7. Erin #2
We drive back that evening. Six hours round trip, Cleo asleep across the back seat by the time we hit the mountain pass, the cat-eared beanie sliding down over one eye.
David doesn’t say much. Neither do I. The biopsy results won’t be back for two days.
There’s nothing to say yet that isn’t just the two of us sitting inside what we already suspect.
He drops me at the cottage a little after nine.
I watch the truck pull away and go inside.
The next two days I see morning patients, drive home at six, eat something, and refresh the lab portal at nine and again at midnight.
I set a broken finger, remove a mole from Hank Ford’s forearm, review two Medicare charts with Whitlock, who glances at me once over the stack and says nothing.
I eat dinner in the cottage both nights and watch the snow through the window and try not to count the hours until the report lands.
In the day I manage it fine. It’s the quiet parts that are harder — the drive home, the cottage dark, the seconds after the portal loads.
The portal flags at nine-oh-four p.m.
My hand goes to the chain at my chest — fingertips at the locket, the metal warm from the skin it’s been lying against all day — and then I read.
Hypocellularity. Cellularity less than twenty-five percent. Fatty replacement. No infiltrative process. And the conclusion: findings consistent with severe aplastic anemia per Camitta criteria.
My hands are cold. The cold starts again at the base of my palms and spreads inward, that pull, that retreat.
I’ve felt this before. Fourteen months ago, a different report, a different child.
I know this disease. I spent two years learning it through Tommy Hayes.
I know what it costs. I know what it cost Tommy.
I close the laptop.
I go out the back door into the alley and the November cold comes in all at once, real and sharp, and I count.
Four in, hold four, four out, hold four.
My hands shake against my thighs while I count.
The snow falls sideways over Cedar Hollow, same gray sky.
The diner sign is dark. The street is empty.
By the fifth round, my hands are steadier. By the eighth, they’re warm.
The same disease that took Tommy Hayes.
I go back inside. I call David.
The next morning, at seven-fifty-five, the waiting room chairs are empty.
Linda rescheduled before I asked her to.
Whitlock has the speakerphone on the consultation table.
He’s standing beside it in his pale blue scrubs, glasses on, and when I walk in he looks at me once — level, steady, a small nod — and goes back to the speakerphone.
Linda stands at the back of the room, arms at her sides, face flat.
Lito is at the front desk but he’s standing, knuckles cracking more than usual, and when David and Cleo come through the door he gives her a small wave and a smile. No jokes, no quips today.
Cleo is in her cat-eared beanie and a puffy jacket, both hands wrapped around David’s. She takes the chair beside him and sits very straight, hands in her lap, back against the rungs.
Dr. Henry’s voice comes through clearly on the speakerphone. Whitlock introduces the room. We run through the preliminary setup.
Then I walk David through it.
I start with the four CBC values from the morning of the draw, and then the biopsy report on the tablet, one section at a time.
The hypocellularity. The fatty replacement.
The Camitta criteria. I explain what the cellularity means.
I explain what marrow failure does to a body as small as Cleo’s — what it means when the space inside the bone where the blood cells should be forming goes quiet and stops.
I give him the diagnosis. The color drains from his jaw, slowly, his hands flat on the table, the rest of him still.
Cleo has both hands in her lap, back straight, watching me. She glances at her father and back.
He asks one question. "Is it treatable?"
"Yes." I hold it firm. "There are options. There’s a way through this."
Dr. Henry confirms it from the phone, steady, plain. Whitlock says nothing. Then the speakerphone clicks off. The room goes quiet.
David takes one breath I can see from across the table, slow and even, and then Cleo climbs up into his lap with both arms around his neck, her face in his collar. She turns her head sideways and looks at me.
"Daddy? Will I get to bring my stuffed animals?"
His voice barely carries across the table. "Yeah, Clementine. You can bring everything you want."
I look at the surface of the table as he used her full name. "I’ll be right back," I say.
Past Lito — he doesn’t look up — down the back hall, through the heavy door into the staff lot. Snow coming down light and sideways, same gray sky. His truck is in the second space.
I make it to the bumper.
I’m sick on the asphalt — the coffee from this morning, the toast at seven — twice, three times, until there’s nothing left.
I stay on my knees with both palms flat against the cold metal of the bumper and I don’t cry.
I’m not allowed. There is a man in the room down the hall sitting at a table with his daughter in the cat-eared beanie and I am the doctor in charge.
I wipe my mouth on my sleeve and push myself to my feet. The sky over Cedar Hollow is gray and even. It gives nothing back.
I close my eyes. Slow inhale, deep. Release.
Then I go back inside.