by Julia London
Ruby giggled. “Elves can’t live in your head.”
“That’s what I said,” Kyra had assured her. “Want to get some ice cream?”
Any thought of the tests had flitted out of Ruby’s head at that point, and she hadn’t said another word about it since.
“I’m happy for you, Kyra,” Deenie said as she picked up her tray. “Everything is coming together, and you totally deserve it.”
The lunch shift flew by, and afterward, with the sweet potato mousse recipe in her back pocket, Kyra went to the Washeteria. Dax and Ruby had gone to see Jonathan today, so she had the entire afternoon to herself.
She returned to Number Three with a basket full of clean laundry—which now included Dax’s laundry, as Kyra figured that was the least she could do in return for all he was doing for her. Before she put the laundry away, she picked up the living room. Dax had made Ruby a menagerie of wooden animals. A cow, a horse, a dog. It seemed like a new one appeared every day. Ruby carried them everywhere, and twice Kyra had noticed Ruby experiencing a seizure while holding one of the wooden figures. She thought it was interesting that Ruby’s fingers would curl tightly around the toy instead of fluttering, as if part of her brain knew not to let go.
Kyra was settling down to study when she got the call from Dr. Green she’d been expecting. “Hello?” she asked cheerfully and grabbed a pen to jot down the name of the medicine she expected him to prescribe.
“Hold for Dr. Green, please,” the receptionist said.
A moment later, the doctor said, “Mrs. Kokinos?”
It never seemed to matter how many times she circled Ms. on forms, the doctors’ offices insisted on calling her Mrs. “Hi, Dr. Green. I was hoping you’d call soon.”
“We got the test results back and I’ve had a chance to look at them,” he said. “I’m going to refer you to a neuropathologist.”
Refer her? Kyra wasn’t expecting that. “A what?”
“It looks like Ruby has a small tumor,” he said.
With those words, the world dropped out from beneath Kyra’s feet. Dr. Green suddenly sounded as if he were at the far end of a tunnel. Something about removal and a biopsy, and the location of the tumor was good, which sounded so asinine to Kyra, but she couldn’t say so, because she couldn’t breathe.
“Mrs. Kokinos?”
Kyra found her voice. “What are you talking about?” she croaked. “You said you were sure!”
“I said I was ninety-five percent, but that’s why we did the tests. Look, I’m still not too concerned. It’s a very small tumor, and the location is such that it should be easily removed. But we need to know what we’re dealing with, so we need to have it removed and get it biopsied.”
A wave of nausea came over Kyra so suddenly she thought she would vomit right there. A memory, so deeply buried she hadn’t thought of it in years, came roaring back to her. We need to know what we’re dealing with. That’s what her mother had told her. That was the reason, she’d told Kyra, that she was going to the hospital.
“Ohmigod,” Kyra whispered. “Ohmigod.”
“I know this is not the news you were expecting to hear, Mrs. Kokinos, but please don’t panic. We don’t know what this is, and it might be nothing at all. No matter what we find, we have all sorts of treatments available to us. Now, I’m referring you to a place that can see you Friday. It’s in the city, but they are the best. I’ve already sent the films.”
The best. Did that mean she’d have to sell her car? “I don’t . . . I don’t understand,” she said and rubbed her forehead. So many dangerous thoughts were suddenly pinging around in her head.
“Mrs. Kokinos, I am still very, very optimistic,” Dr. Green said.
That was supposed to comfort her? Going from certain it was nothing to optimistic it wasn’t anything did not sound like a good thing to her.
“Do you have a pen?” he asked.
Kyra took down the information. Dr. Green invited Kyra to call with any questions. “Anytime, day or night,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said weakly and hung up the phone. She still couldn’t catch her breath—her heart was beating painfully in her chest. She stacked her hands on top of her head and walked a tight circle around her kitchen, trying to suck in air. A flurry of images of Ruby went by—her daughter in a surgery gown. With tubes sticking out of her. In a casket that happened to look just like her mother’s casket.
That image forced Kyra into a chair. She braced her hands on her knees and bent over, trying not to pass out. Kyra had lost her mother when she’d needed her most—she never dreamed she could lose her daughter, too.
“No!” she shouted and slammed her fist down on the table. She would not lose both her mother and her daughter to brain tumors, she would not. She’d do anything she had to do—
Kyra suddenly opened her laptop and clicked on her banking app. She had thirty-six hundred dollars in savings. That was all she’d managed to save in the last six years, and she hadn’t even scratched the surface of her health insurance deductible.
She went to a government site to see if she could get Ruby on Medicaid, but their quick calculation box said that she made too much money to qualify. How ironic was that? They were living hand-to-mouth, and yet she made too much money. Kyra’s chest began to feel even more constricted, and she wondered if she was having a heart attack. She willed it to stop—she had to be here, she had to be strong for Ruby. She stood up and walked in a circle again, her mind racing, then went back to her computer and opened Facebook.
Josh Burton. He had to help her. There was no longer any choice for him.
She found him on Facebook again. There he was, his latest picture of him and two guys he’d tagged—one with the same last name—fishing on some lake. It was grossly unfair that he could enjoy some simple pleasure like fishing while his biological daughter was growing a fucking brain tumor. Kyra had let the man off the hook all these years, and until this moment she’d been okay with that. But she was going to pull out every stop for Ruby, and if he had health insurance, she needed it.
She googled him. Several Josh Burtons came up, three in Indianapolis. But there was only one Josh Burton at Castlemaine Industries. She searched Google records, clicked on every link she could find having to do with Josh Burton of Indianapolis and Castlemaine Industries. She was about to pay for a subscription to one of the record-searching sites that would give her a phone number and address, but before she did that, she went back to his Facebook page one more time to make sure she had her facts straight. And when she clicked on About, she saw something that she’d missed, and it startled her. Josh’s mobile phone number was displayed. Apparently, he’d not locked that information when he’d entered it.
It was a gift from heaven.
Kyra grabbed her phone and dialed the number. It rang three times and a woman answered.
She jerked back, almost as if she’d been struck. “Ah . . . I’m sorry, I must have the wrong number.”
“Who are you trying to reach?” the woman asked pleasantly.
“Josh Burton?”
“He’s right here,” she said. A moment later, a man said, “Hello?”
A visceral shiver ran through Kyra at the sound of his voice. The years sloughed away, and several forgotten memories crowded into her head.
“Hello?” he said again.
“Josh,” Kyra said and cleared her throat. “It’s Kyra Kokinos. I really need to talk to you.”
Chapter Nineteen
Ruby Coconuts wanted to stop at McDonald’s on their way back from Teaneck. “Mommy never lets me go there,” she said, pouting.
“Maybe next time,” he said.
“But we always go to McDonald’s when we visit the baby.”
Dax snorted. “Your math doesn’t add up, Coconut. This is only the second time you’ve seen Jonathan. You haven’t gone enough times for always.”
Ruby didn’t say anything, and Dax glanced at her in the rearview mirror. Her gaze was fixed on the wind
ow, but she was holding her hand up at her chest, and the fingers were fluttering. Dax wondered if it was his imagination that the seizures were growing more frequent or if he just noticed them more now.
She suddenly looked at him. “Can we go to McDonald’s?”
“McDonald’s, huh?” It was odd, he thought, how sometimes Ruby stepped back in time after a seizure instead of picking up with whatever she’d been doing. That didn’t seem to fit with what he knew about absence seizures.
“We always stop at McDonald’s when we visit your baby.”
“I hope they teach you math in school,” he said.
“I want chicken nuggets,” she said.
“My life lessons are falling on deaf ears,” he said and pulled into McDonald’s.
By the time they made it back to East Beach, Dax was in a jovial mood, eager to tell Kyra that Jonathan was eating like a little oinker and was sleeping through the night. He would also report that Ashley made him change a diaper today, which, Dax could proudly admit, he got right on the first try. He was going back on Sunday. Ashley had mentioned Stephanie would be playing soccer all day, and in spite of his and Stephanie’s quasi truce, Dax definitely intended to take advantage of that time without her hovering nearby.
When they pulled into the drive of Number Two, Ruby flung open the door and leapt from the car. Otto pushed his way out of the screen door and bounded down the steps to her, his tail wagging furiously, happier to see Ruby than the man who fed his useless ass every day. Ruby didn’t notice Otto loping behind her as she raced toward her house, her long ribbon of red hair streaming behind her and the few functioning lights of her boots blinking with each step. The plastic toy she’d received in her Happy Meal was already forgotten, left behind in the passenger seat.
Dax picked it up and went inside.
In the kitchen, he carried Otto’s water bowl to the sink to refill. He happened to look out the window and saw Kyra standing on her porch, looking in the direction of his cottage. He smiled . . . but then he noticed the way she was hugging herself. He had a shiver of premonition—something was wrong, he could sense it.
Dax put the dog’s bowl down and went out the back door. He began to walk across the lawn, and when Kyra saw him, she ran. She leapt off the porch steps and ran, halting herself at the fence a few steps ahead of him.
His alarm bells began to sound—she’d been crying.
“Kyra?” He reached for her, cupping her face. “What the hell?”
Kyra glanced nervously over her shoulder and said, “She won’t come out, I don’t think—I put her in front of the television.”
“Ruby?”
“She has a tumor, Dax. A tumor.”
That word—the sound of it grotesque—didn’t really compute with him. He stared at Kyra, waiting for her to take it back, to say tremor or tutor, or anything but that word. But Kyra didn’t take it back. “What?” he asked dumbly.
“She has, like, a growth,” she said, gesturing wildly at her head. “A tumor.”
“Kyra, you’re not making sense. She has absence seizures, not a . . . not that,” he said, unable to say the word. He had an insane urge to laugh, but his heart was beating too hard for that. “Tell me what they said.”
“He said he was ninety-five percent certain, but now he’s only optimistic, and there is so much he said that I didn’t understand because I couldn’t breathe—”
Dax was stunned, but Kyra looked like she was going to collapse. He hopped over the fence and grabbed her before she could, wrapping his arms around her and holding her tightly to him.
She sobbed into his shoulder.
“Don’t cry,” he said roughly, stroking the back of her head. “Please don’t cry. We’ll get to the bottom of it, I promise. Calm down, catch your breath, and tell me everything.”
She nodded and wiped her face on his shirt. They perched on the fence as Kyra told him her conversation with the doctor, her voice monotone, her expression desolate.
Dax was devastated. He thought of that bright little girl and couldn’t imagine anything really wrong with her. It made him feel sick. And furious. He wanted to rip a tree from the ground and throw it in the lake. He put his arm around Kyra’s shoulder and squeezed. “Look, it sounds dire, but it may not be.”
“Please, don’t say that,” she said morosely. “Everyone said it was nothing before, and I believed them, and look what happened. My God, I am so scared.”
“I know,” he said and held her tighter. “So am I.”
“I don’t know how I’ll pay for it. I’ll have to sell my car and my grandmother’s opal—”
“Hey, hey,” Dax said. “Don’t get ahead of yourself in finding things to worry about. First things first—you’re going to see a neuropathologist on Friday, right? Let’s see what that doctor says and then think about next steps.”
“I already took the next step. I called Josh,” she said, as if she were announcing something important.
“Who?” Dax asked, confused.
“Ruby’s father,” she said, and a tear slipped from her eye that she hastily wiped away.
Dax was stunned by her admission—he hadn’t thought of that loser since Kyra first told him about the circumstances of Ruby’s birth.
“He has insurance, I know he does,” she said bitterly. “It’s only fair, right?”
“What did he say?”
Kyra shook her head. “First, he had to call me back. I guess he was with his wife. He said that his wife didn’t know about Ruby, and it would destroy his marriage, and he couldn’t tell her. But that he would send me five thousand dollars to help.” She snorted. “Like that’s going to do it. My dad lost everything paying for my mom’s care, and they had insurance.”
“Had you talked to him before today?” Dax asked curiously, still trying to put the pieces together.
“What? No,” she said morosely, shaking her head. “I haven’t spoken to him since before Ruby was born. I found him on Facebook.”
“He’s never helped you.” It wasn’t really a question, but more a confirmation of what Dax thought he understood.
Kyra snorted and folded her arms across her middle. “Helped me? Not one bit. He made it pretty clear when I found out I was pregnant that he didn’t want her. I should have forced the issue, but I didn’t want him around if he didn’t want her, you know?” She buried her face in her hands. “God, I’m such an idiot. I knew what it was like to be a single parent. I watched my dad work all the time just to make ends meet. Why didn’t I insist that Josh do his fair share? She’d be on his insurance now, and I wouldn’t have to worry.” She lifted her head. “I can’t stop thinking about all the mistakes I made that are going to cost my daughter now.”
“Hey,” Dax said sternly. He put his hand to her chin and made her look at him. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Kyra. You didn’t put that tumor in her head. You made the best decisions for her that you knew to make at every step of the way, and you can’t fault yourself for that. I won’t let you.”
It was clear she wasn’t listening—she was spinning. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. What if she needs surgery? What if she needs more than that? What if she needs therapy, or a lot of medicine? I have the worst insurance.”
“All I know is that right now, today, you have to get it together, Kyra. Ruby doesn’t know what’s coming down the pike, and she needs you at one hundred percent.”
Kyra stared at him. For a moment Dax thought he’d crossed a line. But she nodded in agreement and dropped her gaze. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right.”
He picked up her hand and held it. “I’ll go with you to the biopsy.”
“You don’t have—”
“Don’t even say it,” he warned her. “I’m not going to let either one of you go through this alone. We’ll see what they say and figure it out from there.”
Kyra looked up, her expression hopeful and grateful at once. She squeezed his hand. “You will?”
“Of course I
will. Everything’s going to be okay.” It had to be, because Dax couldn’t bear to think of the alternative. But the rage of impotence was brewing in him. How could this happen to such a beautiful little girl?
How could this have happened to them all?
Chapter Twenty
Dax was right, Kyra decided. She couldn’t spend another moment beating herself up with bad-mother guilt. For Ruby’s sake, she had to focus on the positive. So she picked herself up and clung to the fact that Dr. Green was still optimistic. That was her new mantra—optimism in all things.
But privately Kyra couldn’t stop comparing Ruby’s situation to her mother’s. She even called her dad one night, needing to commiserate with someone else who understood. It had been months since she’d talked to him—they’d drifted so far apart over the years that now their only communication seemed to come around the holidays.
“Haven’t heard from you in a while,” he said when he answered the phone.
For the record, Kyra hadn’t heard from him, either. “I have news,” she said.
Her dad was silent as she told him about Ruby: the seizures she didn’t know were seizures. The tests, the tumor.
When at last he did speak, he asked, “Is it hereditary?”
“I don’t think so. The doctor said probably not. But I . . . what do you think?”
“I guess it could be.”
Kyra squeezed her eyes shut. What she really wanted was for her father to tell her that it was impossible, that everything was going to be okay. She didn’t know why she thought he would give her that, really—he’d never been able to assure her, not even when she was twelve and had needed his reassurance so deeply. “I don’t know what I’m going to do, Dad,” she said quietly.
“You’re going to put one foot in front of the other, that’s all you can do.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“I’m sorry this happened,” he said and then changed the subject. He began to talk about fishing, which seemed to be the only thing he did these days.