Of course, he’d stopped joking about that once they both realized how much he’d welcome the excuse.
None of them had had reason to look ahead to a life without Rebecca, who at fifty-seven had been far too young and vibrant to pass the way she did. Natural causes, they called it—but vague underlying conditions be damned, it didn’t feel natural that such a big heart had simply given out. For Doug, Rebecca’s singular devotion to Sela had been a safety net for him shirking his own. For Leigh, it was more personal. With her own family out of state, Sela’s mother had been a surrogate parent since college. That her death brought the friends back together was the only good that had come of it.
That, and the fact that Sela didn’t have to worry about how she’d pay for treatment. At least, not for a long time. Even with health coverage, patients were advised to have a staggering hundred thousand dollars banked before they even thought about pursuing a transplant. Her mother’s life insurance payout took care of that.
Sela would have rather fundraised, groveled, panhandled, a hundred thousand times over.
“You know…” Leigh’s poker face was horrible. Especially when she was bracing herself to share an unpopular opinion. “If your mother had known she was on her way out, she might have revisited her stance on your father.”
Sela fought the urge to say Leigh sounded like Doug, though it would have gotten her to stop. He’d never been so uptight before all this. In fact, his old devil-may-care gleam was the first thing she’d ever noticed about him—the thing that had drawn her near. He’d been waiting on a bar stool for his blind date, who was running late. Sela had popped in for a carryout order, they’d gotten to chatting, and when the date finally arrived, he’d leaned to whisper in Sela’s ear, “I don’t want to have dinner with her. I want to have dinner with you.”
She’d smiled coyly. “Tomorrow?”
And he’d replied, “Not soon enough.”
His date was not amused.
Sela wasn’t the only one who’d grown so different she was unrecognizable now.
“No,” she told Leigh. “Ecca had opportunities aplenty to reverse course on dear ol’ Dad.”
When your mother raised you around a steady stream of artist friends and students and buyers, when she spoke of herself in the third person as if to reassure you both—There, let it never be said your mother can’t manage dinner on a dime—and when you had no father or sibling around referring to her as Mom, you ended up creating your own version of the name you most often heard her called. In their case, the only bit Sela could pronounce as a toddler stuck. When she started school, she saved Ecca for home and publicly opted for Mother, even though her friends sometimes asked, Why so formal? She never knew why Mom felt strange on her tongue. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Ecca, though they made a tight pair, was so obviously not meant to belong to anybody, least of all in a supporting role. She imagined Brody would have called his grandmother Ecca, too, had she lived to see him thrive.
“But if you hear back—when you hear back—from this sister, we all know it’s not just her on the other end of this. This could be big: a whole side to your family you didn’t know about. Maybe they’ll be glad to hear from you.”
“Given it’s already been a few days, we can probably rule that out.”
“Premature.”
“Plus, we’ve been over this. My father isn’t on the table. That way, I don’t betray Ecca’s wishes, he doesn’t have to feign some heartfelt explanation for the past three point five decades, and all I have to do is handle the small matter of winning over his other daughter enough to … well, you know. It keeps things the simplest possible version of clusterfunked.”
Leigh sighed. “I understand the boundaries you need to draw around this to feel okay about reaching out. But we all know there’s a lot more to this than a potential, maybe, compatible kidney donor. All I’m saying is to keep an open mind. Having more support in your life could be a positive thing, no matter what else happens, or doesn’t happen. I worry about you, Sela.”
What to say to that? That of course the possibility of there being “more to this” had not only entered her mind but consumed it? That Sela could think of little else but what Caroline must be thinking—whether she’d ever suspected, whether she even believed her? That hinging hope on this far-flung chance—the idea of a prospective sister relationship as slim and foreign as that of a donor match—was too thick a risk when she was hanging from so thin a thread? That she still longed for her mother with the fervor of a lost child?
Do the DNA test, her doctors had urged upon learning half of Sela’s parentage was unknown.
Contact her, her friends had urged upon learning the test had turned up a half sibling. Leigh herself had helped her look up Caroline online: A husband and three kids, her bio said. That meant half nieces, nephews. Maybe not too far off from Brody’s age.
Did people really think it was only the DNA on her mind? Sela let it stand—though a less biased party might have thusly seen her as cold, calculating, in spite of all the nudging required to carry her this far. Better than the unbearable vulnerability of admitting that the idea of a family was a far stronger pull even than a kidney her life might depend on.
“We’ll see. Like I said, you won’t catch me driving to Ohio, knocking on doors.”
“Has anyone told Doug that?”
“I take it you saw his Big Ask.”
“Is that what they call it when you’re trying to assuage your guilt in public?”
“That’s what he calls it.”
“Should I put out a call too? I didn’t realize we’d reached that point, but if we have, I will not be upstaged.” Leigh had done the initial blood test last year, in spite of being advised she should be sure her family was complete before donating. A moot concern: no match.
“We have not. But I appreciate you putting your competitive nature to work for my cause.”
“Competitive kidney culling. And here I thought I’d missed my chance at an Olympic medal.” Sela laughed—it wasn’t just a lame joke. Leigh’s onetime Olympic hopes were what had brought her to town; Brevard College’s cycling team was about the only thing putting it on the map. But when her times didn’t improve enough after a year of hard training, she acquiesced to her coach’s doubts. I love it, she’d said then, but I don’t live for it the way those people do. I can accept that what I’m willing to offer is not enough. That was it: no wallowing. Sela always admired that her friend had somehow managed to quit without ever behaving as a quitter.
Sela didn’t think she had it in her to let go of a dream that way.
These days, her dreams consisted of things other people took for granted. But she did live for them—fought for them harder than she’d ever fought for anything before. On the online forums she canvassed, fellow patients talked about the upsides they’d found to their illness, and though Sela found it difficult—laughable, offensive—to feel anything but spite toward hers, if forced to cite a silver lining, it was that she’d found the fight that had been within her all along. She was here, wasn’t she? Out in the world, breathing the air? Getting her steps in, rain or shine?