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you’ll benefit from the therapy you’re getting, and the less your body will respond to any of those X-factors that go into the medical miracles we’re always hearing about. I’m sorry to sound so sharp. I hope you know that I’ll do anything I possibly can to help you. But you’ve got to help yourself.”
    Scolari looked away.
    “Sure,” he said. “Anything you say.”
    Jessie wondered how she would respond to having life as she knew it end with the ghastly suddenness his had. No more neurosurgery, no more walks, no more volleyball at the Y, maybe no more dressing herself, or even feeding herself. Did she have what it would take to retool? She knew there was no way she, or anyone else, could really answer that question until they were where Dave Scolari was now. She set her hand on his shoulder. The muscle tone was gone, and she knew that atrophy had already begun. But some bulk was still there.
    “You just do your best,” she said, clearing a rasp from her voice. “Whatever hand you’re dealt, fair or not, is going to be your- hand. Just try to do your best, Dave, and chances are some good things will happen. Say, listen. I’ve got an idea. Do you think you could handle having a quadriplegic friend of mine come and visit you? His name’s Luis Velasco, and he’s quite an incredible person. ... Dave?”
    “Whatever.”
    “I’ll take that as a yes. I’ll call Luis tonight. Hang in there, pal.”
    Jessie followed Emily out of the room.
    “Let’s intensify his therapy,” she said. “Make sure they’re doing enough electrostimulation.”
    “You really think he’s getting stuff back?”
    “I’m sure of it. Not a breakthrough, but definitely something. Dave’s just too depressed right now to accept the change and work with it. That’s understandable, too. When your idea of activity is knocking someone’s block off on a football field, a little flicker of a couple of fingers just doesn’t cut it. We can’t let up on him, though. Any guy who thinks I look too young to be a neurosurgeon is definitely worth saving.”
    Emily took Scolari’s chart off a rolling rack and wrote orders for the intensified therapy. Then she and Jessie headed for room 710, a double that, for the past few days, had been occupied by only one patient—thirteen-year-old Tamika Bing. Before they reached the room, Jessie stopped and flipped through the girl’s chart.
    Seven days had passed since Jessie performed the excision of a glioblastoma infiltrating deep on the left side of Tamika’s brain. The operation had gone as well as she could have hoped, given the nature of the problem. Tamika’s motor function, a major concern, had been completely preserved. But the teen’s ability to connect with words appeared to have been lost. With that realization had come a devastating depression and an inertia even more disabling than Dave Scolari’s. Only the threat of tubes down her nose had gotten her to eat anything. And getting her to leave her room and take a walk was out of the question.
    Friends, family, nurses, social workers, psychiatrists, Jessie—no one had made a dent.
    “What am I going to see in there?” Jessie asked now. “Guess,” Emily replied.
    “Any ideas?”
    “The shrink wants to start her on an antidepressant.”
    “Ugh. As if having her brain messed with surgically isn’t enough. Well, I guess we don’t have another option. Has she used the laptop her mother brought in?”
    “Nope. Her mom says she was on it all the time at home, and even took it to school. Apparently it was her prized possession. She won’t touch it.”
    “Poor baby.”
    Tamika’s half of the room was as cheerful as the nurses and her mother could possibly make it, filled with cards, letters, pictures, stuffed animals, candy, magazines, and a portable CD player with headphones. In the middle of the comfortable clutter, propped in bed at almost ninety degrees, the girl sat, her wide, dark eyes staring straight ahead at nothing in