RYAN WANTED TO SPEND THE night in the hospital with Lucas, but Doctor Trundell advised against it. “Lucas will need your strength to get through this,” he said, and, as much as I disliked the man, it made sense. Lucas was going to be in for the fight of his life. Literally. And we would need to be strong for him when he couldn’t be for himself.
With Trundell’s help, I was able to convince my brother to go home, only by promising to return first thing the following morning. Lucas would be returning home in a couple of days, after more tests were run.
I followed Ryan out of the hospital, staying as close physically to him as I could. His body, his entire being, looked compressed, weighted down. I expected him to collapse at any moment.
He didn’t.
He went in the opposite direction from me when we walked out of the sliding hospital doors. I tugged on his shirt. “Where’re you going?”
He tilted his head, like I was insane. “To my car.”
I snorted. “You are not fucking driving right now. You’re in no fuckin’ shape to get behind the wheel.”
His brow furrowed. He must’ve forgotten that I had met him at the hospital earlier in the day. I pulled on his shirt again, and said, “We’re taking my truck. We’ll get your car tomorrow when we come back.”
He seemed to think about it for a moment, although, truth be told, he probably couldn’t even do that.
Almost mechanically, he followed me to my truck. I unlocked it with the fob, and he slid into the passenger’s seat. Climbing in behind the wheel, I glanced over to him. His face was pale, his eyes wide and staring straight ahead, and his hands were folded in his lap.
I had seen that look before, usually in the men that had been badly wounded out in the field. The ones that truly felt their lives were over. It was a look of acquiescence, totally giving up even before he’d begun to fight. I understood that a lot of it was shock. The diagnosis was a kick in the nuts, and he was entitled to curl into a ball, but only for a little while.
I couldn’t let him fall too far, though. Like I did for those men, like I did for Ryan when we were kids, I had to figure out how to make him fight. I had to figure out how to fight.
I just didn’t know how.
I woke up the following day, feeling exhausted. I silently wished a truck had run me over. If I felt this bad, I could only imagine how Ryan would feel when he woke up.
I padded out to the kitchen and started a pot of coffee. I had been living in Ryan’s house for a month, since returning from Afghanistan, but had tried to keep to myself. Ryan and Lucas had built a life for themselves after Sarah left, and I felt like an intruder. The construction job I’d gotten right after returning stateside helped keep me out of their hair and provided me with a decent source of income. I had become familiar with where he kept everything in the kitchen, so starting a pot of coffee was done almost mechanically. I didn’t drink much of the stuff, but I knew Ryan did. And I knew he’d need it after everything he had been through the day before. I would actually be surprised if he had slept at all.
Once the coffee was started, I sat on the couch and pulled out my laptop. I didn’t know much about leukemia, so I had determined that I would need to research it. Knowledge is power, or so they say, and I wanted as much knowledge as I could get about it.
One thought kept popping into my head. How do you fight an enemy you can’t see?
I was used to seeing who I was up against, being able to track their movements either through binoculars or the scope of a gun when needed. But I couldn’t see leukemia, I couldn’t shoot it.
Ryan finally wandered out of his room. Yawning, he plopped himself down on the couch next to me. Through a yawn, he said, “Morning.”
Glancing up from my laptop screen, I said, “Morning. How’d you sleep?”
I knew the answer without him speaking. I could see it in his face, the dark-colored bags under his eyes, and the slump to his shoulders.
“Like shit. You?”
“Same. Coffee’s made.”
“So I smell.” He leaned his head against the back of the couch and fell silent for a moment. I almost thought he had fallen back asleep when he whispered, “What am I gonna do?”
I knew it was a rhetorical question. He didn’t really expect me to have an answer. But I had one anyway. “You’re going to fight. We’re going to fight. You, me, and Lucas.”
With his head still pressed to the back of the couch, he turned to me and said, “What if I’m not strong enough? What if I fail him?”
I knew where his questions were coming from. His marriage was in shambles. Sarah had left him six months earlier, leaving both him and Lucas behind to start a new life with a man fifteen years her senior and far, far wealthier than Ryan could ever hope to be. I hated the woman for instilling the sense of failure in him, the same sense that he was afraid of when it came to Lucas.
“You won’t. You’ve always been a fighter, you just couldn’t see it. You were smart too, and you need to be both now.”
His lip curled at the corner. “No, you were the fighter, my protector. I can’t outsmart this. I can’t win against this with my brain.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But you still have to be strong for him and yourself. You might not be able to outthink it, but you can certainly look into it. Get second opinions. Hell, third opinions if needed. But don’t give up. I won’t let you.”
This time, his lips curled into a full smile. “What’re you doing?”
“Research.”
Throwing himself forward, he scooted toward where I sat on the couch to get a better look at the laptop.
“Holy shit! I don’t think you’ve ever researched a thing in your life. I did your research papers for you in high school.”
I gave his shoulder a playful shove, but was silently grateful that there was at least some sarcasm in what he said. That meant he wasn’t entirely lost. Yet.
He got up from the couch. “Coffee?”
“Sure. But only a little. That shit makes me jittery.”
Ryan wandered into the kitchen and I opened my internet browser to Google and typed leukemia into the search field.
The first site I pulled up was The American Cancer Society. I figured they would have the most information, and may be able to point the way for different treatment options.
Ryan returned to the living room and handed me a small cup, keeping the larger one for himself. I set my cup on the coffee table and handed him the laptop. “Read.”
Ever the obedient little brother, he did, sipping his coffee as he scanned the page. After several minutes, he turned to me and said, “I never realized there were different kinds of leukemia.”
“Me either.”
“And each one has its own treatment protocol.”
I didn’t take the laptop back. I wanted him to read, to follow the path that I had purposely set him on. Knowledge is power, and he needed the power.
I stood from the couch and grabbed my cup of coffee from the table. “I’m going for a run. Need to clear my head. When you’re done with that, shower, and we’ll go see Lucas.”
Without turning away from the laptop’s screen, he said, “Sounds like a plan.”
I may not be the smart one, I thought, but I sure as fuck can be crafty.