My daughter, Caroline, is up for a job at Brevard College, of all unlikely places. Needless to say, she can’t get that offer. You don’t want her, or Fred, or least of all me down there any more than I do. Surely as an employee you can pull some strings, call a friend in HR? Whatever it takes. Your phrasing exactly, as I recall.
Do this, and consider yourself off the hook. You won’t hear from me again, but you can stop groveling, for pity’s sake, move on, ease your conscience. Mine will be a bit heavier for this, but I guess that’s the way it goes.
You have my word that I won’t begrudge you anything anymore. Just don’t begrudge me this one request.
Standing by, —H
A few days later, Ecca had sent a one-word reply:
Done.
Sela read it again and again as her brain put the pieces together. Starting with Caroline’s story about her blown shoo-in interview and how it marked the beginning of the end with Keaton. She’d looked like she wanted to say more on the subject—like that end still signified to her a heavy, closed door.
Caroline’s own mother had been responsible for that.
Ecca, her coconspirator.
What’s more, Sela could only conclude from the wording that Hannah had known she existed. Otherwise, why be so sure Ecca didn’t want Fred anywhere near her? Ecca had indeed not given a second thought to Sela’s father all those years; she’d devoted all her wishful thinking to his wife. To begging forgiveness for having betrayed her in the most unforgivable way, with the most permanent result. A letter every year—for more than twenty of them. For pity’s sake.
Ivy had talked about Ecca being emotional after Sela’s graduation. But it had never been about Sela. It had been about her sister. And in a metaphoric sense, Ecca’s too.
Sela clicked on the drafts and found lengthier replies.
H, You know I meant what I said. If this is really what you want, say no more. But … I can’t help feeling for your daughter. If this opportunity is really something she wants, you have my word I’d steer clear, never say a word. There’s no one else here who’d put two and two together. I’ve never so much as dropped a hint at what happened, not even (especially not) in my own house.
* * *
H, You say this is how it has to be, but please—the idea of never seeing or hearing from you again, even now, after all this time … Our friendship was always stronger than all the bullshit, no matter what. I’m so sorry I lost sight, during the weakest period of my life, of how special that was. There are things I never told you.…
* * *
H, You’re right: I’ve apologized enough. If you could see Sela, you’d understand why it was all worth it. Why I can never regret it, no matter how bad it hurt us both.
So that was it. Ecca had agonized over taking her only chance to say how she really felt. To have some say in how things went down, finished up. And in the end, she had squirreled away the words, unsent, and replaced them with just one: Done.
Ecca did not do things on other people’s terms—not even commissioned work. She was up front about it, having learned her lesson: No complete creative control, no deal. The fact that Ecca had capitulated told Sela everything she needed to know about how Ecca felt about Hannah. And, more to the point, how Ecca felt about her own trespasses against Hannah.
Unforgivable, maybe. Regrettable, no.
Sela’s father truly had never known about her. Not that she hadn’t believed Caroline when she’d said so—she believed, at least, that Caroline believed it. But finding confirmation here between the lines was something else entirely.
Not only had Hannah actively kept Caroline from knowing her sister, she’d kept Fred from knowing his daughter.
Then again, whether driven by guilt alone or something more, Ecca had done the same. She’d sent that one-word reply, when it came down to it, for Sela’s sake as much as anybody’s. At least, that’s the way Ecca had seen it. Even as Sela bucked against what her mother had done, she knew Ecca’s actions had come at no small cost to her conscience, her dignity, her sense of self.
Sela would not endanger the terms of that tenuously evened score now. She’d already wreaked enough havoc on Caroline’s happy family; already come too close to dishonoring Ecca’s memory.
Caroline could never know what either of their mothers had done. No matter how bad it hurt Sela to carry yet another burden alone.
21
Caroline
“May I ask,” the woman on the line said crisply, “which patient referred you to this number?”
“I—” Caroline was sitting in her van at Riley’s soccer practice, engine off, while the team scrimmaged in the rain. It pattered down the foggy windshield in streaks, making the driver’s seat feel more private than it was—a shell of unexpected solitude, as Walt had gotten home from work early and saved her from dragging the other kids along. Even so, she hadn’t expected names to come into this. She certainly didn’t intend to give her own.
“No one. I do know a patient, but I’m calling without her knowledge. My questions are hypothetical.” That didn’t come out right. It made her sound dismissive. “Preliminary, I mean.”
She’d looked up the transplant procedure online, of course. She still needed details, still had questions, but the gist of it seemed to be that, well, it was major surgery. As such, it scared the hell out of her—overall dislike of hospitals notwithstanding. But well-regarded medical professionals the world over would not routinely perform an operation on healthy people if it wasn’t by and large safe. Would they?
Data analysis was literally in her blood. After more than a week of obsessing, she’d moved beyond reacting off-the-cuff. She couldn’t in good conscience rule this out, couldn’t decide how she felt about any of it, until she knew more. More than some website would say.
“I see.” The woman sounded wary, and Caroline hoped she was an operator and not the actual point of contact. She’d found this number online, dialed it blind. “What did you want to know?”
Caroline closed her eyes, trying to pretend this was a work call. Speccing out a new venue for a client. Merely the middleman. “If I were calling about being tested—to see if I’d be a match for this person—what exactly would that entail?”
“Well, for starters, you’d have called the wrong number. This is the office for the transplant coordinator. You’d start with the living donor coordinator. They’d put the request in the system, and someone from our office would call you back to go through our preevaluation survey. It takes fifteen to twenty minutes, and probably covers a lot of the specifics you’re wondering about—your own medical history and whether you might be eligible, but also what the testing involves, first steps, et cetera. I can give you that number, if you’d like?”
“Why do I call them, if you’re the ones doing the evaluation?”
A keyboard clacked in the background. “A transplant might seem like one process, but it involves two patients: The prospective donor becomes one the instant they enter our system. As such, donors have their own coordinators for the sake of their own best interests and confidentiality, as well as the recipients’.”
“Can you just tell me what that first test is, exactly?”
“If you are deemed eligible—no disqualifying medical condition or obesity—the first step is a simple blood test.”
“Just my blood type?”
“Not quite that simple. They’re looking for a tissue match. Antibodies, things like that.”
“And if I’m not an initial tissue match, that’s it? No go?”
“No go.”
“And if I am?”
“Much more involved evaluations follow, both to check for other compatibilities and to ensure the donor’s safety.”
“So I could initially be a tissue match but turn out not to be a candidate?”
“Quite often, unfortunately.”
Unfortunately. Right. That was supposed to be the mind-set of the people calling.
“Did you want tha
t number for the donor coordinator?”
Did she? That was the question.
Walt was livid with Sela. Incensed in a way Caroline had never seen him, in a way that made her tears-in-her-eyes grateful she was not the object of his ire. He seemed convinced Sela had had some master plan—to lure Caroline closer with bittersweet thoughts of all the years they could’ve been there for each other, then ensnare her with an appeal only a cold heart would deny.
Caroline wasn’t so sure. Once the shock of Sela’s circumstances wore off, her mental devil’s advocate kicked in. Did reaching out to someone qualify as manipulation if you had independently valid reasons for doing it—aside from something you might, yes, secretly hope they might do for you? Caroline, not Walt, had witnessed the wistful way Sela traced Rebecca’s old school-day commute, how she’d hugged herself fiercely on the sidewalk when she’d thought no one was watching. Caroline, not Walt, had heard the way she’d talked with Lucy about her fears, offering a solution that was both empowering and tender—and effective, as Lucy hadn’t had a bedtime issue since. Caroline, not Walt, had seen the conflict in Sela’s eyes when they exchanged hesitant details about their lives to date. The look not of someone fishing for a sisterly connection but of someone open to one in spite of reservations.
A look a lot like the one she saw in the mirror.
Maybe Caroline should have guessed she was missing something big. What if she’d asked ahead of the visit, as any good hostess should, if Sela had dietary restrictions? What if she’d shared the details of their father’s heart attack when it happened—Sela had called while she was at the hospital, after all—or later, in the interest of relevant family medical history, asking if Sela had information to volunteer in turn? Caroline hadn’t willfully avoided these topics, per se; and if they’d come up, would Sela have lied, evaded? Caroline didn’t think so. Had Sela been obligated to tell them something so personal from the start? Would Caroline have done so in her shoes?
Maybe she didn’t feel the anger Walt did simply because his burned hot enough for both of them—so hot, in fact, she couldn’t help backing away from it, for fear that mere proximity could singe her. What she felt toward Sela was sympathy. To have her pregnancy end with such a tragic diagnosis—to be gifted with a new life born from hers, with the very big caveat that she might not live to see it through—and then to lose Rebecca so soon afterward? To see her marriage crumble in the midst of it? Yes, Sela’s situation extended to Caroline in ways she’d rather it didn’t. The person inside that situation, though, had the worst of it, by far.
But when Sela wrote to Caroline her first night back in North Carolina, she didn’t speak of her own plight.
I don’t know what the right way to tell you was, but I wish I’d done it better—from the beginning. I guess I got caught up in the possibility of having someone like you and your wonderful family in my life—in any capacity. And, if I’m honest, I underestimated how wonderful it would be to spend time with people who didn’t know, who treated me like a normal person and not like some ticking clock. I let it go on too long. But you have to believe me: I don’t wish any responsibility for my health upon you. There’s nothing I’d like better than to go back to how things were before you all knew, as much as that’s possible. For my sake and for yours.
Caroline could not undo the way she’d felt that night before she found out the truth: convinced Sela could be the one positive in this whole negative mess. A sister, a sister-in-law, with a nephew in tow. A “real aunt,” Lucy had called her without even knowing. What did it say about Caroline if Sela being sick changed her openness to any of those things? Even if Walt’s take did have a grain of truth to it, could you fault someone for trying to save her own life?
In Sela’s shoes, Caroline would go to any lengths—if not for her own sake, for her children’s.
“Ma’am? Would you like that number? Do you have a pen?”
If Walt knew she was doing anything other than dismissing this option out of hand, he’d be beside himself. Not with anger, necessarily, but worry, protest.
Anguish.
If she wasn’t a tissue match, it was a no go. She’d be off the hook—no decision to make. And even if she did pass the initial screen, she could still be ruled out—very often, unfortunately. Someone else would blessedly do the ruling. Not her. Not Walt. They could be a united front again, at least, on that much.
The real question was, once she started down a path she wasn’t sure she wanted to continue, could she stop?
“I might as well get it while I have you,” she told the woman. “Thanks for your help.”
22
Sela
Janie poked her head through the door to the waiting room and, in lieu of calling her next patient’s name, sang out, “You can go your own waaaaaay!”
A few curious heads turned as Sela got to her feet, smiling sheepishly.
“I can’t tell you what a relief it is to finally have a nurse who remembers my divorce anthem from visit to visit,” Sela told her once they’d reached the relative privacy of the exam room. “It’s tiresome filling out the same questionnaire every time.”
“I aim to deliver that personal touch.” Janie winked. “Says here you haven’t been feeling well? Tell me what’s been going on.”
Janie showed no inkling of suspecting that a real answer to this question would far exceed the time she had available. “Well, I went out of town for a weekend, and made the mistake of thinking I could eat like a regular person just that once.”
“Ah. You’re back to your strict self now, though?”
“For two weeks. And I swear I didn’t slip all that much in the first place. But I can’t get myself right. My energy isn’t back.”
“Possibly the problem was never your intake. Anything else different?”
Without Caroline to write to and hear from, without the possibility of what their relationship might mean to Sela—not just to her kidneys, damn it, Walt—without that hope of filling some corner of the gaping void her mother and husband and health had left in her life, everything seemed different. Unfamiliar, too, was the slow-growing anger she’d found herself directing at Ecca’s memory since discovering those red-handed emails. Righteous indignation toward Hannah was quicker, easier. But this—she felt as if she were stuck holding something she’d never wanted to be handed and couldn’t find a place to put it down.
“Not really.”
“How about exercise?”
It was all she could do to throw a tennis ball for Oscar in her little fenced backyard, to play a simple game of indoor hide-and-seek with Brody.
“Not happening. But I think that’s more of a consequence than a cause? My body feels … I don’t know. Heavy.”
“Let’s check you over.”
Janie did the requisite blood draws and an extra-thorough job of the usual exam. Then she sat across from Sela and leaned in.
“Did you go to the seminar we talked about?” Sela nodded. “And are you following through? You seemed to have reservations, before. Did it help with those?”
“It…” She didn’t want to disappoint her. “Brought some clarity.”
“Good. So how’s it going? Putting out the call, I mean?”
Putting out a call did seem less daunting now that it was off her to-do list. If she’d decided this was too much to ask of someone she did know, how could she ask it of someone she didn’t? But she couldn’t see how to explain her stance without passing implicit judgment on the fact that Janie had done this very thing—accepted kidneys from not one but three living donors. Sela didn’t judge her; in fact, she envied Janie’s ability to accept the gift with more gratitude than doubt, with more love than fear that she might prove unworthy.
“I haven’t rented a bullhorn yet. But I was going to ask my favorite comic about incorporating my ask into her act.” A good-natured, far-fetched enough duck of the question.
Plus, she’d found some video of the nurse on YouTube. Just snippets—a two-minut
e bit here, an improv skit there—but quite funny.
Janie made a psssshhhh sound. “If you’d ever seen your alleged favorite comic’s act, you’d know she already does.”
Sela squinted at her. Surely she was joking.
“Hey, even in stand-up some things are off-limits—unless you’re the one in the position. You think I’d miss the opportunity to milk my donor kidney for material? I’m taking everything I can from this thing for as long as it lets me.”
“Seriously?”
“WebMD describes kidneys as ‘sophisticated trash collectors.’ My kidneys are more like my actual trash collector, on a windy day. Ever try to clean up that mess strewn across your yard? Turns out the rest of my organs are as lazy as he is, so they’re like, Fuck that, leave it, the wind will pick up again eventually. And somehow I’m the one who gets stuck with this giant fine for littering. I mean, it says it’s a hospital bill, but it feels like a fine. Because the mess is still there, but now I’m broke, too.”
Sela burst out laughing.
“It helps when my sister’s in the audience so that after I explain I have her kidney, I can punch myself in the side and have her yell, ‘Ouch!’”
Sela laughed harder. And then, somehow, she was crying. Aimless, ugly sobs. Again. What was it about Janie? How did the only person in Sela’s life she could laugh with about this keep dissolving her into tears?
Maybe it wasn’t so much Janie as the way Janie made her realize how much she missed laughing with anyone else.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry, Sela. I didn’t mean to—”
“No, no.” She sniffed, raising her head. “Clearly I do need to come see your set. Just maybe not when I’m feeling so poorly.”
“I know not everyone has a sister who—”
She shook her head, hard enough to silence the appeal. Even in cataloging the risks versus rewards, Sela hadn’t gotten so far as to thoroughly consider the physicality of going about life with a piece of Caroline inside of her. Of anyone inside of her. How could anything seem so intimate and so impersonal at the same time, that humans could be reduced to machines in need of a replacement part?
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