Page 95 of Tear Me Apart

“That’s understandable, and I’ll do my best, okay? You’ll be happy to know Lauren told her last night that you were going to be here today. She’s excited to meet you.”

“And I am excited to meet her, too. It feels very strange saying that, I mean that I’m only now meeting my own flesh and blood.”

He stares out the window as they wind down the mountain and cross under the highway into the city of Vail, then take the turn for the hospital. He is surprised by how much he likes the architecture of the small city, the stone and timber buildings, the well-placed evergreens, the high-end shops and walking-only streets. There are already a few skiers strolling around in goggles and boots with skis on their shoulders. He assumes they’re gearing up for breakfast before the lifts open, eager to get a jump on the day. A few cars move slowly around the base of the slopes, but they pass through the stoplight then wind around to the hospital without too much delay, arriving at ten after five.

She turns off the engine. “First things first. Let’s go talk to Dr. Oliver and get your blood work done, then Mindy should be awake and ready to talk. She’s an early bird, we won’t be waking her.”

He feels that odd twinge, another similarity.Like me.Vivian was the opposite, always wanting to linger in bed, read the paper, drink some coffee. Zack had usually taken a run, showered, eaten breakfast and started a book before she even woke up.

Of course, that’s when he was home.

All in all, he figures that out of two years of dating and marriage, he’d actually been with Vivian for about four months over the course of that time.

He barely knew her.

She barely knew him.

But they created a brief life together, and once she got pregnant, he planned to ask for a transfer back to base so he could be home with his family. Then she died, and the baby was gone, and he felt like he’d failed her on every level. He’d loved her. But that hadn’t been enough.

And now, half of the biggest mystery of his life is about to be solved. Silently, he asks her spirit for strength.

Kat woofs from the backseat as Juliet gets out of the car. Zack doesn’t move. He is suddenly terrified. He’s clung to the notion of Violet being out there somewhere for so long that the immediacy of knowing she is just inside the walls in front of him makes him want to run away screaming and rush inside and never let her go all at the same time.

What if she hates him? What if she looks at him with disdain, or worse, indifference?

What if, what if, what if?

“Grow a pair,” he says to himself and gets out of the truck.

54

The sense that everyone is staring makes Zack uncomfortable, but then he realizes they are looking at the dog, not him, and he relaxes a bit. The doctor, Oliver, is kind and excited, watching his nurse take Zack’s blood sample then writing the label himself.

“They’re going to messenger this to the lab and get the test done immediately. We’ll know in an hour at most if you’re enough of a match. If you are, we start the process. It’s going to take a couple of days to get everything straight, get Mindy prepped, so you guys will have plenty of time to visit. We’ve had her on a non-myeloablative regimen, so we’d be ready the moment a donor appeared. We’re going to move to an intensive myeloablative regime for the next two days, then, with any luck, transfer the stem cells.” He claps a hand on Zack’s shoulder. “Congratulations, sir. I don’t know what else to say.”

“Could you say what you just said in English, maybe?”

“We’re going to nuke all the bad cells to prepare her body to receive the clean ones.”

“Copy that. I guess I have a lot of catching up to do on the lingo.”

“Ask Mindy. She understands everything. She’s been studying exactly what happens. That kid is a seriously smart cookie.”

“How do you get the stem cells?”

“We’ll hook you up to a machine that pulls out your blood, captures the blood cells we need, then returns your blood to you. The second I see these results are positive, we’ll start you on a drug called Filgrastim. It pumps up your blood cells. Normally it’s a five-day process, but to be frank, I don’t know that we have that long, so we’re going to ramp it up and make it go faster.”

He pushes up his glasses. “In other words, you’re going to feel like crap for a couple of days, and Mindy will, too.”

“You have to make her sicker to make her better?”

“Yes. That’s the problem with these treatments. But, with a specifically coded DNA match, this will go a lot smoother for her than it would from someone who’s a match but completely unrelated. At least, that’s my hope. I have a great partner who’s been making serious strides in this field, from Boston University. He was here and laid out the entire protocol last week. It’s all set and ready to go, including a specific treatment designed for Mindy’s DNA so she doesn’t suffer graft-versus-host disease. We have been planning for this, as you can tell. We want to give her the best possible chance to kick the cancer and go into remission from our first round.”

“Graft-versus-host—that’s when an organ transplant is rejected, right? It can happen to blood?”

“Yes, it can. But with this new treatment, it shouldn’t be as high a risk as it might have been with an outside allogeneic donor. You being her father, your DNA is much closer.”

Juliet sits outside the glass door to the lab, in the waiting room, watching intently while holding Kat. He smiles at her, gives a little wave.