Moonface

by Angela Balcita

  “Done,” I said.

  “And lots of exercise. You have to promise. I’m talking three days a week, half an hour of cardio. No more sitting on the couch. If I give you my kidney, you’ve got to keep it, be good to it. I’m not doing this for my health. I’m doing it for yours.”

  For me, I thought.

  Charlie was concerned about his investment. And I couldn’t blame him. He was hoping for a good turnout here; something that would last me a long time. But I wanted to make sure he was thinking about his side of the deal, too.

  “There are factors you’ve got to think about.”

  “Like what?” he said.

  “The surgery.”

  “No sweat. Slice me open,” he said, running an imaginary scalpel across his midsection with his thumb.

  “The tests—MRIs, x-rays, all that poking and prodding,” I reminded him.

  “I’ve gone through worse. Especially during those drug-testing years, ” Charlie reflected fondly.

  “Rejection.” This is the one that worried me the most.

  “Moonface, come on, seriously. Could you ever reject this guy?” He pointed his thumbs in the direction of his chest. His eyes twinkled under the pendant light.

  How could I? How could I ever reject him now? There was nothing about Charlie I could resist. In fact, I wanted to take all of him, not just his kidney. I wanted us to be like one person, one brain and one body, moving through the world. It was already starting to feel this way. I had already felt myself relying on him to verify my own feelings and to finish my half-baked ideas. Would taking his kidney make our relationship stronger? Would our plan even work?

  “I don’t know, Charlie,” I said. “So many things have to go right.”

  “They will,” he said, quick and sure. “Things will go right. Now, let’s finish making dinner. I’m starving.” He jumped out of his seat and walked toward the counter. The sun was setting in the window over the sink, and it outlined the power lines above our neighbor’s garage. Shades of pink and lavender filled the sky. “Come on, Moonface,” Charlie said, motioning to me with the knife. “Soak the noodles.” I wanted to get up and help him, but I couldn’t move. I was taking in this scene in the kitchen, which was well-lit even though daylight outside was slowly creeping away from us. Charlie chopped away at the cutting board, moving the knife in a wavelike motion over the onions. He lifted the slices from the board and heaped them onto a plate. He repeated this several times—chopping, then lifting, then stacking. He piled the stacks higher and higher until they were towering, precarious mounds. I sat in my seat, hoping they wouldn’t fall.

  Chapter Six

  In an Act of Brave Stljpidity, Two Daredevils Lalgh in the Face of Death

  The first time i ever saw Charlie cry was in Hawaii.

  We had just started dating and were living in an expansive apartment overlooking Baker Beach in San Francisco with three dogs and six other humans. The real estate was prime, but it was difficult to have a romantic dinner without a tail wagging in your face or a hand trying to mooch off your plate. It wasn’t the most ideal situation in which to start a relationship. Then, one day, Charlie goes: “Tell me where you want to go, Moonface. I’ll take you anywhere.”

  “Hawaii!” I said, having never been and suspicious of his offer. But then Charlie started depositing fives or tens or anything he had into his bank account, and sooner or later, we were packing up our rucksacks and heading out over the ocean.

  I woke up in the window seat on the plane and saw the entire island of Kauai from the air. A two-lane road wound around its circumference. Tiny cars drove between the ocean on one side and a dark, dense mountain that rose from the center of the island on the other. The ocean was sparkling, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the mountain.

  We weren’t quite sure what we were doing there; we were both new to this. What do people who are in love do? Within a few days of our arrival, we found an apartment furnished with 1970s rattan chairs and a lumpy queen-size bed. It was on the southern end of the island, just a few yards from the beach. Charlie unpacked our rucksacks, stuffing our clothes into the closet shelves, and I walked down to the corner market to supply our kitchen with some basics.

  At about four o’clock every afternoon, just as we got back from a swim, the sky would open up and a rain shower would move across the island, changing the mood from a balmy summer beach day to a cool, romantic evening. We left the windows in the bedroom open all day, and sometimes Charlie and I would make love to the sound of the rain on the palm trees and on the windows, before it quickly disappeared, and the quiet clear sky returned.

  Our landlord, stopping me every time I walked past the rental office, gave me sugary-sweet oranges from the tree in his backyard. The neighbors, who were gone most of the day, were native Hawaiians who kept the place clean and quiet. I bought dishes and hand towels from the local Walmart, and with a few hundred dollars, we bought a well-used tan Oldsmobile from a guy who was sailing to Tahiti and selling everything he owned. The car had headlights that wouldn’t turn off, so every time Charlie parked the car, he had to lift the hood and turn off the battery so it wouldn’t drain. The owner threw in an electric typewriter with the deal for free.

  “Why wouldn’t you be totally happy in paradise? It’s like you have no excuse,” Charlie said, sipping a beer and leaning back on a lawn chair we found at the Goodwill.

  In the tan clunker, we drove around the island looking for work at upscale hotels. We applied for every position—waiter, bartender, security guard. But because the island was so small, our prospects were low. We handed our resumes to everyone from Poipu Beach all the way up to Princeville. Nothing. We drove around the island, trying to keep a lookout for more prospective stores and restaurants. But my eyes kept being drawn to the middle of the island, to the dark, rainy spot at its center. The mountain, with its mossy flora and its ever-present rain cloud, seemed darker and creepier than it looked from the air.

  We took a break from job hunting on Super Bowl Sunday to watch the Broncos play the Packers, in an open-air bar in walking distance from our apartment. I had many margaritas, as did Charlie, and we stumbled home, falling into the sand a few times and rolling over in laughter. The next morning, my head throbbing with a hangover, I started throwing up. This would be otherwise unremarkable except for the fact that once I started, I did not stop. Not that evening, not the next day, not the next evening. Charlie camped out beside me on the bathroom floor, but since he had yet to see me this sick, he really had no idea what to do.

  “I’m just a puker,” I tried to explain. This was true. At the first sign of illness, whether it was gastrointestinal or not, my body always tried first to get rid of whatever was in my stomach. I tried to convince him that it was probably something I had eaten, but by that third day, Charlie insisted on taking me to the emergency room.

  “You’re being ridiculous,” he said as he pulled me off the bathroom floor and carried me to the car. In the outdated island hospital, with its walls of concrete blocks and its palm trees in the front lawn, we waited for hours for a general practitioner to review my blood tests. I wrung my hands as we waited and cried into Charlie’s shoulder in the exam room.

  “I’m scared,” I confessed. “What if something is really wrong?”

  Charlie was quiet and bounced his knee on the ground. He said he hadn’t been in many emergency rooms and just didn’t like the idea of hospitals.

  The doctor who examined me deemed me officially dehydrated and not, in his opinion, having a problem with my kidney . . . yet.

  “But if you plan on moving here, you should know that there are no nephrologists on the island. You’d have to fly to Oahu just to see a specialist. Just something to think about,” he said, as he left us in the room to think about our next move.

  I came back to the apartment feeling like a surfer who had just been tossed by a wave. I sat on the bed while Charlie pushed my clothes back into my backpack. It was not an easy decision when we ag
reed that I should go back to San Francisco and see a kidney specialist as soon as possible. Charlie’d follow once he got us out of the lease and sold the car.

  “Geez, you’re in it now,” I told Charlie, as I watched him from the bed.

  “Eh,” Charlie said, “I don’t know about the humidity here. And the sun! What’s an Irish guy doing trying to get a tan? Our plan was just bound to fail.”

  I thought to myself that this was not the way to start a relationship. I didn’t want to scare him off; I wanted him to find paradise with me.

  He smiled at me as he moved from room to room gathering our things and putting them back in our bags. I lay on the bed and watched the walls turn dim. The sound of the rain rattled on the roof and it tapped metallically on the windowsills. I got up from the bed to find Charlie in the living room standing in front of the window, his chin to his chest, his shoulders rising and falling with his rapid breath, tears sliding down his face like raindrops.

  He could have left then. He could have sent me on that plane and never followed me to San Francisco. But instead he flew to the mainland a few days later and took me to my doctor to make sure my kidney was still healthy, that it really was just dehydration. I had made him relinquish paradise, and brought him back to the rainy season in San Francisco, where the sun didn’t burst through until March. So, years later, when Charlie offered his kidney to me, I joked to myself, How much more does this guy have to give?

  Not long after Charlie made that offer, kerry stood in front of The Pita Pit waiting for me. Her corn-silk hair caught the bright sun even as she tried to hide under the awning. A red skirt partly covered her long heron legs. Kerry was another writer in my program who came to Iowa the year before I did. She brought her Long Island wit with her, but seemed softer and gentler than most New Yorkers I knew. She wrote often about death, about her mother dying from melanoma when Kerry was still young. But for someone who thought about death as much as she did, she was lively and joyous whenever I saw her. She celebrated everything. I liked her from the moment I met her, but didn’t always like her hugs, because they were like choke holds around my chest. Her bony arms were deceiving. I wove through a crowd of college students on the sidewalk to finally get to her, and when I did, she grabbed me tightly and nearly collapsed both my lungs, as usual.

  “How are you feeling?” she said. I hadn’t seen Kerry since the end of the semester, but I assumed she’d heard of my recent medical dilemma. I had heard she was taking the summer easy, jogging in the morning and writing in her attic apartment in the afternoons. When she had called a few days before, she was eager to meet. It was only after we found a table that she came clean. “I don’t really want a pita,” she said.

  “I think they have other things,” I said, scanning the paper menu. “Subs, salads.”

  “I want to give you my kidney,” she said.

  I looked up, and the collar of her jean jacket was brushing against her glossy pink lips. Her face was frozen with a raised eyebrow waiting for me to answer.

  “Pardon?” I said. The place was loud; surely I had heard her wrong.

  “I want to give you my kidney.”

  “What could possibly possess you to do a thing like that?” Behind her was a wall mural of a giant dancing pepper, and as I slid back in my red plastic chair, I tried to negotiate the seriousness in her face with the goofiness of that pepper. There was an eggplant, too, which was not helping.

  “I want to help. My mother always told us that if you can help, then you should. This, I can do.”

  “No way,” I said almost instinctually, shaking my head, thinking that this was as silly as a dancing eggplant. She didn’t know what she was getting into. I knew she wanted to help me, but this was not going to be the way she was going to do it.

  “Look,” she said, leaning into toward the table and softening the lines in her face, “I want you to know that I’ve thought about it and I want to donate it to you. I want to at least get tested.”

  Her voice dropped low, and I could tell that she had thought it through, that this was something she had already committed herself to before coming here. Knowing this, my heart swelled. I could feel it filling my chest, pushing against my sternum, making it hard to breathe. This girl just loved to take my breath away. I went over my relationship with Kerry in my head. I had known her for less than a year. Even though I barely saw her during the week, when we would sit down to chat at a park bench, our talks lasted for hours, long after the school kids threw their backpacks on the ground, goofed around on the jungle gym, and went home. Why would she give her kidney to me? I almost didn’t want to tell her that I would be taking Charlie’s donation. But when I did, she let me know that the offer would stand: “In case, you know, something doesn’t work out.”

  Later that week, my mother, who had begun reporting on my health to everyone she knew, told me that my cousin Joanne in California had called. She wanted to give me her kidney, or at least get tested, too.

  “So sweet,” I told my mother, but to myself, I thought: What is wrong with these people? This was major surgery they were committing to, opening their bodies and letting me steal a living part of them. I would not accept their offers, but would it be wrong of me to keep them on reserve, in case, you know, things actually didn’t work out?

  “That’s impossible,” Charlie said when I confessed this to him. He folded his arms over his chest and said, “You don’t need a backup.”

  Our transplant coordinator at the hospital agreed with him. The medical team had already begun the poking and prodding process to see if he would be a fit. Charlie came home from the clinic, happy to show me the papers on which it was repeatedly stated that none of Charlie’s results came back abnormal.

  “Healthy as a horse,” he told me. “Someone actually used the cliche.”

  I watched our coordinator’s pink lipstick as she sat across the conference table and said, “He’s good enough.”

  “Perfect, you mean,” Charlie corrected.

  “Well, your blood type is O-, so you are a universal donor. That works out great. But your antigens—it’s impossible that the two of you would match all six. You matched one. We were hoping for more, but one will work.”

  “So he’ll work?” I asked her.

  “Told you,” Charlie said, smiling annoyingly. I just knew it was coming.

  Charlie’s mother called one evening in late May. She called often to check on us in those days, when my health was slowly fading. Charlie talked to her on the phone in the kitchen, and I listened from the living room as their normally uneventful weekly exchanges suddenly became heated.

  “No, she’s fine, she’s lying on the couch.”

  “I won’t . . . No . . . What? . . . No, mom, we’ve got it covered . . . No!”

  His voice grew louder but not in the usual excited, sprite way Charlie turns up the volume. He stood up from the wooden chair and paced the floor in short, impatient laps. When I sat up from the couch, he looked at me, and shaking his head, he mouthed: “She wants to give you her kidney.”

  It was her insistence that was driving him mad, that she wasn’t listening to him when he told her that he wanted to do this, that he had to this. I watched Charlie from the edge of my seat on the couch as if he were in a boxing match. I wanted to throw my hands in the air and say “Move to the left” and “Don’t forget the ropes!”

  “Mom, we’ll be fine.” He sat down again, putting his elbow on the table and his head in his hand. “You’re not doing this . . . No.”

  Charlie’s mother had always been soft-spoken and even-tempered, quietly listening as we told her where we were moving to next. She didn’t yell at Charlie when he took long hiatuses from working. Instead she’d bring up the subject of money and careers to him slowly, over dessert, in quiet conversations that lingered nowhere near the topic. But once she started, she didn’t stop. She wanted him to know that there were other things he could do with his life.

  “Physical therapy,” she wo
uld say to him repeatedly. “You’re very athletic, you know. Or a teacher. You love kids!”

  Charlie would always kindly turn down her suggestions, and then grab my leg under the table in frustration. She welcomed me into her home and into their lives and always treated me like the daughter she had always longed for. I liked the times when she and I stood in the kitchen over a cup of tea, and she’d tell me stories about Charlie’s childhood: his boundless energy that she had given up trying to contain, his friendship with his stuffed penguin, his imaginary friends.

  This time, it was clear that she was trying to protect Charlie. I remember Charlie telling me that she had lost her own mother at a young age because of complications from a routine surgery. I understood where she was coming from, and I was overwhelmed that yet another person was willing to put her life on the line for me.

  But, honestly, at that moment, I wanted her to stop talking. “This is ours,” I wanted Charlie to say. “Ours.” This transplant was something that Charlie and I were meant to do together, and I didn’t want her to come between that. I wanted to think he was thinking the same thing as his voice rose higher into the receiver. His blue eyes bulged with the frustration he was keeping in. He held firmly to the phone, his knuckles stretched tightly over the receiver.

  It was only when he made an excuse that she couldn’t factually dispute that she backed off: “Think about it, Mom. I think it would just be better for her to have a twenty-eight-year-old kidney than a fifty-year-old one.”

  As I heard him fighting for the right to do this, fighting for us, I thought that this was bigger than an operation. When he finally got off the phone with her, he shook his head, and ran his hands through his hair, looking like he’d just come out of a knock-down, drag-out fight.

  This was our story. From the moment he spoke of it, I dreamt that our connection was exclusive. In order for Charlie to live and function as part of my body, I had to believe that this was more than the simple swapping of serum, or organs changing places, or the rewiring of equipment. I had to believe that with kidney transplants some sort of magic exists.