Pastense

By Robert Gordon Johnson

About the Book
In the 1980s, Mary Edwards watches as her daughter Emily fights for her life against leukemia. With each visit to the hospital, Mary finds herself drawn to the research floor, and meeting with a mysterious man named Bun who educates her on the advancement of stem cells, and the critical work being done by Dr. Randall Byrne, before he abandoned his research after a psychotic break and disappeared into the night many years ago.
As Emily finally succumbs to her cancer, Mary, in her grief, finds herself on the park bench outside the hospital where Emily suffered and fought, and meets the long-lost Dr. Byrne. Miraculously, he has found a way to travel back in time, to a pivotal moment. Mary takes a leap and is sent twenty-four years into the past to save Dr. Byrne and, through his research, her Emily.
A bittersweet story of grief, love, reconnections, and reflection, Pastense is a heartbreakingly beautiful take of one woman's journey through the past, present, and hopeful future.

About the Author
Robert Gordon Johnson is an orthopedic surgeon who trained in Toronto, where Pastense takes place. He has been involved in stem cell research, and the science presented in this novel is real. Johnson loves to read, write, and exercise at the gym. He has run a dozen marathons and participated in the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii three times. Johnson still practices orthopedic surgery in San Antonio, where he lives with his wife Andrea, son Colin, and two cats. He has a son and daughter, Richard and Rachel, from a previous marriage.
Much of the inspiration for Pastense came from the death of a friend’s child from leukemia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: Jul 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798886837254

Book preview

Chapter 1

Toronto, September 1986

Mary had never, until that day, touched a dead body. In a thousand years she couldn’t have guessed that her first time, it would be her daughter. Leaning over the simple wood casket, she kissed Emily’s cheek. It felt like Indian rubber.

Behind her, a scratchy rendering of Rock of Ages piped into the chapel. Emily would have preferred something by Bon Jovi, probably Livin’ on a Prayer. The last six months of her life had come courtesy of a prayer. So had her death. Mary looked around to see if her ex-husband had decided to show.

A scattering of people drifted around the room. Mary recognized a teacher, two of Emily’s girlfriends, both with handkerchiefs applied to their eyes, and Dr. Rosa from the clinic. The girlfriends had shown up at Mary’s door a few days earlier and run directly to be with Emily in her room. An hour later, puffy-eyed, they’d handed Mary a neatly printed obituary along with Zoom, her stuffed zebra. She wants to be buried with Zoom, the younger girl sobbed.

Two years earlier, when Uncle Zack had died and Mary told her daughter the sad news, Emily had walked to her closet and taken out a blue dress she’d selected and ironed for the funeral. Emily now wore the same blue dress and clutched Zoom to her barely sprouted breast. Emily’s last words to her mother, spoken in a low, gurgled whisper only days before, were, I’ll see you again, Mommy.

A hand touched Mary’s shoulder. It’s time, Mrs. Edwards. Mary swiveled by pushing forward on the right wheel while backwards on the left, then steered her wheelchair to the space in the aisle between the two front pews. The hymn had changed to Blessed Assurance.

She closed her eyes and retreated to some dim place within.

•••

Outside, it was one of those glorious fall days. The sky, a blue heightened by crisp air, contrasted with the brilliant red of maples and gold of birches. The old man sat on his bench, curled against a vagrant wind that swooped down from the polar ice caps. He was muttering what sounded, by its cadence, like a poem.

The park had been a favorite place for Emily. The path, bordered by a stirring of fallen leaves, cut a diagonal swath through century-old oaks and sugar maples, their long shadows now melting into the dusk. As Mary approached the bench, the man’s eyes traveled over her. He was often there with his rusted cart, neatly stacked with the day’s offerings: bags and boxes, odd-shaped and angled, a half-eaten pizza, a circle of wound-up string, bits of plastic and metal. She stopped in front of the peeling slats of warped wood at the end of the bench opposite to the man. A child had scratched a hop-scotch pattern onto the pocked asphalt along with the words HELLO WORLD in yellow chalk. The smell of burning leaves drifted in the air.

Mary looked away from the man, took a deep breath, blew it out long and slow. She had never talked to him, not in the three years she and Emily had lived in the area. Emily once offered him some popcorn and told him her name. Without looking into her eyes, he’d only shaken his head. He’d once nodded as they passed. That would have been six months back, their last visit to the park. Emily had lost weight. He couldn’t know she was dead, but he might guess something had happened by her absence.

On Avenue Road, bordering the park, traffic droned. Across the road rose the blackened red-brick face of the hospital. She glanced at the man. He had followed her gaze toward the hospital, stopped reciting his poem, and was nodding in a manner of agreeing with someone. Someone distant and undefined.

Mary shifted her weight, her legs twisted over the chair’s edge like two dried twigs. Leaning down on the wheels, she creaked forward, angling a little left to avoid the old man’s pushcart. He wore a gray wool tuque, and his trousers were frayed and hung limply. She caught the scent of cologne, musky and raw. It reminded her of some tiny moment of security from her past. She couldn’t place where or when, just a fleeting feeling of warmth. The man turned his gaze from the hospital to a spot on the ground, somewhere between Mary and his own feet. His lips moved. Mary crept past. He said something that was indistinct, then repeated it.

Mary froze in mid-thrust of her wheel. She’d heard the words he had said but he repeated them a third time, his voice as soft as a prayer.

She didn’t have to die.

Chapter 2

Three years earlier—Toronto, April 1983

The Royal Princess Hospital was born from a cold, water-filled hole in the winter earth in the early-twentieth century. At the time, a vista from its front doors included several barns and a scattering of limestone squares and towers that was the university. It grew up an unattractive, red-brick edifice, six stories tall. Its front entry, set back off the rutted, two-lane Avenue Road, faced a copse of sugar maples, elms, and oaks that would become Hayhoe Park, named after the Mennonite farmer who’d willed the property to the city. From either side of its recessed entrance extended wings of brick and mortar, like two stubby arms enfolding all who entered. In middle age, The Royal Princess had not improved its looks. Her walls had accumulated the grime of an expanding, prospering city. Younger siblings had sprouted about The Princess, tall and sleek, steel and glass, blocking out the sun. Like a mushroom she had survived in the shadows, relentlessly pursuing the mandate of her birth—to discover the cure for cancer.

•••

It was a morning in the spring. The air smelled of thawed earth while patches of black snow clung to the shadows of trees and park benches. Avenue Road had swelled to three lanes in either direction, and tiny green buds peeked hopefully from the branches of shrubs lining the path across Hayhoe Park.

Mary loved the spring for the usual cliché of reasons: a fresh start, new beginnings, the return of birds and leaves and hope. Emily tugged at her side, lingering at each mud puddle and clump of melting, dirty snow. She’d asked her mom why she wasn’t going to school; it was, after all, a Tuesday. Mary had told her nine-year-old daughter that they were taking a field trip. She pulled Emily along beneath barren limbs outstretched toward a swirling, gray sky, past a homeless man muttering what sounded like poetry from his park bench. She pushed the crosswalk button and waited until the little green man appeared, then steered her daughter up the concrete steps into the hospital.

Chapter 3

Toronto—September 1986

Mary entered her home by the side door. Since being confined to a wheelchair she found the porch, with its front steps, insurmountable. A shared driveway separated Mary from her neighbor, Claudette Hoyt, an immigrant from Guyana. Claudette had four full-time children and one part-time husband who was the biologic father to two of the kids and real father to none. The aroma of curried chicken with roti swirled in the gap between the two houses. Neither Mary nor Claudette owned vehicles, which was just as well because the narrow drive barely accommodated two tricycles side by side. One of the younger boys had defecated on Mary’s doormat again.

Mary turned the key and nudged up the shallow ramp. Three years ago, when she’d found the rental, she was using a cane. The upstairs was now inaccessible to her. It was an old place, built in the 1920s before everyone owned cars and long before accommodating the lame and infirm had become law. But it was close to the hospital.

A blast of hot, stale air escaped around her. In her final days Emily had been forever shivering with cold, and Mary kept the thermostat on eighty. Emily’s room was downstairs in what was originally designed to be a dining room. It had French doors with paneled windows. Emily had made and hung the curtains for privacy—not girly curtains, pink and flowered, but dark and heavy. Off to the right, a living area with bay windows gave onto the narrow porch, a ragged strip of grass then the street. One of the panes was stained glass, the creation of some impoverished academic who’d inhabited the dwelling prior to Mary and Emily. Squares of multicolored light painted a rainbow pattern on the buckling hardwood floor. She pushed into her daughter’s bedroom.

Mary took a shaky breath. The bed was made. A green oxygen cylinder stood upright by the bed with a clear plastic hose still attached and coiled on the floor next to it. Her dolls were neatly scattered over the bedspread, minus Zoom the zebra, who was… Mary squeezed her eyes, pushing out the tears that were waiting there. A nurse, trying to be helpful, told Mary to keep the bedroom untouched—a shrine. The hospital psychologist had advised her to grieve and move on.

She glanced into the full-length mirror that Emily used to practice speeches for school. Emily liked to observe how she appeared to others while speaking. She’d practice looking serious, or determined, or sad, depending on the topic. What Mary now saw was a face she hardly recognized—a face drawn, and empty, and angry, and resigned all at the same time.

On the opposite wall Emily had taped a length of paper, three feet high, stretching the entire length of the wall at eye level. She called it The Mural of My Life. Starting at the left, Emily drew pictures of the events that had filled and shaped her short existence. Mary wheeled closer, reached over, and picked up Cyrano, Emily’s anteater, from the bed. Cyrano had been Emily’s second favorite stuffed animal after Zoom. He smelled of childhood.

About six months before while reading a bedtime story—Mary strained to remember if it was Moby Dick or a poem by Robert Frost—Emily had handed her Cyrano. You keep Cyrano, Mommy, she’d said in the voice of one who’d just seen a revelation. He’ll look after you for me. If you want to reach me, tell it to Cyrano. She then closed her book and her eyes, pushing back onto the pillows, and hugged Zoom. Where Zoom and I are going you cannot come. Mary felt a tear trace a line down her right cheek.

To the extreme left of the mural Emily had pasted a newborn, an early photograph of Mary from high school, and a picture of the man she called Father. There followed birthdays and school portraits and picnics and sleepovers. Scattered amid the photos were hand-drawn depictions of animals and flowers and the house. More recently she had traced the square features of The Royal Princess Hospital, faceless men and women with stethoscopes slung around their necks, intravenous poles and bags of yellow and green medicines dripping. There were three drawings of the park bench with the homeless man. In one he was sitting next to his pushcart of earthly possessions. In another he was curled on the bench under a blanket. In the third and most recent depiction, there was a woman on the bench next to him. The woman had long, brown hair, like Mary’s, was clutching something in one hand but beyond that was unrecognizable.

Mary exhaled a slow, sad breath. Beyond the window crept the lonely advance of evening. Turning to go, Mary noticed an entry at the far-right side of the mural. It was new, and separated from the earlier drawings by a vast expanse of paper years. She wheeled closer. There were two crosses, hand sketched, side by side, with no background. At the base of one cross was a clear representation of Zoom, the zebra. Because Zoom had been buried with Emily, this had to represent Emily’s gravesite. Printed onto the second cross was the word Mommy. Mary’s eyes welled. A lump swelled in her throat. She did something she hadn’t done in a long while. Reaching into her purse that she kept slung over the arm support of the wheelchair, Mary rummaged for a crumpled package of Viceroys. She lit one up.

In a dream later that night, Joseph explained to Pharaoh the meaning of the two crosses. Mary jolted upright in bed. Her bedside clock glowed 3:17 a.m. Her heart was pounding somewhere between her chest and eardrums. Emily had gone to great lengths to keep her mural sequential. Each and every event fell into its rightful spot in the timeline, from left to right, birth to death.

Yet the two crosses were years later and side by side, Mary’s and Emily’s.

Chapter 4

Three years earlier—Toronto, April 1983

The corridors of The Royal Princess Hospital were dark and overheated. The floors, a highly polished pink granite flecked with black, echoed their footsteps and the tap of Mary’s cane. The walls were barren except for the occasional portrait of a seated, steely-haired professor in full ceremonial attire, smiling beneficently and clutching a thick textbook. The smell in the air, while not offensive, conveyed that this was an institution of sadness—the chemical aroma of a place that people avoided if at all possible.

Emily skipped beside her mother, passing closed doors with frosted windows labeled Laboratory, and Speech Therapy, and Electron Microscopy. Deeper into the mouth of The Princess they advanced. Mary, her heart pounding in both ears, looked down at the letter she’d received in the mail that indicated their destination.

Today’s journey had started with a nosebleed, two months earlier, on a Saturday—February 5.

•••

Mary was sleeping in, recovering from a frenzied Friday night at the bar. She’d heard a scream, at first in a dream, then in the real world of Timmins, Ontario. Outside, the snow was dirty and thick on the ground, the sky gray, and the neighbor kids were playing ball hockey. Emily had David Keon in a headlock, their breaths exhaling in snorts of dense fog, and the driveway at their feet was an explosion of bright red. At first Mary could not determine the source of the bleeding, although Emily seemed to be in control of the fight. Then a spray of pink mist spewed from her nostril.

Mary had rushed outdoors in her housecoat, separated the two combatants, and applied pressure to Emily’s nose. The boys circled, leaning on their hockey sticks, fascinated by the torrent of blood and sight of Mrs. Edwards in her pink robe and bare feet with half of her left breast exposed. There had been a low of thirty-two degrees below zero the night before, a record for that particular date in Timmins. The nosebleed hadn’t stopped and one of the kids, Johnny Cochran, ran and found his father who drove them to the hospital. The doctor on duty had packed Emily’s nostrils with strips of gauze until she looked as though her face were about to explode, but the bleeding stopped. They took some blood and sent her home.

•••

Mary saw the sign ahead on the left—Paediatric Out-Patient Clinic. Her breath caught fleetingly in her throat, and she slowed her pace. Emily looked up into her mother’s face.

Are you going to see the doctor, Mommy?

Mary took her hand. You and me both, she answered as soothingly as she dared, but the words still wavered across the thick, still air. A man wearing green scrubs and a short white coat passed them going the opposite direction. The intercom overhead paged a Dr. Berkowitz to the operating room.

Emily glanced from her mother back to the door. You mean me, don’t you, Mommy? she said quietly. I’m going to see the doctor, and you are going to hold my hand.

They entered the clinic hand-in-hand. There was a boy about Emily’s age sitting on the floor in one corner. He had no hair. Several other children sat on chairs next to parents. A few glanced up at the new arrivals, then quickly resumed their silent vigils. Mary approached a woman in white with a starched nursing cap seated behind a desk.

The receptionist looked up and smiled. It was one of those half-smiles that communicated, I’m very sorry you have to be here today. She glanced down at Emily. Hello, sweetie, she said. What’s your name?

Emily didn’t miss a beat. I’m Emily Edwards. I live in Timmins. I’m nine years old and attend Northlands Public School.

After checking in, Mary and Emily took a seat next to a small boy in a wheelchair. The waiting room faced Hayhoe Park. For reasons unknown to Mary, she stood and walked to the window. Emily was busy with Robinson Crusoe.

The old man was leaning forward on the park bench, elbows on his knees, reading a book. She could see his lips moving and he was nodding here and there as though engaged in conversation.

Above a spindly tree line, the sky looked bruised.

Chapter 5

Toronto—September 1986

The next day Mary returned to Emily’s room. It was infested with books and exhaled a thousand memories. She knew what she’d seen the day before was real, but still harbored the possibility that her imagination was messing with her head. Tracing the mural from its busy early life, across the void of adolescence, adulthood, middle age and to the end, Mary confirmed her previous observation. There were two crosses side by side at a place that should have represented, if Emily’s scale had been accurate, old age.

A school counselor had used the word precocious to describe her daughter. The visiting psychologist said that Emily was headed for Harvard even before she’d been conceived. Mary sat on the bed. Streaks of early sunlight slanted through the gloom before dissolving into the floor. At an early age, Emily pounded her mother with questions well beyond Mary’s pay grade: If light bends, as Einstein theorized, why can’t we see around corners? If spacemen traveled at the speed of light, their clocks would slow and they would age more slowly. If that were true, couldn’t they return to earth before they’d even left? Couldn’t they return to an earlier time in their lives? Or even before they were born? Mary had no idea where Emily got such notions; perhaps it was from her parents. She’d known Emily’s mother but not her biologic father.

Mary stared at the crosses. Her world was collapsing and she didn’t know what to do. She desperately wished Emily were with her to explain. Two crosses side by side didn’t necessarily mean that the deceased had died at the same time. People bought adjacent plots to be buried together, sometimes decades separating their deaths. But if that were the case, wouldn’t Emily have placed her own cross earlier in the mural?

Emily knew that she was dying; she’d told Mary so. The two had talked about Heaven. She’d written her own obituary with the help of two friends. Mary scoured the mural. There were no crosses except the two at the extreme right. Another possibility nudged its way into Mary’s head; a welcome notion. Mary’s life, her reason to be, was gone. Did the neighboring crosses mean that Mary herself was soon to die? She closed her eyes. Her head ached. She knew she was not destined to die so soon. That would be more than she deserved. Emily’s last words to her had been, I’ll see you again, Mommy.

An ache swelled in Mary’s chest. She looked again at the two crosses. Her analyzing had shed no light on their meaning.

If anything, it had left the darkness even blacker.

Chapter 6

Timmins, Ontario 1962

There’s a story about Timmins that goes like this: One day, in the big city of Toronto, a young man responding to a Help Wanted sign entered a greengrocer shop on Danforth Avenue. The applicant was neatly dressed, his hair parted, and the proprietor of the store was impressed. During the ensuing interview the owner, in casual conversation, mentioned the town of Timmins.

Timmins, the young man exclaimed, an edge of disgust in his voice. All that town produces are hockey players and prostitutes.

The proprietor visibly recoiled in his chair. Now wait just one minute, son, he said admonishingly. My wife happens to hail from Timmins.

The applicant’s face darted to a photograph of the probable wife on his prospective boss’s desk. His eyebrows hiked north. Really, he said with genuine enthusiasm. What team did she play for?

Timmins was a rough Northern Ontario town, the product of a gold rush in the early 1900s. Later on, copper, zinc, and silver were added to the discoveries. Hockey players were still its most famous export, until much later when Shania Twain really put it on the map.

Many years before Shania, Mary Edwards was rubbing shoulders with NHL hopefuls along the corridors of Timmins Collegiate and Vocational Institute, TCVI for short. Mary’s father was the pastor of Faith Brethren Assembly. In the order of strictness of the various Protestant denominations, Brethrens were way to the right. The United Church was pretty liberal, with the Presbyterians and Anglicans somewhere in between. Only Pentecostals were stricter than Brethrens, but they were weird, speaking in tongues. A Pentecostal friend of Mary’s, Ruth Desjardins, confided to her once that she would mumble gibberish in church meetings because her parents expected it.

Mary slowed her pace as she approached the boys’ lockers on the second floor of TCVI. Her heart speeded up just a smidge and she felt her cheeks redden. They were between History and French classes, and Madame Hebert’s (pronounced ay-bear) homeroom took her past the boys’ side of school. Guy Tremblay’s locker was number 632, toward the end of the row and—Mary inhaled a shaky couple of breaths—he was standing in front of it placing a math book onto the top shelf.

Guy was in the twelfth grade and had transferred to TCVI from a town in the Ottawa Valley to play hockey for the Timmins Gold Diggers. Mary, along with about a hundred other girls at TCVI, had a crush on him. It was rumored that the Boston Bruins were scouting Guy Tremblay.

Mary hurried past and took her seat in French class. The walls were lined with drawings labeled in French. There was a tree—arbre; a whiskered cat—chat; a house on a street—maison; and so on through the entire alphabet. Mary mentally placed a photograph of Guy in the B’s—bel for beautiful.

Mary was good at French. Although born into an English-only family, she’d picked up the accent and cadence of the language very easily. It helped that Northern Ontario had a large indigenous francophone population stemming from the fur trade hundreds of years before. Madame Hebert liked Mary and encouraged her to pursue a university degree in foreign languages. Being a bilingual country, there was a market for young professionals who were fluent in both languages. The government was always on the lookout for translators, but Mary hoped she’d someday land a job in business. There were manuals, pamphlets, innumerable industrial documents, all needing translation from English to French and vice-versa. Translation paid well, and she fantasized about occupying a corner office on Bay Street with a view of Toronto Harbour. In recent months she’d expanded her dream to include being married to Guy Tremblay. She pictured going to his home games at Maple Leaf Gardens (of course he would have to be traded from the Bruins to Toronto, but trades happened all the time). Perhaps on weekends she could even accompany him on road trips to New York, and Boston, and Chicago. She vowed that they would make love in every new city they visited.

The bell rang, jarring Mary back to the real world of eleventh grade French. As always, when her thoughts were impure, she sent off a brief plea for forgiveness to God, but mostly to her preacher father, ever grateful he could not read the mind of his chaste daughter.

Chapter 7

Timmins—February 1983

Two days after the nosebleed, and less than twenty-four hours after a different ER doctor had nervously removed the packing from Emily’s nose, the telephone rang. It was a nurse from the Timmins Civic Hospital. How is Emily feeling? Any recent coughs or colds? Does she have a fever?

Fine, no, and no, Mary had answered, suddenly afraid for reasons she found hard to define. Why? What did the blood test show?

Mary stared out the side window of their rental house at the neighbor’s beige metal siding. She barely noticed the brilliant sky and powdery new snow that the recent front had dumped in its wake.

A couple of her tests are—Mary heard the crinkle of paper through the line—abnormal. Has she started her periods?

She’s only nine, Mary answered curtly. Mary’s own periods had started when she was eleven—she swallowed at the lump forming in her voice box—and stopped forever when she was sixteen. What’s that got to do with it?

Emily’s hemoglobin—that’s the red molecule in the blood—

"I know what hemoglobin is. Mary barked the words into the phone, her heart now at a gallop. What is Emily’s?" Mary understood all too well the oxygen-carrying, life-sustaining role of the hemoglobin molecule. Her own levels had plummeted to life-threatening lows on that same day she’d become barren.

The nurse took a breath. "I apologize, Mrs. Edwards. I don’t mean to speak down to you. It’s just that most of my patients are—go ahead and say it—high-school dropouts, losers—less educated than you."

Mary composed herself. How low is it?

There was more shuffling paper. Her hemoglobin is nine. Her platelets are also quite low at eighty thousand. Most concerning, her white blood cell count is elevated at thirty thousand.

Mary’s head began to spin. She’d now have to swallow her pride and ask for an explanation of all this. Doesn’t a high white count mean infection?

The nurse continued in a conciliatory voice. Very often it does. However, in view of Emily’s apparent good health and, combined with the low platelets and hemoglobin— She hesitated. I really think you need to have your family doctor examine Emily and go over the blood results with you.

Mary wanted to scream. I don’t have a family doctor. Her voice shook. She knew something bad was happening. We go to the clinic on Algonquin Street.

I could have the results sent over there, the nurse said.

Mary began to sob. Please tell me what to do—please.

Unknown to Mary, this last plea cut through the rules and regulations that steered the medical profession. For a few moments the nurse allowed herself to be guided by the primal bond linking all women—the protocol of motherhood.

There’s a clinic in Toronto. The best in the country. Have you got a pencil?

Chapter 8

Toronto—April 1983

The hospital room was sparse but efforts to enliven it were evident. Walls of a smooth plaster had been recently painted a soft, sky blue. Two colorful, patterned rugs broke up the original white tiled floor. Off to one side there was an open door to the bathroom and the faint scent of vomit lingered in the air above the best efforts of a pine-scented aerosol spray. There were two metal-framed beds in the room. The one by the window was occupied by a curled lump completely concealed beneath a thin pink blanket.

You’ve got a roommate, Jessica, the nurse sang out, preceding Mary and Emily into the room. Jessica didn’t move. This is your bed, sweetie, she said to Emily, patting the tightly stretched sheets of the second bed.

Emily tossed her small backpack onto the covers, then jumped up herself. The letter had told Mary to be prepared for immediate admission to the hospital, so they’d packed Emily’s jammies, toothbrush, some books and, of course, Zoom. The air was thick and pressed down onto Mary from all sides. Her head throbbed with every heartbeat, and she fought to keep her breathing steady.

This is okay, don’t you think, Mommy? Emily said softly, unzipping a side pouch of her backpack.

It was happening so quickly. In the clinic downstairs, Dr. Rosa had scanned the lab results from Timmins, probed at Emily’s neck just beneath the jaw line, glanced back at the paper. How are those Gold Diggers doing this season? he asked in a friendly tone, at the same time pulling down on the skin beneath Emily’s lower eyelids and peeping at the pale membranes they concealed. Without waiting for an answer, he announced, How would you like to spend a few days with us, sweetie? Then, patting Emily on the knee, he got up and moved to the next cubicle.

•••

The Royal Princess watched the admission of her latest guest with a familiar sorrow. She ached at the sight of another tiny child, suspecting immediately what Emily’s tests and biopsies and microscopic evaluations would reveal. Better than any human, she knew the look in her doctors’ eyes, the seeming perfunctory prodding of body parts, and their genuine but strained efforts at comforting small talk. The Princess knew what was to become of Emily Sarah Edwards. She would fight bravely but, like the others, she would die.

They came and went with the inevitability of daybreak. Not just children, but adults. Kwon had been a young man of twenty-three when he entered the embrace of The Royal Princess. He was an immigrant from Taiwan, studying at the university. When he graduated as an engineer, Kwon was planning to bring his mother and sisters over to Canada and buy them a house in the country, and grow vegetables in a garden, and open a restaurant. But Kwon’s left knee snuffed out those hopes in less than six months.

It started as a swelling, barely perceptible on the inside of his femur. By the time the cancer spewed its venom into the lungs and brain and back bone, Kwon had shrunk to ninety pounds and was gasping for each breath. The Princess tried her best to save him. Kwon’s last words were to an intern, summoned late one night to restart an intravenous line that had clotted off. They were both still children, patient and healer. Kwon whispered into the junior doctor’s ear, Do all you can, please. There are many things I have yet to accomplish.

Kwon died before sunrise. It was a breezy Wednesday. He departed The Princess from a loading dock on a gurney covered from head to foot by a purple blanket, pushed by two men who were discussing the previous night’s baseball scores

Chapter 9

Toronto—September 1986

Mary lay down on Emily’s bed. She had not eaten, and it felt like her insides were trying to get out. There were so many things to do, collecting Emily’s things at school to start, although she’d not attended for weeks. Mary felt a tidal wave of loneliness. Closing her eyes, she permitted her mind to play a cruel game inside her head. Mary pretended that this day was in the future, a future without illness or death. She arose from sleep and made coffee, then got Emily up for school. She chose a dress, packed a lunch, handed her daughter her books, and kissed her goodbye. Later, after school, they sat in the cool confines of the bedroom and discussed each other’s day. Emily did her homework while Mary cooked dinner. Years later they would discuss boys, and colleges, and which automobile was safest for a new driver. Things that would never happen.

The doorbell rang. Mary lay there, listening to the sound, like a wind chime, hoping whoever would just go away. Maybe it was Julian, her ex, back from God-knows-where his job took him.

Mary struggled up, made the transfer into her wheelchair, then pushed to the door. It was Shirley Chisholm, a lady from the church she and Emily attended sporadically. She was holding a casserole. Shirley let herself in, hugged Mary, then took the dish to the kitchen. You mustn’t forget to eat, my dear, she said.

Mary listened to the clinks and shuffles from the kitchen as Shirley placed the food into the refrigerator and must have started washing the dishes that had accumulated over the last week. She realized how few friends she’d made over the past three years. Her time had been focused on Emily: school, hospital stays for chemotherapy, walks in the park to maintain her sanity. Mary had decided to stay in Toronto for Emily’s treatments rather than make the eight-hour drive back and forth from Timmins. Besides, there wasn’t much to keep her there anymore. She hadn’t spoken to her father in—she closed her eyes—twenty years.

Shirley returned to the living room and made small talk. God knows best, she said in her last-will-and-testament voice, at the same time patting Mary’s shoulder. We don’t own anything in this world, you know. God lent us little Emily for a while and now wants her to be in Heaven.

Mary stared beyond the window at the few remaining sumac leaves clinging desperately to their branches. She found the house depressing. It was so sad and lonely without the chatter and smell of her little girl.

Shirley droned on about God’s will. Mary listened without hearing. As annoying as she seemed, Shirley was the only visitor to seek Mary out. In Mary’s head a voice was singing, a tune from years ago— early one morning, just as the sun was rising, I heard a maiden singing, in the valley below. She was, once again, with Emily, strolling through Hayhoe Park, hand in hand.

What did the old man mean when he said she didn’t have to die?

Chapter 10

Timmins—1962

It was a Saturday in January. The Mattagami River, which meandered across the jagged, forested Canadian Shield slicing Timmins into two bite-sized chunks, was frozen in its tracks. Beneath its surface, now twelve inches of solid ice and dotted with colorful winter fishing huts, pike and muskie hovered in frigid hibernation.

The town was abuzz with speculation about that night’s hockey game. The Pembroke Little Lumber Kings were in town and there was no love lost between the two teams. The Gold Diggers were battling the Lumber Kings for first place in their division and, while still early in the season, tonight’s game heralded the eventual match-up in the finals.

Mr. Nienkirken, who owned the bakery on Hollinger Street, had already sold out his supply of Lumber Logs. These were special elongated sticky buns dripping with honey and a sprinkle of crushed walnuts. He baked up a batch every time the Diggers faced off against the Kings whether the match was at home or away. The citizens of Timmins devoured their archrivals in effigy and with great gusto. It wasn’t unusual to see folks strolling down the street munching aggressively on a log-shaped pastry at the same time spitting out, Go Diggers!

Mary met Janie Wilkins at Bedor’s Chip Wagon. Did you get tickets? she cried to her friend from a distance. Janie waved a pair of red paper rectangles, then stuck them protectively back into her purse. Each girl had a pair of white figure skates slung over her shoulder. Their exhalations came like snorts of steam in the below-zero cold, and the snow squeaked beneath their boots. They bought and shared a large order of chips, which were actually greasy French fries served in a brown paper bag and liberally doused with vinegar and salt.

Goin’ to the game? Serge Bedor asked with a pimply smirk. Serge was a tenth grader at TVCI and worked his father’s chip wagon on weekends.

Maybe, Mary replied with a flick of her head.

And maybe not, Janie threw over her shoulder causing a half-eaten fry to waggle between her lips like a smoke.

Heads together and giggling, the two hurried away. Passing by the back end of the chip wagon, Mary saw a movement in the corner of her eye. Through the partially opened rear door Mr. Bedor, Serge’s father, was leaning into the street. Mary rarely noticed Mr. Bedor. He was always in the interior of the wagon doing the cooking, out of view except for his long, flannelled arms sliding their orders onto the counter. Those same long arms were now handing paper bags of fries to the Shepley kids. The older Shepley, Brian, was in high school. They lived in a trailer outside of town. Their clothes were always unwashed, noses runny, and they smelled.

Mary and Janie spent the day cruising the main drag on foot, window shopping, always on the lookout for boys, especially Guy Tremblay. The tickets to the game included an hour of free skating starting at five. They stopped into Canadian Tire to have their skates sharpened and Mary bought a pair of furry pink mittens. It was not unheard of for some of the hockey players to show up for the pre-game skate, but usually only those who had girlfriends. Mary had never seen Guy Tremblay there. No matter. They’d get to the arena early and pile their stuff onto seats directly behind the home team bench. From there they’d get an unobstructed view of their hero for two sweaty hours.

Mary and Janie skated hand in hand, trying to appear sedate while discussing the chances that Guy would notice them in the seats behind the home team. Boys whizzed in and out, playing tag, seeing just how close they could skirt girls without actually sideswiping them. One kid from her class, Joel Riggins, cut them off and screeched to a stop in a spray of ice. Hi, Mary, he said in whiney falsetto.

Mary and Janie split around him. Oh, grow up, Riggins, Janie called out.

The scratchy sound system of the Timmins Memorial Arena launched into Love is Blue, always a favorite with couples. The girls fell silent, each visualizing squeezing a male skating partner’s hand, almost certainly the same male.

•••

By the start of the third period of the hockey game, the Lumber Kings were leading the Gold Diggers two to one and the crowd was becoming surly. Hockey fans possessed great loyalty but little patience. There was one, and only one, acceptable outcome to any home game—victory. There had been three fights already and the potential for as many again before the final buzzer. Two players from each team were ejected in the second period. The Gold Diggers were now a man short due to a tripping penalty to one of their defensemen when coach Prentice, who taught Mary’s chemistry class, sent out his star player, Guy, to salvage the situation.

As he hopped over the boards and onto the ice, Mary sighed heavily. He is so cute, she said absently. Even though they were sitting less than a good spit behind the players’ bench, neither girl had yelled anything directly to player number 6. Janie stuck two pinkies into her mouth and gave a shrill whistle. There was now one minute left in the game.

The puck was dumped into the Timmins’ end and bodies scrambled behind the net to dig it out. Guy circled in front of his own goalie, fending off the lone Pembroke defenseman who was assigned to cover him. Suddenly, the puck ricocheted out of a tangle of skates and sticks and skidded toward the Lumber Kings goal. At that instant, Guy, one of the fastest skaters in the league, happened to be headed in the right direction to intercept it. His defender, momentarily distracted, was glancing somewhere else.

Accelerating, number 6 caught up with the loose puck at center ice. The crowd shot to its feet in choreographed unison. Mary put Janie’s arm in a vice lock as Guy catapulted toward the Pembroke goalie. It was a breakaway, with no defenders between Guy and the rival goal. For the first time that night the crowd fell silent.

Guy had a deadly accurate shot and usually released it from about twenty feet. Everyone in the audience and on the ice knew his signature move. So did the Lumber King goalie.

Guy sent a blistering wrist shot toward the upper left corner of the net. Mary winced; it was too obvious. The goalie was right-handed and didn’t have time to swing his left catching glove across his body to snag the missile, so he simply straightened from his crouch and the puck rebounded off his right shoulder.

The crowd groaned.

There is a split second after the puck bounces off the goalie’s pads when it’s up for grabs. The goalie has the advantage of being closer, but is looking down and scrambling to find it while the attacker has a clearer vantage point. Before the puck even struck the ice, Guy swept in, poked it between the goalie’s legs and into the net.

Pandemonium erupted in the arena. Mary and Janie were still hugging as the players eventually trickled back to the bench. With ten seconds remaining in the game there was a face off at center ice, a desperate swipe at the puck by the Pembroke left winger, and then it was over. A tie, but it felt like a win for Timmins.

Mary remained standing as the crowd made its way to the aisles, slapping each other’s backs and high fiving. She was determined to watch her heartthrob to the last second. Their seats were adjacent to the tunnel leading from the ice to the dressing rooms below. Kids and adults were stretched over railings, reaching down to their idols as they trekked toward the showers. Some of the players threw towels into the crowd, and a few handed their game sticks to wide-eyed fans. Getting a player’s hockey stick was winning the lottery.

Mary and Janie turned to go. Guy had remained on the ice talking to the coach and some reporter from Channel 4 and was at the trailing end of the exiting Gold Diggers. As Mary reached the railing, a trio of boys and one adult were pestering number 6 for his stick. Guy glanced up, his helmet pushed back on his scalp, stringy black hair plastered by sweat to his forehead, and his eyes met Mary’s. He was gorgeous.

C’mon, Guy, let me have your stick, one kid screamed.

No, no, me, chimed another.

The adult groupie took a swipe at it, but Guy pulled the hockey stick out of reach. He walked to the edge of the rail, eyes still locked onto Mary’s—perhaps he recognized her from school—and handed her his hockey stick.

A dozen wondrous eyes and gaping jaws fixated on Mary as though she were Venus Incarnate.

Chapter 11

Toronto—April 1983

An orderly came for Emily at eight the next morning. Time for some tests, Princess, he said cheerily, pushing a wheelchair next to the bed.

Mary had stayed the night at the Windsor Hotel, a ten-minute walk from The Royal Princess, and had arrived back in Emily’s room in time for her breakfast. Jessica, the roommate, had gone downstairs for chemotherapy. She was from Sudbury, a city not too far from Timmins. In fact, when she was a teenager, Mary and her mother used to drive to Sudbury to shop. The memory of her mother brought a lump to Mary’s throat.

Emily scooted into the wheelchair.

What tests are scheduled for today? Mary asked as they waited for the elevator. She could hear its approach from below, the muffled whir of cables

resounding against the morning silence. The orderly, whose name tag read Ozigbo, consulted a clipboard. He was angular, very black, and possessed a slash of white teeth. There had been one Black student in the Timmins high school when Mary attended. Her name was Felicity Oilepo. She was from some country in Africa—Ghana, Mary seemed to recall. Her father worked in the silver mines north of Timmins.

A chest X-ray followed by a bone marrow sample, the orderly replied in a musical accent. The elevator arrived and they entered.

What’s the bone marrow for? Mary asked, her voice constricted.

You remember, Mommy, Emily chimed. Zoom, the zebra, sat facing forward in Emily’s lap. That’s the test to see why my white blood cells are so high. Dr. Rosa had explained the test to them in the clinic the day before. They take it from here—Emily leaned forward and touched her right hip—and it’s only a tiny ouch.

On the first floor they entered a doorway labeled Haematology. It was cold inside and had a rubbing alcohol smell that seemed to infect all hospitals. Mary’s stomach knotted. Someone will be with you in a minute, Ozigbo said with a nod of his head then left, closing the door.

An elderly man who was holding a cane between his legs was the only other occupant of the waiting room. He smiled at Emily, revealing a cemetery of rotten teeth. After a few minutes, a nurse introduced herself and led them to a room in the back. Emily sat up on an examining table while the nurse prepared a silver tray for the procedure. Mary sucked in a breath. There was an eye chart on one wall and a poster of how white blood cells were formed on another. Mary read the words Lymphocyte, Lymphoblast, Leukocyte, then stopped and closed her eyes, inhaling a dose of panic.

The clinking of metal reopened Mary’s eyes. The nurse was laying out stainless steel instruments onto a white linen towel on the silver tray. She recognized scissors and what looked like large tweezers and a long and very thick needle.

Emily was watching in fascination. It’s okay, Zoom, she said, reassuringly hugging her zebra, those are for me, not you. This is a people hospital.

The door opened and a man in green scrubs sauntered in. His name tag read Phillip Norton, MD, and he looked about twelve. I’m Doctor Norton, he said, snapping on a pair of surgical gloves. The nurse had Emily lie on her side on the table and pulled a gray blanket up to her knees.

You cold, honey? she asked, then lowered Emily’s pajama bottoms until the boney prominence of her hip was exposed.

Emily shook her head. Can Zoom watch?

Doctor Norton straightened and shot Emily a puzzled look. You mean you’re the patient? he said, then broke into a huge grin. I thought we were going to biopsy a zebra this morning.

Emily’s eyes became two saucers, and she drew Zoom closer to her chest.

The nurse released a chuckle and patted Emily’s leg. He’s only kidding, sweetheart.

Emily frowned. I knew that, she said. Besides, Zoom is as healthy as a horse. Zebras are only horses in pajamas, you know.

Dr. Norton wiped Emily’s hip with a cotton ball dipped in iodine. This’ll feel cold, sweetie.

The nurse pulled a chair next to Mary. Why don’t you sit, Mrs. Edwards, she said. You can hold Emily’s hand. This won’t take long. She handed the doctor a glass syringe filled with clear liquid.

Mosquito bite, the doctor said, poking the needle into Emily’s pink skin over her hip.

"I hate mos—ouch!" Emily squeezed her eyes shut but said nothing more. Mary couldn’t watch and turned her head away. The nurse was stroking Emily’s hair.

Part one finished, Dr. Norton said, straightening.

That wasn’t all? Mary asked hesitantly.

The nurse took the syringe and dropped it into a red plastic box on the cabinet. That was just the freezing, sweetheart. We’ll give it a minute to numb everything, then the doctor will aspirate bone marrow from the hip.

Mary felt a muscle jump in her neck.

That didn’t hurt all that bad, Mommy, Emily said.

Mary concentrated on breathing, in through her nose, out through the mouth. There were brief moments when she thought it was all a dream: the nosebleed, the telephone call from the nurse in Timmins informing Mary the blood tests showed something was wrong with her little girl’s body, the long drive down to Toronto, and now this. She brushed off a tear before it could fully form. Why was this happening to them—to her?

Ready for the last part, Dr. Norton said, selecting the long, thick needle from the tray.

Mary twisted her head away again, found Emily’s hand, and squeezed. She peeked back