18

Noelle


UNC Wilmington

1988

Noelle was happier than she’d ever been in her life. Her classes and clinicals were going well and she loved her work as a Resident Assistant. The girls on her floor turned to her easily with their concerns, and it wasn’t unusual to find her sitting with a group of them on the floor at the end of the hall, chatting about their boyfriends or their professors or their relationships with one another. The gathering had the feel of a mini support group, a relaxed get-together with meat at its heart. Noelle made sure everyone felt welcome, though. She didn’t want her end-of-the-hall group to turn into a clique.

The other RAs thought she was overly involved with the students. “You should just be there in case they need something,” they said, but Noelle felt protective of her charges. She wanted to be their safe harbor. The night one of them nearly died of alcohol poisoning, she wept because she should have seen it coming. But she did recognize another student’s bulimia, intervening before it was too late, and she counseled yet another girl as she decided what to do about an unwanted pregnancy—even though she was privately heartbroken when the girl decided to have an abortion.

All in all, she loved her girls. The fact that she loved one of them more than the others was something she was learning to hide.

She’d gotten her emotions at least somewhat under control when it came to Emerson McGarrity, doing her best to treat her like all the other girls on her floor. If anyone noticed that she paid a little more attention to Emerson, that she lit up each time she saw her, that she questioned her more than the other girls about her adjustment to campus life, her classes, her family, no one said a word about it, at least not to her. She no longer needed Emerson to know their relationship. Being close to her, being a part of her life, was enough. It was clear that Emerson knew nothing about her mother’s teenage pregnancy, and clear that Noelle’s existence had been swept under the rug. Noelle made a conscious decision to leave it there forever. She wouldn’t hurt Emerson or her family, but one way or another, she would always be a part of her sister’s life. She wouldn’t lose her now that she’d found her.

She was coming to like Tara, too. Tara’s exuberance was a good counterbalance to Emerson’s gentle, calm nature and she was far deeper than Noelle had originally guessed. For most of Tara’s life, her mother had spent her time in and out of psychiatric hospitals. It was not something she talked about easily, and Noelle felt touched when she finally revealed that part of herself to her. Noelle came to see Tara’s love of theater as her escape from a childhood and adolescence that had been difficult to endure.

There was, however, one small, niggling problem in Noelle’s life: Sam Vincent.

Plenty of guys on campus were intrigued by Noelle, but Noelle herself had been drawn—seriously drawn—to only two men in her life. Sam was number three.

She met him the second week of school when she stopped by Tara and Emerson’s room to offer them a couple of granola bars. He was there alone because Tara and Emerson were baking cookies in the dorm kitchen, and he was stretched out on Tara’s neatly made bed, writing something in a notebook. He looked up and gave her a quick, easy smile and that was all it took. The smile slayed her. She felt her internal organs melt and her heart thumped as hard as it had the first time she’d walked into this same room and laid eyes on Emerson.

“You’re Sam,” she said, glancing at the long-haired guy in the picture on Tara’s dresser. This Sam looked different. The guy in the picture was a boy. The short-haired guy on the bed, a man. He was slender. Not overtly masculine; macho had never appealed to her. Thick, jet-black lashes framed his blue eyes, and his lips were full and a little pouty. It was only the broad cut of his chin that saved him from being too pretty.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m waiting for Tara. You live in the dorm?”

“I’m the RA. Noelle.”

“Oh, yeah.” He sat up a little straighter, his back against the wall. Setting his notebook on the bed beside him, he folded his arms across his chest. “Tara told me about you. She thinks you’re cool.”

Noelle smiled and sat down in Emerson’s desk chair. “I’m glad she thinks so. I like her, too.” She nodded toward the notebook. “What are you working on?”

“Journal.” He grinned with the tiniest hint of embarrassment as he lifted the notebook from the bed and set it on his thigh. His arms were very tan and dusted with dark hair. “Thought I’d give it a try,” he said. “You know, writing down my deepest, darkest thoughts.”

She loved the answer. What guy journaled? If she hadn’t already pinned him as a rarity, she did now.

They talked for a while about UNC and his plans for law school. He told her he’d known Tara since they were kids, although Noelle already knew that. Actually, nothing he told her was new; Tara talked about him all the time. Words passed between them, but they could have been any words at all. They could have been talking about the weather or what they’d had for dinner the night before. It wasn’t the words that were being communicated. Something deeper was going on. Noelle felt it and she knew in all those melting, hungry organs of her body that he felt it, too. The way he held her gaze. The way he couldn’t stop smiling at her no matter what he was saying.

She offered him one of the granola bars and watched his tanned, perfect fingers slit open the wrapper. He took a bite, then licked a crumb from his lips, his blue eyes back on her. She pictured him in her bed, both of them nude. He was between her legs, slipping inside her. She didn’t even try to erase the image from her mind. If he had not been Tara’s, she would have asked him flat out, “Do you want to make love?” because that was her style. Why mince words? And if he were not Tara’s he would say yes. But he was Tara’s and, deep in her heart, she knew he always would be.



19

Anna


Washington, D.C.

2010

There were few things I hated as much as having Haley under general anesthesia. For an hour or two or three, it was as though she was gone. I always tried to reassure myself that at least she was in no pain during the time she was out. Yet the goneness, the unreachableness, still scared me.

She’d received the transfusion a couple of days before and her red blood count had bounced back nicely, but now the surgeon was moving her port from one side of her sore chest to the other and aspirating her bone marrow at the same time. It was never ending, the torture they put her through. Haley’d been stoic when the surgeon told her his plans for today, but I had the feeling she would have chewed him out if Bryan hadn’t been present. She was on her good behavior around Bryan. I actually preferred her feisty side. I liked when she cussed out her doctors. Holding in her anger and frustration wasn’t a good thing. She wanted her Daddy to think she was a sweet girl, though—which she was most of the time, when she wasn’t loaded up on steroids and fighting for her life.

I didn’t think Haley totally grasped the implications of this bone marrow aspiration. They’d be looking at her MRD level. Minimum Residual Disease. If it was too high, it would mean the chemo was not doing the job and she’d need a bone marrow transplant. Going down that road terrified me. It would mean more grueling chemotherapy plus full-body radiation to destroy her immune system and all that simply to prepare her for the transplant itself. And of course a donor would have to be found. So if I’d been the praying type, I would have been praying for a very low MRD. Very, very low. Although it had required nearly two full years of treatment, chemo alone had taken care of the cancer when she was a toddler. I was hoping for the same outcome this time.

I made sure the staff had my cell number, then walked down to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and to check in with my office. Bryan was on a job interview in Bethesda. He’d offered to cancel it when I told him about the surgery, but I encouraged him to go. I’m used to dealing with her alone, I nearly said, but caught myself. Now wasn’t the time to guilt-trip him.

I didn’t go straight back to the East Wing, but walked instead to the neonatal intensive care unit. It wasn’t the first time since Haley’s relapse that I’d found myself wandering through the halls of the NICU, even though they now had the babies safely tucked away in private rooms and I wasn’t able to see them as I could years ago. I was actually glad. I wanted those babies to be out of sight.

My work occasionally took me to hospitals, and I always wound up trying to see the babies. The tiniest babies got to me. All those wires and tubes. Those little rib cages pumping air in and out, every breath looking like an effort. They were so vulnerable. Their dependence on others to protect them always cut into me.

Why did I do that to myself? Why did I look? Why did I search the features of the babies, looking for one who resembled Lily? I sometimes felt as though I couldn’t leave. I needed to stand guard. The nurses couldn’t watch every baby every minute. Even here in the remodeled NICU at Children’s, I searched for evil intentions in the face of each person I saw. That’s when I knew it was time to walk away. I became the director of the Missing Children’s Bureau in part because of my own pain and my passion, but also because I’d been able to hold on to my sanity. That sanity allowed me to distance myself from my own ordeal so that I could be rational as I kept the bureau functioning. That’s why I had to walk away when I began to imagine someone—one of the nurses? A total stranger?—coming into the nursery, detaching one of those fragile, helpless infants from her tubes and wires and slipping out the door with her.