Chapter Nine
The donor advocate’s name was Dr. Pell, and she had asked me the same question on four separate occasions.
“Why do you want to do this?”
I’d given her four answers. Mara is a friend. I’m a match. I’m a physician. I can.
All true.
?
“Elias,” she said on Tuesday, “I’m going to sign off. You’ve met every criterion. But I’ll tell you what I tell every donor I have doubts about.”
“You have doubts.”
“I have a feeling.” She took off her glasses. “People who donate out of love recover well. People who donate out of guilt sometimes find that the guilt is still there afterward. Minus a kidney.”
?
I didn’t answer.
She signed the form.
?
Rain on a windshield. A green light. The radio on low.
Mara laughing at something I said. I don’t remember what. I’ve tried for eight years.
Thirty-one hours awake. A residency shift that should have been twenty-four.
My eyes closing for one second.
Only one.
?
I sat in my car in the medical center garage for forty minutes.
When I got home, Wren was at the kitchen table with her feet up on a second chair and her blood pressure cuff on her arm.
“One forty-six over ninety-five,” she said, not looking at me. “Dr. Anand says it’s still Thursday.”
?
I sat down across from her.
“I need to say something,” I said, “and I need you to hear the whole thing before you answer.”
She took off the cuff. Waited.
?
“If you’re induced Thursday,” I said, “and you ask me not to go—I won’t go. I’ll call the coordinator from the delivery room. I’ll postpone. Whatever it costs. You only have to say it.”
It was the most honest thing I’d said in four months, and I watched it land on her like a slap.
?
“No,” she said.
“Wren—”
“No. You don’t get to do that.” Her voice was very low. “You made this decision without me for four months. You don’t get to hand me the last ninety seconds of it.”
“I’m trying to give you a choice.”
“You’re trying to give me the blame.”
?
She stood up, awkwardly, one hand on her back.
“If I tell you to stay, and she dies, I’m the pregnant wife who let a woman die so her husband could hold her hand. If I tell you to go, and something happens to me, you’ll never forgive me for saying it.”
She was crying now, furious and quiet.
“You don’t get to make me choose between being selfish and being a widow’s joke. You’re a surgeon. Make the call.”
?
She went upstairs.
I sat at the table and understood, for the first time, what I had done. Not the lie. The shape of the lie. I had arranged things, for four months, so that every road led to a room where somebody else would have to decide.
?
I made my own decision that night.
I would tell her the rest. The car. The rain. The one second.
Tomorrow. First thing.
?
At 11:52 p.m., my phone buzzed on the nightstand.
Not a text. A call. Diane.
I took it into the hall.
“Her potassium is six point eight,” Diane said, and her voice, for the first time in eight years, was not cold. It was terrified. “They’ve admitted her. They’re saying her heart could stop tonight.”