“Daddy! Push me!” Emily yelled.
“As soon as I talk with your mom,” I said. Kari’s eyes met mine when we hugged, and I could see the worry there.
“Look at her,” she said. “Is there anything about her that makes you think she’s sick?”
“No, except those bruises,” I said. “She’s rowdy and she plays hard. That’s not a sickness.”
“I know, and I feel silly rushing her to the doctor,” she said. “Dr. Sortor-Thompson is going to think I’m a worrywart.”
“I hear you,” I said. “But you know what Brenda said.”
“I do,” Kari said. “I’ll call the doctor in the morning.”
That night I couldn’t get to sleep, and Kari was restless. At about one in the morning, Emily came to my side of the bed in tears.
“Daddy!” she whispered. “My knees hurt really bad.”
She showed me a tender spot on her knee. I pulled her into the middle of the bed, snug between us. “Just stay here with us,” I said.
But as her pain got worse, Kari went to get pain medicine. I rubbed Emily’s legs. The combination of the pain medicine and the massage relaxed Emily, who drifted off to sleep. Having her between us soothed us, too. Kari and I fell asleep, the whole family together. I had set my alarm for 4:00 a.m. because I had to go in early for that job in the farm field. But before the alarm sounded, Emily tugged me awake.
“Daddy! Daddy! There’s something wrong with my legs!”
I tried to think how to help. “When my joints hurt, nothing feels better than a warm bath,” I said.
Kari drew the bath. I carried Emily to the bathroom, trying to have as little contact as possible with her sensitive legs. In the light of the bathroom, I saw bruises on her belly and in the fleshy parts of her underarms—places you don’t normally get them. As I lowered her to the water, I noticed reddish-purple dots on her legs. When the back of her legs touched the bathwater, she writhed.
“Owww!” She shrieked. “Get me out! Get me out!”
I wrapped her in a towel and laid her back in our bed to snuggle with Kari just as my alarm sounded. The last thing I wanted to do was leave them.
I couldn’t stop thinking about them as I rose up in the bucket, watching the sun rise over the field. When I am forty-five feet high above a farm field, I get a view that others pay to see, like the glimpse from the top of a roller-coaster. When the sun pours through the trees, it’s like the light in a cathedral, and during those moments I pray. I come from a devout Catholic family, and I go to church when I can, but it is in nature that I sense the presence of God. That morning, I took in a long breath of the sweet, late spring air to try to calm my fears as I cast my eyes beyond the horizon.
My family has lived in Pennsylvania for so long that no one is really sure when the first one of us settled in the western foothills of the Allegheny Mountains, midway between Lake Erie and the Chesapeake Bay. My hometown, Philipsburg, has about 2,700 people, and many of them are related to me. The hills are thick with hardwood trees, maple and birch, and crisscrossed by streams and creeks. As kids, my brothers Jim and Greg and I chased each other through the huckleberry, teaberry, and mountain laurel. We caught frogs and snakes in the pools made by the spring water and floated in the “crick” with our friends in inner tubes, dodging the heat of the summer.
My father was a lineman for the electric company. Eventually all three brothers joined our father on the power lines and, soon after, we started families of our own. One of the many things I loved about my wife, Kari, was that she grew up with three sisters in Woodland, a nearby town even smaller than Philipsburg. When we married, we hoped we would be blessed with a baby. We agreed that the childhood we would offer her would have a strong foundation: safe and secure in a big family, yet in all other ways unbounded. No clock or compass, and with enough free space for any adventure she could dream.
Emily had just turned five. Our families had celebrated her birthday and her graduation from preschool with a big party in our backyard just a few weeks before, and now the summer stretched out ahead of us. She and her half dozen cousins would spend the days swimming, having picnics and Sunday family barbecues in the long afternoons, and fishing at our family camp, until she started kindergarten in the fall. There was no part of our plans that included Emily getting sick.
Up in the bucket looking east, I prayed over and over, like a chant. “Dear Lord, please let Emily be okay. Dear Lord, please.” I had shut my eyes to focus on the prayer when my phone vibrated in my back pocket. I yanked off my gloves and swung the bucket away from the wires to take the call safely. The moment I heard Kari’s voice, I knew those whispers that something was wrong with Emily had been right.
“You have to come right away,” Kari said. “The doctor wants us to go to the emergency room at Clearfield Hospital for blood work. She suspects leukemia.”
“I’ll leave now,” I said. “I’ll get there as soon as I can.”
It seemed like it took forever to get down from the pole, lift the outriggers that stabilized the truck, and drive out of the field. As the truck rumbled slowly down the dirt road toward State Route 53, my heart ached for Emily. If she had leukemia, nothing would ever be the same for us, or for our families. Our world would go out of balance. I needed to
