“It’s the next thing on my list,” he said. “Right after this appointment. You want to gather everybody together, right here?”
Jason looked at Rob. Rob nodded. “I’ll activate the family emergency broadcast system.”
“Who’d have thought that pain-in-the-ass group text function would ever come in handy?” Jason asked.
“Me. A coupla’ times.” Rob winked. “Noon, Joe?”
“Should be fine. Thanks, boys.”
“Hang in there,” Jason said, and he grabbed Joey in an uncharacteristic bear hug, and said it again. “Hang in there, little brother. We’re gonna get through this together. As a family. And she may not know it yet, but that includes Emily.”
“Yeah, whether she likes it or not.” Rob clapped his arms around them to make it a group hug.
Joe felt himself getting all choked up again and wrestled himself free. “All right, all right, you guys are gonna have me bawling again. I can’t show up at Sophie’s place all teary eyed. Gotta be the man now.”
“Gotta be the dad, now,” Rob said, grinning. “I always thought you’d be the last McIntyre to produce an heir.”
“You and me both,” Joe replied. “See you at noon.”
#
Emily had planned to meet Joey in the clinic’s waiting room, but they never even paused there. The minute they’d walked through the stunning Victorian’s massive hardwood front doors, a beautiful woman had greeted them with a stunning smile, and said, “You must be Emily. And Matilda! You’re as pretty as my cousin Joey said you were.” She crouched low. “I’m Dr. Sophie. But you can just call me Sophie, since we’re family.”
“We are?” Matilda asked.
Emily cleared her throat, drawing the blonde’s gemstone eyes, which widened just a little. “Oh, right. Um, well, come on back with me. I’ve got a room all ready for you.”
Then she led them to where they now waited, in a room painted pale blue with giraffes and alligators and monkeys frolicking on the walls. There was a little wooden desk and chair from days gone by, and Matilda sat there, making excellent use of the coloring books and crayons it held.
No one else had been in the clinic when they’d arrived. Emily found that odd and wondered why. But before she’d wondered long, the door opened, and Sophie came back in with Joey right behind her. Her eyes weren’t quite as sparkling as before.
“Joey filled me in,” she said. “As much as he could. I’ll get more info from you, but first….” She brightened her expression and her voice as she turned to Tilda. “Would you mind terribly if I put you up on my table and took a look at you?”
Tilda set her crayon down, got to her feet and opened her arms to Joey. Not to Emily. It hurt like a knife in her heart.
But it seemed to have the opposite effect on him. He practically lit up as he obliged her unspoken request. He lifted her up high, and spun her around twice before lowering her carefully to the paper-covered exam table, while she giggled maniacally.
“Thank you, Joey,” Sophie said, and she moved closer and proceeded to look into Tilda’s eyes, ears, and down her throat with a light, to palpate her glands and her abdomen, to listen to her breathing and her heartbeat, to measure her blood pressure and temperature.
She did a thorough job, then said, “Would you like to finish your picture now?”
Tilda nodded.
“I have a surprise for you. Come on, hop down.” Sophie held out her arms to help, and when Tilda was once again sitting at the little desk, Sophie picked up an iPad with a set of headphones attached and said, “Do you like Frozen?”
“It’s my faybret!”
“Want to watch the best part while you color?” She set the tablet on the desk, the movie already queued, and then gently lowered a headset over Tilda’s ears, and tapped the PLAY button.
Then she turned to Emily. “Those are noise cancelling headphones, so we can talk. First, just know that she’s fine at the moment. There’s no sign that the condition is active yet.” Then she looked at Joe. “This is how it goes with this thing. There’s nothing, there’s nothing, there’s nothing, and then all of the sudden there’s something.”
He nodded. “That’s how it was with Dad. He was fine, and then he got sick, really sick, all at once.”
Emily nodded. “Every time she gets so much as a hiccup, I start to panic,” she said. “Her doctor in New Mexico said when the symptoms do begin, the disease progresses rapidly. Within days.”
Sophie glanced down at Tilda, her expression gentle and kind. Tilda was completely absorbed in her movie. “Just remember, she’s okay for now. We’ll want to monitor her closely. And I’ll get moving immediately on testing everyone in the family to find her a marrow donor.” She shifted her gaze to Joey then. “Does the family know?”
“Just Jason and Rob. I’m calling a family meeting at high noon to break the news.”
“You tell them to get their asses over here this afternoon to be tested. I’ll move all my other appointments to tomorrow.” She put a hand on Emily’s shoulder. “Your little girl has just become my top priority. I’m going to do everything in my power. I know one of the top doctors in pediatric blood disorders, and he knows all the others. I’ll call him as soon as we finish up here.”
“Th-thank you.” Emily barely knew what to say.
“She’s family,” Sophie said. “That’s the way this family works. Call her doctor in New Mexico. You’ll have to give permission for them to send me her files. Let them know I’ll be contacting them later today.”
“I will.”
“How long are you staying in town?”
She shot a look at Joey, then at her little girl. “I…don’t know.”
“Oh.” Sophie looked from one of them to the other.
“At least through the holidays,” Joey said. And he looked at her as he said it. He didn’t make it sound like a question, but in his eyes, it was.
“Yes, through the holidays and until we get the test results back. That’s…I can’t look any further ahead than that right now.” Why did she feel like the ground beneath her feet was crumbling all over again? Had she been stupidly hoping this doctor would tell her something different?
She’d felt the same way when she’d first got the diagnosis. As if the very planet was just falling out from under her.
“What if…” she looked at Sophie, her eyes blurred with moisture. “What if no one’s a match?”
“What if everyone is?” Sophie replied. She smiled gently. “Listen, I want you, both of you, to leave the medical stuff to me. Unload that from your shoulders, okay?”
Joey nodded. Emily nodded too, but it was a lie. There were a thousand options running through her mind. Clinical trials. New, European treatments not yet available in the states.
“You need to keep your heads in the here and now,” Sophie went on. “She’s not sick right now. Right now, she’s just a normal three-and-a-half-year-old kid looking forward to Christmas. That’s all. And that’s where you need to be, too, until and unless there’s a reason not to be. Do you think you can do that?”
Joey nodded hard. “I can. I will.” He turned to look at Emily.
She gaped at him, then at Sophie. “I’m sorry, but… you just expect me to pretend my little girl doesn’t have a terminal disease? Just pretend everything’s normal?”
Joe frowned and said, “I know it’s hard—”
“You don’t know anything. You’ve known her for two days. She’s my world, Joey. She’s my heart.”
Tilda looked their way suddenly, a beaming bright smile on her face as she pulled the headset off, her attention span completely maxed out. Emily quickly turned around, so her little girl wouldn’t see her tears, and at the same time, Joey scooped Tilda up and turned her a little bit away from her mom.
“Go ahead and fix your makeup, Emily,” Dr. Sophie said. “Tilda and I need to finish this picture of hers.”
Nodding, Em slipped out of the room and into the hallway. The tears flood
ed over out there, and she leaned back against the door, a hand cupped over her mouth to keep from sobbing out loud.
She couldn’t live if she lost her little girl. She couldn’t survive it.
Taking a deep, shuddering breath, she straightened up and made her way through the clinic in search of the restroom.
#
Joey left Tilda and Sophie to finish coloring and went in search of Emily. He found her coming out of the restroom, eyes red but no tears in sight, gold and amber curls looking as if she’d run her hands through them a few times.
“Are you okay?”
She met his eyes, then looked at the floor. “I’m trying to be strong, I really am.”
“You’ve shouldered this whole thing alone. You don’t have to do that anymore. You need to break down now and then… I’ll cover you. And I’m hoping you’ll do the same for me.”
She nodded, took a trembling breath, seemed to gather herself.
“I don’t want to put more on you, Em, but…I want to be able to tell her I’m her daddy,” he said. “I don’t know what I did to make you think I don’t deserve that little girl, but—”
She opened her mouth but he held up a hand. “I don’t particularly care. I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to prove you were wrong about me.”
“Or the rest of hers,” she whispered, and the damn tears tried to flood her pretty eyes all over again. She searched his face, though. “You really have changed.”
“I’ve changed a little. Not as much in four years as I have in the last two days, though, I’ll tell you that. And it’s the truth. I was a kid back then. I’m a man now. I’m a father now.” Holding her eyes, trying to show her his soul in his own, he said, “At least I want to be.”
She didn’t look away. It felt like she was stripping his soul bare, and scrutinizing his bones. “She already loves you,” she said. “It’ll be worse. Way worse if she knows and then you…” Her voice trailed off.
“Disappoint her?” he asked. “Hurt her like I apparently hurt you?”
She looked around the corner, into the room where Tilda sat, coloring with intense concentration. Her tongue was sticking out the corner of her mouth. “You can’t, that’s the thing. If we tell her, you can’t hurt her. You understand? No matter what, no matter how hard it gets, whatever you start with her, you need to follow through. You can’t change your mind.”
“I swear to God, Emily, I’ll put Matilda ahead of everything and everyone else in my life, always.” He looked in at her, too, and felt all mushy over her round little cheeks and her lips, like a swollen valentine. “I’d jump in front of a train for her.” His chest felt full again. It happened every time he looked at his little girl. It felt hard to breathe, and kind of close to bursting like an over-inflated balloon.
He dragged his eyes away to look at her mother, and suddenly glimpsed a mirror image of Matilda. Emily’s high, perfect cheeks were not quite as round but the tip of her Tinkerbell nose was the same.
Some long-dormant tenderness for Emily stirred around in his soul. No. No… no, he thought, giving the sleeping dragon a pat on its head. You just go on back to sleep. Tilda’s the focus now. Not her mamma.
“Okay,” she said softly.
Those two syllables snapped him back to attention. “Okay?”
“Yeah. I’ll tell her you’re her father.”
He put both hands on her shoulders and held her eyes hard. He was the one doing the searching this time, trying to find evidence she really meant what she was saying. “Thank you. But we’ll tell her. Together. All right?”
Her jaw tightened just a little. “I’m the only parent she’s ever had, Joey. Right now, you’re just a brand new friend in her life. I at least have to prepare her for the notion that she has a father.”
“She’s never asked?”
She averted her eyes. “She started to a couple of times. Just recently as a matter of fact. I just always sense it coming and steer her onto another topic.”
He nodded. “Still, you’re right. I didn’t think about your way being easier on Tilda.” Then he nodded. “You break the news first, if you want, and then….” He looked past her, searching space for an image that didn’t come to him. “And then what?”
“And then we’ll spend the day together, celebrating. Showing our little girl the time of her life, just like Doctor Sophie said.” Then she added, “Just give me the rest of today with her, okay? I’ll tell her this afternoon, and we’ll meet in the morning.”
“Okay.” A smile pulled at his face. “It feels wrong to be so happy when she’s so sick.”
“Believe me, I know. There’s this constant tug of war going on in my heart every minute of every day.” Emily shrugged. “But Sophie was right. She’s not sick yet. Maybe we should be as happy as we can for as long as we can.”
“Yeah,” he said, looking a bit longer at the prettiest little princess in the west.
#
Joey returned to the Long Branch, knowing he’d find his family there. His stepmother Vidalia was behind the bar wiping glasses, long dark curls with silver strands that looked like they’d been added on purpose, all pulled around to one side and held with a turquoise, Navajo style clip. As much as his father kept nudging at her to retire and travel with him, she loved her own saloon, the OK Corral, and her five daughters too much to go too far away. He’d have expected his father to have figured that out by now.
“You look like you’ve been rode hard and put away wet, boy,” she said. She drew him a beer and slid it across the bar as he took a seat on a saddle shaped stool. “Girls,” she called toward the back. “Joey’s here!”
The two women who responded were her two youngest, Melusine, the PI, with her pixie short hair as dark as her mamma’s and Selene, his half sister, with hair the color of the moon and Arctic blue eyes.
“Your brothers didn’t want you to face a full-blown family meeting,” Vidalia said. “I thought maybe the four of us could talk first.”
Joey sighed, lowering his head. “I just…I don’t want to have to tell this too many times.”
“Landsakes, what’s wrong?” Vidalia reached across the bar to clasp one of his hands between both of hers, and when he looked up, her eyes were wide with alarm.
Melusine moved up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. Selene stood right where she was, just inside the swinging doors that led into the kitchen. She had that look on her face, the same one her mother and sister would be wearing in a minute. Like she already knew.
Hell, maybe she did.
“A few weeks ago,” he said, “Matilda Louise was diagnosed with Sanguis Morbo.”
“Oh, Lord, not again.” Vidalia pressed a hand to her chest and closed her eyes.
“That’s…that’s what your father had,” Mel whispered.
He nodded, turning to look at Selene. “She needs a bone marrow transplant to save her life. We all need to get tested. I mean the boys, and dad and I. And I was hoping you—”
“We’ll all get tested,” Selene said. She was the donor who’d saved his father’s life, the daughter Bobby Joe had never known about until that Christmas two years ago.
God, Joey was dying to talk to his father about this. If anyone would understand his warring feelings of elation and anger, of joy and devastation, it would be him.
“Thanks, Selene.” Then he looked at the women, at the tears in their eyes. “She isn’t sick yet. Sophie says she might go a whole year before…any symptoms set in. Then again, it could happen any time. Once they do, it’s…fast. So I need everyone to get on this. Sophie’s cleared out her appointments today to make room for us.”
“We’ll do it today.” Vidalia squeezed his hands. “I’ll let everyone else know so you don’t have to keep putting yourself through this.”
“Thanks, Vidalia.” He shook his head. “I wanted to tell Dad myself,”
“That man’s been acting off ever since Emily and Tilda arrived in town.” She sighed. “No matter. You let me w
orry about your father.”
Melusine sighed and slid onto the stool beside his. “Why did she keep Matilda from you for so long?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“We’ve had other priorities in the two days she’s been in town, Mel.”
“I guess, but—”
“It’s okay,” Selene said. “It’s in the past. What we need to focus on now is getting her better.”
“You’re right,” Vidalia said, reaching for her phone. “Joey, I’m going to activate my prayer circle.”
Mel reached out a hand and said, “Mom—”
“No, no, that’s good, Vidalia,” Joey interrupted. “Let’s throw everything we’ve got at this thing.”
“Then I’ll call the coven together,” Selene said softly.
Vidalia rolled her eyes.
“You take care of your girl, Joey,” Melusine said. “Let the family help out with everything else. We can take shifts at the Long Branch, we can babysit, and we can make sure you and Emily get fed and cared for while you deal with all this.”
He said, “I think we both just want to give Tilda the best Christmas ever.”
“Oh honey,” Vidalia said, smiling gently. “Christmas is what we do best.”
#
Tilda napped for her usual hour, and as always, woke up ravenous. By the time Emily convinced her to use the bathroom, wash her hands, and get dressed, she was pretty hungry herself.
“Well now,” Ida Mae said as they came down the stairs, “that’s not the same outfit you were wearing this morning, is it dear?”
“Nope.” Tilda lifted her arms over her head, and turned in a complete circle, imitating a ballerina. She’d chosen a dress with a glittery purple tulle skirt, orange and yellow paisley print leggings, and her pink Converse high tops.
“I think that’s the prettiest dress yet, Matilda Louise.”
“Thank you,” she said, smiling so hard her cheeks glowed.
“You hungry? I have your lunch all ready.”
“Is it hot dogs?” Tilda asked in a hopeful tone.
“No.”
“Oh.” Tilda sighed, then added, “They ain’t really made of dogs, you know.”
Oklahoma Starshine Page 7
