Chapter Seventeen

In my room at the Ronald McDonald house, the last resident had left a calendar. It's a diary of sorts, the small boxes that are supposed to represent days filled with appointment reminders, medicine changes, drug reactions, simple facts of life with a dying child.

Meagan admitted, relapse, acute lymphoblastic leukemia. chemo/radiation ruled out as options cbc-white count 1500 Meagan falls getting to bathroom, breaks tibia, wheelchair bound hip bone marrow aspiration, spinal tap done

m.d.b.g and g tested for compatibility. negative. Meagan put on bone marrow transplant list

The notes are jottings of facts, but I wonder how many tears were shed writing them.

The notes end abruptly. I don't know how to interpret the facts of the last few days to know if it ended well, but I tend to think not. If'n it were me, I'd take the calendar home and put it in the baby box where I keep Ashley's treasured things, so that one day I could pull it out and show her and say--

But I don't know what I'd say. See how God answers prayers? See what a little faith can accomplish? Or will I say, See how miraculous science is? See what the persistence of doctors and the will of a family can accomplish?

I sit on the bed fingering the pages, the glossy photos of Texas wildflowers. I find a pen and turn back a month, just two days after Meagan's last treatment and write, "Ashley admitted, diagnosed type 1 diabetes." I fill in as many days I can. First low blood sugar. First shots: lantus and humalin. Leave hospital. And then I stop to decide if I want to fill in the days we are home and decide not to, merely drawing a line though them with the word HOME on top,

Next I fill in our current stay. I end with today. 1 month anniversary. Dr. says desens a failure. It is all that will fit in the box but it says so little about what is going on.

Travis walks out of the bathroom as I'm hanging it back on the wall. "The shower was cold tonight."

"Visiting hours are over. Everyone is coming back to clean up for dinner." Dinner has come to mean less of a meal and more a time of day. No one here eats much.

He looks at the calendar where I've written and points at a blank one at the end of the month. "One day we'll write, 'took Ashley home' on one of those squares," he says.

"Not take it home?"

"No. We should leave it for the next family. So they know."

"About Ashley?"

"Yes. And hope."

I don't answer, so he takes me by the shoulders and turns me around.

"You have to believe, Babs."

"In what?"

"Just believe--that Ashley will get better."

But that makes no sense to me. You can't just believe without believing in something. And right now neither God nor science is pulling through for me.

"Did Dr. Benton tell you what he's going to do now?" Travis asks.

"No," I answer.

Travis lets go of me and picks up his towel to rub his hair dry. "He said he has someone flying in to talk to us tomorrow. Where are you going?"

"Back to the hospital. Do you want to come?"

"I thought we were going to spend some time together. I just got here. I ain't hardly seen you in weeks."

"Then come with me."

"We can't talk there. Not in front of Ashley."

"She's asleep."

"Exactly. Now's the perfect time to go out. Let me take you out for real food, Babs."

It's been three weeks since our last eating out disaster, and seeing as how that one didn't end so well, I'm not anxious to repeat it. "I'm not hungry."

"It's not about the food."

"So why go out?"

"To be together," he insists. I want to remind him that our last togetherness thing ended with me alone at the table and him fuming in the bathroom until his enchilada got cold.

"We can be together in the hospital."

"This conversation's like a dog chasing his tail." He grabs the remote to the TV and throws himself in the one chair we got in the room.

"What?"

"Just go." He punches buttons on the remote. A baseball game appears.

"Are you coming with me?"

"No."

When I get to Ashley's room she's asleep, and I sit in the dark watching her chest rise and fall. Her hair has thinned, and she is ghostly white.

I should be at the house with Travis. We've barely spoken in the weeks since Ashley and I packed up and moved our lives to Austin. He drives back and forth every night and we talk on the phone, but mostly when we talk it's about his roofing job and TV shows and Logan, who is now out of school and working at a music store selling guitar strings and clarinet reeds. The conversations are clipped; we are both exhausted. If we speak about anything truly important, we argue, so we don't.

It's not because of Ashley, though. It's been years since we've had more than these surface conversations. I don't know when we stopped having the real conversations that newlyweds have: the kinds that are about what you hope and dream for your life and for the world in general. It must have been when I couldn't see no further than getting through the piles of laundry and how to make dinner with no cheese or ground beef in the house. Sometime around when Travis gave up running his own contracting business to work for someone else so we could have insurance and afford to fix the brakes on the truck.

Brakes and insurance are important things, but not much of a conversation starter.

The monitor hooked up to Ashley's heart is beating unbearably fast. Tiny bleeps across a black screen. I move over to the bed and sit beside her. Brushing her hair back, I can tell her head is hot, like she's running a fever. I feel like she's slipping away from me.

"Can't we do a transplant?" I asked Dr. Benton last week. Pulling out my notebook and flipping to the pages full of examples of islet and pancreas transplants, I ask again, "Why aren't we doing this?"

"I'm not ruling it out. But she's going to be hard to find a match, and on top of that, the success rate is about 64 percent. The likelihood that her immune system would attack the new pancreas is high. It's just delaying the decision we have to make now."

"But it might buy us time, right? Isn't that all we need? A little more time? Then maybe that mice vaccine thing might be working."

"We don't want to trade one very serious problem with another. There's a risk of death with the surgery, along with a long list of complications that could have Ashley needing to come back to the hospital several times a year. And whether the new pancreas works or not, Ashley would have to be on immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of her life."

"We'd be trading one poison for another?"

"In a sense. There's also a good chance, a very real chance, that the transplant would only be partially successful."

"How can it be partially successful?"

"The body accepts the new pancreas. It works, but not well enough that the diabetic can stop taking insulin altogether."

"What about the baby teeth thing?" I say, switching gears easily.

"We can't use her baby teeth. I've told you that. But it might lead to something else. I'm still researching."

"When?"

"I can't tell you when it will be, or if it will be something at all. I'm trying here just as hard as you, Mrs. Babcock." As I cool Ashley's head now with a washcloth, hopelessness fills me. Every road is a dead end.

~~~~

I lost Logan when he was four in a Wal-Mart. We'd gone to get the kids' Christmas pictures taken, and Ashley was in the cart in a red velvet dress. Logan walked up and down the aisle with me hunting for ingredients to make sugar cookies. While we were sorting through the cookie cutters choosing shapes, I noticed Logan had a plastic candy cane in his chubby fist--one of the big clear things full of red and green chocolate candies.

"Where the Sam Hill did you get that thing?"

"Can we buy it, Mama?"

"No. Where'd it come from?"

He pointed to the end of the aisle. I swung the cart around to return it, and Ashley reached out at the same time to grab an angel cutter. The entire display cascaded to the floor. Ashley squealed and clapped her hands as I looked at the dozens of brightly colored shapes around the cart.

"I'll pick 'em up. You go put that back. Straight there and back, you understand?"

Logan nodded solemnly and took off for the display. I sighed and knelt to put the cookie cutters back in their box. When I finished I stood and looked for Logan. He was gone.

"Dadburnit. Now where'd he go?" We high-tailed it to the end of the aisle. There was a cardboard display with 24 holes for the plastic candy canes. Not one was missing.

I looked around but he wasn't there. I kept walking, looking down each aisle but he wasn't there. My heart started beating a little faster as I reversed direction and went the other way. Still no Logan. I started calling his name, quiet at first to not draw attention to us, but then more loud. Customers stopped to ask if I needed help and they, too, fanned out, looking. Someone brought me the store manager.

"Is there a problem?"

"I lost my son. He was right here, and then he wasn't. He's four, about this high, brown hair, brown eyes. He's wearing black pants and a red sweater with a reindeer on it."

He spoke into a walkie-talkie, sending employees to the toy section and the front doors and soon lights were going off and the intercom was announcing a Code Adam and everything shut down.

They found him in the shampoo aisle, frightened and wondering how he'd gotten turned around.

For months after that I had dreams about losing him, waking with that awful pit in my stomach. Even though I knew it was a dream, I'd sneak into his room in the middle of the night and put my hand on his back to feel him breathing, just to make sure.

The dreams went away before he turned six, and I stopped checking that he was breathing every night. And in those little acts of negligence, I lost him all over again.

~~~~