The Last Letter(12)

I nodded my thanks as the kids opened their costumes. Such an ordinary thing in extraordinary circumstances.

Ada wrapped her arm around my shoulders, pulling me in tight.

“It feels more trick than treat,” I said quietly so the kids didn’t hear me. They giggled and changed, trading pieces so Maisie wore Ryan’s Kevlar helmet and Colt had a sparkly, silver halo.

“These are rough days we have coming,” Ada agreed. “But you’ve raised a pair of fighters right there. Maisie won’t give up, and Colt sure won’t let her.”

“Thank you for the costumes. I can’t believe I forgot. And everything with Solitude, and gearing up for the season—”

“Stop right there, missy. I’ve been raising you since you came to Solitude. It’s always been you and Ryan, and Ruth, Larry, and me. Ruth was strong, but she knew it would take all of us to pull you kids through after you lost both your parents. Don’t you worry about a thing back home. Larry has it under control. And as for the costumes, you have bigger things in that beautiful head of yours. Just let me feel useful and remember the little ones.”

…

So many scans. CT. PET. The letters ran amok in my head while she was in surgery. They called it minor. The tumor they found on her left adrenal gland and kidney was anything but.

Another conference room, but I wasn’t sitting down. I was taking whatever news they had for me standing up. Period.

“Ms. MacKenzie,” Dr. Hughes addressed me as she walked in with a team of doctors. I was grateful for whatever arrangement she had with Montrose that allowed her to be here, to have the same face, the same voice with me.

“Well?”

“We performed the biopsy and tested both the tumor and the bone marrow.”

“Okay.” My arms were crossed tightly, doing their best to hold the rest of me together.

“I’m so sorry, but your daughter’s case is very aggressive and advanced. In most neuroblastoma cases, the symptoms present much sooner than this. But Maisie’s condition has been progressing without any outward signs. It’s likely been advancing undetected for years.”

Years. A monster had been growing inside my child for years.

“What are you trying to tell me?”

Dr. Hughes walked around the table to take my hand where I stood rocking back and forth like the twins were still babies in my arms in need of soothing.

“Maisie has stage four neuroblastoma. It’s taken over 90 percent of her bone marrow.”

I kept my eyes locked on her dark brown ones, knowing the moment I lost that contact, I’d be drowning again. Already the walls felt like they were closing in, the other doctors fading from my peripheral vision.

“90 percent?” My voice was barely a whisper.

“I’m afraid so.”

I swallowed and focused on bringing air in and out of my lungs, trying to find the courage to ask the obvious question. The one I couldn’t force past my lips, because the minute it came out and she answered, everything would change.

“Ella?” Doctor Hughes prompted.

“What’s her outlook? Her prognosis? What do we do?”

“We attack it immediately and without mercy. We start with chemo, and we move forward. We fight. She fights. And when she’s too tired to fight, then you do what you can to fight for her, because this is an all-out war.”

“What are her chances?”

“Ella, I’m not sure you want—”

“What are her chances?” I shouted with the last of my energy.

Dr. Hughes paused, then squeezed my hand.

“She has a 10 percent chance of surviving.”

That roaring returned to my ears, but I shoved it away, concentrating on every word Dr. Hughes said. I needed every ounce of information.

“She has a 10 percent chance of surviving this?” I echoed, needing her to tell me that I’d heard wrong.

“No. She has a 10 percent chance of surviving the year.”

My knees gave out as my back hit the wall. I slid, paper crumpling behind me as my weight took down whatever had been there. I landed on the floor, unable to do anything but breathe. Voices spoke, and I heard but didn’t understand what they said.

In my mind, they repeated one thing over and over. “10 percent chance.”

My daughter had a 10 percent chance of living through this year.

Which meant she had a 90 percent chance of dying, of those angel wings she refused to take off becoming very real.

Focus on the ten. Ten was better than nine.

Ten was…everything.

…

I pulled myself together. Chemo. PICC Line. Appointments in Montrose and Denver. Aggressive cancer meant an aggressive plan. Binders full of information, notebooks with scribbles. Planners and apps and research studies became my every waking moment. My life changed in those first few days.

I changed.

As if my soul had caught fire, I felt a burning in my chest, a driving purpose that eclipsed all else. My daughter would not die.

Colt would not lose his sister.

This would not break me, or my family. Holding it together was my second priority only to Maisie’s survival.

I didn’t cry. Not when I wrote the letters to Ryan and to Chaos. Not when I told Colt and Maisie how sick she was. Not when she started vomiting after that first session of chemo, and not when a month later, during her second week-long session, her beautiful blond hair fell out in clumps the day before her sixth birthday. I nearly lost it when Colt showed up from the barber with Larry—his head as shiny and bald as his sister’s—but I just smiled. He’d refused to be separated during their birthday, and as much as I didn’t want him to see what she went through during chemo, I was incredibly thankful to be with both of them, not to be in a constant state of worry about one while I was caring for the other.