Page 92 of Lady and the Butcher
Grandpa and Grandma were already at the door because families develop a sixth sense for these things. “It’s Stephen,” I said, voice steadier than I felt. “Something’s wrong. We’re going straight to the hospital in Charleston.” I hugged them both. “We’ll call as soon as we know more. I promise.”
Grandma pressed a paper bag into my hand—peach slices, napkins, bottles of water—like I was twelve and leaving for a field trip. Grandpa squeezed Dad’s shoulder and said he’d keep the porch light on. “Thank you,” I told them. “For everything. We’ll update you when we can.”
“You drive?” Dad asked Atticus, and it wasn’t a challenge. It was an offering.
“I will,” he said simply. To me: “We’ll be there in four hours and fifteen minutes if the traffic cooperates.”
I called Mom and told her what I had to. She didn’t cry. She said, “Okay,” which is sometimes the bravest word. “I’ll handle Darla and the twins. I’ll meet you there.”
“Be safe,” I said.
“You, too.”
We didn’t talk much on the way. The road hummed. I counted exits and power lines when the fear got too intense.
When we arrived, the Medical University hospital was a series of rectangles pretending to be calm. I’d been here dozens of times before—walked these hallways, rolled carts,touched mothers’ hands in labor rooms upstairs. I’d attended to deliveries at Palmetto Birth Center just down the street, shepherded families through joy and fear alike. But this wasn’t that. This wasn’t a delivery with warm blankets waiting and new lungs crying the air alive. This was my brother. My Stephen. And nothing about it felt routine.
We rode an elevator that knew too many stories to be impressed by ours. My chest tightened with each floor, the sterile smell of antiseptic nearly overpowering.
When the doors opened on Stephen’s floor, the hallway spread out in front of us, glossy floors reflecting light that was too bright, too merciless. Nurses moved with hands that waved as if they could smooth grief away. Doctors passed in white coats, faces worn into masks that promised nothing the body couldn’t deliver.
I felt Atticus beside me, a presence that filled more space than his body should have. His hand skimmed my back, not guiding but anchoring, and I realized he had shoved everything else aside—his noise, his shadows, his world of danger—and put me, put Stephen, putusfirst. I wanted to crumble into that. I wanted to let it hold me up. It meant a lot.
Instead, I straightened, inhaled, and stepped forward. Because whatever came next, it was ours to walk into together.
We turned the corner and the room hit me all at once—Mom posted at the foot of the bed, Darla curled sideways in a chair like she owned it, the twins, Max and Milo, taking up too much space and trying to take up less. Alicia sat closest, fingers laced with Stephen’s, her face soft and fierce at the same time.
Stephen looked like a pencil sketch someone was still shading in. Too pale. Edges faint. He still managed a thumbs-up when he saw us, the same stubborn gesture he’d used as a kid when the creek ran higher than it should. “Don’t make a big deal,” he said, voice rough.
“Too late,” Darla murmured, and squeezed his toes through the blanket.
Mom gathered our bags like controlling objects could control outcomes. Dad moved to her side, quiet as a hand on a shoulder. Atticus stayed a half-step behind me, anchoring without crowding, the kind of gravity that let me take the last steps to the bed on my own.
I reached for Stephen’s free hand. It was warm. Real. I felt the room breathe.
Atticus settled near the window. He wasn’t part of the family geography we’d laid out over thirty-one years, but he didn’t hover like a question mark either. He existed with the certainty of something structural.
Before long, the oncologist we’d talked to on the phone came with a team and an iPad that glowed with diagrams none of us needed etched into memory. She spoke words that belonged in textbooks:induction. remission. allogeneic transplant. graft-versus-host disease.My brain did what it had been trained to do with women in labor — take the impossible, turn it into the human. Translate the storm into breath. Only this wasn’t a mother and child. It was my brother’s blood, his marrow, his very blueprint that was under siege.
“Testing for a donor begins now,” the doctor said. “The goal is to replace Stephen’s diseased marrow with healthy marrow from someone else. We start with siblings, since matches are more likely in families. If no one matches, we’ll search the national registry.”
The air shifted. The floor went unsteady. It was one thing to nod at words liketreatmentandcounts. It was another to hear it stripped to bone. Someone’s body would have to give its marrow so his could live.
“I’ll test,” I said, already shoving my sleeve up.
Darla did the same, her chin high. “Me too.”
The twins jostled each other, blurting over one another about who was braver, who would roll up the right sleeve first. Their noise felt like hope, even when they offered the wrong arms.
Dad cleared his throat. “I’m O negative. Always said it made me useful. Does that help?”
The doctor shook her head gently. “This isn’t about blood type. It’s about marrow. HLA markers. Compatibility down to the smallest code.”
Dad sat back, hands folding useless in his lap.
I tried to swallow, but my throat burned. I thought about every time I’d told mothers their bodies were made for survival, that nature had built in redundancies and chances. Now, I was praying mine had been built as a match for Stephen. That somewhere in me was the marrow that could keep him alive.
I reached for his hand on the bed, squeezed it hard enough that he opened his eyes. He looked sickly, but his mouth curved stubborn. “Please, Sim, don’t make this a thing,” he whispered.
