her lap. She’s praying under her breath. But when I listen hard, I hear the same phrase that she’s been mumbling all week. “It will be okay. It will be okay.”
I don’t believe her. I don’t think that she believes herself, either.
We fly through cloud. It hangs against the window, thick and damp and grey. I can’t see outside, any more than I can see my own future. I’m flying blind. It’s daunting.
There’s a jolt as the plane touches down. We’ve landed, yet I have little recollection of the last part of the flight. I’ve been reliving the day just two weeks ago when a grim-faced doctor pronounced two words that changed my life.
“It’s leukemia.”
Angela gasped.
I knew vaguely what leukemia was, but in hope that I was mistaken, I blurted out, “What’s leukemia?”
“Cancer of the white blood cells —”
My pulse pounded in my ears, drowning out the doctor’s words. I felt strange, as if I was outside myself looking in. Occasional words pierced the fog: three-and-a-half years’ treatment … Edmonton … Calgary … Children’s hospital … Ronald McDonald…
“Do you have any questions, Adam?” the doctor asked.
I wanted to know what Ronald McDonald had to do with anything. I didn’t ask. My voice had vanished.
Angela unclips her seat belt, the metallic clunk bringing me abruptly back to my surroundings. I get out of my seat and follow her up the aisle of the plane to the exit, moving oddly, almost gliding, feeling as if the contents of my head are floating along a few inches behind. Angela looks back at me. She’s tired, I can tell. Her eyes are red and puffy. Briefly, I catch a look of pity on her face, and then it’s gone, replaced with a determined but silent it will be okay.
Life has changed. And although part of me hopes that I’m in a nightmare and will wake up soon, somewhere deep inside I know that things will never be the same.
CHAPTER THREE
From high in a clear blue sky, the fish hawk scans the land for one particular fish-bearing river. She sees its familiar shape and knows she is nearly home. She now searches for the tall, dry spruce where her parents had raised her, high above the reach of predators. Her powerful eyes spot a squirrel scampering up a tree and a mouse darting across open ground. Her cousin, the red-tailed hawk, would have pounced on these meals, but the fish hawk is not interested in small land creatures. She eats only fish.
She continues searching, but something isn’t right.
If you’re going to fight a terminal illness, I guess this is the best place to do it. It’s bright and cheerful-looking here at Stollery. Everyone is really nice, and the doctors and nurses seem to know what they’re doing.
But I don’t want to be here in the oncology ward.
I don’t want to see kids with bald heads and skinny arms and gown-covered, stick-like bodies. I don’t want to look like them. I don’t want to be stripped of everything I am. I was second in last year’s cross-country meet for all the schools in the Wood Buffalo Region. I plan to win gold this year.
I mean I planned to win gold this year.
How the hell can this be happening to me?
I’m hundreds of kilometres from home, and I don’t know what lies ahead. I don’t know what they’re going to do to me, how much it will hurt, or how much pain I can take. My future is one huge question mark, and although I hate to admit it, I’m scared, really scared. Even though Angela is here with me, I feel completely alone. I can’t talk to her. She left me when I was a baby, and I don’t think I’ll ever forgive her for that. Or Frank. Several times since they reclaimed me, Angela has told me how hard it was for her leaving me in Fort Chipewyan with my grandfather.
Hello! How about asking how hard it was for me!
Both she and Frank told me they did it for me, because they wanted me to have all of the opportunities that they never had. They said they had to leave Fort Chip to be trained and get good jobs, blah-blah-blah. I didn’t buy it then, and I still don’t buy it now. They left me! It was my grandfather who took care of me all those years. Recently, Frank and Angela have changed their story. They tell me they were just kids themselves when I was born, so they needed to grow up before they could raise me. They say I’m old enough now to understand. But they are wrong, because I still don’t understand. They are always wrong — about everything.
Eventually, once they figured out they’d “grown up enough,” they sent me a one-way plane ticket. They told me my grandfather was coming to live with us too. “Soon,” they had said. But soon turned out to be more than six years. He moved to McMurray just a couple of months ago, and I’m pretty sure that my parents only flew him down here because they’d heard rumours about school kids doing drugs and getting arrested, committing suicide, or getting pregnant. Frank and Angela must have figured my grandfather could provide round-the-clock daycare while they were both working. Like I need a babysitter — come on, I’m almost fifteen!
All the same, I was looking forward to him coming. I thought it was going to be great, because I remember being happy when I lived with him. But when he arrived, everything was different. With the four of us under one roof, everyone was on edge.
Before my grandfather came, Frank would tell me to be respectful to my elders, and by that he meant him. But I never saw him doing anything that earned my respect, so I never gave it. And now that my grandfather lives with us, Frank isn’t respectful to him at all. In fact, the two of them can’t get along. Frank is such a hypocrite. He only gets along with Angela. And I don’t get along with either of them. My grandfather is the only one I feel any affection for, but he’s so stuck in the old ways that it’s like he’s from another planet, and we have nothing in common. When everyone is in the house at the same time, I stay in my bedroom. My grandfather does the same. It’s a good thing that both Frank and Angela work shifts, or we’d never come down to eat!
Now that I’m stuck here in the hospital, the idea of living in a house where four people are at war sounds half decent. If I could go home, I’d be nicer to them — if only I didn’t have to be here.
Here! There are ten beds in this ward, and the other nine kids all look much worse than me. Some of them are totally bald. I can’t even tell for sure if they’re guys or girls! And their age is anyone’s guess. When I first got here, most of them stared at me silently. A few said “hi.” I didn’t say it back. Angela smiled at them, whispering to me that I should be nice and make friends. But I didn’t want to be nice. And I still don’t. I don’t want to make friends. Not here. Because all the kids here have cancer with a capital C. How can I be one of them? I tell myself I’m going to wake up soon, and this will all have been a bad dream. But it’s no dream. I’m awake. There are ten beds, and I’m in one of them.
One in ten: it’s a statistic that has been plaguing me since I left Dr. Miller’s office when Angela told me over and over that everything would be okay. She said the survival rate for leukemia is much better than it used to be, and that I have a 90 percent chance of becoming cancer-free and living a completely normal life. She said it quite a few times. Perhaps she was trying to convince herself that it was true.
When I think
