"Daddy," Nita said.
He was sitting in his chair in the living room, with only one lamp on, everything else in shadow, his face rigid and stunned-looking in the dim light. "What?"
"Daddy...what they told us," Nita said softly, "it's scary, yeah... but maybe it's not what you were thinking."
He didn't ask how she knew. "Nita," her father said, reluctant, "you didn't see them when they first brought her in, after the X ray, before I came back. I saw the doctor looking at the X ray. I saw her face..."
Nita swallowed. Her dad put his face in his hands, then raised it again. His cheeks were wet. "They're being careful," he said. "They're right to be: They have to do the tests. But I saw the doctor's face." He shook his head. "It's not... it's not good."
Then he clenched his fists. "I shouldn't be frightening you," he said. "I could be wrong."
"You always say we have to tell each other when we're scared," she said. "You have to take your own advice, Dad."
He was silent for a long time. "It's stupid," he said. "I keep thinking, 'If I hadn't been working so hard, this wouldn't have happened. If she hadn't been working so hard on the accounts, this wouldn't have happened.' It's like it has to be all my fault, somehow. As if that would help." He laughed, a short, bitter sound. "And even when I know it's not... I feel like it is. Stupid."
Nita swallowed. "I keep thinking," she said, "I should have seen it, that she wasn't feeling okay." "So do I."
Nita shook her head. "But I guess that...when someone's been there forever... you stop looking at them, some ways. It's dumb, but it's what we do."
Her father wiped his hands on his pants and looked up at her with an expression that was considering, and full of pain. "You know," he said, "you sound a lot like your mom sometimes."
It was the best thing he could have said to her. It was the worst thing he could have said to her. When the shock wore off, all that Nita could say was "You should try to get some sleep."
Her father gave her a look that said, You must be kidding. But aloud he said, "You're right."
He got up, gave her a hug. "Good night, honey," he said. "Get me up at eight." He went off to the back bedroom and closed the door.
Nita went to bed, too, but there was nothing good about her night at all. She lay awake for hours, rerunning in her mind all kinds of things that had happened the previous week, especially conversations with her mother—trying to see what had gone wrong, what could have gone differently, how she could have predicted what had happened today, how she could have prevented it somehow. It was torment— and she didn't seem able to stop doing it—but it was better than going on to the next set of thoughts that Nita knew was lying in wait for her. The past, at least, was fixed. The only alternative was the future, in which any horrible thing could happen.
The sound of a hand turning the knob of her bedroom door brought Nita sitting up straight in bed in absolute terror. Of what? she thought a second later, scornful and angry with herself, while also trying to breathe deeply and slow down her pounding heart, which seemed to be shaking her whole body. But she knew what she was afraid of. Of hearing the phone ring downstairs in the middle of the night, of having her father come in and tell her... tell her—
Nita gulped and struggled for control. In the darkness, she heard a couple of steps on the floor. "Neets," said a small voice. Then the bedsprings creaked a little.
Dairine crept into Nita's bed, threw her arms around Nita, buried her face against her chest, and began to sob.
Nita suddenly found herself looking at a moment long ago: a small Dairine, maybe five years old, running down the sidewalk outside the house, oblivious— then tripping and falling. Dairine had pushed herself up on her hands and, after a long pause, started to cry... but then came the laughter of the kids down the street, the ones toward whom she'd been running. Nita had been struck then by the sight of Dairine's face working, puckering, as she tried to decide what to do, then steadying into a downturned mouth and thunderous frown, a scowl of furious determination. Dairine got up, and said just one thing: "No." Knees bleeding, she wiped her face, and walked slowly back to the house, shoulders hunched, her whole body clenched like a small fist with resolve.
I don't think I've seen her cry since, Nita thought. And so Dairine had gone on, for so long, expressing herself almost entirely through that toughness. But now the shell had cracked, and who would have ever known that there was such pain and fear contained inside it?
But Nita knew now, and there was nothing she could do but hang on to her sister and let Dairine sob herself silent. It's not fair, Nita thought, the tears leaking out as she hugged Dairine to her. Who do I get to cry on? Who's going to be strong for me?
If any Power listened, It gave her no answer.
Sunday Morning
BEFORE DAWN NITA FOUND herself awake and sitting up in bed, looking at the faint blue light outside her window. There had been no transition from sleeping to waking: just that unsettling consciousness, and a feeling that the world was wrong, that everything was wrong. She had no idea how long it had taken her to get to sleep last night after Dairine, silent and drained, had finally slipped away.
Drained. That was the word for how Nita felt, too. But some energy was beginning to coil back into that void as the shock wore off. Nita looked at her manual, and saw the words in front of her eyes without even having to touch it: / will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; I will not change any creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened—
She swallowed. I am a wizard. And if my mom's life isn't "threatened" right now, I don't know when it will be. There has to be another way to fight this than just what they've got in the hospital. And I'm going to find out what it is.
She got up, dressed, grabbed the manual, and took it back to bed with her. Its covers were fizzing. Nita settled herself up against the wall at the head of the bed and flipped the book open to read the message waiting for her, then glanced out the window at the bleak predawn light. I'll get in touch with him later. No point in waking him up early just to get him upset. I've done enough stupid stuff to him lately.
She paged through the manual to the section with information on the medical and healing-related wizardries. That section was much larger this morning than she had ever found it before. Nita began reading what was there with intensity and with a concentration she could hardly remember having expended since she first found this book and understood what it meant. She had a couple of hours to spare before the time her dad had told her to wake him up.
She used them, pausing only once, to go to the bathroom, taking the book with her when she did. To say that the subject was complex was understating badly. There was just too much information. She had the manual stop displaying everything that had to do with injuries and trauma, chronic diseases and afflictions... and though she narrowed and narrowed her focus, the section she was reading didn't get any thinner. Finally there was almost nothing between the covers except pages and pages of material concerning abnormal growths and lesions, and still she found more every time she targeted a specific condition. Nita also saw a lot of a word in the Speech that she didn't much like— a word that translated into English as intractable. There was a lot of discussion of theory here, but not many spells. Nita got nervous when she noticed that, but she didn't stop reading. There had to be a way. There was always a way, if you could just push through to the core of the matter...
The light grew in her room; she hardly noticed. Birds began singing the restrained songs of early autumn, but Nita shut their voices out. She read and read... and suddenly her alarm clock went off, at eight-thirty.