Fortune by Annabel Joseph (ebook reader for comics TXT) 📕

“I can’t,” he said gently. “I don’t have privileges here.”

“We can have him moved to another hospital,” blurted Kat. “One of the ones where you do have privileges. I mean, this is your field, isn’t it? Brain tumors and stuff?”

“Yes, it is, Kat. But it’s not that simple.” His gaze pleaded with her, begged her to understand. Surgery may not even be an option, and if it is, it will be a highly risky procedure. Don’t you see? I don’t want to be the one who kills him. Don’t make me be that person. “Let’s wait and get more information,” he hedged. “They’ll need to do some more tests and nail down exactly what treatment he’s going to need going forward.”

But the tests and hurried consultations revealed that surgery was necessary, and Ryan knew it would be best to have it done at his hospital, Boston General. Even worse, he knew he was the most qualified surgeon on staff to do it.

At home that night, Kat was racked by fears and worries. “We should have known,” she sobbed against his shoulder. “His headaches. His strange moods. We should have made him go to the doctor sooner.”

“No, Kat. It’s not your fault. These types of tumors appear and grow rapidly. They’re very aggressive—” He clamped his mouth shut but she’d already heard the truth in his voice. After all his careful efforts to preserve hope, she heard the truth of it. She stared at him.

“He’s going to die, isn’t he? He doesn’t have a chance.”

“There’s always a chance, Kat,” Ryan insisted through the tightness in his throat.

“No. Oh, no.” She didn’t believe his backpedaling. He wouldn’t have believed it himself. She bolted away from him, into the other bedroom where she kept her things. He thought she would slam the door, lock him out and grieve in there, but she didn’t. She returned a moment later holding out two rumpled cranes in her hands. One was the crane he’d folded from the paper placemat at the diner. The other was the one from her hospital room, the one he’d made from newspaper after she fell down the stairs.

“Here’s two more,” she said. “Show me how. Show me how to make them. I’ll help you make a thousand. Please, I need your wish.” She was pleading, as abject and desperate as he’d ever seen her. “I’ll give it back. I’ll return your wish and all that work you did, I promise, but I need it for my father. Please, Ryan!”

He looked at the worn cranes she clutched in her palm. What could he say to that?

He showed her how to fold them and in her panic she learned quickly. They weren’t as accurate and precisely folded as his, but he didn’t say a word. They bent over the small squares of paper until the wee hours of the morning, and with each completed figure Kat seemed to believe more strongly that the magic of the cranes would work. That the paper symbols might really have the power to bring fortune and grant a wish. Senbazuru. A desperate wish for a beloved father’s life. Before they were done, she’d extracted his promise to do the surgery.

When they finally went to bed she slept the sleep of the dead, but he lay awake a long time looking at the strings of one thousand cranes. At the placemat and newspaper ones at the very top of the very last string. Moments crowded his memory. Kat frowning up at him from a hospital bed. Kat fidgeting across from him at the diner, choking down the fat-free cream cheese. The look in her eyes the first time he’d tied her, when she gazed up at him with a crane in her mouth. The times he’d teased her, the times he’d comforted her. Moments of submission and moments of rebellion, moments of ecstasy. He thought of her laughter, thought of her life-filled family. Finally he succumbed to the grief and helplessness strangling him, and he wept.

* * * * *

Dmitri was moved to Boston General and his surgery was scheduled for Thursday. Ryan consulted with his team of doctors, trying not to let his personal feelings for the patient cloud his professional opinions. He still did his other work and went home in the evening feeling wrung-out and fragile, only to turn around and accompany Kat to Elena’s to sit and comfort her mother. Elena—bold, vibrant Elena—was struggling. Her natural ability to comfort everyone else was sorely needed now. She could not seem to comfort herself.

They all prayed. The house vibrated with endless, fervent prayers in Russian. Even the youngest children were subdued, not really understanding why the adults were so sad, but still affected by it. Ryan prayed too, in will if not in guttural Russian exhortations.

Elena prayed hardest of all. She seemed almost in a trance. The daughters questioned her, asking why she couldn’t tell them Dmitri’s outcome. That was her job, after all. But in this, she could not—or would not—see. She was too afraid to look, she explained on a sob. Ryan suspected she knew, but that like him, she chose not to tell. Just in case she didn’t know, he guarded his gaze from her. If she looked in his eyes she would see the future written there clearly enough.

Not that he gave up completely. It was his job as a doctor to expect miracles, to continue to press forward even if success was unlikely. He couldn’t operate on Dmitri as if the end was inevitable, because that would be a betrayal. But Ryan knew, even if Dmitri survived the invasive surgery, he would not be himself anymore. Even if he survived he would have to endure chemo, radiation… None of which would stave off the insidious astrocyte cells for long. Dmitri would not be giving Kat away at her wedding. Even in a best-case scenario, Dmitri would not see the leaves start