LITMIR.BIZ

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Songbird away. Give her and her vivacious personality a referral.

      But as he began to frame the words, he made the mistake of looking at her. Specifically, at her eyes. There was something eloquent and tender within the blue orbs, not just the humor with which she peppered her words, but something more. Something that made him feel that if he turned her and her brother away, he would be guilty of an unspeakable crime.

      Peter was far more surprised than she was to hear himself say, “Why don’t you bring Blue back tomorrow morning and we’ll see about getting back on the right footing.”

      He watched, mesmerized as the smile on her face blossomed until he felt as if it spread to him, as well.

      “What time?”

      He had consultations lined up back to back both at the hospital and in his private office across the street from Blair. The two open three-hour blocks had surgeries packed into them. There wasn’t even time for lunch. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d eaten in snatches, between patients. “How does seven in the morning sound?”

      “Early.”

      He sighed, thinking, looking for an alternative. His last surgery was at five. If all went well, it would end at eight. “There’s nothing open until—”

      She didn’t let him finish. Her bright smile cut through his words before he could get them all out. “Early’s good,” she assured him. “I’m usually up at five. Blue doesn’t sleep in much later than that.”

      “Five?”

      “Five.”

      “Voluntarily?” He tried not to stare at her mouth. The smile made it difficult not to.

      She nodded. “It’s a holdover from living on the farm. You had to be up early to take care of chores before school started.”

      He shook his head and laughed, realizing that for the first time in weeks, he was actually amused by something. “This is beginning to sound like pages from Little House on the Prairie.”

      Raven’s laugh echoed in the wake of his. He found himself liking the sound a little more each time he heard it. He usually wasn’t aware of laughter, because he usually wasn’t aware of any kind of happiness, other than when he told members of a family that the patient would pull through. Ordinarily, he left that sort of thing up to whoever was assisting him. The less personal contact he had with people, the better. It was just too much of an effort otherwise.

      But this bird-woman left him no choice. He didn’t like not having a choice.

      “At times,” she was saying to him, “it felt a little like that, too.”

      He found himself staring at her, at her mouth when she laughed, at her eyes when she looked at him. With effort, he reined himself in and focused on what they both needed him to be: Blue’s surgeon, nothing else.

      And as such, there were procedures he needed to outline for her, things that had to be done before a prognosis.

      “Before I see your brother tomorrow, I’m going to need those scans I mentioned yesterday.” Opening a drawer, Peter frowned. He didn’t find what he expected. Annoyed, and doing a bad job of disguising it, he played hide-and-seek with two more drawers before locating the hospital order forms in a fourth. He pulled one off the top and began writing instructions across the bottom. He signed his name with a flourish, then slowly printed the boy’s name in the space at the top.

      “Take this to Imaging on the first floor,” he told her as he wrote.

      “Don’t I need an appointment?”

      “You’ll have one by the time you get there,” he assured her. “Ten o’clock, all right?”

      She was surprised that Sullivan was actually asking rather than ordering. Blue was in school right now, but she could easily get him out. That gave her more than an hour to get back.

      “Ten’ll be terrific.”

      “All right.” Finished, he put down his pen. “Just present this when you get there.” He held out the form to her.

      Taking it, Raven squeezed his hand. “Thank you, Doctor. You’re not going to regret this.”

      He already was, he thought, as he watched her leave the office.

      The boy looked smaller to him this time.

      Sitting in the chair that he had occupied a little more than a day ago, Blue Songbird seemed to have mysteriously gotten smaller. Or the chair had somehow gotten larger.

      Or maybe it was the gravity of what he had seen on the scan that was affecting the way he viewed the boy, Peter thought, making him seem so vulnerable.

      Calling the Imaging department as soon as the boy’s sister had left his office yesterday, he’d told the woman on the other end of the line to put a rush on the procedure. Because of his standing in the medical community, not to mention Blair Memorial itself, the receptionist knew better than to offer even a single word of protest or to point to the fact that they were already overbooked, overworked and understaffed for the amount of scans and films they had to take and review.

      Instead she’d offered a pleasant, “Yes, Doctor,” and promised to do her best. He’d ended the conversation by telling her he certainly hoped so.

      As he’d hung up, he could almost hear the woman cowering. A tinge of guilt pricked him before he’d blocked it. He was not in the business of making friends, he was in the business of extending lives, of making them more tolerable for people who, through no fault of their own, were faced with intolerable alternatives. Everyone had a purpose in life, and healing was his.

      As he looked over his shoulder at the backlit display on the wall and the CAT scan held in place with metal clips, he remembered why he didn’t, as a general rule, operate on children. Because as impervious as he tried to make his heart to the life-and-death situations he dealt with, the plight of someone so young faced with something so devastating got to him.

      As if reading his mind, the small boy in the large chair smiled brightly at him. It seemed as if he was somehow trying to convey the thought that the situation was not as dire as it appeared. That everything would be all right if he just had a little faith.

      It was entirely unfounded optimism. Peter knew that he lived in a world where everything that could go wrong did go wrong. And, more likely than not, with heavy consequences.

      Peter suppressed a sigh he felt to the very bottom of the soles of his feet. A kid of seven wasn’t supposed to be faced with things like this. He was supposed to be able to run, to laugh and to feel immortal.

      Like Becky.

      Peter banked down the thought before it could go any further. He shifted his eyes toward Raven. She was unusually quiet for a woman who had verbally accosted him not once but twice. What they had to talk about was not meant for a child’s ears. “Are you sure you want him here?”

      Blue answered before his sister had a chance to. He answered with the voice and attitude of a young adult who had always been allowed to think freely, who felt that his thoughts mattered as much, not more, not less, than the next person’s. That person usually being Raven. “It’s my body.”

      Strange, strange family, Peter thought with a resigned shrug. He looked at Raven again.

      “As we’ve already determined, Dr. DuCane was right. There are tumors on your brother’s spinal column. Initially it looked like a cluster, but in actually there seem to be four. Four small tumors.”

      “That doesn’t sound like so many,” Blue offered.

      One was too many if it was the wrong kind or in the wrong place. And, in this case, it might be both. Tests would have to be done on the actual tissues before they could discover if the tumors were malignant or not. In his experience, Peter thought grimly, given their location, they usually turned out to be the former. If nothing was done and the tumors were left where they were, it was

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