“Well.” Dr. Farrigan grinned at Isaac. “You didn’t do this on purpose, did you?”
Isaac looked up, guiltily. “I didn’t. . . did I?”
Dr. Farrigan shook his head. “No, but your wish is about to come true.”
“My wish?” Isaac repeated.
“Hmm.” Dr. Farrigan took a deep breath. “How would you feel if I told you that you officially have my endorsement to drop out of school for awhile? Like the rest of the year, maybe?”
Isaac swallowed. “You’re kidding, right?”
Dr. Farrigan shook his head. “I have some bad news, though.”
Isaac bit his lip. “Some bad news?”
“You’re going to have to go back to the hospital, kid. Just for a few days.” Dr. Farrigan was apologetic.
Isaac groaned. “Back to the hospital?”
Dr. Farrigan nodded. “I think so.”
“Why?” Isaac asked.
“Well, your white blood cell count is really high, for one thing,” Dr. Farrigan said, “which means you have a bad infection. And I cannot pinpoint it, which means lots of tests. Also, kid, since you don’t have a virus, it’s probably bacterial. Antibiotics.”
“I’m taking those,” Isaac protested.
“Exactly why you have to be in the hospital,” Dr. Farrigan said. “We’re going to give you more of something stronger.”
Isaac sighed. “With an IV?”
“I knew that would make you happy,” Dr. Farrigan remarked.
Isaac bit his lip. “For how long?”
“Not too long, actually,” Dr. Farrigan told him. “As much as I’d enjoy seeing you every day, I don’t think you’d enjoy seeing me.”
“You’re not that bad,” Isaac murmured. “How many days, though?”
“Two or three?” Dr. Farrigan said. “More if it’s for something that we have to do surgery on.”
“Like. . . what would that be?” Isaac wanted to know.
“Frankly, kiddo, we could have a surgery field day on you right now,” Dr. Farrigan said. “There’s a lot of things we’re going to have to do surgery on, later.” He paused for a moment. “I’m telling you that, because I want you to be prepared for it, when it happens. Which won’t be for awhile, okay?”
“Okay.” Isaac nodded.
“But if we find something life-threatening, we’ll have to do surgery on it then,” Dr. Farrigan told him. “Which might knock you up to five or six days, maybe over a week.”
Isaac swallowed. “Over a week?”
“You will not. . . and I am promising you this. . . have surgery unless you absolutely need it,” Dr. Farrigan assured him. “For one thing, Ike, I’d be scared to try it.”
“Why?” Isaac asked.
“Because you need to be stronger,” Dr. Farrigan said.
“I’m strong enough,” Isaac protested, not because he was eager for more surgery but because it irritated him that Dr. Farrigan would question his strength.
“Are you, now?” Amused, Dr. Farrigan lifted Isaac off the examining table and deposited him, on his feet, on the floor.
“I am too,” Isaac muttered, reaching for his shirt.
“You don’t have to go in right away,” Dr. Farrigan told him. “Within an hour or two, but not right away.”
“It’s basically just tests?” Isaac asked.
Dr. Farrigan nodded. “Basically just tests.”
“I do not want you,” Zac informed his older brother, “to go back in the hospital.”
Isaac sighed. “I don’t want to go either. I just have to.”
“When you didn’t want to be at school you runned away,” Zac pointed out.
“Yeah, but that was stupid,” Isaac murmured.
“Why can’t you do it now?” Zac wanted to know.
“It would still be stupid,” Isaac told him.
Zac’s eyes filled. “I will never, never see you again.”
“Yes you will,” Isaac promised him. “I’ll be home in a couple of days.”
“If you don’t, I’ll be mad,” Zac threatened.
“I’ll come back soon,” Isaac assured him.
“Is there anything you want to watch?” Nora asked Isaac. It was ten PM. He couldn’t sleep and she didn’t want to leave. Outside, people moved back and forth in the hallway, talking in low voices. Even though he’d spent so much time on his own in the hospital, she didn’t want to abandon him right now.
He shook his head. “I don’t care.” After an afternoon and evening of medical tests, Isaac was exhausted, but restless. He didn’t think he could concentrate on TV that long. “You can pick.”
“Okay.” Nora picked up the remote control and started flipping through the channels. “Stop me if you see something that looks interesting,” she said, but Isaac didn’t.
Nightline was showing rows of cribs filled with crying children and listless babies. Glancing at Isaac, Nora put down the remote control.
“The conditions of Romanian orphanages have, for the first time, been made available. . .” intoned the announcer. “. . .overcrowding. . . malnutrition. . . poverty and abandonment. . .”
“Ike,” she said, “do you want to watch this?”
Isaac’s eyes widened as the camera scanned over a group of babies wrapped in blankets and arranged five to a row on each level of a hospital crash cart. . . the only bed they had. “Somebody gave up all those babies?” he whispered.
Nora nodded, swallowing back the lump in her throat. “A lot of their families were too poor to keep them, or their parents couldn’t take care of them.”
“But they’re babies,” Taylor said to Dan.
“They did something bad?” Zac wanted to know.
“No.” Dan shook his head and settled Zac into his lap. “They didn’t do anything bad.”
Zac looked dubious. “Then why did their mommies not want to keep them? Even my mommy kept us when we was babies.”
You’re still babies, Dan wanted to tell him, but he didn’t. “Their mommies couldn’t keep them. They couldn’t afford to buy food for them, and they couldn’t take care of them very well.”
“And they didn’t have any brothers to watch them?” Zac asked.
Dan shook his head. “No, I don’t think any of them did.”
Taylor’s eyes spilled over, and he buried his face in Dan’s arm. “All those poor little babies,” he sobbed. “They don’t even got their own little beds!”
Dan put his arm around Taylor. “It isn’t easy to watch something like this, is it?”
Taylor shook his head. “They don’t even got any toys, and they miss their mommies. . .”
“Who taked them away?” Zac demanded. “Who comed and taked them away?”
“Nobody came,” Dan bit his lip. He didn’t know how to explain this to two little boys who had been through an experience so similar, in many ways, to those of the children they were seeing on TV. Except these kids really didn’t have anything, or anybody, and that made a world of difference.
“Mama,” a little boy sobbed, clutching the bars of his crib. “Mama. . .”
“He’s probably about the same age as Zac,” Isaac whispered to Nora, and the thought of his little brother alone and scared in a strange place terrified him. “Maybe about four.”
Nora nodded, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. “My God,” she murmured. “Those poor little kids. . .”
“Those poor little kids!” Taylor sobbed. “I would be nice to them!”
“I know you would be,” Dan agreed.
“And I would even buy them food and stuff,” Taylor said. “Where do they live?”
“In Romania,” Dan said.
“Can we drive up and see them?” Taylor asked. “And tell them not to be sad?”
“It’s across the ocean, buddy,” Dan sighed. The little faces on TV were going to haunt him forever, and the expressions in the winsome little eyes were all too familiar. “I wish we could go visit them, but it’s too far.”
“We can call them on the phone,” Taylor suggested.
“I didn’t see they had a phone,” Zac pointed out.
“We can write them a letter,” Taylor proposed.
“Tomorrow,” Dan said. “Now, it’s time for bed.”
“But we can’t sleep!” Taylor protested.
“That’s why we came downstairs,” Zac added. “We miss Ike. We want him to come home.”
“I hope he didn’t see those babies on TV,” Taylor said. “He would feel too sad.”
“What are they going to do with them?” Isaac asked. “The babies?”
Nora tried to smile. “They had an address at the end for people to write to them, people who are interested in adopting babies.”
“Do you want one?” Isaac asked.
Nora laughed. She’d love to help an orphaned child, but she had her hands full already. “Dan and I have you guys.”
“Yeah, but you would probably like a baby,” Isaac said.
“Babies are nice,” Nora agreed.
“And it wouldn’t know that you weren’t it’s real parents,” Isaac added, “so you could pretend that you were.”
Nora smiled. “You know, even if Dan and I adopted a baby who looked exactly like us and would never know that we weren’t it’s biological parents, I’d still tell him he was adopted. It’s the kind of thing a person deserves to know.”
“Yeah, but if he looked like you, maybe you could forget,” Isaac pointed out.
“Why would I want to forget the best thing that ever happened to me?” Nora wanted to know.
“See?” Isaac was emphatic. “You should get a baby from TV, because it will be the best thing that ever happened to you.”
Nora shook her head. “Actually, honey, the best thing that happened to me already happened. Or, it is in the process of happening right now.”
“What is it?” Isaac wanted to know. “You don’t have a baby yet.”
“Not ‘a’ baby,” Nora agreed.
“And when you get rid of us, you won’t have any kids around at all,” Isaac shook his head. “So if you want one of those babies, you should write to them now, or all of them will grow up.”
“Ike,” Nora said, “what makes you think Dan and I would ever get rid of you?”
Isaac shrugged. “Well, wouldn’t you rather have a baby?”
Nora shook her head. “No, I would rather have you guys.”
“A baby would call you Mommy and Daddy,” Isaac told her. “We don’t call you that.”
“Isaac, I don’t care what you guys call me,” Nora told him. “Call me anything you want.”
Isaac was taken aback by this. “Anything I want? I mean, I wouldn’t call you anything mean or anything, but what if I called you, like, Bob or something?”
Nora grinned. “Since that isn’t my name, I might wonder how you’d decided to call me that, but I wouldn’t mind. I would mind if it was a mean name, though.”
“You’ve never had a baby before,” Isaac told her, “so you don’t know how cute they are. And it’s nice when they smile at you. Even though they cry a lot.” He took a deep breath. “I remember when Zac was a baby.”
Nora smiled. “What was he like?”
Isaac’s eyes were faraway. “You had to take care of him a lot, but sometimes you could just hold him? And he’d hold onto your finger, and he would look at you and look at you. And you could make him smile. I only remember a little bit about Tay, just that he screamed all the time. And he looked like instead of a head, he only had a mouth. That was how loud he screamed.”
“It would be hard to take care of a baby,” Nora remarked. “They couldn’t tell you anything, except by crying.”
“Yeah, but you should try a baby, Nora,” Isaac said. “You might like one.”
Nora grinned. “Ike, if I ever ‘tried’ a baby, it would be in addition to, and not instead of, you guys. And right now, three is enough to handle.”
“Well,” Isaac told her, “if you ever decide to give us back, get a baby from that orphanage.”
Chapter Fifty-Three?