Chapter Two
Four months earlier.
The transplant coordinator had a bowl of peppermints on her desk and a photograph of a golden retriever. I remember both of those things more clearly than I remember what she said.
“Dr. Hale. You’re a match.”
“How good?”
“Six out of six antigens. Negative crossmatch.” She smiled like she was giving me a present. “Frankly, it’s better than we see with most siblings.”
?
I should explain that I’m a doctor, so I understood every word.
Orthopedics, not nephrology, but I know what a six-antigen match means.
It means the kidney will almost certainly take.
It means Mara Quinn, who is thirty-four and has been on dialysis three days a week for nineteen months, would get her life back.
It means I was the answer.
?
“You’ll want time to think,” the coordinator said. “And to talk it over with your family. Most donors—”
“Yes,” I said.
She blinked. “Yes, you’ll think about it?”
“Yes, I’ll do it.”
?
She told me, kindly, that there were more tests. A psychological evaluation. An independent donor advocate. A mandatory cooling-off period. She told me I could withdraw at any point, for any reason, and nobody would ever tell Mara why.
I nodded through all of it.
I had said yes before she finished the sentence.
I have never told anyone why I said yes that fast. Not the coordinator. Not the donor advocate, who asked me three different ways. Not Mara.
Not my wife.
?
I drove home the long way.
Wren was on the couch with her feet on a cushion and a bowl of cereal balanced on her belly. Twenty-two weeks. The baby was the size of a papaya, according to the app she read to me every Sunday.
“You’re late,” she said, and smiled, and I felt it in my chest like a hand.
“Long day.”
It was the first lie. It was also true. That’s how it started. Everything I told her for four months was true, and almost none of it was honest.
?
“Come here,” she said. “He’s doing the thing.”
I sat on the floor beside the couch and put my palm on her stomach. Under my hand, our son rolled. A slow, deliberate turn, like someone shifting in his sleep.
“Hi,” I said to him.
Wren laughed. “He likes your voice. He always goes quiet when you talk.”
I kept my hand there. I told myself I would tell her tonight. After dinner. When she was comfortable.
?
Her pregnancy was high-risk. I need to say that plainly, because it’s the reason I gave myself, and it’s a real reason.
Two losses before this one. A cervix that needed a stitch at fourteen weeks. A blood-pressure reading in October that had put her on bed rest for nine days. Her doctor had used the word stress four times at the last appointment. I’d counted.
How do you tell a woman in that condition that her husband wants to have an organ removed?
You don’t, I decided. Not yet.
?
At 11:40 p.m., Wren was asleep, and my phone buzzed on the nightstand.
Mara: Coordinator called. She said you said yes without even taking a breath.
Mara: Elias. Did you tell Wren?
I looked at my wife. One hand on her stomach, even in her sleep.
I typed: Not yet.
I looked at it for a long time.
Then I deleted it, and typed: Yes. She’s fine with it.
And I pressed send.