How to Fix Ten Months of Almost Together

They ask to sit together. Every time.

On the couch. In the waiting room. On the third-floor terrace with a mile of open cushion right beside them, Ruby and Beatrix King squish in shoulder to shoulder anyway. Ask them who gives the best hugs in the family and Ruby doesn’t hesitate. She points at her sister. Then she leans over and kisses her square on the cheek.

They’re twins. Three years old. In their mother Maya’s words: built-in best friends.

That closeness is the easy part of their story. The hard part is how much of the last year has tried to pull them apart.

The Kings are from Rehoboth, Massachusetts. Kyle and Maya had just moved the family into a house with a yard. The kind of milestone that feels like the ground finally settling under your feet. Their days ran on the happy chaos of twin toddlers. Hikes. Scooters. Playgrounds. Snacks. The daily project of using up even a fraction of two three-year-olds’ energy.

Ruby and Beatrix were funny and busy and inseparable. If one headed for the swings, the other was already halfway there.

Then, Ruby got sick.

The diagnosis was medulloblastoma, the most common malignant brain tumor in children.

Maya remembers the moment less as a memory than as a fog. “You’re so shocked and overwhelmed,” she says. “I asked the nurse to write down the word hydrocephalus, because my brain wasn’t taking in any information. It’s very out of body.”

The surgery lasted eleven hours. Kyle caught the first flight he could get out of Kansas City and reached the hospital with about fifteen minutes to spare before they wheeled his daughter in.

Beatrix went to her grandparents to wait for her people to come back together.

It’s a small story. It says everything. Strong-willed. Funny. Still, unmistakably, herself. Her parents say she never lost that. Not through the hardest treatment days, not through the appointments that emptied the tank, not through the long stretch of not-knowing that followed.

“Even on the hardest days, in the trenches of her treatment,” Kyle says, “I don’t think there was a single day we couldn’t find a laugh in her.”

Here is one of the quiet cruelties of childhood cancer, a part the gold ribbon doesn’t show. It doesn’t just threaten a child’s life. It scatters a family.

For nearly ten months, the Kings lived in pieces. Kyle on a plane while Maya signed consent forms. Beatrix at her grandparents’ so her parents could pour everything into Ruby. Treatment stretched across cities and hospitals — a few months of care closer to home, a few more in Boston, a plan built specifically to spare Ruby from radiation. For one brief stretch, it seemed to be working.

Then a follow-up MRI found a second mass. It had grown that fast.

Another brain surgery. A feeding tube. A port. And the one thing the original plan had fought so hard to avoid: radiation, to the full brain and all the way down the spine. If that wasn’t enough, the proton therapy Ruby needed wasn’t available where they were.

It was in New York.

Less than a month passed between the recurrence and the family’s arrival in New York City. A social worker mentioned a place they could stay. And that is how, on June 8th, all four Kings finally ended up under one roof. Together. At Ronald McDonald House New York.

What all of that adds up to isn’t lodging. It’s the thing a scattered family had been missing.

“Everything we’d done so far had been almost entirely separated,” Kyle says. “Here, even though it’s tough, we’re only apart a couple of hours a day. The rest of the time, it’s just the Kings in New York.”

Ruby’s appointments usually wrap by mid-morning. Then the day is theirs to conquer. The Museum of Natural History. The Central Park Zoo, more than once. Playgrounds, and a lot of walking. A family, doing family things, in the same place at the same time.

To be clear: gathering four Kings into one room is not necessarily always a peaceful act.

Sit them down for an interview and the girls rule the show. Kyle turns introductions into a game. “Is your name Nacho? Is your name Mommy?” Ruby answers in what he affectionately calls alien tongues. Beatrix, asked a question, fires one back: “Are you twins?” There’s a run on the microphone. There is enormous delight in hearing your own voice say hello into a tiny, magnetic black dot on mommy’s shirt.

Ask Ruby her favorite food and she locks on like a lighthouse. “Strawberries. Strawberries. Strawberries and grapes and strawberries.” Ask what flavor of ice cream the House would be and she works the entire case — vanilla, banana, strawberry — before landing, inevitably, back on strawberry.

Beatrix is living this too, from the passenger seat, in a way no three-year-old should ever have to.

She has learned to read her sister. When Ruby is low, or nauseous, Beatrix brings her a blanket. Rubs her back. When it’s safe to help, she likes flushing the feeding tube, smoothing on a band-aid. She wants in. She wants to be part of Ruby feeling better.

And because they are sisters, and because they are three, they fight over who gets to help first.

“She’s learning about empathy,” Maya says, “in a really unique way.”

Ruby is not Ruby without Beatrix. If Ruby wants the microphone, Beatrix wants the microphone. If Ruby slips into alien tongues, Beatrix meets her there. It goes both ways, every time.

The family’s steadiest support has come from other families walking the same road. One afternoon on the terrace, chalk out and bubbles going, the Kings fell into long conversations with three different families in a single day. At the treatment center, they spotted a boy with a scar much like Ruby’s. Another medulloblastoma family. They connected on sight.

“It’s a support group,” Maya says. “Just naturally occurring, in the wild. You end up chatting with other families.”

There’s a shorthand here the outside world can’t offer. A place where you can skip the explaining and just talk.

It was.

Out on the water: barges of fireworks, the Brooklyn Bridge off to the left, the nation’s 250th painted across the sky. It may have been the biggest display the family had ever seen. And one detail Maya can’t get over. Last year, the fireworks terrified the girls. They cried. This year, they cheered.

Just a year older. Just a little further from the worst of it.

“Everyone’s story is different. But for our family, we’ve been in a whirlwind for going on ten months. And the comfort of knowing this place is here—a place to rest your head where we can get her care and focus on her and our family—is priceless. It’s given us so much time together. Some of our best memories since diagnosis have happened here.”

Childhood Cancer Awareness Month wears a gold ribbon every September. Gold, because what it stands for is rare, and precious, and worth everything.

It stands for the kids. For the Rubys, strong-willed and big-hearted, hollering for someone to turn the lights back on.

But it stands for everyone around them, too.

The Kyles, racing for the first flight out to get to a daughter’s side.
The Mayas, asking a nurse to spell the word and holding down the fort with grace.
And the Beatrixes, three years old, carrying a blanket across a room because their best friend needs one.

Cancer’s cruelty takes many forms. One of the hardest is how quickly it can scatter a family, just when they need one another most. One parent keeps vigil at a hospital bedside. Another boards a plane. A sister stays with relatives, counting the days until her family can finally be together again.

For ten months, that was the disjointed shape of the Kings’ lives.

And then, for six weeks in New York, it all changed.

Ruby and Beatrix King ask to sit together. Every time.

Today, a House makes sure they get to.