From the corner of her eye, Katie saw a boy with red hair who was about her age. He stood near the doorway, looking nervous. With a start, she realized he was watching her, because he kept diverting his gaze when she glanced his way. Odd, Katie told herself. Katie had a nagging sense she’d seen him before, even though she couldn’t place him. As nonchalantly as possible, she rolled her wheelchair closer, picking up a magazine as she passed a table.
She flipped through the magazine, pretending to be interested, all the while glancing discreetly toward the boy. Even though he also picked up a magazine, Katie could tell that he was preoccupied with studying her. Suddenly, she grew self-conscious. Was something wrong with the way she looked? She’d thought she looked better than she had in months when she’d left her hospital room that afternoon. Why was he watching her?
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Published by
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Random House Children’s Books
a division of Random House, Inc.
New York
Copyright © 1992 by Lurlene McDaniel
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eISBN: 978-0-307-77632-7
RL: 5.0
Reprinted by arrangement with Bantam Books
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Also Available in Dell Laurel-Leaf Books
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Author’s Note
Other Books by This Author
One
Dear Katie,
You don’t know me, but I know about you, and because I do, I want to give you a special gift. Accompanying this letter is a certified check, my gift to you, with no strings attached, to spend on anything you want. No one knows about this gift except you, and you are free to tell anyone you want.
Who I am isn’t really important, only that you and I have much in common. Through no fault of our own, we have endured pain and isolation and have spent many days in a hospital feeling lonely and scared. I hoped for a miracle, but most of all I hoped for someone to truly understand what I was going through.
I can’t make you live longer, I can’t stop you from hurting. But I can give you one wish, as someone did for me. My wish helped me find purpose, faith, and courage.
Friendship reaches beyond time, and the true miracle is in giving, not receiving. Use my gift to fulfill your wish.
Your Forever Friend, JWC
KATIE O‘ROARK REREAD the letter that had mysteriously appeared in the drawer of her bedside table at the hospital two weeks before. It had been in a long envelope, sealed with red wax and stamped with OLW, for the One Last Wish Foundation. She remembered the numbing shock she’d experienced as she read the letter and found a certified check for one hundred thousand dollars. No matter how many times she went over the letter, she was unable to figure out the identity of her benefactor. The check, made out to her and signed by a Richard Holloway, whom she’d also never heard of, was hers to spend on anything she wanted. Her parents couldn’t figure it out, either, but it was no joke. The money was now in the bank.
“Still trying to solve that mystery?” her mother asked, coming into Katie’s bedroom. “Your father’s tried everything he knows and can’t come up with an answer.”
Katie’s dad was a reporter on an Ann Arbor newspaper, and had access to computer banks of data and information. If anyone could find out about the Foundation, Dan O’Roark could. Even he couldn’t, though.
“It bothers me, not knowing who’d give me so much money,” Katie said. “I want to know who and why.”
“Don’t think about it. If the generous JWC wanted you to know, he or she wouldn’t act so secretive. Let’s just be grateful.”
Katie adjusted the flexible tubing attached to the oxygen tank beside her bed and leaned wearily against her pillow. The money was a fantastic gift all right, but how could it buy her the one thing she needed most? No amount of money could purchase her a new heart.
“I came up to tell you that Melody’s here. She wants to see you. Are you up to visitors?” her mother asked.
Melody Bernelli, Katie’s sixteen-year-old best friend, stopped by every day after school. Katie wanted to see her, but couldn’t deny that Melody’s visits were becoming harder emotionally. Melody reminded her too much of the “normal” world she’d had to leave behind months before. “Sure, Mom. Tell her to come up,” Katie replied, tucking the letter under her sheet.
Minutes later, Melody bounced into the room, her brown eyes wide with concern. “Your mom said you had a bad night.” Melody dragged a chair over to the bed. “I won’t stay long, but I just had to see you, Katie. I almost skipped last period today because I got this horrible feeling that you were worse and that I wasn’t going to get to see you again.”
Katie smiled, although the effort cost her. Even the smallest tasks robbed her of strength. “I’m no worse,” she assured her friend. “No better, either.”
“I just can’t believe this is happening to you,” Melody wailed. “How will the track team manage without you next spring?”
Ann Arbor High was a big school with well over twelve hundred students in attendance. The girls’ junior year had just barely begun. “Coach Hudson stopped by last night,” Katie said. “She tried to give me a pep talk, but unless a miracle happens, I won’t be running track again.”
“Mrs. Collins wants to do an article in the school newspaper about you.”
Katie frowned. “I wouldn’t like that. Dad’s already run one in his sports column about me. I hate having half of Michigan knowing about my problems.”
“Why? When he writes about you, he’s impartial. He never gives our school’s track team more space than any other. Even last year, when we won all-city and you had the best time on your leg of the relay race. This time, it’s different, Katie. This time, if more people read about what’s happening to you, maybe you’ll have a better chance.”
“Better chance
for what?” Katie asked as she took deep breaths of oxygen. “My only chance is to get a new heart. Who’s got one to spare?”
Melody hung her head, and Katie saw that her eyes had filled with tears. “Don’t cry, Melly—it won’t help, and it makes me feel bad,” Katie whispered.
Melody grabbed a tissue from the table next to the bed and dabbed her eyes. “I can’t help it. It’s all so unfair! Why did this happen to you?”
Katie had no answers. The past few months of her life seemed like a nightmare. She’d gotten a cold—a simple, ordinary cold—last May. It had persisted, and no matter what she did, she couldn’t shake the lingering fatigue and shortness of breath. Soon, even climbing the stairs to her room had become a chore. She’d experienced dizzy spells, and although it was June, she’d felt cold all the time.
“You’re going to the doctor for a thorough exam,” her mother had insisted.
Her family doctor had referred her to the teaching hospital at the University of Michigan, where she’d become the patient of Dr. Curtis, a cardiologist. He put her through various tests. She could hardly complete the treadmill test, a real embarrassment for the girl who’d been named top sophomore sprinter by a vote of all area high school coaches only last spring.
Dr. Curtis told the O’Roarks, “I’m putting Katie in the hospital and getting a complete workup done on her.”
“Hospital?” Katie cried. “I don’t want to be in the hospital.”
“Katie’s never been sick a day in her life,” her mother declared.
“Well, she’s sick now,” Dr. Curtis said, “and I want to get to the bottom of it.”
Overnight, her world had turned upside down. Katie had been hospitalized, and poked and prodded and tested until she thought she would scream. Dr. Curtis did a heart catheterization, numbing an area in her groin and snaking a thin, flexible tube up an artery into her heart. She watched the procedure on a video monitor as he injected dye through the tube to better see the inside of her heart.
Katie would never forget the day Dr. Curtis had sat her and her parents down in his office and grimly explained, “Katie’s suffering from viral cardiomyopathy. Your heart’s a muscle. A virus has attacked and destroyed it.”
“My heart?” Katie asked, incredulous. At first, her parents were too stunned to react.
Dr. Curtis picked up a plastic model of a heart from his desk and explained the functions of its chambers. “Your heart muscle is weakened and flabby. It’s enlarged and having to work twice as hard to deliver oxygen to your blood. That’s why you’re tired all the time.” He reached over and took her hand. “That’s why your nail beds and lips look bluish.”
He was right. There was a definite bluish cast to her fingertips. She took her hands away and shoved them in her lap.
“What are you going to do about it?” her father asked.
“First, we’ll get Katie stabilized, put her on medications, and, I hope, send her home.”
Katie’s already sick heart was pounding rapidly and making her feel lightheaded. “Then I can start school in September and resume track?” Katie asked.
The doctor shook his head. “Absolutely not, Katie. You’re a very sick young lady.”
Apprehension over missing school and track season was replaced by fear. “How sick?” she heard her father ask.
“Cardiomyopathy is fatal,” Dr. Curtis said. “Katie’s only real hope is a heart transplant, but getting into the program is complicated.”
She learned that getting a heart transplant was a long process that began with interviews for psychological suitability—not everyone who needed a new organ could handle receiving one.
The O’Roarks learned that nationwide, over twenty-five thousand people were awaiting lifesaving transplants, for hearts, kidneys, or livers, and that every four hours, someone died—still waiting. She learned that even if she was eligible, she would be placed on the long waiting list of the university’s transplant program.
Her father had demanded to know how she could be moved to the head of the list. Dr. Curtis patiently explained, “Need is our main criteria of evaluation.”
“You said Katie needed it. That she’ll die without it.”
“Right now, she’s stable and ambulatory. There are others much sicker. Even if she goes onto the list, she’ll have to wait for a suitable donor, one similar in body structure—someone tall and slim with her rare blood type.”
“Could her blood type be a drawback?”
“It depends. Sometimes, it can move her to the top of the list, all other factors being equal. Sometimes, it can be an impediment because the rarer the blood type, the harder to match it.”
Katie had listened to all the talk and grown more frightened. With so much against her, how did she have a chance? Then, mysteriously, the day before she checked out of the hospital to return home, the letter and the check had arrived from the One Last Wish Foundation. The mysterious JWC’s gift had suffused her with new hope. Surely, someone understood her plight. Someone realized how desperate her situation was growing day by day. Although money wasn’t a criterion for who received a transplant, she was grateful for the kindness of JWC.
Dr. Curtis sent her home with a regime of medications. Katie did all right for awhile, but now she was bedridden and on oxygen almost twenty-four hours a day. Katie read her Wish letter every day and prayed that she’d live long enough to spend the money from a stranger she could only hope one day to meet.
Two
KATIE WOKE WITH a start. Someone had closed her blinds, and her room was shrouded in gloom. She looked around for Melody, then realized that she must have fallen asleep while her friend had been visiting with her. She imagined Melody tiptoeing out so as not to awaken her, and felt embarrassed. She couldn’t even last through a half-hour visit.
From downstairs, she heard the sounds of her mother preparing supper. Sadness stole over her as she remembered how once she would have been setting the table and telling her mom about her day at school. Katie felt tears well up, and she might have allowed them to flow, but her father walked through the doorway.
“Got time for a visit from your old man?” he asked.
Katie quickly wiped away the tears, not wanting him to see her bawling and feeling sorry for herself. “Plenty of time,” she told him.
He took the chair Melody had used. “Can I turn on a light?”
“Go ahead. I didn’t realize it was so late.”
He lit the lamp, and immediately she felt less alone. “How’re you doing, honey?”
“I’m sort of down today, Dad.” She figured, why lie?
He took her hand, his blue eyes looking pained. “I’d give anything if I could make this all go away for you.”
“I know.” There had been a time when she’d believed that her daddy could do anything. He was strong and big, with a hearty laugh that had chased away goblins when she was a small child, scared by the dark. “I thought you had to cover a football game tonight,” she said.
Since her dad was a sports reporter, autumn was one of his busiest times of the year. He covered area high school football and many of the University of Michigan games in his biweekly column. “I got Hank to fill in for me.”
“So you could sit around and watch me sleep?”
“I’m working on other projects this week.” He had a computer set up in the den that was linked to the newspaper’s main terminal.
“You’re not going to do another schmaltzy column about me, are you?”
“Is that what you think of my writing?” He pretended to look offended.
“Only when it’s about me.” In truth, when he’d written about her last spring, it had been one of the proudest moments of her life. He’d called her “a flash of brilliance” with “wings on her feet, swift enough to bring victory laurels to her school and pride to her father’s heart.”
“The story I wrote about the need for organ donors has brought a flood of mail in to the paper.”
Of course, he was tal
king about the same story Melody had mentioned. “Sure … but did it bring in any hearts?”
He smiled at her dark humor. Her mother entered the room, sat down on Katie’s bed, and fussed with the bed sheet. “Supper’s on hold,” she said. “I thought I’d bring trays up and we could all eat together tonight.”
Katie knew something was up, because they both looked so serious. “What’s happening, Dad?” she asked.
“I had a powwow with Dr. Curtis and the chief honcho of the transplant department today.”
“You didn’t cause a scene, did you?”
“I’ve tried that already, remember? No. Today we talked about your overall condition. You’re weaker, Katie. Two weeks ago, you could navigate the stairs if we helped you. And you weren’t sucking on oxygen around the clock.”
“I don’t want to go back to the hospital. I hate it there.” Here at home, she at least had all the familiar trappings of her life around her. It was comforting.
“Katie, Dr. Curtis is putting you on a beeper.”
Going on the beeper meant that she’d been activated on the United Network for Organ Sharing—UNOS—the national computer network that matches donated organs with waiting patients. “I moved up on the list?” she asked.
“You’re a priority, Katie,” her mother said.
“The hospital will give us a beeper,” her dad explained. “It can go off anytime, day or night. When it does, we go immediately to the hospital, because it means they have a potential donor for you. And as you know, time is of the essence.”
Katie felt a fine film of perspiration break out on her face. Living in the same city as a national transplant center made it easier for her to get to the hospital quickly, but the donor heart might be coming from anywhere. And despite all the newest and latest medical technology, a donated organ had maybe a four-hour life span outside the human body. That meant that her surgeons had very little time to transport the heart and place it inside her.
“I guess I should be glad. It’s what we’ve all been waiting for, isn’t it?” Katie remarked.
Someone Dies, Someone Lives Page 1