Exposed (Rosato & DiNunzio #5)(18)
“It’s in Dumbarton’s best interests, and OpenSpace’s, too.”
Nate met her eye, arching an eyebrow. “Why shouldn’t I fire you?”
“You’re too smart to do that.”
Nate burst into laughter. “Good answer!”
“That’s why I make the big bucks.”
Nate’s eyes glittered. “Bennie, come on. Ditch the cop, whatever his name is.”
“It’s Declan, and he’s a lawyer.”
“I bought a coat company for you. Would he do that?”
“I can buy my own coat,” Bennie answered, smiling.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A hazy dusk streaked the sky a copper-tinged blue, as if the sky itself were rusting, and Mary got out of the cab on 34th Street, hoisted her purse and messenger bag to her shoulder, and scanned the ultramodern building, with its curved glass fa?ade. White electrified letters on top read The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in the colonial script favored by the University of Pennsylvania, on whose campus the hospital was situated. Mary had gone to Penn for undergrad and law school, but she had never been to the Children’s Hospital before now.
She beelined for the entrance, crowded with families, visitors, and staff wearing scrubs, their blue ID lanyards flying. She went through the doors, showed ID at the front desk, and entered a cheery, bright atrium that looked ten stories high, hung with colorful mobiles. The floor tile was covered with stars, planets, and circles, like a whimsical solar system, and the lobby was more like a playground than a hospital. Children pulled levers on a funky modern playset and banged on a piano in a glass-walled music area with real instruments. More than one toddler wore a surgical mask, and Mary felt a wrench in her chest as she passed them.
She joined the crowd at the elevator bank and rode up in an elevator packed with staff, families, visitors, and both sick and well children. She couldn’t fight the sensation that she was entering a world that she had never been a part of before. She had grown up so healthily, but she knew from talking with Simon that Rachel lived an entirely different life as a child. Simon never complained, always mindful that Rachel was the patient, and he hid the toll that her illness took on him. He lived every day since her diagnosis with the strain of her up-and-down white cell count, her sudden rashes and mouth sores from chemo, and the fear of sudden or unexplained fevers. Mary sent up a silent prayer for Rachel and every other child at CHOP, fighting a daily battle for something that so many adults and children took for granted. Life itself.
She got off on Oncology, then kept going until she reached the special wing with bright green doors that read Blood & Marrow Transplant Unit, next to a Purell stanchion with a red sign, VISITORS: PLEASE DO NOT VISIT IF YOU ARE FEELING SICK. Mary knew from Simon that she was entering one of the most private areas of the hospital, since its young patients had so little resistance to disease, even less than other cancer patients. In fact, Mary had learned that in order to be able to accept a blood or marrow transplant, the child’s immune system had to be essentially destroyed so that it wouldn’t reject the marrow.
It would be a three-hundred-day countdown to transplant day, and before that would be an endless series of blood tests, a spinal tap to make sure that there were no leukemic cells, three days of total body irradiation followed by three days of chemotherapy using Thiotepa, which required that Rachel be showered every six hours and go to the bathroom every two. Transplant Day would be Day Zero, and Rachel was only on day 278, so the trick would be keeping her in remission and without infection so that she could maintain her eligibility for the transplant. Even so, Mary had been surprised to learn that CHOP’s BMT Unit didn’t require surgical masks unless the patient was in isolation. CHOP wanted to keep its atmosphere as friendly and upbeat as possible, and the nurses and doctors wore street clothes. Visitors weren’t restricted unless the patient was in isolation, which Rachel wasn’t.
Mary used the sanitizer, went through the doors, and walked to the nurses’ station, a curved wooden counter with a colorful mosaic of ducks, butterflies, and flowers. “I’m going to visit Rachel Pensiera in 3E46A,” Mary said, and they gestured to the right. She followed the curve around the desk, and along a path of pretty stripes on the floor matching the mosaic. Children’s pictures hung on the wall, and a homemade bulletin board with a baseball hat that read WE ARE THE ONCO TEAM, THANKS FOR BEING A TEAM PLAYER!! Underneath were homemade baseballs and on each one was a crayoned thank-you to a nurse, a doctor, or a fellow patient.
She passed a painted mural of Ronald McDonald holding a teapot in one hand and a tray of muffins and flowers in the other, which was mounted above a glass door next to a sign, FAMILY LOUNGE. She hadn’t realized that McDonald’s sponsored a lounge here, though her parish church cooked Christmas meals for Ronald McDonald House in West Philly, which was a large home that the company maintained for out-of-town families who needed a place to stay during their children’s hospitalization at CHOP. She turned the corner and kept going until she got to Rachel’s room, easily identifiable because of its cutout of her beloved Horton, the elephant from Dr. Seuss.
Mary peeked through the window and could see Simon sitting next to Rachel’s hospital bed, reading her a book. Rachel looked more pale than she had been, with her eyes closed like half-moons and her little bald head to the side, grasping a plush purple elephant under one arm. The light in the room was gentle, shed by a pink elephant lamp that must have been brought from home. A crayoned sign taped to the head of the bed read RACHEL, and red, white, and blue streamers were woven through its slats, decorations that a healthy child would have put on bicycle spokes.