Part 2 — The First Monster

My name is Mason Mercer, though almost nobody outside courtrooms and hospitals calls me that. On the road, I am Ox. Lily calls me Dad when she is frightened, Mason when she is testing my patience, and Sir Hornsalot when she wants something from the vending machine.

Before leukemia entered our lives, I owned Mercer Recovery, a towing yard wedged between an auto-glass shop and a dry wash on Tucson’s south side. I worked six days a week, slept badly, and raised Lily alone in a two-bedroom stucco house where the air conditioner sounded like loose bolts inside a coffee can.

Her mother, Rachel, had died when Lily was four.

A delivery truck crossed the center line on State Route 86 during a dust storm. Rachel died before the helicopter arrived. Lily survived because her car seat was on the passenger side.

I reached the crash scene in my tow truck before anyone told dispatch who was inside the wreck.

For years afterward, I could not approach a crushed silver car without tasting dirt in the back of my throat.

I had been sober for fourteen months when Rachel died. By the funeral, every man in the Iron Vultures expected me to drink. Diesel removed the whiskey bottles from the clubhouse without mentioning my name. Mercy Bell, our treasurer, slept on my porch for four nights. Cruz Navarro changed the locks at my towing yard because I kept going there at two in the morning and starting equipment I was too exhausted to operate safely.

Nobody gave speeches.

They stayed.

That was how our brotherhood worked when it worked well. When it failed, we mistook silence for loyalty and anger for strength.

Lily grew up among chain wallets, work gloves, coffee cans full of bolts, and men whose faces frightened substitute teachers. She knew which riders carried peppermints, who snored during movies, and whose beard she could braid without asking.

Diesel was her favorite.

He taught her to use a tire-pressure gauge. Every birthday, he gave her a new socket from an old American-made set, promising she would own the entire collection by eighteen. He never attended her school performances, but he waited outside afterward with hot chocolate.

Then Lily became tired.

At first, I blamed summer. Tucson in June can drain the argument from a child. She stopped riding her bicycle after dinner, began falling asleep on the couch, and complained that her legs hurt.

The bruises came next.

One appeared behind her knee, another along her ribs, and three small purple marks gathered near her elbow. When I asked where they came from, she said perhaps she had been wrestling invisible bears.

The clinic drew blood at 4:40 on a Thursday afternoon.

By seven, a pediatrician was speaking carefully while I stared at the unopened juice box in Lily’s hand. Her white blood cell count was wrong. Her platelets were dangerously low. We needed to go to the hospital immediately.

“Can we go home first?” Lily asked.

“No,” the doctor said.

“Can Dad bring my unicorn book?”

I said yes before remembering Rachel had bought that book.

It still contained her handwriting.

At the hospital, specialists repeated tests. Nurses brought warm blankets. A social worker asked whether we had family nearby, and I named a motorcycle club because it was the only answer I had.

The oncologist entered just after midnight.

Dr. Priya Shah was forty-two, small enough that I could have lifted her with one arm, and completely unimpressed by my size. She sat instead of standing over us. Then she said leukemia.

“You’re supposed to be with me.”

That landed cleanly.

She asked whether I was scared. I said no, and she called me a liar. Then she reached into the cloth bag the child-life volunteer had given her and removed a sheet of unicorn stickers.

“Mom said unicorns are brave,” she told me.

I remembered Rachel reading that book at bedtime. I remembered correcting her once, saying unicorns were not real.

Rachel had looked over Lily’s head and said, “Neither is half the courage people need. They make it anyway.”

Lily selected a purple sticker and pressed it against my scarred knuckle.

“If unicorns fight monsters,” she said, “we need one.”

That morning, she began building the horn.

A cereal box supplied the cardboard. Pink foam came from the activity room. The twisted clear plastic tube inside had once covered a sterile medical dressing. Lily insisted on purple glitter because gold looked too royal and silver looked like plumbing tape.

She made me promise to wear it for every treatment.

I promised too quickly.

Neither of us knew treatment would last years.

The first time I fastened it to my helmet, she smiled. Not broadly. Chemotherapy had already made her nauseated, and smiling pulled at a sore inside her mouth.

But she smiled.

I started the Road King beneath her hospital window. The V-twin shook the glitter loose, scattering purple flecks across my shoulders.

Lily placed one palm against the glass.

I touched two fingers to the horn.

That became our signal.

Her first monster had a medical name.

Mine was the door I had abandoned.