by Piper Lennox
“London, no—let me talk to the doctor alone, okay?”
Her face crumpled. Waterworks were imminent.
“Hey, London,” I said, lifting the countertop over the entryway to the desk. “You want to play a game on my phone while your dad checks on Buttons?”
“A game?” Her voice still trembled, but she wriggled free of her dad’s grasp and stepped through to join me.
“Oh...um, thank you,” Orion told me. His daughter bounced in my desk chair while I pulled up Gem Tide on my phone. “Be good, London, okay? I’ll be right back.”
“Okay, Daddy,” she said distractedly. “Give Buttons the sock!”
“The sock?” Dr. Aurora asked. I glanced up, wondering this myself.
Orion blushed a little. “The cat has this thing about socks. He, uh...snuggles them, I guess?”
“They’re his pillows,” London informed me. She’d already completed Level One; the sound of gems exploding and powerups trilling made the waiting room feel more lively than usual, this time of day.
Dr. Aurora held the door for Orion. As he followed her back, I saw him pull a balled-up sock from his pocket, his hand closing tightly around it before the doors closed.
Orion
“...closed the wound with sutures, so you’ll need to keep it bandaged after he comes home. And he’ll need a cone.” The vet stepped back so I could see the cat through the cage door. “We can give you one, or you can pick one up at a pet store.”
“When can I take him home?”
“I’ll have someone call you tomorrow evening, if he’s ready to go. We’ll administer antibiotics so he won’t get an infection, but I might want to keep him longer if he shows any signs—since we don’t know what injured him. But I’m guessing it was a raccoon.” Her eyes bore into me over her glasses like an investigator. “Do you feed the cat outside?”
“Yes....”
“Ah. And you probably left his bowls outside, right?”
“Yeah. I mean...where else would I put them?”
“Most raccoons leave cats alone, and vice-versa—but when food’s involved, especially if the cat is aggressive, it can become an issue.”
“Buttons is not aggressive.” The sentence felt ridiculous coming out of my mouth. I didn’t even like the cat that much. What did I care if the vet knew his personality?
“Feed the cat in the kitchen,” she said, as if I hadn’t said anything at all, “or at least, bring in his dish after he’s done with it. And make sure no pieces of food are lying around to attract more raccoons.”
On instinct, I felt angry. What, it was my fault the cat got in a scuffle? At least I’d brought it in here, fighting nausea the entire drive and a headache from London’s screams.
Then, I took a breath. The vet was just helping me, the best way she knew how.
“Thank you.” I shook her hand. “I really appreciate your help.”
“Of course. I’m glad you brought him in.”
When I got back to the front desk, London barely noticed me. She was sitting in the office chair with her feet propped up, while the receptionist stood behind her. Her arms were propped on the seat back; she pointed at the screen. “You got a power up! Use it, use it, quick!”
London laughed and tapped the screen. Well, “tapped” wasn’t the right word. She practically broke her finger.
“Daddy, look! I got all the gems and now I’m on Level Six!”
“That’s great, bug. But we’ve got to get going now, okay?”
“But I’m on Level Six! Colby said the highest she got was Ten, so I want to get Eleven.”
My headache doubled. Don’t yell at her. It wasn’t her fault I’d skipped dialysis the day before, or that I was pushing the limit today, too.
“Come on. Uncle Walt is taking you to dance class soon, remember?”
She didn’t take her eyes off the screen. “Well...can I play on your phone?”
“No. You know the rule about phones.”
“But Colby let me have her phone!”
“Well, Colby,” I snapped, “didn’t know the rule, and this was a special circumstance. Get up.” My voice was steel. It had no effect on London, but the receptionist took a deep breath.
“London. Now.” I snapped my fingers, making London scramble to finish her current level while melting limb by limb out of the chair—her own brand of “fast.”
The receptionist sucked in another breath.
I looked at her. “What?”
“Nothing.” Her shrug was transparent. I waited for what she really thought, which I had no doubt she’d share, whether I wanted to hear it or not.
“Just surprised,” she went on, slowly, “at how strict you are.”
My teeth ground together. “And I’m surprised,” I said flatly, wrestling the phone from London, who started the tears immediately, “that someone without kids has questioned my parenting twice, without being asked.” I held out her phone. She hesitated, then took it.
“You did ask, the second time,” she said. “And I wasn’t questioning your parenting, just...sharing an observation.” Her ponytail bounced as she flopped back into her seat. “Strict isn’t a bad thing. I was saying it because most young parents aren’t like that. They let their kids get away with everything.”
“Oh.” The pressure in my chest eased up. “Your...your tone wasn’t clear.”
She waved goodbye to London as we started for the doors. But not, I noticed, to me. “I get that a lot.”
Three
Colby
“It’s not that I hate people. I find people fascinating, actually—why they do what they do, the way they interact with each other.”
“The fact you’re not including yourself in that ‘they’ tells me you really aren’t a people person, you know.” Orion slips his hands into his pockets as we round the front of the event building for the seventh time. We started walking to calm our nerves before going back to the party, but now the easy pace and conversation has us in a loop neither seems eager to break.
“Not being a people person doesn’t mean hating them. And the whole ‘they’ versus ‘us’ thing is just semantics.” I pick apart the flower petal in my fingers and let it flutter away on the breeze. “Look, I just prefer honesty. Is that really so bad?”
“People don’t like honesty,” he says. “They want to hear...well. What they want to hear.”
“Even if it isn’t the truth?”
“Especially when it isn’t the truth. People would always prefer not knowing.”
“Huh.” We’re at the back of the event center, now. An employee is smoking near the fire valve. He gives us a nod, and we give ours back.
“Honesty is a good trait,” he adds. “It’s very underappreciated—it’s one of those things everyone says they want from other people, but they don’t.”
“So, what, everyone is just lying about not wanting people to lie to them?”
Orion laughs, rocking his head back and forth a little. “Yes and no. It’s more like, people think they want honesty. They really, truly believe they do. But they don’t.”
“Like when I said you were strict because you asked what I was thinking, and all it did was piss you off?”
He shifts his jaw. “Stuff about London and my parenting makes me really quick to react. Sorry.”
As we round the building again, we each pause and look at the door. We’ve done it every single time we’ve passed by, as if considering to go back inside makes it better when, instead, we keep walking.
“I bet you did get a lot of judgment,” I offer, “having her so young.”
He nods, running his tongue over his teeth.
“Can I ask how old you were? I mean, you look, like...my age.”
“I was seventeen, she was sixteen. We met at kidney camp.”
My laugh stutters out. “I’m sorry.” I cover my mouth. “I’m not laughing at you, I swear. I just...was not expecting that phrase.”
“Making fun of sick kids. That’s l
ow.”
When he elbows me, I have to take a breath to stop smiling. It feels wrong, having any fun today. Aunt Rochelle can call this a party all she wants, but it’s basically a second memorial for Eden.
Still. Laughing beats panic attacks, any day.
Orion
“It doesn’t bother you?” Colby takes a strawberry from my plate, so I slide it in front of her. I haven’t had an appetite since my plane landed, and even though the party’s almost over, I haven’t relaxed much.
Walking the grounds and talking to Colby, in fact, was my first time actually enjoying Hawaii.
“Not even a little,” I answer. Across the crowd, Rochelle is still talking animatedly to the other recipient who attended. For the most part, I’m just a piece of the background, now. “The eyes and heart are a big deal, for things like this. She gets to look into her kid’s eyes again. And if the person who got her heart was here, she could hug her and feel it beating. That’s powerful. She can’t feel or see kidneys. Hell, people don’t even think about their own kidneys.” I pause and take a long drink of my water. “Until something happens to them, anyway.”
Colby’s stare makes me tense up. She has a way of doing that, I’ve noticed: looking at you so intensely, you have to brace yourself for whatever observation she’s about to make.
“Did you always have bum kidneys?”
I laugh. “Now there’s a phrase I was not expecting. No, I got diagnosed with stage two when I was fourteen. Then stage three for about a year, a graceful slide into stage four...and then stage five, the day before my eighteenth birthday.”
“That must have been hard. Being sick for so long.”
“Stages four and five were the only times I actually felt sick. Before that, it didn’t affect my life too much.” Under our table, my foot bounces like it’s on a spring.
“I’ve heard people can get, like, memories and personality traits,” she says, flicking a chunk of raw broccoli off the table. “From a donor organ. Do you feel any different?”
I can’t tell if she’s asking because she’s curious—which seems to be her main M.O. in life—or if, despite her continued verdict that this party is “creepy,” she needs her own kind of closure. She mentioned living with her cousin in California. They must have been close.
“Not really.” If she’s disappointed at all, she doesn’t show it. “But kidneys have a lower rate of that happening compared to...I don’t know, the heart, liver. Maybe it’s because I’ve only got one of her kidneys. Someone else has the other. So it’s kind of like...half an organ?”
“No wonder you aren’t the life of this party.”
“Yeah. My story’s pretty dull.”
Colby smiles faintly. “I wouldn’t go that far. It’d still make a good headline. ‘Young, single dad gets life transformed with transplant.’”
“That,” I cringe, “sounds more like a Lifetime movie.”
“This whole day feels like a Lifetime movie.” Only now does her face fall, and I get the feeling this party is more than just weird to her. It must be hard. Like having to say goodbye all over again.
“You want to get out of here?”
She seems as surprised to hear me say this as I am. “We’ve still got an hour left, though.” It’s not exactly a protest, but more of a challenge.
“I wasn’t missed for the whole first hour. Come on, you said you grew up here, right? Show me what Kona is like for the locals. I’ll say goodbye to your aunt and thank her again, then we can go check out some shops.” I snap my fingers and point at her. “Or a volcano.”
“Locals don’t go traipsing around volcanoes,” she snorts, “and they’re on the other side of the island.” Her watch glints under the lights. “But...yeah, I wouldn’t mind showing you around, a little.”
“Awesome.” I push my plate of uneaten strawberries even closer to her. “I’ll be right back.”
What I thought would be a quick escape turns into twenty minutes of photo ops and off-the-cuff interviews. Rochelle hugs me even harder than before. I think my back cracks.
“You forgot your swag bag.” Colby nods to the gift basket on the table near the door, a pink index card proclaiming “ORION” with a heart. It’s one of nine, which I’m sure the photographers loved: it makes a bittersweet story even more heartbreaking. Nine lives saved or transformed, and only two showed up.
“I feel kind of bad for my aunt,” Colby whispers. She nods towards the table after I take mine, the enormity of them unaffected. I notice mine is the only one with a name, save for the eye recipient’s. The rest have much smaller writing, in pencil. Liver. Lung 1. Lung 2. Heart.
I turn away fast.
“On the other hand,” she adds, as her heels click behind my dress shoes, “I knew this would happen.”
The sunlight as we step outside makes us reel. “That only two people would show up?”
“That or no one. But I knew my aunt would get her hopes up and plan for all nine to show. Which she did. Plane tickets and all.”
“Wow. I didn’t know she got the tickets. I mean...I thought it was like the hotel rooms or something. Donated.”
“I think my mom and dad paid for the tickets. Rochelle’s been struggling.” Her expression darkens again. “She hasn’t lived in her house for months. And she’s stopped paying the mortgage. I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets slapped with a foreclosure, soon.”
I hold up my gift basket and peer through the cellophane at the gourmet chocolates and coffees. “I feel really shitty for admitting this, but I almost didn’t respond to her letter.”
“Don’t.” Colby leads me to the parking lot of the event center, past the idling news vans to a beat-up blue compact. We get in. “I totally get it. If my mom hadn’t blackmailed me to come home, I’d still be in Santa Barbara.”
“Yeah...but I feel like you and I had different reasons for not wanting to come here.”
“Why? What was yours?”
I watch Colby crank the ignition twice, then a third time before it catches and the car rumbles. “Facing Rochelle. It seemed way too hard. I mean...she lost everything, and I gained so much from her loss. And that’s...that’s a really hard feeling to live with.”
The car pulls onto the road before I feel Colby’s stare.
“You have a right to feel that way, though. And it’s not like you benefiting changes what happened. Eden would have died whether you got her kidney or not. At least you and the other recipients getting to live adds some kind of meaning to her death.”
“I guess.”
“See, I tried telling my mom that exact same thing—that people wouldn’t be chomping at the bit to meet Rochelle, knowing her kid died and that’s how their organ got to them. It’d be like if every cell phone came with a video of the poor sweatshop workers who had to build them.”
“You, uh...you’ve got a way with analogies.”
“Look, I’m just saying—I get it. You want to move on. Actually live your life now that you’ve got one ahead of you. Not dwell on the past.”
“Exactly. I felt obligated to do it, though.”
“Well. I do think it was good for my aunt, so thank you.” She cranes her neck to study the rearview, then whips the wheel to take a hairpin turn, uncaring of how tightly I grip the handle over my door. “But I don’t agree that your reason and mine are any different.”
“You thought the party was creepy. I thought it was just...too emotionally difficult.”
“No,” she says patiently, almost casually, even though that one word makes me guard myself like she’s swinging a sword. “We both want to move forward, instead of rehashing old shit. We want to get on with our lives.”
It’s the way she snaps this part that makes me grip the handle hardest.
“Okay.” I force a cough. “Then...yeah. We did have the same reasons.”
Her fingers flex on the wheel. From the side of her sunglasses, I catch her blinking faster.
“Where do you want to go?” The car r
attles around another turn. “The beach? A restaurant?”
“What do you usually do?” I sit up and loosen my hold on the handle, then let my hand fall onto the armrest molded in the door. “When you’re home on visits, or whatever. Or before you moved to California.”
“Surfed, swam. Worked in my parents’ vet practice. Pretty much it.”
“You surf?”
Her fingers slide behind one of the lenses, pretending to scratch. I know she’s dabbing at the water on her lashes. “Windsurfing, mostly. Or paddle boarding. Locals tend to learn that stuff early on, when you live close to the water.” The glance she throws my way sends mine out the window, instinctive. “You?”
“The most I’ve ever done is boogie boarding. And I was terrible at it. But we don’t have to go to the beach—I spent a lot of time on it yesterday, after my flight. I’d rather see...I don’t know, something I can’t see in California.”
“Like a volcano.”
Her sarcasm waters down the tension. It’s still floating between us, but weakened.
“Yeah,” I smirk. “Like a volcano. Is it really that far away? You said the other side of the island, right?”
“Do you have any idea how big Hawaii is? It’s a two-hour drive to the park. And that’s assuming you’re fine just seeing a big hole spewing steam. If you want to see actual lava, you’re looking at a long-ass hike.”
“Oh.” I crank my window handle after she does the same. The air pouring in smells like a greenhouse, the landscape just a wash of green plants and bright, clear blue sky. “Never mind, then. I’d only want to see the lava. I guess I thought you guys had, like, volcanoes all over the place.”
“A lot of people think that,” she sighs, but smiles, propping her head in her hand as she rests her elbow on the window ledge.
“What was it like, growing up here?” I slip my hand out into the breeze streaming past the car. “It seems so perfect.”
“It’s not. It’s like anywhere else. Just hotter and more expensive.”