Chapter 7: Scared and Afraid to Show it

After getting off of the phone with the orphanage down to the southwest of Atlanta in the backwoods county where she had just made arrangements for her latest problem to be transferred to, Sandra headed back to the hospital to speak with the doctor treating the child who had been brought in off of the streets the day before. While she considered the overnight stay in the hospital to have been needless, it had given her a little extra time to find a suitable placement for the State's frequent temporary ward. Now it was time to collect her and make the long drive to the small orphanage.

Upon arriving at the hospital, Sandra was given a message that the doctor who treated the street child the day before wanted to speak with her as soon as she got to the hospital. Sandra figured that the kid hadn't been faking after all, she really did have the flu despite the fact that the kid's behavior seemed exaggerated to her. Mrs. O'Connell was taken to a conference room and waited for Dr. Wilkens impatiently since she had a long drive ahead of her unless he could give her a very good reason to not take her down to the orphanage just yet. It wasn't like the flu was a debilitating disease. What she wasn't prepared for was what doctor came in to tell her.

"More tests?" Sandra inhaled as she asked the doctor to explain. "Why?"

"I told you yesterday that I was concerned over Kira's swollen spleen, not to mention the excessive bruising and enlarged lymph nodes. Add that to the low oxygen count and then the results of the blood work that's come back so far… Let's just say I'm worried."

"But you think that you know what is wrong with her, though, don't you. You said that it didn't sound like the flu yesterday and now today… What's your diagnosis if it isn't the everyday, run in the mill flu?"

Dr. Wilkens usually waited until he had all of the test results back before speaking his mind but in this case he figured he could make an exception. Normally he didn't want to panic the parents of the children before he absolutely had to. His current patient, however, had no parents to worry.

"If I'm right, I'm afraid that Ms. Duchess has a rare form of cancer. I'm going to need your permission to run the extra tests though to be sure."

Kira listened as the doctor tried to explain why she wasn't being released from the hospital as she had expected. By the way the doctor was telling it, he planned to drill holes in her hipbone to run more tests on her. That meant surgery and more time in the hospital. Of course she couldn't refuse the tests since her social worker had already approved them.

Hearing the doctor's vague explanation of her lack of being discharged, Kira began to grow very scared. Just what did the doctor think was wrong with her to make him run tests for which a blood sample couldn't be used? Of course a nurse had come in to take more of that from her as well. After the blood was drawn, Kira was then left in the hospital room utterly alone to wonder just how the flu that she thought she was coming down with had turned into some mysterious disease that required more tests on her blood.

No one returned to the room until a worker brought her a lunch of the typical hospital food that didn't look all that appetizing to her. There was a gelatinous blob that was supposed to be meat apparently with overcooked vegetables as well as a small bowl of pudding. Knowing that she wouldn't be given anything else to eat until the next day after a surgical procedure that would run some sort of tests on her hipbone, (along with other tests that she needed to be asleep during) Kira did her best to choke back at least part of her dinner. Despite the fact that the texture rivaled some of the meals that she'd dug out of the dumpsters back during the hottest parts of the summer.

Once she'd had her fill of the unappetizing meal, Kira noticed a lot of activity out in the hall and soon realized that it must be time for the shift change for the nurses. That meant that she had a few moments to herself without having to worry about anyone coming in to check on her. Getting up from the hospital bed (glad that she hadn't been given an IV yet), Kira grabbed the extra chair that was in her room and took it into the shower room with her. Setting the chair up against the door knob to ensure that no one would be able to open the door, Kira removed the hospital gown that she'd been given and jumped into the shower for a moment. She used the miniscule bar that had been put inside to wash her crudely cut hair and then set about determining which marks on her skin were from the numerous bruises that she had and which ones were from the streaks of dirt that had become almost like a second skin for her a long time ago.

Before the dirt was all washed away, her skin had begun to prune up and her small allotment of soap had long ago disappeared into nothingness. Kira was just about to give up for the day when she heard a knock on the bathroom door just as the knob was jiggled. Kira jumped at the sound and quickly turned off the water while her heart pounded away. She knew that it was just a nurse coming to check on her finally but that knowledge didn't keep her from nearly jumping out of her skin.

"Are you alright in there? You've been in there quite a while," the nurse on the other side of the door hollered.

"Fine," Kira finally said as she reached for the towel that was resting on the sink. "I'll be right out."

"Take your time. I just wanted to make sure you were okay."

Kira swallowed hard and dried off before putting the hospital gown back on. After glancing in the mirror and seeing her scared reflection, she did her best to put the look of someone who couldn't care less what others thought of her or what they wanted to do back on her face. If she had learned anything while living on the street, it was that she had to look tougher than she felt at any given time. She couldn't show just how scared she was at the fact that she wasn't being shipped off to yet another orphanage. She couldn't show that the sight of the needles that the nurses brought in with them made her want to run and hide under a sewer cover. She couldn't show that the presence of so many strangers coming in to care for her made her want to cringe each time one of them reached forward to touch her.

No, she had to be as hard as iron to anyone who approached her. She couldn't show that she felt as fragile as a broken egg shell.

Kira laid awake, pretending to be asleep when the nurse came in to check on her after her surgery. Her side hurt a lot where they had gone in and drilled a hole in her bone; so bad, in fact, she had reluctantly told a nurse so she could give her something for the pain earlier. Now, she still hurt but not nearly as badly as she had before. Not enough to ask one of the women to bring her another shot, at least, but she didn't see herself being able to drift off to sleep anytime soon.

After the nurse left, Kira was faced with another night alone in her hospital room with absolutely nothing to do. Normally, when she couldn't sleep, she'd pull out a book that she'd taken from the library to read until she was able to drift off. Not tonight. Tonight she had no books to flip through and the only magazines that she'd seen when she was taken into the common room that had been set up for the adolescence in the hospital had been teen magazines that gave advice to girls her age on how to attract boys or how to apply their make-up right. Basically, not the kind of magazines that interested her.

On the street, the last thing that she'd wanted to do was to attract the attention of anyone to her body. Instead, she did her best to hide the fact that she was a girl at all through the use of extra layers of clothing and even in the manner that she walked down the street. Kira had no desire to draw any of the usual trouble that a girl living on the street could face. As bad as it was for boys her age to be homeless, it was much worse for girls. Girls were more likely to be assaulted on the street than boys.

On the streets, every day was a fight to survive but the nights were even worse. That had been one reason that she'd decided to leave the other street teens behind. It was hard to figure out who were your friends that you could depend on and who would betray you for an extra bite to eat or a warm blanket on a cold night. It was much easier to just assume that she couldn't trust anyone. That way she wouldn't run the risk of trusting the wrong person only to end up regretting it.

Lying in bed, she heard when another person walked into her room but the individual didn't come to the bed like the nurses had in the past when they had come in to check on her. Curious and worried about her late night visitor, Kira cracked her eyes open only to discover that the person was the cleaning lady doing her best to mop the room without disturbing her. She looked to be in her mid-twenties, much younger than most of the women that Kira'd seen working at the hospital.

When the woman got closer to the bed, she noticed that Kira was awake and apologized for waking her up.

"I wasn't asleep. I slept all day it feels like. I'm just bored since I have nothing to do," Kira confessed as she sat up in the bed, wincing as she rolled onto her back.

"I could see about getting you a book to read from the library downstairs," offered the lady as she continued to mop around the bed.

Kira shook her head. "I've read all of the ones they have here already. That or they are for little kids anyway."

"What kinds of books do you usually like to read?"

Kira had just finished reading Celt, Druid and Culdee by Isabella Elder and had considered reading something a bit different next, perhaps a book about the Sumerians. She loved history and did her best to learn as much of it as she could. Still, she knew from experience that if she shared her love of that history she would get odd looks from others. The thing was, now that she no longer had access to the library of Atlanta, how will she be able to continue to read about the long since gone civilizations?

"History, mainly," Kira said with a shrug. "There's enough of it that it never gets boring."

"Never gets boring?" The woman whispered while swooping the mop under the bed. "I think when I was your age, the only thing I did in history class was fall asleep. In fact, I still have a hard time staying awake when the professor is going over all of those dates."

"Then ignore the dates." Kira was matter-of-fact like as she pulled her blanket up higher since the hospital room always felt too cool to her.

"I wish I could, but teachers have an annoying habit of putting things like that on tests." The housekeeper finished her tasks before heading toward the door. "Anyway, you should try to get back to sleep. I'll see you tomorrow night."

Kira watched as she left and wondered what she was going to do now that she was once more left alone. Talking with the housekeeper had passed some time but she wasn't about to try that with the nurses. Every time one of them came into her room, it usually had something to do a shot, needle, medication, checking her vitals or taking her for some medical procedure or another that was bound to leave her in pain and exhausted. No thanks; she'll pass on calling them into her room more than absolutely necessary.

Looking out from her room, Kira watched as the doctors and nurses who had ended up having to work on Christmas tried to brighten the day of their patients. She really didn't see what was so special about it. At least this year she wouldn't go hungry. Some of her previous foster parents had drunk away the holiday. They had been the better ones. Now here she was nearly sixteen and was too old to believe in magic or miracles.

It had been almost three weeks ago now since she'd first been brought in off of the streets after being found sleeping in the library. After which, she was brought in for treatment for a rare cancer that she highly doubted that they even knew what they were talking about when they spoke about the various treatments that they intended to use on her. Each day she seemed to feel sicker, not better.

Her hair had started to come out, too. One nurse had told her it was from the medicine. She had been angry that someone would give her something that would make her hair fall out. Of course, many of the kids in this section of the hospital had lost their hair. Looking out her door that a nurse had left open to encourage her to participate in the special activities of the morning, Kira watched as families came to visit the other children.

The staff had started to pity her since she had no family to visit her. Her case worker had dozens of other children to check in with and had only been able to come twice since her arrival. She had wanted to tell them exactly where they could stick their pity and would have is she just had enough strength to do it. So instead, she sat in bed, staring out the door. Wondering what was so Merry about Christmas.

"Shawn, you know that I already have plans for the morning. The same ones I have every year," Ben Kyle, a man well into his sixties who was a self-made man, looked back at his son as he spoke.

Ben has been a successful lawyer in the state, catering to the most affluent clientele while devoting his free time to doing charity work and pro bono work to give back to the community, for most of his adult life. After all, he could still remember what it was like as a child; living from hand to mouth, watching his parents and older siblings literally kill themselves working the long and hard hours in the textile mills so that he and the others in the family had enough to eat. They had worked sixteen hour days and at times, had been too exhausted at the end of the day to see to their own needs.

Ben had been one of the lucky ones. He'd been able to rise above his meager beginnings and he felt duty bound to help others do the same. His greatest disappointment had been that neither of his children had inherited that same sense of duty to help their fellow man. Instead, despite the fact that they were both in their thirties, his son and daughter were overgrown spoiled brats.

"You know that you don't have to go, Dad. Someone else can go in that ridiculous costume and make a fool of themselves. Elizabeth and Dave have been planning this for weeks." Shawn barely hid the disgust that he felt at the sight of his father, well respected attorney for decades, sporting the same beard that he would grow every year in the weeks leading up to the holidays. By the morning, the embarrassment will be complete when the old man put on that red suit of his that he insisted on not only keeping but wearing every year.

"And she should have known better than to plan it on Christmas Eve. The two of you have grown up knowing that this was a yearly tradition that I've not missed in over thirty years. This year won't be the first. If there is time afterwards, I'll come by towards the end of the party but I won't make any promises." Ben put his pen down and stared at his son in a challenging manner. He didn't intend to disappoint those who were counting on him simply because his kids wanted to show off for their friends. Or in many cases, those who his children wished were their friends. No, he always kept his word, especially to those out at the Atlanta Hospital.

Shawn clenched his teeth as he prepared to make his case once more on just why his father was needed to make sure that he was at Elizabeth's party and on time. The individuals who were coming could very well help Dave's bid for a Senate seat. As much as Shawn hated it, his father's show of support wasn't only something that would help pave the way, without it, Dave didn't have a prayer with some of those supporters.