Page 100 of Finding Jack
“Because you were working miracles?” I interjected softly.
He shook his head. “There are no miracles. Only science, and only statistical anomalies that broke my way a few more times than they should have. But I didn’t see it at the time. I was unstoppable, and we were sending kids into remission in cases where no one thought we could. Then we got Clara.”
He reached up to smooth a hank of hair with the mindless distraction of someone who had made the same gesture a thousand times. “Clara was ten when she came in with an osteosarcoma. Bone cancer,” he said, when I shot him a questioning look. “She was a tiny thing and already obsessed with gymnastics. She came to her first appointment in a leotard because the mass was in her hip and she said it would make it easier for us to examine it without having to show everyone her underwear every time.” He smiled. “She was a pistol. And gifted. Her mom told me that Clara had already been placed on her gym’s athlete development track because her natural talent was so raw that they could already see it.”
I knew how this story ended, how it had to have ended for him to go hide on a rural mountainside. But even if I wasn’t sitting in the place he’d escaped to, I would have known the outcome because it was carved into every line of his face.
“It was bad,” he said. “The conventional protocol was clear. Cut it out, then treat the area with radiation to kill anything that was left behind. But it would have meant taking enough of her hip that she would have to keep getting hip replacement surgeries for the rest of her life.”
“And no gymnastics.”
“No gymnastics. So I did an insane amount of research, convinced one of the most brilliant surgeons from the hospital where I did my residency to come and operate in a way that left the greatest amount of bone in place, and then put her in a clinical trial for a new immunotherapy treatment. I was convinced it would work. I could have taken a safer route that would have killed the cancer, but this was going to cure herandlet her keep competing.” He pushed the noodles around his plate some more. “Have you ever known anyone with cancer?”
“No one close to me. One of my high school teachers died of breast cancer a couple of years ago, but no one in my family.”
“You’re lucky. Like wildly lucky, statistically. I’m glad you haven’t seen how ugly this disease is up close. It eats people up. That’s what it does. It eats away everything healthy and good inside of them, and it is so evil that it will do it even when winning means it kills its own host, and it dies. So it was my job to kill it first. That means my patients are miserable and so sick from the medicines I give them that sometimes they beg to die.”
He pushed his plate away and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes for a minute, the way I sometimes did when I got tension headaches. “Clara, she was terrified. She had this huge mop of curly brown hair, and when it started falling out, I found her crying in her room one day. She told me that the only two things that made her pretty were her gymnastics and her hair, and now she was losing both. So I told her hair was stupid anyway, and I would shave mine off until hers grew back. She said, ‘No way. One of us has to stay pretty,’ and she made me promise I wouldn’t cut mine until hers grew back, and that for every inch hers grew, I’d cut an inch off mine.”
“But hers never grew back,” I said, guessing the end of the story. I reached over and slipped my hand into his. There was nothing else to say.
“No. Because I was arrogant. Because I didn’t follow the protocol that could have saved her. Because I believed I could heal her and keep her competing. And now she’ll never do any of it.” He pulled his hand from mine and rose, scooping up a light jacket as he reached for the door. “I’m sorry. I need some air. Stay as long as you like, but I understand if you decide to leave.”
The door shut behind him, leaving me at the table with two half-eaten meals and a salad neither of us had managed to pick at. I cleared the dishes and put all the food away.
I sat on the sofa to wait for him, studying the sparse cabin again. He’d fled here for refuge, but it had become his prison. He was trapped on this mountain by his pain and his guilt.
I had no idea if and how that would ever change. All I knew for sure was that it needed to. But as long minutes stretched into hours with no sign of Jack and my texts unanswered, the less sure I was that it ever could.
Chapter 37
A little over two hours had ticked past on my watch. I was debating whether or not I should text Sean to ask how worried I should be that Jack still wasn’t back when my phone went off.
“Hey,” I said, snatching it up as soon as I saw Jack’s name on the caller ID. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I walked the main road so far that I was closer to Sean’s place than mine, so I called him, and he picked me up.”
It was a gut punch. I’d spent the whole time he was gone trying to figure out how to connect with him, and he’d spent it running away. Again. Like he had from so many of our conversations. “You’re with Sean now?”
“Yeah. Look, I’m going to crash with him tonight. I’ll be back in the morning, but the roads aren’t lighted up there, so go ahead and stay tonight. It’s not a great drive into town if you don’t know the road. Take my bed or the sofa, whatever you want. I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”
“Sure, great.” It was all I could get out before I hung up. I turned the phone off completely and dropped it in my purse before I stood and looked around the living room. I could fit on the sofa, but it would be tight. I wandered to Jack’s small bedroom. It was as stark as the rest of the house, a double bed with a plain navy comforter on it, bare walls, and a dresser with a small pile of change on top.
I retrieved an afghan from the living room and curled up on top of Jack’s comforter. I wanted to make sure he made it home in the morning, and then…
A tear rolled across my nose and dropped to the blanket. More were coming, and I knew it. But it hurt. It hurt that Jack had finally told me about the pain he’d been carrying with him for two years but didn’t trust me to share. He’d taken off literally at the first possible second. From his job. From his life.
And now, from me.
While we’d laughed and shared and teased all day, I’d felt a growing sense of need, a desire to know everything about the man whose kisses made me lose all sense of time and place only to find myself in his eyes again. I needed Jack in my life, and my brain had been trying to figure out how to make it work the whole time we were together.
None of that mattered.
Even if I convinced Jack to leave Featherton and bring his talents to San Francisco, I’d never have all of him. He’d bricked himself behind a wall of pain I couldn’t break down. Not by jokes and distraction, not by coming to meet him on his turf, and not even by sitting and listening and carrying the weight of his pain with him in the quiet of his home.
At first, I wasn’t even sure what I was crying for. Missed opportunities, maybe. But mostly for the tragic waste of it all, for the brilliant doctor I could see that he’d been and should be again. But he wouldn’t be. He was going to stay here, holed up on this mountainside, keeping in all the pain, but also locking away all of his gifts.
I cried it all out, waiting for sleep to overtake me, but it wouldn’t come. Instead, I ran through all of our conversations and every single touch, every kiss. Every look. Every word I’d fought to drag from him, then had hoarded and replayed over and over during the last two months.
