much coffee to contemplate, hushed, serious voices...and Joe. Always, there was Joe.
Kim thought once or twice about asking him how the farm could function without him, even in this time after the harvest. But Nathaniel was still there, she remembered, and the truth was that she was afraid of his answer. She was very afraid that he would nod, say it couldn’t, that he had to go back now.
Her mother had always told her that it was pure tomfoolery to look a gift horse in the mouth. And her mother ought to have known, Kim thought, huddling in a hard chair in yet another waiting room. Few enough gift horses had ever found their way to the Wallace door.
Of course, Joe would go eventually. She’d have to stand on her own two feet again...eventually. But not yet. Not now.
She roused a little at the scent of more coffee. She looked vacantly at her watch before she reached to take the paper cup from Joe’s hand. Somewhere beyond these sterile walls, the sun was rising. It was nearly six o’clock.
“Thanks,” she murmured.
“How are you holding up?” He dropped into the chair beside her. He couldn’t hide the little groan of relief that escaped his throat at finally sitting down, hard plastic or not.
Kim smiled wanly. “I’m holding. Where’s...well, everyone?”
She hadn’t been back to the farm, but she knew that it was once again in the grip of full chaos, with Jake and Katya and all their kids. Joe had mentioned that one or two of the sisters had poked their noses back into the kitchen in her absence. And all those people, even people she only barely remembered from the blood drive, had visited the hospital at one time or another, to offer moral support or merely hold Susannah’s hand.
“I chased everyone home,” Joe answered. “You know, I never knew how effective I could be by just shouting.”
“Don’t make it a habit.”
He lifted a brow at her. He waited. He needed to hear her say that she’d had enough shouting for a lifetime, and she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him in peace. She didn’t do it. He let out a rough breath. “Any word yet?”
Kim sipped coffee and shook her head. “No. Then again, what could they possibly tell us this soon?”
They’d done Susannah’s irradiation over the course of the past six days. They’d done it by something they called “fractionated schedules.” By now, Kim had more medical terminology zinging around in her brain than she’d ever thought it could hold. But what she’d understood was that the fractionated chemotherapy and irradiation somehow minimized the risk of side effects. Dr. Coyle, expert that he was, preferred it over single-dose therapy. And that was good enough for Kim.
They’d begun the peripheral blood stem cell transfusion via intravenous catheter last night. It was called the “rescue process.” Rebekkah’s stem cells would travel through Susannah’s bloodstream to the marrow that had been destroyed. The engraftment, the blood cell production from the transplanted stem cells, wouldn’t take place for another two to four weeks. It would take years for Susannah’s immune system to recover completely. But they were years in which she would more than likely be alive.
Susannah would spend at least the next two months
in the hospital. Oh, God, the bills, Kim thought, sinking a little lower in her chair. The insurance company—the company she still had thanks to Jake—hadn’t yet started bleating about their ceiling, but she knew that would come. And somehow, she would pay the difference. Because the most serious side effect of the irradiation and the transfusion was something called “immunosuppression.” Susannah’s body would be rendered even more incapable of defending itself against infection and germs for a while. She could not leave the protective isolation of her hospital room.
She was already one sick little cookie, Kim thought, cringing. When she had seen her last night, just before they’d started the transfusion, she’d been wan, lethargic, sick to her stomach from the conditioning therapy. But as Dr. Coyle had said, one couldn’t rebuild until one had first torn down.
Those words haunted her. They echoed in her head, over and over again. Was that what had happened to her? Her defenses—all those perfect defenses she had left Dr. Parra’s office with a lifetime ago—had been assaulted and torn asunder this past month. By Adam. By Jake. But most of all, above all, by Joe. She glanced over at him. He was staring unseeingly at the television again. A shiver worked its way slowly, with exquisite care, over her skin.
She thought she loved him. But after all they had both been through recently, how could she know? It seemed to her this was something she wanted to be very sure of. She needed to be sure. Without her defenses, she was vulnerable, raw, terrified to move or make any decisions. She was like Susannah, needing to stay in a sterile environment for a little while, she’d decided, with no chances taken.
“I’ve been thinking,” they both said at the same time.
Kim flushed. Joe gave a weak grin. Then they both spoke in unison again. “You first.”
Kim laughed nervously. Silence fell, heavy and weighted. She finally cleared her throat. “I’m going to have to get another job,” she said. “I can’t spend the next two months without any income. And the best place for a cocktail waitress to collect good tips is in a city the size of this one.”