“We can’t jump to conclusions.”
Lopez felt darkness closing in. “What’s the worst it could be?”
The doctor looked at Olivia as he said, “Cancer.”
On the way back to the homestead, Olivia stopped and covered her face. Lopez put his arms around his daughter. At first her shoulders shook and the only sounds she made were sudden inhalations. Then came wailing, and she clenched his shirt in her fists. He felt nothing. No panic, no dread, no darkness closing in. Nothing. He rocked slightly and made the same shushing sound he had made when she was a baby. “It’s okay, Nena. Oh, oh, it’s okay.”
When she was done crying, he still felt nothing.
Lopez felt as if the air had been replaced by a drug so thin and so light it flowed across a body like wind and filled the lungs, removing all sensation. He was himself and not himself as he led his daughter by the hand to their cabin.
Lani met them at the door. He told her what the doctor had said, and she shook her head. “He wasn’t sure. He said he wasn’t sure.”
Dr. Lo had told Lopez about several doctors in Sebastopol that could make or rule out a diagnosis of leukemia. Lani wanted to go there with Lopez and Olivia, but they both agreed that traveling with two women might prove too great a temptation for the worst sort of men to resist. So they decided Lopez and Olivia would leave the next day. Until they returned, Lani didn’t want to talk about it.
Lopez and Olivia sat on the porch. He took his daughter’s hand. She squeezed it. “Papá?” She was studying him. Her expression was flat, exhausted. “How are you?”
“Fine, fine, mija. Don’t worry about me.”
“But if I have cancer, then so do you.”
“You can’t worry about me. I don’t feel…anything just yet.”
She laid her head on his shoulder and he put his arm around her. “I’m worried you’ll have one of your panics.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
They sat in silence, watching the shadows stretch. When Lani called them in for dinner, she did her best to cheer them up. It worked, a little. Lopez was hungry. He couldn’t remember ever feeling hungrier.
The next morning, they rode through bleaching dry-season sunlight to reach Sebastopol at dusk. Lopez bought a dinner of sausages and dumplings. They lit two candles in a cathedral that seemed to be both under construction and falling apart. They camped on the town’s edge, beside a lemon tree.
At dawn he took Olivia to the address Dr. Lo had given him. It was an old mission-style building, plaster flaking. The nurse took them up to a wide room with two rows of beds. Hours passed, punctuated by different doctors who questioned and examined Olivia before vanishing.
Finally a doctor explained that blood came from bone marrow. To see if something was wrong, they had to stick a needle into Olivia’s hip. She bravely agreed, squeezed her father’s hand when they did the horrible thing. Lopez thought he heard a crunch; it felt as if the sound came as much from his chest as from her hip.
Afterward, Olivia cried silently while he brushed her hair back. “Mija, mija,” he murmured. Gradually her breathing slowed. Midday heat crawled into the room. Olivia slept.
In the evening, they talked about what might be happening on the homestead while he sat on her bed. They must have dozed off, for when he opened his eyes again they were sitting in a square of moonlight.
In the morning, one of the younger physicians appeared wearing an expression of practiced, perhaps genuine, concern. “You have the bone marrow test back?” asked Olivia.
The doctor sat down. “I am sorry, but the results are consistent with leukemia.”
Olivia buried her face in her father’s stomach. He sat down and wrapped an arm around her. “Can it be cured?” he asked.
The young doctor exhaled. “Long ago it was often cured, four out of five cases. But back then there were many more drugs.”
“And you don’t have all of those drugs now?”
“We don’t have any of them. Not here. There is one drug left that comes from a wild flower, a kind of periwinkle, from an African island named Madagascar.”
Lopez cleared his throat. “You don’t grow that flower here?”
“The only place left that grows it is the hospital in the old university.” He looked at Lopez with searching blue eyes. “Can you take her down the peninsula? Often the Bridge People take sick children across without fee. We can write you reports. The drug you should ask for is called vincristine.”
“I’ll take her. Her mother’s people are from down around there.”
The doctor nodded and left. Olivia wasn’t crying. She took his hand and pressed it to her cheek. “Papá,” she said.
“Nena,” he whispered.
There was nothing left to say.