by Jan Ellison
They say the human body can lose 50 percent of its body parts and survive. But it depends on which parts, and which body. Renal agenesis. They don’t call it a disease; they call it a condition. The condition of being born with only one kidney, occurring in roughly one in two thousand people. Most never know the condition exists, because the single kidney grows large enough to accommodate the body’s needs.
What was it that hit you? Not a tree. Not the hard ground. Not a rock jutting up from the ravine. But something manufactured, plastic or glass or steel, some man-made, hard edge of the car that caught the curve of your body as you flew, piercing you on impact.
When we arrived at the hospital, you were in a medically induced coma, which I was made to understand was a sort of freezing of you, a fabricated reprieve from your own body that would allow your internal organs to rest. We had been informed that while your body was in that state, there was not much we could do. The coma might be necessary for a few days, or a few weeks, or even a few months. It was too soon to tell.
We called my mother. She said your sisters were sound asleep. She said that my father, whom I hadn’t seen in more than twenty years, had indeed finally arrived from Maine. She said the two of them would hold down the fort. Jonathan and I drove up and down El Camino Real until we found a room in a motel close to the hospital, the Mermaid Inn, a pink stucco affliction squeezed between a Starbucks and an independent bookstore. Aside from its proximity to you, and the coffee that could be procured next door, the single feature that can be put forward in that motel room’s defense was the price—sixty-three dollars a night.
Two
PEOPLE SAY a mother is only as happy as her least happy child. But what if the state of that child’s happiness has become a mystery? What if that child is no longer a child but a young man who has removed himself to a great distance and encased himself in a great silence? In June of last year, you arrived home from Northwestern for the summer, and a photo arrived in our mailbox. That September, the car flipped. Between those bookends was a family whose happiness might still be intact if only I’d been able to see the threats to it more clearly.
Kids are resilient. That’s another thing people say. But what choice do they have? Polly is only six. Six-year-olds cry. Yet I worry that she cries more, this winter, than she used to. I worry about Clara, too. I wonder whether it’s normal for a nine-year-old to spend so much time alone in her room making pencil drawings in a sketch pad. I wonder how much is simply their budding natures, and how much the result of our family’s new arrangement, in which you are absent, and your father and I live in separate houses, and your sisters are passed between us like a restaurant dessert.
This morning, Polly sat at the kitchen table trying to write a story, squeezing the pencil hard between her fingers. She’d printed her name and the date at the top, writing the month as “Marsh” and making the 7 for the day, and both 2’s in 2012 backward. If you’d done that, I’d have whisked you off to a reading specialist. But she’s only in kindergarten. I’ve learned to wait that kind of thing out. And the whispers of small worries are silenced now, mostly, by the volume of the worry over you.
“How do you spell gonna?” Polly asked the room at large.
“Gonna isn’t a word,” Clara said.
“Yes, it is,” Polly said.
“No, it’s not,” Clara insisted.
I poured them both Cheerios and started to make their lunches. Polly puzzled over the letters on the cereal box.
“There’s no Z on this whole box,” she said. “So why have it?”
“Actually, there’s lots of Z words,” Clara said. “Like zipper, zip, zebra.”
“But Polly’s right,” I said. “It’s one of the less frequently used letters. That’s why in Scrabble, it’s worth a lot of points.”
“How many points?” Clara said.
“I don’t know, exactly.” I cut the sandwiches I’d made in half and slipped them into plastic bags.
“Actually,” Polly said, “can I have a hot dog in my lunch? Daddy puts hot dogs in our lunches instead of sandwiches and they’re much, much better.”
IT WAS A Tuesday, the last week of May, nearly ten months ago now. My favorite day of the week, because your father took the girls to school so I could get to the store early. I’d been working all morning on a series of lights made from vintage kitchen implements—stovetop toasters, copper colanders, antique silver spoons that I’d drilled and wired, then fitted with gorgeous halogen lights. I turned off all the other lights in the store and sat down to admire my work.
Fourteen years since I started the store. Fifteen since you entered first grade and I found myself a part-time job at a lighting store at the west end of Twenty-fourth Street, near Castro, between our house and your school. The original store sold contemporary lamps and chandeliers and sconces from designers all over the world, but the merchandise was too stuffy for a San Francisco neighborhood like Noe Valley, and within a year, the shop closed. Your father, who had listened to my complaints about the buyer’s taste for months, encouraged me to take over the lease and start my own store, and I did. When we reopened, the shop had a new name, the Salvaged Light, and a new look, and one-of-a-kind fixtures that I bought from local artisans and sometimes made myself. It pleased me then, and still did fourteen years later. The reuse of discarded metal and crushed rock and old wood. The marriage of whimsy and beauty. The intersection of junk and utility. The transformation of dead stuff into brilliantly lit life. For a moment, I wished to sit alone in the silence and never compromise the store’s perfection by allowing a customer inside.
For the last ten years, an older couple, Ellen and Walter, had lived in the loft upstairs and helped out in the store. But the month before, they’d moved back to L.A. Ellen had worked as store manager, Walter as carpenter, handyman and unofficial night watchman. In the last year, Walter had painted the loft and its bathroom, refinished the floors and built a new staircase. Ellen had designed geometric cutouts in the faces of the steps, and I’d installed blue lights behind them, so that at night they threw sharp patterns on the treads of the stairs. Just before they’d moved out, we discovered water stains on the ceiling beneath the claw-foot tub in the loft. Walter did his best to make repairs. In hindsight, I ought to have called a professional plumber. Perhaps if I had, the tub would not have fallen through the floor the very night you were flying from a car.
I mourned Ellen and Walter’s leaving, and badly needed to replace them before your sisters were out of school for the summer. But I also found myself reveling in the solitude.
The front doorbell made its tinkling sound, and I looked up. A young woman was standing at the locked door. I checked my watch. Ten minutes to ten, nearly time to open, anyway. I stood up and flipped over the sign.
“Come in,” I said. “I was just about to open.”
“I love your store,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I’m Emme Greatrex,” she said, extending her hand.
“Emma?”
“No,” she said. “Just Emme. One syllable. Like the letter M. Might I have a look around?”
“Certainly,” I said. “I’m Annie Black. Take your time. Let me know if you have any questions.”
I sat down at my desk. It was my policy never to hover, but I glanced up now and then to observe her. She looked like a model out of a Free People or Anthropologie catalog. She wore a short skirt with an uneven hem, textured tights and a patchwork sweater that exposed her midriff. She had bangles on her wrists and combat boots on her feet, and she’d tied a scarf around her head that pulled her long blond hair back from her shapely face. She had large, round eyes, gray-green headed toward blue, the eyelids thickened by many colors of shadow.
She was tall, and her limbs moved loosely as she walked through the store. Her head bent slowly from side to side, as if to some private music. She stared at a lamp—one of my favorites—the paper shade an archival giclée print mounted on a base of Vermon
t slate. She tapped the globe of a blood-red sconce, as if fascinated by the sound her index finger made on the glass. Then she stood, swaying, looking out the front window.
“Do you have any questions?” I said, and she turned toward me with a start, as if she’d forgotten I was there.
“No,” she said. “Your things are lovely, but I’m afraid they’re all a bit beyond my resources. I’m actually here about the loft?” She pointed to the LOFT FOR RENT sign in the window.
“Oh,” I said.
I took her upstairs and showed her the apartment, then she sat across from me at my desk and we talked. She spoke softly, and I detected a faint accent.
“Where are you from?”
“England, originally,” she said. “But I’ve been living in New York quite a while.”
“Is your family still in England?”
“Well … my parents are no longer alive,” she said.
That stopped me. Not just the fact, but the bruised way she said it.
“My last tenant paid a thousand a month,” I said. “I’m prepared to keep it at that level. Even though I could probably ask a bit more, given what San Francisco rents are these days.”
She looked at me steadily. “I’m afraid I can’t afford quite that much.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, then—”
“I wonder … Might there be a way I could pay you in the future? Once I’ve found work? I’ve only just driven out from the East Coast and as yet, I’m unemployed.”
“Well,” I said. “I don’t know about that.”
She held herself very still, waiting for me to say more. She was the right age—I guessed late twenties—and she was fashionable and beautiful. She would appeal to the young customers working for high-flying start-ups who were more and more the people in the Bay Area with money to spend. And, most important, she was ready to start right away.
“Maybe we could figure out some kind of work-rent exchange,” I said finally.
She smiled. “That would be lovely.”
We shook hands. She moved into the loft and started work in the store. She knocked on the door to our lives, and I invited her in, and it very nearly cost us yours.
Three
THE SECOND WEEK of March 2012. I sit at the kitchen table and make my pen move across the page. I resist imagining the present—the store flooded and shut, your father absent, you absent, too—in order to finger my way along the thread, backward to the beginning. But what is the beginning? It depends on who you ask. When I ask myself, my hands take me too far, back and back, down through the decades of marriage and the days in Paris and the months in London, until I am still living at home in Los Angeles, not yet twenty, and my own father is backing his truck down the driveway with an odd smile, insufficient amid the heavy bones of his face.
Where does the thread begin for you? Perhaps on the Fourth of July, when Emme stepped out of the store and into your life.
Where does it begin for your father? When did his seamless happiness begin to unravel? The evening in late August when I made my confession? Three days later, when you were helicoptered to the trauma center? Or the afternoon in September, fourteen days after the accident, when he and Mitch met privately to discuss the results of the tissue tests? The preliminary kidney-donor screening had been reviewed. We knew your father’s blood type was compatible. The next step was to assess tissue compatibility and perform the cross-match test. His blood had been drawn three days earlier for that purpose.
There were no protocols to violate. There were no precedents to follow or not follow. I thought the meeting was routine, best handled by Mitch and your father, since they were both doctors, even if your father had never really practiced. And because one did not question a doctor of Mitch’s stature—chairman of the Department of Neurology at Stanford, a celebrated researcher, and one of GQ magazine’s 2008 “Rock Stars of Science.” We’d teased Mitch no end after he received the award and was pictured on the cover of the magazine in rock-star sunglasses and scrubs, even though he hadn’t spent time in an operating room in years. Not until you landed in one, at least, and he stepped in to manage your care.
The trauma-center doctor had decided you were stable enough to emerge from the medically induced coma, and the plan was to take you off propofol the following morning, when the success of your dialysis and the need for a kidney transplant could be better assessed. So when Mitch and your father went off for their meeting, I was happy enough to visit your bedside alone. I sat and watched your face for a long time. I took your bloated hand in mine, and I took comfort in the promise that the following day, or at least within a few days after that, you would wake and be returned to us.
Later, I found Jonathan standing at the window in the waiting room. He was staring into the courtyard below, where a single sycamore tree had been planted. Its leaves had already fallen and its branches were bleached and bare, like bones long buried, dug up and scrubbed clean and displayed in the late-summer light.
I stood next to him at the window. I let my fingers brush his forearm, but he moved a step away from me. He didn’t look at me when he spoke. He told me your body was sensitized to his blood. You had antibodies to some of his antigens. If he were the donor, your immune system would turn on his kidney and destroy it.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you wanted it to be you.”
“It’s all right,” he said.
But it wasn’t.
DRIVING BACK TO the city from the hospital, at twilight, there was a thickening of color in the sky behind the hills, and I felt hopeful, in spite of everything. We’d known it was possible your father would not be a match. We’d known there was only a 50 percent chance of a match for each of us, and though I knew he was disappointed he would not be the one to make the sacrifice, I felt sure that my own tissue test would show a positive, and that my kidney and I would be up to the task, if required, and that your body would embrace your new organ with its usual grace and competence. You would come out of the coma the following day and we would all set out on the road to recovery.
“Are you all right?” I said to your father.
“I’m fine.”
But he did not hold my hand across the center console. He did not take the scenic route we sometimes took, pulling off at the coast to watch the sun drop behind the horizon before we drove home.
That night, he slept on a camping mat, as he had in August, when I returned from London.
“Why are you sleeping on that again?” I asked him.
“My back hurts,” he said.
I handed him a pillow off the bed. “Take this, at least.”
“I don’t need that,” he said. He bent down and began to blow up the attached inflatable compartment.
“Maybe you should let me do that,” I said. “I’ve had more experience blowing things up.”
I had wanted it to seem like an apology, for London, but it came across sounding bitter. He didn’t even acknowledge I’d spoken. He did not kiss me good night, and I did not lower myself to the ground and ask him to. I lay on top of the sheet, the covers shoved aside, sweating. This was how I would live if your father never forgave me. This would be the trade I’d made. A moment’s friction for a life in which I would never again be free of my own body. I would never again press against his coolness beneath the sheets. I would be encumbered by my own reckless heat, the way I had been the winter I met him.
The way, perhaps, you had been last summer, Robbie, when you first met Emme.
Four
IT WAS EIGHT MONTHS AGO, last Fourth of July. Emme had been living and working in the store for just over a month. I’d extended her a last-minute invitation to join us for the day, and I’d promised her we’d pick her up on our way out of the city. We all piled into the Suburban and set off, and when we reached the store, I knocked on the glass door, then returned to the car to wait.
“ ‘The Salvaged Light,’ ” you read. “Did you repaint the sign?”
“Yes,” I said. “The
old one was getting faded.”
“I used to call it ‘the Savage Light,’ ” you said.
“Because you had a lisp.”
“It wasn’t the lisp. I really thought it was ‘the Savage Light.’ Because of that book we had, remember? About the savage.”
“I remember that book,” your father said. “We must have read it to you a thousand times. It was about a boy who writes a story about a monster, right? Then the monster comes to life.”
“It wasn’t really a monster,” you said. “It was just a person who went wild. The boy starts writing the story when his father dies, to distract himself. When the savage comes to life, he can’t tell where he ends and the savage begins.”
“I always wondered what the writer was trying to say, metaphorically speaking,” your father said.
“Something about the power of the stories we tell ourselves to fend off despair,” I said. “Or am I being too literal?”
Polly piped up from the third row of seats. “I know that story. I remember it. We still have that book.”
“No, we don’t,” Clara said.
“Yes, we do,” Polly said.
“No, we don’t. Mommy gave it away to the library with all the other books.”
“I didn’t give all the books away,” I said. “Just the ones nobody ever reads.”
Emme emerged from the store, cutting short the argument. She was wearing very short shorts and her combat boots, and she carried an enormous fringed bag over one shoulder. Her legs were thin and pale and her hair was so thick and blond and long it was more like a Barbie’s hair than a woman’s. I had never seen it down before. I’d only seen it tucked beneath a hat or a scarf or pulled back in a headband or wound around her head in a braid, like a crown.