I worry about Mom getting through this too. She’s not exactly a rock. Neil doesn’t want us to worry. He wants us to go on with our lives. But how am I supposed to concentrate every day in school, wondering if he really does have cancer again?
I miss you, Ethan. I wish I could see you and talk to you. You always cheered me up whenever I felt down this summer. I still think about summer, you know. I still remember our being together, and your trying out English things. How are things going with your family? I know you miss Rebekah. I know I do. But whenever I start to miss her big-time, I think about the day of her funeral and what I saw in the woods. That always makes me feel better.
In your last letter, you asked me how my doctor’s appointment went in September. Dr. Thomas says I’m doing just fine and that my MRI and X rays look clear.
Leah stopped writing and leaned back in her desk chair. The house was eerily quiet. Outside her window, the night looked black and deep. Her windowpane felt cool. Leah shivered. She reread what she’d written and shivered again. Her X rays looked clear and she didn’t have to go back in for a checkup until spring. Yet a hard, cold knot had settled in her stomach. She couldn’t seem to get rid of it. Yes, it was true that things looked good for her medically. But then Neil had thought the same thing. He’d thought he was perfectly fine. And now he was sick again.
Leah didn’t want anything to happen to Neil. He’d been good to her mother, good to Leah. He was different from the other stepfathers she’d had. He was kind, generous. Neil had to get well. She and her mother needed him.
Leah buried her face in her hands and wept.
THREE
“Hey, Leah! Wait up!”
Leah turned to see Sherry Prater, a girl from her English class, coming toward her down the hall. While they weren’t exactly best buddies, Sherry was friendly and energetic, and Leah liked her. Sherry was overweight, and therefore not on the social A-list. This suited Leah just fine. Leah had been with the in crowd at her former high school and thought the distinction highly overrated. “What’s up?” she asked the out-of-breath Sherry.
“I was wondering if you were going to the football game Friday night. I thought we might hook up and sit together.”
“I forgot about the game.”
Sherry stared at Leah as if she were speaking a foreign language. “This game’s against Henderson. They’re our biggest rival! Everybody’s going.”
“My stepfather’s not well,” Leah said. “He’s in the hospital.” In fact, Neil had been in the hospital for the better part of the week.
“I didn’t know.” Sherry’s brown eyes filled with concern. “Is he going to be all right?”
“I don’t know yet. He’s going through some tests.”
“That’s too bad. When you find out what’s wrong, will you tell me?”
Leah agreed. “As for the game, I’ll let you know if I decide to go.”
Sherry looked pleased. “It’s not just because everybody’s going that I want to go,” she confided. “It’s because of Dave Simmons.” Her eyes took on a soft look. “I think he’s so gorgeous.”
Dave was Johnson High’s primary football star. Leah thought him conceited, vain and even cruel. One boy had been sent to the hospital after Dave had crushed him during a game. The next day, Dave had bragged about it. “You really like him?” Leah asked.
Sherry nodded. “Of course, he’ll never notice me, but it’s nice to dream.”
“I know what you mean,” Leah said, thinking of Ethan.
“You’ve got a guy?”
“He doesn’t live around here.”
“A long-distance romance …”
Leah chuckled over Sherry’s dreamy expression. “Actually, he’s Amish.”
Sherry’s jaw dropped. “Are you kidding? The Amish keep to themselves. How’d you even find each other?”
“It’s a long story.” Leah realized she’d said more than she’d meant to. “Listen, I’ve got to run.” She waved goodbye and hurried out to her car in the student parking lot. The October air smelled crisp and clean, and the sky was a brilliant blue. Yet she felt sad and lonely. Mentioning Ethan had only made her miss him more. She had no idea when she’d see him again. Still, he had promised he would come see her. And Ethan always kept his word. Right now, his promise was the only bright spot in her life.
———
When Leah got to Neil’s hospital room, her mother was there, as was Neil’s oncologist, Dr. Nguyen. She was a young, petite Asian woman with black hair held against the nape of her neck by an eye-catching silver barrette.
Neil said, “Doctor, this is my daughter, Leah.”
His introduction surprised Leah. He’d called her his daughter.
Dr. Nguyen smiled an acknowledgment. “I’ve just been going over your father’s test results.”
Leah caught Neil’s eye. The transition had been made. Without ceremony, she’d officially passed from “step” into daughter status. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it. At the moment, she didn’t have time to dwell on it, because Dr. Nguyen was continuing to talk.
“There is evidence of cancer in your liver, Mr. Dutton.”
The words fell like heavy weights. Leah’s mother cried, “No!” Leah felt sick to her stomach.
“Everything points to it—abdominal bloating, the tenderness in that area when I examined you, your jaundice, plus the radioisotope scan and the needle biopsy. The pathologist’s report shows a clear grouping of cancerous cells.”
“I don’t believe it!” Leah’s mother blurted out.
“I wouldn’t make this up, Mrs. Dutton,” the doctor said.
Neil took his wife’s hand. “It’ll be all right, Roberta.”
Leah saw tears fill her mother’s eyes and her knuckles grow white as she gripped the bed rail. Her mother said, “But they took out his bad kidney years ago. How could he have cancer in his liver now?”
“Some maverick cells escaped surgery and chemo. It happens. The cells get into the bloodstream, travel down the portal vein and metastasize in the liver. They can lie dormant, then activate.”
Neil cleared his throat. “All right. That’s the worst of it. What are we going to do about it?”
“Chemotherapy is the standard treatment procedure.”
Neil winced. “It didn’t work before. How about radiation?”
“Unfortunately, radiation is very destructive to liver cells and not very harmful to liver cancer cells.”
“What about surgery?” Leah’s mother asked.
“Not an option in Neil’s case.”
“I hate chemo,” Neil said sullenly.
Dr. Nguyen put her hand on Neil’s arm. “We have made improvements in the drugs since you went through it before. The side effects can be much less horrific. I’m going to do a minor surgical procedure to insert a shunt into your abdomen. You’ll wear an infusion pump and the chemo will be administered automatically, in small amounts, twenty-four hours a day.”
“When do I start?”
“I want to begin treatment at once.”
“Will it work this time?” Roberta’s question sounded hostile and accusatory, as if Dr. Nguyen was somehow to blame for Neil’s diagnosis.
“Second chemo protocols aren’t always as successful as the first,” Dr. Nguyen said cautiously. “But it’s still your best hope.”
Leah let her words sink in. By the time she grasped the full meaning, Dr. Nguyen was talking again. “I’m scheduling you for surgery tomorrow morning. I’ll get the shunt in and get you regulated. You should be headed home in a couple of days.”
“Then what?”
“Then we wait it out, keep testing you for progress and see what happens.”
Leah, Neil and her mother all looked into each other’s eyes. No one asked the obvious: “What happens if it doesn’t work?”
Leah went home alone, leaving her mother and Neil to have dinner together in his hospital room. They had asked her to stay, but she excused herself, saying she had hom
ework. In truth, she couldn’t stand hanging around the hospital one more minute.
At home, she brought in the mail and found a letter from Ethan. Eagerly she tore open the envelope.
Dear Leah,
I just got your letter and am writing you right away. I am sick inside my heart about your stepfather’s illness. I have also told Charity and together we will pray for him. And for you and your mother.
I also miss you, Leah. I, too, think of our summer with each other. Your smile is always before me, inside my mind, making my heart glad. On weekends, I still dress English and go into town to be with my friends. Except it is not nearly so much fun as when you lived in town. I pass by the apartment building where you lived and I want to run up and pound on the door and have you open it and let me inside. But you are not here, no matter how hard I wish for it.
We miss Rebekah very much. Ma cries sometimes when she thinks no one sees her. She and Oma and Charity go to the cemetery some afternoons, just to be with Rebekah, even though we know her spirit is with God and only her body lies under the ground.
I fear that Pa and I are not getting along very well. He wants me to return to church and stop running with “that wild bunch” (as he calls my friends). I tell him over and over that I am not yet ready, but it only makes him angry. It is good that we have so much work to do on the farm to prepare for winter. Hard work keeps us too tired to argue.
Sarah had her baby—a little boy they named Josiah Christian. He is very handsome. I like being an uncle. When he grows up, I will tell him of his aunt Rebekah. She would have loved him. Like a little doll.
I must close now, for it is late and my lamp is burning low. Thank you for your letters, Leah. They make my days happier. I keep the picture of you in my pocket, next to my heart.
Ethan
P.S. Charity says that I am to tell you hello. Hello.
Leah finished reading the letter through tear-filled eyes. The ache within her was so real she was certain it would ooze through her skin and onto the paper. She reread the letter, then pressed it against her cheek, imagining the paper in Ethan’s hands, touching his skin.
Leah had returned from the summer believing that with Rebekah’s death, the worst was over, that there was no place to go but up. But now Neil had been diagnosed with liver cancer and her mother was falling apart. Leah and Ethan were miles away from each other. She still had to face future checkups for her own health—which, she now realized, was a total unknown.
What about me? Leah wondered. Will I get sick again too?
Like Neil, Leah had convinced herself that cancer was behind her—that either Gabriella had made it disappear or the chemo treatments had succeeded. Like Neil, Leah thought she was home free. But Neil’s cancer had returned like an evil ghost. And now he had to begin his fight against it all over again.
Leah vowed to help him however she could. They were comrades in a battle against a mutual enemy. She’d lost her real father without ever knowing him. She didn’t want to lose this one.
FOUR
Leah didn’t think twice. The next morning, the day of Neil’s minor surgery, she missed school and sat with her mother in the waiting area. She wished the two of them could be anyplace else. “He’ll be fine,” Roberta insisted. “Neil has the constitution of a much younger man. This won’t keep him down for long.” Her mother’s forced cheerfulness got on Leah’s nerves. Roberta was the picture of health. She didn’t know what it felt like to be shattered by the three words You have cancer.
“I just want him to be okay,” Leah said with emotion. “It isn’t fair he has to go through this twice.”
“No, it isn’t,” her mother agreed. “But then, when has it ever been fair?”
Neil needed several more days in the hospital after the surgery, but by the end of the week he was sent home to recuperate. He wore sensors, wires, and tubing that controlled the constant flow of chemotherapy drugs into his body. A special belt around his waist held a small black monitoring device that resembled an overgrown pager. It beeped if a line clogged.
“How’s your stepfather doing?” Sherry asked Leah after school a few weeks later. They were putting their books in their lockers.
“He’s hanging in there. He sleeps a lot, and he’s sick to his stomach, but his doctor says he’ll gradually adjust and then he’ll feel better.”
“It’s so awful that he’s got cancer. It’s such a scary disease.”
Leah thought, You don’t know the half of it, but said, “Neil can handle it.”
“Are you going to the Harvest Ball?” Sherry changed the subject. Next to the prom, the Harvest Ball was the biggest event of the high-school year.
“I don’t think so.” Leah shut her locker and twirled the combination lock. “I really don’t want to.”
“Is it because of that guy you told me about? The Amish one?”
“Even if Ethan weren’t in my life, there’s still nobody I’d like to go with.” Leah had gotten only two more letters from Ethan. She made excuses for him to herself—that he was busy with farmwork and exhausted by day’s end—but she couldn’t get Martha Dewberry out of her mind. Martha had all but told Leah last summer that once she was out of the picture, Ethan would come back to Martha, the Amish girl his parents wanted him to marry. Leah hoped it wasn’t true, but she and Ethan were so far apart and weren’t getting any closer.
“I’d give anything to be asked,” Sherry said with a sigh.
“Maybe someone will ask you.”
“Right. And maybe there really is a Santa Claus.”
“Stop putting yourself down. You’re a great person, Sherry. A guy would be lucky to go out with you.”
“If only boys thought like girls instead of boys,” Sherry said. “I know I’m not pretty.” She gave Leah a wistful smile. “Anyway, it’s nice of you to say that, Leah.”
By the time Leah got to the parking lot, most of the cars were gone. Her red convertible sat by itself in the sunlight. She was about to get inside when she heard someone call her name. She turned to see Dave Simmons coming toward her.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Leah saw Dave’s car sitting near the back of the parking lot. Several of his football buddies were lounging against it. “What is it?” she asked.
Dave’s neck was as thick as a bull’s, his hands as large as ham hocks. His head was shaved except for a brown tuft on top. Because of his sheer size, he reminded Leah of Jonah Dewberry, Ethan’s friend whom she hadn’t liked too much.
Dave glanced over at his friends. “I want to ask you to the Harvest Ball.”
Leah stared at him blankly.
“You haven’t been asked yet, have you?”
Leah shook her head, trying to assemble her thoughts. “I hadn’t planned on going,” she finally said.
Dave grinned. “Then plan on going with me.”
He tossed another look toward his friends, which irritated Leah. “Thanks, but no thanks.”
He stared at her as if he hadn’t heard correctly. “But I want to take you.”
Looking at this boy brought back memories of Ethan, of his gentleness and his quiet, unassuming manner. Dave figured every girl in the school was dying to be noticed by him, and it irked her. “Look, if you want to ask somebody, ask Sherry Prater.”
“Who?”
“Sherry. You must know her. The girl whose locker’s next to mine.”
“That cow?” Dave shook his head. “No way.”
Leah saw red. “She’s a nice person, and you have no right to call her names.” She jerked open her car door and swung into the seat.
“Hey!” Dave looked startled. “I asked you to go to the dance with me.”
“Not if you were the last person on earth.” Leah threw the car into gear and drove out of the parking lot, leaving Dave Simmons standing on the asphalt.
Leah’s rejection of Dave’s offer became the talk of the school. Even Sherry asked, “Why did you say no? I can’t b
elieve it. Was it because you knew I liked him?”
“He’s not my type.” Leah vowed she’d never tell Sherry what Dave had said about her.
“Well, I’d give anything if he’d asked me. Course, we both know he never would.”
“Don’t waste yourself,” Leah said. “You’re too good for him.”
“A girl can wish, can’t she?” Sherry asked.
“Sure,” Leah said with a shrug. “Dreaming’s free.” She dreamed about Ethan, but dreaming hadn’t brought him any closer. And she had once dreamed of belonging to a nice little family, but with Neil’s illness, that dream was caving in on her too.
Over the next few weeks, Neil slowly rallied as he adjusted to his chemo dose. It was mid-November when he asked Leah, “Would you walk with me out to the barn?”
“Sure.” The refurbished barn was where Neil kept his collection of antique automobiles. He had once enjoyed polishing them, tuning up their already perfect engines, and sometimes taking Leah and her mother out for a drive in the countryside. But his medical ordeal had kept him preoccupied and away from the old machines.
When they reached the barn, Leah slid open the door and turned on the light. Large tarpaulin-covered mounds peppered the clean cement floor. How different this barn was from the one on Ethan’s farm, where the smell of hay and livestock filled the air.
Neil walked over to one of the hulking mounds and peeled back the cover to reveal a shiny maroon-and-chrome hood. He patted the metal surface as if it were a pet. “I’ve collected these cars all my life. They’re worth a great deal of money. I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s time to start selling them.”
“You can’t do that,” Leah declared, alarmed by the resignation in Neil’s voice. “You love these cars. Who’ll take care of them the way you have?”
“Any number of enthusiasts,” Neil said.
“Well, I think it’s a bad idea. You’re going to regret it if you do.”
“I can’t keep them up the way they should be kept,” Neil said sadly. “I feel lousy.”