Season of Blessing (16 page)

C
HAPTER

Twenty-Eight

The morning
Tory was to start her new job, she set her alarm for 6:00. Waking up wasn't a problem, since she hadn't really slept much at all. She had lain in bed listening to the rhythm of Barry's breathing and wondering if she was doing the right thing by taking Hannah to the nursery for several hours at a time. Of all the people in Breezewood, she trusted the lady who would be caring for Hannah. But she still worried.

She'd be right down the hall. If Hannah got upset or sick or hurt herself, Tory would be just feet away. It wasn't as if she was leaving her at all. And she needed this.

Despite her trepidation, she'd been a little excited about working with the older children who had the same affliction as Hannah. She wanted to hear how clearly they could speak. She wanted to see what concepts they could grasp, how much they could learn, whether they had skills of reason and logic.

“Why are you up so early?” Barry's sleepy voice sounded slightly irritated.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered. “I didn't mean to wake you up. I just have to get ready for work.”

“You don't have to be there till nine.”

“Yeah, but I thought I'd run a couple of miles first, read my Bible, do a couple of loads of laundry, make the kids a good breakfast…”

“Tory, are you gonna do this every day?”

“Nope. Just the days I work. I refuse to neglect my family for an outside job.”

Barry sat up and turned on the lamp. “You're not neglecting your family, honey. Brittany and Spencer will be at school. They'll never even know you're gone. And you can do the laundry on your off days.”

She slipped on her shorts and sat down on the bed to pull on her running shoes. “I just want to start out right.”

“You'll be exhausted by the time you get there.”

“Don't worry about me.” She came around the bed and kissed him, then turned the lamp back off. “Go back to sleep. Your alarm doesn't go off for another hour.”

He pulled the covers up over him again and settled back on his pillow.

Tory scurried out of the room.

She went to the laundry room and started a load, then hit the floor and began her stretching.

When she was finally warmed up enough to run, she took off out the door. The dark morning air was full of dew, but summer still hung on, making it warm. She left the cul-de-sac and headed down the mountain road, easily making the distance she had marked off so long ago. She ran hard and fast, and when she reached the one-mile point, turned around and headed back uphill.

The run back was more punishing than the first half had been, but it was important to her to stay fit and slim. She couldn't stand the thought of getting plump and lumpy. It wasn't vanity. It really wasn't. She just expected more of herself, had a higher standard than most. She wanted to be her best.

By the time she got back home, it was 7:00, and she was soaked with perspiration. Barry had already gotten up and had put in a second load of laundry. Scrambled eggs and bacon fried on the stove.

“You're cooking,” she said with a grin.

He nodded. “Not the kind of thing you eat, but the kids'll like it.”

She kissed him. “I promise not to wake you so early every time I work.”

“It's okay. You're nervous.”

She got a towel out of the laundry room and wiped her face. “Am I? You think this is nerves?”

“I know it is.”

She leaned against the doorway. “So why am I nervous?”

“Because you're not sure you're doing the right thing.”

She smiled. He knew her too well. “Am I?”

“Yes.” He grabbed the waistband of her shorts and pulled her close, until her nose touched his. “You're doing the right thing, Tory. I want you to say that fifty times while you're in the shower.”

She grinned and brought her sweaty arms around his neck. “If you say so.”

“I do. And you'll see.”

She felt better as she got into the shower. Barry was on her side, Brittany and Spencer wouldn't know the difference, and Hannah…

She heard Hannah crying as she woke up, and Barry called out, “I've got her!”

As the warm shower rained down on her, soothing her jitters, she smiled. It was going to be okay.

Class was already going full tilt when Tory finally left Hannah in the nursery and went to her classroom. The children, age six to nine, all with Down's Syndrome, sat at a table, already hard at work. Their teacher, a woman named Linda Shelton, sat with them as they shaped Play-Doh blobs into things only they could identify.

“Hi, Miss Tory,” the teacher called out in a singsong voice as Tory came into the room. “Children, say hi to Miss Tory.”

The children looked over at her while still molding their Play-Doh and muttered things that sounded a little like “good morning.”

“Good morning, boys and girls.” She wondered if Linda called them “boys and girls,” or if they even knew that they were boys and girls.

Then she told herself to stop obsessing. These children were forgiving. If she made a teacher faux pas, they probably wouldn't notice.

She pulled a chair up to the table and sat down. Ten children sat around two tables. Two of them sat in wheelchairs, and three others had braces on their legs.

But the other five she had often seen running down the hall-way on their way to lunch or recess.

“Thank goodness for your help,” Linda said. “We'll get so much more done with you here. And frankly, I was thrilled when Mary Ann told me you're a Christian. It's not a requirement for working here, you know. But I love the fact that most of the teachers here are. And I like for the kids to have that kind of influence. Some of their parents aren't believers. But they really need Christ, I think. Don't you?”

“Of course,” Tory said. “But I didn't think we could talk about Christ in the classroom.”

“Sure we can,” Linda said. “This is a private school. And even though it isn't a Christian school, the people who run it are believers, too. So they're just fine with our passing our faith on to our precious children.”

Tory looked at the children working so hard on their blobs, and wondered if they even had the capacity for faith, but she didn't say so. It seemed to make Linda feel better to think she had an impact. And who was she to say Linda didn't?

The little boy next to her tore off a glob of Play-Doh and thrust it at her. “Thank you,” she said. She looked at the teacher. “What's his name?”

“Ask him,” Linda said. “He'll tell you.”

She asked him his name, and the boy said, “My name Bo.”

“What are you making, Bo?”

“Haws.”

“A horse?” she asked, delighted that she'd understood.

“I make a ball,” one of the other ones said, and she oohed and aahed over the ball. A couple of the others muttered things that she could not understand, but the teacher managed to translate as she helped them work on their Play-Doh creations.

Already, she tried to picture Hannah sitting at this very table in this very room hammering on a piece of Play-Doh and explaining what her vision for it was. Would she be one of those in the wheelchairs or have braces on her legs, or would she walk and talk like Bo? Tory didn't know, but just being here gave her peace that she hadn't had before. Sylvia and Barry had been right. She was glad she had taken the job.

C
HAPTER

Twenty-Nine

Sylvia grew
more serious as the day of her first chemotherapy treatment approached in the second week of September. She'd been warned that the treatment would be given intravenously and could take three hours.

When the day came she packed a couple of novels, her Bible, and some magazines, and Harry drove her to the Cancer Center.

The place looked different than she'd expected. Decorated in warm shades of green, with accent lighting in strategic places around the room, it looked more like someone's living room than a sterile hospital room. Recliner-like vinyl chairs were spaced about three feet apart in the large room, and soft classical music piped through the sound system.

Several other cancer patients occupied those chairs, their own medication dripping into their veins. A couple had on Walkmans, and leaned back with their faces pale and sunken eyes closed. Would she look like that a few months from now?

The nurse led her to a chair next to a woman who stared in front of her with dull, lifeless eyes. The woman's hair had already begun falling out, and thin, lifeless wisps hung into her face. She had a yellow cast to her skin, and dark circles hung under her eyes.

Sylvia tried to get comfortable as the nurse drew blood to check her count. When she disappeared to take it to the lab, Sylvia shivered, and wondered why they kept it so cold in here. She didn't know what it was about doctor's offices, but it seemed that the moment she stepped over the threshold, her circulation cut off, and her extremities flirted with frostbite.

The nurse returned with her IV pole. Sylvia trembled as they inserted the IV needle into her arm and began the drip of the poisonous fluid that would kill the cancerous cells in her body. She looked over at the woman next to her and saw that her eyes were closed. She wasn't asleep, though, for she had a frown on her face. Sylvia could see that she was already beginning to get sick. Sylvia reached over and took the woman's hand. Her eyes flew open.

“Are you okay?” Sylvia asked.

“No,” the woman said. “I hate this. It's going to kill me.”

Compassion welled up in Sylvia's heart. “No, it's not. It's going to save your life.” She smiled. “My name's Sylvia.”

The woman's frown melted. “I'm Priscilla.”

“Hi, Priscilla. How many treatments have you had?”

“Three before this one.” The woman glanced at her hair. “Is this your first?”

Sylvia nodded. “I'm very nervous.”

The woman let go of Sylvia's hand and touched her balding head. “I would have worn my wig, but my skin feels so irritated during the treatments…”

Sylvia swallowed. Would she have three whole treatments before her hair started falling out? “It's cold in here,” Sylvia said.

“They'll bring you a blanket if you need it. I don't. This stuff has brought on early menopause for me, and I seem to live in a perpetual hot flash.”

Sylvia had been taking hormone replacement therapy since her own menopause, but the doctors had taken her off of it after they detected the breast cancer. She'd struggled with those symptoms herself, and Harry had warned her that they would likely get worse.

She looked at Priscilla. The woman was probably in her early forties. “What kind of cancer do you have?”

The woman sighed. “Breast, but it's metastasized to my lungs. You?”

“Breast, too.”

Priscilla shook her head. “I have three kids. I have to beat this. But cancer can make you feel out of control. All my efforts still might not work.”

“God's in control,” Sylvia said.

Priscilla started to cry then, as if she wished that were true but didn't quite believe it.

Sylvia's head was starting to hurt, so she laid it back against the seat. Her stomach churned, and a nauseous feeling seeped through her.
Focus
, she told herself.
Think about something else
.

Slowly, she started to sing. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus…sweetest name I know…”

Priscilla looked over at her.

“Do you know the song?” Sylvia asked.

“Yes.”

“Sing with me,” she said. “Come on. It'll get your mind off of it.”

Sylvia started to sing again, and finally her new friend joined in with a weak, raspy voice. Sylvia watched the woman's countenance lift.

Priscilla's treatment ended an hour before Sylvia's. By the time her new friend was gone, Sylvia needed all her energy to get through her last hour.

When it ended, she found that she wasn't as ill as she'd expected. Headachy and queasy, she checked with the appointment nurse to see when the woman's next treatment was and scheduled hers at the same time. Maybe they could help each other again, she thought. Then she returned to Harry, who'd waited patiently in the waiting room.

He sprang up the moment he saw her. “How are you, honey?”

“Better than I expected,” she said. “Just a little headachy, but that's all.”

He took her shoulders and looked into her eyes. “Are you sure you're not feeling sick? You have this way of putting on a happy face for everybody, but I don't want you putting one on for me.”

“You don't think I can hide it, do you? I mean if I start throwing up, I can't very well pretend that I didn't. And don't start wishing bad symptoms on me, Harry. When I say I'm okay, believe me.”

As they drove home, she felt the fatigue seeping into her bones. She needed a nap, she thought, but that was all. She had much to be thankful for. But she didn't delude herself into thinking that it wasn't going to get worse. She knew that the next treatment might not be so mild.