Once Upon a Wish (35 page)

Two weeks after the seventh-grade basketball game, Dakota relapsed.

Sharon could feel it in her bones on the way to his routine checkup. The anticipation of every appointment sat heavy in her chest, nestled deep into her heart, but this appointment was different. Dakota’s color wasn’t quite right. It hadn’t been for two weeks, and his energy had dipped with his spirit.

“I’m afraid to tell you this,” said Dr. Becton after returning to the tiny room where Sharon and Dakota waited, hours after he drew Dakota’s blood. Every tick of the clock, every minute it had taken to comprise those hours had settled miserably into Sharon’s gut, second by second, and she knew what was coming. She knew that any sign of cancer, any glimpse of its existence, required multiple tests, trips to pathology, second and third opinions—required time.

After those long, torturous, unsettling hours, Dr. Becton’s eyes, usually radiating strength and confidence, looked down, troubled, before looking up at her, this time strikingly sad. “The leukemia has returned.”

Sharon’s heart folded over itself, fell into the abyss of the pit in
her stomach. The pain of it pounded into her chest so violently that everything else went numb—her arms, her legs, her mind. Dakota dropped his head to look at the floor, and Sharon wrapped him in her arms.

“We’re going to get through this again, son,” she reassured him. “We’ll do whatever it takes. We’re going to get through this as a family.”

You’re the mother
, she thought to herself.
Keep it together, stay strong
.
Save your tears for later.

When Dakota called to tell his father the news, Henry closed his eyes. He pictured the bruises on Dakota’s knees—bruises he had convinced himself were from kneeling on the basketball court during season pictures, bruises that could indicate the return of cancer, bruises he wished he could pray away.

“I hate this, Dad,” Dakota said. “But Dr. Becton said we can beat it again.”

“You bet, son,” Henry said, his voice unwavering. “We will beat it again.”

And he already knew how.

Nine months earlier, when Dakota was in remission from cancer but still undergoing chemo, Henry, Sharon, and Riley had all been tested as potential bone marrow donors—for the possibility that cancer would return, for this very moment.

It was Valentine’s Day 2003 when Dr. Becton skipped into the room where Sharon sat, waiting for results. He was barely through the door before nearly shouting, “Riley is a perfect match! If we ever need him, if it ever comes to that, he may be Dakota’s lifesaver.”

Lifesaver.

Sharon let that word, with all its hope, all its promise, rise up and float there. She closed her eyes, breathed out, silently thanking God. It was no coincidence to her that on this day of
love she found out her son, Riley, could possibly give the gift of life to his brother.

She couldn’t get to Riley’s school fast enough, where she knew he was celebrating this very special day in his fourth-grade class, opening tiny, stuffed envelopes with messages from Scooby Doo and Elmo, eating heart-shaped candies etched with “I love you” and “Hug me.”

She led him by the hand and into the hall, then hollered, “Riley, we’ve been given the greatest gift of all today! You’re a perfect match for Dakota!”

Riley’s face beamed, radiating happiness, but he remained silent in shock as his mom squeezed him tight, grabbing and kissing his face all over.

Finally he spoke.

“Let’s go!” he shouted, leading Sharon back into his classroom, where he told his teacher and made an announcement to the class. The words
cancer
and
transplant
probably meant nothing to that room full of fourth graders, but Riley’s excitement, the smile that stretched across his entire face, sent his classmates out of their seats, their hands pounding together, their cheers filling the halls.

   7   

Cancer had made its return, but before Riley could save Dakota’s life, Dr. Becton had to get him back into remission, at least partially.

As before, Dakota had good days and bad. And while his body was tired, weakened by such an intense first round of chemo, he resisted the treatment’s misery and remained hopeful and spirited. His hospital stays were longer, darker than before, but he still made rounds to eagerly awaiting children, still tricked his nurses with apple juice-filled syringes.

After just a few days, two Child Life volunteers made a visit to Dakota’s room and told him about the Make-A-Wish Foundation—told him that he could ask for anything in the world, seek anything in his heart’s desire, and his wish would be granted.

Anything—
that word would stretch any twelve-year-old’s imagination to its limit.

A trip to Australia
, Dakota thought.
Meeting Brett Favre from the Green Bay Packers … No, the memories will fade.

Sharon and Henry leaned forward, wanting desperately to read his mind, to hear his wish.

“I want something that will last,” he finally said.

Dakota closed his eyes, remembering a moment just a few weeks before, when he was living a cancer survivor’s dream—remission—still living his answered prayer.

It had been a brisk, October morning when he, Riley, Henry, and Henry’s father, Papaw, rode their ATVs through the silence of the woods, the sun still resting peacefully beneath the horizon, the freedom of the wilderness stretching endlessly ahead, dark and adventurous.

It was the first day of deer hunting season, and at the ages of ten and twelve, Henry decided it was time for Riley and Dakota each to have his own deer stand. Hunting from the time they were toddlers and shooting with their own guns starting at six and eight, their senses were trained, their instincts polished.

They were ready.

Riley’s eyes looked up the length of an oak tree at his deer stand—one of the tallest he had ever seen—placed, from his point of view, sloppily up top. A steep, skinny, worn ladder led toward the sky and into the stand, which offered no place to sit.

“I don’t want to go up there,” Riley said, keeping his wide eyes on the stand.

They had just come from looking at Dakota’s stand—300 yards away—a shorter, more solid-looking tree house–type structure with a chair.

Dakota looked at his younger brother.

“Papaw, Riley can have my stand.”

They got settled into their own stands, sat, and waited in the silence, the serenity, of the forest. Endless stars dotted the black sky while a light breeze danced peacefully through the trees, the only sound for miles. After fifteen minutes, a sudden bang cracked that silence, its echo a warning to all wildlife.

“He got a deer,” said Henry, who was about 300 yards away.

Riley also heard the shot.

“It’s a seven-point buck!” Dakota yelled, hovering over his fallen prey.

He smiled in his hospital bed at the memory and decided in that moment what his wish would be.

“I wish to have an ATV,” he said proudly.

Not only was he choosing something he knew his parents could not afford to buy for him, he was choosing a wish of freedom, of independence, of adventure. He would use it to maneuver the thick woods, haul animals, explore.

He brainstormed aloud all of the desired features for his ATV—its speed, capability.

“We’ve never met anyone who knew what he wanted quite the way you do!” said one of the volunteers, laughing, charmed.

In between IV drips, blood draws, chemo, trips home, and back to the hospital, Dakota was attached to his laptop, researching every detail, every function, of his new, personalized ATV. Nurses continued to poke and prod, change medicines, switch arms for IVs, but he would work with them, using his good arm to run the mouse, peek around them politely to see the computer screen.
He never stopped researching—color, speed, engine size, brand, model, accessories.

His thoughts went from leukemia—from chemotherapy and test results and transplant—to riding the ATV through the forest, hunting, life after cancer.

Dakota settled on a John Deere Gator HPX 4 × 4—it went one mile an hour faster than the rest.

   8   

When he went into partial remission—enough for a transplant—it was time to get Dakota and Riley to Houston, Texas, where the bone marrow transplant would take place. Obtaining doctor’s approval of Dakota’s wish, getting every detail of his special order just right, took a significant amount of time, which volunteers with the Arkansas Make-A-Wish chapter suddenly ran out of when they learned that Dakota was in partial remission and leaving town very soon.

Knowing the family was heading to The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston on Saturday morning, it was a small miracle that the chapter received the Gator in time. They quickly made sure it had the correct hood, windshield wipers, doors—every detail—before covering it with bows and balloons and taking it to Dakota’s home Friday night.

Sharon and Henry, who knew it was coming that night, hosted dinner for a house full of loved ones, their closest family and friends, telling Dakota they were there to see him off before their eight-hour drive to Houston the next morning.

The smell of wholesome Southern cooking lingered in the kitchen after dinner and followed the group into the game room, where they laughed, chatted, and played pool until a big, dark,
quiet figure snuck up to the glass patio doors that lead from the game room to the pitch blackness of the night.

“No way!” Dakota yelled when the porch light illuminated two Make-A-Wish volunteers pushing his Gator, his wish, his freedom, toward the closed door. His beaming smile pierced Sharon’s heart as he ran past her, opened the door quickly, and crawled inside the Gator.

“Who wants to go for a ride?” he asked excitedly.

Everyone gathered around as Dakota checked the wipers and the hood, opened and closed the doors, and gave the Gator a full inspection. The volunteers handed him a pile of John Deere clothing, which he layered with his own before heading out into the cold, January night. The summer sounds of crickets and bullfrogs had been hushed for months, the absence of lightning bugs leaving the moon and stars to light the way.

Dakota took one load after another of friends and family for a ride, and as Sharon and Henry watched, the Gator disappeared time after time into nothing but the sound of its own hum, taking the silence of the night with it. They had never seen him happier, or, after everything he had been through, more free.