“May I ask,” the woman on the line said crisply, “which patient referred you to this number?”
“I—” Caroline was sitting in her van at Riley’s soccer practice, engine off, while the team scrimmaged in the rain. It pattered down the foggy windshield in streaks, making the driver’s seat feel more private than it was—a shell of unexpected solitude, as Walt had gotten home from work early and saved her from dragging the other kids along. Even so, she hadn’t expected names to come into this. She certainly didn’t intend to give her own.
“No one. I do know a patient, but I’m calling without her knowledge. My questions are hypothetical.” That didn’t come out right. It made her sound dismissive. “Preliminary, I mean.”
She’d looked up the transplant procedure online, of course. She still needed details, still had questions, but the gist of it seemed to be that, well, it was major surgery. As such, it scared the hell out of her—overall dislike of hospitals notwithstanding. But well-regarded medical professionals the world over would not routinely perform an operation on healthy people if it wasn’t by and large safe. Would they?
Data analysis was literally in her blood. After more than a week of obsessing, she’d moved beyond reacting off-the-cuff. She couldn’t in good conscience rule this out, couldn’t decide how she felt about any of it, until she knew more. More than some website would say.
“I see.” The woman sounded wary, and Caroline hoped she was an operator and not the actual point of contact. She’d found this number online, dialed it blind. “What did you want to know?”
Caroline closed her eyes, trying to pretend this was a work call. Speccing out a new venue for a client. Merely the middleman. “If I were calling about being tested—to see if I’d be a match for this person—what exactly would that entail?”
“Well, for starters, you’d have called the wrong number. This is the office for the transplant coordinator. You’d start with the living donor coordinator. They’d put the request in the system, and someone from our office would call you back to go through our preevaluation survey. It takes fifteen to twenty minutes, and probably covers a lot of the specifics you’re wondering about—your own medical history and whether you might be eligible, but also what the testing involves, first steps, et cetera. I can give you that number, if you’d like?”
“Why do I call them, if you’re the ones doing the evaluation?”
A keyboard clacked in the background. “A transplant might seem like one process, but it involves two patients: The prospective donor becomes one the instant they enter our system. As such, donors have their own coordinators for the sake of their own best interests and confidentiality, as well as the recipients’.”
“Can you just tell me what that first test is, exactly?”
“If you are deemed eligible—no disqualifying medical condition or obesity—the first step is a simple blood test.”
“Just my blood type?”
“Not quite that simple. They’re looking for a tissue match. Antibodies, things like that.”
“And if I’m not an initial tissue match, that’s it? No go?”
“No go.”
“And if I am?”
“Much more involved evaluations follow, both to check for other compatibilities and to ensure the donor’s safety.”
“So I could initially be a tissue match but turn out not to be a candidate?”
“Quite often, unfortunately.”
Unfortunately. Right. That was supposed to be the mind-set of the people calling.
“Did you want that number for the donor coordinator?”
Did she? That was the question.
Walt was livid with Sela. Incensed in a way Caroline had never seen him, in a way that made her tears-in-her-eyes grateful she was not the object of his ire. He seemed convinced Sela had had some master plan—to lure Caroline closer with bittersweet thoughts of all the years they could’ve been there for each other, then ensnare her with an appeal only a cold heart would deny.
Caroline wasn’t so sure. Once the shock of Sela’s circumstances wore off, her mental devil’s advocate kicked in. Did reaching out to someone qualify as manipulation if you had independently valid reasons for doing it—aside from something you might, yes, secretly hope they might do for you? Caroline, not Walt, had witnessed the wistful way Sela traced Rebecca’s old school-day commute, how she’d hugged herself fiercely on the sidewalk when she’d thought no one was watching. Caroline, not Walt, had heard the way she’d talked with Lucy about her fears, offering a solution that was both empowering and tender—and effective, as Lucy hadn’t had a bedtime issue since. Caroline, not Walt, had seen the conflict in Sela’s eyes when they exchanged hesitant details about their lives to date. The look not of someone fishing for a sisterly connection but of someone open to one in spite of reservations.
A look a lot like the one she saw in the mirror.
Maybe Caroline should have guessed she was missing something big. What if she’d asked ahead of the visit, as any good hostess should, if Sela had dietary restrictions? What if she’d shared the details of their father’s heart attack when it happened—Sela had called while she was at the hospital, after all—or later, in the interest of relevant family medical history, asking if Sela had information to volunteer in turn? Caroline hadn’t willfully avoided these topics, per se; and if they’d come up, would Sela have lied, evaded? Caroline didn’t think so. Had Sela been obligated to tell them something so personal from the start? Would Caroline have done so in her shoes?
Maybe she didn’t feel the anger Walt did simply because his burned hot enough for both of them—so hot, in fact, she couldn’t help backing away from it, for fear that mere proximity could singe her. What she felt toward Sela was sympathy. To have her pregnancy end with such a tragic diagnosis—to be gifted with a new life born from hers, with the very big caveat that she might not live to see it through—and then to lose Rebecca so soon afterward? To see her marriage crumble in the midst of it? Yes, Sela’s situation extended to Caroline in ways she’d rather it didn’t. The person inside that situation, though, had the worst of it, by far.
But when Sela wrote to Caroline her first night back in North Carolina, she didn’t speak of her own plight.
I don’t know what the right way to tell you was, but I wish I’d done it better—from the beginning. I guess I got caught up in the possibility of having someone like you and your wonderful family in my life—in any capacity. And, if I’m honest, I underestimated how wonderful it would be to spend time with people who didn’t know, who treated me like a normal person and not like some ticking clock. I let it go on too long. But you have to believe me: I don’t wish any responsibility for my health upon you. There’s nothing I’d like better than to go back to how things were before you all knew, as much as that’s possible. For my sake and for yours.
Caroline could not undo the way she’d felt that night before she found out the truth: convinced Sela could be the one positive in this whole negative mess. A sister, a sister-in-law, with a nephew in tow. A “real aunt,” Lucy had called her without even knowing. What did it say about Caroline if Sela being sick changed her openness to any of those things? Even if Walt’s take did have a grain of truth to it, could you fault someone for trying to save her own life?
In Sela’s shoes, Caroline would go to any lengths—if not for her own sake, for her children’s.
“Ma’am? Would you like that number? Do you have a pen?”
If Walt knew she was doing anything other than dismissing this option out of hand, he’d be beside himself. Not with anger, necessarily, but worry, protest.
Anguish.
If she wasn’t a tissue match, it was a no go. She’d be off the hook—no decision to make. And even if she did pass the initial screen, she could still be ruled out—very often, unfortunately. Someone else would blessedly do the ruling. Not her. Not Walt. They could be a united front again, at least, on that much.
The real question was, once she started down a path she wasn’t sure she wanted to continue, could she stop?
“I might as well get it while I have you,” she told the woman. “Thanks for your help.”