Angels Watching Over Me (12 page)

“And you think this Gabriella is some kind of a nutcase too?”

“I don’t know what to think. But you and Rebekah are the only people who’ve seen her, and since Rebekah’s gone, she may come back and visit you again.”

“She already has.”

“What!” Molly sat bolt upright. “When?”

“The night Rebekah left. I ran into Gabriella in the rec room. She walked me back to my room and stayed with me until I fell asleep.”

Grim-faced, Molly shook her head. “I’m
having security beefed up. What does she look like?”

Leah closed her eyes to get a clearer picture of Gabriella. “She’s pretty. Her hair’s short and reddish. I think her eyes are brown. She’s about your height and size.” She opened her eyes and saw Molly’s worried expression. “I don’t think she’d harm anybody, Molly.”

“Probably not,” Molly said slowly. “Still, she doesn’t belong up here. I don’t like the idea of anyone sneaking in at night and bothering our patients.”

“Well, if she shows up again, I’ll push my call button.”

“Good. Now, let me go and have a talk with security.” Molly stood, told Leah not to worry and left.

Leah shuddered. What a crummy day this had turned out to be! She’d learned about the horrors of chemo and about a weirdo stalking the halls at night. A weirdo only
she
could identify.

Still, try as she might, Leah couldn’t picture Gabriella doing anything mean, and she didn’t want her to be turned in to security. “You’d better not come and see me again, Gabriella,” she muttered under her breath. Then she
clicked on the TV and turned the volume up to chase away the chills she felt.

Leah spent most of the next day reading, playing video games and watching TV. She wanted to keep her mind as busy as possible. When her mind did veer to the subject of cancer, she quickly shut out the frightening thoughts and grabbed something else to do.

After dinner, as she was settling down for the night, she heard a commotion in the hallway. Moments later her door swung open and there stood her mother—her face flushed from the icy December air—wearing a long fur coat and a look of steely determination.

L
eah threw her arms around her mother, hardly believing how much she’d missed her.

“Honey, we got here as soon as we could. Neil had to move heaven and earth to change our tickets so close to the holidays, but he did it.”

Neil stood behind Leah’s mother, looking tired but triumphant. Snowflakes clung to his head of silver-white hair, and his blue eyes were full of concern. “How are you, Leah?”

She was surprised to find she was glad to see him too. “I’m better now that the two of you are here,” she told him.

Her mother squirmed out of her coat and
flopped into a chair. “We’re exhausted. We flew from Japan to Los Angeles, then from L.A. to Chicago, but that’s as far as we got. All air traffic was grounded in Chicago because of the weather. So Neil rented a car and we drove the last two hundred miles in a snowstorm.”

“Thank you,” Leah said to Neil.

“We’re family,” he said with a grin.

“How was Japan?” Leah felt obligated to ask. Now that the preliminary greetings were over, she felt awkward and overwhelmed.

“Japan was wonderful. We’ll have lots of pictures to show you, but this isn’t the time to talk about it.” Roberta glanced at her husband and said, “Neil, be a dear and see if you can find us a hotel near the hospital. I need a hot bath and a good night’s sleep.”

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“Order us a pizza.” She turned to Leah. “I’ve eaten so much fish lately, I’m about to grow fins.”

Neil left, and Roberta climbed up on Leah’s bed and hugged her again. “It’s
so
good to be back in the good old U.S.A. I thought I was too old to get homesick, but when I passed through customs in Los Angeles and that customs agent
stamped my passport and said ‘Welcome home,’ I got all teary-eyed.”

Leah allowed her mother to unwind, knowing that she’d get a chance soon enough to tell her what had happened in the hospital. She was glad of the distraction. She wasn’t sure what she was going to say, or how much she wanted to tell her mother about the past week.

Her mother picked up Leah’s bandaged hand. “So, this is what caused all the trouble?”

“And this.” Leah tossed back the covers to expose her knee, still wrapped.

“I find it hard to believe. Honestly, you’ve been the picture of health all your life.”

“Dr. Thomas said that this kind of cancer mostly hits teenagers.”

“I still think we should get a second opinion. Neil thinks so too.”

“If … If it’s true,” Leah said hesitantly, “then I want to stay in this hospital.”

“Whatever for?”

“I know the nurses. I made some friends.”

Her mother sighed and rubbed her temples. “We’ll have to talk about it tomorrow. I’m too tired to think straight right now. But I will tell you one thing. If this Dr. Thomas doesn’t impress
me, you’ll be out of here in the blink of an eye.”

“I’m quite sure of my diagnosis, Mrs. Dutton.”

Leah heard Dr. Thomas, but she kept her gaze on her mother. They were seated in his office, and her mother was regarding him warily.

“It’s simply hard for me to believe, that’s all,” her mother said. “I mean,
cancer
.”

Dr. Thomas picked up a stack of large gray envelopes. “Let me show you and Leah something.”

He stood, turned and flipped a switch, and a light board attached to his wall glowed with fluorescent light. He extracted a piece of X-ray film from each envelope and snapped each one to the board. “Come closer.”

Leah moved forward with her mother and saw a series of grayish white bones, from a skull all the way to bones in the feet. “Is that me?” she asked, fascinated.

“Yes. This is your skeleton, top to bottom, from your bone scan.”

Leah was impressed and a bit freaked out. It was strange seeing herself without skin.

“So where’s the problem?” her mother asked.

“Here,” Dr. Thomas said, drawing a circle around Leah’s right kneecap with a marking pen. “And here.” He drew another circle around her left forefinger.

Leah squinted and saw that both areas looked dark, like small holes.

“Remember,” the doctor said, “bones are dense and show up white on X-ray film. Dark space is the absence of bone.”

“So?” Leah’s mother asked.

“These dark areas indicate that the bone has been eaten away. This is very typical of bone cancer.”

“But a few X rays can’t tell the whole story,” her mother argued.

“True, but based on these, I did the biopsy.”

“And what did that say?”

“Here’s the pathologist’s report.” He picked up a file and handed it to Leah’s mother. “It’s inconclusive, unfortunately. But based on years of treating this disease, I think Leah has osteogenic sarcoma.”

As he spoke, Leah began to feel icy cold.

“You
think
?” her mother retorted. “This is just your opinion?”

Dr. Thomas sighed. “My opinion counts, Mrs. Dutton. I’m a specialist who’s treated many cases of this disease.”

“All right, all right. If this is true, how do you treat it?”

Leah knew the answer already.

Dr. Thomas didn’t answer immediately. Instead he laced his fingers together and leaned forward. “Long-term treatment, chemotherapy.”

“Long-term? What about the short term?”

“Sometimes drastic measures are needed to preserve a person’s life.”

Leah felt a tingling sensation all through her body. He was leading up to something horrific. She could sense it. “Like what?” she asked, her heart pounding.

“Like removal of the appendage with the tumors.”

“Y-You mean, removing the tumors,” she clarified.

“No. I mean amputating your leg and finger.”

“No way!” Her mother exploded off her chair. “Leah’s a young woman with her whole life ahead of her. You cannot cut off her leg! I won’t let you.”

Dr. Thomas shook his head sadly. “Mrs. Dutton, I don’t like telling you this either, but this
is
the only way to maximize her recovery. After the amputations, she’ll undergo chemo. Once she goes into remission, we’ll monitor her closely. The cure rate—”

Leah stopped listening. She was numb. She tried to imagine her leg gone, her finger missing, a tube in her chest, needles and medicine. She began to cry.

Instantly her mother was at her side. “Oh, honey, it’ll be all right.”

Leah couldn’t talk. It would
never
be all right.

“There are prostheses now that look very lifelike,” Dr. Thomas was saying. “You’ll go through rehabilitation. We’ll work with you.”

“I don’t want you to cut off my leg!” Leah shouted. “I want you to leave me alone!” She pushed herself out of the wheelchair and limped out of his office as quickly as her aching leg allowed her to move.

L
eah lay in bed, facing the wall, refusing to eat or talk to anyone who came to see her. Not even Molly could raise her spirits. “I’m supposed to be off for a week starting tomorrow,” Molly said. “But I don’t want to go away and leave you like this.” When Leah didn’t respond, Molly squeezed her shoulder and added, “You have friends to help you through this.”

Her mother paced the floor, muttering under her breath, sometimes stopping by the bed and saying, “We don’t have to take his word for this, Leah. I know X-ray technicians can do sloppy work. And the pathologist’s report isn’t even conclusive.”

Leah let her mother voice all the anger and
frustration she was feeling. But she still had to face her own fear alone.

“I want to go home for Christmas,” Leah said, the first words she’d spoken in hours.

“Don’t you worry. There’s no way I’d keep you here for the holidays.”

“Then after Christmas—” Leah’s voice broke.

“We’re not going to think about that now.”

“When are we going to think about it?”

Her mother leaned over Leah’s bed and stared into her eyes. “You know, Leah, for a long time I had to do things I didn’t want to do, just for the two of us to survive. I worked jobs I hated, left you with day care centers when I wanted to stay home with you. I even married men I didn’t honestly love so that you and I could have a better life.

“I really love Neil and he really cares about us. He’s the father you
should
have had all these years.” Leah winced at the mention of her father. Her mother continued. “But that’s not what I want to say. What I want to say is I’m not ready to give up this fight. Everything I have, I got because I fought for it.”

Confused, Leah asked, “What are you talking about?”

“I’m going to make Dr. Thomas run that bone scan test again before we check out.”

“And the biopsy?”

“We may do that again too, after the holidays, of course. I can’t explain why I have a bad feeling about that test, but I do.”

The fervor in her mother’s voice lit a candle of hope inside Leah. “Do you really think the tests are wrong? Grandma Hall’s tests weren’t wrong.”

Her mother shrugged. “I don’t know what to think. All I know is that I would never forgive myself if I let them cut off your leg when I have this gnawing doubt inside me.” She looked away for a moment, and Leah was shocked to see tears in her mother’s eyes. Her mother never cried in front of her. “I have some regrets about the way I treated you and your grandmother, Leah.”

“What regrets?” Leah had not heard her mother discuss her grandmother since the day of her funeral.

“I should have been kinder to her. She truly loved you, and I kept her out of your life for far too long.”

Leah felt tears brimming in her own eyes.
“Why did you? I loved her too. And I only got to be with her when she was dying.”

Her mother sniffed and hung her head. “I was bitter about your father leaving us. He wasn’t well, you know. I mean psychologically. He couldn’t handle the responsibilities of marriage and a family, so he left. I took it out on your grandmother because I couldn’t get even with him. That was wrong of me. Then, once he died, my anger seemed so pointless.”

Shocked by her mother’s confession, Leah stared. Her mother was asking her to forgive her for her past mistakes. “Is that why you want Dr. Thomas to run the tests again? So you won’t make another mistake?”