A Million Reasons Why

by Jessica Strawser

  “And…” Leigh glanced at the house again. “It’s clear she’s not expecting you.”

  Caroline felt the embarrassed flush return. “I tried to explain on the phone,” she began, but Leigh shook her head.

  “I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been beside myself trying to figure out…” She seemed to catch herself. “Please. I’d really like to talk with you before you go in. Would you come with me? Fifteen minutes. That’s all I ask.”

  Walt met Caroline’s eyes and nodded, almost imperceptibly. They could hardly not go, at this point. Even if Caroline did feel uncomfortably like a coconspirator.

  “Come with you where?” she acquiesced. The concern melted from Leigh’s face, replaced by a genuine but fleeting smile. She was already headed past Caroline, to her car.

  “Follow me,” she commanded. “There’s someone you should meet.”

  * * *

  Caroline would not have knowingly agreed to this, but it was too late now.

  She and Walt sat on a brown leather couch in the bland, unfeeling second-floor walk-up where Sela’s bland, unfeeling ex-husband now lived. Actually, he’d just finished explaining they were technically still married, as if this somehow made the situation—ambush was more like it—more acceptable. Caroline disliked Doug with surprising intensity as she watched him pace to the tiny adjoining kitchen and back.

  Then again, she already had, sight unseen.

  “I’m so glad Leigh ran into you,” he said. Caroline cringed at his sincerity. Where had it been when it mattered to Sela? He held out two cans of soda, and numbly she and Walt accepted, though neither of them ever drank the stuff. The apartment bore the sparse look of a divorcé—or an all-but-technically divorcé—avoiding calling an unloved place home. No pictures on the walls. Few signs of life, save for a fleece throw draping the sofa behind them and a half-zipped gym bag discarded on the floor by the door. He carried over two stools from the kitchen and motioned for Leigh to join him in sitting to face the couple. She’d been hanging awkwardly inside the door, an instigator turned oddly reluctant, but she obeyed, not meeting Doug’s eyes.

  Caroline watched as Leigh scooted her seat farther away, giving him the wider berth of a necessary evil.

  “Sela has been increasingly … fragile,” Leigh began. “Since Cincinnati.”

  Must they harp on this? Caroline had made it clear she hadn’t known. But before she could go on the defensive, Walt cleared his throat. “I’m afraid that might be my fault.” He sounded truly sorry, and she dropped a hand onto the knee of his jeans.

  “Our fault,” she corrected. “But that’s why we’re here. To make it right.”

  “It’s not your fault.” Doug ran a hand through his hair, in the annoying manner of a parent debating how much complexity a child might be able to grasp. “I don’t blame you for saying no,” he continued. “I just—selfishly—wish you hadn’t made up your mind so quickly. This will be a long haul for her, and—”

  “I’m sorry?” Caroline interrupted. Walt peered inside his soda can as if he weren’t sure what he’d find and took a tentative sip.

  “The kidney,” Doug said. “I know it’s a big ask. I mean, that’s what it’s called. But I think when you said no so outright, it was her last—”

  Walt coughed loudly, choking on the carbonation, or the assumption, or maybe both. She was afraid to look at him.

  “I did not say no outright,” she said carefully.

  Leigh bit her lip. “You didn’t?”

  Caroline shook her head, suddenly unsure. Sela was no mind reader, after all. “We might have given that impression,” she admitted. “At first.”

  “I gave it.” Walt bowed his head, and Caroline observed his new, subversive demeanor with detached fascination. Maybe he was overcompensating, overconcerned about getting off on the right foot with Leigh and Doug, but Caroline wasn’t feeling so eager to please. Leigh might have meant well, but Doug had left Sela in the midst of this—even their infant son hadn’t been enough to keep him home.

  “I’m trying to get her to try this again, talk again,” Caroline explained, assuming her I’m not the bad guy here stance. A stance typically followed by nervous rambling. “About her condition, her options. Our options, now that I’m a match. But she’s shut down.”

  “Did you say you’re a match?” Doug’s mouth had gone slack-jawed, his eyes wide.

  She realized too late she’d missed an opportunity to keep this between her and Sela. Leigh and Doug had been under the impression she’d ruled herself out. Which meant Sela probably hadn’t wanted them to know. Caroline could only nod, wishing she could take the slipup back.

  “Sela knows?” Seeing Leigh’s equally wide eyes, Caroline registered the pressure drop in the air.

  “Only the first blood test, tissue test.” Caroline’s voice sounded thinner than before, as if she were speaking into an empty auditorium instead of this boxy storage unit of a room. “It’s not that significant. The next round is where most people get ruled out.”

  But Leigh was shaking her head.

  “With Sela, nobody has been even close to compatible. At any point.”

  Caroline’s mouth went dry. Sela had told her she was tough to match, but Caroline hadn’t realized she’d been referring to round one, to tissue alone and not substance, shape. Did this mean that if they’d gotten this far, they had a better chance of going all the way? She swallowed hard, keenly aware of Walt’s silence beside her. “Even so,” she said unconvincingly.

  “Look,” Walt said, shifting on the cushion. “We haven’t made a decision about moving ahead. It’s clear how much you both care about Sela, and we’re happy she has that support, but you have to understand this has come at us really fast. We have young kids, and there might be a family history—we don’t want to subject ourselves to judgment here, with all due respect. It’s a personal decision. A private decision. But we don’t take it lightly.” Caroline felt the tension in her body begin to ease. She couldn’t, in that moment, have spoken for herself so well. He really had heard her yesterday. “We’re here to understand more, and regardless of what happens from here, we’re not going to turn our backs on her. Certainly not on her son.”

  “Her son,” Leigh repeated, the words flat. Beyond flat—concave.

  Caroline looked to Doug. While she found it impossible not to soften at any mention of her own children, his face seemed incongruously hard. Maybe that was what happened when your child’s mother had her life on the line. Even so, maybe it was better that he’d left if he couldn’t handle this.

  “I haven’t even met Brody yet,” she said, waiting for him to give in, smile, gesture to the room down the hall where his son came to stay and tell her what a sweet kid he was, how every other weekend together was never enough. “But parent to parent, I assure you he is my concern as much as Sela is. He’s the reason I would never ‘make up my mind so quickly,’ as you put it.”

  Doug closed his eyes, shaking his head. Beside him, Leigh dropped her face into her hands. For a long, bizarre moment, they both stayed that way—stone still. The only sound in the room was the muffled snuffling when Leigh began to cry.

  Caroline reached for Walt, and he caught her confusion in his warm hand, wrapping his free arm reassuringly around the small of her back. Complicated as this trip had first seemed by his presence, she was suddenly and overwhelmingly grateful he’d come—enough to blink back tears of her own, to cradle a knot of emotion in her throat.

  She might not have sensed what was coming. Not yet.

  Only that something was not right.

  Something no parent should have to face alone.

  When Doug’s eyes opened, they held so much pain Caroline faltered. Maybe she had him pegged wrong. Maybe—

  “You can’t meet Brody,” he said, so quietly she had to strain to hear.

  She leaned reflexively into Walt, catching his expression from the corner of her eye. He looked every bit as defensive as she felt. Caroline didn’t unders
tand. Sela had tried to keep her away, but Leigh had said she’d been right to come, only then she’d brought her here to be—what? Guilt tripped? Chastised? Sent away?

  “Why not?” Her voice came out as a whisper.

  “Brody was born much too premature. He didn’t survive.”

  36

  Sela

  Leigh was probably telling them right now.

  Sela could only watch helplessly through the blinds as her friend intercepted Caroline and Walt on the path. What a loop-the-loop of emotions: the spontaneous jolt of involuntary joy at the sight of her sister, the crash of humiliation at remembering why this was not a joyful thing, the mounting dread at the slow-motion sight of Leigh blocking their way, turning their heads, leading them off.

  As Caroline climbed back into the car, she’d stopped to take a halting look around, and Sela wanted so badly to burst out the front door and down the walk, she could almost feel the cold air on her face, the exhilaration of Caroline turning, smiling.

  “What are you doing here?” Sela would call, delighted, arms outstretched for a hug, legs carrying her faster than the reality of her disease would allow.

  And Caroline and Walt would forget all about Leigh and follow Sela instead.

  It didn’t matter anyway, why they’d come.

  She knew they wouldn’t stay.

  Leigh herself hadn’t stayed. She’d come back, sure, but only after Ecca was gone and the guilt got to her. Sela and Leigh’s falling-out after their pregnancies diverged did not occur in a vacuum. Nor did her subsequent split with Doug. Ecca was the only one to understand any of it. Maybe if Sela had known her mother’s days were so numbered, she’d have tried harder with the others.

  She held to the belief, though, that she shouldn’t have had to.

  Then today, Leigh was so confused about why Sela had told Caroline not to come. Sela found it hard to explain—largely because she did want to see her sister, to be sisters—and Leigh’s familiar frustration flared. All Sela could think to say was Sorry.

  Such perfectly terrible timing, for Caroline to pull up right then. Walt, too, for added effect. Sela found herself swallowing the sort of inappropriately giddy laugh that swells up inside you at a funeral. Yet equally strong was the urge to smash something. To revel in the forbidden release: set the giggle free, wind back her arm, and let go.

  Where had Leigh taken them? How long until Caroline came back? Surely she wouldn’t drive this far and then turn and go all the way home? Maybe she would. She’d been steered off course easily enough—a few words exchanged, an agreeable nod.

  Caroline and Leigh would hit it off. Wherever they were, no doubt they were already trading stories, filling gaps. Leigh, of course, would think Caroline’s was good news. But then she’d go and ruin it by telling her own version.

  Sela should have been used to this feeling by now. Of being unmoored, caught in the current, at its mercy. Only for Brody—waiting there on the shore, calling for her—had she found the strength to keep swimming. To follow instructions, no matter how counterintuitive: into the riptide, trusting that if she waited out the exhaustion, the relentless pull would at last let her go.

  Now, she lifted her head from the tumbling waves and saw nothing but a barren swath of hot, dry sand.

  No Brody.

  Nothing to stay afloat for.

  She let the slats of the blinds fall closed. She’d been standing here since they’d left, icy fingers curled on the windowpane, bracing against collapse. Waiting, she supposed, for what came next. Her best guess was, either Caroline and Walt would be right back, declining to be sidelined by whatever Leigh proposed, or this would take a while. Possibly an indefinite while.

  Oscar whined at her feet. She’d been doing her best to ignore the way he was circling them, trying to detect what was so interesting outside. She crossed to the back door and let him out into the yard. His safely fenced happy place. Where he deserved to be.

  As the riptide persisted, stronger now than ever, the stairs were the soft ocean floor beneath her bare, swollen feet—chilled through, but even socks felt constraining these days, and just as well. This way she could feel the sand shifting, giving way with every step, each brush against the bottom a reminder that she had tried. She had tried. She could stop fooling herself into thinking the ground might become solid enough for her to drop anchor. Its claws would merely drag through the sludge with a uselessness she could no longer bear.

  Doug, Leigh, now Caroline—they’d chased Brody away, or lured him, maybe. But could she blame them? It was unfair of her to expect someone so tiny to stay and hold so much weight.

  She ran her fingers softly over his closed bedroom door as the undertow pulled her down the hall. The crocheted baby blue B Ecca had made still hung from the doorknob, and it swayed at her touch, like a half-hearted wave to someone you’ve already said good-bye to.

  The current carried her past the bathroom, with its dreaded scale and mirrors and reminders of things her body’s systems declined to do. Past the bedroom, with the heating blanket and sickly smell and vacant California king that reduced her to a fraction of what she’d been. A half of a couple.

  She’d tried to tell them all:

  She didn’t do things by halves.

  In her studio, one last wave deposited her in front of her mother’s old nightstand, sturdy and reliable. It had stood by Ecca’s side until the end, until the morning Sela had gone looking and found her still in bed, later than she’d ever have slept. Now it sat here at hers, so she wouldn’t be alone. Sela had chosen carefully indeed, the things of her mother’s she’d held on to. She crouched as low as the fluid in her joints would allow and reached into the corner of the bottom shelf, felt for the hand-carved pillbox Ecca had brought back, as a young twenty-something, from Europe.

  “I knew I couldn’t linger there forever. I always felt like a visitor, no matter how long I stayed,” Ecca had told her. Sela had just that day been diagnosed, and she’d been sitting at the kitchen table of her childhood, hunched over lemon tea, letting the steam work at her tears. “I loved the places I lived there, but none of them felt like home. At the same time, I didn’t want to come back—to face my awful parents and all the things I’d felt so eager to escape from. It’s a desolate feeling, to want nothing more than to stay somewhere, but not be able to think of a single somewhere you’d like to be.”

  Ecca had placed the box on the table in front of Sela and pried open the hinged lid with a fingernail. “I brought this back with me, in case I never found a place.”

  Somehow, Sela had instantly known what those three tiny pills were. But her mother explained anyway: a guaranteed fatal dose or your lira back. Painless, quick, and unavailable stateside. Sela had recoiled, unable to comprehend that her mother—so at ease with her art, so in control of her world, so present for the people in her circle—had ever felt that lost.

  “Did you ever take one?” She’d held her breath.

  “There’s no point in taking one. It’s all three, or none at all.”

  “What happened then?” she’d asked, sniffing hard.

  “I met your father.” It was the only time Ecca had ever spoken of him voluntarily.

  “And he was—?” Sela couldn’t find the words for what she’d wanted to ask. You loved him, after all? He showed you … something new? The value of life?

  Ecca had placed her open hand against the gentle rise of Sela’s belly, where her pregnancy had barely begun to show. “Not him. You. He gave me you. A place to be.”

  Sela had marveled that a single touch could transmit so much love, so much hope. Not just to her but through her. She’d had no doubt that in that instant, Brody could feel the beating of her own mother’s heart. Three generations of longing.

  “This disease is scary and horrible and unfair, especially finding out now.” Ecca’s words had been somehow both soft and firm, like her touch. “But maybe it’s good you didn’t know before—it will be easier to bear now. Because you already h
ave, right here, the reason you’ll never have use for a box like this. Having someone to fight for is no small thing. It’s everything.”

  “Then why,” Sela had asked through fresh tears, “do you still have it?”

  Ecca hadn’t hesitated. “In case you ever needed to know.”

  The truth of that talk, the memory of that box, the contrast between the woman her mother had once been and the woman Sela knew her to be, all of it sustained her through the early, baffling months of her illness, through the remaining, hopeful months of her pregnancy.

  And it haunted her from the day she was admitted to the hospital with preterm pain to the day she came across the box, not long after Ecca’s funeral. For an instant, she’d been seized with fear—conjuring anew that horrible picture of Ecca so cold and still in her bed—but no, all three pills remained.

  Ecca never would have left the world by choice. Unless, perhaps, Sela had left it first.

  Her fingers closed around the wood’s complicated surface now, and she slid to the floor, leaning into the heirloom shelves for comfort, bracing for the last tsunami of a wave.

  The box was a clamshell in her hands, holding three pearls that were the only thing she could fathom trading her son’s life for.

  37

  Caroline

  Doug and I always thought we wanted a big family, but things didn’t work out that way.

  So many of the things Sela had told her were imprinted on Caroline’s mind—as if on some level, she’d intuited all along that there was more to know, deeper to delve.

  He reminds me of myself, Sela had written of Brody in one of her early letters. The way I can tell he’s dreaming his stuffed animals to life, bringing them along on his adventures. And of Doug, too, the way he acts like a little man of the house, sometimes even checking on me like I’m his responsibility, instead of the other way around.

  She remembered as clearly their heart-to-heart in person, on the subject of Doug, how things had fallen apart.