by Jill Wolfson
Dear Donor Family,
My name is Jermaine and I’m in eleventh grade. Because of you, I have a new liver, and a new life.
I was born with biliary atresia. That means that the bile – which is basically a stream of toxic waste – couldn’t drain out of my liver. When I was only a couple of months old, doctors gave me an operation, but we knew it wouldn’t keep me alive forever. While I was waiting for a transplant, my liver got so bad it couldn’t break down food at all. I had to be fed liquid mush through a tube. That’s as gross as it sounds.
Because of your gift, I have a real life now. I want to say thanks, even though that’s kind of lame. You deserve a lot more than that, but I can’t find the right words. So the thanks coming your way has horns and drums and a big opera singer belting it out. I hope you hear it loud and clear, and that it gives you at least a little bit of comfort.
Sincerely yours,
Jermaine, your loved one’s
liver recipient
Dear Donor Family,
My daddy got new lungs. He’s a firefighter. You saved his life. You saved mine, too! I couldn’t live without my daddy.
Love and kisses,
Emily, age six
P.S. My mom helped me write this letter. She says thanks, too. That makes three lives saved. Plus anyone my dad saves in a fire.
To My Donor Family,
My name is Jaya, and I’m twelve. At the age of four, I was diagnosed with diabetes.
I tried to write you a letter five times since my transplant, but I never got very far before I started crying. I feel bad about not getting in touch sooner. I just want to get this down on paper. Thank you, thank you for the pancreas.
I also want to say how sorry I am for the loss of your family member. It’s not easy to decide to donate an organ. I know because when I was eleven, the diabetes first wrecked my kidneys and my dad gave me one of his. That means we’re a donor family, too.
No one can ever replace your loved one‚ but I hope it makes things a little easier knowing that there’s someone who no longer has to take injections or check their sugar ten times a day. I can eat whatever I want. I can think about going to college, maybe becoming a doctor. I am so grateful to be just a normal kid.
I need to stop writing now because I’m crying again.
Yours truly,
Jaya (which means Victory)
TWENTY-SEVEN
THE FRONT DOOR OPENED. His mother’s voice: “Tyler?”
“In my room.”
“Come down and say hi. How was your day? Any mail?”
“On the kitchen table.”
A pause. “This magazine? That’s it?”
Every day, the same question hung in the air. His mother’s voice expectant, then that note of disappointment. Tyler kept hearing what his mother would probably deny if he pointed it out to her. She was waiting for something miraculous that would undo or make sense of Amanda’s death.
Tyler didn’t answer her.
He looked at the final letter and recognized the handwriting on the envelope. From her. From Dani. From the girl with his sister’s heart. He took his time reading her letter twice, turned on Amanda’s computer, and Googled the few facts that he had: Dani and heart transplant and high school and the name of their town.
It didn’t take long to track her down. A few months earlier, there had been a neighborhood fund-raiser to help pay her hospital bills. The local weekly newspaper published an article. From that, Tyler learned her last name, and her mother’s name, and the school she went to, and the name of the neighbor organizing the event. A hundred people had attended. He learned the amount of money raised and how she had been born with her heart on the wrong side of her chest and that she played soccer once and liked old, scary movies. He learned that she didn’t live far away. Not far at all. He wouldn’t even need to take a bus. He could bike there in no time, if he wanted to.
But why would he want to do that? What would that prove? Would he knock on her door? Would she open it? If she did, what would he say? What would she say? What would he say back? He would probably just stand there. And she would stare, and it would all be a big, big mistake.
Tyler ordered himself to put the idea out of his mind. It was pointless. He tried to click off the newspaper site, but nothing happened. Frozen. Then the screen flashed once before going dark. When he tried to reboot, nothing. Nothing at all.
Amanda’s computer was old. Maybe it could be fixed. Or maybe the hard drive had crashed and with it her private thoughts, her secret wishes, the memories the two of them had shared. He felt relieved that he had printed some of the documents.
His sister had already died once. He couldn’t lose her again.
In the middle of the night, Tyler bolted upright in bed. What was it? Why did he keep thinking about this girl Dani? He had nothing to tell her. There wasn’t a string of questions he wanted to ask her. He didn’t care about this girl’s favorite subject at school or what music she liked or even what she thought about the big things like God or death.
So what was it? What was the pull? What did Tyler need?
The answer came to him as one of those strange expressions that he would normally never use.
To lay eyes on her.
“I need to,” he said aloud.
That was an understatement. He needed to see her in the way that the earth needed to revolve around the sun.
Tyler had all the traits of a good spy. He could be patient when he wanted to be. He knew how to dig up information and how to pretend that everything was normal. He was very sneaky. He had a whole childhood’s worth of experience in that. So the next morning, he woke, brushed his teeth, went to school, zoned out in class, felt contempt for everyone around him, came back home, grabbed his bike, and headed off.
It took a while to find Dani’s place because it wasn’t an easy-to-identify house but an apartment in one of those low-slung complexes that sprawls like the arms of an octopus around a central rental office. He didn’t even have her specific apartment number. Frustrating. Her letters didn’t give any clue about hair color or height, anything that could help pick her out.
So he decided to suck up the nerve to ask. There were two preteen boys on skateboards; they buzzed by too fast. He ruled out a group of kids about his own age smoking by a clump of trees. Too much attitude. Then two girls – looked like about sixth grade – made things easy by coming right up to him.
“Are you new here? You’re new here.” They looked like they had been shopping at yard sales and decided to wear everything at once, hippie skirts and polka-dotted leggings and berets and vests with metal studs and mismatched earrings and weird high-top camouflage sneakers.
“How do you know I’m new?”
The one with the bright yellow shawl answered. “We know everyone. We’re the fashion setters of this place.”
“We especially know all the boys.”
“I’m just visiting. Actually, I’m looking for, um, my friend. Her name is Dani.”
“Dani!” one shrieked, and the other asked, “Who wants to know? If she’s really your friend, you’d know she’s in the hospital.”
“Is she okay?” he blurted, and then scrambled for a more casual tone. “I didn’t know because I’m an out-of-town friend. I mean I was out of town, but now I’m here.”
“She was supposed to come home, but then she got an infection, and now the infection is getting better. I think she might be home soon, maybe the end of the week. Are you a boyfriend?”
“No, I’m … a boyfriend would know her apartment, right? So I’m not because … which one is it?”
Yellow shawl pulled on his sleeve, and he followed them across the courtyard. They pointed to a blue door that looked like all the other blue doors. He felt strange about that. It was supposed to look somehow different. Parked in front was an old Toyota with rusted red paint. Tyler jutted his chin at it. “And that’s—”
“Her mom’s car. So, aren’t you going to knock?”
>
“You said she wasn’t home.”
“You could leave a message. A love message.”
“It’s got to be weird.”
“What?” Tyler asked.
“Knowing someone died so you could be alive.”
Tyler felt something squeeze in his chest. For some reason, he needed to defend this girl he didn’t know. “She – Dani – didn’t do it… You know, she didn’t kill anyone.”
“Yeah, guess not. But it’s got to be weird.”
“Creepy,” agreed the other.
From a far end of the complex, a mom voice yelled and the girls ran off. Tyler returned their “see ya!” then turned his attention back to the apartment door. Nothing going on. And now the kids who were smoking were checking him out. Yeah, they were suspicious, all right. He better take off. Nothing more would happen today anyway. Dani was still in the hospital.
Tyler hopped on his bike, and when he circled around toward the exit, he caught a glimpse of a woman coming out of the apartment. He got off his bike and pretended to check a tire. She draped the front door with some orange party streamers and tacked up a handwritten sign: WELCOME HOME. With a red marker, she added DANI!
The next day, Tyler cut class before lunch. When he got to the apartment complex, no one was around. Anyone who would have recognized him from yesterday must be in school. Good. Still, he better not just stand in the middle of the courtyard. He headed over to the clump of trees and picked an oak toward the back. From that angle, he could see the apartment door clearly. But unless someone was specifically looking for him, Tyler knew he blended in. If anyone spotted him at all, he was just some high school boy chilling out with a book.
He kicked aside some cigarette butts, sat down, got comfortable. Who knew when she’d be getting home? It could be hours.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“PROMISE?”
“Promise.”
I assured Milo that I would visit him. And when I couldn’t get to the hospital, I’d call. Every day. But that wasn’t the promise he kept talking about. No matter how hard I tried to keep the conversation about us, about the future of us, he kept coming back to her. The heart donor. Her. Amand… It was impossible for me to say her name aloud anymore; it lodged in my throat. It was hard to even hear someone else say it. It made her too real, too much of a person. But Milo kept going on and on about how he wanted to know more about her. He wanted me to be the one to find out. And no matter how much I tried not to, I felt these strange pangs of jealousy. But at the same time, I felt ridiculous and pathetic because there was no one to be jealous of.
“Why is this so important to you?”
He fumbled to put his thoughts together. “It’s maybe … not important for me, but for you.”
“It’s not important to me.”
“You might not think that now. But if I knew more about the guy whose liver I got, maybe I wouldn’t have treated it so—”
“That’s you. I’m me. I don’t…”
My voice trailed off. It was hard to get self-righteous with someone who looked as awful as Milo did. Those dark circles under his eyes. His stomach was so bloated he could have been hiding a cantaloupe under his top. Another sign that his liver was shutting down. How could I argue?
So I wound up promising that I would find out more about her. I really didn’t think it was a promise I could keep. The thought of knowing anything more … why? Why did I have to know?
Why? Why? Why?
The truth – and this might sound selfish, but I don’t care! – was that I wanted to know less. It wasn’t that I wasn’t grateful. Thank you, thank you, thank you. How many more times could I say that? I was grateful. But I wanted to wave a magic memory wand and forget about her for a while. Forget how she died. Forget that she had parents and a brother and friends, and how awful they must feel and how they’d never get over it, never stop missing her. How could they? Forget about all the things in life that she’d never get to do.
I wanted to forget that my heart, my real heart, was in some drawer in cold storage. I didn’t want to keep thinking about that. I wanted to forget.
But I couldn’t. I was reminded of her every time I talked to Milo and felt my heart speed up, every time it slowed down when I was drifting off to sleep. Why did I need to know anything more? I already felt her like a ghost wandering through every part of me, haunting me all the time. I wondered if I would ever not feel her.
“Ready to leave this joint for good?” Nurse Joe asked.
“Ready.”
Dr Alexander said that my latest echocardiogram was spectacular. That’s the word she used. Spectacular! I had zero rejection of the heart and no infection anywhere. But still, due to insane insurance rules, I wasn’t allowed to be a normal person and walk out of the hospital. Joe pushed the wheelchair, making jokey race car sounds. I guess he forgot that I wasn’t eight. Dr Alexander and Brianna, my other favorite nurse, walked alongside, carrying my suitcase and a packet containing a week’s supply of pills and my hospital discharge instructions. The automatic door whooshed open, and Mom was waiting at the curb with the car.
Joe hugged me, and Mom hugged Dr Alexander, and Brianna got teary and then Joe did, too. It was like a math problem: There are five huggers, some of whom are crying some of the time. How many permutations of hugging and crying can there be?
We went through them all and then I buckled myself in. Joe leaned his elbow on the roof of the car and lectured me through the open window. “I don’t want to see you back here ever again. Except for your regular checkups. Or to visit me. Or Milo.”
“Take care of that heart. Promise?” Brianna asked.
“Promise.”
After a couple of miles, I pointed out to Mom that we were headed in the wrong direction.
“For home it’s wrong.”
“Where are we going, then?”
Mom pulled the car into the next strip mall parking lot and shut off the engine. She stared down at her hands like someone caught cheating on a test. It wasn’t like her to not meet my eyes. “Dani, I couldn’t stop myself. I found out where they live. I thought you might … if you don’t want to … I understand. No pressure. I’m not going to talk to them or anything. I just want to look, see. I thought…” Big sigh. “I’m not sure what I thought.”
First Milo, now Mom. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t understand why she was so obsessed with her. “But why—”
Mom broke in because she knew exactly what I was going to ask. That’s how insanely close we were. Usually, there was something great about not having to explain myself to someone and to have a mom who talked to me like we were best friends, practically inside each other’s heads. But closeness like that could also be suffocating, and now was one of those times.
“It’s this way, Dani. I know everything about you – who your father was, what you ate as a baby, everything that’s gone into making you you. And now there’s this other thing, this heart, and it’s part of you. Where did it come from? Who? I need to know. Understand?”
I did, kind of, but I didn’t care what she needed. I wanted her to start the car. I would stick my head out the window and take big, gulping lungfuls of air as we pulled away and went home.
I didn’t care what she wanted!
And then I felt bad for not caring.
And then I felt angry that I felt bad. And then guilty for being angry.
I felt that heart speed up and start beating hard. I wanted to pound my fists on the dashboard, but I didn’t. Our old, familiar mother-daughter dynamic kicked in and something collapsed inside me. Trapped.
She waited and when I gave her a weak nod and an even weaker smile, she asked, “Sure?”
“Sure.”
But I wasn’t. Not at all.
“That one?”
“That one.”
We found the address no problem and parked across the street, far enough so we didn’t look like we cared about that particular house, but close enough to see anyone coming or going
. Mom had obviously given this parking plan a lot of thought. I don’t know why she bothered. We looked like a perfectly normal mom and daughter parked on a street talking about mom-daughter stuff. When a man walked by with his dog, I made sure to look repentant like I was being lectured about breaking a major family rule.
The house. So there it was. The shingles were painted deep sky blue. Flowers in terra-cotta pots on the steps. A brass knocker on the brick-colored front door. The house was a lot nicer than anyplace Mom and I ever lived in, a real mom-dad-kid house, the kind I usually envied. I supposed Milo lived in one just like it. It looked like an ordinary house filled with people living ordinary lives. But it was anything but that. It was her house.
Outside, nothing was moving. No front door opened. No mail carrier arrived. The house had two stories, so I figured that the bedrooms – her bedroom and Tyler’s – were upstairs. I quickly lowered my eyes, afraid of spotting any kind of movement at the windows, any sign of life. I wasn’t ready for that.
Ten minutes passed, and I felt tense every second of it.
Then another ten minutes. Usually Mom and I never ran out of things to talk about. I don’t think we’d ever been together in that small a space with so few words passing between us.
A half hour, and then finally I started to relax. Nothing was going to happen. They weren’t home. They weren’t coming home. I closed my eyes for a bit, and when I opened them, lacy curtains in a downstairs window fluttered once from a breeze. That was all, and I was really glad. Mom had gotten her chance to see the house. It was time to go.
“Beth, can we…?”
That’s when a silver Toyota pulled into the driveway. I took a breath and let it out only when the car door opened and a pair of legs in a skirt came out. Then hips, waist, shoulders, body, back of head. A mom, a regular mom coming home from a regular day at work. The only odd thing was how she stood there awhile looking at the house, studying it, like she was afraid of it. Then she whipped around so suddenly, I jolted and ducked my head so that it was resting on Mom’s lap.