The Ice Child (28 page)

“You go to the hematology department.” He was already writing the form.

“Just a minute,” she said.

He glanced up at her. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but it is urgent.”

He handed her a piece of paper. On it he had written the address of the department, and the road and gate number she should use. “Don’t bother with the main parking lot,” he said. “Just take him direct to that gate, go through, a hundred yards. Park on the left. There’s six spaces there.”

She looked at the paper, then back at him. “Straight through,” she repeated.

“Yes.”

She got up in a daze. She had almost got to the door, and Sam had insisted on being put down, and was pulling on her hand, and trying to reach the door handle, when she turned back to Jowett. It was as if all the information had only just hit her. “Low blood count,” she said. “That’s what you have when you get leukemia.”

Jowett got up and walked toward her. He put his hand on her shoulder. “It might be one of several things, not necessarily that,” he said.

It was as if the ground had just dropped out from under her. She felt it go. One minute it was solid—the green carpet of the room, the concrete below—then there was nothing. She was dropping—free-falling.

“He’s not that sick,” she said. “He’s okay, really.”

“Good,” he replied. “Then we’ll prove it today.”

She looked down at Sam. He had stopped pulling and was looking first at her, and then at the doctor.

“Are you okay to drive?” Jowett asked her.

“Yes … yes.”

“Let one of the girls make you some tea. Rest for a second outside.”

She pulled away from his hand and opened the door.

“I can tell you something for nothing, Dr. Jowett,” she said. Her voice felt like someone else’s—thin, reedy, aggressive. “My son hasn’t got leukemia.”

She grabbed Sam, and walked from the room.

It was some time before she arrived at the ward that Dr. Jowett had described. She drove as far as the hospital, and then pulled up outside it, the engine running, staring at the buildings ahead of her.

She had the feeling that, if she went in, she would set in train some awful chain of events, something over which she had no control at all. If she didn’t go in—if she just disappeared—then those things would never happen. She heard the breath snag and catch in her throat as her hands tightened on the steering wheel. Whatever was waiting for her behind those hospital walls could never materialize if she didn’t go in, she told herself. She could hold back time; she could freeze time itself. Everyone around her would remain in the same unchanging moment, but she could carry on. With Sam. Take him somewhere. Somewhere safe. Somewhere warm. Someplace far away. The Seychelles. Mauritius. Grenada … She pictured him on a hot beach, letting the sand run through his fingers, grinning. The last time they had been on a beach, she had made an octopus out of sand. He’d loved it. She would do that again … take him there. Away.

Whatever he had in his blood—whatever the
hell
it was—would simply stay the same. Never change. Never grow. Never affect them. They would be someplace else, out of reach.

She’d pressed both palms to both temples. The nursery-rhyme tape that she’d put on for Sam came to the end with a click. She looked around and saw that he had fallen asleep.

Tiredness. Lethargy. Bruising
.

No, it wasn’t possible. Not leukemia. They had had their share of bad luck. The nightmare had already happened to them. They weren’t due any more. Jo had lost her lover, her husband in all but name. Sam had lost a father he had never known, never would know, except by photographs. Lately she had begun to think that they had turned a corner, and she could see clear water. So leukemia could not happen to them. It had to happen to somebody else, somebody who hadn’t had any misery yet.

She didn’t deserve it. Sam didn’t deserve it. Sam, most of all.

“Oh, God,” she whispered. She fought down the incredible urge to run, and the irrationality of her own thoughts.

If only Doug were here
, she thought.

Even now she sometimes forgot his death. Actually forgot that he had gone. It was a safety mechanism, she supposed, against the loss. Giving yourself, subconsciously, a break from the experience. That it was some kind of dream. Then, waking from that delusion, she would read something in the paper, and turn to tell him … or the phone would ring. She would be two beats into the ringing, moving toward it, before she would remember that it could not be him.

But there was no way to forget now.

She had to go into the hospital.

She had to do this alone.

Eventually a van pulled up behind her. It was some sort of delivery truck. The driver got out and tapped on her window.

“If you don’t move from here, love,” he mouthed at her through the glass, “you’ll be towed.”

She wound down the window. “What?”

“Ticket, at least. Just warning you, like. You’re on double yellows.”

She’d blinked. “Oh … thanks. Thanks.”

He nodded at her. As he walked away, he glanced back, once, with a frown. She looked in the rearview mirror and glimpsed her own white face.

Slowly she put the car into gear, and indicated right.

Twenty-two

The evening went on forever.

It was one of those days in June when the light seems reluctant to leave. Even though the streets looked dim—the lights were just coming on—the sky was a light, improbable turquoise, and as Jo leaned her head against the glass of the hospital window and looked out, she saw people going down the street, arms linked, talking, passing under the trees.

She wondered if the day would ever really end. It had lasted centuries already.

As soon as she had come into the ward with Sam—almost immediately—he had been hooked up to a drip and given a blood transfusion. Someone had stood by her side, the head nurse, and told her why it was necessary. She heard the words, but they fell through her. She couldn’t seem to make any sense of them. She had held on to Sam’s hand and soothed him. Talking. Talking about anything. Her heart had pounded until she felt sick. She didn’t look at the bag of blood hanging over him. She didn’t look where they had put a tube in his arm. She played round-and-round-the-garden a couple of times, but had to stop because it made him move too much. She told him about Dumbo, who was painted on the wall, and the crows who couldn’t believe he could fly. The nurses brought her tea, but she didn’t touch it. Sam cried, and scratched at the needle in his arm, and flung his head from side to side.

Halfway through the morning she suddenly remembered Gina and Catherine, but after she got out her mobile phone, the staff told her that she couldn’t use it in the hospital. They brought her a pay phone, but she picked up the receiver and then just stared into space. What on earth was she proposing to say to them both? How could Gina drive up here again? She’d only gone back thirty-six hours ago. She’d be busy. And Jo realized that Catherine, working now on an anthropology thesis, usually turned her mobile phone off.

And what would be the net result of ringing either of them, anyway, Gina or Catherine? Jo thought. They could do nothing. She would only be spreading her terror around.

She’d put the phone back.

They had sedated Sam a little, and he had slept, a frown on his face.

“Mr. Elliott will see you this afternoon,” the head nurse told her, at about one o’clock.

“Who is Mr. Elliott?” she asked.

“He’s the consultant,” the woman said, and patted her shoulder. “He’s very good with the children.”

I
hope he’s very good with the parents
, Jo thought. She wanted to shake this anonymous man. She wanted to hit something. She felt like saying,
This is a mistake, you’ve got me mixed up with someone else
.

They took Sam’s details. His date of birth; what kind of birth it was; what illnesses he had had; his height, weight. They took more blood. Jo watched the vials fill up. She thought, objectively, that was all they really were. She and Sam. Everyone. Blood and bones. Tissue. Chemicals.

Her thoughts had bounced around haphazardly. By midafternoon she was exhausted listening to the random firing of her own mind, the tangents and irrelevancies it was engaged in. Her brain was playing a sort of weird mental tennis. Back and forth. Back and forth. That morning, before going to the doctor’s office—sitting at home over breakfast, Sam at his chair, reaching awkwardly up for his cereal, a skill he had just mastered, and she writing a shopping list—
God! It had only been this morning
—she had planned what she would buy after leaving the doctor’s. And now, along with the nameless nightmares stalking through her head, she kept thinking that she needed orange juice, and Pampers. Somehow this particular thought—that Sam wasn’t even toilet trained yet, that he was lying here in his diaper—seemed the most outrageous of all. How could a child in a trainer pant be attached to a blood drip? It was a farce. A sick joke of the worst kind. She screwed her eyes shut, willing tears away. He wouldn’t wake and see her crying. Her fingers smoothed through his thick, dry hair.

The consultant arrived two hours later, at five.

He came to the bed, where Sam was, by now, awake, and eating ice cream.

“Hi, Sam,” he said. “That looks good.”

Sam stared at the stranger, not sure, spoon poised halfway to his mouth. The man smiled and held out his hand to Jo.

“My name is Bill Elliott,” he said.

“Jo Harper.”

“Nurse Stevens would like to sit with Sam, if I could talk to you?”

Jo glanced at her son. “Can’t we talk here?”

“We won’t be long.” He stood back, indicating the way to a room across the corridor.

Jo leaned down and kissed Sam’s forehead. “Back in a minute,” she said.

“We’ll keep the door open,” Bill Elliott told her. “We’ll put your chair by the door. He’ll be able to see you.”

That evening light was just beginning. The room, facing west along the line of trees in the road, was bathed in a rosy light. Jo glanced at Elliott’s desk, and a framed photo standing there, a picture of Elliott with his wife. They had three children, it seemed. Two girls and a little boy of about Sam’s age. All through the interview that followed, she kept looking back at them.

“We have the results of some of the tests,” Elliott said.

Jo couldn’t reply. It was hard to breathe, let alone talk.

Elliott didn’t look at his notes, or the file on his desk. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped.

“Have you any idea what is wrong with Sam?” he asked.

“Just tell me,” she said. “Please.”

How many times have you done this?
she wondered.

Someone outside in the street shouted, calling a name. Laughing.

“Sam has a problem with his blood,” Elliott said. “Let me try to explain a bit.” He stared down at his clasped hands for a moment. “Blood is made in the bone marrow, the spongy tissue in the middle of bones. Our bodies control the growth of marrow.” He glanced up at her. “It’s hard work,” he continued. “About three million red cells and about a hundred twenty thousand white cells are produced every single second.”

“I see,” she murmured. She, too, unconsciously, knotted her fingers together.

“We have several kinds of blood cell in our bodies,” Elliott told her. “Lymphocyte T-cells—they control immunity, kill viruses. Lymphocyte B-cells—they make antibodies. Granulocytes—mainly neutrophils—they fight infection and kill bacteria.” He smiled a little at her. “Too complicated?” he asked.

“No, no,” she said, frowning. “Go on.”

He nodded. “Then there’s monocytes,” he continued. “They work at antibody production, among other things. The red cells carry oxygen, and the platelets help clotting, prevent bleeding.”

“Yes,” she said. But she had probably only retained twenty percent of what he had said, holding on to the thought that whatever the words meant, they were irrevocably connected to Sam, and the bruises.

“All these different cells have different lifespans,” Elliott said. “Red cells live for about four months after they leave the marrow. Neutrophils for a few hours. Platelets for a few days. Because white cells and platelets go so quickly, they can’t easily be replaced by transfusion.”

She looked away from him, to the picture, and back again.

She took a long, deep breath. “Has Sam got leukemia?” she asked.

Elliott sat back. He waited a beat, as if thinking how to phrase his next sentence. “We need to do more tests,” he said. “I would like to do a bone marrow biopsy tomorrow.”

“But has he got leukemia?”

“No,” Elliott told her. “I don’t think that Sam has got leukemia.”

She stared at him a second, then gave an almighty sigh. Until that moment she hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath. “Oh, thank God,” she said. “Thank God.” She put her head in her hands, covered her face. She felt Elliott’s hand on her knee. He was giving her a tissue.

She wiped her eyes and face. “You just don’t know how relieved I am,” she said. “Oh … all day today, I thought …” She shook her head. “Thank you,” she repeated.

“I think that Sam has got aplastic anemia,” Elliott said.

She blew her nose. She was half laughing. “Anemia,” she said. “Just anemia. That’s okay, then, isn’t it? You can cure that, can’t you?”

A spasm crossed Bill Elliott’s face: a reflex of real pain. Jo stopped, the tissue pressed to her mouth for a second. Then her hand slowly dropped into her lap. “You can cure that, can’t you?” she repeated.

“Mrs. Harper …”

“Jo,” she said.

He nodded. “Jo. Look, we need to talk again tomorrow. Maybe the next day. These tests have to be done several times. We have to make sure.”

“But you’re sure he hasn’t got leukemia,” she pointed out.

Elliott frowned. He rubbed his face with one hand. “It’s been a long day,” he said. “Much longer for you than for me, and believe me, it’s been a long day for me. So”—he rose to his feet—“you go home and get some rest. Let Sam get some rest. We need you back here in the morning.”

She remained where she was, staring up at him. “Aplastic anemia,” she said.