DARKEST FEAR Read Online Free PDF

he in the hospital?”
    “No. He lives at home and goes to school and he looks fine, just a little pale. But he can’t play competitivesports or anything like that. He seems to be doing well, but … it’s just a matter of time. He’s so anemic and his marrow cells are so weak that something will get him. Either he’ll contract a life-threatening infection or if he manages to get past that, malignancies will eventually develop. We treat him with hormones. That helps, but it’s a temporary treatment, not a cure.”
    “And a bone marrow transplant would be a cure?”
    “Yes.” Her face brightened with an almost religious fervor. “If the transplant takes, he can be completely cured. I’ve seen it happen with other kids.”
    Myron nodded, sat back, crossed his legs, uncrossed them. “Can I meet him?”
    She looked down. The sound of the blender, probably making a frappuccino, exploded while the espresso maker shrieked its familiar mating call to the various lattes. Emily waited for the noise to die down. “I can’t stop you. But I’m hoping you’ll do the right thing here.”
    “That being?”
    “It’s hard enough being thirteen years old and almost terminally ill. Do you really want to take away his father too?”
    Myron said nothing.
    “I know you’re in shock right now. And I know you have a million more questions. But you have to forget that for now. You have to work through your confusion, your anger, everything. The life of a thirteen-year-old boy—our son—is at stake. Concentrate on that, Myron. Find the donor, okay?”
    He looked back toward the soccer moms, still cooing about their children. Listening to them, he felt an overwhelming pang.
    “Where can I find Jeremy’s doctor?” he asked.

4
    W hen the elevator doors opened into the reception area of MB SportsReps, Big Cyndi reached out to Myron with two arms the approximate circumference of the marble columns at the Acropolis. Myron almost leaped out of the way—involuntary survival reflex and all—but he stayed still and closed his eyes. Big Cyndi embraced him, which was like being wrapped in wet attic insulation, and lifted him into the air. “Oh, Mr. Bolitar!” she cried.
    He grimaced and rode it out. Eventually she put him back down as though he were a porcelain doll she was returning to a shelf. Big Cyndi is six-six and on the planetoid side of three hundred pounds, the former intercontinental tag-team wrestling champion with Esperanza, aka Big Chief Mama to Esperanza’s Little Pocahontas. Her head was cube shaped and topped with hair spiked to look like the Statue of Liberty on a bad acid trip. She wore more makeup than the cast of
Cats
, her clothing form-fitted like sausage casing, her scowl the stuff of sumos.
    “Uh, everything okay?” Myron ventured.
    “Oh, Mr. Bolitar!”
    Big Cyndi looked like she was about to hug him again, but something stopped her, perhaps the stark terror in Myron’s eyes. She picked up luggage that in her manhole-paw resembled a Close’N Play phonograph from the early seventies. She was that kind of big, the kind of big where the world around her always looked like a bad B-monster movie set and she was walking through a miniature Tokyo, knocking over power lines and swatting at buzzing fighter planes.
    Esperanza appeared in her office doorway. She folded her arms and rested against the frame. Even after her recent ordeal, Esperanza still looked immensely beautiful, the shiny black ringlets still falling over her forehead just so, the dark olive skin still radiant—the whole image a sort of gypsy, peasant-blouse fantasy. But he could see some new lines around the eyes and a slight slouch in the perfect posture. He’d wanted her to take time off after her release, but he knew she wouldn’t. Esperanza loved MB SportsReps. She wanted to save it.
    “What’s going on?” Myron asked.
    “It’s all in the letter, Mr. Bolitar,” Big Cyndi said.
    “What letter?”
    “Oh, Mr. Bolitar!” she cried