Authors: Karen Harter
He paused to let that sink in. My mother gasped. I just stared at him.
“This is not something I recommend lightly. It is really our last resort. It can be a long, drawn-out process and will require
a commitment from you, Samantha”—then he looked at Mom—“and your family and friends. You are going to need a strong network
of support.”
“What other options do I have?”
He shook his head. “None that I can see.”
“So, what are you saying? If I don’t get a heart transplant . . . I die?”
“Well . . . we can’t really predict an exact timeline on these things.” He leaned toward Mom. “What we do know is that current
treatments available to us have not proven successful and the quality of life for someone—”
“Dr. Sovold,” I interrupted. “Cut the canned doctor talk.” I stood and found myself glaring down at the twelve hairs on top
of his bald head. “And please, talk to me, not her.”
“Samantha!” Mom was obviously mortified.
“If you don’t get a hair transplant, Doctor, you’ll still be here next year and the one after that, a little balder maybe,
but you won’t miss your son’s graduation or your daughter’s wedding because of it. I want to know the facts. I need to know.
If I don’t get this heart transplant, will I see my son enter first grade?”
Dr. Sovold paused. “No. No, Samantha, you probably won’t.”
I held my stomach as if I’d been punched. He sat me back down in the chair and placed his fingers gently on my wrist for a
pulse. “Put your head between your knees if you need to.” I did. He spoke, but I barely heard. I was glad my mother was there
to process all the details, because I was watching movies in my mind. Past. Present. Future. TJ with infant colic. I couldn’t
assuage his pain. We walked the floor of that first apartment and cried our lonely hearts out. I saw TJ bounding through the
tall grass, heard his musical laugh, pictured him standing confused and forlorn by my grave. I sat up straight and watched
the doctor’s lips move. Concentrate.
“. . . and once you’re registered with this network, you’ll be placed on the waiting list for a donor organ. When a donor
heart becomes available, the organ procurement organization enters all vital information in their computer. That information
is used to match up a donated organ with a recipient. Now, it’s not necessarily going to go to the person who has been waiting
the longest.” He passed me a stack of pamphlets and a reading list. “There are a number of determining factors, including
blood type, body size, geography . . . and the severity of a potential recipient’s condition. A seriously ill patient may
be given priority for an organ at a nearby transplant center. On the other hand, if a patient becomes too ill to withstand
major surgery, they could be ruled out. Now, I’m glad that Samantha has given me permission to speak freely. The truth is
that the number of patients on the waiting list outweighs the number of acceptable donors. There are an estimated sixteen
thousand people a year in the United States who could benefit from a heart transplant. Unfortunately, at this time only about
twenty-three hundred operations actually occur annually.”
The avalanche of information came too fast. I couldn’t outrun it. There was no place to go.
I had always considered myself an athletic person. In Reno, I had a group of friends who hiked in the summer and cross-country
skied the white terrain of Lake Tahoe in winter. I took pride in at least keeping up, if not leaving my buff guy friends in
the dust, or the powder, as the case may be.
I was the one who had climbed a steep rock face in Red Rock Canyon without the aid of pitons and ropes, which was stupid because
halfway up I got stuck. I still remember the warm metallic smell of the rock my nose was plastered to as my fingers desperately
sought a crevice, my boot toe feeling for any protrusion, paralyzed with the horror that there was no way up and no way down.
I don’t know how long I clung there wishing for a rescue chopper, but the sun dropped behind the western ridge, and as the
sky turned purple behind me and the cold seeped through my clothes like ice water, something kicked in. I thought of TJ, who
was still in diapers at that time, and I made a decision to survive. I even prayed. “God, help me,” I said. That’s all I remember.
I don’t think God made a ladder in the stone. I think the rock face probably stayed the same. But I moved, inch by inch, until
finally I stood victorious—queen of the mountain—gazing down on the moonlit valley below.
Of course, I never let on to my buddies, who revered me for my raw guts and courage, that I had almost died. The thing about
amazing daredevil feats is that you’re a hero only if you succeed. If I had splattered at their feet, they would be shaking
their heads now, saying things like “What a waste. What a careless way to die. That Samantha never had a brain in her head.”
Anyway, here I was again, with my nose to a rock, suspended in a cold, lonely place between life and death, with a decision
to make.
“God, help me,” I said.
I
T WAS NOT UNTIL late afternoon that Lindsey mentioned it. We had been together all morning, cutting and stringing garlands
of construction-paper leaves to adorn the bulletin board and cafeteria at the Darlington Hospital, where she volunteered.
Then, just as casually as if she were commenting on the hint of autumn in the air, she lit the fuse. The news traveled in
a spray of sparks and exploded inside me. Paper leaves fell in a flurry to the kitchen floor.
“What? How do you know Tim is in town? Why are you just getting around to telling me this now?”
“Well . . . I didn’t know if I should. I mean, I didn’t know if you were up to hearing this right now. You shouldn’t get upset
or excited. . . .”
“This is what gets me upset!” I stood and my hand involuntarily reached for my chest. “You’re treating me like . . .” I sat
back down, trying to breathe normally without looking like I had to try. “Just don’t treat me like that. I’m not that bad
off.”
“Okay. I’m sorry. I really am. I wanted to tell you; I ran into Tim’s sister Sarah at the hospital. Their mom is in chemo.
Breast cancer.” Lindsey shook her head sympathetically. “Anyway, Sarah was there waiting for her mom. We were in line together
in the cafeteria and she called out my name. I didn’t recognize her at first. She’s lost a lot of weight since high school.
So we got our coffee and sat at one of the tables until her mom came back down.”
“What did you say? Did you say anything about me?”
“I said you were home.”
“What else?”
Lindsey fidgeted with the scissors. “I told her about TJ. I hope that was okay.”
I nodded. Surely Tim’s family must know the suitable-for-soap-opera account of TJ’s birth. The grandson/nephew they almost
had.
“Sarah’s getting married. I guess Tim has been living in Oregon, driving a log truck. He’s here for her wedding and he might
stay on for a while if he can get a job up here. He wants to be there for his mom, you know. Since their dad died, he’s the
only man in the family.”
Tim’s father had taken two years to die. All through Tim’s sophomore and junior years in high school, his dad suffered from
some rare liver disease. It broke Tim’s heart. He wept openly in front of me once, an incident that endeared him to me immediately.
I watched manhood overtake him while other guys in his class still begged for the car keys so they could hang out at the Mill
Road Cemetery, drinking beer until they puked. Tim worked as a mechanic at the garage next to the Shell station in town. He
drove his younger sisters to piano lessons. He repaired the roof, changed the oil in his mother’s car and, finally, bore a
corner of a sleek mahogany casket and laid his father in the ground.
Tim said I was the light at the end of his tunnel. I made him laugh. Sometimes he complained that I was unpredictable. He
said I flirted with danger and that I shouldn’t be so quick to make decisions, but he didn’t try to change me. “At least we’ll
never be like that old couple that eats breakfast every Tuesday at the Halfway Café,” he quipped. They always ate their oatmeal
and raisins in silence as if there was nothing left to say. “We’ll never be bored.”
Lindsey was not volunteering much information. “Come on,” I said. “There’s more, isn’t there?”
She punched holes in a stack of orange and yellow leaves and began threading yarn through. “Well, she invited me to her wedding.”
I pondered for a moment. “Is Tim in it?”
She glanced up from her work. “Yes. He’s one of the groomsmen.”
“So. Are you going?”
She shook her head. “I don’t really know them very well. I know you and Tim have a history, but I only knew Sarah from PE
class. As I recall, when she was choosing players for the basketball team, she picked me last.”
“Don’t take it personally. She probably thought you throw like a girl. Which you do. And then you make that noise.”
She raised an eyebrow and didn’t smile. “What noise?”
“You know. That
oh, I-hope-I-don’t-break-a-fingernail
helpless squeak.”
“Oh, hush!”
“I’ll go with you.”
“What?”
“To the wedding.”
“Oh, no, Sam. I don’t think—”
“You got an invitation, didn’t you? Did it by any chance say ‘To Lindsey Matthews and Guest’?”
“Yes, but . . .” She studied me for a moment. “If you want to see Tim, why don’t you call his mom’s house? He’s probably staying
there. At least she would know how to get in touch with him. You two need to get together and talk. I just don’t think the
wedding is going to be the right atmosphere.”
I got up and poured a cup of coffee while I considered what she said. “Maybe I don’t want to talk to him. I just want to see
him from afar. Maybe he’s bald now and missing teeth. What if he lost both his arms in a logging accident or something?”
Lindsey gave me that long motherly look, and when she spoke her voice was soft. “I think it wouldn’t make any difference to
you. I think you still love him.”
I swirled the coffee around in my mug, watching my distorted image spin. I would love him until the day I died, arms or no
arms. But the truth was that if he wanted to, he could have found me. I had left a trail more obvious than a slug’s. For five
years I had looked behind me, hoping. I thought I glimpsed him driving by, or sitting in the shadows at the Starlight Room
where I waited tables, or with his back to me slipping through a crowd. But it was never him. He was in my head when I brushed
my teeth, when I made up the bed, when I poured myself a glass of wine at night. I had needed him when TJ fell on his Tonka
dump truck and ran to me peering through streams of blood. I had wished for a daddy for TJ when I worked nights and my roommate
with the big hair whom I didn’t really like was the one tucking my son into bed. I guess I had always thought Tim would eventually
show up at my door. He would forgive me and slide back in and embrace TJ as his own. It was a comforting delusion.
“I don’t know him anymore, and he doesn’t know me,” I said. I pushed my chair from the table and began cleaning up our paper
debris.
Car doors slammed and a minute later Mom backed through the kitchen door with an armload of packages. TJ burst in behind her.
“But why, Grandma?”
“Because it will spoil your dinner. We’ll have our treats after we eat our pork roast and Brussels sprouts.”
I pulled TJ into my arms protectively. “Ooh. Not Brussels sprouts. Is your mean grandma making you eat Brussels sprouts? What
did you do? Shoplift or something?”
“I didn’t do anything bad.”
Lindsey reached for him. “Give Auntie some sugar.” He obliged her with a kiss, but his mind was obviously on other things.
He pushed away as politely as he knew how.
“Me and Grandma went to story time. I got some books. You wanna see?” He spread his colorful library books on the table. “I
got a new one about George the monkey.” He reached for another, almost toppling Lindsey’s coffee. “Look, Mom!” He giggled,
pointing with a pudgy finger. “This bug has a lightbulb in his bottom!”
I pushed the mug to safety in the nick of time. “Gus the Firefly. We had that when we were kids, remember, Lindsey?” I flipped
through the familiar pages. “Do you think the library has ever considered buying something published in this millennium?”
“We’re talking Darlington here,” Lindsey said. “I’m not sure anyone knows the old one passed.”
“Mom, can you take me to see Mikey?”
I knew TJ was referring to the new Appaloosa foal at the Duncans’ place, which he had named after the buddy he left behind
in our Reno apartment. Donnie had charged down the driveway a few weeks prior, spraying gravel behind his tires and rounding
us both into the cab of his truck. We sped back to the ranch in time to witness the uncomplicated birth. Donnie had stroked
the mare’s quivering white neck, both of them sweating in the late August heat, while she seemed to be seriously regretting
her fling with a certain stallion. I had seen the foaling process before, but that time was different. I held TJ where we
sat against a stall wall in a pile of fresh hay, more moved by the wonderment passing across my son’s sweet face than the
miracle that the poor mare could survive passing the gangly colt from her body. I couldn’t help but think it was like giving
birth to a long-legged teenager, skateboard and all.
“Not today, baby. Mommy’s going to take a nap.”
TJ wilted dramatically, like a cartoon flower deprived of water. “You always take naps,” he whined. Suddenly, he sprang back
to life, his eyes bright. “Donnie could come get me.”
I ran my fingertips through his dark hair, letting them linger at his temple. TJ adored Donnie. Maybe too much. “No. It will
be dinnertime soon. You want to be here when your grandpa comes home, don’t you? Take your books to your room and pick out
one to read at bedtime, okay?” He finally obliged.
Lindsey packed up her project. “I suppose I should get home before David and do the Suzy Homemaker thing. Mom, do you have
anything in those grocery sacks that you can dump out of a bag and make it look like you’ve been cooking all day?”