The Legacy: Making Wishes Come True (10 page)

New tears formed in Jenny’s eyes as she said, “Well, this path is really hard, and right now, I can’t see any reason for it. And I’m sure I never will.”

That night, Jenny lay awake in the dark. She envied Elaine and Kimbra, who were asleep under their covers, but for her, sleep was impossible. She knew she could ring for a nurse and get a pill to help her sleep, but she didn’t want that either. With a sigh, she tossed off the covers, slipped on her robe, and padded down the dimly lit hall looking for someone to talk to.

She passed by one of the children’s rooms and heard a soft whimper. She went inside and discovered a small girl huddled in her bed and crying. “Can I help?” Jenny asked, leaning down and whispering.

The little girl’s eyes grew wide with fright. “Are you going to give me a shot?”

“Why, no.”

“Are you a doctor?”

“No … I heard you crying, that’s all.”

Still, the girl looked skeptical. “Why’s that thing on your face? Is something wrong with your mouth?”

Jenny touched the mask. It had become so much a part of her that she’d forgotten she was wearing it. “Nope. I have a very
big
mouth. See?” She slipped off the mask and opened wide, causing the girl to sniff and smile. “I’m really a mermaid, and sometimes, I have trouble breathing real air.”

The girl giggled. “Mermaids have fish tails. Where’s your fish tail?”

Jenny glanced down. “Oops. I must have lost it.” She ducked down and looked under the child’s bed. “It’s not there. Hum-m-m. Wonder where I left it? That thing is so hard to keep track of.…”

The girl giggled again. “You’re teasing me.”

“Yes, I am.” Jenny pulled a chair next to the bed. “I’m Jenny. What’s your name?”

“Betsy. I’m six.” She held up six fingers.

“I’m sixteen.”

“I get lots of shots,” Betsy said. “I hate shots. They’re making me take medicine too, and it tastes bad. I hate it here. I want to go home.”

“Me too.”

“My mom couldn’t stay with me because she’s going to have a baby. I miss her.”

Jenny’s heart twisted. She imagined how torn Betsy’s
mother must feel, having to leave her child alone to face the terrors of the night because of her pregnancy. She touched Betsy’s soft blond curls. Jenny knew that soon the silken locks would fall out in handfuls and Betsy would be bald and ill from chemo.
Another victim
, she thought. “How would you like me to read you a story?” Jenny asked.

“Will you?” Betsy looked so eager that Jenny smiled broadly. “I have some books.” Betsy fumbled under her covers and extracted several worn copies of books by Dr. Seuss. She handed them to Jenny and settled back against her pillow. “I can read them by myself,” she said, “but it’s better when someone reads them to me.”

Glad to find a way to help pass the seemingly endless night, Jenny took the books and began to read.

By midmorning the next day, Jenny couldn’t pull herself out of bed. Her throat felt scratchy, and her head ached. “How’s Noreen?” she asked Kimbra, shielding her eyes from the sunlight streaming in the window. Her eyes felt sore in their sockets.

“Still recuperating.”

“Does she know about her other tumors?”

“I don’t think so. Are you all right?” Kimbra peered closely at Jenny’s face.

“I’m hot all over.”

“I’ll get a nurse.”

“No … don’t …”

But Kimbra was gone before the words were half formed. She returned with a nurse, who shook down a thermometer and placed it under Jenny’s tongue. A minute later, she pulled it out, read it, then hurried from the room.

J
ENNY FELT AS
if she were burning up. Her chest felt tight, her arms and legs like lead weights. The cool hands of the nurses were the only thing that comforted her. Dr. Gallagher arrived quickly, listened to her lungs through his stethoscope, then ordered her to be taken down to Radiology for lung X rays. He wore a mask, yet Jenny saw the serious look in his eyes.

She wanted to make a joke, but it took too much effort to form words, so she simply closed her eyes. Voices drifted in and out of her hearing. She heard Kimbra say, “But she was fine last night at bedtime.” She heard a teary Elaine say, “First Noreen, now Jenny. She has to be all right, Kimbra. She
has
to!”

Jenny heard her grandmother speaking to her and felt her cool dry hand against her forehead. She struggled to open her eyes and tell her not to worry, but couldn’t. Eventually, Jenny heard snatches of conversation between Dr. Gallagher and her grandmother:
“…  pneumonia … infection … very ill … isolation … intensive care …”

At one point. Dr. Gallagher leaned over and said, “Jenny, you’re going on a little ride down to ICU, where you can get round-the-clock nursing. Don’t be alarmed, but I’m going to put you on a respirator for a while, just until your lungs clear up. It will help you breathe easier, so relax … we’re going to fix you up.”

A machine that could breathe
 … Jenny thought the information fascinating. She understood they were going to move her out of her room, and she tried to ask them not to, tried to ask Kimbra and Elaine not to let anybody take her place in the room. But again, she found talking much too difficult.

Hands lifted her onto a gurney, and she felt the motion of being rolled down the hall. Bright lights flashed past overhead. She floated, as if on the sea, and she embraced the sensation. She imagined that she was on the ocean, adrift on billowing waves of deep cobalt blue. She imagined that Richard was with her, holding her hand and smiling, his green eyes as bright as emeralds.

Suddenly, she wanted to see him again. She wanted to touch him, have him hold her as he had the night they danced at the country club. Why had she acted so stubborn these past weeks? Why had she refused to let him visit her? She’d been stupid.
Richard
. She cried out his name in her heart.

Hands settled her on a bed. Needles pricked her arms, tubing lay against her skin. She heard the unfriendly hiss of machines all around her, the rattle of bed rails being raised, fencing her in.

A crushing heaviness seized her chest, and she gasped for air.
What if I die and never see him again?
Tears slid from the corners of her eyes. She felt helpless, hopeless, alone. She heard one nurse tell another, “Poor kid. She’s crying.”

She heard the other say, “Impossible. She’s not even conscious.”

She felt dizzy and saw what seemed like a dark hole reaching out for her. Subconsciously, she back-pedaled, but the hole grew larger, until she had no choice but to fall into it … down … down … like Alice down the rabbit-hole.

In the ICU waiting room, Richard paced the floor as a caged animal caught in a trap. Marian sat in a chair, her back stiff and straight, her thin, veined hands clasped in her lap.
Ten minutes
. That’s all anyone was allowed to go into ICU every hour.
Every other hour for me
, he reminded himself.

On the day he’d learned of Jenny’s setback, he’d gone straight to Marian and begged to be allowed to see her. “I—I don’t know,” Marian had said. “I’m not sure it’s what Jenny would want.”

He could tell Marian was genuinely torn, and he used her ambivalence to his advantage. “She’ll never know,” he replied. “It’ll be our secret. But I have to see her. It isn’t right not to let me, and you know it.”

In the end, Marian had agreed. Now, ten days later, there was little change in Jenny’s condition, even though she’d been placed on a respirator and pumped full of antibiotics to fight off the persistent infection.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Marian’s question stopped Richard’s restless pacing. “For the first time since her diagnosis, Jenny was free of leukemic cells. They were going to let her go home and continue her treatment
as an outpatient. And then this happened. An ordinary germ has knocked her out.”

Richard saw permanent lines of worry etched in Marian’s face. She looked to have aged ten years over the past three months. “She’ll get well,” he insisted. “She can’t have been freed of cancer only to go down to pneumonia.”

“I hope you’re correct.”

Richard glanced at his watch and saw that it was time for his visit to ICU. “I’ll be back,” he told Marian, who only nodded and continued to stare into space.

He entered the glass-walled chamber where Jenny lay surrounded by the tools of technology. A tube, attached to a respirator, protruded from her throat where the doctor had cut a hole in her trachea and inserted it. Wires snaked from her chest and hooked up to a monitor that kept a constant vigil over her heartbeat.

She looked as if she were asleep. Her face was gaunt, but even so, he could see her beauty through the ashen skin stretched tight over delicate facial bones. Dark circles smudged her eyes, and a fine fuzz of hair had begun to grow on her scalp. Tentatively, he reached out and touched the new growth. It felt as soft as down.

A knot filled his throat, and he could scarcely swallow around it. Rage filled him, blinding, white-hot anger that wanted to make him explode. Why was this happening to her? Was there no one to help her? Rationally, he knew the doctors were doing everything possible, but he sensed in his gut that her life didn’t lie in the hands of medicine.

In the glare of the artificial lights, the walls of the cubicle seemed to fade away. And he saw Jenny
through the eyes of memory, on the Easter Sunday of the previous year, when she’d been fifteen. She was dressed in wispy voile the color of buttercups. She wore a straw hat, and her long, dark hair hung in loose waves down her back.

When he’d seen her sitting in the pew, when she’d turned and caught his eye and smiled, his breath had almost stopped. It was if he were seeing her for the first time. She wasn’t the kid he’d grown up with, taught to sail, run with, barefoot, on the beaches. She was suddenly different, more beautiful than any girl he knew at college. Maybe that was when his feelings toward her began to change. Perhaps that was when he began to love her, and to want her in every way.

Richard shook his head, dislodging the shimmering picture.
“You can’t die, Jenny,”
he whispered. She had so much to live for.
They
had so much to live for. He felt a firm resolve grab hold of him as he realized what he knew he must do. He would become a lawyer the way his father wanted. He would work hard, earn money, become the kind of man Marian would allow Jenny to marry. Suddenly, his future looked full of purpose and direction.

But first, she had to get well. And only God could grant that wish. He closed his eyes and rocked back on his heels. If he was going to be an attorney, and if God was the final judge, then, at this moment, he had an opportunity to plead his first case.

He ignored the incessant noise of the machines and bowed his head.
Dear God … help her … please
 … Richard swallowed, feeling inadequate with words of prayer and petition. He prayed the simple words again and again, until a nurse came to remind that his time in ICU was long since up.

Richard cleared his throat, bent, and kissed Jenny’s forehead, hoping with all that was in him that God had heard him and would be lenient. Jenny was all he wanted. Hope for a future with her was all he had.

R
ICHARD WAS SITTING
alone in the waiting room when a one-armed girl wearing a bathrobe entered. Self-consciously, she stopped in her tracks and clutched her robe tightly across her breasts with her remaining hand. “I—I thought Mrs. Crawford would be in here,” she said.

“She’s in with Jenny,” Richard replied. “Ten minutes doesn’t last very long, so feel free to sit down and wait.”

The girl hesitated, but then crossed to the other side of the small room and eased into a chair. “How’s Jenny doing?” she asked.

“No change.” Richard fiddled with a Styrofoam coffee cup. “You a friend of hers?” He recalled Jenny’s writing to him about a girl who’d lost an arm to cancer.

“I’m Kimbra Bradley, one of Jenny’s roommates. I knew I couldn’t get in to see her, but the nurses in ICU know how worried we are about Jenny, so
sometimes they let me stand outside the glass partition and look in at her.” Kimbra sighed helplessly. “I know there’s nothing I can do for her, but I couldn’t sleep tonight, and so I came up just to hang around. You don’t mind, do you?”