Arcadia's Gift(25)

"Gina, can you give us a moment?" the doctor asked, then gestured for me to sit.
Once we were alone, Dr. Kristy slipped her glasses off and gave me that serious expression that adults give when they are trying to get you to level with them.
"I'm just trying to get a better understanding, because without your detection, Lucy might be in serious jeopardy. She still might be, but because of you, at least I know to go in and remove the mass. Cady, can you tell me what exactly you felt?"
Dr. Kristy was the adult I trusted most, even more than my parents sometimes.
"I'm not trying to be difficult, honest. It's just hard for me to describe."
"Can you try?"
I nodded and began to tell her exactly what happened from the time I set off down the trail with the dogs to when I realized something was wrong with Lucy.
"It was like this cold glow that vibrated off of the spot. The feeling would get stronger, more concentrated, the closer my hand got to the bottom of her right lung. Then, some —instinct, maybe? —told me that there was something in her that shouldn't be there. I just knew."
The doctor gazed at me thoughtfully, her head bobbing slowly as she took in my words.
"Has this ever happened before?" she asked.
I shook my head. "No. Never. It was weird."
She sighed. "Well, I need to go help Gina prep for surgery. We have to wait until tomorrow for Lucy, since she’s eaten today. I don’t know how you did it, but thank you."
Dr. Kristy gathered her things and left the office. I sat there chewing my thumb nail down to the quick.






 
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Chapter 11


After leaving the shelter, I called my dad to see if Aaron and I could stop by, but there was some sort of crisis on one of his job sites that would keep him working until well into the night. I could tell he felt bad putting me off. We hadn’t spent much time together since the funeral. I suspected he was using work as a distraction from dwelling on his loss. I guess we all cope in our own way. I sent Aaron a text to cancel our plans.
At home, my brother and his friend, Trent, were hanging out in the kitchen waiting for a frozen pizza to heat up in the toaster oven. Aaron sat on top of the counter tossing an oven mitt from hand to hand. They were laughing, a noise which sounded out of place in the House of Gloom.
"Hey," Trent grunted at me when I entered through the back door.
"Hey." I was still keyed up from the Lucy situation and wasn't in the mood to socialize.
So, Aaron was going on with his life. He had the right idea. We would all miss Lony, but tears couldn’t bring her back. Sleeping fifteen hours a day only put off the inevitable. We all had to move on. Faint gray shadows were still visible beneath my brother's blue eyes and his smile still held a fake, plastic-like quality, but it was a smile nonetheless. He was trying.
Up in my bedroom, I decided I would try, too. I put the morning's events out of my mind and went to work catching up on my studies. If I was going to go back to school Monday, I needed to work hard to catch up to the rest of my class. Good thing it was still so early in the school year. I hadn’t missed too many important tests or project deadlines.
I was in the middle of typing a writing assignment when my cell phone rang. I rubbed my eyes, strained from staring at a computer screen in the fading evening light. I flipped on my desk lamp and checked the caller ID. Bronwyn.
“So my parents wanted me to ask you...” she said, her tone dripping with reluctance, “The topic for Youth Group this week is Placing Your Sorrow on Jesus, like about dealing with grief when you lose a loved one, and they want me to invite you to come. There will be a guest speaker from Grace Christian who’ll be talking about the loss of his daughter from cancer and then a group discussion.”
“I don’t know, Bron,” I sighed and tried my best to be polite. “You know how I am about the religious stuff. And I’m not sure I want to work on my grief issues in a room with a bunch of kids I don’t know.”
“Oh, you are already going to a support group meeting up at the hospital? Too bad they meet on the same night.”
Ah, I get it. One or both of her parents were standing over her making her call me. This kind of thing happened a couple of times a year, usually to invite me to a Youth Group social function or to a church service they thought might be of particular interest to me. Her parents felt it was the duty of all true Christians to “shepherd non-believers into the loving arms of the Lord” or some crap like that. As if for every person you converted you got bonus points on God’s Great Scoreboard. I don’t know, maybe they would win some prize when they got to heaven like a golden harp or a cloud with a view of the Grand Canyon. Being such a good friend, I decided to mess with her.