Go ahead. Read on. It’s not the ending I thought.
My daughter—you’ve never met her—groans there on the couch.
“Oooooie…It huuurts. Ooooo…�

It’s four-thirty and she’s five years old and this seems unnecessarily dramatic. I’m hassled.

“It huuuuurts,� she complains. From the other side of the playroom comes Dragon Tales’s moving color, an inanely catchy tune. Her bookend brothers—one two years older, one two years younger—sit on little wooden rocking chairs closer to the television.

I stride toward the couch, registering little more than impatience and the fact that I’m starving. They must be starving. I’ll fix an early dinner. Just as soon as I return the call to the plumber and empty the dishwasher.
This evening, though, will deny me the commonplace.

I approach Aidan to find that her left elbow is all puffed up. This is when the pinprick wash of adrenalin—you know the feeling—radiates over my scalp and down my shoulders. Her elbow looks like dough that’s been left to rise too long. It looks like you could push your finger down into her flesh ad your finger would sink through to the bone.

When I sit on the coffee table between her and Dragon Tales and she doesn’t holler, more pin-pricks flood my shoulders and down my spine. The feeling is liquid, chemical, this is the rush of futile adrenaline that washes to the surface and—on any other day—dissipates.

I lean closer to her. She’s holding her legs sort of frogged in front of her. When I take up an ankle she moans, “ooooooie.� Both of her knees are swollen. One has entirely lost its shape. It’s a puffy balloon of a joint. The other is less swollen, but even you—who have little idea what my daughter’s knees looked like before—even you would understand that something was wrong.

Then I see the blotches. All over her legs. Reds and purples in scattered ovoids. Some as small as a wavery red Skittle, some the diameter of a deformed golf ball.

I kiss Aidan softly on her small mouth as I am wont to do. I tell her, “This’ll be alright. Let’s go see Dr. Greene.�

I ask my seven-year-old to find his flip-flops. I shove sneakers on the three-year-old who wants to be carried, but I have to carry his sister. Because there is urgency in my carefully leveled voice, he does not insist.

Aidan can’t walk. An hour before she was in her bathing suit skimming bellydown across the slip-‘n’-slide. When I lift her onto my hip, she groans. She holds her knees away from my body.

And when tears stream—sudden—down her small face, heat and dark red fear course through me.

“Oooooooooowwwiie,� comes from deep inside of her.

As we move toward the front door, the prickling moves deeper into my skin. I am shaking. With the thought that it’s too early for the mommy to be shaking.
I call my husband, Bill, on the way out to the car. I say, “Aidan’s knees and elbows are all swollen and she has these purple blotches on her legs. Can you meet us at the clinic?�

I want him to tell me it’s fine. I want him to say that I am being catastrophic and that I don’t need to take her to the clinic and that he doesn’t need to meet us.

He says he’ll be there before we are. I hang up and feel the hot sting of tears—you know the pressure, that weight at the back of your eyes. I blink.
There’s no way Aidan can climb into her seat in the way back. I tell her we don’t need to bother with her booster. Her eyes go round with fear and I want to die.

“ooooooiieee…� It’s softer now and she is crying. The prickling that I had only ever experienced before in quick, horrible surges? It just keeps coming.
By the time we make the end of our street I have broken my rule about not using my cell phone while driving. I have dialed my mom, who’s in her office with a client. I get her machine. I tell her to call me back. I dial Dr. Greene at home. He’s a family friend and because it’s after five I assume he’s at home and I need him. His answering machine clicks on and I hang up. I call again. I call again and then once more.

In the clinic parking lot I ease Aidan onto my hip and the boys trail behind us. I pass by the check-in desk to a nurse we’ve had a half-dozen times before. Kathy. Kathy is her name. I think that maybe because I have remembered her name before even seeing her nametag that she will be the one to tell me that my daughter is alright. I will Kathy to tell me it’s nothing but when she tilts her head to better see the swollen joints and the blotches spread over the legs of the child I am holding, worry darkens her features. Kathy leads us to the examination room. I set Aidan on the crinkling paper of the high table and hold her hand. The sound of the paper is too much for me, the warmth in the room, the closeness of my sons and Kathy’s questions are all too much but I have no choice. I soothe my children and calmly answer the nurse.

And the prickling over my scalp grows because Aidan is now holding her limbs in an even stranger way—as though these arms and legs don’t belong to her, as though she doesn’t want them any more, these elbows and knees all swollen up like this.

The doctor enters immediately, which is worrisome. She is young, hip looking. She’s an urgent care doctor who can’t be more than twenty-five. It’s after-hours and the regular doctors have gone home to return their own calls to plumbers and to unload their dishwashers and to put their own children to bed.
Bill steps into the room just after the young doctor and I am inordinately relieved. Oddly, though, I need him to stay with the boys across the room, not close to me. If he comes over to kiss me or to reassure I will start crying because he makes that a possibility. I manage a feeble, scared “hi� just as it gets worse—but keep reading—because usually-boisterous Aidan says of her usually-beloved brothers, “their voices…are too loud for my ears.� Bill herds them out and I sink further into this.

“oooooooowwiieee,� goes on and on, a kind of little kid keening, only dropping in volume as Aidan is mercifully distracted. This doctor is young and has a fashionable flippy hairdo and a shimmery pink top. This doctor is calling my daughter cutie and sweetie-pie and peanut and honey-bun. Aidan smiles up at her even as this young doctor fumbles with the button on her pink shorts. The doctor continues fumbling. She fumbles more. She looks up at me and says, “You can tell I’m not a mom,� and I want to scream.

I ease off Aidan’s shorts and the doctor examines her legs. She studies elbows and knees, she palpates my daughter’s tummy.

“You know, love-bug?� her voice is bright but her brows have drawn together and something steely has entered her eyes. “This is a real puzzle! I’ve never seen anything quite like this! You sit tight, lovey. I’m going to have another doctor take a peek.�

She looks to me then, her brightness draining. “We’re going to want blood work.� Something cold drives into my chest when she says, “right away.�

Four doctors crowd around my baby.

“HSP?� says one, his voice conspiratorial, as though I weren’t listening with every fiber of my being.

“Maybe, but look, this is raised.�

“I’d want a SED-rate.�

“And an ANA and a comp.�

“This is what’s really impressive,� says one as he feels Aidan’s elbow.

Another runs her hand over my daughter’s thigh. “This is pretty fabulous as well.�

I watch them run fingers over my child and it seems crucial that they are not afraid to touch her blotches. But then these doctors add “remarkable� and “extraordinary� to “impressive� and “fabulous� and I feel betrayed by the very nature of language.

They ask her in bright sing-songy voices if her tummy hurts—it doesn’t.

They ask if she can stand up—she can’t.

She answers the doctors and smiles weakly because there are four of them crowding and my daughter loves attention. She also loves the “fruit� snacks and Gatorade that Bill has bought from the vending machine. I ply her with bubble gum from my purse and suckers from the cabinet, thinking that I would give this child my kidneys, my liver, my heart.

Minutes elongate before a middle-aged male doctor enters. He lifts Aidan’s leg gingerly as his colleagues peer at the largest of the blotches on the back of the thigh. Then they step back.

They have no idea what’s wrong—but keep reading.

“The good news,� says the shimmery one, “is that she’s in good spirits.�

“Yeah,� says another, whose mien is significantly more grave than when he arrived. “Order the CBC stat.�

“She does look good,� manages the middle-aged man.

“But,� I say, drawing their clinical glances, “When you say she looks good I worry that there’s really something wrong. You know? That you are saying that she looks good as if that’s surprising, because there’s something really horrible going wrong.�

And to that, there is nothing they can say.

They need her blood.

I press them and they pronounce the word “leukemia.� They say “bleeding abnormalities� and “rheumatoid arthritis.� The prickling over my scalp surges and my vision starts to close. I pull for breath and squeeze my daughter’s hand. They leave the room, promising—sweet-pea and cutie-pie and here-take-a-unicorn-sticker—that they’ll be back in just a minute.

Read on, but know that this is where it gets dire.

She’s lying down now. The wide swathes of tape they have put over the numbing medicine at her inner elbows and the backs of her hands are horrible…she says they are “stiff� and “scary.� She says, “They feel sooo yucky.� She says, “Please take them off. Please.� She wants to count to sixty because the shimmery doctor said they would be back just in a minute. We count to sixty. We count to twenty three times. We count in French then in Spanish. I hold my face close to hers and together we count and I want to cry but I don’t.
The nurse moves us to a tiny room with a gurney and a video player, “Because,� he explains cheerfully, “we want her good and distracted!�

They need twenty-one vials of my daughter’s blood.

Aidan sees the surgical steel tray roll in. She sits up from the paper-covered pillow and says, “What’s that?� Then my daughter is wailing, “You promised! After those five shots for kindergarten you promised that I wouldn’t have a single other shot until I was twelve! Please! Please don’t let me have a shot! You promised!� Her beautiful face—because she is beautiful, I have always known it and have been modest at appropriate times, but in that moment I see the incontrovertible beauty in her enormous blue eyes in her high forehead and her perfect cheekbones—her beautiful features crumple and the nurse is saying, “It’s not Mommy’s fault. Mommy didn’t know,� and I can only think that I had been heartless enough—that very morning—to shove dozens of this perfect child’s drawings, many with “To: Mommy, Love: Aidan,� into the recycling.
The nurse has to leave the room, shaking her head and murmuring, “I need another tray. They’ve ordered so many tests… �

Aidan stares wide-eyed at the tray, wailing, “I wish this never happened! I wish this never happened!�

Two nurses come back in, one taking up the needle and Aidan screams. She pushes her head back into the pillows and I press my face into her little heaving chest and she is screaming, then her head comes forward and she is yelling, “Count! Count, Mommy!� then “Hug me, Mommy!� even though I am already hugging her, then “Make it stop! I know you can make it stop! Please make it stop!�

The nurse eases a syringe into a swollen, veinless elbow. She makes a defeated clucking noise as a few drops trickle into the vial. “Collapsed,� she mutters of the vein she was lucky to hit and I want to smack her hard.
The nurse readies to try the vein in the back of the hand and Aidan screams, “Put your head how it was before, Mommy. On me! Put your head on me!�

I count. Aidan screams. The second vein collapses.
Purple has begun to pool in the swelling at the elbow.

The young hip doctor appears. She leans close and whispers, “This is troublesome. The veins collapsing and the pooling indicate a blood function disorder that is now high on my list of immediate concerns.�

Which is when the strange conviction develops in me, through the continuous prickling, that I am not in my body. I am elsewhere. That this is not happening.

Aidan screams that she will not have one more needle put into her until my mom is here. I call my mother again, then again. I envision her seated in her office with a client, the little red light on the machine insistent and I envy her lack of awareness. She picks up on the third call and in her professional voice says, “I do have someone here.� With uncharacteristic bluntness I say, “Aidan is sick. She won’t have any more blood drawn until you get here. You need to come now.�

We wait for my mother and for the new phlebotomist Bill has stormed the halls and found and demanded. I hug Aidan and she relaxes a bit. Minutes warp and twist and pass.

And in those five minutes, the oddest thing happens. I’m trying in vain and then with only marginal success to get Aidan to watch the video she has chosen. But then the prickling spikes as she and I together focus on the screen. I think I might actually vomit, because Beauty and the Beast is mid-scene. Beauty and the Beast is a movie I don’t know. The screen shows an elderly father lying prostrate in the prison cell of some Disney castle. His daughter huddles on the other side of the weirdly low grate. This daughter is begging to take her father’s place. This daughter is bargaining with a beast to spare her parent in exchange for her own life. She is brave and beautiful and she is succeeding. The father is being dragged out of the cell and away and he is screaming—the father is screaming—“Let my daughter live! Let my daughter LIVE!!� and I—who do not believe in signs—I damn someone, I damn and then beseech a presence I have no right to beseech. I damn the absence of a beast with whom I might bargain.

The new nurse arrives. She cinches the rubber tourniquet and Aidan is screaming because squeezing flesh so swollen is excruciating. The nurse’s voice is quavery when she tells Aidan she is so so sorry, and that she won’t lie, that she does not lie, that this is going to hurt but that it will be over soon.

“How soon??!!� Aidan screams, then “Count, Mommy! Count!!�
I count.

The nurse jabs and digs.

Aidan screams “Make it stop!� then “Is it out?! Is it out?!� and it is not out and the nurse is telling the assistant that if she milks my writhing daughter’s swollen arm they might get more.

I count.

I press my face into Aidan’s chest and I see myself returning, in a matter of hours, to a child’s room emptied of its child. Her orange slip-n-slide bathing suit will lay wet on the floor, the spaces for her legs still there and I will never be able to touch it. I will not be able to go on. I will have lost my child, the girl who is so much like me and whom I love more than I had ever even realized. I will cling to Bill even as I go out of my mind. Not my mother, not my boys, nothing will ease this absence. I have the are strange, self-indulgent thought that I will never write again. I will never be able to read again. I will not survive the loss of this daughter. I am the Disney parent being dragged out of the castle but there is no bargaining for my child to be spared.

But hold on, don’t stop reading—it’s not that ending.

Blood spatters in an arc across me, across the ceiling and across papery white sheets.

“I’m superstitious!� calls the nurse. “If you’re ready for a draw, it’ll never come.� She swirls on her stool and grabs something from a cabinet, she asks my mom to swab something with Betadyne as she calls out, “If you don’t have everything set, that’s when you get what you need!�

Less than a minute and it’s over. Twenty-one vials of my child’s blood. The needle is withdrawn and Aidan’s pain abates. I use her pet name for the first time this evening. “The hard part’s over, Nudge.� And I hope it’s not a lie.
She gulps Gatorade. She sits up, glassy-eyed, but hungry for the Fig Newtons and Life Savers on the bedside table. She holds half-a-dozen suckers in her pudgy kid hands.

An older doctor comes in—a white-haired man they’ve sent over from Stanford Children’s. He wants a chest x-ray and perched on the little rolling stool in the radiology room she is the most gorgeous child I have ever seen. Her eyes are huge. Her hair is pushed back from her face by tears and sweat and the washcloths I have wetted and held to her forehead as the endless prickling continues over my scalp. My daughter’s cheeks are the most lovely shade of red. When the friendly technician asks her to she takes a deep breath and I have the surreal thought that I wish I had my camera to snap a shot of how beautiful she looks sitting bravely on her stool.

An eternal twenty minutes back in the small examining room with the video player and the young hip doctor steps in. The CBC has come back normal. She is “really pleased� with how Aidan’s blood looks. “There’s water to go under the bridge,� she says, yet more chemical fear prickling from the base of my skull. “But this is encouraging.�

A new color of Gatorade is swilled. She scarfs a packet of Oreos. We have given her Motrin now that the blood draws are finished and she is no longer whining. She tells me she feels a little bit better. My mother, who has been holding Aidan’s other hand, finds a wheelchair and offers to push my girl out of this blood-spattered room, down hushed and carpeted after-hours halls. Dinner has come and gone. Somehow it’s gotten to be almost ten but no one—except Aidan—is hungry. Her younger brother perches on the footrests of the chair and her older brother walks alongside as Bill and my mother and I roll her up and down half-lit halls. When we are back there are Nutter-Butters and crayons alongside a stack of clinic letterhead.

Fifteen minutes later the young doctor returns. The blood function test is normal.

I am euphoric. My vision gets funny. Still there is the prickling, but I am euphoric. Give me anything. They are debating rheumatoid arthritis…lupus… something equally grave-sounding but that I have never heard of. Give me anything, I think, but let her live.

Another two tests come back normal.

Crazy bliss wants to burst my chest. Aidan lies back and I press cool washcloths to her beatific forehead. She sits up to organizes her stickers from least to most favorite and asks me which one I love the very very most.

Another hour and it’s eleven and all of the results have come back negative. They are going to give her a double injection of antibiotics just to be safe, but they have ruled out all the life-threatening possibilities and we can go home.

She sits with her stickers and her suckers and asks if she can sleep with us in the big bed and I say yes.

She asks for more Oreos and gets them. She wants to know if she’s going to school tomorrow and I laugh—Bill and my mom do too—and I say, probably not, probably not tomorrow.

And there on the screen before us, I realize when my mother and Bill move into the hallway to push the boys around, is another video. In all our waiting we’ve made it through Beauty and the Beast and to the end of Shrek. There on the screen—I marvel—is the ending I wanted.

This ending is jubilance. This is victory and joy. The soundtrack soars as the Princess-Ogre runs along with her Ogre-love and Eddie Murphy’s donkey voice is maybe the finest thing I have ever heard. There in the tiny room I smooth the hair back from Aidan’s face. The credits roll and I lean forward and kiss my daughter’s lips.