Chapter Eleven
I didn’t finish it.
I have told myself many things about why. That there wasn’t time. That she needed sleep more than she needed the truth. That a story like that shouldn’t be told in a rush with a car waiting.
Here’s the true reason. I was afraid that if I told her, she would take back go.
And I had already decided to go.
?
“I’ll write it down,” I told her. “All of it. Tonight.”
“Elias.”
“I’ll give it to you before I go under. I swear to you.”
She looked at me as if she were memorizing me.
“You swore in November,” she said.
?
Mara was in the cardiac step-down unit, room 5-14, hooked to a monitor that chirped every few seconds with an irregularity I could read from the door.
Diane was in the chair beside her. She looked eighty years old.
“Thank you,” she said when she saw me. It was the first time she had ever said it.
I didn’t know what to do with it.
?
Mara was awake. Barely.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she whispered. “Tomorrow—Wren—”
“Wren told me to come.”
“Did she?” Mara’s eyes filled. “God. She’s better than both of us.”
“Yes.”
?
The transplant team found me at midnight. The plan: pre-op at four-thirty, anesthesia at six, first incision at six-twenty. Mara’s side would begin once my kidney was out and checked.
“You look like you haven’t slept,” the anesthesiologist said.
“I haven’t.”
“Then sleep. There’s a family room at the end of the hall.”
?
I didn’t sleep.
I sat in the family room, under a flickering light, with a legal pad from the nurses’ station, and I wrote my wife a letter.
?
It took me three hours. It is eleven pages long. I will not reproduce it here. Some of it belongs only to her.
But I will tell you how it starts.
Wren. I was driving.
?
At 3:30 a.m., my mother arrived. I had called her. I needed one person who had seen all my broken windows.
She sat down beside me. She looked at the legal pad.
“Is that what I think it is?”
“Yes.”
“Then go downstairs and give it to her.”
“She’s asleep. Jess is bringing her at six.”
“Then wake her.”
?
I folded the letter in thirds. Crisp. Even.
I held it out to my mother.
“If anything goes wrong in there,” I said, “give her this.”
Ruth didn’t take it.
“And if nothing goes wrong?”
“Then I’ll tell her myself. Face to face. The minute I’m awake.”
?
My mother looked at me for a very long time.
Then she took the letter, and put it in her handbag, and zipped the handbag closed.
“You’re standing in front of the window again,” she said.
At 4:25, a nurse came to take me to pre-op. My mother kissed my forehead, and I went.