A Morning Like This (37 page)

“Will it work, Dad?” Braden must have asked a hundred times while they drove west on the highway, through American Falls and
Meridian, the four-lane winding down deep, curvy plateau edges as they headed toward Pendleton. “Do they know it’s going to
help?”

“They think it’ll help. They can’t be sure,” David answered. Braden didn’t know what to do to make the time go faster. He
counted mile markers as they disappeared along the pavement.

Road-worn and travel-weary, they all helped read the maps and point out the street signs to help David find the way in Portland.
They got stuck on the wrong interstate going the wrong direction at least two different times.

When they got to Sam’s room in the hospital, they had to put on masks. “Can you believe it?” she asked. In her hand, she was
holding the old dusty rabbit’s foot his mother had given her. When she hugged their father, Braden noticed she had tears in
her eyes.

During the entire process, things changed and got harder every day. Braden stayed with his sister, talking and waiting, finding
things to do with Sam for as long as they would let him. He brought her a Slinky and some Silly Putty.

He got into trouble for the Silly Putty because it stuck to the bed.

On the opposite wall from Sam’s pillow, Dr. Riniker hung a chalkboard where nurses wrote down numbers after the doctor tested
her blood. “You’re doing a good job,” Braden heard him say to Sam one day after she’d stopped feeling very good. “I know the
chemo’s tough, little one.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “My brother’s here.”

While Sam lay there, her brown hair, which he’d liked so much in her pictures, fell out in big clumps.

For a few days after they arrived in Portland, Sam’s room seemed like a party. Friends stopped in to visit. Get-Well cards
lined an entire wall. Flowers topped every surface and bouquets of balloons bobbed beside the bed. But then, as time passed,
things had gotten quiet. The green, pink, and purple lines on the Hewlett Packard monitor moved in mesmerizing waves. Occasionally,
when a beeper went off, a nurse would rush in and adjust a setting on Sam’s oxygen.

Braden knew, without anybody telling him, that this had become very frightening and serious.

Dr. Riniker measured Sam’s blood early on Tuesday morning. He scribbled figures on the chart, and the nurse erased the numbers
on the chalkboard and wrote, “Red-.01. White-.01.”

His sister didn’t wake up that morning to play tictac-toe with him or to make the funny, bare rabbit’s foot of his mother’s
scamper without its body across the blanket. She kept sleeping all day.

“She’s almost down to zero,” Braden overheard a nurse say to Sam’s mother. “What’s done is done now. There’s nothing left
to do. Only time will tell.”

And Braden kept praying.

As the hours progressed for Samantha, Abby watched Susan forget that anyone else was in the room. She only left when she needed
to remove her mask. Sam’s immunities were so low from the chemo, the doctor made those who entered keep their faces covered.

Abby watched Susan go without meals because she didn’t want to leave her child.

She listened as Susan sat close beside her daughter’s head against the pillow, not knowing whether she could hear or not,
while she sang “Day O” through her mask just like Harry Belafonte.

Abby watched while Susan swept her hand across the dome of her daughter’s head as gently as if she was rearranging downy fuzz
on a baby’s head, making herself remember, as if she had sculpted the smooth shape of it herself.

As days passed, Susan stood at her daughter’s bedside, more isolated and friendless than anybody Abby had ever seen. “It was
an anonymous donor,” she said aloud once, even though she’d never glanced in their direction. “We don’t even know where it
came from. Maybe Jackson Hole.”

“You’ll never know, will you?”

“Probably not.” Another stroke on Sam’s head. Another, while she read Sam’s sleeping face. “We’ll always be so grateful.”
Then, with eyes raised to David, “What if she doesn’t survive this?”

“I don’t know. I just keep praying—”

“It’s an awful thing to watch her body go through,” Susan said, her voice twisting with pain.

When Abby turned toward David, his entire stature registered the same shock and sadness as Susan’s.

Abby watched him glancing at Samantha’s still face whenever he thought nobody saw him.

She watched him sit down and stand up, sit down and stand up, desperate to do something that no one could do.

Whenever a nurse or an orderly entered the room, Abby saw David hoping someone might be able to tell him something.

“Hey,” he said to Abby as she brushed against him, reaching for the water pitcher on the nightstand beside the bed. “Those
pants make you look like Julia Roberts.”

Abby straightened, the pitcher in her hand. “You like these?”

“Yeah, I do.”

Across the room, Susan lifted one of the slats on the window blinds and bent to peer out. Abby and David’s gazes locked. She
remembered something Viola Uptergrove had told her once. Hardest thing you’ll ever do, being a Christian, Viola had said,
is to keep believing in believing. You’ve got to expect things from Jesus, and then start looking for them.

Abby followed David’s gaze across the hospital room, saw him watching Susan, and felt a sense of rightness. She wrapped both
hands around her husband’s arm so he’d know she was sure. “If you want to hold her during some of this, I’ll understand,”
she whispered. “She’s so alone. I think she needs you.”

“Ab?” he whispered a question.

“I know what we’re working toward, David,” she said without a doubt in her voice. “I know I’m your wife. I also know that
Susan will always be Samantha’s mother.”

“Abby,” he said with the depths of his soul in his eyes. “Thank you.”

The bag of marrow for Samantha was brought in almost as unceremoniously as a rack of ribs into a smokehouse. “Here it is.”
Dr. Riniker hitched it up on an IV stand and let it swing there, a long narrow baggie with rich, red thickness inside. He
attached it to a port that had been in Sam’s chest since they arrived. “The gift. It drips in like this. And it’s amazing;
this stuff finds its own way into the depth of the bones.”

“How long will it take before we know anything?” David asked.

“A few days,” the doctor said. “It’ll take hours for this to drip in. Tomorrow we’ll start with the blood markers again. If
those numbers go up, we’ll count it a success.”

Braden stood by his sister’s bedside for the next few days and watched Samantha struggle. There were good days and bad days,
victories and defeats. There were days when Sam was smiling even though she was too weak to raise her head. There was a day
of fever, when nurses brought ice in and put it on her and her mother, Susan, cried.

Always, always there was the chalkboard. Every day Dr. Riniker would check Sam’s blood and the nurses would write the numbers
on the board. It got to where Braden couldn’t understand their words anymore; he could only understand the numbers. Every
day, the nurse would write “Red-0. White-0.” and he would know that nothing had changed. Every day, he would wait for the
board to be erased, and he would try to guess at the numbers before she wrote them down.

But it was always the same. Zero. Always zero. Until, one day, when Dr. Riniker smiled. He gave the nurse his papers and she
picked up the chalk for the board.

Our Father, who art in heaven
, Braden prayed.
Please. Take care of my sister
.

The nurse wrote, “Red-.03. White-1.”

For a long time, everybody stared at what she’d written. Another nurse said, “Well, that’s interesting. The markers have started
to climb.”

Dr. Riniker stood back and crossed his arms over his chest with pleasure. “That’s progress,” he said. “That’s certainly progress.”

Samantha’s mother wiped away tears. Braden’s dad scrubbed his eyes with his fingers. Braden’s mom sat down hard in a plastic
chair beside the bed.

“I’m pleased,” Dr. Riniker said. “She’s moving in the right direction.”

Braden stood beside the bed where he thought nobody could see him. He wanted to cry and laugh all at the same time.

“Hey, sport. Come over here with me.” His dad gestured and slapped his knee.

Braden climbed into his father’s lap with pleasure, and they held on to each other for a while. “I love you, son,” his dad
whispered.

Then, unable to contain their emotion, they started wrestling and knuckling each other’s hair until they couldn’t stop laughing,
and both of their heads looked like Don King.

S
amantha Roche, standing four-feet-four with her toes curled deep into the sand, and healthier than she’d been in eighteen
months, gave her brother Braden—who hadn’t seen the ocean during his entire life—a tour of her favorite place. Even though
jewel-sun mornings can be rare on the Oregon coast, today the light glittered on the swells and dips of the water. The sky
was crisp and broad and glorious with blue, a gift from a heavenly Father who delighted in the treasure of His children, both
the young ones and the grownups, who had sought Him even though it hadn’t always been easy or felt right, and were letting
Him prove Himself faithful.

Gray gulls sailed overhead, dipping deep into the air as if they were attached to riggings, their bowed broad wings bearing
them aloft like kites. Gulls began to zoom in for a landing beside Sam and Braden. One came, then another, a dozen, maybe
two, screeching with greed and beating hard at the air as they alighted, sidestepping, their alert eyes on the little sack
beside Sam’s leg.

“No fair,” Braden whispered to her. “You’re baiting them with fries.”

“Sh-hhh,” Sam whispered back. “I know what works. McDonald’s.”

“You’re bribing the birds.”

“Yep, I am. This is how it’s done. You ready?” Sam asked.

“Yeah,” Braden whispered.

The two children raised themselves on their haunches, then sat as still as driftwood while seagulls continued to descend.
Birds landed beside their knees and behind their backs and upon gnarled roots that protruded from beach sand like bent elbows.
They landed on rocks and limbs and water-glossed sand. They didn’t stop touching down until Sam and Braden launched themselves
in unspoken agreement, springing from their places like they were springing from a starting block, sand flying from their
feet. They parted that huge gathering of seabirds like Moses, with God’s help, parting the Red Sea.

Braden flapped his arms at them. “Go! Go! Fly! Fly!”

Samantha leaned her head back, her hair streaming in the wind, her mouth wide with joy.

An unfathomable number of birds took flight, emitting screeches of terror and complaint, wheeling away, circling over the
breakers, rising higher.

“Ah! You’re killing me.” Braden held his ears against his sister’s screams.

Of course no beach scene like this one can be complete without a sandcastle. So, while the children were occupied chasing
birds, Abigail Treasure took it upon herself to scoop a trough out of wet sand beside the weathered log where she sat. She
worked a good while, digging deep, using a McDonald’s soda cup to shape and stack turrets one upon another. So absorbed was
she by her task that she only stopped once to tuck a strand of stray hair behind her ear.