The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition (16 page)

If any Power listened, It gave her no answer.

Before dawn Nita found herself awake and sitting up in bed, looking at the faint blue light outside her window. There had been no transition from sleeping to waking: just that unsettling consciousness, and a feeling that the world was wrong, that
everything
was wrong. She had no idea how long it had taken her to get to sleep last night after Dairine, silent and drained, had finally slipped away.

Drained.
That was the word for how Nita felt, too. But some energy was beginning to coil back into that void as the shock wore off. Nita looked at her manual, and saw the words in front of her eyes without even having to touch it:
I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; I will not change any creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened—

She swallowed.
I am a
wizard
. And if my mom’s life isn’t “threatened” right now, I don’t know when it will
be. There has to be another way to fight this than just what they’ve got in the hospital.

And I’m going to find out what it is.

She got up, dressed, grabbed the manual, and took it back to bed with her. Its covers were fizzing. Nita settled herself up against the wall at the head of the bed and flipped the book open to read the message waiting for her, then glanced out the window at the bleak predawn light.
I’ll get in touch with him later. No point in waking him up early just to get him upset. I’ve done enough stupid stuff to him lately.

She paged through the manual to the section with information on the medical and healing-related wizardries. That section was much larger this morning than she had ever found it before. Nita began reading what was there with intensity and with a concentration she could hardly remember having expended since she first found this book and understood what it meant. She had a couple of hours to spare before the time her dad had told her to wake him up.

She used them — pausing only once to go to the bathroom, taking the book with her when she did. To say that the subject was complex was understating badly. There was just too much information. She had the manual stop displaying everything that had to do with injuries and trauma, chronic diseases and afflictions; and though she narrowed and narrowed her focus, the section she was reading didn’t get any thinner. Finally there was almost nothing between the covers except pages and pages of material concerning abnormal growths and lesions, and still she found more every time she targeted a specific condition. Nita also saw a lot of a word in the Speech that she didn’t much like—a word that translated into English as
intractable.
There was a lot of discussion of theory here, but not many spells. Nita got nervous when she noticed that, but she didn’t stop reading. There had to be a way. There was
always
a way, if you could just push through to the core of the matter….

The light grew in her room; she hardly noticed. Birds began singing the restrained songs of early autumn, but Nita shut their voices out. She read and read… and suddenly the alarm on her smartphone went off, at five minutes to eight.

Nita grabbed the noisy thing, shut it off, and went to see if her dad was up yet. Pausing outside the master bedroom, listening, she couldn’t hear any sound of anyone stirring in there.

She knocked softly on the door. No answer. “Dad…”

Still nothing. Nita eased the door softly open and peeked in.

Her father was asleep in the reading chair in the corner between the two bedroom windows. He sat slumped over, his mouth hanging open a little, a slight snore emitting from him—almost the same sound Ponch made when he lay on his back with his feet in the air and snored; the thought almost made her smile. But smiling about anything right now seemed like some kind of betrayal.

She glanced at the bed, which had not been slept in, and let out an unhappy breath, then went over to her dad and crouched down beside the chair. “Daddy,” she said.

His eyes opened slowly; he looked at her as if he couldn’t understand what he was doing here.

Then it all came back to him. She saw the pain fill his eyes. Nita clenched her jaw and managed to keep from getting any weepier than she already felt. “It’s just eight, Dad,” she said. “You said we should go to the hospital around nine thirty.”

“Yeah.” He slowly sat upright and rubbed his face. “Yeah.” He looked at her then. “How are you doing, honey?”

“Better. Maybe better,” she said. “Daddy, I guess I was so scared, I forgot for a minute.”

“Forgot what?”

“Maybe I can do something.”

Her father looked at her, uncomprehending.

“Daddy,” Nita said, “I
am
a wizard! In fact, we’ve got two of them in the house. And we know a bunch more of them, all over the place. Wizardry’s
about
fixing broken things, healing hurt things… saving lives. We must be able to do
something.
”

Her dad’s expression went curiously neutral. “Honey,” he said, sounding slightly embarrassed, “you know, that’s the kind of thing I’ve—been trying not to think about. It still seems like a fairy tale, sometimes. Even when everything’s all right, I don’t think about it much. And right now, now I’d be afraid it’ll…”

Fail,
Nita thought. It was the thought that had been nagging at her, too. “Dad, in Mom’s case, it’s really complicated. I’ve barely had time to start working out what to do. But there has to be
something.
I’m not going to do anything else until I find out what.”

Her father rubbed his face again. “Well. All right. In the meantime, we’d better get ourselves over there. Have you had your shower?”

“Not yet.”

“You go ahead. I’ll make us some breakfast. Is Dairine up?”

“I don’t know. She had trouble getting to sleep last night.”

“She wasn’t alone,” her father said softly.

He reached out to Nita and hugged her. “Oh, honey…” He ran out of words for a few moments. Then he hugged her harder. “You hang in there. We’ll all keep each other going somehow, and it’ll be all right.”

“Yeah,” Nita said, hoping that it was true.

***

When they got to the hospital, Nita’s mother was sleeping, having had her PET scan. “She was awake late last night,” the head nurse, that large lady with the bun hairstyle, told Nita’s dad, “and it seems like a good idea for her to get caught up on her sleep now. But her doctor’s finishing another procedure, and she asked me if you could wait for half an hour or so. She’d like to see you.”

“No problem,” Nita’s father said. In reality it wasn’t even that long; after she and Dairine went up to take a quick look in at their mom, and Nita saw that she was indeed sleeping peacefully, Nita left Dairine there to have a moment with their mom by herself, and made her way back to the little waiting room, where she found her dad already talking to Dr. Kashiwabara. The doctor looked up as Nita came in.

“Good morning,” she said as Nita sat down. “Well, your mom had a quiet night, except for the scan, of course. She’s been doing the sensible thing, and sleeping when we weren’t actually running her in and out of the machines. In fact, she fell asleep during the PET scan, but it’s not noisy like the MRI would have been—and Mrs. Callahan managed to fall asleep during
that
, too. Which I wouldn’t normally have thought possible. It’s like sleeping in a garbage can while someone’s banging on it.”

“If you lived long with our daughters,” Nita’s dad said, “you’d be surprised what you’d learn to sleep through.”

Dr. Kashiwabara smiled faintly. “Come to think of it,” she said, “where’s the younger one?”

Nita looked around in surprise. Dairine should have come back from their mom’s room by now. “Be right back,” she said.

Nita retraced her steps. Slipping quietly into the room, she found Dairine standing there, her back against the wall near the door, looking across the closer, empty bed at the curtained one where their mother lay. In her arms she was holding Spot—which Nita hadn’t noticed Dairine bringing to the hospital in the first place—and the whole room was sizzling with the electric-air feel of a wizardry on the ebb, either newly dismantled or incomplete.

“What are you doing?”
Nita whispered, and grabbed Dairine by the upper arm. “Come
on
!”

Dairine didn’t resist her: she didn’t have the energy. Nita was sure she knew why, but there was no dealing with it right now. She hustled Dairine back to the little conference room and sat her down.

Nita’s father gave Dairine one of those looks that said,
Misbehaving again, I see,
but said nothing aloud. The doctor greeted Dairine, then turned back to their father.

“Well,” she said, “Mrs. Callahan’s status is pretty stable. And now we’ve had the scans that I wanted. I’ve had a chance to look at them, and this morning I had a couple of my colleagues look at the results. We’re all in agreement.”

She took a long breath. “Mr. Callahan,” she said, “I don’t know; you’ll have to tell me whether you think it’s better that you and I should discuss this alone first.”

“Not a chance,” Nita said. Dairine shook her head.

Her father swallowed. “They’re both intelligent girls, Doctor,” he said. “They’re going to have to hear, anyway. Better they should get the explanation from you than secondhand from me.”

The doctor nodded, then got up, shut the door to the corridor, and sat down again. “All right,” she said. Her voice was measured, gentle. “Mr. Callahan, the growth in your wife’s brain is definitely a tumor. We’re ninety percent sure that it’s a growth of a type called glioblastoma multiforme. This kind of growth is very invasive, very fast growing. It invades nearby tissue quickly and destructively. And it is usually malignant.”

They all sat still as statues.

“The only way we’re going to be a hundred percent sure of the assessment is to do a biopsy,” Dr. Kashiwabara said. “We’ll do that in a day or two, once Mrs. Callahan is completely stable, so that we can determine our course of action. But I want to stress to you that the tumor itself can be removed. That will relieve the pressure on the surrounding structures.”

“But that’s not everything, is it?” Nita said.

The doctor shook her head. “I said that this kind of growth is invasive. It can also spread through other parts of the nervous system, though not usually beyond to other organs. But because glioblastomas grow so quickly at this stage in their development, it’s hard to tell how long the tumor may have been hiding there in ‘silent’ mode, seeding itself. The important thing is going to be to start chemotherapy as soon as possible after the surgery to remove the tumor. Possibly radiotherapy as well.”

Nita’s father nodded. “Have you discussed this with my wife?” he said.

“Not yet,” said the doctor. “That comes next. I wanted a chance to prepare you first, since you two will want to talk about it together, and it’s important that you both have all the facts.”

“The ‘seeding,’” her father said. “It’s cancer that you mean. Spreading.”

“Yes,” said Dr. Kashiwabara.

Nita felt as if she had been turned to ice where she sat.
Cancer
was a word that she had come across repeatedly in her reading that morning, but she had been trying to ignore it. Now she realized her folly, for the most basic tool of wizardry is words, and a wizard who ignores words willfully is only sabotaging herself.

“What are her chances?” Nita’s father said.

“It’s too soon to tell,” said the doctor. “Right now our priority is to get that tumor out of there. Afterward there’ll be time to look at the long-term options.”

“Is the operation dangerous?” Nita said.

Dr. Kashiwabara looked at her. “There’s a certain risk,” she said. “As in any surgical procedure. But the tumor’s in an area where it won’t be too hard to get at, and for this kind of surgery, we use a technique that’s more like the way we fix people’s noses than anything else. It’s not nearly as invasive or traumatic as brain surgery was years ago. I’ll sit down with you and show you some diagrams, if you like.”

“Thanks,” Nita said. “Yes.”

The doctor turned back to their dad. “Is there anything else you want to ask me?”

“Only when you think the surgery will be scheduled.”

“As soon as possible. There’s a team of local specialists that we put together for this kind of surgery. I’m getting everyone’s schedules sorted out now. I think it’ll be Wednesday or Thursday.”

“Okay,” Nita’s dad said. “Thanks, Doctor.”

The doctor went off, leaving them together.
I saw her face
, Nita remembered her dad saying. She was shaking.
He was right…

“There’s no point in us hanging around here,” her father said. “Why don’t we look at the diagrams Dr. Kashiwabara has for us. Then I’ll drop you two home, and come back a little bit later, so I can talk to Mom.”

“Daddy, no!” Dairine said. “I want to stay and—”

Dari,
Nita said silently,
shut up. We need to see Tom, in a hurry. And you and I need to talk.

“No, honey,” their father said. “I want to see her first. Okay?”

“All right,” Dairine said, subdued, but she shot Nita a rebellious look. “Let’s go.”

Nita held her fire until they were home, and all had had something to eat. When her father was getting ready to go out, she stopped him at the door and said, “We may be going out, Dad. Don’t be surprised if we’re not here when you get back. There are visiting hours tonight, right?”

“Yes, I think so. You can go then.” Her dad exhaled. “I guess it’s a good thing that the surgery will happen quickly. We can start—coping, I guess.”

“Yeah. And we’ll do more than that.” She gave him a hug. “Give that to Mom for me.”

“I will.”

She watched him pull out of the driveway and drive off.

Nita started up the stairs and met Dairine halfway down them, shrugging into her jacket, with Spot under her arm. “Not so fast,” Nita said. “I want you to tell me what you were doing in there.”

“Something,” Dairine said. “Which was more than
you
were.”

Nita was tempted to hit her sister—to
really
hit her, which shocked her. While she was standing there being horrified at herself, Dairine brushed right by Nita and headed for the back door. Nita grabbed her own jacket and her manual, locked the back door, and went after her.