“He made it to the third floor,” Gail said. She was sitting in the visitor chair in a hospital gown of her own, a plastic bracelet on her wrist, with a thin pillow strapped against her side. “Then his phone rang. And when he hung up, he turned around and said, ‘Gail, I cannot do it. I failed the screening. They found something this morning. My pressure was too high, and the doctor said I might not wake up if they put me under. And then he said, ‘You have to go in for me. You are the backup. Please. Do not let Marcus find out that I could not.” She pressed her lips together. “So I did. I went in at six this morning.”
I stared at her. I could not make my mouth work. Gail, my former sister in law, who had never liked me and whom I had never entirely liked, who had sat at the opposite end of every Thanksgiving table for sixteen years, with her arms crossed, was in a hospital bed because of my son. “You gave him a kidney,” I said. She nodded. “You did not tell me.” She shook her head. “I could not. Randy made me promise. He is so ashamed, Denise. He cried the whole way here. I never saw my brother cry.”
He had been a drinker once, and a bad husband. He left Marcus when the boy was five, and he returned, off and on, with flowers and excuses. But when Marcus got sick at nineteen, with the disease that took his kidneys, Randy was the first one to be tested. He stood in the waiting room with a number in his hand, and he said, “Take mine.” The doctors said it was a good match. I had cried with gratitude. For nine months, he had stayed sober, he had gone to every appointment, he had called Marcus every night. I had begun to believe he had changed.
A man walked into the hospital to give his son a kidney and left because his own body would not let him.
The surgeon found me in the corridor an hour later. She was a small, brisk woman in blue scrubs with a surgical cap printed with cartoon cats. She said the operation had been a success, that the new kidney had pinked up right away and was making urine on the table, which is the thing everyone waits for. And she said Gail was doing well, too. I thanked her. I thanked her three times. Then I asked the question I had been holding. “The screening,” I said. “What did they find with Randy?” She hesitated. “Mrs. Cole, I cannot discuss another patient. But I will tell you that his blood pressure was dangerous, and that he was right to step aside.”
I went to find him. He was in the chapel on the ground floor, a small, dim room with a stained glass window of a lamb. He was sitting in the second pew with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, still wearing the same coat, and I could smell the cigarettes on him from the doorway. I sat down in the pew behind him. For a while I did not say anything. At last he said, without turning around, “I am sorry, Denise. I am so sorry. I wanted to give him something. For once.”
“You did,” I said. He turned around. His eyes were swollen and red, and his face looked like a map of every wrong turn he had ever taken. “No, I did not. Gail did.” I shook my head. “Randy, you got him there. You got him tested. You found the match. If you had not stood in that waiting room nine months ago and said take mine, the whole thing would never have started. Gail would not have been tested. She told me so herself.” He looked at me as though I had spoken in a foreign language. “You are not angry?” I said, “I am furious. And I am grateful. Both are true. Welcome to being a parent.”
Marcus woke up that afternoon. He looked gray and tiny against the white pillow, and a tube ran from his arm to a pole, but his eyes, when they found mine, were clear. “Mom,” he whispered. “Did Dad come?” I took his hand. I thought about lying. I thought about the ten thousand small lies parents tell to protect their children. Then I thought of Gail with the pillow strapped to her side, and I decided that the truth would be gentler than the lie. “Baby, your father started this,” I said. “And your aunt Gail finished it. She is down the hall. And she wants you to know it was no trouble at all.”
He asked to see them both. The next morning, the nurses wheeled Marcus down the hall in a chair, with his IV pole in tow, and Gail was wheeled in from the other side, and the two of them met in the middle of the corridor like ships. Randy stood beside her, holding her IV bag, awkward and gray. Marcus looked at his aunt for a long time. Then he said, in a thin, cracked voice, “Is it true you have my kidney?” Gail laughed, and winced, and pressed her hand to her side. “Honey, you have mine,” she said. “And you better take good care of it. I would like it back someday.”
Marcus laughed so hard that a nurse came running. Then he reached up and took his father by the sleeve. “Dad,” he said. “You came to the third floor.” Randy shook his head. “I ran away.” “You came,” Marcus said firmly. “That is farther than you ever got before.” I watched my former husband hold the back of the hand of his son to his forehead, and I thought, there is more than one way to be brave. Some people walk in. Some people walk to the third floor, and turn around, and send someone braver. And sometimes that is enough to save a life.
Six months later, I stood in my kitchen in Wichita with a frosty from Wendy, which was the request of Marcus on the day he was allowed to eat anything he wanted. He sat at the table with his sleeves rolled up, color back in his face, and ate it with a long plastic spoon, one slow bite at a time. He had been sober for fourteen months. He was learning, at fifty six years old, how to show up. Through the window, I watched him tighten the last screw. Then he turned and waved.