Once Upon a Wish Read Online Free Page A

to create a brilliantly colored butterfly with a wingspanstretching from one side of it to the other was now white and nearly lifeless.
    “Everybody, join hands,” Dan said, jolting Sherry from her thoughts. The four of them formed a circle around Tatum and tightly held hands. Dan began to pray, and Tatum’s chest, which had remained so still, suddenly lifted with his words. Her breaths, which had been so quiet, sounded like whispers filling the room. As Dan finished the prayer, Sherry leaned toward her daughter’s face and said, “It’s okay, baby, calm down. Just rest.” The prayer filled them with strength, and they knew they were not in this alone.
    “Okay, you can come with me,” said a short Indian man who introduced himself as Dr. Patel a few minutes later.
    David and Sherry followed him into another small conference room where Dr. Patel sat them down and asked, “Do you have a faith?”
    Before Tatum was born, David would have proudly answered “no.” He had chosen to fall away from the Christian beliefs he was raised with—until seven years ago when Tatum was born. He looked into her eyes that day, and she had turned him back into a believer.
    “Yes, we are Christian,” he told Dr. Patel. With a slightly tilted head and questioning eyes, David stared.
    “Now would be a good time to start praying,” the doctor said gently. “All we know is that it looks like her organs are shutting down.”
    “Shutting down?” Sherry cried. “Everything was fine a few days ago! She’s never been sick in her life!”
    She wanted so desperately for her reasoning to be enough to change what the doctor was saying, but she knew it wasn’t. Her hands shook and tingled and she fell to her knees, gasping for air between sobs. For David, a solid hit to the chest with a baseball bat might have felt better than the pain he experienced when heheard the doctor’s words. He knelt beside his wife and hugged her tightly with both arms. The brief silence gave Sherry’s mind a quick chance to clear, and she managed to ask, “What do we do next? How do we save her?”
    Dr. Patel had perfected the necessary calm in a voice that still had hard news to deliver.
    “We’ve done all that we can do,” he said softly. “We’re sending her to Children’s Medical Center.”
    The critical nature of the moment, the shock, the reality, deepened—Children’s Medical Center of Dallas was a place for very sick, and often dying, children.
    “What can they do for her there that you can’t do here?” Sherry asked. She felt as though Dr. Patel was telling them that they had given up. That there was nothing left for them to do.
    “They have techniques to try that we don’t have here,” Dr. Patel explained.
    The heaviness in David’s chest sunk slowly toward his heart. How could this be happening to their little girl?
    The transport team placed Tatum into the ambulance, and Sherry looked at her husband as he wrapped his arms around her and whispered, “Everything’s going to be just fine.” Tucking a blond curl behind Sherry’s ear, he pulled away, touched her cheek, and smiled down at her. She let out a long breath, stared into the eyes that made her strong, and nodded.
    David drove their car, and Sherry climbed into the front seat of the ambulance. When they arrived at Children’s, the driver threw the ambulance into park, the back doors were ripped open, and by the time Sherry stepped out, she was surrounded by people in white. Doctors and nurses, she guessed, but her mind was spinning. Her heart pounded violently in her chest, and one of the EMTs said, “You sign her in, we’ll take her.”
    Take her? Take her where? Where do I go?
    She needed David. She frantically looked around, and there, in the blur, stood Dan and Kelli. The three of them followed a nurse to the ICU waiting area, where family and friends had already started to gather.
    Sherry took a moment to step away from the crowd and look out the window, where she