A Million Reasons Why

by Jessica Strawser

  She might be Sela’s best chance to get help.

  With any of it.

  38

  Sela

  “Mama?” Sela’s eyes fluttered open. Brody knelt before her on the studio floor, smiling his crooked grin. The late-afternoon sun, light and golden here on the warm side of all these windows, caught the shine of his soft brown hair, as silky now as it had been at birth. “The door,” he told her, as if she’d been playing a silly game.

  Had she been? She’d been sleeping so little. Feeling too much.

  Her neck cricked in protest as she lifted her head from where it had lolled against the bookcase. She must have fallen asleep, here of all places. How long ago? An hour? Two?

  A swift, efficient knock echoed from downstairs. The still-trying-to-be-polite kind that would soon turn to pounding. Then, the what about me? of Oscar’s bark from the backyard.

  She uncurled her legs in front of her, stretching her swollen joints, and a tiny box tumbled to the woven rug beneath her.

  She blinked at it, as if it were a remotely familiar face she couldn’t place.

  “What’s that?” Brody’s little fingers reached for the intricately carved wood, and she sprang into motion, snatching it away before they could connect. She was not too disoriented for horror and relief to seize her. How could she have been so thoughtless as to leave this out? Even to have stored it in the first place on this low shelf, where he could reach?

  But he hadn’t reached. No harm done. If you were lucky, your parental missteps came with these reprieves—you could learn the lesson without paying the price. She smoothed Brody’s hair, leaving his question unanswered, and scanned the room’s higher points for a better hiding spot. Nothing as mundane and predictable as the medicine cabinet would do. Not when Leigh and Doug and now Caroline had become so insistently nosy.

  Caroline. The realization jolted Sela to her feet. She’d been here, with Walt. Then gone, with Leigh. Sela moved her eyes quickly left to right a few times, a trick she’d learned to clear fog from the brain.

  This was why she was here. But had she—

  She opened the pillbox, counted. All three, still inside.

  The pounding crescendoed downstairs, accompanied by a muffled call through the door, words she couldn’t make out over Oscar’s barking, more insistent now.

  They were back, then. Just Caroline and Walt, or Leigh too? Damn it. Sela hadn’t meant to stay. But she couldn’t do anything about it now. Not on short notice, not in front of Brody.

  “Mama?” Brody was pointing at the door, confused—but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that he was here. A small miracle all over again. Tears pricked her eyes and she bent and gathered him in a fierce hug. He hadn’t left her, then, without saying good-bye. Maybe he could stay after all.

  That’s what she wanted. For him to stay and them to go.

  She carried him with her to the closet and tucked the box out of sight on the top shelf, behind a bin of plastic-sleeved prints she sometimes sold at art shows.

  The release of the dead bolt clicked from downstairs, and a woman called her name. A voice she’d conjured more often than she’d heard it—narrating the emails she sent, laughing over conversations Sela wouldn’t dare begin.

  Caroline.

  But Caroline couldn’t have gotten in alone.

  She hugged Brody tighter, rocking him. Why couldn’t everyone let them be? They’d done it before—thoroughly. What made them so sure she needed them now? Arrogance was what it was. Superiority. She scrunched her face in determination, fighting back fresh tears.

  The rattle of the back door in its frame. Excited retriever paws skidding on tile. Then: tentative footsteps on the stairs. She didn’t have much time to pull herself together. Or to—what? More voices, male this time: Walt? And the unmistakable baritone of Doug. Brody heard it, too, tried to wriggle free. “Daddy!” But she didn’t want to let him go. What if he liked things better Doug’s way? He might slip—the way children of divorce did from one parent’s house to the other’s—from one parent’s reality to the other’s. What if he left for good this time?

  She couldn’t keep hold of him, though—so squirmy. He broke loose from her grip just as Leigh appeared in the doorway—cheeks flushed, face pinched with worry—and Caroline squeezed in behind her, filling the frame with such eager pity it took all Sela’s self-control not to crawl under the desk behind her, plug her ears, and wail.

  Leigh had told Caroline, all of it. Sela had suspected as much, yet seeing it splayed across her sister’s face made it real.

  “Oh, thank God,” Leigh said, her hand flying to her chest. “When you didn’t answer, and the house was so quiet, I thought—I don’t know what I thought.”

  Sela’s eyes darted around the room. Where had Brody gone? The corners waited in vacant shadow. Everything so empty, so still, that his absence squeezed her heart until she didn’t know how it could still beat. Leigh and Caroline were blocking the exit—but had he slipped between their legs and run for Doug? Had Sela been too sidelined by panic to see him go?

  No. He was nowhere.

  Four expectant eyes locked on her face now, trying to be there for her, to be here for her. They didn’t change the fact that she’d never been more alone.

  “I must’ve fallen asleep,” Sela mumbled, stealing a futile look into the closet once more. The words came out garbled.

  Leigh frowned. “Here in the studio?”

  Sela snapped to then, shooting all her hurt and confusion and fury into one laser look at Leigh. A look that said, I’ll sleep anywhere I please in the privacy of my home—which you’ve invaded. A look that said, You don’t know what this is like, how this feels, and who are you to judge? A look that said, If you don’t like it, why don’t you leave?

  And by the way, I know what you’ve done. And it isn’t okay.

  Nothing is ever going to be okay.

  Leigh shrank inward, reading her loud and clear. Sela should dial it back, show that she understood her friend meant well. She knew how to do that. She’d swallowed her envy and anguish and stayed at Leigh’s side through two forays into early motherhood and another on the way—but she didn’t have it in her just now. Not in front of Caroline.

  Not without Brody.

  “Heya, sis,” Caroline said weakly. Sela’s eyes followed the voice. Walt did not appear at Caroline’s side, nor did Doug. They must have hung back, sent the women ahead. Typical.

  “I said not to come.”

  But her sister didn’t avert her gaze or flush the way Leigh had. She merely shrugged. “I said I needed to.”

  Caroline looked so open—her expression, her posture—the only way, Sela supposed, to leave room for so many unasked questions. They flowed from her sister in strands, wove themselves into braids, coiled around Sela’s ankles until she feared that with a single tug, they might pull her legs out from under her.

  “They told you I’m crazy.” Might as well come out with it.

  “Nobody said that,” Leigh interjected, recovering from the stare-down. But Caroline’s silence told Sela otherwise. She imagined the cords tightening around her ankles. A warning.

  Then Doug was there. A hand on Leigh’s shoulder, a panting dog at his feet. Even Oscar was eyeing Sela warily, not sure he should enter all the way.

  “They needed to know,” Doug said, too calmly. “That Brody isn’t real.”

  Sela’s breath caught as she stepped back, putting as much distance as she could between them until the hard edge of her mother’s bookcase met her spine.

  This. This was a one-sentence summation of everything that was wrong with Doug. Of all the reasons why he could never stay, even if he wanted to.

  “He’s real,” she snarled. She looked to Caroline. “You think I don’t know,” she said, voice warbling, “that he isn’t alive? That he didn’t survive?” Zero to sixty, she was shouting now. “That doesn’t mean he isn’t, wasn’t, real! That doesn’t mean I’m not a mother.”

  Osca
r did come to her then, too sensitive not to. She dropped a hand onto his head. He was the only one she wasn’t tired of reassuring.

  Caroline’s eyes filled—but not with guilty, frustrated tears, as Sela had seen too many times in Doug and even Leigh. All she saw reflected there was her own heartbreak.

  “I told you I’d been pregnant,” Sela pleaded, not wanting the mirror in her sister’s eyes to cloud, to shatter. “I said I gave birth too soon. It was you who assumed the outcome had to have been good.”

  “I’m so sorry, Sela.”

  Sela could see she meant it. Caroline wasn’t angry, or scared, the way everyone else seemed to be, even under the guise of empathy. Only sorry.

  Had Caroline disputed her, Sela would have tried to explain. How from the moment she’d neglected to correct Caroline’s logical but very wrong assumption, everything Sela had gone on to tell her was true. At least, it all felt true. Not a single story she’d relayed about Brody had been some tall tale invented on the spot. She’d drawn every quirk of his personality, every scrunch of his nose, from memory. The way he’d grown, the things he said and did, all of it had happened to Sela at some earlier moment, here in the studio, or curled in her bed, at her mother’s boutique, walking to the park. She’d hidden those private moments away, sacred to mother and son alone—until Caroline came along.

  What pure, freeing joy it had been to finally get to share Brody with someone. To gush, as any mother would, over his heroic little heart in ways she hadn’t been able to with anyone else. The way Caroline did about her own kids, about childhood and motherhood and everything in between. Who could resist it, after that first, inadvertent taste? The chance to make those moments she and Brody shared in her mind even more real, if only for a precious while?

  She knew Brody couldn’t be with her—yet it didn’t make sense. Because he was real.

  If he weren’t, that would mean this disease had taken everything she’d ever wanted, everything she could ever want to hope for again. It would mean there was nothing left of her. Nothing left for her. Except for the pillbox waiting in the closet.

  “I’m not delusional,” she said. The night she’d lain in her hospital room and listened to Doug and Ecca arguing outside the door, it was the only word he said that she made out loud and clear. She’d never discerned whether he’d been calling his wife or her mother the delusional one, but when she woke to find Doug gone, it made no difference.

  “Brody is real, buried next to the spot where I will be one day. But I’d much rather live in a world with him in it. So I do.”

  Caroline nodded—Doug and Leigh and Walt and Oscar and the world around them fading away—and all that was left was the two of them.

  Half sisters with no capacity for a half connection. All or nothing.

  “I’m still here,” Caroline said softly. A vote bravely cast for all.

  But all would draw in Caroline in ways Sela could not abide.

  “She says she told you,” Doug interjected. Sela wouldn’t look at him. Better to go on pretending he’d actually managed to leave her all the way. For all of their sakes. “That she’s a prelim match, See. You have to talk to her, hear out her questions, see if—”

  She shook her head, hard. “Stop telling me what I have to do. If she were your wife, would you want her to help me? To risk herself for me? Tell the truth!”

  The answer was on his face. Finally. She had him.

  No one had ever said it aloud to her: that maybe there was a reason people like Sela were at risk for being bumped down the transplant list. Maybe they were less deserving. Ranking people didn’t seem right, but they did have to, somehow, so how else would they?

  These were the things that no one said but everyone thought—and would never stop thinking, regardless of what happened from here.

  She knew it was true, because everyone included her.

  Even with a healthy kidney filtering the toxins inside of her, there would be things it could never filter. Things that would never again be pure.

  “I tried to tell you,” she said, speaking only to Caroline now. “I changed my mind. It was a good story, finding each other, but you don’t need to stick around and see how it ends.” She managed a smile—sad, but as reassuring as she could make it. It hadn’t been that good of a story, anyway, on Caroline’s end. What had signified hope and possibility for Sela had upended Caroline’s entire belief system—in her parents’ marriage, her mother’s character, even her own partner and whether her first choice might’ve been a better one.

  “No.” Leigh sounded surprisingly strong, ready for a fight they’d been putting off for too long. “You’re right that there are still things to work out, but—”

  “I tried to prepare you for this,” Sela interrupted. Leigh had moments, like on Brody’s birthday, when she’d seemed to understand anew the depths of what Sela had lost. But if she didn’t truly get it by now, she never would. “You know my mother didn’t want this anyway.”

  “I know no such thing. And even if I did? I loved Rebecca, but she wasn’t right about everything. If you think for a second this”—she gestured around the studio as if it were some twisted shrine—“is what she had in mind for you, you’re wrong.”

  Ecca had let Brody stay. They never spoke of him, but Ecca had been the only other person to accept him. No one else ever would.

  “You need help, Sela, one way or another. We’re done going on like this.” Leigh stepped back, into the bedroom, and for a second Sela thought she was leaving, storming out without actually storming. But she was only making way for someone else to get through.

  Janie smiled at Sela—warmly, as if nothing unordinary was happening. As if she were about to take the microphone and step onto the stage, work the room. Doug opened his mouth to speak, and she turned on him the skeptical glare reserved for hecklers. Daring him to try.

  He closed it.

  “Leigh called me,” Janie said, so casually she might have been crashing a party. “Sorry I’m late.”

  Sela hadn’t realized she was trembling. All over. She searched the room once more for Brody. If Janie was going to take her away from here—was she?—he had to come, too.

  Janie took her by the arm, reassuringly, and leaned in close. Janie, whose body gleaned its strength from her own sister’s kidney. Janie, who had seen worse—depending on your definition of the word. Janie, who didn’t suffer fools—including Sela.

  “Sing it with me,” she whispered directly into Sela’s ear. “You can go your own way.”

  39

  Caroline

  In spite of everything, Walt and Caroline couldn’t bring themselves to backtrack to the stoic chain hotels closer to the highway. Brevard was a town of inns, and the one where they landed was an inviting red brick from the mid-1800s, with two levels of white column–lined porches and clean, crisp accommodations. They’d requested the most tucked-away, out-of-earshot room available, and their lone third-story suite was updated tastefully, with all the right historical touches left in place—down to the oversized claw-foot tub stocked with spa-quality bath salts.

  It was lost on them, all of it.

  By the time they checked in, the sunset had faded to black. The day had been long enough to feel like a week, but Walt didn’t stay to get settled. He dropped his duffel and announced he was heading out for provisions. When he returned a short time later with wine, cheese, olive oil, and a baguette—packaged neatly into a basket with glasses, plates, and utensils—she was still standing where he’d left her, at the window. Gazing at a view that could have been beautiful, if not obscured by the night.

  “Not exactly dinner,” he said. “But enough so we don’t have to face the public.” A polished wooden table divided two reading chairs in the sitting area at the far side of the bed, and he busied himself unpacking the spread there—pouring the wine, shaking herbs into the oil, slicing the bread and cheese. The inn owners had given him the works, but Caroline remained motionless at the window, unable to fatho
m eating but unwilling to say so. She understood the need he felt to do something.

  “I’m so sorry I dragged you into this,” she said, her words small in the stretch of room between them.

  “You have nothing to be sorry about.” His were surprisingly solid, strong by contrast, and they drew her, at last, into motion. Toward him. She dropped into one of the chairs, and he followed suit. Neither of them made a move toward the table.

  “If I wasn’t here, would you be staying at Sela’s right now?” he asked. No judgment that she could detect. Only curiosity.

  “I have no idea. I’m glad you are here, for what it’s worth.”

  The silence lingered, thoughtfully. He leaned forward, over his knees. “You know, seeing Doug…” He raised his eyes to hers. “I could never leave you, Caroline, the way he’s left her. Never. No matter what.” She’d been bolstering herself for—what? A lecture? A rehashing of their collective horror and surprise? But not this—the thing she should have counted on.

  Walt. Had things gotten so strange between them that she’d lost sight of him? He’d wanted to keep his guard up, keep her safe. But Walt, like the rest of them, was a human, a parent, not just a spouse but a friend and, more uncommon, good and sincere at all of the above.

  “Being here in Brevard with you,” he said, “I can see why you fell in love with the place. And I can’t help but look at you here and wonder what you see. If you’re picturing the other life you might have lived in these mountains, on these streets—because I’d be lying if I said I couldn’t picture it. You and Keaton and—” She opened her mouth to object, but he held up a hand. “Who knows if you’d have met Sela any sooner, but even so … Things could have been totally different, all the way around. Would have been, very easily.”

  The fact that he of all people would voice her feelings somehow made them valid, even if she didn’t want them to be. She nodded uneasily.

  “With everything that’s happened today, maybe this is selfish. I mean, I know it is.” His voice dropped to a hush. “But I can’t stop being grateful. I’m so relieved it never came to be.”