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Chapter 44

Claire had been dead on when she said Casey would be in heaven when he saw his new Gamecube the next day. The moment the boy saw the Nintendo logo on the box peeking out of its plastic shopping bag, his eyes lit up like Christmas lights. As soon as he’d pulled the large box out of its bag, he tore open the flaps, determined to get the video game system out of its packaging as soon as possible. With an astounding burst of energy, he ripped through layers of plastic and styrofoam, uttering exclamations like “Sweet!” and “Awesome!!” the whole time. Nick simply sat back and watched, a smile tugging on the corners of his mouth as he saw how happy he’d made Casey.

Finally, expelling a triumphant rush of air, Casey set the box-shaped Gamecube on his lap. His hands roamed its smooth surface admiringly, like a man with a shiny new Ferrari, and then he looked up, his eyes still shining. “Thank you, Nick,” he said again, and Nick couldn’t keep from grinning.

“You’re welcome, kiddo. Hey, check the bottom of the bag, would you? I think you missed something…”

His eyes widening, Casey snatched the shopping bag again and thrust his hand in. “Sweet!!” he cried again when he found himself holding two new Nintendo games. One of them was the Star Fox game they’d talked about the day before; the other was the newest version of Mario Kart.

“You can thank Claire for the Mario Kart; she picked that one out,” put in Nick.

“I love Mario Kart,” explained Claire with a grin. “I’ll play you if you want… but I call Luigi.”

Nick smirked; Claire always wanted to be Luigi when they played the Mario games. He was more of a Wario guy himself.

“Luigi sucks!” said Casey. “I like Yoshi.”

“Suit yourself.”

Nick got the Gamecube hooked up to the TV in the room, and they played a few rounds of Mario Kart. When it was time to leave, Casey asked, “Are you guys coming tomorrow?”

Nick and Claire exchanged glances. “Well, I have to work most of the day, Case, but-“ Claire started to say.

Casey interrupted her with a groan. “Yeah, so does my mom. She’s always stuck working. It’s okay though,” he added quickly. “I understand…”

He was clearly used to his mother having to leave him alone while she went to work, and Nick could tell he was trying to be mature about it, but he wasn’t doing a great job at hiding his disappointment. Feeling sorry for the kid, Nick spoke up, “I don’t have to work tomorrow. I could come hang out during the day.”

Casey brightened. “Really? Awesome! We can play Star Fox!”

“Cool. Then maybe Claire can stop by for awhile when she gets off work, and we can whoop her butt at Mario Kart again,” said Nick, glancing over at Claire, whose smile of gratitude quickly turned to a feigned look of insult.

“Hey, I resent that!” she exclaimed, crossing her arms over her chest. “I didn’t play that bad, did I?”

“It wasn’t really you,” Casey said kindly, with the air of a big brother defending his much-younger sister, despite the fact that Claire was more than twice his age. “I told you, Luigi sucks.”

Nick never thought in a million years he would feel this way, but as he left Tampa General with Claire that day, he realized he was actually sort of looking forward to coming back the next day. Sad as it sounded, he got bored and sort of lonely on days when Claire worked and he stayed home. Spending the day playing Nintendo with an eleven-year-old would be better than hanging out alone, even if it meant going back to the hospital.

And so, shortly after noon the following day, he found himself trekking through the familiar halls of the oncology ward. When he got to Casey’s room, he found Casey propped up in bed, his lunch tray pushed to the side.

“Hey, Casey,” said Nick, glancing at the uneaten food on the lunch tray. “Typical hospital lunch, it looks like. No wonder you didn’t eat much of it.”

Casey shrugged. “I wasn’t hungry,” he replied, sounding almost apologetic.

“Nah, I don’t blame ya. I’m never hungry when I’m here either.”

“They started my new chemo today,” said Casey, gingerly touching an IV line that disappeared down the front of his hospital gown. Nick assumed he had a central line implanted there; he himself had had the same thing when he was on chemo the first time.

“Aww man, that stinks,” he empathized. “How is it so far?”

Casey made a face. “I threw up earlier,” he confessed and looked over at an emesis basin that had been perched handily off to one side of his bed, just within his reach. Nick blanched at the sight of it, his stomach turning just at the memory of the horrible nausea the chemo had given him most of the time.

“I puked a lot when I was on chemo too,” Nick told him. “Not much fun, huh?”

Casey didn’t reply at first, just gazed at him for a few seconds. Then he asked, “So you really did have cancer too?”

Nick knew that Claire had told Casey how she’d met him, so this question caught him off guard. What, did he think Claire was just kidding or something? “Yeah,” he answered with mild surprise. “I had a kind of bone cancer.”

Casey tipped his head to the side, still studying him. “You can’t tell,” he said finally. “You look normal.”

That, too, caught Nick by surprise, and he couldn’t help but chuckle. Normal? Yeah right. He knew he’d never look ‘normal’ again, not really. And yet… it made him feel sort of good when he realized that Casey hadn’t noticed about his leg – he really couldn’t tell.

“Well, you look ‘normal’ too,” Nick pointed out. “So does Claire.”

“She didn’t used to. She used to be bald.”

“I know. I used to be bald too.”

“Oh,” said Casey. “Well, you look normal now.”

Nick shrugged. “Maybe at first glance. But trust me, you can tell with me.” He paused to take a deep breath, then continued, “My cancer was in my leg… and to keep it from spreading, they had to amputate my leg.”

Casey’s eyes grew huge, and his mouth fell open slightly as he stared at Nick. “You only have one leg??” he asked, sounding shocked. Nick nodded. “So you have a fake leg?” Nick saw Casey’s gaze drop to his lap and descend downward.

“Yeah,” said Nick. “You wanna see?” Casey nodded, not even bothering to conceal his curiosity. Obediently, Nick lifted his left leg and propped it up on Casey’s bed. Rolling up the bottom of his pants, he exposed the prosthesis for Casey to see.

“Cool…” Casey whispered, inspecting the artificial leg through narrowed eyes. Looking back up, he said, “In fourth grade, a soldier came to my school to talk to us, and he had a fake leg too. He got his real leg blown off in the Iraq war.” He frowned. “That must have hurt a lot…”

Nick nodded as he lowered his leg to the floor again; he’d seen plenty of amputees from the war on TV in the last year, and hearing their stories always made him thankful he’d at least lost his leg under anesthesia. He couldn’t even imagine… “I was asleep when they cut off mine,” he said. “So I couldn’t feel it.”

Casey looked relieved at that.

Hoping to get away from the heavier topics, Nick proposed, “So hey, how about some Star Fox? Feel up to it?”

Casey grinned. “Yeah, let’s play!”

Nick untangled the Gamecube controllers and handed him one. Before long, they were immersed in a space battle. Nick was going easy on the kid, letting him stay slightly ahead, but Casey really wasn’t bad, for an amateur. So when he found himself beating him, despite his best efforts to lose, Nick looked over in confusion. “Hey, you fallin’ asleep over there, kid?” he joked. His stomach jolted at what he saw.

Casey was white as a sheet, with a slight greenish cast, and a fine sheen of perspiration had broken out on his face. Just as Nick started to ask if he was okay – a stupid question, for it was obvious he wasn’t – Casey dropped his controller and made a mad grab for his emesis basin. He pulled it in front of his face just in time; seconds later, he began to vomit.

Cringing at the horrible retching sounds, Nick watched helplessly for a moment, not knowing what to do. All of a sudden, he didn’t want to be there anymore. He wished Claire was there with him; she would know what to do. She had that motherly side to her… he remembered how she’d rubbed the back of his neck and soothed him the last time he’d been that sick from chemo. He wasn’t good at stuff like that.

He waited until Casey had stopped, then asked uncertainly, “Should we call one of the nurses in?”

“No,” said Casey, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’ll be okay.”

Nick nodded and looked at the basin Casey had set aside. “Um… do you want me to rinse that out?” His stomach rolled at the thought, but he knew he had to be an adult about it. Casey nodded wanly, and he dutifully got up and carefully carried the basin into the small bathroom. He dumped its contents into the toilet, flushed, and rinsed it out in the sink. With a newfound respect for all nurses and for the guys, who had done this for him when he was sick at home, he swallowed hard and returned the basin to Casey.

“Thanks,” Casey muttered, his greenish tint replaced by a slight flush. He looked rather humiliated, and Nick’s heart went out to him, remembering how he’d felt the same way.

“You don’t have to be embarrassed, you know,” he said gently. “I’ve been through this too… I know how it is. You can’t help it any more than I could.”

Casey offered him a weak smile of gratitude, which Nick returned, briefly resting his hand on Casey’s bony shoulder.

After another minute, they went back to playing their video game. But Nick could tell Casey’s heart wasn’t into it anymore; he clearly didn’t feel well, and it wasn’t long before he was getting sick in the basin again. Nick eventually called for a nurse, who gave Casey a dose of medicine that was supposed to help with the nausea. It did help, but the chemo and its unpleasant side effects had drained Casey of his energy. By the time Claire got there after work, he’d drifted off into a restless sleep.

***

The first day of October was a Saturday, and Claire was looking forward to a night out with Nick. For the last month, the two of them had spent a great deal of their free time at the hospital with Casey. She felt sorry for him, and she knew Nick did too; after all, the eleven-year-old had no one else to be with him during the day, for his little sister was in school, and his mother worked long hours, struggling to support her family and pay the bills. Casey’s father, they had learned, had left his mother at the beginning of the year; he was now living in New York, and a divorce was pending. Both of them knowing how lonely it could get at the hospital and how miserable it was to go through cancer treatments alone, Nick and Claire taken it upon themselves to keep Casey company when his family could not. Nick usually went up to the hospital for a few hours during the day, and Claire came for another hour or two when she got off work, staying until Casey’s mother could leave work herself, pick up his sister Catherine from daycare, and come back to the hospital for the evening.

Casey was still holding his own, although the weeks of chemo had taken their toll on him. All of his dark hair had fallen out, and pounds had dropped rapidly from his already-thin body, making him look much more like the frail little boy Claire had grown so attached to years ago. She was still very fond of him, the bond they had formed five years ago intact, and it pained her to see him going through all of this again. He was handling it well though, as well as an eleven-year-old could be expected to handle it anyway. He complained occasionally – not that Claire blamed him for it; he had a lot to complain about – but he always had a smile for her and Nick when they visited. Sometimes, when he felt up to it, they played video games; his mother had bought him another game for his Gamecube, a Harry Potter game, that he liked a lot. More often lately, though, he didn’t feel well enough for Nintendo, and then they just watched TV or read. Claire had bought the first Harry Potter book for him, to go along with his new video game, and she had started reading it aloud to him when he was too sick and tired for anything else. She had learned that kids were never too old to enjoy being read to, and Casey liked hearing the adventures of the boy wizard the same age as him. Only she read them though – apparently he’d gotten to Nick to read a chapter once before she got there, “but according to Casey, I always say the spells wrong, and I don’t do the different voices as well as you,” Nick had explained later with a look of annoyance. She’d just laughed, knowing he didn’t really mind; Nick hated reading out loud.

She enjoyed reading to Casey, but even so, she was very glad to be escaping Harry Potter and hospitals for the night. She’d read in the paper that morning that the Empress Cinema, an old movie theater that had been built in the 30s and restored to look as it had then, was kicking off its month-long lineup of classic horror movies, in honor of Halloween, by showing a double feature that night. When she’d seen King Kong listed as the second movie, she’d told Nick, “Come on, we have to go!” They had shared their first kiss during the end credits of King Kong last summer, in that same theater, during what she supposed could classify as their first ‘date,’ although they hadn’t called it that then. Nick had shot her a cute little smirk across the kitchen table and agreed to dinner and a double feature that night. It was certainly nothing extravagant, but she was excited nevertheless; they needed a night out together, just the two of them.

In just ten days (she couldn’t believe how fast the last month had flown by whenever she thought of it), Nick would be leaving, flying to Los Angeles to meet up with the other Backstreet Boys and start work on their next album. He’d wanted her to come with him; she’d had to tell him no. “Nick, I can’t just take off work for weeks to go to California with you; I just can’t,” she’d told him regretfully. She wished she could – she knew how much she was going to miss him while they were apart – but there was no way. Dr. Somers had always been wonderful when she’d needed time away from work before and after her bone marrow transplant; he’d promised her she could – and should – take off as much time as she needed and that her job would be waiting for her when she was ready to come back. But she knew it would be wrong to try to take advantage of his leniency and kindness and ask for time off to hang out in LA with her boyfriend. She’d already used her vacation time to go to first Hawaii and then LA with Nick over the summer.

Needless to say, Nick hadn’t been happy. They’d had a huge argument about it one night, and he’d nearly pitched a fit. “Why do you have to keep working anyway?” he’d demanded angrily. “You live with me now; we’re getting married… you know I can support you just fine without you working.”

“That’s not the point, Nick! I like working; it gives me something to do and makes me feel like I’m serving a purpose. Besides, I like making my own money. I don’t want to just live off your income; then I’d feel like I was using you like a regular gold-digger.”

“Damn it, Claire, you know I would never think that about you. I want to support you; I don’t want you to have to work.”

“Well then, I won’t be working because I have to; I’ll be doing it because I want to. I’m not quitting my job, Nick.”

She’d gone to bed that night wondering if she was being selfish for insisting that she keep working when he clearly didn’t want her to. She knew he didn’t like the fact that she worked most weekdays instead of hanging out with him, but she’d always felt that he could just deal with it; like it or not, she was a regular person, and regular people worked regular jobs. In a way, she was beginning to dislike his job too. He was going to be out of town – maybe even out of the country – a lot over the next few months, while he and the guys worked on their album, and she knew that when the album was done, he’d be gone again, traveling everywhere to promote it. Then there would probably be a tour, and that would mean months on the road, away from home and away from her. She didn’t even want to think about that now. I’ll think about it later, she’d decided, feeling very much like Scarlett O’Hara. She had come to one conclusion though – he had no more right to ask her to leave her job than she had to ask him to quit his. And she would never dream of doing such a thing, for that would truly be selfish.

The horrid stench of burning something distracted her from her thoughts, and at once, Claire realized she’d been holding her flatiron against her hair for way too long. Letting out a little gasp at the sight of wisps of smoke curling from the flatiron, she unclamped it and quickly set it down on the bathroom counter before leaning across the sink to inspect the damage up close in the mirror. Grimacing, she gingerly touched the fried ends of her hair and brought them to her nose; the nasty smell of scorched hair filled her nostrils.

“Damn it,” she groaned, letting the burnt hair fall. The ends were actually blackened; how dumb was she? And people thought Nick was bad about letting his mind wander.

“Yo, Claire!”

Speaking of Nick…

He appeared in the bathroom doorway and held out her cell phone, which was ringing. “Phone,” he said, handing it to her.

She smirked briefly as she took the phone from him; she’d found a ring tone of “Quit Playing Games” and set her phone on that, just to annoy him. He’d told her once he hated that song these days because he and the guys had been singing it at pretty much all of their concerts in the last decade. “And the music video for it is downright embarrassing,” he’d added with a look of disgust. She’d downloaded it from the internet after that to watch it; now she knew why.

She checked the caller ID on the phone and saw that it was Jamie. Remembering her hair, she said, “I’ll call him back in a minute.” He would get a kick out of what she had just managed to do to herself. Setting the phone back down just as her voicemail kicked in, she turned back to Nick and said flatly, “Look,” pointing to her singed hair.

Nick’s eyes widened. “What happened??”

“Apparently if you start daydreaming and forget you’ve got a hunk of hair in a hot flatiron, it can burn,” she replied with a smirk. After looking momentarily horrified, Nick cracked up. She let him laugh, knowing she had it coming. Then she said, “Go get me a pair of scissors, would you?”

His eyes widened again. “You’re gonna cut it??”

“I have to; it smells disgusting. You won’t want to sit by me in the movie theater.”

Laughing, Nick obediently went to find a pair of scissors. When he returned, he stood and watched, amused, as she cut off the burnt part. When she was finished, that lock of hair was noticeably shorter than the rest. She frowned at her reflection. “Remind me to call my hairdresser tomorrow morning,” she said and walked into the bedroom. She rummaged through her half of the huge walk-in closet until she found her large collection of hats, scarves, and bandanas, remnants of her days on chemotherapy. She selected a black bandana patterned with spiderwebs; it would match her black top and be perfect for the occasion, she decided. Returning to the bathroom, she expertly tied the bandana around her head and surveyed her reflection in the mirror. It was odd to see hair hanging beneath the edges of the bandana, she thought, but it did the trick – the too-short part was no longer noticeable.

“Got any black lipstick?” Nick asked as he watched her in the mirror. “I could put some on, and then we’d both look goth.”

“Ha ha,” she smirked into the mirror. “It’s Halloween; lots of black is acceptable.”

“In thirty days.”

“You can add; good for you,” she teased, sticking out her tongue at him. “Watch out, or I’ll dye your hair black in your sleep.”

“Do it, and my fans will probably murder you in yours,” he shot back, running a hand through his freshly-highlighted locks. “They like it blonde; it’s my trademark.”

As she laughed, her phone beeped, reminding her she had a voicemail. Remembering Jamie, she snatched the phone to play the message.

“Hey Clairie, it’s me. I s’pose you’re already out partying at some wild and crazy Backstreet Boy bash-“ Claire smirked at the sarcasm. “-but I just wanted to call and give you a heads up – I’m gonna be in town next week for a job interview; maybe we could hang out. Call me.” The message ended with that, and she pressed the button to save it, making a mental note to call him back tomorrow. So he was finally leaving his job, it sounded like. She wasn’t surprised; he’d been complaining about it for awhile now. But looking for a job here? Now that was unexpected. She thought he liked being in Iowa, closer to his family.

“Was that Jamie?” Nick asked, his voice monotone.

“Yeah. I’ll call him back tomorrow though,” replied Claire. She checked the time on her phone; it was already five o’clock. “Are you about ready to go? We should probably head out soon if we want to get dinner in and make it to the movie by seven.”

Nick nodded. “Yeah, whenever you are, oh Crispette, Princess of Darkness.”

She giggled. “You’re such a dork.”

“Wait, who burnt her hair off with that thing?” he asked, pointing to the flatiron. “And I’m the dork?”

“Takes one to know one,” she fired back.

“Oh-ho, good one.” He rolled his eyes teasingly, and she flashed him an impish grin.

“Come on, then, let’s go. I’m getting hungry.”

“The smell of burnt hair got your appetite going, huh?”

She smacked him playfully as they walked out of the bathroom. “I’m never gonna live this one down, am I?”

He flashed her the classic Carter smirk, his eyes dancing with wickedness. “Nope. Not as long as you’re with me.”

Smiling, she shook her head. “Like I said… never.”

***