Chapter 38
Chapter Thirty-Eight
JADEN
Dr. Ethan Stone, the man wearing a shirt and tie under his coat, whom I already ran into in the ER the other day and who is apparently the new head of surgery, studies my X-ray and MRI scans with a highly professional expression.
‘No bone injuries, your muscles and tendons appear to be intact,’ he says absently. ‘You were lucky, Mr Reynolds.’
I figured as much. The examinations weren’t really necessary, but I knew Nyla would feel more comfortable if I went along with them, so I didn’t object.
‘Good, then I can be discharged.’ I push myself up on the examination couch. My shoulder hurts, but I don’t let it show. Even if a few things have changed, there are still some superhero genes left in me.
He doesn’t react, continues to stare at the X-rays. Now and then he smiles faintly, then he shakes his head again.
‘Dr. Stone?’ I ask, louder this time. ‘Can I be discharged?’
At once his expression turns businesslike again. ‘From my point of view there’s no reason not to. Your attending physician will take care of it.’ With his hands buried in the pockets of his coat, he says goodbye and heads for the door.
There he almost bumps into Nyla, who comes in at that moment. She doesn’t seem to take any notice of him, doesn’t even greet him before he disappears into the hallway.
Instead she fixes me with a piercing look, her cheeks bright red, her breathing fast. She is holding a medical file in front of her chest, her fingers gripping it so tightly that the edges crumple.
‘I’m allowed to go home,’ I say, no idea why. Maybe because the sight of her scares me.
She keeps staring at me without blinking. What is this? Why is she standing there at the door and not saying a word?
I get up from the examination couch and walk over to her. When I’m about to kiss her, tears suddenly start running down her cheeks. She wipes them away, gasping for air.
‘Did something happen?’ Admittedly, the question is stupid, because that something happened is obvious.
She puts the file on top of the cabinet and reaches her hands out to me. At first I think she wants to hug me, but then she feels along my neck.
‘Does that hurt?’ she asks me when she reaches my lymph nodes.
My shoulder is injured, why should my lymph nodes hurt? ‘No,’ I say, and suddenly there’s panic in her eyes.
Her fingers wander on to my collarbones. ‘And that?’
‘What are you doing, Nyla?’
‘Does that hurt?’ Her tone is shrill now. ‘Come on, Jaden, does that hurt?’
I’ve never seen her like this before.
Worried, yes. Afraid, yes. But like this… I take her hands in mine, hold them tight. ‘No, that doesn’t hurt.’
She gasps, fresh tears welling in her eyes. ‘My God…’
What’s wrong with her? ‘You’re scaring me.’
‘I always thought I could…, that I… twenty-five percent…,’ she stammers as the tears keep streaming relentlessly down her cheeks. ‘You’re not one percent… Lilly…, why didn’t I…?’
Something about the way she looks goes right through me. Goose bumps spread over my whole body. ‘What are you talking about, what’s going on?’
She sways. I hold her steady. ‘Your lymph nodes.’ Her voice breaks. ‘They’re enlarged.’
Instinctively, I take a step back.
‘They’re enlarged and you’re not in pain.’
No. No pain, and that’s hardly surprising. ‘I’ve been given painkillers, you know that.’
‘They’re enlarged and you’re not in pain and your bloodwork points to a…’ She draws in a sharp breath. ‘…points to a tumor.’
Tumor.
The word echoes inside me.
Tumor.
No. That can’t be. ‘I don’t think…’
She shakes her head, pain flooding her expression. ‘Lilly,’ she says again.
What about her?
‘A family risk for Hodgkin lymphoma is rare, but it’s…’
‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’ Whatever is going on in her head right now isn’t real. ‘I would have noticed if something was wrong with me,’ I try to calm her down, but the more I talk to her, the more violently she shakes her head. ‘And the fact that my bloodwork is off is normal after the cut.’
‘Stop it, Jaden!’ she suddenly yells, and I don’t recognize her. ‘You’re tired all the time and you’ve lost weight, haven’t you?’
Where is she getting that from?
‘Your shirts, they fit so loose,’ she answers the question I didn’t ask.
‘A completely normal fluctuation because I’ve been training less lately.’ I try to stay calm so she’ll calm down too.
‘And why have you trained so little?’ she asks.
‘There was a lot going on, I hardly had any time, that’s all,’ I reply, although that’s not all. Yes, I’ve often been exhausted lately, but that’s not because of an illness, it’s because I’ve been partying too much.
‘You’re sick, don’t you see, you’re sick!’ She looks like a madwoman now, my God, she can’t think clearly at all anymore.
I put my healthy arm around her to calm her. She’s trembling all over, so I rock her gently back and forth. ‘I’m fit, honestly, everything is fine.’
She nestles against me, I stroke her back. Of course I understand that she’s worried, but this is clearly over the top. Slowly I draw her over to the examination couch, we sit down, and I feel her gradually relax.
Thank God.
‘Everything is fine,’ I say again. ‘There’s absolutely no reason to worry.’
‘But the readings and the symptoms…’
‘Shhh.’ I kiss the crown of her head gently, she lets out a long breath.
Out of nowhere, her whole body goes rigid. Despite my attempts to hold on to her, she pulls away from me.
What is she doing? Is she seriously staring at the CT image on the screen?
Yes. She keeps staring at it, then she gets up as if in a trance and moves toward the image. The silence in this room suddenly becomes unbearable.
Now she taps the monitor with her index finger. ‘There.’ It’s only a small word and she barely whispers it, yet it sends a shiver through me. ‘The lymph nodes have fused together, all three of them.’
I get up too and take a look at the image. Admittedly, the nodes aren’t particularly well delineated from one another, but they are not fused.
Besides, I can’t be sick. I can’t have the same thing Lilly has, I can’t go down the path she…
No. I’m healthy.
‘I don’t see anything worrying there,’ I say.
Her expression is serious. Far too serious. ‘You’re not a doctor either.’
No, I’m not. But I’ve studied long enough to be able to assess the situation.
She really needs to stop cobbling together horror scenarios for which there is no real basis.
Abnormal blood values after a cut and lymph nodes that don’t hurt when she’s on painkillers don’t give the slightest cause for concern.
No doctor in the world would suspect cancer—only Nyla, who is once again turning into Miss Worst Case over absolutely nothing at all.
‘Everything points to it.’ Nyla sounds as if she has completely lost her mind by now—no, wrong, she doesn’t just sound like it, she has. She has lost her mind. ‘We should look into this further.’
Did she really just suggest that? Because she can’t get a handle on her irrational fear any other way, I’m supposed to undergo painful tests? ‘No.’
She scrutinizes me relentlessly, bitter seriousness etched on her face. ‘You have cancer.’
That’s enough now. ‘I’m healthy,’ I reply forcefully. I have to be, because anything else would be… Whatever, it’s not like I even need to think about it.
We look at each other—I have no idea for how long—then she shakes her head. ‘Just because you don’t want to see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.’
Her words conjure up our conversation in the garden earlier, and for a moment I wonder if she’s right. Am I behaving like my mother right now?
No. This has absolutely nothing to do with that. Nyla is completely losing it. Nothing she believes is real actually is. But how on earth am I supposed to make her understand that?