The Comeback Season by Jennifer E. Smith

Author:Jennifer E. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
Published: 2008-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

* * *

NICK HAS PLANS TO GO UP TO WISCONSIN WITH his family for the Fourth of July, and then spend the rest of the month at his grandparents’ lake house, swimming and sailing and barbecuing. None of this should come as a surprise to Ryan, but somehow, the idea that they could be up there carrying on as if nothing were wrong is deeply perplexing.

She’d had a similar feeling after her dad died, a sense of astonishment that the world could still hum along at exactly the same pace, that such a great loss could hardly cause any interruption. But this is different: Nick is still here. And while he spends the month sitting on the edge of a pier, all they can do is hold their breath and wait and hope that another tumor won’t show up on his arm. Ryan feels nearly mad with frustration that there’s nothing that can be done to prevent it, this possible cancer, this potential disaster.

That afternoon, Nick had walked her home from the train station in silence after the ride north from Wrigleyville, neither willing to be the first to speak, to break the quiet between them that felt somehow safer than words. After she’d taken a hot shower and put her wet clothes in the laundry, Ryan spent a few hours circulating her house like some sort of distressed ghost, until Mom finally pointed to a chair.

“Sit,” she said. “Talk.”

This struck Ryan as a good idea, though she realized it wasn’t Mom who she needed to talk to, but Nick. She backpedaled out of the family room—away from the troubling normalcy of the scene before her, where Mom and Kevin and Emily sat around the television unaware that anything had changed today—and left for Nick’s house.

His mother answered the door, and though Ryan attempted a greeting, her tongue was thick in her mouth. “He’s upstairs, honey,” Mrs. Crowley said, and Ryan thanked her, then hurried up and knocked on the door to his bedroom.

“I have a few more questions,” she told him when he appeared in the doorway.

He stepped back to let her in. “I sort of thought you might.”

They spent the evening sitting on the floor of his room. There were no more jokes, no more long pauses. He answered her questions dutifully, as distantly as if he were talking about someone else.

“What are the chances it will come back?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It either will or it won’t.”

“But if it does?”

“If it does, it would depend on how bad it is,” he said evenly, his words measured in the quiet room. “And whether it’s self-contained or not.”

“What happens if it is?”

“Same thing as before, probably.”

“Surgery?”

“And chemo.”

“But if it’s worse?”

“It could spread to the rest of the bone or my lungs,” he said, and this was the first time Ryan thought she could detect a hint of alarm in his eyes. Or, at the very least, the first time he’d failed to hide it.

“But this is all just a big maybe,” she said.

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