The Legacy: Making Wishes Come True (7 page)

Yet, for all the torture, Dr. Gallagher still couldn’t achieve the goal of remission. Jenny began to think
there was no such thing, that remission was simply a rumor, a carrot held out on a stick. “This form of leukemia is stubborn,” Dr. Gallagher said. “Just hang on and keep the faith. We’ll lick it.”

Hang on
. Jenny made his words her life’s motto. But as the days passed, hanging on and keeping her faith that she’d overcome her disease became more difficult. The days she spent in isolation were bad enough, but the nights were impossible. She felt like a vampire, not only because of the frequent transfusions she received at night, but because she presumed herself to be a creature of the night, doomed to wakefulness, loneliness, cut off from all she knew and loved.

“Perhaps I could locate some of your classmates for you to talk to,” her grandmother suggested.

Jenny recoiled in horror. Most of the girls in her prep school were boarders, and when each term ended, they went back home, or off to Europe, or away to family retreats. “There’s no one I want to see,” Jenny told her. “No one I want to see me like this.”

Jenny’s one joy was the letters she received from Richard. He wrote of his days on his job or of sailing out to Martha’s Vineyard for the weekends.

Seeing her in person was still the last thing Jenny wanted Richard to do. It was more than vanity on her part. It went beyond her not wanting him to see her looking sick and ugly. She couldn’t even explain it to herself, but she knew that Richard represented a world she might never know again. Just seeing him, and facing completely the loss of that world of beauty and innocence, of wellness and wholeness, would be more than she could bear.
I’m a coward
, she told herself, but it didn’t make any difference.

One afternoon, when Mrs. Kelly was preparing to return Jenny to her private room after a radiation treatment, the nurse told her, “Men are working on the private elevator today, so we’ll have to take the regular one. I hope you won’t be too uncomfortable.”

Jenny touched the scarf on her head, hoping it was covering all of her bald head, and nodded nervously. She wasn’t crazy about the way her grandmother and Mrs. Kelly treated her like a pampered princess, but she didn’t care much for mingling with the healthy world either. “It’ll be fine,” Jenny said.

The public elevator was crowed with visitors,
nurses, orderlies, and technicians. Jenny felt self-conscious sitting in her wheelchair among them. Mrs. Kelly shielded the chair deftly to keep Jenny from being buffeted, but every time the door slid open, she caught glimpses of other floors, other areas of the hospital.

She recalled how large the hospital had seemed to her the first time she’d seen it, and realized that except for her room on a special floor, the chemo treatment room, the Radiation Department, and a few hallways, she’d never toured the inside of the place.

Again, the elevator door slid open, and someone from the hall yelled, “Hold the door, I’m coming!” The remaining people in the elevator waited patiently for the person who’d shouted, and Jenny gazed with interest out into the hallway. The walls were gaily painted with a circus theme, and the floor bustled with activity. A parade of kids of all shapes, sizes, and ages passed in front of the elevator door. Many of the children were bald, some were on crutches, others rolled their own wheelchairs.

Startled, Jenny stared out at them. She saw a girl who looked to be her age and could scarcely believe it. “Where are we?” she asked Mrs. Kelly.

“Pediatric oncology,” Mrs. Kelly replied. “Remember, Boston Children’s Hospital is one of the foremost treatment centers in the country, so many physicians send their patients here.”

Intellectually, Jenny had known that, but now, seeing others, the message began to sink in.
They’re just like me!
she thought.
We’re all alike. We’re all sick
.

The next morning, when her grandmother came to visit, Jenny told her about what she’d seen.

“Of course, my dear,” Grandmother said with an
indulgent smile. “I made certain that you had the latest, newest technology available.”

“But there looked to be so many others. I—I didn’t think about it before now, but I’m not alone.”

Grandmother looked puzzled. “Certainly you’re not alone. You have Mrs. Kelly and me. Isn’t one of us always here for you?”

How could her grandmother be missing the point? Jenny wondered. “How come I’ve never run into other kids during my treatments?”

“Because I’ve arranged for you to have total privacy.” Jenny stared at her, dumbstruck. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? To be alone?”

Was it? Jenny asked herself. Was total isolation what she really wanted? “Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Whatever you want, I’ll try and get it for you.” Grandmother tidied the bedcovers as she spoke.

“How about a rope ladder to the ground below?”

“It’s good to see you feeling better.” Grandmother smiled and kissed Jenny’s forehead. “Can I get you something before I leave?”

Jenny said no, and once her grandmother had gone, she sent Mrs. Kelly on a wild-goose chase, climbed out of bed, and slipped on her embroidered cotton robe. Grateful that this was a day she didn’t have a treatment and that she felt pretty good, Jenny scribbled a hasty note to Mrs. Kelly about going exploring and returning soon.

She took the repaired private elevator down to the ground floor, looked on a wall directory for the pediatric oncology floor, and took the public elevator there.
One good thing about being in my nightgown in a hospital
, Jenny told herself,
no one seems to notice how I’m dressed
.

When the elevator doors opened onto the children’s
cancer floor, Jenny stepped out into what seemed like another world. Murals of circus tents and painted ponies covered the walls. A tightrope walker looked real enough to touch.

“Are you all right?” The nurse’s question made Jenny whip around.

“I’m fine.” Her heart hammered. Would the nurse chase her away?

“Everyone’s in the art therapy room. Don’t you want to join them?”

“The what?”

“Art therapy classes,” the nurse said with a sunny smile. “I hear they’re making Christmas wreaths. Can you imagine? Christmas in July?”

She pointed toward a door, and Jenny hurried to it. Hesitantly, she swung it open and peeked inside. She saw kids, lots of kids, sitting at long tables heaped with mounds of pinecones, artificial greenery, ornaments, ribbons, paste, scissors, and glue. Christmas music was playing on a stereo, and several women were bent over, helping little hands shape wires into circles.

Jenny blinked, hardly believing her eyes. She felt like Dorothy viewing Munchkins for the first time. Had she gone over the rainbow and fallen into Oz? “Come in,” a woman urged, when she saw Jenny at the door. “There’s plenty of room at the teen table.”

She pointed to a table of girls who sat working with a pile of materials. Yet, it wasn’t the wreaths Jenny was seeing. She was looking at girls like herself. All were bald, but not concealing their baldness with scarves. One was missing an arm. Another’s hand was attached to an IV line on a metal stand parked beside the table, and a third appeared incredibly thin and gaunt.

The girl with one arm saw Jenny and beckoned with her remaining hand. “Come on over and pull up a chair. We don’t want to be having all this fun all by ourselves.” She rolled her eyes, and the others giggled. “I’m Kimbra,” she said. “Who are you, and when did you check in?”

“I
’M
J
ENNY.”
S
HE
pulled out a chair as she spoke.

“Welcome to Happy Hour,” the girl with the IV said. “I’m Noreen, and this is Elaine. We had no idea there’d been a new admittance last night.”

“Pay no attention to Noreen,” Kimbra warned. “She considers herself the mouthpiece of the floor. If something’s happening on Nine West, our chief reporter wants the scoop.”

“You two look forward to every tidbit I collect, and you know it,” Noreen insisted.

“If you’re so good, why haven’t you uncovered any information about the hospital’s mystery guest?” Elaine asked with an innocent smile.

“A mystery guest?” Jenny asked, fascinated by the camaraderie between the three girls.

Noreen leaned closer to her. “There’s someone famous up on one of the floors.”

“There is?” Jenny leaned forward eagerly. “Who?”

Noreen glanced around. “We don’t know, but I
think it’s a movie star. Whoever it is has private times in the treatment rooms, and no one’s allowed to mingle with him or her.”

“You have an overactive imagination,” Kimbra insisted.

“Famous people get cancer too,” Noreen said defensively. “It
could
be someone superspecial.”

“Or it could just be a superrich snob,” Elaine offered.

Jenny was momentarily stunned into silence. They were talking about her!
She
was the mystery patient. She flushed, not wanting them to know, not wanting them to think she was someone who considered herself too good for them. “So what are we making here?” she asked, attempting to change the subject.

“Something dumb,” Kimbra kidded. “But art therapy is one of our few diversions. We have it twice a week, so we go with the flow.”

“What are we supposed to do?”

“I’ll show you,” Kimbra volunteered, and for the next thirty minutes, Jenny sorted through pinecones, ribbon, and decorative ornaments. Contentedly, she listened to the others chatter, asked a few questions, and answered vaguely when someone asked her something. She learned that she was the oldest of the four. Kimbra was fifteen and from a suburb of Baltimore. Elaine was fourteen and from rural Vermont. And Noreen was fifteen and from Quincy, a suburb of Boston.

“Noreen has ten brothers and sisters,” Elaine told Jenny with admiration. “Out where I live, there’s barely ten neighbors.”

“You should try waiting in line for the bathroom at my house,” Noreen joked. “That’s why I’m the
only one in this room who doesn’t mind being in the hospital. I finally have some privacy.”

“So, what are you in for?” Kimbra asked Jenny. “For me it’s Ewing’s sarcoma—that’s bone cancer. They cut off my arm last year, and I had a lot of radiation. They thought they had it licked, but now it’s turned up in my shoulder.” With her remaining hand, she touched the shoulder of her amputated arm. “Radiation again. The pits.”

Noreen said, “I’ve got non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in my stomach. That’s a slow-growing tumor that’s trying to take over my body.”

“Yeah, like an alien,” Elaine inserted.

“Cute.” Noreen sniffed. “My doctor’s trying to shrink it with X rays, then I’ll have an operation to cut it out.”

Jenny shuddered. At least Dr. Gallagher didn’t have to cut up her insides.

“Leukemia,” Elaine said. “This is my second time around. I got it when I was ten and had a really long remission. Then it popped up again.”

Jenny found the news frightening. Although she realized that patients could relapse, she had been so focused on achieving her first remission, she hadn’t thought beyond it. What if she relapsed too? “Leukemia for me too,” she told the girls. “Just diagnosed.” While it wasn’t exactly the truth, Jenny didn’t feel like fielding a bunch of embarrassing questions.

“Have you gotten a room assignment yet?” Noreen asked, as she pounded a hapless pinecone onto her wreath.

“Sort of.”

Kimbra gave her a puzzled look, but before Jenny was forced to elaborate, Noreen piped up with, “So,
why don’t you ask your doctor to put you in with us?”

“Sure,” Elaine agreed. “We have a room with four beds, and one’s empty. The little girl who was using it went home Monday.”

“You’d want me in your room?”

“Why not?” Kimbra said with a shrug. “We’re about sick of each other’s company, and the more the merrier.”

“Sick of each other?” Elaine cried. “Just for that, I won’t let you watch
General Hospital
this afternoon.”

“And I refuse to fetch your basin if you have a puke attack after your afternoon treatment,” Noreen added.

The one-armed Kimbra tossed a pinecone at the other two. They all laughed, and Jenny smiled reluctantly. Their sense of black humor, the way they kidded about their horrible illnesses, amazed her. Suddenly, the thought of going back up to her lonely, isolated room, with no one her age to talk with, became unbearable. “Let me tell my grandmother, before she makes other arrangements. Don’t let anybody in that bed except me.” Jenny flashed a bright smile as she stood. “I get first dibs.”