Chasing Abby (2 page)

The vault door opens onto a corridor, which runs perpendicular. Straight ahead of us is a room where another heavy, rectangular vault door stands open, revealing a narrow room lined from floor to ceiling with brass safe-deposit boxes. I look right and see more vault doors leading to other places. The man with the keys leads us forward to the room with the safe-deposit boxes. There aren’t any tables, just a single plastic chair with metal legs pushed up against the back wall of the narrow room. I may need that.

“Do you know which box is yours?” the man asks.

I look up into his dark eyes and my mind blanks, so Caleb speaks for me. “Fifteen-five-zero-eight.”

I nod in agreement and the man smiles as I hold up my key, still unable to speak. 

He leads us to the middle of the room and taps a box on the left. “This is it.” He begins walking back toward the door. “Go ahead and take your time. When you’re ready, just press this button right here and someone will come back to let you out.”

I nod again. “Thank you.”

He nods as he closes the rectangular vault door, closing us into the room. My fingers are beginning to tingle again, but I don’t wriggle them. I don’t want to worry Caleb.

I hand him the key. “You open it.”

“Do you want me to look inside and tell you what I see?”

“Yes, please.”

He looks at me for a moment, then he heads for the back of the room. He carries the chair back to me and pats the seat. I sit down and try to resist the urge to wring my hands. 

“Deep breaths, Abby,” he reminds me.

“Just open it. I need this over with.”

He quickly slides the key into the lock and turns. He pulls box 15508 out of the slot and I lean forward to put my head between my knees. I don’t want to see until I know what’s in there.

“It’s a memory card and… Holy shit.”

“What?” My head snaps up, but I can’t see inside the box from this angle. “What is it?”

His eyes are wide, but I can’t tell if he’s excited or terrified. 

“Caleb! Answer me. What is it?”

“It’s… There are some pictures in here.”

“Pictures? So… what? Why is that shocking?”

His Adam’s apple bobs in his throat as he gulps. “It’s not the pictures that are shocking… It’s who’s
in
the pictures.”

“What? Let me see.” I stand up to get a look at the contents of the brass box, but Caleb quickly slides it back into the slot. “What are you doing?”

“You asked me to tell you what I saw
before
you see it.”

I slap his arm in frustration. “Then tell me, damn it!”

“Abby, calm down.” 

He looks into my eyes with that stern look that only Caleb and my dad can pull off. 

I take a deep breath and nod. “Okay, I’m calm. What’s in the box?”

“It looks like… your biological father is… Chris Knight.”

I narrow my eyes at him. “What? Is that supposed to be a joke? Because that is not funny at all. Just tell me what’s inside the box.”

He’s not smiling as his eyes lock on mine. “This is not a joke.”

The silence is so absolute, I can hear my feeble heart stuttering under the weight of this news.

“Sit down, baby,” he whispers and I gladly sit as he pulls the box out of the slot again. “Are you ready?”

I nod and he carefully sets the box in my lap. The first thing I see is the picture sitting on top of the stack. It’s clearly a professional family photo. Chris Knight, his wife, and their three kids are standing in front of a large elm tree. They look so happy and… perfect. I’ll bet all the TVs in their house work perfectly.

Caleb kneels in front of me and reaches forward to wipe a tear from my cheek. “Are you okay?”

I shake my head, shaking loose another tear. “No.” 

I lift the photos out of the box and move the top picture to the bottom of the stack. The next one stops me cold. It’s a picture of Chris Knight looking quite a bit younger. He’s dressed in a suit and holding… me.

CHAPTER TWO

Five years before

B
RIAN
HOLDS
OUT
A
BOTTLE
of water to me and I push it away. It’s offensive. How can he even think of
my
needs when Abby is out there burning up on the soccer field?

I march toward Coach Fred, but the moment he sees me he shakes his head in dismay and turns his attention back to the field, as if I don’t exist. “She needs to come out! Take her out!”

I don’t care if all the parents are rolling their eyes. They find me annoying. That much has been obvious from the moment I set foot on the soccer field for Abby’s first game six months ago.

Abby had been begging me to let her play a sport, but the only two sports she was interested in were soccer and basketball. Well, I’ve heard enough horror stories about basketball players with bad hearts collapsing on the court and never waking up. I denied her request for two years until I couldn’t take the begging anymore. I told her I’d let her play soccer if she played a defensive position. I didn’t factor the Carolina humidity into my decision.

It may be the end of November, but Abby’s asthma always acts up more during cool weather. And if she’s having trouble breathing, she’s going to pass out soon. Her heart just isn’t equipped to deal with that kind of stress.

She’s standing two hundred feet away from me and, even from this distance, I can see her cheeks are a vibrant red and her mouth is hanging open with exhaustion. But she’s one of the team’s best defenders, so Coach Fred thinks I’m overreacting. She couldn’t play so well if there was anything wrong with her, right? 

Wrong. Abby may look like a normal, slightly smaller-than-average thirteen-year-old girl, but she is far from normal, as much as she hates being reminded of that. Right now, her heart is being crushed under the task of trying to keep her body cool and pump oxygen into her lungs. She’s going to pass out if I don’t get her off that field.

Coach Fred turns to me, his already wrinkled lips pursed in severe disapproval, a look that probably worked on recruits when he was in the military, but it doesn’t intimidate me one bit. “There is one minute and forty seconds left in the game.”

“I don’t care. Call a timeout.”

“Mrs. Jensen, I am going to have to ask you to please let me do my job. These kids have been working too long for this.”

“Lynette, come on.” Brian clasps his large hand around the crook of my elbow. “It’s almost over.”

“Are you kidding me?” I wrench my arm free and shoot him a scathing glare. 

The referee’s whistle blows and we all turn toward the field. Abby is holding up her arm, the way they’re taught to do if they’re injured. I manage to take three steps onto the field before she collapses on the grass.

I race toward her, but Brian and the referee beat me there. Brian immediately pours cool water on her face and chest as I dial 911. We’ve never had to deal with this particular scenario before, but we’ve had to call an ambulance enough times to have the routine down. Brian roars at the crowd forming around us to disperse.

“She needs air! Move back!”

I fall to my knees next to her, spouting off the location and the facts to the 911 operator. “Eastgate Park, the east side entrance on Wingate Drive. Thirteen-year-old female with severe heatstroke.”

“No, not heatstroke!” Brian bellows. “Cardiac arrest! She’s in cardiac arrest!”

CHAPTER THREE

A
S
I
STAND
NEXT
TO
Abby’s hospital bed, all I can think is, if I knew thirteen years ago what I know now, I’d have done everything differently with her birth parents. I was thirty-three years old when Chris and Claire Knight came to us asking to change the closed adoption into an open adoption. I wasn’t young, but I was foolish. Foolish to think Abby would never need them. Foolish to think
we
would never need them.

Lynette stands next to me, gently stroking the back of Abby’s hand with her thumb, the way she has every day for the past seventeen days since Abby collapsed during that soccer game. It wasn’t the first time my little girl had passed out from overexertion. Abigail was born with an AV (atrioventricular) canal defect: a gaping hole in her heart. 

After the surgery she underwent at the age of five months, her recovery seemed to be going well. Then, we noticed four-year-old Abby struggling to breathe while chasing Harley, our Jack Russell terrier, around the yard. Sure enough, we took her to the doctor and they discovered one of the valves in her heart had begun to weaken and her body wasn’t getting enough oxygen. Abby had one more surgery to reshape the leaflet, during which she was technically dead for three minutes and twenty-four seconds. We vowed to do everything we could to prevent her from ever needing surgery again.

Unfortunately, this means Abby has been forced to take various medications for years. We knew this came with a risk of injury to her liver and kidneys. We didn’t know—we
couldn’t
know—when she switched medications four weeks ago that she’s genetically predisposed to liver toxicity due to the way her body synthesized the new drug. This time, it wasn’t the stress on her heart that made her collapse. Cardiac arrest was secondary to the most pressing issue: liver failure.

But as I watch her lying in the hospital bed, lost in the haze of sedation with a tube buried in her throat, I almost wish it were her heart. At least then I’d know that there’s some kind of surgery that could fix her. 

There is no surgery that can fix Abby’s liver. They attempted to reverse the toxicity with corticosteroids, but she’s only gotten worse. If she doesn’t get a new liver, she could be dead in days. Her best chance at survival, due to her heart condition, is to find a genetic liver donor.

I squeeze Lynette’s shoulder and she sniffs loudly. “We have to contact them. We have to at least try,” I whisper.

She shakes her head. “What will she think of us when she knows we lied to her?”

“She won’t think anything of us if she dies.”

“Stop that,” she whispers, her voice strangled by the truth of these words.

“It’s true. We need them whether we like it or not, and… she needs more from them than a piece of their liver.”

Just saying these words aloud fills me with a level of regret so heavy and palpable I feel as if I might collapse from the realization. I grit my teeth and attempt to swallow the lump that forms in my throat. I’m no longer the one person my little girl needs more than anyone.

Reaching forward, I pull a few strands of hair away from the tape holding Abby’s breathing tube in place. I want her to look her best for the photograph I’m about to take, quite possibly the most important photograph of her life. And she’ll be sleeping right through it. The moment I touch her warm cheek, her head twitches and Lynette pulls my hand back. She doesn’t want me to touch Abby’s face. She thinks it introduces germs into her nose and mouth and she’s afraid of what will happen if they have to give Abby antibiotics.

“I thought we wouldn’t have to tell her until she’s eighteen. I just don’t think I’m ready,” Lynette whispers as she reaches for the camera, which rests on the chair beside her. She holds the camera out for me to take, but she doesn’t let go when I attempt to grab it. “Wait. Let me fix her hair.”

I can hardly breathe as I watch Lynette smooth down Abby’s blonde hair. As similar as Abby’s hair color is to Lynette’s, she doesn’t really resemble either one of us. She has brown eyes while Lynette’s and mine are blue. She noticed this a few years ago and when she inquired about it, Lynette’s response was “Because you got all our best traits. That’s why you’re so much prettier than us.”

You don’t have to share DNA with your child to know when they’re suffering. Whether Lynette admits it to herself or me, the truth is that Abby knows she’s different. I read about adopted children who grow up feeling unwanted even when their adoptive parents make every effort to show them they are loved. This is one of the main reasons why I was so adamant about not allowing Chris and Claire Knight to have any contact with Abby after her first birthday. I knew that if there were a chance that Abby ever felt unwanted or unloved, she would go running to them. Now, I just want her to feel normal. If meeting them is what will save her life and give her back the sense that she is loved, I’ll do anything to give her that.