7. Erin
ERIN
David doesn’t sleep. Neither do I.
Through the thin wall between the kitchen and the living room I hear him shift on the couch — midnight, then two, then sometime before four — careful not to move the child on his chest. Cleo’s breathing leveled out around eleven. David’s hadn’t.
I lie in the dark and think about the bruising on Cleo’s shins, the pallor in her nail beds, the cap refill I measured three times in my kitchen because the number came back wrong every time.
Then I make myself stop. There’s nothing to act on without data, and running a differential at two in the morning has never changed a lab result.
I put it where I put things I can’t touch yet.
Around three I get up and stand in the kitchen doorway.
The wood stove has gone out. The cottage is dark except for the porch light coming in at the window, and through the doorframe I can see the back of David’s shoulder and Cleo’s feet over his knee, her small socked feet slightly pointed in sleep.
The wool throw has shifted. Her hand is up at his collar, the same grip she had in the doorway last night.
She held onto his flannel even while she was burning up, even while she could barely breathe.
I watch them for a moment. Then I go back to my room and lie there and wait for six-fifty-five.
At six-fifty-five I get dressed and call Linda.
"I’m already here," she says.
We bundle Cleo in the wool throw from my couch, David’s flannel underneath, the cat-eared beanie pulled down over her ears.
She surfaces halfway — says hmm at nothing, closes her eyes again — and David lifts her from the cushions without a sound.
She finds his collar and settles there, same grip as before.
He carries her to the truck and drives the three blocks to the clinic.
I follow in my sedan with my bag on the passenger seat.
Snow coming down light and sideways. Main Street empty — the diner still dark, Hank’s garage still dark, the whole town still asleep.
Linda is at the door, sign already taped to the glass: CLINIC CLOSED FOR PRIVATE CONSULT 7:00–8:30 . She holds it open without greeting any of us.
Exam room two. I set up while Linda gets Cleo’s weight and temperature.
Cleo submits to the thermometer with great deliberateness, chin up, as if she’s doing us a favor.
Then David settles her into his lap and I bring the tray over.
Cleo is awake now, eyeing the tourniquet narrowly.
I line up the tubes: CBC with differential, reticulocyte count, peripheral smear.
"That’s a lot," she says.
David says, "Cleo — what kind of bird is that out the window?"
She twists toward it. I get the tourniquet on and the needle ready, and when she turns back I’m already drawing the first tube.
"That’s not a bird," she says. "That’s a plastic bag."
"Huh." He considers it. "That’s embarrassing."
She laughs — short and honest, small mercies she’s laughing at all — and I keep my hands moving.
Draw two, three, four. Labeled, double-checked.
Linda takes the tubes from me at the door.
She’s already in her coat. She called the regional lab at five this morning, and she drives the samples there herself.
I clean up the tray and re-cap the sharps and do not look at David’s hands, resting on Cleo’s knees now, loose and still.
David carries Cleo toward the door. He stops just inside the threshold and turns. "I’ll be at the cabin. Please call me when you know. And — thank you."
"I’ll call the moment I know anything," I say.
"Doc." He nods once. Then he goes.
The CBC comes back at four-fifteen in the afternoon. I’m at my desk finishing a referral note when the portal flags. I close the note.
Hemoglobin 6.9. Platelets 28. ANC 480. Reticulocyte count 0.4 percent.
My hands go cold. Not from the room — the heat’s been running since seven. The cold starts at the base of my palms and moves inward, blood pulling back from the surface. All three lines down. Pancytopenia. The marrow has nearly stopped producing and isn’t compensating.
Thomas Hayes. Tommy.
I push back from the desk and call Faye. She picks up on the second ring and I read her the numbers without preamble. She doesn’t breathe for the length of a sentence.
"Send her to Northwest Memorial for a biopsy," she says. "I’ll call Henry. He’ll see her tomorrow."
"Faye —"
"Send her, Erin."
I hang up. The clinic goes quiet around me — Linda closing out the back rooms, the cabinet clicking. Through the window the light over Cedar Hollow is going early, the mountains taking the sun by four-thirty. I sit with the lamp aimed at the wall and the portal still open on my screen.
Then I call David.
Without any question, he drives us to Denver.
I’m in the passenger seat, and Cleo is in the back, half-asleep, the cat-eared beanie crooked over one ear.
She’s awake for the first forty minutes — how big is the needle, is it bigger than this morning’s, what does Dr. Henry look like, does he have a cat, what does the inside of a bone look like, is it hollow, like a straw — and then she goes quiet somewhere past the first rest stop and the truck goes quiet with her.
The mountains fall away behind us. The highway runs flat and gray toward the plains.
I go through differentials in my head. Nutritional, viral, toxic, malignant, congenital.
The reticulocyte count keeps pointing at the same one.
I watch the road and tell myself I don’t know yet.
The biopsy will tell me what the numbers mean.
Until I have the biopsy I’m a passenger.
"You’re very calm. You’ve seen this before," David says. His eyes stay on the road. In the back, Cleo has shifted. She’s found a more comfortable angle, cheek against the window, completely out.
"Bone marrow conditions," I say. "Yes."
He nods. He doesn’t ask anything else, and I don’t say anything else, and the mountains get smaller in the rearview mirror the rest of the way.
Dr. Henry Park meets us in the lobby of the pediatric wing. He’s already crouching to Cleo’s level when I start to say his name — salt-and-pepper hair, reading glasses on his lanyard, chart in hand but not yet opened — and he looks at her directly, not at the chart.
"Hi, Clementine," he says, shaking her hand. "I’m Dr. Henry. I’m going to help Dr. Clark take a tiny look inside your bones."
Cleo studies him. "With what?"
"A needle."
"Like this morning?"
"A little different. We’re going to give you sleepy medicine first so you don’t feel any of it. And when you wake up, your dad will be right there."
She thinks about this. “Okay,” she says.
David goes in with her for the line and the induction. I don’t. I stand in the hall with my back against the wall, arms crossed, and I count ceiling tiles and grout lines and my own breaths.
The hall smells like antiseptic and floor polish and recycled heat. I know this smell. I’ve spent nine years in buildings that smell exactly like this one, and for eight of them it was just the smell of work. Fourteen months ago it became something else. I stand here now and I breathe through it.
Sixteen ceiling tiles in this section of the hall. Twelve grout lines between here and the elevator. A nurse passes with a cart, doesn’t look at me, doesn’t need to. I’m just another person standing against a wall in a hospital.
Twenty-one minutes. The door stays shut.
A child goes by in a wheelchair, maybe eight, earbuds in, completely unbothered.
Her father is pushing her and reading something on his phone.
The child says something to him without taking the earbuds out, and he laughs without looking up and she grins at the ceiling.
I watch them go past the corner and disappear.
I think about Tommy in the room one floor above where I’m standing right now.
I think about the hall I stood in outside his biopsy — a different hall, same smell, same fluorescent flicker at the far end — and the way the report came back and I already knew what it said before I opened it, because some part of me had known since the first CBC.
I think about his mother in the waiting room with her hands in her lap.
I exhale and stop thinking about it.
Thirty-two minutes. The door stays shut.
I count my own breaths. Four in, hold, four out.
My hands are fine. I make sure they are, checking each finger against my thumb in order — something I do when I need to know my hands are still mine.
They are. I am standing in a hospital hallway, and I am not in that other hallway, and Cleo is not Tommy, and I do not know yet what the biopsy will say.
I don’t know yet. For now, that is enough.
Forty-three minutes and fifteen seconds by the wall clock. Then a nurse waves me down the hall toward recovery.
The alcove sits two doors past the procedure room.
Cleo's on the gurney, the head of the bed tilted up, her eyes half-closed and heavy.
David sits beside her, his hand resting over hers.
Pulse-ox clipped to her finger, reading where it should.
IV taped down in her left hand. Warmed blanket pulled to her chin.
Dr. Henry is at the foot of the bed making notes on a tablet. He looks up at me and gives a small nod. It went fine, then. Or fine enough.
I wait. Cleo blinks at the ceiling, then at her father, then at me. Her voice, when it comes, is small and slow. “Erin.”
“Hello, Cleo.”
There is a long pause. And then, “…popsicle? May I have a red one?”
"Of course,” Dr. Henry says, the corner of his mouth lifting. "There is always red."
"What about orange?" Cleo asks.
"We have it, too."
"Daddy likes orange."
Dr. Henry looks at David. "Two, then."
I follow them toward the elevator. Cleo is in David’s arms now, her head against his shoulder, eyes already closing again.