The Legacy: Making Wishes Come True by Lurlene McDaniel Read Free Book Online Page B

protecting Jenny from Jenny’s own fears. If only he could convince Jenny that he didn’t care how she looked. “Do you think she’d read a letter from me if I wrote to her?”
    “I think a letter would be ideal.”
    A letter was a poor substitute in Richard’s mind, but perhaps he could use it to somehow persuade Jenny to allow him to be with her. As if she’d read his mind, Marian added, “Only don’t make it a piece of propaganda—a tool for plying her with guilt in order for you to get your way.”
    “I’m not giving up.”
    “I don’t expect you to. All I ask is that you be sensitive and try to see her perspective.”
    Richard clenched his jaw until it hurt to keep from saying anything he might regret.
It’s not her fault
, he told himself. Trouble was, it was no one’s fault, and so there was nothing he could do, no one he could blame. Richard whipped around, stomped across the thick pile carpet, and slammed out of the luxurious study.

Nine

    F OR J ENNY, THE days passed in a long unbroken chain of treatments and illness. The radiation treatments didn’t hurt, but often made her nauseated, lethargic, and irritable. Her skin felt tight and sore. She was warned to stay out of sunlight without first applying sunscreen. Jenny found this advice laughable. She figured she’d never get out of the hospital, much less go to the beach again.
    The combinations of potent drugs made her ravenous on some days, made it impossible for her to keep anything down on others. Sores formed in her mouth, and her beautiful long, black hair fell out in clumps. The cortisone medications gave her a “moonface,” a peculiar plumpness that had her resembling a pumpkin. She felt so hideously ugly that she asked for all mirrors to be removed from her room.
    Yet, for all the torture, Dr. Gallagher still couldn’t achieve the goal of remission. Jenny began to thinkthere was no such thing, that remission was simply a rumor, a carrot held out on a stick. “This form of leukemia is stubborn,” Dr. Gallagher said. “Just hang on and keep the faith. We’ll lick it.”
    Hang on
. Jenny made his words her life’s motto. But as the days passed, hanging on and keeping her faith that she’d overcome her disease became more difficult. The days she spent in isolation were bad enough, but the nights were impossible. She felt like a vampire, not only because of the frequent transfusions she received at night, but because she presumed herself to be a creature of the night, doomed to wakefulness, loneliness, cut off from all she knew and loved.
    “Perhaps I could locate some of your classmates for you to talk to,” her grandmother suggested.
    Jenny recoiled in horror. Most of the girls in her prep school were boarders, and when each term ended, they went back home, or off to Europe, or away to family retreats. “There’s no one I want to see,” Jenny told her. “No one I want to see me like this.”
    Jenny’s one joy was the letters she received from Richard. He wrote of his days on his job or of sailing out to Martha’s Vineyard for the weekends.
    I haven’t gone once to our cave. I can’t. Somehow, it’s not right to go there without you. Remember the time you were eleven and stashed a supply of candy bars in a little hiding place in one of the rocks? And then when we were settled in telling ghost stories and you went to get them out, you found only empty wrappers because the crabs had gotten to them? You cried. I’m sorry I laughed at you. Okay—not real sorry—you looked sort of cute bawling over a
bunch of shredded candy wrappers. I know I told you that the ghost of some shipwrecked sailor had probably gobbled them down. Of course, you pretended to believe me. So now I want you to believe something else I’m going to tell you
. You will get better and get out of the hospital!
And when you do, we’ll go to the cave. We’ll go sailing. We’ll do all the things we used to do. Please believe me. And please change your mind