Chương 1: Chapter 42: Discharge: A New Hope

The month inside the hospital felt like a year. The last aspiration hurt terribly, but waiting for the result was the real agony. The absolute neutrophil count was everything, Robin's only chance to escape. If they made him stay, he was sure he'd never leave this place. Robin had to lie in bed to keep pressure on the aspiration point. They patched the wound with brown pressure tape. The nurses had him on a yellow bag of platelets and gave him Tylenol 3, which he hated. The codeine made him nauseous and foggy.

It barely blunted the awful pressure. An hour after the draw, the doctor arrived. Robin and Una froze, afraid to hear, but desperate to know.

"The initial smear looks good. We'll know more in four hours and be certain in twenty-four. Rest up and try not to worry about it," the doctor advised. Try not to worry about it. It almost felt like a joke, what else could he do? Robin was too foggy to play chess, too tired to paint, too gray to do anything but lie in bed. The fatigue was already worse than the prednisone crash. It felt like they'd scraped away everything good inside him and left this skinny, useless husk. The four hour count was good.

Una looked like she might cry with relief. They made her go home. It would be a long and lonely night. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Robin was completely bald now. Even his eyebrows and lashes were falling out. When he looked in the bathroom mirror, a pale alien looked back at him. His eyes were blue-tinged and sunk into pits of shadow. The only good thing about the isolation was that only Una and the priest saw him like this.

He tried to think about the game, about anything but the count. What about when he got home? Weeks of at-home isolation, then another aspiration, another gauntlet. Then what? How could he face everyone? He'd had to work so hard to make friends in Albuquerque. Now that he looked like a walking corpse, no one would want him around anymore. He'd be stuck inside all summer, alone. He'd have to eat the awful low-bacteria diet and listen to the coyotes howl every night.

Robin wondered if he ought to just run off and spare everyone the trouble. Better not. He probably couldn't make it around the block. He held up his hands. His forearms were motley with bruises and lines of tape residue in the moonlight. What a mess. They bore the record of a long, bitter campaign. He was a living map. It gave him an idea. Robin reached for his diario.