"Dying?" Matt stared at Caldwell, disbelief evident on his face. Surely, he had heard wrong; how could she be dying? "From what?"
Caldwell wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "It has a name – a long complicated name with about ten syllables and almost unpronounceable. You probably wouldn't recognize the name anyway. It's extremely rare."
"But you don't look sick." Matt's mind was whirling. Working in the hospital, Matt had seen his share of terminal patients but they always looked like they were seriously ill. The petite girl beside him appeared to be perfectly healthy.
Caldwell smiled wanly. "Thanks. Today is a good day; and fortunately enough, my good days still outnumber my bad days. But I do on occasion look and feel like death warmed over – pardon the euphemism. I was born with a dormant rogue phagocyte that decided to wake up about five months ago. Normally phagocytes attack viruses and bacteria in order to protect the body. Instead this one attacks the healthy part of my body like my red blood cells and my neurons."
"Can't the doctors remove it?" Matt felt incredibly dense. He knew all about phagocytes and neurons and red blood cells from biology but this was completely new to him.
"It's not as easy as that. That one rogue phagocyte has probably cloned itself fifty times since it woke up. By the end every phagocyte in my body will be a carbon copy of the rogue cell. There's not a lot known about this disease because it is so rare. Only about one in every hundred thousand people, mostly women, spontaneously develop the destructive phagocyte without it being genetically passed down."
Matt considered what she was saying. "Your mom died from this didn't she?"
Caldwell nodded. "Yeah, she died when I was a senior in high school. I knew after she was diagnosed that I had only a one in four chance of being unaffected by the disease. My other three options was to be an inactive carrier, meaning that I would have the dormant gene and would only pass it on to my children if my husband was also a carrier. That would be the next best thing to not having the gene at all. Barring that I could be an active carrier, which would mean that the phagocyte would remain dormant in me, but any child I had would develop the disease at some point in his or her life. The fourth option is the one that happened to me; the dormant phagocyte wouldn't stay dormant and I would get sick as well."
Matt nodded and stared up at the starry night. There was so much going through his mind right then, so much he wanted to say but didn't know how. A lump grew in his throat. "How long do you have?"
Caldwell shrugged. "I don't know. When the doctor first diagnosed me five months ago, he tried to give me an estimate. I told him I didn't want to know. I didn't want to mark a calendar and give my body a deadline to live to. I could live with this for a couple of months or a couple of years. Right now, my bad days are few and far between by good days. I figure when it's the other way around I won't have long left."
It was on the tip of his tongue to ask how long her mother survived from the diagnosis until her death. But he stopped just short of blurting out the question. He couldn't handle it right then if her answer was any number close to five months. "Does my dad know?"
She shook her head. "No. It's on my list of things to do but some how it keeps being one of those things I push further and further down on the list. You are only one of a small handful of people here in Glen Oak that does know. My boss knows because I had to explain why there would be days I just couldn't work, and of course my doctors at the hospital know."
"What can I do?" Matt looked her in the eye, searching the deep ocean of green for any hint of how he could erase the pain he saw there.
"Go home." She gave his hand a squeeze. "I really did have a great evening, Matt, but I've thrown a huge curve ball at you tonight. Go home and digest what I've told you. After you do, it's up to you what you do next. You have my number; if you still want to see me again, call me. If this is all too weird for you, then there's no harm no foul."
"You mean that? If I walked away right now and never looked back, you wouldn't think I was the most horrible guy to walk the earth?"
"I'd be disappointed but I would understand." She said with a slight smile. Matt recognized the words as pretty much the exact words he'd used earlier that evening when he asked why she went out with him. But the more he looked at her the more he realized she really meant them even more so than he had when he had said them.
"I'm going to call, I promise you that."
Caldwell looked away. "Don't. Don't promise me anything until you've thought about this a great deal. Right now, you are still reeling from the shock of what I've told you and nice guy that you are you are probably thinking not going out with me again would a scuzzy thing to do. But it's not. IF we go out again, I want it to be despite my illness not because you feel sorry for me."
She rose and handed him his jacket back. Kissing the tip of her finger, she placed it against Matt's lip. "Goodnight, Matt Camden. I really did enjoy tonight."
Matt watched as she retreated inside. As the front door closed behind her, he shook his head. "I am going to call you again Caldwell James. Count on it."
