From Ant to Eagle(30)

“The bone thing.”

He nodded. “The bone marrow biopsy.”

“Yeah.”

“We’ll need to look at the cells inside Sammy’s bones. In order to do that, we put a needle into his hip bone and pull off some of the cells from inside. Then we look at those cells under a microscope to see if there is any cancer there.”

Hold on. Back up.

Did he just say a needle into the bone?! The room began to spin like I’d just put my head on a baseball bat and run in a circle. I felt like if I didn’t sit I was going to fall over so I bent my legs and let myself slide to the floor. I could actually feel the blood drain from my face. My list of Worst Things Imaginable had just gotten one longer but for Sammy’s sake, I decided to keep that to myself.

I looked at my brother. He was sitting silently in the bed watching us as if we weren’t talking about him.

Was he not listening? Did he not hear Dr. Parker speaking as if he were narrating the latest volume in the Goosebumps series starring none other than Sammy himself? Six-year-old boy about to get a needle stuck into his bone and yet, six-year-old boy is mindlessly staring with nothing more than a blank look on his face. Wake up, six-year-old boy! Tell them this has to be a mistake! Tell them you feel fine or that you were just faking it. Why are you just sitting there as if you’re watching cartoons or something? Why are you always too young to understand things that matter?

I wanted to go over and shake Sammy but I couldn’t get up. There was a sick feeling in my stomach.

Dr. Parker was looking at me worriedly.

I looked over at Mom and Dad but I couldn’t tell what they were thinking. Normally I could always tell exactly what they were thinking—Mom’s are-you-hurt-face, Dad’s I’m-concentrating-onmy-paper face, or both of their stop-teasing-your-brother-face—but right then they were as unreadable as a piece of white paper.

Dr. Parker walked over and offered his hand. I reached up and grabbed it and he guided me to Sammy’s bed where I sat down by my brother’s feet. The bed was way too long for Sammy; his feet barely went halfway to the end.

“Don’t worry, it won’t hurt,” Dr. Parker said. “We’ll give Sammy medicine to put him to sleep.”

He kept looking at me so I felt obliged to nod though, really, that didn’t sound much better. I pictured Sammy waking up to find someone standing over him with a white coat, giant needle and a crooked smile. Shhh, go back to sleep, the imaginary doctor whispered, this won’t hurt…much.

Crust, I needed to stop reading Goosebumps books.

There was a long, uncomfortable pause where no one said anything. Dr. Parker walked over to Sammy and patted him on the knee. “Any questions from you, young man?” he asked.

Sammy looked over at me for a second then back to Dr. Parker.

“Will Cal get cancer too?” he asked.

“No,” Dr. Parker said. “It’s very unlikely.”

“But we used the same spoon yesterday,” Sammy said, a guilty look on his face.

Dr. Parker smiled. “You don’t have to worry about that. It’s not like a cold. You can’t give it to someone by using the same spoon.”

Sammy laid his head back on the pillow, but I could tell he was still thinking this through. I knew I’d have to explain everything later because I could tell when he didn’t understand something. It was like when we’d be sitting in the tree fort reading a Goosebumps book and I’d read a word that he didn’t understand. He’d let me read on a little further, but I knew he was still thinking about it because he always got this scrunched up look on his face when he didn’t get something. Then a few sentences later he’d stop me and ask what “gruesome” meant, or whatever the word had been, and I’d have to stop and explain it to him.

“Any other questions?” Dr. Parker asked.

He looked first at Mom and Dad but their faces were still blank paper, then back to me.

Of course I had questions—lots of them. But more than anything I just had to ask, “Is Sammy going to die?”

The silence that overtook the room was terrifying. I saw Dad swallow hard and his eyes glaze over, Mom looked away as if I had just said the most awful thing imaginable. Dr. Parker’s smile faded briefly but returned again—like the sun dipping behind a cloud before popping out the other side.

“Let’s take things one step at a time. Right now, you don’t have to worry about that. Once we do the bone marrow biopsy and have a better idea of what’s going on, we’ll know what medicines we can give Sammy to make him better. Sound like a plan?”

Why couldn’t he have just said “no?” I’d wished so badly back then that he could have just said “no.” One word would have meant the world to me. But I know now that he couldn’t. He didn’t know the answer. No one knew.

I spent the rest of that night thinking about the bone needle and whether Sammy was going to die while pretending to Sammy that I wasn’t thinking about the bone needle and whether he was going to die.

After Dr. Parker had left, Mom and Dad stood up and said they needed to go grab something from the cafeteria. I could tell by the shakiness in their voices that they didn’t need to go to the cafeteria, they just needed to go somewhere else. So they both hugged Sammy for a really long time and told him everything would be okay, even though they didn’t know that everything would be okay, and just as Dad pulled away from Sammy he broke down and started to cry but instead pretended to be coughing, which only made it worse.