Kathleen pushed the accelerator to the floor and the van shot forward. She didn’t slow down until she had crossed from Davis Island to the mainland. She didn’t look back. She didn’t allow herself to cry until she was home and in the safety of her room.
Raina let herself into the town house and saw her mother sitting at the counter, poring over work she’d brought home.
Vicki glanced up. “I fixed a plate for you to warm in the microwave—Raina? Are you all right?”
“Annie died this afternoon. I was holding her when she …”
Vicki hopped off the counter stool. “Oh, honey … I’m so sorry.”
Raina fended off her mother’s hug. “Everybody said she would. It’s not like it came as a surprise. I … just … wish …”
Vicki looked sympathetic. “You never forget the first patient you lose. I can still remember mine. He was an elderly man, and so very nice. His wife was shattered. They’d been married fifty-five years. I felt helpless, like ‘if there was only more we could do.’ But there wasn’t. Death is the enemy, Raina. We may keep Death at bay for a time, but he always wins.”
Raina heaved her books onto the coffee table. She wasn’t in the mood for Vicki’s tour down memory lane laced with platitudes. “I went to see Dr. Portera too.”
At this, Vicki’s eyes grew wary. “Alone? Without me? I told you we needed to go together.”
“I thought I’d save you some time tomorrow.” Raina’s exhaustion and sense of helplessness began to lift. She continued with dogged persistence. “He told me that I was a great match for the woman in Virginia. I wish I knew her name. Anyway, I can’t walk away from this, Mom. My bone marrow can help this woman. It might even reverse her cancer and save her life. How can you say no just because I’ll be sore for a few days? Or because I’ll miss some school? Even the part about me going under a general is bogus. I’m young and healthy and if I needed surgery to fix a problem with me, you’d never say a word about the general.”
Vicki’s expression had turned to stone as she listened to Raina’s arguments. “I—I need some time to think.”
“What’s to think about? Dying woman. Healthy marrow. Transplant ASAP.”
Then Vicki surprised Raina by saying the oddest thing. “I’m going upstairs to take a warm shower. Sit down here and wait for me.”
“But—”
“Just wait. I’ll be down shortly.”
Mystified, Raina watched her mother ascend the stairs. A shower? Now? Right in the middle of their conversation? What was going on? Frustrated, she ripped open her book bag and took out her laptop. She set it on her knees and started an e-mail to Hunter. She poured out her heart, weeping as she wrote about Annie, getting irritated as she wrote about her mother’s reluctance to allow her to donate her bone marrow. She had just pushed the Send button when she heard Vicki coming down the stairs. Raina set the laptop aside, mentally prepared for another round of arguing her case.
Vicki sat in the wingback chair catty-corner to the sofa. She was wrapped in her thick white terry cloth robe, her hair wet and slicked back, her face clean and devoid of makeup. She looked vulnerable, younger than her forty-two years. Her feet were bare, her toes painted a bright shade of pink that appeared out of place with the austerity of her expression. She propped both feet on a footstool and crossed her arms. She cleared her throat and said, “Raina, we need to talk.”
sixteen
IF VICKI hadn’t looked so serious, Raina would have said, “Well, duh! Yes, we do.” Instead she nodded agreeably, preparing mentally to challenge anything negative her mother might be about to say. “You start.”
“This isn’t going to be easy because it—it’s going to change your life.”
Raina’s heart beat faster. What could her mother possibly mean? Suddenly, she had a horrific thought. “Are you okay? You … you’re not, like, sick, are you, Mom?”
“No, I’m not sick.”
Raina breathed easier.
“But I’m not all right.” Vicki picked at a thread on the arm of the chair. “Sometimes it’s necessary to make difficult choices in life. Choices that were right at the time we made them, but that can revisit us years later.” Raina bobbed her head, hoping to encourage her mother to get to the point. Vicki sat as still as a rock. “Back in Ohio, when I was sixteen, I was crazy in love with a boy at school. That’s why I’ve always understood about you and Hunter. I knew that you loved him with all your heart.”
Love. Present tense, Raina corrected in her mind, not wanting to interrupt but clueless about the point.
“Well, I loved Dustin in the same way—with all my heart. And then—” She glanced at her hands in her lap. “And then just before Christmas of my junior year, I found out I was three months pregnant.”
Raina’s mouth dropped open. “Pregnant? You?”
“I was amazingly naive. We were having sex, but I wasn’t taking any precautions. Dumb, huh? I was playing with fire but expecting not to get burned. And the idea of STDs never entered my mind. We were in love and we were each other’s firsts.”
When her ordeal with Tony had happened, Vicki had never yelled at Raina or bombarded her with recriminations. She’d brought home a prescription for birth control pills, handed it to Raina and said, “If you’re going to be sexually active, don’t get pregnant.” At the time, Raina had been shocked and relieved, but she had also felt intense shame, knowing she’d disappointed her mother. Suddenly, the way Vicki had handled things back then made perfect sense to her. “Okay, so you got pregnant. What happened?”
“The whole scene got pretty ugly. Dustin’s parents went ballistic and refused to let us see each other. My parents freaked out and called me terrible names. Everyone wanted me to have an abortion. But I couldn’t. I wanted my baby.”
Vicki plucked out the thread and rolled it into a ball between her thumb and forefinger. “My family disowned me. Haven’t you ever wondered why you’ve never met your grandparents?”
“I used to. When I was younger, you said they lived in California and it was too far for us to visit. I used to wonder why they never sent me presents or anything, though.”
“It’s because they don’t know about you.”
“They don’t know about me?”
“They were so ugly and mean to me during my first pregnancy that I decided they didn’t deserve to know about my second,” Vicki said matter-of-factly. “We haven’t communicated for years.”
Who was this woman in the room with her? Raina wondered. She’d assumed she and her mother had no secrets from each other, but for Vicki to live all her adult life without ever speaking to her own parents … “So you had the baby?” The words sounded foreign to Raina.
“I went to a special home for unwed mothers and yes, I had the baby. A girl. I named her Crystal because she was small and pretty and looked as fragile as glass to me.”
“And—and Dustin?”
“His family had shipped him off to relatives in Michigan. I got word to him when she was born, but there was nothing either of us could do. Besides, I think that secretly he was relieved. He had a garage band and was having a good time. He didn’t want to get married and raise a child.” Vicki ran her hand through her hair, now almost dry, and the light from the floor lamp next to the chair highlighted a few strands of gray. “I gave Crystal up for adoption. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I was only sixteen. I couldn’t raise her alone. I had no support. She deserved better. It was the best thing for all of us.” Her voice caught, and for a moment Raina thought her mother might break down. “I was told she went to a good family. As if they’d tell me she went to a bad family. I told the adoption agency I wanted my records left open. I wanted her to be able to find me if she ever wanted to meet me, get to know me. But she never has.”
The wistful tremor in Vicki’s voice almost made Raina cry. “Maybe it’s because she’s happy.”
Vicki smiled pensively. “Maybe.”
Her mother stopped talking and as t
he silence lengthened, Raina heard the grandfather clock ticking in the hallway and the faucet in the kitchen dripping into the sink. The refrigerator hummed and the central heat cut on. Everything around Raina seemed ordinary. But nothing was ordinary. Not anymore. She saw her laptop on the coffee table and wondered how she could write about this conversation to Hunter. Somewhere I have a half sister. Raina stared down at her hands. All the color was gone from them and they felt cold. “Why didn’t you tell me this before now?”
“I wanted to tell you many times. I tried. I almost said something when the thing with Tony happened, but you were so hurt, so sad. I just couldn’t.”
Angry, hurt, Raina jumped up. “Why didn’t you tell me when I was five, or six? It would have been easier if I’d known all my life.”
“I was trying to keep life and limb together, Raina. It was just the two of us and that was fine with me. I didn’t want to think about her. Don’t you know how it hurt to pretend she didn’t exist? She was born in April, and every April for the past twenty-six years, I’ve thought of her. But she isn’t my child, Raina.” Vicki leaned forward, her face a mask of pain. “I gave her up. She belongs to another family. But you belong to me.”
Raina wanted to hit something, or throw something at the wall. She was furious. “So why tell me now? What’s so special about now?” And then in an instantaneous flash, like pieces of a puzzle falling into place, her mother’s story took on fresh meaning. Goose bumps ran up her arms. “The woman in Virginia … Is she … could she be …?”
“Yes. She is.”
Raina felt as if the wind had been knocked out of her. She dropped to the sofa like a lead weight. “How do you know? The registry’s so secretive.” She could scarcely get the words out.
“I thought nothing of it when the first hit came and you were asked to send in a second sample. But when those tests came back and so many factors matched …” Vicki let the sentence trail off.
Hadn’t Dr. Portera told Raina that very afternoon how unusual it was to have so many factors match in unrelated donors? She’d taken it as a sign that she was destined to be this woman’s donor. In reality, it was an announcement that she had a half sister.
“When I suspected the truth,” Vicki continued, “the registry was more forthcoming, especially once their unrelated donor was, in fact, a related donor.”
Raina’s head was swimming. How could this be happening? How could she have lived all her life and not known? How could her mother have lied to her for so many years? Wasn’t there some law about keeping this kind of secret? It was cruel. It was hurtful. And she’d always thought of Vicki as a best friend!
“But you tried to talk me out of being a donor. Would you have let your own daughter, the other one, not me, die?” Raina asked cruelly.
“Stop it!” Vicki slapped the chair arm with her palm. “You go too far, Raina.”
Raina snapped her mouth shut and sent her mother a blazing, defiant look.
“Don’t you ever say that to me,” Vicki went on. “You can’t imagine the hell I’ve been living through in the past few days knowing that one child is needed to save the other.”
“But you tried to talk me out of it. You kept harping on me going under a general, and missing school, and it may not work, and—”
“And I had to know that you wanted to be a donor, Raina. I didn’t want more pressure on you to become one just because you were related to the recipient. You had to make your decision independent of that issue. And you had to be told of the ramifications. Not just for yourself, but for her too. Your bone marrow may not save her.”
Raina squared her chin. “I think it will. I want to do it.”
Vicki nodded slowly. “All right. I believe you. And now that you know this story, you may as well hear the rest of it.”
Raina’s reeling emotions spun out of control. “You mean there’s more?”
“There’s more,” Vicki said, leaning back in the chair. “Oh yes. There’s more.”
Holly lay on her bed staring up at the ceiling and feeling more bored than ever before in her life. She was totally caught up with her schoolwork—in fact, she was several projects ahead in most of her accelerated classes. Sometimes being smart was a curse. She knew that her mother was sitting downstairs, knitting and listening to amazingly boring music, and her father was at his desk preparing for the adult Sunday school class that he would teach later in the week. The television was off because her parents only allowed it to be on a couple of hours a day, and only if they approved of the programming. Truly, hers was the most boring existence on the face of the planet.
It didn’t help that Hunter was away. Without his comings and goings, the house felt tomblike. She’d someday get even with him for running off and leaving her to face this monumental ennui by herself. She couldn’t wait until she could drive. But when she could drive, her parents would probably ration that time also. To the corner and back? Maybe to the store to pick up milk? She could see her father writing down mileage in a notebook. “Now, don’t dally,” he’d say. “It’s five point two miles to the store. One traffic light. Three minutes to park. Ten inside the store. Back home. I’ll be looking for you.” Holly shuddered. She was a prisoner.
Holly reminded herself that she should be more charitable toward her father, because life could turn on a dime. Just last week she’d reported to pediatric oncology only to find the nurses’ station in turmoil and Susan, her favorite nurse, gone. “What happened?” Holly had asked.
Cheryl, one of the other nurses, had said, “Susan got a call this morning—her father dropped dead of a heart attack. She couldn’t believe it. It was totally unexpected. I mean, the man was only fifty-five years old. And he and Susan weren’t on good terms either. She was totally shook. Grabbed her things and rushed home to pack and fly out to Denver, which is where she’s from.”
“He just died?”
“Keeled over at his office desk. He had no history of heart problems.” Cheryl shook her head. “Really sad. I feel sorry for Susan. She kept saying, ‘Why wasn’t I nicer to him? I can’t even remember what we were arguing about.’ ” Cheryl looked knowingly at Holly. “I guess it just goes to show you that life is short and no one knows when the grim reaper will show up for a person.”
Guiltily, Holly said a quick prayer, asking God to forgive her for grousing about her own father. Susan’s dad was less than ten years older than Holly’s.
She sat up. Where were Kathleen and Raina? Neither was answering her phone. She decided to send them an e-mail. Maybe they were doing homework and needed a break. She went to her desk and hit the screen refresh button on her computer. The parental controls warning popped up. She rolled her eyes.
She opened her e-mail program, and the friendly voice told her she had mail. Good. It was the most excitement she’d had in the past two days, she decided. But when she saw the list of e-mails, none was from Kathleen or Raina. And one was from an unfamiliar name: kn-u-cme. Can you see me. Who’s this? She pondered for a moment, considered lab partners at school, but they had never used this name. She knew she shouldn’t open it. Her parents had warned her about opening e-mail of unknown origin because it could contain a virus. But she had a firewall on her machine.
“What the heck?” Holly opened the e-mail.
Hello—
If I could have one wish, it would be to spend one day of my life with you, Holly Harrison. Maybe someday, my wish will come true.
Shy Boy
Holly sat staring at the screen and rereading the message. Who in the world …? She revisited the address line, but it revealed nothing except the time it had been sent. Could it be for real? Should she reply?
Just then, her bedroom door flew open and Kathleen ran inside and threw herself across Holly’s bed. “This is the worst day of my life,” she wailed.
seventeen
HOLLY FORGOT about the message on her screen and moved to console Kathleen. “What happened?”
Kathleen stammered out her t
ale of driving to Carson’s and seeing Stephanie’s car in the driveway.
“You should have called first,” Holly said.
“Why? So he could lie to me?”
“He likes you, Kathleen. Don’t keep throwing up roadblocks.”
“Why do you always want to think the best about people? Take off your blinders.”
“And why do you always think the worst?” Holly felt her patience growing thin. She had half a mind to call Carson herself and talk to him about Kathleen. Except that Raina would strangle her because she believed that noninterference in friends’ lives was a prime directive.
Kathleen sniffed, but Holly saw that she was calming down. “I’m not wired like you and Raina. The two of you are confident and outgoing. You can talk to anyone about anything. I’m just not that way. I’m shyer. I wish I weren’t, but I am.” She looked as if the confession embarrassed her.
The word “shy” brought Holly back to her mysterious e-mail. She wanted to talk to Kathleen about it, but now wasn’t the time. “I know you’re shy.” Holly sat beside her friend and put her arm around her. “That’s okay. You’re probably better off, because I charge in like a bull in a china shop”—that was what her mother had often told her—“and Raina speaks her mind too much. But isn’t that what helps us all be friends? We’re alike, but we’re different too.”
Kathleen’s thick red hair bobbed up and down as she nodded in agreement.
Holly bounced off the bed. “Have you talked to Raina yet?”