Protected by Four: The secret baby

Becky

I counted the bruises on Micah's arm while we waited for the doctor to come back. Four of them, dark and yellow at the edges, in places where he hadn't fallen or bumped into anything. I knew because I asked him, every time a new one showed up. He always just shrugged and said he didn't remember.

He was asleep now, curled against my side on the exam table paper, his breath thin and fast even though he was just lying still. Three weeks of fevers that came and went. Three weeks of him too tired to finish a bowl of cereal, too tired to ask for cartoons. My son who used to run circles around our apartment building until I begged him to slow down.

I should have brought him in sooner. That thought had been looping in my head since the nurse drew his blood an hour ago, since I watched her face change when she looked at the tube in her hand before she caught herself and smiled at me like everything was fine.

Nothing about her smile had been fine.

The door opened and Dr. Alvarez came back in, and this time she wasn't alone. Another doctor followed her, older, with reading glasses pushed up into gray hair, and neither of them was smiling now. Dr. Alvarez pulled the rolling stool close to the table and sat down so she was at my eye level instead of standing over me. I'd read somewhere that doctors do that when they're about to say something bad. I don't know why that detail surfaced in my mind right then, but it did, and my stomach dropped before she even opened her mouth.

"Becky," she said, "I want you to know first that Micah is stable right now. He's comfortable. That's the most important thing."

"Okay," I said, because I didn't know what else to say to that.

"His bloodwork came back with some numbers that concern us. His white blood cell count is very high, and his platelets are low, which explains the bruising and the fatigue you've described." She paused, glanced at the older doctor, then back at me. "We believe Micah has a form of leukemia. We won't know exactly which type until we run more specific tests, but I don't want to wait to tell you what we're seeing."

The word landed somewhere behind my ribs and just sat there, too big to actually understand. Leukemia. That was a word from movies, from other people's lives, from fundraisers I'd scrolled past on Facebook and felt a flicker of sadness for before moving on to the next thing.

"Cancer," I said, because I needed to hear myself say the real word, the one she hadn't used.

"Yes," she said gently. "It's a cancer of the blood and bone marrow."

I looked down at Micah. He hadn't moved. His eyelashes were so long they cast little shadows on his cheeks in the fluorescent light, and I thought about how just last month I'd been annoyed with him for tracking mud across the kitchen floor, how I'd raised my voice about something so stupid and small while this had already been growing inside him, quiet and patient and waiting to be found.

"What do we do," I said. My voice didn't sound like mine. It came out flat, mechanical, like I was asking about a parking ticket instead of my son's life.

The older doctor spoke for the first time. "Given the numbers we're seeing, I'd recommend starting treatment as soon as possible. Ideally this week. We'll need to admit him, do a bone marrow biopsy to confirm the exact subtype, and begin induction chemotherapy. The good news, and there is good news here, is that childhood leukemia has one of the higher survival rates among pediatric cancers when treatment starts early."

Induction chemotherapy. Bone marrow biopsy. The words piled up in the air between us and I couldn't hold onto any of them long enough to understand what they actually meant for my son, for tomorrow, for the rest of this week.

"How much," I heard myself ask. "How much is that going to cost."

Dr. Alvarez's expression flickered, just slightly, the way people's faces do when they're about to tell you something they wish they didn't have to. "I know you mentioned when you checked in that you don't currently have insurance coverage. We have a financial counselor on staff who can walk you through options, payment plans, state assistance programs, foundations that help with pediatric cancer costs. You won't be doing this alone."

But I would be. That was the thing nobody in this room understood yet. There was no husband in a waiting room somewhere, pacing and calling his mother with the news. There was no family in town I could call to come sit with me, no coworker good enough to trust with my son while I figured out how to keep both of us alive. There was just me, and a nine-dollar balance in my checking account until Friday, and a job at the diner that didn't offer health insurance because I hadn't been there long enough yet.

I felt the tears before I understood I was crying. They came fast and silent, running down into the collar of my shirt, and I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth so I wouldn't make a sound and wake Micah. He didn't need to see me like this. Not yet. Not until I figured out how to be strong enough for both of us.

"I don't have anyone," I said, so quietly I wasn't sure they heard me. "I don't know how I'm going to do this."

Dr. Alvarez reached over and put her hand on my knee, just for a second, the kind of touch that wasn't in any manual but that every good doctor seemed to know how to give anyway. "We're going to help you figure it out. One step at a time. You don't have to have all the answers today."

I nodded, wiping my face with my sleeve, trying to pull myself back together before Micah woke up and saw his mother falling apart.

The older doctor was writing something on his clipboard, and when he looked up, his eyes were kind but focused, already moving toward the next necessary thing.

"Becky," he said. "I have to ask. Is Micah's father in the picture at all? Would there be any way to reach him? Sometimes, in situations like this, family history and additional support can make a real difference."

I looked at my son's small chest rising and falling too fast, and I didn't know how to answer him.

Becky

I didn't sleep that night. I sat in the chair beside Micah's hospital bed and watched the numbers on his monitor blink in the dark, and my mind kept sliding backward, five years, to a night I'd spent a long time trying to forget.

I was twenty-four then, working two jobs and drowning in both of them, and my roommate had dragged me to a bar downtown for her birthday. I hadn't wanted to go. I remember that clearly, how tired I'd been, how close I'd come to staying home. But she'd begged, and I'd put on the one dress I owned that didn't have a coffee stain somewhere on it, and I'd gone.

He was at the end of the bar, alone, in a gray suit that looked like it cost more than my rent. I noticed him before he noticed me, the way you notice someone who seems to belong in a different, shinier world than the one you're standing in. When he finally looked over and smiled, I remember thinking he had the kind of face you saw in magazines, not the kind t