Page 9 of Don't Go
I followed.
I didn't look back at the bar, at the ring of guests who had moved aside to let the stretcher through, or at my mother's face when she walked past me with one hand pressed to her mouth.
The hospital was twelve minutes away. Cade drove there in eight.
I sat in the back seat with my mother. Her hand was in mine. Her palm was dry, warm, and shaking. I pressed it between both of mine. Nothing said in the car registered with me. The streetlights moved across her face every two seconds, then not moving, then moving again.
Suzanne was in the front seat with her hand resting on Cade's thigh.
The waiting room was beige.
We sat in beige chairs.
My mother cried into Suzanne's shoulder. Suzanne held her. My brother stood at the desk, asked the right questions in the right order, and wrote things down on the back of a receipt because he hadn't grabbed paper. I sat in a chair, held my elbows, and didn't move.
I told myself it was going to be fine over and over.
Dad's going to be fine. He's sixty-three. He's not even old. He runs three miles every weekend. He's fine. People collapse from stress. This was a stressful event. The event was suffocating — I told the bartender it was suffocating, I told her, and she laughed, didn't she laugh, didn't she —
I closed my eyes.
The doctor came out forty minutes later.
She was small, tired, and had her glasses pushed up into her hair and a clipboard against her chest. She said all our names in the wrong order, “Cade Nightingale, Vivienne Cross, Beau Cross, Suzanne Cross.” Cade corrected her quietly without making it a thing, "Jenkins," and she nodded without apologizing because there wasn't time.
“Could we step into the family room?” she asked.
We followed her.
The family room was smaller than the waiting room and more beige.
She didn't sit. None of us sat.
“Mr. Cross had a seizure,” she said. “We've stabilized him. He's awake. He's confused but oriented. We did a CT scan when he came in, and the radiologist found a mass.”
The room got smaller.
“It's on the right frontal lobe. It's significant. We'll need an MRI tonight to get a clearer picture and a biopsy to be certain, but the radiologist's preliminary read is—” She glanced at her clipboard. She didn't want to read what was on it, but she read it anyway. “Consistent with a high-grade glioma. Most likely glioblastoma.”
The second I heardglioblastoma, my body recognized the word before my mind did.
I'd funded research on it and read summaries about it. I'd stood on a stage at a hospital and read the word off a teleprompter while shaking the hand of a researcher we had given two million dollars to. I knew what high-grade glioblastoma meant.
It meant my father was going todie.
The room got smaller again.
My breath went shallow, and my heart went up against the inside of my chest. Cold started at the back of my neck.
My mother made a sound.
It was the sound she'd made on the carpet, only smaller, because there was less air to make it with. She reached for me. Her hand came out, fingers open, and Suzanne caught her elbow. Cade put his hand on the small of her back, and they held her up.
She reached for me.
I couldn't.
I couldn't take her hand and couldn't move toward her. I watched my reflection in the glass from the corner of the family room. My legs were locked.
