After the End(50)

How many times have we read that book to Dylan? How many times did he trot over to the bookcase in his room, and drag over Chocolate Mousse for Greedy Goose? How many times did we say Not that again, and Dylan bounced up and down and said That one, that one!

“. . . but lazy Sheep says, ‘no, let’s . . . s l e e p.’”

This is where Dylan says Again, again! This is where he throws his arms around Pip and kisses her mouth and laughs and says No sleep! and where Pip untangles herself and tells him Bedtime now, little man. There are big adventures waiting for you tomorrow.

But the scene in front of me won’t follow the script, and my heart hurts so bad I think it might give up. I don’t think I say anything, but perhaps I do, because Pip looks up, and I know she’s playing the same movie in her head that I am.

“I’m sorry—I know I shouldn’t be here.”

“It’s OK.”

I walk across the room and kiss Dylan. His forehead is hot and damp, the wisps of hair clinging to his head. I sit in the chair next to Pip. I’m shocked by how thin she looks, how tired.

“What’s going to happen to us, Max?” Her voice is tremulous. She doesn’t look at me but keeps her eyes fixed on Dylan, whose chest rises and falls beneath his white blanket. I think of the knitted yellow squares Pip was going to make into a throw for his room, and wonder what became of them.

I fight to keep control. “I guess we’ll find out in court.”

“Not Dylan.” She looks at me. “Us. What’s happening to us, Max?”

I want to hold her, to kiss her, to tell her how much I still love her, despite everything. How I’m almost as scared of losing her as I am of losing Dylan.

But I walked out on her. I’m fighting her. I’m the last person she wants holding her. So I say nothing. And eventually she turns away.





twenty





Leila


Leila can feel the tension in the air. Emmett has decreed that three nurses be kept on late, and another two brought on early, but the extra staff have added a nervousness to the ward that isn’t helping. The cleaners have been briefed to be extra thorough, rightly resenting the implication they are ever anything but. Yin and Cheryl have taken down curling pieces of paper reminding people to Wash your hands and replaced them with laminated signs. The entire ward is standing to attention, and all for one man.

Dr. Gregory Clark Sanders Jr. is an easy decade older than the photograph on his website, which shows him as a thrusting young doctor, sitting splayed-legged in a mahogany office. Leila has looked at the photograph several times—has read the impressive list of qualifications held by the Houston specialist—and has, each time, felt a little less impressive herself, a little less qualified.

Now, as she walks up the corridor toward the glass door at the entrance to PICU, she feels her confidence coming back. Gregory Sanders is a small, slightly built man, with sandy-colored hair and a pleasant face with no sign of the smugness exhibited on his website. He extends a hand as she approaches.

“Dr. Sanders, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Call me Greg.”

Leila is not good at accents. She anticipated a stronger one from Greg—the Texan drawl she remembered from the reruns of Dallas Ruby loved to watch—but Greg Sanders’s accent seems to her to be little different to Max’s.

“And this is my barrister, Laura King.” Max puts a hand on the shoulder of a woman in her midforties, with expensive caramel highlights in her shoulder-length hair. She wears a navy blazer with white tailored trousers, and looks as though she should be taking the air in Monte Carlo, not standing in the entrance of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at St. Elizabeth’s Children’s Hospital, Birmingham.

“Welcome to PICU.” Leila takes them to the sink and waits while they wash their hands. Yin walks by, trying not to stare, but surely feeling the same way as the rest of the staff about this American specialist who claims he can succeed where they have failed. His visit carries implicit criticism that makes them all as defensive as they are curious. Leila is curious, too, but although she spends the next hour with Greg, he asks more than he offers, and she learns little beyond what she already knows.

“Houston ProTherapy has the highest success rates in the world,” he says, as they reach Room 1. “We have state-of-the-art equipment, and our staff are outstanding.”

Leila feels instantly protective of her own outstanding team. She wonders how Greg’s staff would cope with NHS budget cuts and insufficient resources, whether Houston ProTherapy ever has to rely on grateful parents to buy lifesaving defibrillators.

“The main advantage of proton therapy is being able to direct the beam and have it stop where you want it to stop.” Greg is answering a question from Laura King, but as he talks he makes eye contact with everyone in turn, making Leila feel as though she is back in the lecture room. “With medulloblastoma we treat the cerebral spinal fluid pathway, the whole brain, and the whole spine, but with none of the spread of radiation that occurs with conventional treatment.”

He is standing next to Dylan, moving his hands to indicate where and how treatment will be administered, but he hasn’t yet said hello to him. He hasn’t touched the child’s arm and introduced himself, explained that he’d like to take a look at his chart, and that he’s here to help him. Leila knows that Dylan has little or no awareness of who is standing by his bed, but even so, she has to bite her lip. Dylan Adams is a child, not a case study. She strokes his forehead and silently tells him It’s all OK, just a lot of talking.