A Million Reasons Why

by Jessica Strawser

  “Did you ever truly forgive Dad?”

  Without hesitation, a nod. “Fred made a choice to do right by you and me, and that was the best I could hope for at that point. He went on to prove himself a fantastic dad, and a good husband, and after a while, I stopped doubting he’d follow through. Everything I’d wanted my life to be was right there, but I wouldn’t have truly had it if I’d held on to that hurt. So I let it go.”

  “Until I started talking about moving to Brevard.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “The day you started talking about Brevard was the day it hit me that you were grown, and what that meant. Fred had fulfilled his duty to us both. After more than two decades, no reasonable person could say he hadn’t. Not even me.”

  Mom closed her eyes and inhaled slowly through her nose, contracting as her lips parted to let the breath go. It was as if every seemingly melodramatic, hallmark sigh over the years had been some miniature version of this: of having to mindfully stop herself from holding her breath.

  “I was terrified,” she whispered, “that if he crossed paths with Rebecca again, he wouldn’t make the same choice.”

  Her eyes opened, pools of tears. “When I say that I saw the way he looked at her, what I mean is that I saw what was missing in the way he looked at me. That adoration had been there, between us, too—but always in me. It was always me.” The pools spilled down her cheeks in smooth lines she didn’t wipe away. “I couldn’t take the risk of having them in the same city, even by happenstance, even for a day or two here and there. Not if I could help it. And I could help it, because I knew Rebecca feared all the same things for all the wrong reasons.”

  She grasped Caroline’s hands between her own, which felt cold, and trembling, and frailer than they ever appeared—and, like so many other things about her, the exact same shape as Caroline’s. “The way I saw it, I did what I had to do to keep my marriage safe. But I told myself it wouldn’t cost you anything but a meaningless job. And that was a lie.”

  There it was, at last. Hannah Shively’s version of the truth. Caroline could add it to Dad’s, and Keaton’s, Walt’s, Sela’s, her own. How many perspectives did you need before you could see the three-hundred-sixty-degree view of a life or even of a pivotal moment? This was not the last version left to tell—certainly they’d never know Rebecca’s.

  But it was the last one she wanted to hear.

  Caroline stared down at their fingers. She’d been here for hours, long enough for the silent backdrop of her parents’ house to turn from an empty echo to a peaceful respite and back again. Lucky as she’d been to catch Mom alone, Dad would be home soon. Walt and the kids were surely at the house by now, waiting for her to rejoin them for what was left of the weekend. It was time to go.

  She wasn’t sorry she hadn’t let Mom explain before. If she needed to hear this, it was right for it to be today. When she had the wherewithal to be glad she’d never known enough to be quite this sad for her parents before. When her pride was far enough in check that though not everything had turned out for the best, she could be grateful for the things that had.

  When she’d already forgiven but could do Mom the kindness of doing it again.

  So, she did.

  42

  Sela

  Sela wouldn’t say therapy was helping, but she wouldn’t say it wasn’t. Sometimes, it even felt like something Ecca might have gotten behind—not like last time, when she’d worried those facing-facts sessions would be the thing to give Sela a real, all-the-way breakdown. This was in Ecca’s language—exploring the gray area—and Sela was learning to accept how those shades had painted Ecca, too, thanks to Dr. Kay.

  Sela had never seen someone so happy to be recovering from major surgery. Not that the therapist acknowledged her own state, or allowed Sela to, but the aura that had seemed so charged with purpose at the start had settled into something more satisfied, peaceful. She left Sela to come to realizations on her own.

  For instance, that it was harder to live in a dreamworld when you were talking about the real one by appointment.

  And damn near impossible on dialysis.

  She spent so much time hooked to lines now, half her waking hours were supervised. Janie had been right about the upside of the grueling treatment: It put you in good company. Well, company, anyway. Might as well make the best of it.

  None of the fellow patients were near Sela’s age, but they were mostly grandparent types inclined to dote on her. The women knit her hats and scarves and pulled lotion from their purses when they saw the new dryness of her skin. The men doled out mints to combat nausea and shot bouncer-esque looks at Doug when he stopped in. They didn’t know the whole story, of course—but his we’re still on the same health plan line hadn’t impressed. Sela didn’t begrudge him checking on her. Leigh’s pregnancy was in full swing now, and she had her own appointments to juggle. Someone had to report back to Caroline.

  Sela would make sure the reports were good. Not because she’d agreed when Janie said that she had to be open to a potential donor’s help, that Caroline was an adult with free will and Sela was not responsible for whatever she might decide. But because Sela had looked at Caroline on that last-ditch day in the studio and seen something so simultaneously simple and complex and new and yet unconditional, it could only have been sisterhood.

  It came to her now not in emails or phone calls but in care packages. They made it seem okay that she and Caroline didn’t know what to say to each other, that they’d temporarily taken to communicating secondhand, through Leigh; the gifts meant more than words. She took them with her to the dialysis center to unwrap there, something to look forward to. Books signed by the authors—saw this woman speak at Joseph-Beth, picked up a copy for you. Lip balms flavored with chocolate and caramel—because there’s more than one way to get a sugar fix. And most recently, pictures drawn by her nieces and nephew. Lucy’s made her stop and stare.

  Rainbow Rain, Lucy had written across the bottom, each letter a different color. And that’s what she’d drawn—periwinkle and red-orange and rose and sea foam and lemon-hued drops showering a house where a woman and a little girl stood in the yard, holding hands.

  There was one child, eight-year-old Dustin, whose dialysis often overlapped with Sela’s. She never got the full story on why he wasn’t in the pediatric unit but gathered it had to do with circumstance, some exception—maybe a scheduling or transportation problem, as the closest one was some distance away. He was her favorite and also least favorite person in the little family the patients had become: Favorite because he was incapable of doubt that any of them would get well. Least favorite because she was not, and he was here, and nothing about that was fair.

  She propped the picture on a little table opposite them, where they both could see it.

  “I wish rain really did come down in colors,” he mused. “That way, we wouldn’t have to wait for the sun to come out before the storm is done. Real rainbows hardly ever happen.”

  It was such a treat, talking with a kid one-on-one; it had never escaped Sela that Leigh didn’t trust her alone with hers. When the treatments left her with any energy, she took Oscar on walks to meet Leigh at the park and watch only “real” children play. She leaned into her sweet dog’s companionship; Doug stopped taking him weekends, so she wouldn’t be in the house alone.

  Sela missed Brody. She missed the way a sense of calm washed over her at the sight of him. The comfort of his tiny hand in hers. The way his face lit up every time she dared dream aloud of a new adventure they might take together.

  He never cared about the likelihood that they would never go.

  He always knew, in a beyond-his-years way, that when it came to dreams, it was never too late.

  43

  Caroline

  What do you do when a decision looms so large, you can’t see around it?

  You look through it. A filter, for everything.

  You see a doctor and learn what you don’t have a detec
table predisposition for. Your suspicions are confirmed, though, that there’s no way to really know. No guarantees.

  You hug your kids as tight as they let you, as often as they let you. They don’t seem to notice a change, or maybe they do. You sit with the fear that one day they’ll need something you no longer have in your possession to give. You remind yourself how many levels of hypothetical this is, how even if they came to need a match, you might not be one, how you’d do everything in your power to find another way. How dicey it is to turn your back on an immediate need in the name of one that might never materialize.

  Justifiable, maybe, but dicey nonetheless.

  You get back to the rotation of big family dinners, behaving as if everything is normal until it almost is. Since the day you told your mom everything, crying your heart out, you haven’t felt the urge to broach it with her again. You can’t say you don’t judge your parents, but you swallow your judgment; forgiveness tastes sweeter. You stop resenting your husband’s family simply for being as decent as you once thought yours to be. You spend more time with your best friend, laugh louder and longer at Mo’s off-color jokes.

  You admire her, too, what a wonderful stepmother she is, though this heightens the tragedy of Sela dismissing her own prospects outright. Were Sela well, she might marry again. Someone with children, perhaps. There are so many ways to have a family. You’ve learned, too, that we never know when we’ll be gifted things we didn’t see coming, didn’t think possible.

  You take your time. You do not rush.

  You write that letter of thanks and apology to your ex. It’ll be the last he hears from you.

  You think about how it felt that time a woman you didn’t know, in a waiting room you didn’t want to be in, mistook you and your stranger of a sister for the usual kind of siblings and called you lucky. You wonder if you really played along because you didn’t feel like explaining—or if maybe, for an instant, that reality seemed preferable to the truth. Maybe you wanted to see what it felt like to try it on for size, pretend it was real. Or maybe you didn’t want to see your disappointment reflected in that woman’s eyes, knowing she, too, wanted to believe.

  You read about photographers and artists who specialize in portraits of infants who never make it home. You wonder if Sela has such a picture of Brody—one perfect image of his perfect face, unmarked by wires or monitors or barriers. One in which no one would ever know he wasn’t sleeping. You’d like to see it, if she does. If she can bear it, so can you.

  When Christmas rolls around, you again divvy up the gift list with your husband. You don’t joke about the best and worst one he ever chose, not knowing if it’s funny yet, if it ever will be. You go to church, knowing you are missing something. You had once intended to be a Methodist, as your parents had. Your husband and kids come along, willing, inquisitive. You slip into your purse a leaflet, What We Believe. It clarifies what this version of God cares most about. Including, interestingly, what you do with your body. Sprinkle it with holy water; tattoo its skin; reduce it to ash when your soul is gone.

  At home that night, you show your husband the section you were surprised to see. You weren’t looking for it, but it found you.

  Organ transplantation and donation are acts of charity, agape love, and self-sacrifice. We recognize the life-giving benefits of organ and tissue donation and encourage all people of faith to become donors as part of their love and ministry to others in need.

  He is not surprised.

  Not then, and not a few days later, when he sits with you as you make the call to the clinic number you’ve saved, in case you would ever be brave enough or foolish enough to use it.

  But neither of you sees it coming, what happens on the other end. They’ll keep you on file, call you if something changes. As of now, though?

  A match has already, newly been identified. All they’re authorized to say is that things are moving ahead quite optimistically without you.

  You hang up and cry: Relief and joy bind you to your husband, who is crying the same tears. Then you laugh, your foreheads pressed together. All that agony for nothing.

  Except it wasn’t.

  It was for everything worth anything.

  So you pick up the phone again, to finally hear her voice.

  The sister whom you might, after all, get to keep.

  Epilogue

  Nine Months Later

  The last Saturday of the summer, Sela awoke feeling as she had every day of the past three months post-transplant: free. To take deep, cleansing breaths of air-conditioned oxygen. To drink when she was thirsty, to eat food that tasted like food. To move without shivers of pain—or, rather, with pain she could identify, wait out. This, from the incision that hadn’t quite healed. That, from adjusting to the new prescription. There, from yesterday’s yoga.

  Even with a distance to go, she could look around her empty bedroom in the just risen sun and flex the satisfied smile of a woman who’s escaped the clutches of an unrelenting captor.

  Which, for the time being, she had.

  Pancakes. She had to check that she wasn’t dreaming the smell—but there it was. Sweet and comforting as those lazy college taste tests at home with Leigh, as those special mornings out with Ecca. And that one time, with Brody. Silver dollars that day.

  Janie wasn’t the only one, it turned out, who took annual trips with her sister to commemorate their successful transplant. It was kind of a thing: not always a trip, but a dinner, a photo op, one of those fundraising walks, something symbolic for donor and recipient both to celebrate another year of health, another year of life.

  Sela didn’t think she and Caroline’s mother would ever do that.

  One could be grateful without building a relationship on that gratitude, just as one could give sincerely without the slightest desire to see strings attached.

  The gift had never really been for Sela, of course. It was for Caroline. So she wouldn’t have to, but also because she’d cared, more than anyone wanted her to, more than anyone thought she should. Because Brody—in perhaps his last, most noble act—had wriggled into his aunt’s heart in a way that Hannah could not help seeing. If Hannah was looking to make right something in her own conscience as well, certainly nobody ever said so out loud.

  Still, funnily enough, when Sela got the news—donor identified!—her first thought was of that advice issued from the podium at the Big Ask, Big Give seminar. That you might not need to ask: Just tell. She’d scoffed, but it proved true. Just not in any way she could have guessed.

  Sela knew not how her father had taken it, whether he’d pushed back. The only facts that mattered were those that added up to a small miracle: that Caroline and Hannah had always been so physically alike, Hannah found herself wondering about the long shot that if one of them was a tissue match for Sela, the other might be, too—even without that same biological link. That though she fell on the upper end of the donor age range, she’d kept impeccable health, in part due to her husband’s restrictions. One of the few things Sela begrudgingly owed to her father.

  Besides, wasn’t everyone driven by conscience, a little? Even those labeled altruistic.

  The months leading up to the transplant were long, strained. Hannah’s compatibility tests seemed to go on indefinitely, almost as if the medical team wouldn’t stop until they found some reason to. Meanwhile, Sela had to complete a desensitization to boost her initially borderline compatibility with the donor kidney. So began an arm’s-length phase between Sela and Caroline, between Sela and everyone invested in the outcome. A special kind of loneliness, but still less lonely than before.

  She was glad that was behind her.

  Stepping into her slippers and opening her door, she heard the bubbly chatter of the newly rested and the patter of Oscar, no doubt searching out scraps. She made her way downstairs and stopped in the kitchen doorway, surveying the scene.

  This was Caroline’s first visit since the surgery. For the procedure, Hannah had traveled to Sela’s hospi
tal—though the two met only once, right before go time. Sela’s father was there, too, his body language angled sharply toward his wife and rightful daughter. But something in his expression seemed apologetic, as though he wished he could say more. He looked too familiar already, somehow, for her liking.

  All Sela could manage was, Thank you. It was enough.

  They’d gone back to Ohio at the first green light, and Caroline devoted herself to nursing her mom through recovery. Sela stayed in inpatient as long as she could, then arranged visits from an in-home nurse. Leigh made exactly one appearance before the baby came but still called every other day. Janie did, too. Ivy and the other Aesthetic artists organized a meal train. Friends from dialysis brought puzzles and board games and stayed to play. Doug’s relief was palpable—he could move on now. He was seeing someone, though he never spoke of her. And even when only Oscar was left, Sela got by.

  She no longer doubted that she could.

  Now: Caroline was here, kids in tow, a fresh start all over again. They still didn’t know Sela was an aunt in more than a name, but who could ask for more? Having the gaggle of children gathered around the heap of pancakes on the table, Caroline at the stove warming maple syrup—it filled her house with life.

  After seeing her through the worst of it, Dr. Kay had turned her over to a local practitioner, where Sela had therapy once a week in the open now. Mental health wasn’t an unusual concern post-transplant; it was provided for. She talked about things she suspected other patients did—less about the past and more about the challenges of reentering the world of the healthier.