Sara
       2002

KATE MEETS TAYLOR AMBROSE when they are sitting side by side, hooked up to IVs. “What are you herefor?” she asks, and I immediately look up from my book, because in all the years that Kate has beenreceiving outpatient treatment I cannot remember her initiating a conversation.

The boy she is talking to is not much older than she is, maybe sixteen to her fourteen. He has brown eyes thatdance, and is wearing a Bruins cap over his bald head. “The free cocktails,” he answers, and the dimples inhis cheeks deepen.

Kate grins. “Happy hour,” she says, and she looks up at the bag of platelets being infused into her.

“I’m Taylor.” He holds out his hand. “AML.”

“Kate. APL.”

He whistles, and raises his brows. “Ooh,” he says. “A rarity.”

Kate tosses her cropped hair. “Aren’t we all?”

I watch this, amazed. Who is this flirt, and what has she done with my little girl?

“Platelets,” he says, scrutinizing the label on her IV bag. “You’re in remission?”

“Today, anyway.” Kate glances at his pole, the telltale black bag that covers the Cytoxan. “Chemo?”

“Yeah. Today, anyway. So, Kate,” Taylor says. He has that rangy puppy look of a sixteen-year-old, one withknobby knees and thick fingers and cheekbones he hasn’t yet grown into. When he crosses his arms, themuscles swell. I realize he’s doing this on purpose, and I duck my head to hide a smile. “What do you dowhen you’re not at Providence Hospital?”

She thinks, and then a slow smile lights her up from the inside out. “Wait for something that makes me comeback.”

This makes Taylor laugh out loud. “Maybe sometime we can wait together,” he says, and he passes her awrapper from a gauze pad. “Can I have your phone number?”

Kate scribbles it down as Taylor’s IV begins to beep. The nurse comes in and unhooks his line. “You’re outtahere, Taylor,” she says. “Where’s your ride?”

“Waiting downstairs. I’m all set.” He gets out of the padded chair slowly, almost weakly, the first reminderthat this is not some casual conversation. He slips the piece of paper with our phone number into his pocket.

“Well, I’ll call you, Kate.”

When he leaves Kate lets all her breath out in a dramatic finish. She rolls her head after him. “Oh my God,”

she gasps. “He is gorgeous.”

The nurse, checking her flow, grins. “Tell me about it, honey. If only I were thirty years younger.”

Kate turns to me, blooming. “You think he’ll call?”

“Maybe,” I say.

“Where do you think we’ll go out?”

I think of Brian, who has always said that Kate can date…when she’s forty. “Let’s take one step at a time,” Isuggest. But inside, I am singing.

spaceThe arsenic, which ultimately put Kate into remission, worked its magic by wearing her down. TaylorAmbrose, a drug of an entirely different sort, works his magic by building her up. It becomes a habit: whenthe phone rings at seven P.M., Kate flies from the dinner table and hides in a closet with the portable receiver.

The rest of us clear the dinner plates and spend time in the living room and get ready for bed, hearing littlemore than giggles and whispers, and then Kate emerges from her cocoon, flushed and glowing, first lovebeating like a hummingbird at the pulse in her throat. Every time it happens, I can’t stop staring. It is not thatKate is so beautiful, although she is; it’s that I never really let myself believe that I would see her all grownup.

I follow her into the bathroom one night, after one of her marathon phone sessions. Kate stares at herself inthe mirror, pursing her lips and raising her brows in a come-hither pose. Her hand comes up to her croppedhair—after the chemo, it never grew back in waves, just thick straight tufts that she usually cultivates withmousse to look like bedhead. She holds her palm out, as if she still expects to see hair shedding.

“What do you think he sees when he looks at me?” Kate asks.

I come to stand behind her. She is not the child that mirrors me—that would be Jesse—and yet when you putus side by side, there are definite similarities. It’s not in the shape of the mouth but the set of it, the sheerdetermination that silvers our eyes.

“I think he sees a girl who knows what he’s been through,” I tell her honestly.

“I got on the internet and read up on AML,” she says. “His leukemia’s got a pretty high cure rate.” She turnsto me. “When you care more if someone else lives than you do about yourself…is that what love’s like?”

It is hard, all of a sudden, to pull an answer through the tunnel of my throat. “Exactly.”

Kate runs the tap and washes her face with a foam of soap. I hand her a towel, and as she rises from the cloudof it, she says, “Something bad’s going to happen.”

On alert, I search her out for clues. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. But that’s the way it works. If there’s something as good as Taylor in my life, I’m going to pay forit.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” I say out of habit, yet there is a truth to this. Anyone whobelieves that people have ultimate control of what life hands to them needs only to spend a day in the shoesof a child with leukemia. Or her mother. “Maybe you’re finally getting a break,” I say.

Three days later, during a routine CBC, the hematologist tells us that Kate is once again throwingpromyelocytes, the first slide down a steep slope of relapse.

I have never eavesdropped, at least not intentionally, until the night that Kate comes back from her first datewith Taylor, to see a movie. She tiptoes into her room and sits down on Anna’s bed. “You awake?” she asks.

Anna rolls over, groans. “I am now.” Sleep slips away from her, like a shawl falling to the floor. “How wasit?”

“Wow,” Kate says, and she laughs. “Wow.”

“How wow? Like, tonsil hockey wow?”

“You are so disgusting,” Kate whispers, although there’s a smile behind it. “But he is a really good kisser.”

She dangles this like a fisherman.

“Get out!” Anna’s voice shines. “So what was it like?”

“Flying,” Kate answers. “I bet it feels just the same way.”

“I don’t get what that has in common with someone slobbering all over you.”

“God, Anna, it’s not like he spits on you.”

“What does Taylor taste like?”

“Popcorn.” She laughs. “And guy.”

“How did you know what to do?”

“I didn’t. It just kind of happened. Like the way you play hockey.”

This, finally, makes sense to Anna. “Well,” she says, “I do feel pretty good when I’m doing that.”

“You have no idea,” Kate sighs. There is some movement; I imagine her stripping off her clothes. I wonder ifTaylor is imagining the same, somewhere.

Pillow is punched, cover yanked back, sheets rustle as Kate gets into bed and rolls onto her side. “Anna?”

“Hmm?”

“He has scars on his palms, from graft-versus-host,” Kate murmurs. “I could feel them when we wereholding hands.”

“Was it gross?”

“No,” she says. “It was like we matched.”

At first, I can’t get Kate to agree to undergo the peripheral blood stem cell transplant. She refuses becauseshe doesn’t want to be hospitalized for chemo, doesn’t want to have to sit in reverse isolation for the next sixweeks when she could be going out with Taylor Ambrose. “It’s your life,” I point out to her, and she looks atme as if I’m crazy.

“Exactly,” she says.

In the end, we compromise. The oncology team agrees to let Kate begin her chemo as an outpatient, inpreparation for a transplant from Anna. At home, she agrees to wear a mask. At the first indication of hercounts dropping, she’ll be hospitalized. They aren’t happy; they worry it will affect the procedure, but likeme they also understand that Kate has reached the age where she can bargain with her will.

As it turns out, this separation anxiety is all for naught, since Taylor shows up for Kate’s first outpatientchemo appointment. “What are you doing here?”

“I can’t seem to stay away,” he jokes. “Hey, Mrs. Fitzgerald.” He sits down beside Kate in the emptyadjoining chair. “God, it feels good to be in one of these without an IV hookup.”

“Rub it in,” Kate mutters.

Taylor puts his hand on her arm. “How far into it are you?”

“Just started.”

He gets up and sits on the wide arm of Kate’s chair, picks the emesis basin up from Kate’s lap. “A hundredbucks says you can’t make it till three without tossing your cookies.”

Kate glances at the clock. It is 2:50. “You’re on.”

“What did you have for lunch?” He grins, wicked. “Or should I guess based on the colors?”

“You’re disgusting,” Kate says, but her smile is as wide as the sea. Taylor puts his hand on her shoulder. Sheleans into the contact.

The first time Brian touched me, he saved my life. There had been cataclysmic downpours in Providence, anor’easter that swelled the tides and put the parking lot at the courthouse entirely underwater. I was clerkingthen, when we were evacuated. Brian’s department was in charge; I walked onto the stone steps of thebuilding to see cars floating by, and abandoned purses, and even a terrified paddling dog. While I had beenfiling briefs, the world I knew had been submerged. “Need a hand?” Brian asked, dressed in his full turnoutgear, and he held out his arms. As he swam me to higher ground, rain struck my face and pelted my back. Iwondered how—in a deluge—I could feel like I was being burned alive.

“What’s the longest you’ve ever gone before throwing up?” Kate asks Taylor.

“Two days.”

“Get out.”

The nurse glances up from her paperwork. “True,” she confirms. “I saw it with my own eyes.”

Taylor grins at her. “I told you, I’m a master at this.” He looks at the clock: 2:57.

“Don’t you have anywhere else you’d rather be?” Kate says.

“Trying to weasel out of the bet?”

“Trying to spare you. Although—” Before she can finish, she goes green. Both the nurse and I rise from oursseats, but Taylor reaches Kate first. He holds the vomit basin beneath her chin and when she starts retching,he rubs his hand in slow circles on her upper back.

“It’s okay,” he soothes, close to her temple.

The nurse and I exchange glances. “Looks like she’s in good hands,” the nurse says, and she leaves to takecare of another patient.

When Kate is finished, Taylor puts the basin aside and wipes her mouth with a tissue. She looks up at him,glow-eyed and flushed, her nose still running. “Sorry,” she mutters.

“For what?” Taylor says. “Tomorrow, it could be me.”

I wonder if all mothers feel like this the moment they realize their daughters are growing up—as if it isimpossible to believe that the laundry I once folded for her was doll-sized; as if I can still see her dancing inlazy pirouettes along the lip of the sandbox. Wasn’t it yesterday that her hand was only as big as the sanddollar she found on the beach? That same hand, the one that’s holding a boy’s; wasn’t it just holding mine,tugging so that I might stop and see the spiderweb, the milkweed pod, any of a thousand moments shewanted me to freeze? Time is an optical illusion—never quite as solid or strong as we think it is. You wouldassume that, given everything, I saw this coming. But watching Kate watch this boy, I see I have a thousandthings to learn.

“I’m some fun date,” Kate murmurs.

Taylor smiles at her. “Fries,” he says. “For lunch.”

Kate smacks his shoulder. “You are disgusting.”

He raises one brow. “You lost the bet, you know.”

“I seem to have left my trust fund at home.”

Taylor pretends to study her. “OK, I know what you can give me instead.”

“Sexual favors?” Kate says, forgetting I am here.

“Gee, I don’t know,” Taylor laughs. “Should we ask your mom?”

She goes plum-red. “Oops.”

“Keep this up,” I warn, “and your next date will be during a bone marrow aspiration.”

“You know the hospital has this dance, right?” Suddenly, Taylor is jittery; his knee bobs up and down. “It’sfor kids who are sick. There are doctors and nurses there, in case, and it’s held in one of the conference roomsat the hospital, but for the most part it’s just like a regular prom. You know, lame band, ugly tuxes, punchspiked with platelets.” He swallows. “I’m just kidding about that last part. Well, I went last year, stag, and itwas pretty dumb, but I figure since you’re a patient and I’m a patient maybe this year we could, like, gotogether.”

Kate, with an aplomb I never would have guessed she possesses, considers the offer. “When is it?”

“Saturday.”

“As it turn............