Janie poked her head through the door to the waiting room and, in lieu of calling her next patient’s name, sang out, “You can go your own waaaaaay!”
A few curious heads turned as Sela got to her feet, smiling sheepishly.
“I can’t tell you what a relief it is to finally have a nurse who remembers my divorce anthem from visit to visit,” Sela told her once they’d reached the relative privacy of the exam room. “It’s tiresome filling out the same questionnaire every time.”
“I aim to deliver that personal touch.” Janie winked. “Says here you haven’t been feeling well? Tell me what’s been going on.”
Janie showed no inkling of suspecting that a real answer to this question would far exceed the time she had available. “Well, I went out of town for a weekend, and made the mistake of thinking I could eat like a regular person just that once.”
“Ah. You’re back to your strict self now, though?”
“For two weeks. And I swear I didn’t slip all that much in the first place. But I can’t get myself right. My energy isn’t back.”
“Possibly the problem was never your intake. Anything else different?”
Without Caroline to write to and hear from, without the possibility of what their relationship might mean to Sela—not just to her kidneys, damn it, Walt—without that hope of filling some corner of the gaping void her mother and husband and health had left in her life, everything seemed different. Unfamiliar, too, was the slow-growing anger she’d found herself directing at Ecca’s memory since discovering those red-handed emails. Righteous indignation toward Hannah was quicker, easier. But this—she felt as if she were stuck holding something she’d never wanted to be handed and couldn’t find a place to put it down.
“Not really.”
“How about exercise?”
It was all she could do to throw a tennis ball for Oscar in her little fenced backyard, to play a simple game of indoor hide-and-seek with Brody.
“Not happening. But I think that’s more of a consequence than a cause? My body feels … I don’t know. Heavy.”
“Let’s check you over.”
Janie did the requisite blood draws and an extra-thorough job of the usual exam. Then she sat across from Sela and leaned in.
“Did you go to the seminar we talked about?” Sela nodded. “And are you following through? You seemed to have reservations, before. Did it help with those?”
“It…” She didn’t want to disappoint her. “Brought some clarity.”
“Good. So how’s it going? Putting out the call, I mean?”
Putting out a call did seem less daunting now that it was off her to-do list. If she’d decided this was too much to ask of someone she did know, how could she ask it of someone she didn’t? But she couldn’t see how to explain her stance without passing implicit judgment on the fact that Janie had done this very thing—accepted kidneys from not one but three living donors. Sela didn’t judge her; in fact, she envied Janie’s ability to accept the gift with more gratitude than doubt, with more love than fear that she might prove unworthy.
“I haven’t rented a bullhorn yet. But I was going to ask my favorite comic about incorporating my ask into her act.” A good-natured, far-fetched enough duck of the question.
Plus, she’d found some video of the nurse on YouTube. Just snippets—a two-minute bit here, an improv skit there—but quite funny.
Janie made a psssshhhh sound. “If you’d ever seen your alleged favorite comic’s act, you’d know she already does.”
Sela squinted at her. Surely she was joking.
“Hey, even in stand-up some things are off-limits—unless you’re the one in the position. You think I’d miss the opportunity to milk my donor kidney for material? I’m taking everything I can from this thing for as long as it lets me.”
“Seriously?”
“WebMD describes kidneys as ‘sophisticated trash collectors.’ My kidneys are more like my actual trash collector, on a windy day. Ever try to clean up that mess strewn across your yard? Turns out the rest of my organs are as lazy as he is, so they’re like, Fuck that, leave it, the wind will pick up again eventually. And somehow I’m the one who gets stuck with this giant fine for littering. I mean, it says it’s a hospital bill, but it feels like a fine. Because the mess is still there, but now I’m broke, too.”
Sela burst out laughing.
“It helps when my sister’s in the audience so that after I explain I have her kidney, I can punch myself in the side and have her yell, ‘Ouch!’”
Sela laughed harder. And then, somehow, she was crying. Aimless, ugly sobs. Again. What was it about Janie? How did the only person in Sela’s life she could laugh with about this keep dissolving her into tears?
Maybe it wasn’t so much Janie as the way Janie made her realize how much she missed laughing with anyone else.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry, Sela. I didn’t mean to—”
“No, no.” She sniffed, raising her head. “Clearly I do need to come see your set. Just maybe not when I’m feeling so poorly.”
“I know not everyone has a sister who—”
She shook her head, hard enough to silence the appeal. Even in cataloging the risks versus rewards, Sela hadn’t gotten so far as to thoroughly consider the physicality of going about life with a piece of Caroline inside of her. Of anyone inside of her. How could anything seem so intimate and so impersonal at the same time, that humans could be reduced to machines in need of a replacement part?
“Is there anything you can tell about why I’m feeling so crappy?” Janie could hardly begrudge her the subject change. Other patients were waiting.
“We’ll call with the results, like always. And I’ll spare you the same old lecture on how to take care of yourself. But this, this ask? That is becoming the best thing you can do for yourself that you’re not already doing.”
She took a deep breath. As deep, anyway, as her newly shallow lungs would allow. What if fluid was collecting there? That happened. Didn’t end well. “What if I don’t want to?”
Janie blinked at her. “Sela, there are millions of spare sophisticated trash collectors out there, just sitting around. If everyone who could give did, can you imagine how many lives would be better—would be saved? I have to believe more people would donate if they understood that. So when you spread the word, you’re not just doing it for yourself. You’re doing it for all of us. When you say you don’t want to…” Her frown deepened. “I mean, no one wants to. But there’s no shame in asking for help.”
That’s where Janie was wrong.
Sela hadn’t even gotten as far as asking, and shame was all she felt.