Dropping Gloves (14 page)

I was just glad she’d let me in to meet with her doctor. This was something she shouldn’t go through alone, not any part of it.

Dr. Oliver nodded. “Right now, the tumor is small. It doesn’t appear to have spread at this time, but we won’t know for certain until we get in there—”

“Get in there,” she interrupted. “In my throat.” Her panicked gaze flickered over to me and back to the doctor. Her eyes glistened with unshed tears again. She’d had all sorts of procedures before, so I wasn’t sure why she was freaking out so badly this time.

He gave her an appraising look. “Yes. You know how this works. We have to remove all traces of the cancer or it will only grow and spread.”

“I know, but… How close is the thyroid to the vocal chords?”

Fuck
. It hadn’t crossed my mind. If anything went wrong…

Over the next hour or more, the doctor answered all Katie’s questions and mine as well as he could. Yes, there was a possibility her vocal chords could be damaged in the surgery. No, it wasn’t likely. Radiation first, then chemo, hoping to shrink the tumor as much as possible in order to minimize the risk of complications during surgery. No, he couldn’t guarantee that she would be able to sing again.

With every question we asked and with every answer he gave, Katie’s tension grew. She was close to falling apart at the seams, and I was the one who would have to catch all the pieces and stitch her back together again.

I tried to absorb everything the doctor was telling her about the treatment plan he thought was best and the time frame for each component of her care. No matter how clearly he laid it all out there, I doubted she was taking much of it in. She kept going back to the thyroidectomy that would have to be performed. Back to the thought that she could lose the ability to speak or sing or do any of the things that had been her dream since well before I’d met her. Back to the notion that she might lose herself, or maybe the idea of herself that she’d been holding on to for so long.

We finally finished up. Dr. Oliver handed me a manila folder full of paperwork detailing the treatment plan. I tucked it under my arm and shook his hand, and Katie headed up to the receptionist’s desk to pay for today’s visit.

“She’s going to need help,” he said once she left the meeting room. “Going through radiation and chemotherapy isn’t easy for anyone, but it seems to be more debilitating in cases like this, when the patient has already been through it before. She thought she’d put it all behind her, but now it’s happening all over again. She’s going to need people to keep her spirits up.”

I nodded my understanding, still processing everything that had happened in the last few hours.

“Depression is common in cancer patients,” he added. “And if it becomes severe, it can derail any treatment we can give her.”

“Are you telling me I need to keep her happy? Because I don’t know if that’s something I have any control over.” In fact, I would wager the opposite was true. There were a hell of a lot of things I didn’t know about life, but I did know that no one could force anyone else to be happy. Life just didn’t work that way.

“I’m telling you that you need to keep a close eye on her emotional health, not just her physical health. It’s just as important, and just as deadly.”

“All right.” That I could do. I was already going to be doing it, but it wouldn’t hurt to have it spelled out explicitly like that. “And if she needs help?”

“Make her get it.”

Those words were still echoing in my mind twenty minutes later when I parked in front of Webs and Laura’s house. Katie had asked me to come with her and help her explain everything to them, and I didn’t think it was the best idea to let her drive herself anywhere right now, anyway. She kept spontaneously bursting into uncontrollable tears, which I doubted would make for easy or safe driving.

It felt weird walking up the sidewalk and going through the door with her hand in mine. Weird didn’t even begin to cover it when her parents both looked up from the living room.

Laura took one good look at her daughter and was instantly on her feet and crossing to us. “What is it? What’s wrong?” She reached for Katie to draw her in for a hug, but Katie inched closer to my side. She shook her head, her eyes flashing over to me in a plea, and Laura visibly blanched.

“Katie met with Dr. Oliver,” I explained. I worked my hand free and held Katie’s waist, drawing her in as if I could shield her from the world. If only it were so simple.

Laura’s eyes filled with tears as Katie nestled into my arms. She crossed her arms in front of her since she couldn’t put them around her daughter. “What…” Her voice cracked, and she looked away and put a hand over her mouth.

“Why don’t we all go sit in the living room so we can talk about it?” I suggested.

Webs was still in there, his feet up on an ottoman. He shut down the iPad he’d been watching game film on and followed me with his eyes every step of the way as we joined him, Laura trailing behind me and Katie. I was pretty sure Laura had gotten her feelings hurt when Katie had chosen me for comfort instead of her. Maybe because I’d been the one with Katie at the doctor, too. I never wanted to hurt Laura, but I had to admit that it had made my chest puff up a bit when Katie had burrowed in to me.

Katie and I sat on the love seat across from her father.

Webs had his eyes zeroed in on me. I suppose it was more us than just me. He focused on how she leaned into me. Was he back to trying to intimidate me? I had gotten past that years ago. Katie was shaking again, like she had been when I’d gotten home from practice this afternoon, so I put a hand on her waist and nestled her closer to my side. When I looked up, I thought Webs gave me a nod. But that couldn’t be. Could it?

Laura’s banging kitchen cabinet doors drew his attention away from me, at least for the moment. She had gone in there before joining us, and when she returned, she had a bottle of wine and a bunch of glasses on a tray. “Figured we might need it,” she said. “Or at least I will.” She poured a couple of glasses and offered them around, but no one took her up on it. I figured she would need it more than I would, knowing her as I’d come to over the years. Laura wasn’t an alcoholic. She tended to have a glass or two every evening, for the most part, nothing excessive. But there were definitely times that she used wine to help keep her calm. Once we’d all turned her down, she curled up on the sofa next to Webs, both wineglasses still in her hands. “More for me, then.”

Webs put an arm around her shoulders as she drank from one of them. Once she was settled and had guzzled about half a glass, he nodded across at us. “All right. What’s the deal? Do we have a plan?”

Katie swallowed hard enough I could hear it, and her entire body tensed at my side.

“It’s thyroid cancer this time, not leukemia,” I answered for her, and she softened so much that she melted into my side. Dealing with her parents—her mom in particular—about anything to do with cancer had always been hard for her. I could do it, though. I could take that responsibility from her and let her save her energy for the much bigger fight she had ahead. “Dr. Oliver wasn’t surprised it was a different type of cancer than before. He said that isn’t uncommon after chemo.”

Laura finished her first glass and set it on the coffee table, bringing the rest of the bottle back to her lap. I kept going, laying out the finer points of everything the doctor had told us. Surprisingly, Laura still had half a bottle left by the time I finished my recitation.

“So radiation again, then more tests, then maybe chemo, then more tests, then surgery,” Webs said, boiling it all down to the basic parts.

“And probably more radiation after surgery,” I said, nodding.

Laura sat up, placing the wine bottle back on the table. “How long are we looking at before surgery?”

“Not long enough,” Katie choked out.

“Too long,” her father countered.

“But what if—”

“
What if
, nothing,” Webs cut in. “The tumor has to come out. From what you’ve told us, they’re going to try to shrink it first with the radiation and lower the risk of complications.”

“Which are rare,” I added. “Less than two percent, so you have a ninety-eight percent chance that everything will be perfectly fine with your vocal chords after the surgery is complete and you have time to heal.”

Katie turned her head to look up at me, mountains of hurt forming tears in her eyes. “You’re supposed to have my back on this.”

“I do have your back.” Which meant I would do everything in my power, including gang up on her with her parents, to make sure she had the best chance at living. She could be mad at me all she wanted, but I wasn’t going to budge on this. Katie was too important for anything less. “You remember what you promised me?” I asked, dropping my voice so her parents wouldn’t overhear.

She pressed her lips into a thin line instead of answering.

“You promised you would fight with all you had,” I reminded her, “and I promised I would do everything I could to make sure you came out of this on the other end. I meant it. Did you?”

This time, she glared at me, but there was some heat behind it. It was a bit of the fight she would need to get through this, I hoped, and not just Katie putting up her back and digging in her heels.

Webs straightened himself, taking his feet off the ottoman and setting them on the floor. He bent over his knees, his fingers laced together, and met Katie’s eyes. “All surgeries come with risks. The risk of leaving the cancer in there is so much higher, though, baby girl.”

She turned to face her parents again, extracting herself from my arms. “I don’t want the surgery. I’ll do the radiation and the chemo, all of that. I’ll do it as many times and for as long as it takes, but I don’t want the surgery. Maybe we can shrink the tumor enough that it just disappears.”

That seemed like a huge leap to me, but she was holding on to the idea with both hands, not letting go.

“I can’t— I can’t lose that part of myself.”

“You can if it means you’ll live,” Laura said.

“What kind of life will it be if I can’t do the things I love?”

My gut twisted at the anguish in her voice. I pressed my thumb and fingers to my temples, trying to imagine a future in which Katie couldn’t sing. Just the thought of it was as bad as a future without hockey for me.

But a life without Katie was so much infinitely worse that it was unfathomable.

“It would still
be
a life,” I argued.

For what felt like an eternity, Katie didn’t say anything. She looked from one of us to another, seemingly searching for an ally to support her argument. But we
were
her allies. We were on her side.

She just couldn’t see it.

“Well, there’s time before we have to worry about it,” Laura said. She got up and took her half-full bottle of wine and all the glasses back to the kitchen, putting the kibosh on the rest of the discussion. “I’m going to start dinner,” she called out from the kitchen sink. “Jamie, will you stay?”

Webs nodded at me. Whatever he thought was going on between me and Katie, he was on board with it. Laura was, too, but she had always been agreeable. I angled my head so I could see Katie. She was so mad she might as well have been fuming like a cartoon character with smoke coming out of her ears. I supposed that meant she wasn’t quite as amenable to the idea of me staying as her parents were.

“Yeah, I’ll stay,” I said loud enough for Laura to hear but never taking my eyes off Katie. “Thanks, Laura.”

If looks could kill…

There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that the three of us—her parents and I—were in agreement with Katie’s doctors. She needed the surgery. The tumor had to go, even if it meant that she couldn’t sing anymore. The benefits far outweighed the risks.

Now we just had to convince Katie.

She’d found a bit of scrappy attitude, at least, which she was definitely going to need for the battle that lay ahead of her. I just wished her visual daggers weren’t all aimed squarely at me.

Fear is an
ugly thing. It eats at you from the inside, gnawing away organ and muscle and bone, leaving nothing but skin behind, the shell of the person who’d previously inhabited it. Fear makes you do things you would never do under normal circumstances, makes you say things you don’t mean, makes you lash out like a wounded animal.