Recording Session in New Jersey 

To make a short story even shorter, the cash-strapped hospital jumped at the chance to keep a doctor whom they didn’t have to pay.

First, Andy broached the subject to her attending, Dr. Taneisha Jackson, who called HR and the charitable-giving office with Andy sitting right there in her office, which set up a meeting with Cadell’s lawyer that handled his corporation’s business for the next morning at eight o’clock sharp, who drew up and signed the paperwork and transferred the money that afternoon.

In less than twenty-four hours, it was done, and Andy was riding in the back seat of Cadell’s sparkling, dark blue BMW with Emily in her car seat, while Cadell sat in the passenger seat and a driver drove them around New Jersey.

Emily had never been so excited in her tiny, little life. She giggled all the way from the hospital to a restaurant for lunch and then from there to the recording studio to drop Cadell off for the afternoon.

When they were almost at the studio, a call jiggled Andy’s cell phone.

The screen read UNOS-NY.

She grabbed his seat back, and the driver glanced back at her through the rear view mirror. “Ma’am, pull over. This is it. Hello?” she said into the phone.

“We’re here,” Cadell said, looking out of the window. “We’re at the studio.”

The driver guided the car into a parking lot and into a parking place between a high-end Mercedes and a sports car that looked like fire cast in metal. She turned in her seat and asked, “Do we need to go back to the hospital?”

Andy held the phone pinned between her ear and her shoulder and took notes as fast as she could on a paper napkin that had been stuffed in her purse. “Email me the specifics. It isn’t very close.”

The woman on the phone said, “No, it isn’t, but your patient is in the local zone even though transit time isn’t very good, she’s the right size, and she’s held the longest at the PELD score. According to the algo, she gets the offer. No algorithm is perfect. We need to know now, though. They’re getting ready to harvest it.”

“I’ll explain it to the father. Luckily, he’s right here in my office.”

Cadell had twisted around in the passenger seat and was staring at her, his dark eyes getting larger. “Do we need to go back?”

Andy held up a finger. “Fifteen minutes, and thank you,” she told the woman on the phone and tapped the screen. “We have a donor. We should turn around and go back now. But there’s a problem with it.”

“Oh, my God. This is it.” Cadell reached back and touched his daughter’s foot, a smile growing on his face. Emily grinned back, oblivious. “This is it. I can take her to concerts with me, and I can teach her to ski, and she can learn to swim. This is it.”

“You need to listen to me,” Andy said. “It’s not perfect. It’s not close to a perfect match.”

“But they offered it to her,” he said.

“Emily’s blood type is B-positive. This liver is from an O-negative person. It should be a match, but there is a slightly higher likelihood of rejection or hemolysis. The liver is somewhat local, so the transit time would be suboptimal, which is bad. And the donor was a similar size, so the liver will fit. But this is far from optimal. The donor was CMV-positive, so the person had cytomegalovirus at some point, and she was EBV-positive, but pretty much everyone is. There are also other, small mismatches. Together, those add up to be large risk factors. Emily is only at a twenty-three. She might have a year or more before receiving a transplant becomes critical.”

“So what are you telling me? You think we should tell them no?”

“I’ve only seen one case as mismatched as this and with CMV. The recipient rejected during the first two weeks. They’re offering it because Emily is the right size and she’s local.”

“You’re being too conservative. She could be well.”

“It’s not a good match. One should be conservative when you’re sewing an exogenous organ into a child’s body. The chance of rejection is too high.”

“But she would have this one, and if she rejects, then she’ll get the very next one, right?”

“That’s a very risky strategy, and not one that I could counsel. One might not become available in time. At best, she would have to have two major surgeries instead of one. These surgeries take eight hours or more.”

“Maybe we should roll the dice,” Cadell said, his eyes locked on his daughter, who was playing with his phone.

“Maybe we should do no harm.”

“Sometimes risks pay off. You’ve got to hit on the sixteen.”

Oh, he wanted to talk statistics? Fine. Math had been one of Andy’s strongest subjects. She had scored a perfect eight hundred on the SAT Math section. “Sometimes they do, but if you hit on a sixteen, you will lose seventy percent of the time.”

“But if you don’t hit on sixteen, you lose seventy-four percent of the time.” Cadell grinned. “I play a lot of poker, Texas Hold ‘Em and Blackjack.”

Dammit. “But in this case, you can walk away from the table with your money and your daughter’s life, and you can play many more hands.”

“It’s a transplant. It will save her life. We’ve never been offered one before.”

“She has a higher PELD score, now. She will be offered another.”

“We don’t know that.”

“It’s likely. They prioritize children.”

“If she rejects this one, I’ll give her mine.”

“Your donation is problematic.”

“I’ve been clean for eight months. I’m negative for all the viruses. That biopsy showed that my liver was as healthy as a person who had never used.”

“You’re too big. She’s so little. Look at her. The hepatic ducts might never match up, even with a small graft. And what if you’ve seroconverted on an antigen since then, and when we cross-match you, you’re not a match anymore? What if two eight-hour surgeries in a week are too much for her? What if you roll the dice, and you lose?”

Cadell said, “Call them back. Tell them yes. Tell them to do the liver transplant and save her life.”

“Are you sure about this?”

“No! No, I’m not sure. I just want her to be healthy. I want her to be well so much that I want to kill that disease that’s hurting her and I can’t. There’s nothing for me to start a bar fight with or to catch in a dark alley. Now give her the damn liver.”

He shoved open the door and stumbled out of the car. At the back of the car, he found his guitar case in the trunk and slammed the trunk lid as he marched toward the low, brick building back there.

Andy caught the driver looking through the rear view mirror at her. “Ma’am? I need to go after him. Is it all right to leave Emily with you for a moment?”

The driver said, “Of course, ma’am. I have your cell number.”

“Thank you.”

She stepped out of the car and ran after him, running toward the studio in the harsh afternoon sunlight. The asphalt radiated heat up her legs as she trotted and yanked open the door.

Inside, she called, “Cadell!”

A uniformed woman sitting at a security desk raised her eyebrows. “Can I help you, ma’am?”

Andy flashed her hospital ID badge at the woman. Thank goodness she hadn’t bothered to take off her white coat. “I need to talk to Cadell Glynn. Which way did he go?”

The security officer looked askance at Andy, her large, dark eyes comparing Andy to the photo on the ID and skeptically looking her up and down. She pursed her lips. “I’ll need to come with you.”

Andy pulled the big argument out of her proverbial medical bag. “It’s a matter of life or death.”

The security guard led Andy through hallways to the back recording studio. A sour-faced technician sat in the booth. Her lip lifted when Andy opened the door and came in.

On the other side of a plate-glass window, inside the studio, a bunch of men and one woman were playing instruments. Some random, cacophonous strumming jangled through the speakers in the booth.

The lone woman played an electronic piano, running her fingers up and down the keyboard in what Andy recognized even without sound as two-octave major scales. She had played probably millions of those in her life. Her tiger mother was a big proponent of scales.

One man with short blond hair played a bass guitar, while the man with the long blond hair paced. He touched his throat with a heavily bandaged hand.

Cadell was sitting on a folding chair, his electric guitar on his lap, holding the neck of it like he was strangling it.

The technician, wearing earphones, scowled at them all.

Andy asked, “How do I talk to them?”

The woman pushed a button and swiveled the silver stalk of a microphone toward her, still grimacing, but didn’t say anything.

Andy leaned over and said into the mic, “Cadell, get your butt out here now.”

The tuning and scraping died away, and everyone looked at her.

“I can’t right now,” Cadell said, his voice tinny over the speakers in the mixing board. “It’ll have to wait.”

“It can’t wait,” Andy said, her teeth grinding. They had ten minutes before it would automatically release. “It’s important.”

The other musicians all looked from Cadell to Andy and back.

Cadell glanced around. “Um, yeah. Folks, this is, um, Andy,” he looked back through the window at her, “my girlfriend.”

His what?

Her teeth ground together, and she considered flashing her engagement ring at them just to punish Cadell, whether to tell the others that they were engaged or that she wasn’t involved with him, she hadn’t decided yet.

The blond guy asked, “What?”

She rolled her eyes. This was not the time, nor the place. She needed an answer. “Yeah, whatever. You need to make a decision about this now. They said that we have ten minutes to accept or refuse it.”

Andy spun and stalked out of the sound booth.