“Huh.” Lucy contemplated this seriously. “Did it work? What your mom said to do?”
“Like a charm. I actually liked playing alone in my room after that. Way better than my old tiny one.”
Lucy hopped off the bed and marched to her bookshelf, where she carefully selected a white stuffed tiger. “Thanks, Aunt Sela.”
“I like talking to you, Lucy. If I had a little girl, I’d want her to be just like you.”
“If I had a real aunt, I’d want her to be just like you too.”
It was lucky Lucy didn’t see Caroline in the shadows as she padded through the darkness back to Riley’s room. Caroline never could have explained the tears running down her cheeks.
She was still sorting out their meaning herself.
18
Sela
Sela zipped her bag closed and took a last look around Lucy’s room, feeling—what was this? Her thoughts were sluggish this morning; she’d slept even worse than usual, but her mood was buoyant. Something like a sense of accomplishment, mixed with pleasant surprise at the twinge of reluctance she felt about leaving so soon.
When she got home, she knew, Brody would throw his arms around her, and Oscar would nose through her things, trying to suss out where she’d been before reclaiming his place at her feet. She’d been picturing the scene since before she’d even gotten here, the reward awaiting her at the finish line. But now that the time had come, she pictured her homecoming in a different light. How quiet the house would seem by contrast, how absent of the breakfast chatter coming from downstairs now, and how far she’d suddenly feel from these people—not just a half sister but a half family.
She cheered herself with the prospect of a reciprocal visit—how nice it could be for Brody’s cousins to bring their big energy into his little space. Owen, she knew, would draw the center of her son’s attention—Brody would trail his youngest, most rambunctious cousin like an eager shadow. Riley could spend time with Sela in her studio, lighting up the way she had yesterday when Sela gifted her new colored pencils and delivered a shading workshop on the spot. Lucy might bring an imaginary friend or two. And Caroline—well, she already liked Brevard. They’d avoid the backdrops of that old visit with Keaton, show her an even better time.
That had been a story, a whole parallel universe they might have entered. Sela imagined getting her DNA test results and finding that Caroline had been right there in Brevard for her entire adult life. The bizarre, implausible shock of it. She’d always assumed her father—and his family, if he had one—to be elsewhere. How else would Ecca hide him? Or, rather, from him?
Sela was proud she’d succeeded in leaving him out of this visit—both in her conversations with Caroline and in her thoughts. Facing the mantel that first night was the closest she’d come to tripping up, but she’d kept her footing. She could honestly say she had no desire to smuggle home a photo, or to come out and ask where that distinctive giggle she’d heard from all three kids came from. She was already too sick, frankly, to let him infect her brain or her body further. And if she could get this visit under her belt without overstepping, she should be home free, the precedent set.
“Aunt Sela?” Riley appeared in the doorway looking shy, unsure—a mature cry from the giddy girl who’d run off and left her standing on the stoop upon her arrival. “I know this isn’t very good, compared to what you can do. But I made you something.”
Riley held out a page from the new sketch pad Sela had picked out on the way back from lunch yesterday. The girl had folded it and on the front flap drawn the letters of Brody’s name, varying the weights of the strokes and making tiny doodles in the serifs, the way Sela had shown her. Sela took the card and opened it. Inside, Riley had written: Thank you for the art supplies and for teaching me. I’m very glad you came to visit my mom and us too. Sincerely, Riley.
“I told Mom how much I wanted to thank you and she said I should make you a card.”
Sela swallowed the emotion balling in her throat. She would not get choked up. Not at Lucy’s offhand comment about what it would be like to have Sela as a real aunt, and not at this painstakingly crafted thank-you. She couldn’t read a special connection into every moment just because on some deep, previously inaccessible level, she evidently hoped for one.
She’d never harbored the predictable fantasy of switching places with her sister, à la those separated-at-birth movies. Not even when Caroline’s emails made her ache with envy. But now that Sela was up close, it was hard not to wish for a day in this other-half life. Only to know what it would feel like.
“I’ll display it on my desk at home. Thanks, Riley.”
“You’re welcome. And I’m supposed to say breakfast will be ready in fifteen minutes.”
Sela had had all the unsanctioned meals her body could take. If there was no fruit on the table, she’d beg off, say she wasn’t a breakfast person, and stop at the first market out of town to stabilize her blood sugar and whatever else was haywire in her body.
Two masked superheroes appeared behind Riley. “That means fifteen minutes to battle!” Wonder Woman announced, handing her sister a Batman cape and a blue foam ball popper. Her own popper of choice was, naturally, pink. Owen thrust his wrists out, left and right. “Whoosh, I web you! Whoosh, I web you!” He’d tucked his navy sweatpants into red rain boots, one of which held a flimsy-looking slingshot.
“Well,” Sela said, laughing, “better get to it, supersquad.”
“You too, Aunt Sela!” Lucy crossed to her closet and, improbably, pulled out a Captain America shield, mask, and plastic sword, handing them over in a flourish. “Meet at the bottom of the stairs in one minute! Every hero for himself!”
Riley tied her cape and flashed a thumbs-up. Owen began trying, unsuccessfully, to scale the doorway.
“Aren’t we all good guys, though?” Sela’s confusion felt decidedly uncool. “I mean, aren’t we on the same team?”
“Come on, Aunt Sela,” Lucy called over her shoulder as they scattered from the room. “Your imagination is your superpower!”
Sela laughed. You couldn’t get anything past a kid. She donned her eye mask and, surveying Lucy’s dresser, chose a tiara and a purple feather boa to complete her ensemble. She’d be Captain Miss America. Not a bad Halloween costume, actually.
Before she was down the stairs, the battle was in full swing, foam darts shooting across the entryway, makeshift grenades flying through the air—throw pillows, stuffed animals, one of those inflatable exercise balls.
“Take cover!” Sela yelled, jumping the last few stairs and landing in a dramatic crouch, feathers flying, sword drawn. A squeal of excitement pealed from the dining room at her left, and there was Owen, on the far side of the table. The more time she spent with him, the more he really did remind her of Brody. She gave chase; they lapped the table, twice, three times, reversing course and doing it again, both laughing until their breath came fast. She broke the cycle to run across the foyer, where Batman gave her a taunting wave and ducked into the door to the basement playroom. Sela took off after her, repeated her leap down the second half of the basement stairs.
Riley was hiding, somewhere. Lucy too—her giggles giving her away. And then …
And then Sela couldn’t breathe.
Her breaths came short and shallow, like the onset of a panic attack. Only it wasn’t panic—oh, God. She knew this feeling. She’d overdone it—the sodium, the alcohol, the everything—and now she was paying the price. The morning fatigue wasn’t from the unfamiliar bed. The swelling in her legs wasn’t from the long drive. The shortness of breath, too familiar, brought the full picture into view, showed her what she’d been cropping out of the frame.
She fell back onto the bottom stair, gasping, putting her head between her knees to ward off the stars that would soon follow.
She’d been warned, many times, about the dangers of grazing buffets and of going off script “just this once.” That even when you were mostly behaving, you could lose track of
all the little cheats adding up.
“Aunt Sela?” Lucy bent to peer at her. Sela could feel the heat of her proximity, little fingers prodding her shoulder, though she couldn’t bring herself to lift her head. Not while she was heaving like Oscar after a manic face-off with their backyard squirrels, her heart racing. She hugged the stairs in defeat, her super status reduced to the world’s most out-of-shape woman or a senior citizen who’d forgotten her age.
Or a chronically ill visitor trying to pretend she wasn’t.
“Are you still playing?” Lucy persisted. Then Riley was beside her, asking too. Sela couldn’t even catch her breath to answer. Least of all because she was crying now into her knees.
She should have known one weekend of normal was too much to ask. She of all people knew that wishing something to be true did not make it so.
The girls yelled for their mom, scrambling up the stairs, leaving Sela to fend off the darkness alone.
* * *
Caroline handed her a glass of water—full, cool to the touch—and Sela held it between her shaky hands. She’d managed to move, with Caroline’s help, to the small basement couch and sat now in the cool, humid quiet with her sister, who’d shooed the children up the stairs, saying Sela needed only space, some air, though of course she had no idea what Sela needed, seemed even more baffled than her children were. How many ounces did this glass hold? Sela would retain it all, yet her mouth had gone sandpaper dry. She took a small sip.
“Sela? Talk to me. What is it?”
“I’m all right,” she managed. Another small sip. “Just got a bit short of breath.”
“Short of breath?” Caroline looked worried. Walt appeared behind her, phone in hand, and the bolt of terror that he was about to call an ambulance forced Sela straighter against the couch cushion, though her body cried out to double over, to curl up.
To disappear.
She tried to smile. “Turns out Captain Miss America … maybe can’t scale … half flights of stairs … like a runway.” Another small sip. Good God, this was mortifying.
“But Sela, I have to tell you…” Caroline turned to Walt. “She says she’s short of breath.” It wasn’t a question, but she was searching his face for some confirmation. He nodded once, brusquely, and her gaze swung back to Caroline. “My dad, I mean, our—he had a heart attack last month. Shortness of breath was his main complaint. If you’re saying the same we need to take it seriously. There’s family history.”
Sela shook her head. “I’m not having,” she gasped, “a heart attack.”
“I know it sounds unlikely at our age, but this isn’t normal. Look at you—you’re gray. You look as if you’ve run a marathon.”
How to explain that it was normal, without really explaining it? “She’s right, Sela,” Walt cut in. “If not the hospital, we at least have to go to urgent care.”
Sela looked from one to the other. Their faces did not change.
Up to this point, she could almost honestly claim that the subject of her health just hadn’t come up. That she hadn’t lied by omission; she merely hadn’t gotten around to explaining yet. But not telling them now would be deceit. If she was going to remain in their lives, this would come to light eventually, and what then?
What had been her plan, anyway—beyond the short term of surviving this weekend, testing the waters?
She hadn’t had one.
“No, we don’t,” she said softly. She took the deepest breath she could manage, steeling herself. “I already know what’s wrong.”
19
Caroline
“Chronic kidney disease,” she repeated. “My God, Sela. Why did you not tell us?”
They’d come up to the kitchen, Walt shuffling the befuddled kids back down to the playroom with their French toast on a tray. Caroline could count on them to remain riveted to the movie he put on the old big screen, but not to keep syrup out of the carpet—though this seemed laughably trivial in the scheme of things. The three adults sat around the table, turned away from the soggier-by-the-minute breakfast abandoned on the stovetop.
“Would you believe it’s not a great icebreaker?” Sela tried to laugh, but it came out more like a cry. Although it was brighter here than in the fittingly grim basement, no light had returned to her face. Caroline suspected it matched her own.
“How long have you had this? How did it happen?” Caroline didn’t know what to ask first. She had so many questions. Walt sat quietly, arms crossed in front of him, eyes fixed unreadably on Sela.
“I was diagnosed when I was pregnant with Brody. Things escalated pretty quickly from there.”
“Do they have any idea what caused it?”
She shook her head. “Ninety percent of people with kidney disease don’t even know they have it, until either some routine test turns it up—like in my case—or the symptoms progress to a point of prompting a diagnosis, usually at a later stage. For that reason, they have a hard time studying the onset and early progression.” Sela had switched to a flat, matter-of-fact tone, as if this were just another recitation of the facts, not a game changer that revealed her to be yet another person who had kept yet another secret from Caroline.
Not that Caroline was exactly an open book. But this was more than just a skimmed-over chapter.
“In my case,” Sela went on, “I had something called chronic glomerulonephritis, but the cause of that is murky too. I might have had an infection that randomly damaged my kidneys—something as common as strep throat—and an acute onset turned chronic. Or something might have compromised my immune system. It’s possible I was predisposed to this. But in a subset of women with declining kidney function, pregnancy speeds it up, irreversibly. I’m one of them.”
“And Brody?” Caroline’s eyes darted to Walt—mention of their nephew had softened him the night before, but still he didn’t so much as shift in his chair.
“Well, I told you he was born alarmingly premature. That is quite common with CKD. It’s not a pregnancy-compatible disease.”
“But his kidneys?”
“They were the least of his worries,” she said quickly, looking down at the table.
Caroline cleared her throat. “What can you do? Are you looking at— I mean, from what little I know of kidney problems, dialysis? A transplant?”
Sela nodded. “Either/or. No one can say how soon I’ll need it, but a transplant is preferable. Living on dialysis is … all-consuming.”
“My God, and with a child? How would you manage?” A flare of anger. “Your husband left you in the midst of this? With a baby, no less?” She tried to hold to that sisterly loyalty she’d felt yesterday—on the steps of the school, in the hallway outside Lucy’s room. But it was disorienting learning that the whole time, Sela had been holding back something so defining.
“He—we—didn’t handle it well. In his defense, it hasn’t been an easy thing to handle.”
Was she really so forgiving? A better sport than Caroline. “How does getting a transplant work?” She sneaked another glance at Walt, whose silence was growing eerie. The unease pressed in on Caroline, but she pushed ahead. “You go on a list?” Sela nodded. “Do you have to reach a certain stage first, or…?”
“They encourage you to start the process early, because the pace is glacial. I’m late in stage three, of five. Not dire yet, but no one knows how long I have until it’s going to be.”
“And then?”
“And then…,” Sela spoke slowly, as if articulating every syllable was of great importance. “Unless you have a living donor waiting in the wings, you get on the list—I’m pending approval now—and then wait your turn and hope that when it comes, so does a match.”
“From someone who checked the organ donor box on their driver’s license?”
“Usually. A kidney from a deceased donor doesn’t last nearly as long as a living donor’s, so if you’re my age that’s a temporary fix. But any working kidney is better than no working kidney.”
How many questions
could she ask before Sela got frustrated? Sela was clearly uncomfortable, but Caroline wanted only to understand. To think that all this time Caroline had thought her sister might not relate to what it was like to have your life upended out of nowhere so thoroughly. What Caroline and her parents had been through in learning of Sela’s existence was nothing compared to what Sela had already been facing. Alone.
“That’s why you ordered the DNA test,” Walt said—speaking up at last, but his voice didn’t sound right. It was low, too low, the bottom bass line. “Isn’t it?”
Caroline blinked at him, caught off guard by his accusatory tone. Sela averted her eyes.
“I—”
“You weren’t looking for your father’s family. You were looking for a kidney that might reside in a member of your father’s family.”
Sela’s chest started to heave again with short, quick breaths, and Caroline wanted to pull her out of this, to chastise Walt for being cruel. But the look on Sela’s face—and the silence. It stretched on painfully long, until Caroline knew Walt’s accusation couldn’t be anything but true.
“You’re hitting the road in, what, an hour?” Walt gripped the edge of the table, his knuckles hard and white. “When were you going to get around to asking? Or did you plan to drive home and then send one of your emails?”
“Walt, stop.” He might have been correct, but that didn’t make this right.
“I wasn’t going to ask,” Sela said.
He scoffed. “Yeah, right. Let me guess. No one on your mom’s side is a match.”
“But—”
“And family is the best shot at matching, right?”
Sela shrank back. “That was the other thing about the pregnancy. It increased my PRAs—panel reactive antibodies—making my odds of finding a match more slim.”
A Million Reasons Why Page 17