Part 5
That was the last thing his tail did for two days. The grant reached the hospital before the second transfusion started, and the uncovered balance came to $14,600 over twenty-four months. Jenna wrote the withdrawal on the fifteenth into the calendar for the next two years. The Crossroads deposit stayed where it was.
Hank stayed nine days. His red cell count climbed, dipped, and climbed. Okafor hung up on every reporter who called and, when Jenna asked, would only say, “Holding.”
Cole sold his truck, the ’14 Silverado he’d rebuilt the transmission on himself, to a guy from Tipton who paid cash. It covered the first stretch of the gap Renee had written down. Before he handed over the keys, he took the paw-printed budget out of the glove box. It went on the apartment refrigerator.
Micah’s program started after the one-week delay, two days before Hank came home to a second-floor apartment off Georgetown Road. Hank had two bald patches on his front legs and had to lie down halfway across the living room. When he reached Micah’s seat he folded up next to it without licking or nosing, like a dog who’d been told to be careful and believed it. Micah let his hand drop over the edge of his tray onto Hank’s ear. The dog sighed through his nose.
The immune-suppressing drugs left Hank easy prey for infection, and Okafor wouldn’t clear him for a building full of medically fragile children. Jenna understood the rule and hated it, and in the therapy room she kept glancing at the empty corner by the mat rack.
Nobody on the internet would have sat through the work. Micah practiced keeping his head centered for seconds at a time. Progress was written in protractor readings, stopwatch times, and how far a therapist could slide her hand away before he tipped. A stomach bug took most of July.
When a visiting administrator put unlocking hidden potential on a slide for a donor presentation, Solis tapped the screen with her pen. “Cut it. His medicine treats the SMA. We teach him to use what he’s got. That’s the whole pitch.” The slide was gone by the afternoon meeting.
In late July, a medical director reviewing Pruitt’s formal appeal restored a limited block of core sessions. It wasn’t the whole program, but it was the first time anyone at the insurance company had changed an answer.
In August the goal was a big red switch that made a plastic bear play music. Micah had to reach it with his left hand, and every try was logged. On a Tuesday he hit it three times out of ten. Jenna, sitting on the mat behind him, wanted a fourth before the session ended. When he started to cry she offered the crinkle sheep, then a mirror, then the switch again, closer, until Solis reached over and turned off the bear.
“He’s done,” Solis said.
“He’s fussing, he just needs—”
“Jenna. That’s a no. He’s saying it the only way he’s got.”
Jenna looked at Micah’s face turned into the mat and the stubborn line of his mouth. She played back the last ten minutes and heard it: three times he’d said no, and three times she’d handed him something shiny. She lifted him off the mat and carried him to the window, where the heat came off the parking lot in sheets.
That night she called Cole from the apartment’s little balcony. He was in Kokomo for two days, fixing a friend’s walk-in cooler for cash. “I treat every rep he misses like it’s the one that counted,” she said.
“I check Hank’s bloodwork portal about forty times a day. Like if I stop watching, the number drops.” He was quiet a second. “Maybe that’s what we do when we can’t run the thing.”
“I’m so tired of us.”
“Us? I’m delightful.”
She laughed hard enough that the neighbor’s motion light came on.
The next Tuesday, Micah had slept ten hours. Jenna sat behind the strip of blue tape on the floor. Nikki called it the parent line, because parents who crossed it tended to turn into furniture Micah leaned on. She didn’t say a word. On the first four tries he missed. On the fifth his hand dragged across the foam, his fingers hit the edge of the switch, and the bear sang. He hit it again on the seventh and ninth, and twice more in between that she almost didn’t believe. When the therapist wrote 5/10, Jenna asked to borrow her pen and copied it into her own notebook in ink. The old report had said absent.
Hank’s counts steadied, and Okafor tapered his drugs. The institute’s animal-assisted therapy coordinator tested him from scratch. He barked at a wheelchair, stole a foam puzzle piece, and flunked with his tail going. Cole framed the score sheet. A month later Hank passed, and in Micah’s chart he got one line: familiar social and sensory engagement.
On his first day back, in September, Hank lay at the foot of the therapy table while Nikki worked with a knobby rubber star. The goal had nothing to do with the dog. Micah was supposed to wrap three fingers around the star and hang on while she counted to two.
On the first try his fingers shivered and the star rolled out. On the second he wouldn’t look at it. Before the third, Hank groaned the way he did when a nap was interrupted and rolled onto his side. Micah turned his head toward the sound. Nikki pressed the star into his palm while he was looking away, and his fingers closed on it by themselves: thumb, pointer, middle. They stayed while she said “one,” and “two,” and, because she couldn’t help it, “three.”
Jenna made it to the parking garage before she cried.
It came in lumps. By October he could prop on his forearms and roll with help. He still tired fast. He still needed the cough assist, the splints, and a schedule built around a body that charged him steeply for everything.
One rainy afternoon in November, Nikki set him on a low bench with her hands close around his ribs. Hank lay on his mat by the wall, waiting for a cue from the animal coordinator standing by the door. Jenna and Cole stood behind the blue tape.
“Ready?” Nikki asked.
Micah gave the little puff of air that meant yes.
Nikki slid her hands down to his hips. He listed left, overcorrected, and flopped against her wrist. They rested and tried again. The second time he wobbled like a stack of blocks and didn’t fall. Nikki’s hands came away an inch, then two. Cole was counting under his breath, and he got to five.
Over by the wall, Hank stood up. Every muscle in him wanted to go, and Jenna could see it in his back end. He stayed on the mat and looked at the boy. Nikki’s hands hovered, not touching. Micah lifted one trembling hand off the bench and reached it toward the dog, and his whole body started to lean after it…
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