Free Fireflies by David Morrell Page B

hate to do this. Nonetheless, I need to keep being tough on you. As soon as you’re able, in a day or so, you’ve got to get out of bed. More important, you’ve got to make your bladder work.”
    Through his pain, Matt grinned. “It’s already taken care of.”
    “What?”
    “Here,” David said. He stooped and handed the surgeon the plastic bottle of urine.
    The surgeon looked baffled. “But how did you …?”
    “Well”—David glanced with love toward Matthew—“you might say we went dancing. I think the bed could be a little lower.”
    “Wait a second. You don’t mean …?”
    “You wanted him on his feet as soon as possible.” David directed another loving glance toward Matthew, who kept grinning through his pain. “I promised you. My son’s as tough as any patient you ever had.”

8

    Tough doesn’t describe it. What do you say to a fifteen-year-old boy, who stood only five-feet tall and weighed only a hundred pounds and was totally hairless, whose cancer and chemotherapy had made his skin translucent … what do you say when he recovers from his mind-disorienting sedation after major surgery and realizes the extent of what’s been done to him?
    “Four ribs? A third of my lung?” Matt’s eyes became panicked. His next question, though, so avoided the crucial issue that David’s breath escaped him, pushed out by pity.
    “Then I won’t be able to play the guitar again?” Matt’s voice broke. “I won’t be able to keep up my—”
    “Music?” David said. “The surgeon took some muscle tissue from your back and grafted in onto your chest where your ribs used to be. With some physical therapy, you ought to be able to have the strength to hold your guitar. Later, when you’ve stopped growing”— if , David thought, if you get the chance to be old enough to stop growing —“you’ll have another operation, not as serious, to put a support brace into your chest, to replace the ribs you lost. You won’t have a gap there. No deformity. You’ll stand straight. As far as your lung’s concerned, if you’d lost it completely, you wouldn’t be able to breathe sufficiently to play on stage with a band. But you only lost a third of your lung. You won’t run any hundred-yard dashes. You won’t charge up a dozen flights of stairs. But you’ll be able to walk as easily, with as little effort, as you did before. If you don’t try to be Bruce Springsteen and sprint around the stage, you still have a chance to be a musician.”
    “Still have a chance?” Matthew sensed the implication. He mustered the courage to ask the all-important question. “Still have a …? How’s my case doing?”
    David, Donna, Sarie, and Matt’s physicians had made a bargain with him from the day of his diagnosis. No one would ever lie to him.
    “Dad? My case?”
    “Not so good. The surgeon couldn’t get it all.” David held back tears.
    Matthew knew that his tumor was resistant to chemotherapy, that only once had any combination of chemicals caused a response, and even then only a partial one. To the best of his information, surgery had been his final hope.
    “Then I’m … going to die?” Matt asked the question as if he didn’t understand the meaning of the words, as if they were gibberish or a foreign language. But all at once he did understand, and tears leaked from his eyes. “I’m going to die? ”
    A physician, who saw Matthew seldom and thus hadn’t established rapport with him, responded. “You have to face up to it. There’s a strong risk you might not survive.”
    At the time, David thought the doctor’s response was so cruelly matter-of-fact that David wanted to grab the man, shake him, and curse him for his insensitivity.
    But the physician, it turned out, had been forced to answer that ultimate question so many times in his career that he’d finally concluded that the only adequate response was to be direct and objective. An unemotional statement of the facts.
    And the fact was that