Once Upon a Wish (47 page)

The cancer was behind Serena, but the negative thoughts that had consumed her during isolation and the months following lingered. She needed them gone. She was going to graduate today, and she was leaving high school, with its judgment and its disapproval; all of its forms of cruelty would be a thing of her past in just a few short hours. She decided to rummage through her old journals and find notebooks still in hiding that contained her darkest thoughts:

She shoved the notebooks to the back of her closet, their words to the back of her mind.

I will wake up every morning and focus on something positive
, she decided, whether it was taking a moment to enjoy the simple beauty of a sunrise, internally rejoicing in the success of her favorite sports team, thinking about upcoming concerts and CD releases, or giving herself an invisible pat on the back for accomplishing a personal goal.

At the graduation ceremony, finding something positive to focus on was not a challenge—she was done with high school and she was moving home. “Pomp and Circumstance” played in the background as she walked down the aisle and across the stage toward her diploma, but the thoughts in Serena’s mind overpowered its gentle drum beat, its celebratory march.
I don’t have to deal with any of these people again. I’m done. I can start fresh.

   6   

A few weeks later, Serena and her parents made the twenty-two-hour drive to Bisbee, Arizona, where they would be staying with Kevin’s parents in their one-bedroom guest house for three months before moving a half hour away to the town of Sierra Vista. Kevin and Sedra slept in the bedroom, Serena and Seanza squeezed on the tiny couch in the living area.

No privacy, no bed of her own, no space to get lost in her music. But it didn’t matter. She was in a place with no humidity, no cornfields, no tornadoes. She could listen to the soothing clicks of cicadas in the trees rather than worry about the sudden darkening of the sky, its collapse and uproar threatening the towns below it.

There were a handful of tornado warnings during the four years that Serena and her family lived in Nebraska, and when speakers surrounding the town had screamed their potential arrival, the family fled to the basement, waited, and watched.

Rain poured, thunder crashed, and lightning flashed across skies the color of swamp moss.

Skies the color of vomit
, Serena thought during one particular tornado that flattened a town twenty miles from their Lincoln home.
Only in Nebraska
.

Lying on the hide-a-bed of her grandparent’s couch at night with her sister, her parents in a tiny bedroom just steps away, the misery of their cramped living situation crept into her thoughts. She pushed them back and reminded herself,
Hey, at least we’re back in Arizona. This isn’t so bad.

Serena woke up the next morning and put all of her focus—her positive energy—into starting the next phase of her life. She enrolled at Cochise Community College in Sierra Vista and signed up for classes that would begin her journey toward a degree in art.

She had turned eighteen and was starting her trek down a path that had nothing to do with disapproving classmates, cancer, or Lincoln, Nebraska, until one day, four months after returning to Arizona, a stumbling block rolled into her path.

Serena and Sedra had spent the day at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, where Serena went through the usual routine—blood work, tests, and sonograms of her neck. When the results came back a few hours later, she sat next to her mom on a small couch in the office of her new doctor and she knew bad news was coming

“We need to get them out,” said Dr. Whitaker, her endocrinologist. Her thyroid was already gone, so the only things left in her neck to remove were lymph nodes. Cancer had made its ugly return, and after receiving her “mega dose,” she knew that radioactive iodine treatments were not an option—she had already received a lifetime’s worth of radiation.

“Let’s get you to the surgeon,” the doctor said.

Serena sat with her mom in that quiet, uncomfortable room, with only one thought—
All right, I beat this once, I’ll beat it again
.

No more questions of
why me?
or thoughts of
I’m so alone … nobody understands.
No more tears.

Then another thought entered her mind.
November 12—Darren will be here.

A few weeks before, Serena had seen on Darren Hayes’s website that he would be traveling through Phoenix on that date, performing a small, intimate concert at the Scottsdale Borders bookstore. The anticipation of his visit had become her positive thought every morning, but she never imagined that anything, especially cancer’s return, would keep her from going.

“When will you be doing the surgery?” Serena asked her surgeon, Dr. Michael Hinni, when she and Sedra met with him shortly after their appointment with Dr. Michael Whitaker.

“We’ll schedule it around November sixth,” said Dr. Hinni.

Six days before Darren Hayes gets here
, Serena thought.
I don’t care…I am going to see him.
She had survived cancer once, and in her mind, this was just another surgery. The mere thought that this surgery would not be the cure never entered her mind. She wouldn’t let it. All she had to do was go in for surgery, recover, and life without cancer would continue.

Resurgence—revival, recovery, rebirth,
she thought. Serena knew that the rest of the world found its own meaning in Darren’s music, its own interpretation, but in every song, in every word, she found something. She knew logically that Darren knew nothing about her, didn’t know she existed, but she believed his music was there for a reason, for her, for others. She listened to these lyrics, the words of “On the Verge of Something Wonderful,” every day until the day of her surgery. It somehow gave her hope that Darren, his concert, and his music, would be waiting on the other side.

The day of her surgery was five days before Darren arrived in town. “I’m going whether you like it or not,” she told Dr. Hinni when the surgery was over.

“Sure, you can go,” the doctor said, but his eyes may as well have rolled with the attitude of a teenager, as if to say, “There’s no way you’re going.”

He thought he was safe telling Serena she could go, trying to offer the hope he sensed she wanted. He knew her mind needed something to think about, to look forward to, but, unaware of his patient’s stubbornness and her spirit’s determination to do what her mind gets set on doing, he was certain she would not physically be able to go.

“She won’t feel up to it,” Dr. Hinni later whispered to her mother, offering reassurance.

Comforted only slightly by his words, Sedra knew her daughter—if Serena was determined to go, she would go.

   7   

The surgery had been a smooth success of removing every lymph node from the left side of Serena’s neck, but two days later, lymph fluid that should have absorbed back into her body leaked from
a duct in her upper chest, resulting in an emergency surgery to repair it.

“There’s no way in the world she’ll be up to going now,” Dr. Hinni reiterated.

Five days after surgery, on her day of discharge, Serena lay in her hospital bed watching the music video to Mary J. Blige’s song “Just Fine,” taking in every word she sang about the freedom of living life the way you want to live it.

Time to continue living my life
, Serena thought.
My life
. This was her decision.

“Are you ready to go tomorrow?” she asked her mom when they got home from the hospital.

It was just as Sedra predicted. “Are you sure you’re up to it?”

Serena didn’t answer, just stared at her mom.

“All right,” Sedra said, tilting her head and staring back. “But you’re taking a walker.”

Urgh, I don’t need a stupid walker
, Serena thought, but knowing her mom would not budge, she agreed.