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He shook his head and laughed, realizing that for the first time in weeks, he was actually amused by something. “This is beginning to sound like pages from Little House on the Prairie.”
Raven’s laugh echoed in the wake of his. He found himself liking the sound a little more each time he heard it. He usually wasn’t aware of laughter, because he usually wasn’t aware of any kind of happiness, other than when he told members of a family that the patient would pull through. Ordinarily, he left that sort of thing up to whoever was assisting him. The less personal contact he had with people, the better. It was just too much of an effort otherwise.
But this bird-woman left him no choice. He didn’t like not having a choice.
“At times,” she was saying to him, “it felt a little like that, too.”
He found himself staring at her, at her mouth when she laughed, at her eyes when she looked at him. With effort, he reined himself in and focused on what they both needed him to be: Blue’s surgeon, nothing else.
And as such, there were procedures he needed to outline for her, things that had to be done before a prognosis.
“Before I see your brother tomorrow, I’m going to need those scans I mentioned yesterday.” Opening a drawer, Peter frowned. He didn’t find what he expected. Annoyed, and doing a bad job of disguising it, he played hide-and-seek with two more drawers before locating the hospital order forms in a fourth. He pulled one off the top and began writing instructions across the bottom. He signed his name with a flourish, then slowly printed the boy’s name in the space at the top.
“Take this to Imaging on the first floor,” he told her as he wrote.
“Don’t I need an appointment?”
“You’ll have one by the time you get there,” he assured her. “Ten o’clock, all right?”
She was surprised that Sullivan was actually asking rather than ordering. Blue was in school right now, but she could easily get him out. That gave her more than an hour to get back.
“Ten’ll be terrific.”
“All right.” Finished, he put down his pen. “Just present this when you get there.” He held out the form to her.
Taking it, Raven squeezed his hand. “Thank you, Doctor. You’re not going to regret this.”
He already was, he thought, as he watched her leave the office.
The boy looked smaller to him this time.
Sitting in the chair that he had occupied a little more than a day ago, Blue Songbird seemed to have mysteriously gotten smaller. Or the chair had somehow gotten larger.
Or maybe it was the gravity of what he had seen on the scan that was affecting the way he viewed the boy, Peter thought, making him seem so vulnerable.
Calling the Imaging department as soon as the boy’s sister had left his office yesterday, he’d told the woman on the other end of the line to put a rush on the procedure. Because of his standing in the medical community, not to mention Blair Memorial itself, the receptionist knew better than to offer even a single word of protest or to point to the fact that they were already overbooked, overworked and understaffed for the amount of scans and films they had to take and review.
Instead she’d offered a pleasant, “Yes, Doctor,” and promised to do her best. He’d ended the conversation by telling her he certainly hoped so.
As he’d hung up, he could almost hear the woman cowering. A tinge of guilt pricked him before he’d blocked it. He was not in the business of making friends, he was in the business of extending lives, of making them more tolerable for people who, through no fault of their own, were faced with intolerable alternatives. Everyone had a purpose in life, and healing was his.
As he looked over his shoulder at the backlit display on the wall and the CAT scan held in place with metal clips, he remembered why he didn’t, as a general rule, operate on children. Because as impervious as he tried to make his heart to the life-and-death situations he dealt with, the plight of someone so young faced with something so devastating got to him.
As if reading his mind, the small boy in the large chair smiled brightly at him. It seemed as if he was somehow trying to convey the thought that the situation was not as dire as it appeared. That everything would be all right if he just had a little faith.
It was entirely unfounded optimism. Peter knew that he lived in a world where everything that could go wrong did go wrong. And, more likely than not, with heavy consequences.
Peter suppressed a sigh he felt to the very bottom of the soles of his feet. A kid of seven wasn’t supposed to be faced with things like this. He was supposed to be able to run, to laugh and to feel immortal.
Like Becky.
Peter banked down the thought before it could go any further. He shifted his eyes toward Raven. She was unusually quiet for a woman who had verbally accosted him not once but twice. What they had to talk about was not meant for a child’s ears. “Are you sure you want him here?”
Blue answered before his sister had a chance to. He answered with the voice and attitude of a young adult who had always been allowed to think freely, who felt that his thoughts mattered as much, not more, not less, than the next person’s. That person usually being Raven. “It’s my body.”
Strange, strange family, Peter thought with a resigned shrug. He looked at Raven again.
“As we’ve already determined, Dr. DuCane was right. There are tumors on your brother’s spinal column. Initially it looked like a cluster, but in actually there seem to be four. Four small tumors.”
“That doesn’t sound like so many,” Blue offered.
One was too many if it was the wrong kind or in the wrong place. And, in this case, it might be both. Tests would have to be done on the actual tissues before they could discover if the tumors were malignant or not. In his experience, Peter thought grimly, given their location, they usually turned out to be the former. If nothing was done and the tumors were left where they were, it was only a matter of time before they would grow larger and eventually paralyze this boy who had life pulsing from every pore.
Well, there you had it. He did have tumors, Raven thought. Her fingers and toes felt numb. All this time, she’d been secretly holding her breath, praying that there’d been some mistake, that the initial X ray that Dr. DuCane had authorized was erroneous, that the pains in his back were nothing more than just good, old-fashioned growing pains.
But deep down she’d known it wasn’t a mistake. That there was something very, very wrong with this perfect little boy.
Raven felt the sting of tears and instantly forced them away. She wasn’t about to cry in front of Blue. If she was anything other than upbeat, he would sense it and it would make him worry. Worse, it would make him afraid. There was no way she was going to allow that to happen. He had to feel that this was just something he had to go through and that, at the end, he would be perfect again.
Just as he’d always been.
Peter glanced toward the boy’s sister. For a second he thought he saw the shimmer of tears in her eyes. But in the next moment that smile of hers was fixed in place and she was nothing short of confidence personified.
He only wished he felt half that confident.
Raven took a deep breath. “So, Dr. Sullivan, when can you operate?”
“You understand that the operation is extremely delicate?” he said.
If successful, the boy would heal faster than an adult, but there would still probably be therapy, still a painful recovery period to face. And that was if everything went right. There were no guarantees. A great deal could go wrong that was beyond anyone’s control. He knew that better than anyone.
Raven nodded. She placed her hand over Blue’s and gave it a squeeze along with an encouraging smile. She kept her voice cheerful. “That’s why we came to you.”
“Yeah.”
Peter turned his chair around, looking at the CAT scan. Thinking. As with a great many neurological problems, time was of the essence, but they did have a little leeway. He wanted Raven to use that leeway to carefully think things over before she gave him the okay to go ahead.
This wasn’t the kind of dilemma a boy of seven should be privy to, even if it was his body. Turning his chair back around, he looked at Blue. “I’d like to talk to your sister alone.”
Rather than being upset, Blue looked resigned. “Whatever you tell Raven, she’s only going to tell me later.”
“That’s up to her.” And undoubtedly, the woman could couch this a great deal better than anything he could say to the boy. He’d lost the knack of talking to children, not that he’d really ever had it. It was just that Becky had talked to his heart and that was how he communicated with her.
“Okay.” Blue rose and crossed to the doorway.
“Wait for me in the hall,” Raven told him. After Blue let himself out and closed the door behind him, she looked at the surgeon expectantly. She supposed it was better this way, after all. Dr. Sullivan might say something to make Blue feel that the surgery wouldn’t go well. “All right, we’re alone. What is it you want to tell me?”
Without the boy to listen, Peter felt less restrained. “Are you aware of the risks involved?”
“I think I am. I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on ever since Dr. DuCane told me what she suspected.”
He didn’t bother mincing words. “If I operate, he might still become paralyzed.”
“If you don’t, he definitely will.”
Like the rest of his body structure, the boy’s spinal cord would be small, delicate. Peter had the hands of a skilled surgeon, but he didn’t like taking chances if he could help it. “There’s a small chance—”
She knew what he was about to say. Raven shook her head. “Too small to take. I believe in meeting problems head-on instead of hiding from them.”
“There’s also the fact that the tumors might be malignant—”
Her eyes met his. She could feel the air backing up in her lungs again. “Yes?”
“If that’s the case, the operation might cause the malignancy to spread—”
“Let sleeping dogs lie, is that it?” She smiled, shaking her head. She wasn’t about to place her head in the sand and hope for the best. She had to tackle this and then hope for the best. “It might spread anyway—if it’s malignant and there’s no proof that it is,” she informed him with feeling.
He’d found that when emotions were involved, the right decision was not always made. It was best to make decisions after the heat had left and things had cooled off. “Ms. Songbird, I want you to think about this—”
“My name is Raven,” she told him, “And I have thought about it.”
He sincerely doubted it. He heard the passion in her voice, the urgency. He didn’t want her making a final decision like that. “Think about it some more,” he countered. “We have a small window of time. Use it.”
She blew out a breath, trying not to sound as impatient as she felt. God, why weren’t her parents here? She needed someone to lean on. “How long am I supposed to look through this window?”
Now she was being rational. “At least twelve hours, twenty-four would be better.”
Raven nodded her head. “All right,” she told him even though she already knew what the decision was going to be.
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