A Million Reasons Why

by Jessica Strawser

  “Your wife would like to join,” Mom had huffed.

  “And your son-in-law.” Walt didn’t miss a beat.

  Caroline worried someone might suggest the whole family go, but by then even her good-natured in-laws wanted an out. They volunteered to keep the kids, saying how good a walk would be for Fred’s heart, how nice for him to have time with Caroline.

  Hardly nice. But necessary.

  “I understood,” Mom said now through gritted teeth, “that it was a possibility, but not that she’d keep it from us if it happened.”

  “To be fair, not discussing it was exactly what you wanted. You can’t have it both ways.”

  She whirled back toward Caroline, though her charge down the sidewalk didn’t slow.

  “They’re calling her Aunt?”

  “Term of endearment,” Walt repeated, sticking to his story.

  “I understand how it sounds to you,” Caroline said, calm, “but we chose it to maintain ordinary. We use it with all our old friends. Which is who they think she is.”

  “Ordinary!” Mom scoffed. “Honestly, Caroline. Don’t you think I’ve been through enough with this? I had to find out she’s in your life—in my grandkids’ lives—like that?”

  “Look,” Caroline tried. “I understand you want everything to go back to how it was. But—”

  “Not at all.” Sarcasm dripped from the words. “I adore having my husband sleep in the guest room. It’s how I planned to spend my golden years.”

  Caroline’s jaw went slack. Her parents had given such a strong impression that things were resolved between them.

  Then again, this was a couple that whispered their arguments.

  “Tell us straight,” Mom said. “Do you plan to see her again? Riley seems to think so. And speaking of, what if Sela decides to tell the kids who she is? Who’s to stop her?”

  “It’s complicated,” Caroline mumbled.

  “We’re aware of that,” Dad said. Was he? He hadn’t asked what Sela was like or how the visit had gone. Hadn’t done anything but trail behind his wife, biting down on her ultimatum.

  “It’s more complicated than you’re aware,” Walt said flatly. His eyes met Caroline’s, imploring her that if she didn’t explain, he would. This, she knew, was why he’d come along.

  “In what way?”

  Caroline took a deep breath. For not the first time today, she understood how Sela might have felt in the hot seat. “Sela is sick,” she began.

  By the time she’d finished telling them, they’d stopped walking, the situation’s gravity pulling their feet to a halt. They huddled on the corner of a four-way stop in the center of the development, impervious to the occasional passing car or kid on a bike.

  “You can’t seriously be considering this,” Dad said finally. “If someone has to, for God’s sake, let me.”

  “Absolutely not!” Mom looked stricken, and Caroline put out a hand to calm her.

  “You’re not healthy enough, Dad. They’d never approve you. Not alive, anyway.”

  “Caroline!” Mom shook her off, glowering.

  “I’m just explaining.”

  “It’s out of the question, then,” he said, firm. “There can’t be sufficient data on the outcomes of these procedures—they’re too evolving, too new. No way can they say for certain this wouldn’t negatively impact your life twenty, thirty years down the road.”

  Irritation flared in her. He was himself thirty-five years past an ill-considered, life-altering decision, hardly in a position to preach. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  “Has anyone bothered to study how many donors regret their decisions later?”

  “Yes.” She tossed her head, smug. “Two percent.”

  He stared at her for a quiet moment. “Too high,” he muttered. But he deflated, seeing how capable she was of approaching this exactly the way he’d taught her to.

  Seeing that if she did, he might not like the outcome.

  “Backing up, this raises obvious questions about Sela’s motives,” Walt cut in, unmoved.

  “They’re not obvious,” Caroline argued, turning back to her folks. “I feel awful for her.”

  Mom really looked at her then, at last. “Of course you do,” she said, her defensiveness falling away. “At her age, and with a child of her own? My God, that’s sad.”

  “She doesn’t have anyone to turn to, Mom. Even if she did reach out to me for that reason—not just looking for a donor, I mean, but for support at a tough time—would that be so wrong? We are sisters.”

  “Half sisters,” Dad corrected.

  She looked at him sharply. He was so disappointing lately. “She’s the only one I’ve got.”

  “Far as we know,” Mom drawled.

  Caroline looked from one angry parent to the other. This really was worse than she’d thought. “I just feel awful,” she repeated uselessly.

  Mom touched her arm. “As long as you don’t feel so awful that you do something crazy. Like cut out a kidney.”

  “She’s not going to,” Walt assured her, looking to Caroline for confirmation.

  She evaded his gaze. “I don’t want to,” she said honestly. “But it is complicated. And sad. And I’m the one in this position—not any of you. I’m not sure I can dismiss it that easily.”

  “You’re not sure?” Walt exploded. “For all you know, you could have a genetic tag for this condition yourself. Or the kids could. You think I’m unsympathetic to Sela, but I’m not. I’m just more sympathetic to you.”

  He turned on his in-laws, eyes blazing. “You don’t want to hear this, but you are the ones who’ve made Caroline feel responsibility for Sela. She’s been the only one willing to acknowledge this woman’s existence, and maybe that was okay when no one knew the load that would put on Caroline’s shoulders, but it’s not okay now.” He stood taller. “I love my wife enough to be the one to say you need to find another way to deal with this.”

  He slipped his hand into Caroline’s, and she let him. This was what had always been best about them: that they could disagree and still be on the same team. That he had her back, was her partner above all else, and had been from the very beginning.

  They’d always been different from other couples.

  But now, they were different from the couple they’d been at the start, too.

  I love my wife enough, he’d said.

  He never would have said that then.

  24

  Sela

  Two years ago today, Brody was born.

  He came out swinging—fighting, wisely but futilely, against the false start—and she joined him on the front lines, never leaving his side, reassuring him they’d defeat the odds together, come out stronger. And for the next two years, he never left hers—even as his battle wound down and hers was just beginning.

  Some mothers spoke of their children’s infancies passing in a blur. Not Sela. She’d felt every bit of these one hundred and four weeks. Seven hundred and thirty days, the hardest she’d known, and yet in these same two years she’d fully realized the love only Brody could bring.

  For two years, she’d had the gift of seeing him thrive.

  For two years, he’d given her the gift of witnessing her survive.

  The cake she baked was two-tiered, round, orange-cone-colored frosting carpeted with brown sprinkles in her best simulation of a construction site. There was no real party planned, no reason to be showy, but a sleepless night found her browsing toddler birthday cakes on Pinterest, and next thing she knew she was ordering little plastic toppers: a cement mixer, a bulldozer, an excavator, like the ones in Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site—the board book Doug brought home the day they found out they were having a boy. Hers didn’t look exactly like the picture, but it was passable, icing firming up in its hiding place in the fridge now. She was remiss to cheat on her kidney diet, but this she’d earned.

  Doug was the first to arrive. “Daddy!” Brody squealed, catching him around the legs as Oscar danced
around the doorway, his nails scritching across the hardwood. Doug held a fat bouquet of two-toned roses, and Sela buried her nose gratefully in their cream centers, fingering the red outer petals. She wouldn’t protest a gift today—not from the father of her child.

  “Come in. Pizza’s in the oven.” The low-sodium concoction crisping at four hundred degrees tasted more like cardboard than any pizza she’d ever craved, but at least it sounded festive.

  Doug hung his jacket on the banister, where he always had, and nodded at the display she’d arranged on the entryway table. “Who all sent cards?”

  “My mother’s parents—that was nice.” She still thought of them more as Ecca’s parents than as her grandparents—she didn’t remember them acknowledging her own childhood birthdays, after all—but had to hand it to them for trying. She pointed down the line, ticking off the well-wishers. “Ivy and everyone at Aesthetic, neighbors on both sides, even the NICU staff.” If Doug noticed that nothing from his parents or siblings had arrived, he didn’t flinch. Then again, they’d probably sent them to his address. Sela tried not to pass judgment. Divorce, like illness, seemed more common with age, and she and Doug were facing both prematurely. She couldn’t expect the others affected to know how to handle it any better than they did.

  He nodded approvingly but didn’t move to read the sentiments inside. “How are—” The ring of the doorbell cut him off, and Oscar started up his dance again. From the other side of the dead bolt came the muffled high notes of Annie’s excited chatter and Leigh shushing her, issuing some behavior warning. Sela pulled open the door.

  “Piper sleep,” Annie stage-whispered. “Quiet, goodness’ sake.”

  Leigh hoisted the infant car seat where Piper remained “sleep” higher on her arm. “We don’t have to whisper,” she told Annie. “We just can’t yell.” She smiled sheepishly at Sela. “Sorry. Van got held up at a church thing, and I didn’t want to be late.”

  “We’re happy the three of you are here.” Sela waved them in. “The four of you,” she corrected, eyeing the hint of roundness in Leigh’s silhouette as she set the baby inside the relative dimness of the dining room.

  Doug looked from one to the other, squinting into Sela’s meaning. “Are you—?”

  “It’s early,” Leigh said quickly. “So please keep it quiet. But yes, looks that way.”

  “Wow. Congrats.” He glanced again at Sela, and she busied herself with helping Annie out of her jacket, self-conscious at how obviously he was checking on her and how flat his response sounded. Doug directed so much concern at her that it was sometimes easy for people to overlook the weight of his own version of their tragedy, even if he’d walked away from it, even if he could theoretically start over in ways Sela could not. It was harder, of course, on this particular day, but still. If Sela could be gracious, so could he.

  “It’s wonderful news,” she agreed, smiling brightly at Leigh, who had indeed come around. She hadn’t had to say so: Sela had seen it in the way her friend had taken to cradling her abdomen with a soft, unconscious smile. She knelt to Annie’s level, trying not to grimace as she did. She’d chosen wide-leg pants to hide the extent of the swelling, but her skin was stretched painfully tight, like an overinflated balloon. “I set some cool new blocks out in the living room, if you want to play?”

  Annie scurried in the direction Brody had already gone, Oscar on her heels.

  “Drinks? I have plenty of good stuff I’m not allowed to have.” This was not to exclude her pregnant guest. In Sela’s book, the “good stuff” included most anything that wasn’t water.

  Within minutes they were gathered around the kitchen island—beer for Doug, crushed ice for Sela, soda for Leigh—while the kids made a loud mess of the coffee table, building towers and sending them crashing down. A joyful mess, Ecca would’ve called it. Sela’s childhood birthday parties had been small, simple—a few friends, a few games, a rare junk food free-for-all, and every year a new hand-painted banner reading Happy Sela Day—but oh, had they been joyful. Messy, too. She looked on wistfully as Annie erected a taller, skinnier stack, until she became aware that the adults’ pleasantries had faded into silence. That her guests were watching not the kids but her.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Doug began, “but you look like hell.”

  “No chance of taking that the wrong way,” Leigh deadpanned. But her smile didn’t reach her eyes.

  “I think I look pretty decent for stage four.” Sela shrugged.

  “Oh, no,” Leigh and Doug replied in unison, and Leigh flushed, so obviously not wanting to match him. “Since when?” she asked at the same time Doug said, “Because of Cincinnati?”

  Sela shook her head. “Can’t blame that. None of my symptoms are new, only worse. It happens, I guess: You slip almost overnight, no one knows why. Turns out my kidneys have had a milestone week.”

  “Besides this?” Leigh bit her lip.

  “Along with this. I’ve made the list. Officially.”

  “Oh, no,” Leigh said again, at the same time Doug said, “Good.” So much for matching.

  Leigh laughed nervously. “Did they give you, like, a number? I guess transplants aren’t like the deli counter.” She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Now serving ninety-two!”

  “If your deli has a yearlong line to even take a number, you gotta find a new deli.”

  Doug shook his head. “It takes a lot of nerve to make sick people hurdle so much red tape. But this is a relief, right? First hurdle complete.”

  Sela commanded her head to nod. She did not point out there was only one more stage to go, synonymous with end-stage renal failure. Or that her reaction had been more in line with Leigh’s, as if she now had the label to prove she was at the mercy of too many things.

  Avoid unnecessary stress, Janie had cautioned when she’d called with the latest. It can hold more power over your health than you know. She wanted Sela to come in, go over things in person, but what was the point? They’d entered the realm of inevitabilities.

  “Well, what now?” Doug, reporting for duty. “How do we get you up the list?”

  “We don’t. You remember about the point system.”

  They’d hashed it out, hypothetically, trying to figure out where she might fall in the database’s priority rankings. The vague answer was: somewhere in the middle. At least she wasn’t starting from last in line. For instance, she got points for being sensitized, and for being youngish. Until she aged out, anyway.

  “Can you imagine managing that process?” Leigh’s hand was on her abdomen again. “I mean, it’s up to someone to decide who’s next, and they have to do it based on a score?”

  Of course she could imagine. That was the question you contemplated in Sela’s shoes: whether one life is really worth more than another, when the system is structured not on whether to rank but on how. Did they have points for one’s place in the world? Would it be fair for, say, a mother to get a point for each child whose life would be forever altered without her? For a medical researcher to get a handful if his kidneys went out while working on the cure for cancer?

  The seminars told prospective donors that if anything went wrong with your remaining kidney, you’d go to the top of the transplant list. But it wasn’t quite that simple; what you got were extra points. Not a bypass, a head start. The list itself was fluid, recalibrated every time a kidney became available, as matching was a complex thing. Roughly one hundred thousand people were on it. Three thousand added every month. Of the mere seventeen thousand transplants performed a year, only a third came from living donors.

  Thirteen people died waiting every day.

  “We all manage the process, in a way,” Sela said gently. “If I bypassed the list to find a kidney on my own, that’s exactly what I’d be doing. Jumping the line.”

  Doug looked at her strangely. “That’s the donor’s decision. And right. It’s their kidney.”

  She’d tried, after that last face-to-face with Janie, to consider recon
sidering. To allow that maybe her emotional reaction to learning what this would mean—for Caroline or anyone else—needed time to settle. She’d gone so far as to search out donor experiences online and found an essay that had gone viral: “Why I Regret Donating My Kidney.” The thousands of comments were a firestorm: The irresponsibility of penning an alarmist piece! The insensitivity toward KCD sufferers! But also: empathy, commiseration.

  It didn’t matter that the rest of the search results seemed at a glance positive, even happy. Sela read no further.

  “I brought you something,” Leigh announced, pulling a small package from her purse. A rectangular box, wrapped in brown paper and tied with a simple string.

  Sela took her time untying it. Inside was an opaque white crystal, carved into an unlikely spiral.

  “Annie spotted these in the Crystal Mountain shop,” Leigh began. “She said it looked like a unicorn horn.”

  Sela took it gently into her hands. That was exactly what it looked like.

  “It’s called selenite. There’s a card in there that explains—it’s a healing stone, but more than that. People believe it can reenergize auras. It focuses positive energy, calms worries.… Anyway, it was impossible to read about it and not think of you. It practically has your name in it.”

  “I have always wanted a unicorn,” Sela said quickly, before Doug could jump in with some skeptical remark or, worse, suggest building a fortress of them around her. “Thanks, girl.”

  On the counter behind them, her phone began buzzing with a call. She ignored it, but Doug turned to look.

  “Sela? Your phone.” She resisted snapping that her kidneys were impaired, not her ears.

  “You know how I feel about people who can’t detach from those.”

  “Your phone!” He held it up so she could see the name on the screen.

  Caroline.

  “Oh.” The sound escaped her, unbidden. She was about to stammer that she could still let her half sister leave a message, return the call at a more appropriate time, but Leigh was out of her seat, waving her arms excitedly.