Chapter 6 - The Longest Night
The white room at the Sterling Pavilion didn't look like a hospital.
It had panoramic windows overlooking the botanical gardens of the university, oak-paneled walls that concealed the oxygen ports and monitoring equipment, and a soft velvet sofa where my mother sat, quietly knitting a yellow baby blanket.
In the center of the room, suspended from an automated IV pole, hung a clear plastic bag containing a pale amber fluid.
*Doxorubicin and Cyclophosphamide.*
The nurses called it the "Red Devil." It was the chemotherapy regimen designed to hunt down every rapidly dividing cell in my body—the cancer, my hair follicles, the lining of my stomach, my bone marrow.
Dr. Eleanor Vance stood beside my bed, checking the line running into the subcutaneous port that had been surgically implanted beneath my right clavicle yesterday afternoon.
"Ready, Rebecca?" she asked, her voice warm, steady, and infinitely gentle.
I looked at the plastic line.
I was terrified. Every instinct in my body screamed against letting that poison enter my veins. My body was still recovering from birth; my hips still ached, my abdomen was still soft, my milk had only just dried up under the heavy hormone suppression pills.
Then, from the bassinet near the window, Charlotte made a soft, cooing sound.
I looked at her. Her little hand was raised in the air, batting at the sunbeams streaming through the glass.
*I am not going to die.*
"Start the line," I said.
The pump hummed. A sharp, cold sensation traveled down my chest, followed by a metallic, chemical taste at the back of my tongue.
The battle had begun.
The weeks that followed were an descent into a personal hell that no amount of wealth could soften.
Chemotherapy does not care who your father is. It does not care that you sleep on Egyptian cotton or that the most renowned oncologists in the world are monitoring your blood work every six hours.
By the third week, my hair began to come out in thick, wet clumps in the shower.
I sat on the tiled floor of the master bathroom at Greenbrier, clutching handfuls of dark brown hair, weeping so violently that I couldn't catch my breath. My reflection in the mirror showed a hollowed-out stranger—gray-skinned, with purple circles carved beneath sunken eyes, my lips cracked and bleeding from mucositis.
The bathroom door opened.
My father walked in.
He didn't speak. He didn't offer pity. He was wearing his shirtsleeves, his cuffs rolled back. In his right hand, he held a pair of professional barber’s shears and an electric razor.
He sat on the low stool beside me, picked up a towel, and draped it around my shoulders.
"Dad," I choked out, tears burning my cracked cheeks. "I look like a monster. Charlotte won't know me."
"You look like a warrior, Rebecca," my father said, his voice thick with an emotion he rarely allowed the world to see. "You look like my daughter."
With steady, deliberate hands, Thomas Sterling began to cut.
He cut away the nine years of suburban compromise. He cut away the hair Daniel had liked long because it made me look "obedient." He cut away the last remnants of the woman who had allowed herself to be diminished to fit into a small man’s small life.
When the razor buzzed against my scalp, clearing the stubble until my head was completely smooth, my mother walked into the bathroom.
She didn't flinch. She was holding Charlotte.
Mom knelt down, placing my daughter in my lap.
I looked down, terrified that Charlotte would cry, that she would be frightened by the bald, pale ghost holding her.
Charlotte looked up. Her wide, deep-blue eyes—the Sterling eyes, untouched by any trace of Daniel—stared into mine.
She reached up with one tiny, chubby hand. Her soft, warm fingers brushed against my smooth, bare scalp.
Then, she smiled.
A toothless, radiant, joyful smile that lit up the entire room.
A sob tore from my throat, but this time, it wasn't grief. It was an iron wall rising within my soul.
Daniel Mercer had thought I was weak because I was kind. He had thought I was fragile because I had loved him.
He was wrong.
I pressed Charlotte against my chest, feeling her heartbeat synchronize with mine.
May you like
*I will survive this,* I vowed into the silence of that room. *I will survive the poison. I will survive the surgery. I will watch you grow, and I will build an empire for you that no one can ever touch.*
***
