“You going to try out?”
A little shrug. “I want to ask the doctor if I can.”
So responsible, her sister. “What musical is it this year?”
“Carousel.”
“Have we watched that one?”
A shake of the head, those curls bouncing, and a beaming smile.
Selina smiled back. “But I assume we’re going to watch it tomorrow night?” Friday night—movie night. Courtesy of a DVD player she and the Leopards had taken off the back of a truck, and the library’s extensive movie section.
Maggie nodded. Broadway musicals: Maggie’s not-so-secret dream and lifelong obsession. Selina had no idea where it had come from. They’d certainly never been able to afford theater tickets, but Maggie’s school had taken plenty of field trips to Gotham City productions. Perhaps she’d picked it up at one of those outings, that undying love. Undimming, even when the cystic fibrosis battered her lungs so brutally that singing, standing on a stage, and dancing were difficult.
Perhaps a lung transplant might change that, but she was at the bottom of a long, long list. Even as Maggie’s health plummeted with each passing month, she didn’t move any higher. And the drugs that the doctors had hailed as breakthroughs that would add decades of life for some people with CF…Maggie hadn’t responded to them.
But Selina wasn’t about to tell her sister any of that. She’d never make her feel like there were limits to what she could do.
That Maggie was even willing to audition made Selina’s chest unbearably tight.
“You should go to bed,” Selina said to her sister, setting down the frozen peas.
“You should, too,” Maggie said tartly.
Selina huffed a low laugh that made her aching body protest in agony. “We’ll go together.” She winced as she stood, and chucked the peas back in the freezer.
She’d just turned around when frail arms wrapped carefully around her waist. As if Maggie knew that bruises now bloomed on her ribs. “I love you, Selina,” she said quietly.
Selina kissed the top of Maggie’s head through the riot of curls and rubbed her sister’s back, even as it made her fingers bark in pain.
Worth it, though—that pain as she held her sister, the fridge a steady hum around them.
Worth it.
* * *
—
“I don’t understand how our copay the last time was so much cheaper.”
It was an effort to keep her voice steady, to keep her hands from curling into fists on the counter of the hospital’s checkout desk.
The aging woman in pink floral scrubs barely glanced up from her computer. “I can only tell you what the computer tells me.” She pointed with a long purple nail to whatever was on the screen. “And this says you owe five hundred today.”
Selina clenched her jaw so hard it ached, glancing over a shoulder to where Maggie waited in one of the plastic chairs against the white wall. Reading a book—but her eyes weren’t darting over the page.
Selina kept her voice down, even though she knew Maggie would just lean forward to eavesdrop. “Last month, it was a hundred.”
That purple nail tapped against the screen. “Dr. Tasker did tests today. Your insurance doesn’t cover them.”
“No one told me that.” Even if they had, Maggie needed those tests. Yet the results they’d received…Selina shoved the thought from her mind, along with what the doctor had said moments ago.
The woman finally looked up from her computer long enough to take in Selina. The swelling had gone down on her face, the bruises concealed with some expert makeup and artful arranging of her curtain of dark hair. The woman’s blue eyes narrowed. “Are you the parent or guardian?”
Selina just said, “We can’t pay that bill.”
“Then it’s something to take up with your insurance company.”
Yes, but Maggie would need more tests like the one she’d had today. The next one in two weeks. The third a month from now. Selina did the math and swallowed the tightness in her throat. “There’s nothing the hospital can do?”
The woman typed away, keys clacking. “It’s an issue for your insurance company.”
“Our insurance company will say it’s an issue for you.”
The clacking on those keys stopped. “Where’s your mother?” The woman glanced around Selina as if she’d find her mother standing a few feet away.
Selina was half tempted to tell the woman to take a stroll through an East End alley, since that was the only place their mother would be, dead or alive. Instead, she plucked up the insurance card that had been left on the counter and said flatly, “She’s at work.”
The woman didn’t seem convinced. But she said, “We’ll send the bill to your house.”
Selina didn’t bother replying as she turned and scooped up her sister’s heavy backpack. Slinging it over a shoulder, she motioned for Maggie to follow her to the elevator bay.
“We don’t have five hundred dollars,” Maggie murmured while Selina punched the elevator button harder than was necessary.
No, between the food and rent and today’s tests, the money from the fight wouldn’t stretch far enough.
“Don’t worry about it,” Selina said, watching the elevator floors light up one by one.
Maggie wrapped her arms around herself. Not good—the news had not been good.
That crushing tunnel vision again crept up on Selina. Those five hundred dollars and those stupid tests and that bland-faced doctor saying, There’s no cure for CF, but let’s try another route or two.
She’d almost asked, Before what?
As Maggie continued to hold herself, her blunted, rounded fingertips—their shape another screw you from the disease—dug into her thin arms hard enough to make Selina wince.
Selina pried one of her sister’s hands free and interlaced their fingers.
Squeezing tightly, neither sister let go the entire trek home.
* * *
—
The neighbors were really at each other’s throats.
Barely five minutes after Selina had turned on the movie, the shouting and screeching had begun filtering in through the wall behind them. Curled up on the sagging, stained couch that also served as Selina’s bed, her sister tucked against one end with her feet in Selina’s lap, Selina half listened to the drunken fight unfurling next door and the musical on the ancient TV in front of them.