This kind might require space to process.
“I don’t know if I want to.”
“I could call, if you want? Or we could send an email. Says to allow one to three business days for a response, but it might not take that long.”
“Both?”
Walt pulled up the contact form. “You know, if he does get the email, he’s going to assume you got one too.”
“Well, then maybe he’ll save me the trouble of figuring out how the hell to bring this up with him.”
Mere hours ago, she’d almost laughed this off. A miserable sinking feeling overcame her. She felt nonsensically angry at Sela. She didn’t want to put herself in the woman’s shoes, the way she briefly had at first when it seemed such an improbability, the way Walt was now that it was not. She just wanted her to go away.
But if so much could change so quickly, it had to be as likely that by this time tomorrow, she and Walt would be sharing a belly laugh over the false alarm. Over the agonizing they’d done for nothing. It had to be a mistake. Dad would never let a possibility like this be.
After all, he’d been the one to teach her: If you have half of anything, you round up.
2
Sela
She knew Doug’s SUV by the headlights, even through the dreamlike fog that had descended from the mountains overnight, even in the yawning blackness of the dawn before sunrise. So often had Sela watched him come and go that the exact curvature and yellow white glow of this particular broken promise had imprinted on her mind, and as it approached now she dipped her head, tightening her grip on Oscar’s leash and hoping that if she pretended not to see, Doug would take his free pass and drive on.
Willing Oscar to follow suit was futile, but she did it anyway. As a puppy, he’d been such a curmudgeon, completely uncharacteristic for his retriever breed, let alone his youth. He’d resisted walks, digging in his paws every step that took them farther from home and then pulling so eagerly when they turned back he’d choke himself the whole way. He’d stared with mute skepticism at balls, squeaky toys, and anything else he was actually supposed to mouth or chase or chew, and gave his plush bed a wide berth no matter which corner of which room Sela moved it to. But he’d grown into one of those dogs who clearly identifies more as human child than canine adult, and as such he showered his “parents” with a love so enthusiastic it made a bighearted joke of his name. If he noticed their new shared custody agreement carried for both parties a regret-laden sadness, he showed no sign.
With her eyes averted, it was hard to tell which came first: the vehicle slowing along the curb or Oscar yelping and flinging his tail in jubilant recognition. Either way, the result was the same: her ex-husband meeting her reluctant smile with his own, cutting his engine, and taking a knee in the dewy grass at Oscar’s side, burying his hands in the golden fur to say hello.
“You’re up early,” Doug observed, sounding forcibly casual. “Sleep okay?”
He likely hadn’t been awake for more than a few minutes but nonetheless looked rested, ready to go. Although he’d always been fit, his tall frame had hardened, broadened since he’d left her; everything about him was suddenly so intentional, down to his mussed hair, as if determined to become opposite of her in nearly every way. She’d never been especially athletic but once had a litheness, elegance even. Now, she was more spindly, unable to hide her fragility. Shadows permanent beneath her eyes. Shine gone from her hair. Everything she tried to mask this—cutting her brunette waves to this pixie cut, dabbing on concealer before running even the smallest errand—seemed only to call attention to the problem.
Doug heading to the gym at this hour was normal—she knew without looking that the front seat held a forest green duffel of everything he needed to shower there and head straight to work—but her standing in the front yard was not. Concern was plain on his face, and she hugged her hooded sweatshirt in a posture of self-preservation. The term ex-husband was still foreign enough that Sela sometimes found herself rolling it around her mind, partially because technically they remained married, for reasons exclusive to health insurance. She’d protested the arrangement, already foreseeing the awkwardness when he got serious with someone new and they had to have all the big, teary talks all over again. But he’d insisted. Least he could do, seeing as she was self-employed and thus had limited benefits.
That, and him having left her with a pair of vital organs slowly failing.
“Slept fine,” she said. With declining kidney function came a nighttime restlessness that was cruelly disproportionate to the fatigue she battled all day: swelling, muscle cramps, a bladder that begged to be emptied in the incessant manner of a kid on a road trip—Are we there yet? But admitting this was why she was up at 5:00 a.m. was akin to admitting defeat. Though Doug’s former address really was on his new commute, she never shook the feeling that he was checking up on her, that passing inspection was paramount to avoiding further scrutiny. “I wanted to get a jump on some mock-ups for a new client.”
This was true enough. Working from home with a toddler underfoot was a game of strategy, but in relinquishing every other weekend and stray weeknights to Doug, she wasn’t about to rely on childcare more than absolutely necessary. So she made the most of nap times and playground benches, and her clients grew accustomed to emails time-stamped at all hours. She tried to think of sleepless nights as “found time.”
Sometimes it even worked.
“New clients are good.” His relief at having something positive to say was palpable.
“You bet.”
Doug straightened and jammed his hands into the pockets of the baggy sweatpants he favored for workouts, and Oscar buried his nose in the grass, resuming his investigation of every animal that had touched his territory overnight. “Did you send it?” His face strained with the effort of bracing for another argument, and she wished the tension were enough to make him look like someone other than himself. Like the Doug she’d lost wasn’t the same version she’d loved. “The email, I mean.”
“I did.” She hadn’t needed his nudge—she’d known she needed to do it—but their last blowup was bad enough to give her the push.
“You did?” A nervous laugh escaped him. “Good! I mean, good for you. When did—Have you heard back?”
“Not yet. I expect it might take her a few days. To process.”
“Sure.” He scuffled his feet. “How much did you give her to process?”
As if Sela didn’t have the sense not to scare off someone she’d been reticent to contact in the first place.
“I only introduced myself. But even that is a lot.”
He ran a hand through his hair. It needed a cut. “Good,” he said again. “I, uh. I went to that seminar they recommended. The Big Ask: The Big Give? Really helpful. You should definitely sign up for one, once you’re looking at broaching the subject with her.”
Sela tried to smile. In the whirlwind years since her chronic kidney disease diagnosis, she’d managed to wrap her brain around a lot of unavoidable realities. The careful tally of every nutrient that went in or out of her system. The inconvenience of monthly blood draws and the mounting disappointment of their outcomes. The head-up determination to maintain a quality of life as close to normal as possible, to give Brody a childhood as normal as possible. But the idea of being coached on how to ask someone to consider giving you a piece of their body was not yet in her comfort zone. Ironic her husband had been unable to cope with so much of the rest—to let go of the idea that things could ever go back to the way they were—and yet had made up his mind to earn extra credit on this of all subjects.
“I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume they don’t role-play my particular scenario.” There was how to ask family for a kidney and how to ask strangers for a kidney. But her situation was …
Well, it was both, while managing to feel like neither. And though she was no opportunist, she hadn’t worked out yet how to come across as anything but.
He gave her a look that
said, in no uncertain terms, rehashing this would not be helpful. “What they do is raise your comfort level with the topic. Have you watched their videos online?”
She looked away. Too bad she couldn’t come out and ask him for the kind of advice she’d actually find useful. Like how he managed to avoid exhausting himself with this worried energy that constantly depleted her.
“I know you chose to tune out social media…” He was selecting his words carefully, as they’d butted heads over this, too. Doug had accused her of doing what he’d been warned about, isolating herself, retreating, when she’d wanted only to maintain her sanity, to block out the toxicity inherent online, and yes, to avoid the barrage of well-meaning inquiries about her nothing-good-to-report health. But in Doug’s newly hypervigilant eyes, she’d been morphing from his individually human wife into a case study who refused to behave by the book. He took her noncompliance as a personal affront in a way she didn’t grasp until too late. “But you should know I posted my Big Ask on my accounts, on your behalf.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. She should be grateful, probably, that he was willing to swallow her pride and do the thing she could not yet do. But she could practically see his friends rubbernecking at how desperate her situation had grown and what a stand-up guy he was to try to help. “The seminar says the more people who see or hear the request, the better,” he went on. “Even acquaintances, friends of friends. You never know.”
“But Doug, you know finding a nonrelative match in my case is super unlikely—”
“Of course I know that.” He’d sat through the lesson on her antibodies, too. Highly sensitized, they called her. In fact, even if they found a live donor candidate, she’d almost certainly have to undergo something called a desensitization process to lower her body’s defenses before being green-lighted for the transplant. “But it’s even more unlikely if you don’t try.” This was why he’d been on her to send that email in the first place. Her mother would turn in her grave if she knew about this: that Sela had, if the DNA ancestry test could be believed, located her father’s family via a half sister—something her one and only parent had expressly forbidden her from attempting. People didn’t come much more understanding or nonvindictive than her mother, so Sela trusted that she’d had good reason—that whatever was on the other end of her parentage would be explored at her own peril.
Doug insisted that had her mother foreseen these circumstances, she’d have felt differently—anything to give Sela a fighting chance. At the time of her mother’s death, they’d had a slim, if fading, hope that Sela’s kidneys might plateau at a reduced but livable level. When they didn’t, it became hard to argue with the facts: That a transplant was highly preferable to dialysis at her age especially—and the slow crawl of bureaucracy required she be proactive about her options well in advance. That even now that she’d initiated the process of getting on the transplant list, it could take a year just for approval to officially start waiting. That a living donation would extend her life years longer than an organ donated in death.
That no one on her mother’s side was a match.
Nor was Doug, who turned out to be disqualified regardless thanks to—of all things—growth hormones he’d briefly taken as a cocksure underclassman trying to make varsity. It would have been almost funny, had it not solidified his new stance that no misstep was innocent enough to be laughed off.
Besides. Sela had ordered the DNA test: Deep down, she must have come to terms, let herself hope it wasn’t a lark. Although …
If this were just about a kidney, she’d never have reached out. With her mother dead and Doug gone, Sela’s world had shrunk to a perfect triangle: Brody, her work, and her illness. An unnaturally rigid shape for a life, which was meant to be soft, bendable. Expandable.
That there might be a half sibling somewhere outside those points was the real temptation. Depending on whom she was talking to, the possibility that the half sister might also be a pathway to a one-day donor was either a cover story or an icing-on-the-cake scenario.
But at both ends of the spectrum, this feeling applied exclusively to the mysterious Caroline Porter. Had Sela found her father, she’d have rather died, honestly, than combine his flesh with hers. He was likely either too old or too unfit to donate, anyway—assuming he was about her mother’s age, most people had by then lost the impeccable health required. But a sibling …
“The response on my pages has been encouraging. If you want to take a look, maybe chime in—”
“Please.” Sela held up a hand, chagrined to find it shaking. She was touched by Doug’s frustration, even in this early-morning ambush. It meant he still cared. If only that translated to something that mattered. “I’d like to set this conversation aside for later before I say something that makes me sound ungrateful.”
A counselor had provided this script in the weeks after Brody’s birth, when it became clear that Sela’s condition was both escalating and irreversible—and that neither of them was handling the strain well. She suspected Doug found the line as enraging as she did, but neither of them could say so, since the words did at minimum acknowledge the sensitivity of the situation. Which was more than either of them had accomplished without them.
Doug looked at her now as if he couldn’t decide what he wanted more: to press her to talk or to get away as fast as he could. A well-worn combination—she already knew which would win out.
“Well, the email is a big step,” he conceded. “I’m glad I drove by at the right time to see you.”
She might have invited him in for coffee but figured she’d save them both the humiliation of him saying no. It was tough enough to be standing here at the far reaches of the porch light, staring into the eyes of the person to whom she’d be forever linked in catastrophic failure. They’d disappointed each other, let Brody down, even complicated the simple life of their perfectly innocent dog, who sat between them now, looking from one to the other with his ears cocked expectantly.
Doug meant well. He didn’t know how to let go all the way. But she found things easier without him. With no line of sight to this tormented look on his face, she could pretend, if she needed to, that he was gone temporarily, tending to a business trip or family issue as dutiful people like Doug did. When she knew he was coming, she could pull on a protective layer of numbness, a barrier to keep any particular feeling about him from touching her directly. But when he caught her off guard like this, when she didn’t have time to reach for that coat, it was like being woken from a bad dream to find out things weren’t as she’d feared after all.
They were worse.
“I’m glad you came by too,” she said.
With people like Doug, lies could be a form of kindness.
He bent to give Oscar one last pat. “See you Friday, pal. If your mom’s still okay with me taking this weekend?”
It made the most sense to treat Oscar and Brody as a package deal, keeping the same schedule for both. “Of course.”
She leaned into the thought of Brody asleep upstairs, resisting the cruel temptation to linger and watch Doug’s taillights fade into the fog. She’d recently converted the crib to a toddler bed, and ever since, Brody would randomly wake and come looking for her, simply because he could.
A powerful thing, really—to have someone rely so wholly on finding her where she was supposed to be. She liked to think it meant she could still rely on herself.
After all, she had no choice.
Neither of them had anyone else.
3
Caroline
“Mommy?” A little voice deposited the word so directly into Caroline’s ear, she could feel the vibrations carrying the sound. Her eyes flew open to find her younger daughter’s bleary face inches from her own, smiling expectantly. “What do you think?” As Caroline blinked properly awake, Lucy jumped back and twirled, showing off her outfit: a sparkly heart-covered cap-sleeved shirt, tucked into a metallic silver tutu that billowed around purple leggings, over which had b
een pulled candy-cane-striped knee-highs resurrected from the holiday drawer. Rainbow cowgirl boots that Caroline had learned too late shed more sequins than a Rockette completed the ensemble.
“Wow, you got yourself all dressed,” she said, sidestepping the question.
Lucy nodded proudly. “Everything but my underwear!”
Caroline squinted at her kindergartner, who was potty-trained, of course, but still slept in training underpants. “You put on all that without panties underneath?”
Lucy giggled. “Whoops!”
Behind her, the door to the master bath clicked open, and Walt stood buttoning his dress shirt in the dissipating humidity. He sniffed conspicuously. “Do I smell … glitter?”
Lucy let out a squeal. “Not the glitter monster, Daddy!”
His voice turned ragged, goofy, as he draped his bath towel over his head. “Daddy not here. Only me. Me want glitter!”
The pair took off running down the hallway, and Caroline pulled a pillow over her face, groaning. She was surrounded by morning people in this house. It was inhuman.
Sleep had eluded her for much of the night. As Walt’s breath had grown slow and deep, his arm draped across her turning to dead weight, she’d admonished her brain that worrying about this could wait until morning. Things would look clearer once she had answers from the test provider. No reason to exhaust herself in the meantime. But when she at last drifted off, it was to that off-kilter place where consciousness hovers and waits for an uncertain outcome.
Caroline couldn’t deflect the feeling that a stray cat had been let out of a bag that may or may not have been delivered by mistake. Even if it did have the wrong address, there was a decent chance she’d have to face off with the feral animal.
If only there was some way of knowing whether it had been contained here or escaped to Dad’s in-box.
A Million Reasons Why Page 2