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“STICK OUT YOUR TONGUE and say aah.” Alicia smiled at the little girl propped on the edge of the examining table, her feet dangling over the side. She was flushed with fever, her eyes glassy and pale. She opened her mouth obediently and stuck out her tongue.
Her mother explained, “She’s been running a low-grade fever for a few days, but yesterday it spiked. And she said her stomach hurt.”
The woman sat in a chair against the wall, her hands clenched together over the handle of her purse. She seemed much more nervous than a clinic visit would warrant, but Alicia knew some people were terrified of hospitals and doctors. Maybe she was one of those who only came in as a last resort.
“You did right to bring her in, Mrs. Tatum. Does your throat hurt, Kylie?” she asked her small patient.
Kylie nodded. “When you put that stick in my mouth,” she said.
“Sorry. Did I press too hard? Let me take a look in your ears and then you can lay down.”
The paper sheet crinkled as Kylie straightened out on the examining table. She closed her eyes as though the fluorescent light was painful. Her mother got up and stood close to the table, running her fingers soothingly over the child’s forehead and cheeks.
“What do you think it is?” she asked.
“Her throat does look a little red and inflamed. We can do a strep test to make sure, but I think with the fever and pain it’s a good bet she has it. I’ll write a prescription for an antibiotic. Make sure she gets plenty of rest and liquids and she’ll probably be up and ready to run in no time.”
“Doctor?”
She looked up from the prescription pad she was writing on. “Yes?”
“Could you do a blood test?”
“A blood test? What are we looking for?” she asked, confused. Sometimes the parents of her patients seemed to think they knew more than she did. She was glad she’d gone back to school and switched from Obstetrics/Gynecology to Pediatrics. Dealing with crying children was preferable to crying adults, but sometimes she got both for the price of one.
The mother glanced at the child now sleeping, her breathing low and even. “Leukemia,” she said softly.
Alicia cleared her throat and set the pad and pencil down. She looked down at the insufficient medical data on the chart. “Kylie has never been a patient here before, so we have no record of past illnesses to go by. Is there history of cancer in your family?”
“Yes. My husband’s uncle died of leukemia when he was six. And Emma said Kylie has many of the symptoms.”
“Emma?” Dr. Brock couldn’t help but be surprised. Had the woman come here out of fear because another well-meaning individual diagnosed her daughter with leukemia? The gall of some people. Well-meaning was often code words for busybody.
“My eldest daughter. You delivered her. Don’t you remember? I had to have a cesarean because she was breach. The nurse said she almost died, but you saved her. I don’t know if I ever thanked you, Dr. Brock, but I’ve thought about you often and I knew you were the doctor to ask about this. Maybe because you’ve seen enough to believe in miracles. When I looked up your name on the Internet and saw that you were now practicing Pediatrics, I knew it was meant to be.” Her eyes glistened with unshed tears and she absently twisted at the wedding band on her left hand.
Alicia swallowed hard. She glanced down at the chart to confirm. Tatum. The name suddenly sent her back sixteen years. She’d tried to put that day from her mind, to dwell on the here and now. Thankfully, she had days completely void of memories, so busy and full she had no time to ponder what- ifs. But now she smiled with the realization that a sixteen-year-old girl was alive and had grown up in a loving home because of the decision she had made. A decision that could have gone very wrong, but God had made it right.
Her grandmother once told her that God’s providence consisted of threads both good and bad. Not till heaven would we see the tapestry of our lives woven into perfection. Maybe today she was getting a glimpse. “Emma Tatum,” she said slowly. “She was one of my first deliveries. You probably didn’t know that. Your doctor was out of town and I was on call that day.”
The woman nodded. “Thank God.”
Alicia crossed her arms and leaned against the edge of the writing desk. “I still don’t understand why Emma would make such a diagnosis. Or why you would take it seriously. Am I missing something?”
She looked away and a pink flush rose over her cheeks. She cleared her throat. “Emma sees...Emma seems to have a sixth sense when it comes to...” she trailed off and hung her head, clearly embarrassed.
“Emma thinks she can detect when someone is ill?” Alicia asked, incredulity probably surfacing in her face even though she tried to appear non-judgmental.
The woman nodded. “I know it’s hard to believe. I’ve been struggling with it for years. But Kylie is the living proof.”
Alicia wasn’t sure what that meant, but knowing who Emma’s birth father had been, the girl’s sixth sense seemed almost logical.
“Is she here with you?” she asked, more than a little interested in seeing Emma for herself. A true reminder that something good had come out of that time in her life.
“Yes. She’s in the waiting room.”
“Okay. I can see you’re clearly worried. There’s no harm in ruling something out, so why don’t you have a seat and I’ll send the nurse in to draw blood.” Alicia moved to the door, then turned and put her hand on the woman’s arm. She gave it a comforting squeeze. “I’m sure she’s wrong.”
*****
LORI DIDN’T KNOW WHAT she hoped for anymore. Was she here because she wanted to prove to Emma that Kylie was not dying, or prove that she was? Did it really matter? She was here, and they would know soon enough.
Sam still refused to consider the possibility. He’d stormed out of the house the night before to take Bear for a walk and didn’t return for two hours. Poor Bear looked as though his arthritis had flared up, hobbling along beside Sam, but unwilling to be left behind.
Sam wouldn’t come with her this morning when she begged for support either. He got in the car and left for work as usual. She knew his stubbornness was based in fear, but it hurt nonetheless. She didn’t want to come alone so she asked Emma to take the day off school. Emma was thrilled but insisted on staying out in the waiting room as though she couldn’t bear to hear the news she knew to be true.
Kylie opened her eyes and turned her head toward Lori. “Is it time to go home yet?” she asked, her voice drowsy with fever.
“Pretty soon, honey.”
A nurse pushed open the door. “May I come in?”
Lori nodded.
Kylie struggled to sit up, but the nurse gently held her back. “No need to get up. I’m just going to take a little bit of your blood, so we can test it and know how to make you better.”
“I don’t like to bleed.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll give you a pretty bandage when we’re done, and you can choose a sucker from the jar.” She pointed to a large container of lollypops on the shelf across the room.
Kylie relaxed until she saw the needle. “Mommmmy.”
Lori held her hand. “It’s okay. It’ll be over before you know it.”
Kylie was so lethargic she barely registered the needle prick. The nurse put a bright pink, flowered, bandage over the spot and lifted the candy jar down.
“What’s your favorite color?” she asked.
“Orange.”
“That’s my favorite too. You were very brave.” She handed Kylie the sucker then turned to Lori. “Dr. Brock said she’ll contact you as soon as she knows something. The blood work takes some time.”
The nurse left with the blood samples and Lori sank back onto the chair with a sigh of resignation. Waiting was the worst. She dropped her head in her hands and prayed for strength.
*****
ALICIA WATCHED FROM the doorway of her office when Mrs. Tatum left the examining room carrying Kylie. They made a beeline for a young woman in the far corner of the waiting room, her blonde head bent over a fashion magazine. She quickly set the magazine down and took her sister onto her lap while Mrs. Tatum retrieved coats from the hooks on the wall by the front door.
The frail, weak-lunged, dark-haired, newborn Alicia remembered had grown into a golden-haired beauty teetering between girlhood and full-blown woman.
Alicia stared, unobserved, as Emma helped her sister pull on her jacket and zip it up.
The two of them were as dissimilar as they could be. Kylie was all sharp angles, a thin nose and chin like her mother’s, eyes as pale as ice-covered lakes. Emma was smooth curves and petite features, eyes of midnight. How in the world could the Tatums have raised both girls and never wondered? Thankfully, love truly was blind.
After they left the building Alicia stepped back into her office and shut the door. She retrieved a small key from the pocket of her purse and opened the side drawer of her desk. She pushed file folders forward and pulled out a metal box.
Inside were eight years worth of snapshots, photos of every baby she’d delivered since medical school and before she went into Pediatrics. It was a collection she’d started as a reminder of the good she did when thoughts came unbidden to tell her otherwise. The photos were bundled together by year and wrapped with rubber bands. She found the stack marked 1995. The rubber fell away when she tugged, rotten and weak with age. The pictures fell onto her desktop in a clump, sticky with humidity. She slid them apart, searching. Most had first names and a date of birth written on the back.
She found the photo she was looking for and tilted it toward the light, squinting. She’d left her reading glasses somewhere. There was no name or date on the back, but she could pick these two wrinkled faces out of a lineup of newborns if she had to. She’d stared at it so many times. The twins were placed side-by-side on a warmer, matching thatches of dark hair adorned the crowns of their heads. The boy was crying; the girl was not. In fact, she almost looked as if she were smiling, which was clearly not possible for a newborn, but stranger things had happened.
Alicia smoothed a finger over the photo as though she could touch baby-soft skin. She didn’t know what the Howard family named the boy, had purposefully not pursued knowledge of either child since that day. Perhaps it was time to put names to the faces of the innocent. Time to share what she knew. There wasn’t much, just seemingly random facts that no one, up till now, had put together. Nothing to wake the medical world from the slumber they were in, but maybe enough to question what drug companies really did in the dark corridors of multi-million-dollar laboratories. Maybe.
She picked up a pen and carefully printed EMMA in block letters, consciously leaving a space for the boy’s name. Beneath that she wrote, L. Richards & D. Radcliff (birth parents). She’d never forgotten the woman who died soon after giving birth to this set of twins, or the man who’d unknowingly fathered them.
She jumped at a knock on the door. Nancy stuck her head in. “Doctor, there’s a patient waiting in room four.”
“Thank you, I’ll be right there,” she said, her heart racing.
The nurse pulled the door closed. Alicia hurriedly tossed photos back into the box and replaced it in the drawer. The remaining photo she slid into the pocket of her white coat.
She sighed. She was tired of being afraid. Tired of wondering if one night her car would stall on the railroad tracks in front of an oncoming train and she would make the ten o’clock news. Tired of hiding from the ghosts of her past. She wanted to feel the way she did when Grandma Bea said she was proud of her. Back when her life counted for something. When being a doctor meant more than just avoiding harm, but consciously doing good. Grandma said she was an individual set apart by God to do good works. It was time she started living what she believed.
The twins should never have been separated. It was against nature, against God’s purpose. She allowed it to happen and she could no longer live with that knowledge. It may have been the lesser of two evils at the time, but it was still wrong. Each and every day of their lives they probably felt bereft without knowing why. It was unfair for her to go on withholding this information from them. She was the only one who could tell them. The only one who knew Emma’s true identity.
She patted the pocket of her coat for confidence and hurried to attend her next patient.