And now, half of the biggest mystery of his life is about to be solved. Silently, he asks her spirit for strength.
Kat woofs from the backseat as Juliet gets out of the car. Zack doesn’t move. He is suddenly terrified. He’s clung to the notion of Violet being out there somewhere for so long that the immediacy of knowing she is just inside the walls in front of him makes him want to run away screaming and rush inside and never let her go all at the same time.
What if she hates him? What if she looks at him with disdain, or worse, indifference?
What if, what if, what if?
“Grow a pair,” he says to himself and gets out of the truck.
54
The sense that everyone is staring makes Zack uncomfortable, but then he realizes they are looking at the dog, not him, and he relaxes a bit. The doctor, Oliver, is kind and excited, watching his nurse take Zack’s blood sample then writing the label himself.
“They’re going to messenger this to the lab and get the test done immediately. We’ll know in an hour at most if you’re enough of a match. If you are, we start the process. It’s going to take a couple of days to get everything straight, get Mindy prepped, so you guys will have plenty of time to visit. We’ve had her on a non-myeloablative regimen, so we’d be ready the moment a donor appeared. We’re going to move to an intensive myeloablative regime for the next two days, then, with any luck, transfer the stem cells.” He claps a hand on Zack’s shoulder. “Congratulations, sir. I don’t know what else to say.”
“Could you say what you just said in English, maybe?”
“We’re going to nuke all the bad cells to prepare her body to receive the clean ones.”
“Copy that. I guess I have a lot of catching up to do on the lingo.”
“Ask Mindy. She understands everything. She’s been studying exactly what happens. That kid is a seriously smart cookie.”
“How do you get the stem cells?”
“We’ll hook you up to a machine that pulls out your blood, captures the blood cells we need, then returns your blood to you. The second I see these results are positive, we’ll start you on a drug called Filgrastim. It pumps up your blood cells. Normally it’s a five-day process, but to be frank, I don’t know that we have that long, so we’re going to ramp it up and make it go faster.”
He pushes up his glasses. “In other words, you’re going to feel like crap for a couple of days, and Mindy will, too.”
“You have to make her sicker to make her better?”
“Yes. That’s the problem with these treatments. But, with a specifically coded DNA match, this will go a lot smoother for her than it would from someone who’s a match but completely unrelated. At least, that’s my hope. I have a great partner who’s been making serious strides in this field, from Boston University. He was here and laid out the entire protocol last week. It’s all set and ready to go, including a specific treatment designed for Mindy’s DNA so she doesn’t suffer graft-versus-host disease. We have been planning for this, as you can tell. We want to give her the best possible chance to kick the cancer and go into remission from our first round.”
“Graft-versus-host—that’s when an organ transplant is rejected, right? It can happen to blood?”
“Yes, it can. But with this new treatment, it shouldn’t be as high a risk as it might have been with an outside allogeneic donor. You being her father, your DNA is much closer.”
Juliet sits outside the glass door to the lab, in the waiting room, watching intently while holding Kat. He smiles at her, gives a little wave.
“Thank you, Dr. Oliver. I appreciate you explaining things to me.”
“No, thank you, Mr. Armstrong. If you can help me save my favorite patient, I’ll owe you one.”
They shake hands, and Zack enters the waiting room.
“All set?” Juliet asks.
Zack adjusts the bandage around his elbow. “Yeah. Good thing I don’t have to do needles often. That hurt.”
“You’re a baby. Even Kat thinks so. I swear I saw her shaking her head at the faces you were making.”
He spits out a laugh. “You are a seriously mouthy woman.”
She grins, and he realizes again how young she is. “I just like to have fun. Come on. Jasper and Lauren are already in Mindy’s room, waiting for us.”
Trepidation building in his stomach, Zack takes a close hold of Kat’s lead and lets Juliet steer him down the hallway.
She knocks on the door, and three faces turn toward them. Zack seeks Mindy’s eyes first. She is staring at him, then ducks her head shyly.
Juliet nudges him, and though Lauren is pale, she nods encouragingly, so he takes a few steps into the room.
“Hey there. I’m Zack.”
Mindy looks up again, and he has a moment where he quite literally feels the world turning on its axis. He’s afraid for a moment he’ll faint again. His daughter—my daughter—says, “Melinda Wright.” Her voice is Vivian’s, and his breath hitches in his chest.
Lauren stands, takes Jasper’s arm. “We’re going to grab some breakfast, let you two talk. Juliet, would you care to join us?”
“Heck no, I want to stay here and watch the fireworks.”
“You’re coming with,” Jasper says, exasperated. “Let’s go.”
Zack barely hears them. Mindy rolls her eyes at Juliet, her lip quirked on the left side, and he feels something break inside him. My God, she looks like Vivian when she does that.
The three leave, and they are alone. Mindy doesn’t wait, jumps right in.
“Can I pet your dog?”
“Absolutely. Kat?” He gestures toward the bed. The dog pads forward, then gently puts her front legs on the bed and takes a couple of sniffs. Mindy sets her hand on the dog’s neck, waiting for Kat to make the next move. The dog pushes into her hand immediately.
“You’re a pretty girl, aren’t you?”
Kat closes her eyes in ecstasy. She loves being scratched around the neck. A low rumble comes from her chest.
“Good grief, is she purring?”
“Sounds like it, doesn’t it?” Zack answers, moving closer. “She rumbles like that sometimes when she’s really happy. She was supposed to be a full-blown service dog for military PTSD or autistic kids, but she wasn’t cut out for it, so I took her home with me. She’s a goof.”
“You’re not a goof. You’re a gorgeous girl. Look at your pretty ears.”
Kat takes this as an invitation and hops up onto the bed, knocking aside the IV pole with a crash. Zack lunges for it, catches it before the whole apparatus topples.
Mindy starts to laugh and hugs the dog to her chest. “God, this is the most normal I’ve felt in a month.”
“It’s been hard on you, the treatment?”
“That, and being stuck in this stupid cast.” She gestures to the leg in question, still covered by the blanket. “It’s been a real bummer. I’m not used to being still. You look like you’re in shape. What’s your poison?”
“I run.”
“Does Kat go with you?”
“Oh yes. She’s a fan of the park near my house. There’s a copse of woods on the far end, and she’s allowed off the leash there. She tears around like a torpedo, chasing everything that moves.”
“I’d like to see her run.”
“We can arrange that. She’s just a streak of black and tan when she gets going.”
A small silence. He is trying not to stare, but Mindy is so beautiful. Under the paleness and black circles and bald head, he can see vestiges of the girl she was. Please, he prays to an invisible god. Please let me have more time with her.
He clears his throat. “You like dogs. What else do you like?”
“Skiing. Obviously. Snow makes me happy. Does it snow where you live?”
“Nashville? Not very much, though every once in a while, we get walloped. They close school if there’s even a hint of snow in the forecast. Our buses just aren’t equipped.”
“That’s ridiculous. You teach English, my dad said. Sorry, that was weird. I mean, I know you’re my real dad. But it’s going to take some adjusting to figure all this out, you know? And I’m... I’m sorry about Vivian. My mother.”