Andy stormed down the corridor of the recording studio, her fists clenched, ready to strangle Cadell Glynn when next she saw him.
It was damn obvious that this donated organ was the wrong liver for Emily. If the child did go into a crisis, Andy absolutely would prep Cadell for surgery and graft a section of his liver into his daughter. Their blood types and tissue types matched perfectly, even though tissue typing was less important than the blood type. More importantly, Cadell was CMV-negative and EBV-negative.
The only problem with the transplant was their disparity of size and his past drug use. Other than that, Cadell was a healthy, twenty-something male, the least-rejected, most-preferred type of donor.
Behind Andy, she heard Cadell yell her name.
She kept walking. Evidently, she had to phone UNOS about a liver.
“Andy!”
“Unless you’re going to stop me from accepting this liver for Emily, I don’t want to speak to you.”
“Wait!”
“No.”
His hand grabbed her arm, pulling her. They stumbled into the sound booth of an empty studio. Beyond the small mixing board, the window showed only a dark room with a few tiny lights casting pale twilight over the chairs and microphones.
She yanked her arm away from him. “And I am not your damn girlfriend.”
“It was all I could come up with. The way you stomped out, they’ll believe it.”
“Why should they have to believe it? Tell them that I’m Emily’s doctor.”
“They don’t know about Emily.”
“That she’s sick? Why would you keep that from your closest friends? They should be supporting you right now.”
“They don’t know that she exists. The band is everything to them. They are all sacrificing their blood and bodies to this thing, to make it a success. It’s the most important thing in their lives. They wouldn’t understand that I have a kid and I’m shirking band duties to hang out with a two-year-old.”
“They understood about your heroin addiction. They enabled that.”
“They didn’t know. I was good at keeping it a secret. I was the most functional heroin addict you’ve ever met.”
“There is no such thing. You aren’t a bloody unicorn.”
“I was. I was a perfect rainbow-farting unicorn. The things that I do to keep myself from using have more impact on my life than the heroin did.”
“All this doesn’t matter, and it is wrong,” Andy said, waving her hands in the air to drive away the stupid, extraneous conversation. “There is a liver that has been offered. You shouldn’t take it. Do you want me to cut open your daughter and stuff it in there or not?”
“Emily needs this liver. It’s a win-win situation. If she doesn’t reject it, then she’s home free. If she does, then she’ll be at the top of the transplant list. Either way, it leads to the shortest amount of time before she will be well and able to play and have a life, and it won’t matter anymore if I can’t hold out and use heroin.”
Anger wound up in her chest. “Are you just waiting to use until after her transplant? Are you planning to go back to it?”
“I don’t want to,” he said, shaking his head. His black hair swished with the violence of it, the blue tips waving.
“Because she’s counting on you, you know. You’re all the family that she has, too. If you die or lose custody because you’re a drug addict, she goes into foster care. Most foster care families are beautiful human beings who just want to help children, but most of them are overworked and exhausted. They do the best they can, but a regimen of anti-rejection medicines is difficult under the best circumstances. And they aren’t you. She loves you so much.”
“I’m not planning to,” he protested. “It’s hard. It’s so hard to not do it. The other day on the way to the hospital, I took a wrong turn, but it wasn’t an accident. It was just wrong. I was driving to where my dealer lived last year. I don’t know if he’s still there, but someone probably is. It felt like the car was dragging me, and I drove five more blocks before I could make the car turn and go to the hospital instead.”
She leaned back against the mixing board. “You can’t do that, Cadell, and you can’t tell me if you do. I’m a mandatory reporter. If I don’t report you, I could go to jail or lose my license.”
“I’m dying for it. The anger at her damn disease is killing me, and I’m craving the bliss of heroin. Every time I hear the words biliary atresia, I want to slam my fist into something. I want to be rocked to sleep in God’s arms for just a minute, just so I can stand living like this, but I can’t. If I do, if Emily needs a pound of my flesh, I have to be ready to give it to her, and it has to be clean. If she doesn’t reject this liver, if she’s all right, and then if I slip, it won’t kill her. It might kill me, but it won’t kill her.”
One of Andy’s hands hovered near her mouth, and her other arm clutched her cramping stomach. “Oh, Cadell. You’re breaking my heart.”
His hands stretched, clawlike, as he tried to grasp something that wasn’t in front of him. “My skin hurts. My bones hurt. I hurt all the time. Still.”
She said, “I’m so sorry.”
“I can’t do methadone. As far as my liver is concerned, it’s the same thing as heroin. I can’t even take an aspirin or an Advil because if she goes into a crisis, I have to be ready for surgery. Every time I eat, I check the clock so that I can tell the transplant team what time my last meal was. I can’t slip. If I do, she might die, and I would follow her. I couldn’t leave her over there alone. I would have to make sure she’s okay.”
Andy pushed off the mixing board and wrapped both her arms around his waist.
He leaned down to her, falling into a chair and butting his head against her shoulder. “I don’t know what to do.”
She said, “I’ll stay with you. I’ll stay in your house, and I’ll drive you to the hospital so that you get there, and I’ll make sure you don’t use until Emily gets her transplant. I won’t let you use again if I have to yank the needle out of your vein myself. After she has it, you can start methadone.”
“You can’t. You’re getting married in a few weeks. You’ll have to go on your honeymoon. You guys have to start your lives together. You can’t stay with us.”
“We aren’t doing a honeymoon. I can’t take weeks off in the middle of my residency. And I wasn’t planning on living with him.”
Cadell sat up. Red rimmed his dark eyes. “Why not?”
Her arms were still around his neck. “His house is too far from the hospital.”
“You’re not even going to live together?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You’re newlyweds. You should at least go somewhere romantic for a few days.”
“It doesn’t have to be romantic. It probably shouldn’t be romantic. Having an arranged marriage is more like setting up a company or locking down an investment.”
“That’s not a marriage,” he said, his dark eyes troubled.
“It’s more like setting up and completing a transaction than a Western-style marriage. It’s arranging a position for yourself, like finding a job.”
Cadell slid his arms back until his hands rested on her hips. Even though his hands were enormous, they certainly didn’t span her generous waist. Far from it.
He said, “Xan worked harder to recruit me to start Killer Valentine than this guy has worked at convincing you to marry him.”
“He didn’t have to convince me. My parents wanted to arrange my marriage, so they did.”
“Don’t you want to find someone you love?”
“I wouldn’t want the responsibility,” she said, a phrase that fell out of her mouth before she even thought about it.
All her friends said that.
The magnitude of what she had said rolled over her, that withdrawal from her own life, the willing descent down a deep hole of misery.
Cadell’s expelled breath sounded like he had been punched. “You hold children’s lives in your hands every day. If that’s not responsibility, I don’t know what is.”
Later. She had to think about that later. “That doesn’t matter right now.”
“Yes, it does! It matters to me.”
“It shouldn’t. More importantly, what should I say to UNOS? Should I tell them that we will accept the liver so that you can go back to using heroin as expediently as possible, or will we pass on it to give your daughter the best long-term chance of survival?”
Cadell closed his eyes and swallowed hard. “Pass on it.”
She wrapped her arms around his shoulders again. “I will keep you safe. No matter what I have to do, I will keep you safe. Go back in there and finish your recording. Do you have any access to heroin in that room?”
“No. I don’t think so. The guys that I used with are dead or out of the band.”
“Call me one half-hour before you are done, and Emily and I will pick you up. I won’t let you slip back into it and kill Emily.”
In her arms, he sighed, and his shoulders slouched in relief.