Between Sisters - Kristin Hannah [119]
She looked at Meg. “Do I have cancer? Is that what a tumor is?”
“We don't know what the hell you have. Certainly those dipshit doctors don't know.”
“Did you see the shadow on that X ray, Meg? It was huge.” Claire felt tired suddenly. She wanted to close her eyes and sleep. Maybe in the morning things would look different. Maybe she'd find out it was all a mistake.
Meghann grabbed her, shook her hard. “Listen to me, damn it. You need to be tough now. No getting by, no giving up. This isn't like cosmetology school or college, you can't take the easy road and walk away.”
“I've got a brain tumor, and you throw quitting college at me. You're amazing.” Claire wanted to be angry, but her emotions felt distant. It was hard to think. “I don't even feel sick. Everybody gets headaches, don't they?”
“Tomorrow we'll start getting second opinions. First we'll go to Johns Hopkins. Then we'll try Sloan-Kettering in New York. There's got to be a surgeon who has some balls.” Meghann's eyes welled up, her voice broke.
Somehow that frightened Claire even more, seeing Meg crack. “It's going to be okay,” she said automatically; comforting others was easier than thinking. “You'll see. We just need to keep positive.”
“Faith. Yes,” Meghann said after a long pause. “You hold on to the faith and I'll start finding out everything there is to know about your condition. That way we'll have all the bases covered. God and science.”
“You mean be a team?”
“Someone has to be there for you through this.”
“But . . . you?”
The whole of their childhood was between them suddenly, all the good times and, more important, the bad.
Claire stared at her sister. “If you start this thing with me, you have to stick around if things get tough.”
Meg glanced out the window at a passing motorist. “You can count on me.”
Claire touched her sister's chin, made her turn to make eye contact. “Look at me when you say that.”
Meg looked at her. “Trust me.”
“I must be near death if I agree to this. God help me.” Claire frowned. “I don't want to tell anyone.”
“Why should we say anything until we know for sure?”
“It'll just worry Dad and make Bobby come home.” She paused, swallowed hard. “I don't even want to think about telling Ali.”
“We'll tell everyone I'm taking you to a spa for a week. Will they believe that?”
“Bobby will. And Ali. Dad . . . I don't know. Maybe if I tell him we need time together. He's wanted us to reconcile for years. Yeah. He'd buy that.”
Joe had read once about a species of frog that lived on the Serengeti Plain in Africa. These frogs, it seemed, laid their eggs on muddy riverbanks in the monsoon season when the earth was black and oozing with moisture. But the wet season turned dry in time, and on the Serengeti a drought could go on and on. The eggs could lay trapped in the arid, hard-packed ground for years. Amazingly, when the rains finally returned, newborn frogs would come bubbling up through the mud and go in search of mates, to begin the cycle of life again.
Impossible, he'd thought at the time, for life to adapt to such conditions.
And yet, he felt a little like that now. The meeting with Diana's parents had released something in him. Not the guilt, or not all of it, certainly, but their forgiveness, their understanding, had eased his burdens. For the first time since his wife's death, he could stand straight again. He could believe that there was a way out for him. Not medicine. He could never go through that again, never watch death up close. But something . . .
And there was Meghann. To his disbelief, she'd called. Asked him on a date. His first real date with a woman in more than fifteen years.
He wasn't sure even how to prepare for it.
She wasn't like Diana. There was no softness in Meghann. No single moment with her promised anything—least of all another moment. Even when they were at their most intimate, when he was inside of her, she sometimes turned her face away from him.
He knew it would be smart to forget her and the desires she'd rekindled. Smart, but impossible. That would