Chapter Eighteen
On a bright morning more than a week later, Kyra kissed Ruby good-bye, waved at Dax, then got in her car, and drove to work, giggling. Giggling. She didn’t know when or why the giggling had started, but she couldn’t help herself.
She still couldn’t believe this had happened to her. She couldn’t believe that the guy next door had fallen into her lap and she was now falling for him—and hard. She was falling so hard she was going to splatter in one big, gooey, heart-shaped puddle when she landed.
Even more amazing was that Dax was falling for her. He hadn’t said it in so many words, but he’d said things like, “I’m crazy about you two, you know it?” At times she would catch him staring at her, and he would have this dreamy look in his eyes . . . oh, yes, he was totally into a broke single mom with a six-year-old who wouldn’t stop talking. This was not some one-sided, Kyra’s-desperate-again kind of relationship—this was real.
She marveled at how perfectly it was all working out, as if the love gods had arranged it all for them. Dax played with Ruby in the evenings so she could study. She cooked for him—a heretofore only passable skill that had miraculously seemed to improve, even to the point that she was contemplating asking Judgmental Megan for some recipes.
Kyra arrived at work, donned her apron, and went into the kitchen to help Deenie prepare the setups for the tables.
Kyra said hello, then as casually as she might, she asked, “Megan, could you give me that sweet potato mousse recipe? It was so good.”
Megan’s head instantly whipped around. “Why?” she asked, eyeing her with suspicion. “Have you turned over a new leaf?”
As a matter of fact. “Maybe,” Kyra said, smiling. “Will you please just tell me how to make it? Ruby would love it.”
“I’m sure she would. It’s loaded with sugar,” Megan said with great superiority. “But I’m so thrilled your daughter will actually have some decent nutrition with that sugar, I’m tempted to make it myself and send it home with you.”
That remark would have annoyed Kyra to no end only a few short weeks ago, but she was too happy now. Megan couldn’t get to her. “Or you could give me the recipe and let me try.”
Megan peered at her as if she suspected she was being punked. But she said, “Remind me at the end of your shift.” She picked up a big bucket and disappeared into the cooler.
“Okay, that’s it,” Deenie said. “What is going on with you? You’re asking Megan for recipes? Has an alien invaded your body?”
Kyra glanced over her shoulder to make sure Megan was still in the cooler. “You really want to know?” she whispered giddily.
“Yes, I really want to know.”
“I’m seeing someone,” Kyra said.
Deenie gasped. She punched Kyra’s shoulder. “And you didn’t tell me? Give me all the details. Do I know him?”
“You know of him,” Kyra said. “It’s my neighbor, Dax.”
Deenie gasped again. “The asshole next door?”
“Did I say that?” Kyra laughed. “Yep, one and the same.”
“No way! Keep talking.”
Kyra told her everything. How he’d helped her a couple of times and she’d decided he wasn’t really an asshole. How he was really cute, and great with Ruby. How it had sort of happened after he’d brought a date here, and how everything about her life was suddenly falling into place. She’d had time to study for her real estate exam. There was the small glitch with Ruby and the seizures—Kyra had told Deenie about that earlier—but everyone said Ruby would be fine, and Kyra believed everything really would be fine.
“I don’t know, Deenie—it’s just perfect. I can’t believe it—I’ve always assumed I wouldn’t have an opportunity like this, at least not before Ruby was in college, and boom, here it is.” She beamed at her friend. “I am so happy.”
“Wow,” Deenie said, beaming too. “I kind of wondered after the Phil thing. I mean, I didn’t know having a kid was such a buzzkill. Not that Ruby is a buzzkill,” she quickly amended. “But you know what I mean. How is she, anyway?”
“She’s great,” Kyra said. “I took her for the tests the doctor recommended a couple of days ago.”
“What kind of tests?” Deenie asked and passed a big can of salt to Kyra so she could fill the table salt shakers.
“She had an EEG, which reads the brain waves or something like that. And an MRI and a CAT scan.”
“And?”
“And nothing,” Kyra said with a shrug. “When the test results come in, I’ll get the all clear, they’ll put her on some medicine, and that’s that. The doctor said she’ll grow out of it. And you know, I hardly think of it now. The seizures are so quick, and she never even knows it.”
“Still,” Deenie said. “Poor thing.”
Kyra nodded. “She’s such a little trooper. I am so proud of her, I’m just busting at the seams,” she said. “The worst was the EEG. Not because it hurt, but because she had to lie still for an hour and a half. Dax made her a little wooden dog, so she held onto that, and she did great. I thought the MRI and the CAT scan would freak her out, but Ruby thought it was cool. She said it was like being in a witch’s cave.” She paused and looked at Deenie. “Should I be alarmed that she thinks being in a witch’s cave is fun?”
Deenie laughed.
Kyra truly marveled at her young daughter’s poise. Ruby had done everything they’d asked of her, without complaint. But when Kyra was signing off on the last of the paperwork—and writing a check for her share of the procedure from her dwindling bank account, Ruby had tugged her shirt and had asked, “Am I sick, Mommy?”
“No,” Kyra had said. “Remember how I told you they just wanted to peek inside your head?”
“But why?”
“Because sometimes you flutter your fingers and you don’t see me.”
“I do?” Ruby asked, wrinkling her nose.
“You do. And that’s totally okay, you know. But the doctors want to make sure there aren’t any elves living in there,” she said and fluttered her fingers against Ruby’s head.
Ruby giggled. “Elves can’t live in your head.”
“That’s what I said,” Kyra had assured her. “Want to get some ice cream?”
Any thought of the tests had flitted out of Ruby’s head at that point, and she hadn’t said another word about it since.
“I’m happy for you, Kyra,” Deenie said as she picked up her tray. “Everything is coming together, and you totally deserve it.”
The lunch shift flew by, and afterward, with the sweet potato mousse recipe in her back pocket, Kyra went to the Washeteria. Dax and Ruby had gone to see Jonathan today, so she had the entire afternoon to herself.
She returned to Number Three with a basket full of clean laundry—which now included Dax’s laundry, as Kyra figured that was the least she could do in return for all he was doing for her. Before she put the laundry away, she picked up the living room. Dax had made Ruby a menagerie of wooden animals. A cow, a horse, a dog. It seemed like a new one appeared every day. Ruby carried them everywhere, and twice Kyra had noticed Ruby experiencing a seizure while holding one of the wooden figures. She thought it was interesting that Ruby’s fingers would curl tightly around the toy instead of fluttering, as if part of her brain knew not to let go.
Kyra was settling down to study when she got the call from Dr. Green she’d been expecting. “Hello?” she asked cheerfully and grabbed a pen to jot down the name of the medicine she expected him to prescribe.
“Hold for Dr. Green, please,” the receptionist said.
A moment later, the doctor said, “Mrs. Kokinos?”
It never seemed to matter how many times she circled Ms. on forms, the doctors’ offices insisted on calling her Mrs. “Hi, Dr. Green. I was hoping you’d call soon.”
“We got the test results back and I’ve had a chance to look at them,” he said. “I’m going to refer you to a neuropathologist.”
Refer her? Kyra wasn’t expecting that. “A what?”
“It looks like Ruby has a small tumor,” he said.
With those words, the world dropped out from beneath Kyra’s feet. Dr. Green suddenly sounded as if he were at the far end of a tunnel. Something about removal and a biopsy, and the location of the tumor was good, which sounded so asinine to Kyra, but she couldn’t say so, because she couldn’t breathe.
“Mrs. Kokinos?”
Kyra found her voice. “What are you talking about?” she croaked. “You said you were sure!”
“I said I was ninety-five percent, but that’s why we did the tests. Look, I’m still not too concerned. It’s a very small tumor, and the location is such that it should be easily removed. But we need to know what we’re dealing with, so we need to have it removed and get it biopsied.”
A wave of nausea came over Kyra so suddenly she thought she would vomit right there. A memory, so deeply buried she hadn’t thought of it in years, came roaring back to her. We need to know what we’re dealing with. That’s what her mother had told her. That was the reason, she’d told Kyra, that she was going to the hospital.
“Ohmigod,” Kyra whispered. “Ohmigod.”
“I know this is not the news you were expecting to hear, Mrs. Kokinos, but please don’t panic. We don’t know what this is, and it might be nothing at all. No matter what we find, we have all sorts of treatments available to us. Now, I’m referring you to a place that can see you Friday. It’s in the city, but they are the best. I’ve already sent the films.”
The best. Did that mean she’d have to sell her car? “I don’t . . . I don’t understand,” she said and rubbed her forehead. So many dangerous thoughts were suddenly pinging around in her head.
“Mrs. Kokinos, I am still very, very optimistic,” Dr. Green said.
That was supposed to comfort her? Going from certain it was nothing to optimistic it wasn’t anything did not sound like a good thing to her.
“Do you have a pen?” he asked.
Kyra took down the information. Dr. Green invited Kyra to call with any questions. “Anytime, day or night,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said weakly and hung up the phone. She still couldn’t catch her breath—her heart was beating painfully in her chest. She stacked her hands on top of her head and walked a tight circle around her kitchen, trying to suck in air. A flurry of images of Ruby went by—her daughter in a surgery gown. With tubes sticking out of her. In a casket that happened to look just like her mother’s casket.
That image forced Kyra into a chair. She braced her hands on her knees and bent over, trying not to pass out. Kyra had lost her mother when she’d needed her most—she never dreamed she could lose her daughter, too.
“No!” she shouted and slammed her fist down on the table. She would not lose both her mother and her daughter to brain tumors, she would not. She’d do anything she had to do—
Kyra suddenly opened her laptop and clicked on her banking app. She had thirty-six hundred dollars in savings. That was all she’d managed to save in the last six years, and she hadn’t even scratched the surface of her health insurance deductible.
She went to a government site to see if she could get Ruby on Medicaid, but their quick calculation box said that she made too much money to qualify. How ironic was that? They were living hand-to-mouth, and yet she made too much money. Kyra’s chest began to feel even more constricted, and she wondered if she was having a heart attack. She willed it to stop—she had to be here, she had to be strong for Ruby. She stood up and walked in a circle again, her mind racing, then went back to her computer and opened Facebook.
Josh Burton. He had to help her. There was no longer any choice for him.
She found him on Facebook again. There he was, his latest picture of him and two guys he’d tagged—one with the same last name—fishing on some lake. It was grossly unfair that he could enjoy some simple pleasure like fishing while his biological daughter was growing a fucking brain tumor. Kyra had let the man off the hook all these years, and until this moment she’d been okay with that. But she was going to pull out every stop for Ruby, and if he had health insurance, she needed it.
She googled him. Several Josh Burtons came up, three in Indianapolis. But there was only one Josh Burton at Castlemaine Industries. She searched Google records, clicked on every link she could find having to do with Josh Burton of Indianapolis and Castlemaine Industries. She was about to pay for a subscription to one of the record-searching sites that would give her a phone number and address, but before she did that, she went back to his Facebook page one more time to make sure she had her facts straight. And when she clicked on About, she saw something that she’d missed, and it startled her. Josh’s mobile phone number was displayed. Apparently, he’d not locked that information when he’d entered it.
It was a gift from heaven.
Kyra grabbed her phone and dialed the number. It rang three times and a woman answered.
She jerked back, almost as if she’d been struck. “Ah . . . I’m sorry, I must have the wrong number.”
“Who are you trying to reach?” the woman asked pleasantly.
“Josh Burton?”
“He’s right here,” she said. A moment later, a man said, “Hello?”
A visceral shiver ran through Kyra at the sound of his voice. The years sloughed away, and several forgotten memories crowded into her head.
“Hello?” he said again.
“Josh,” Kyra said and cleared her throat. “It’s Kyra Kokinos. I really need to talk to you.”