A Million Reasons Why

by Jessica Strawser

  As the welcome speaker thanked them again for coming and took his seat, the slide glowing on the whiteboard flipped from the program logo to the first topic of the day: “The Donor Experience.” Sela already felt skeptical about summoning enough self-delusion, enough audacity, to think plopping herself in front of Caroline and merely explaining her situation would be enough to inspire life-altering generosity in a relative she’d just met. Still, this was the part of the seminar she most needed.

  And most dreaded.

  Because it was the only part of the process she had not yet fully researched. She’d had to draw a line somewhere—she’d lost enough sleep googling things that were beyond her control as it was. Immersing herself in what things would be like for the donor seemed the very definition of putting the cart before the highly unlikely horse.

  More honestly, though, she hadn’t wanted to know. She was afraid to find out precisely what her own inescapable need could electively put at risk for someone else. Because she’d never be naïve enough to think “just telling” someone what she was going through and then looking at them expectantly was anything other than asking. It was more like pleading as if her life depended on it. Which it did.

  Sela didn’t begrudge the optimistic young intro speaker his point of view, or his plump pink new kidney, his bond with his loving uncle, even his assumption that everyone was surrounded by people who care about you, who want you to live well. She’d known that the lion’s share of this seminar would not apply to her, that she’d very likely end up on the endless nationwide list, where not everyone got what they were waiting for. She’d known that the idea of bypassing the all-consuming hell of dialysis was a pipe dream and that even if Caroline agreed to get tested, it was a long shot that she’d match.

  When she’d accepted Janie’s challenge to come here, what she’d really been talked into was this: facing up to what she hadn’t known, inescapable now as the applause died down and a surgeon took the mic to elaborate upon the bullet points of The Donor Experience.

  Each statistic, Sela could tell, was meant to highlight the odds in the donors’ favor. But what jumped out at her—screamed at her—were the worst-case scenarios offsetting each one. Hiding between the lines, and yet right there, if you only looked.

  That three in ten thousand donors have a fatal complication from the surgery.

  That other, minor complications were rare but did occur. Infection. A longer or more arduous recovery than expected.

  That dietary restrictions for the rest of the donor’s life were typically reasonable things you should do anyway—eat healthfully, moderate vices, drink plenty of water—but more in-depth maintenance was required if the remaining kidney did not rise to the occasion.

  That occasionally the transplanted kidney did not take, and the donor would need to come to terms with their sacrifice having been for nothing.

  That any complications they’d endured would also have been for nothing.

  That in the unlikely event a donor’s remaining kidney later failed, the donor would be prioritized on the list of those in the exact shoes of the person they’d set out to help.

  They went on, explaining the vetting process, what it entailed, how it was designed to ensure not only a viable match but the health of the donor. And what the recipient’s insurance did and did not cover: the procedure, but not lost wages from the (on average) six- to eight-week recovery period, travel for an out-of-town donor, or other incidentals. But by then, from where Sela sat, the details had been rendered irrelevant.

  She was living every day with the consequences of an “unlikely event.” The emergence of her disease and everything that had subsequently unraveled—her life’s plans, Brody’s, her marriage—all of it had been rare, unusual, unfortunate.

  She had no choice but to live with those outcomes, but she did have a choice about whether she coerced her perfectly healthy half sister to leave the safe cocoon of her life and join her in this game of risk. A game she now understood could be, if she was one of the unlucky ones, for nothing.

  Sela’s luck had run out years ago. And if things didn’t go in Caroline’s favor, she would bear responsibility for that, too.

  She couldn’t.

  All along, she’d thought this all came down to forcing herself to pursue something she wanted but wasn’t entirely comfortable with. What she took away from the seminar was that she’d been wrong. She didn’t want it. If something went awry with Caroline’s health, it would be a waste for Sela’s life to be extended as the only good result, because she’d never be able to live with herself. Crushing as it was to resign herself to this—a long, unhealthy wait at best, a slow, uncomfortable death at worst—it was still more palatable than the alternative.

  Funny to have that realization in a seminar designed to have the opposite effect.

  Afterward, something shifted in Sela. Gone was any hang-up about speaking with Caroline: She felt freed to converse with her like a real person would and not, as she had been, like a machine learning system doing word-by-word analyses to maximize the probabilities of winning her over.

  Also gone? The original life-or-death reason for seeking out her never-known sibling.

  But she had sought her out. And not merely found her but connected, in a tentative but surprisingly meaningful way. Next thing she knew, she was picking up the phone, hearing her speak. Laughing—together. And spontaneously, unthinkably, blurting out an invitation to meet. Caroline accepting, just like that. As if taking the next step forward had been that easy all along.

  The unexpected joy following that call was almost enough to erase the vacant feeling that had overtaken Sela in the seminar’s final hour, when the panel of recipients and their donors took the stage. As gratitude and goodwill poured from the stories they shared, the room temperature Sela had taken upon arrival warmed considerably, the trepidation calmed and soothed by more compassion than she’d ever felt or seen in a single place.

  She’d taken it all in and understood, at last, what it could mean for Caroline to give her back her life.

  Even as she let go of the idea of ever asking her to.

  15

  Caroline

  “Mama, Mama, Mama!” Lucy’s terror came through loud and clear, and Caroline took the stairs two at a time, feeling frantic at the tone even though she knew this was no real emergency, only her kindergartner’s imagination—again. She forced herself not to cry out that she was coming, lest Owen or Riley by some miracle be sleeping through the yelling.

  Somehow, this had become the new routine. Lucy used to be good about falling asleep. So good, in fact, that it took a while for it to sink in that one night’s test-Caroline’s-patience stalling had become a long, bleary stretch of them.

  “It’s a ploy for attention,” Walt warned, unmoved, each time his wife went to her. But Caroline wasn’t so sure. Given the timing, she couldn’t ignore the possibility that Lucy had picked up on a tension shift in the house, weeks before it had culminated in her Gramps’s stint in the hospital. Even before then, she’d been seeing much less of her grandparents—a conspicuous gap that had resumed now that Dad was home and required idle days to heal. What were the odds that their world could feel so altered to her and still feel the same to Lucy?

  As a parent, if you were going to have a personal crisis, it had better be on your own time. And if such a thing didn’t exist anymore—which, of course, it didn’t? Too bad.

  “Sweetheart?” She burst through the bedroom door and found her daughter not merely whining but full-out sobbing, clinging to the safety rail affixed to her twin bed. Caroline pried the little fingers away from the metal-rimmed netting and wrapped them around her own neck instead, standing and swaying while Lucy breathed deep, tear-streaked breaths into her collarbone. “Shhh,” she soothed her. “It’s okay. I’m here.”

  Caroline had always been imperfect when it came to dividing attention among all three children. Her rotation was more reactive than proactive, gravitating to whoever ne
eded her most at the given moment, but even that flawed system was less adept lately. She’d been distracted to the point of apologizing daily for some oversight that was “not like her.” But this was no unclean soccer jersey at game time—this was sweet, easy Lucy, and it wasn’t like her, either.

  She waited until Lucy was calm, sniffing away the last vestiges of her tears, before perching them both at the foot of her bed. “Let’s talk about this,” she said, careful to keep her voice open, warm. “What’s going on here? Why the trouble with bedtime all of a sudden? Is this anything to do with Gramps? Did the hospital scare you?”

  Lucy sniffled, shaking her head. “The hospital was kind of neat.”

  She should be grateful to Dad for that, she supposed. “Then what?”

  Her daughter blinked at her with wide, earnest eyes. “It’s the shadows,” she whispered.

  As simple as a fear of the dark? Was Caroline projecting her own insecurities everywhere? “Okay,” she began, summoning her old MacGyver Mom self. Down to business, then. “You have your night-light, and we leave the hall light on too. What else can we do? Arm you with a special flashlight? Something like a … a sparkle ray?” She had no idea how she’d make such a thing, but if anything could sway Lucy, it was the promise of sparkle.

  Lucy’s bottom lip jutted out skeptically. “Can I just have all the lights on?”

  “Well, that’s not very good for sleeping. Darkness signals to our body that it’s time to rest. Don’t you see the light through your eyelids, even when they’re closed?”

  She nodded. “I like it.”

  “I don’t think it’s healthy, Lu,” she said gently. “Let’s think of something else to try.”

  “But everything looks different with the light off.”

  “Different how?” Caroline envisioned a systematic approach—removing the humpback of Lucy’s fuzzy robe from its hook, turning the vacant stare of a baby doll to face the wall. Frankly, dolls gave her the willies even in daylight. But Lucy only shook her head.

  “I tell myself things are the same as always. But now that I’ve seen them a new, bad way, I can’t stop. Even though I want to.”

  This, Caroline understood. Uncomfortably well.

  Without a clue as to how to fix it.

  It’s the shadows. Dad’s transgressions, no matter how long ago, did change the light that fell on everything around him: his wife, his health, his daughter. Daughters. And Mom’s meddling further darkened Caroline’s memories, almost beyond recognition.

  Caroline had always thought she’d been so in charge of her life—everything scripted to her specifications. But now, she couldn’t help feeling as if she’d been tricked into that false sense all along.

  Hannah seemed so glad to see me, Keaton had told her.

  Hannah didn’t say anything I wasn’t already feeling insecure about.

  Things had been crafted to someone’s specifications all right. But not Caroline’s.

  She’d been a fool to think seeing Keaton might help. In that little corner table, she’d sat down across from her worst mistakes—and though they’d been overshadowed in the chaos that followed, she hadn’t been able to stop them from tailing her home.

  Whereas Keaton long ago made peace with “maybe just one or two” regrets, Caroline had done the opposite. She’d waited him out for as long as she could justify—hoping against hope he’d come back for her, change his mind. And then, when there was nothing left to do but give up, along came Walt, offering her a way to take matters into her own hands.

  But a decade of her own best efforts at taking control had landed her here, in a life—in a family—she scarcely even recognized from weeks ago.

  Caroline didn’t want to see these things the “new, bad way” either.

  “Well,” she told Lucy, “if you can’t go back to seeing things the old way, maybe you can come up with a new new way. One so good, you won’t go back to seeing them the bad way.”

  “A new new way,” Lucy repeated. Her eyes fixed on the wide sliding doors of her closet, and Caroline wondered if she was looking at the posters on them—unicorns, rainbows—or trying to see through to whatever was on the other side.

  The way Caroline did with Sela.

  “How do you want to do this?” Sela had asked. When Caroline agreed right away to meet, her half sister sounded so happy, so hopeful—almost as if freed from some burden. Caroline would have found the mood contagious, had she not been standing in the cardiac unit that housed Dad’s fragile heart, contemplating anew the sign in front of her:

  AUTHORIZED VISITORS ONLY.

  Was she obligated to tell her parents she’d be meeting Sela? If it wasn’t up for debate, and they’d already made their stance on the woman clear, why make it a thing? The potential danger wasn’t just emotional anymore.

  “Well, I don’t know that I can travel anytime soon,” she ventured, suddenly less sure of herself. She was sure that she couldn’t be hundreds of miles from Dad. Not now. “We’ve had … a lot going on.”

  “I’ve never been to Cincinnati,” Sela said easily. “I’m curious, since Mom lived there.”

  Had Rebecca been so set on hiding from Caroline’s parents that she’d cut off contact with the entire town? The deepening realization of all Sela’s mother had sacrificed—to save face, to protect her daughter, to let Hannah and Fred be—filled Caroline with defiance, a surprise sense of solidarity with her sister. It wasn’t as if putting off a visit from Sela would make much difference to her parents’ eventual reactions. Dad would still cite his heart as an excuse. Mom would still telegraph her disapproval via sighs.

  But seeing Sela sooner than later could make a difference to Caroline. Give her something to do with the unsettled energy Keaton left behind and someone to turn to apart from the rest of this mess. Someone who wasn’t a cheater, a manipulator, a friend who remembered uncomfortably well, or even a partner who checked the right boxes, and yet.

  And yet. She despised those dangerous, self-destructive words.

  “Then you should come,” she heard herself say. “Bring Brody, stay a weekend.”

  “I’d like that. Although I might pick a weekend Doug has custody, if that’s okay?” That made sense. The kid had been through a lot of change lately. And after a month of corresponding, she could tell Sela grew lonely on those off weekends. Caroline couldn’t imagine how quiet her house would get if her brood evacuated every other week.

  Come to think of it, how to explain a mystery guest to her own kids?

  “Let me look at our calendar with Walt, and I’ll give the details some thought too. I’ll email you?” Give the details some thought suddenly felt like a gross understatement.

  “Why don’t you tell me one of the bad things?” she asked Lucy now. “We can figure it out together.”

  It was the response she was still awaiting from Walt. She’d hung up with Sela and found him as she’d left him, keeping watch through the window, looking to her expectantly. Whatever you think, he’d said when she told him what she’d agreed to. He wouldn’t stop her, though he was clearly uncomfortable enough to omit his usual assurance: that they’d figure it out together. Whether it was because he disapproved or because he thought this was something she had to do alone, she couldn’t tell.

  “Maybe some other time,” Lucy replied. It was jarring, having your kids parrot your words back to you. Coming from Lucy, they seemed more dismissive than Caroline ever intended. “Please can I keep the lights on tonight?”

  Caroline tried to smile. “Whatever you think,” she said, trying out the words. They sounded equally dismissive, to her chagrin.

  Lucy nodded once, then looked away, in the half-stubborn, half-apologetic manner of someone who senses your reservations but is determined to do as she pleases anyway.

  In a pretty good impression, come to think of it, of Caroline herself.

  16

  Sela

  At the threshold of a house twice the size of her own, the front door cracked open a
nd three small, anxious faces peered out at Sela.

  “Are you Mom’s friend?” the oldest wanted to know. This would be Riley, giving Sela more of a once-over than was warranted from the mundane cover story she and Caroline had agreed upon: old friends who’d found each other and scheduled the weekend to catch up. Don’t get weirded out when they call you Aunt Sela, Caroline had written. That’s how they address all our old friends—they’d think it strange if you were an exception. Would Caroline ever tell the kids, once they were older, that the name was not honorary? Would Sela have any say in the matter if she were still in their lives, a caveat as figurative as it was literal?

  “I am.” Sela smiled—too stiffly, but her nerves wouldn’t get out of her way. A fierce reluctance to leave Brody had overcome her when they’d hugged good-bye at Doug’s this morning, but that might have had more to do with Doug himself. He and Leigh were both so proud of her for initiating this step to see Caroline—all Good for you! and I knew you could do it! before Sela got another word in—she hadn’t had the heart to tell them she’d decided not to Big Ask her sister anything. If this visit went well, she hoped they’d be glad enough of her finding some new semblance of family to reluctantly follow suit when she let it drop. And if it didn’t? Well, that’d take care of itself. The implied answer to the question she’d never voiced would be no.

  She’d tried to leave her hesitation behind as she followed the westbound highway across Tennessee and wound northward through Kentucky. As the miles passed, the greens around her had warmed to brilliant early October hues, and what was autumn, after all, if not a succumbing, a final hurrah?

  “Pleased to meet you,” she elaborated. The door opened no farther; the three pairs of eyes merely blinked, as if awaiting proof. She held up the large, paper-wrapped frame she’d tucked under her arm. “I made you something.”

  Bingo: the password. They jumped back with a collective squeal, flinging the door open wide as every one of them turned and ran, bare feet slapping the ceramic tile.