Please be there, please be there, she thought. And for once, he was. He answered laconically, but as soon as he heard her voice, he said, "What's wrong?"
"Nothing-well, everything. Maybe." Poppy heard herself give a wild sort of laugh. It wasn't exactly a laugh.
"What happened?" James said sharply. "Did you have a fight with Cliff?"
"No. Cliff's at the office. And I'm going into the hospital."
"Why?"
"They think I might have cancer."
It was a tremendous relief to say it, a sort of emo tional release. Poppy laughed again. Silence on the other end of the line. "Hello?"
"I'm here," James said. Then he said, "I'm coming over."
"No, there's no point. I've got to leave in a minute." She waited for him to say that he'd come and see her in the hospital, but he didn't.
"James, would you do something for me? Would you find out whatever you can about cancer in the pancreas? Just in case."
"Is that what they think you have?"
"They don't know for sure. They're giving me some tests. I just hope they don't have to use any needles." Another laugh, but inside she was reeling.
She wished James would say something comforting. "I'll see what I can find on the Net." His voice was unemotional, almost expressionless.
"And then you can tell me later-they'll probably let you call me at the hospital."
"Yeah."
"Okay, I have to go. My mom's waitin " "Take care of yourself."
Poppy hung up, feeling empty. Her mother was standing in the doorway. "Come on, Poppet. Let's go."
James sat very still, looking at the phone without seeing it.
She was scared, and he couldn't help her. He'd never been very good at inspirational small talk. It wasn't, he thought grimly, in his nature.
To give comfort you had to have a comfortable view of the world. And James had seen too much of the world to have any illusions.
He could deal with cold facts, though. Pushing aside a pile of assorted clutter, he turned on his laptop and dialed up the Internet.
Within minutes he was using Gopher to search the National Cancer Institute's CancerNet. The first file he found was listed as "Pancreatic cancer-Patient." He scanned i t. Stuff about what the pancreas did, stages of the disease, treatments.
Nothing too gruesome.
Then he went into "Pancreatic cancer Physician--a fi le meant for doctors. The first line held him paralyzed.
Cancer of the exocrine pancreas is rarely curable.
His eyes skimmed down the lines. Overall survival rate ...
metastasis ... poor response to chemotherapy, radiation therapy and surgery ... pain ...
Pain. Poppy was brave, but facing constant pain would crush anyone. Especially when the outlook for the future was so bleak.
He looked at the top of the article again. Overall survival rate less than three percent. If the cancer had spread, less than one percent.
There must be more information. James went searching again and came up with several articles from newspapers and medical journals. They were even worse tha n the NCI file.
The overwhelming majority of patients will die, and die swiftly, experts say.... Pancreatic cancer is usually inoperable, rapid, and debilitatingly painful.... The average survival if the cancer has spread can be three w eeks to three months....
Three weeks to three months.
James stared at the laptop's screen. His chest and throat felt tight; his vision was blurry. He tried to control it, telling himself that nothing was certain yet. Poppy was being tested, that didn't mean she had cancer.
But the words rang hollow in his mind. He had known for some time that something was wrong with Poppy. Something was-disturbed-inside her. He'd sensed that the rhythms of her body were slightly off; he could tell she was losing sleep. And the pain-he always knew when the pain was there. He just hadn't realized how serious it was.
Poppy knows, too, he thought. Deep down, she knows that something very bad is going on, or she wouldn't have asked me to find this out. But what does she expect me to do, walk in and tell her she's going to die in a few months?
And am I supposed to stand around and watch it?
His lips pulled back from his teeth slightly. Not a nice smile, more of a savage grimace. He'd seen a lot of death in seventeen years. He knew the stages of dying, knew the difference between the moment breathing stopped and the moment the brain turned off; knew the unmistakable ghostlike pallor of a fresh corpse. The way the eyeballs flattened out about five minutes after expiration. Now, that was a detail most people weren't familiar with. Five minutes after you die, your eyes go flat and filmy gray. And then your body starts to shrink. You actually get smaller.
Poppy was so small already.
He'd always been afraid of hurting her. She looked so fragile, and he could hurt somebody much stronger if he wasn't careful.
That was one reason he kept a certain distance between them.
One reason. Not the main one.
The other was something he couldn't put into words, not even to himself. It brought him right up to the edge of the forbidden.
To face rules that had been ingrained in him since birth.
None of the Night People could fall in love with a human. The sentence for breaking the law was death.
It didn't matter. He knew what he had to do now. Where he had to go.
Cold and precise, James logged off the Net. He stood, picked up his sunglasses, slid them into place. Went out into the merciless June sunlight, slamming his apartment door behind him.
Poppy looked around the hospital room unhappily. There was nothing so awful about it, except that it was too cold , but .. . it was a hospital. That was the truth behind the pretty pink-and-blue curtains and the dosed-circuit TV and the dinner menu decora ted wit h cartoon characters. It was a place you didn't come unless you were Pretty Darn Sick.