Between Friends (20 page)

“Whatever, Ali. You know what I’m asking. What will you do if you transfer some and it works? What about the rest of them?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe I’ll let them be adopted?”

Cora visibly paled.

“What would you have me do, Cora? Destroy them?”

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I just don’t know. Yes, I guess that’s what would have to happen.”

“Why would it
have
to happen?” I asked, staring at her in disbelief.

“And if it doesn’t work?” she asked. “If they’re not good, viable? Would you keep going? Get a new donor?”

I frowned. I didn’t want to think that far ahead. I believed, I really did, that at least one of those embryos was destined to be my baby. I could feel a personality out there, waiting for me to claim it, waiting to become my baby.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “It’s so expensive . . . I just don’t know. But what is your hesitation? Are you sorry you did this to begin with?”

“No, no of course not,” she cried. “I love Letty, you know that.”

“I know, but something is definitely different on this trip, Cora. All of this, with Letty and Benny, I mean, you’re taking it all so personally . . .”

A thought occurred to me, something that now seemed obvious, why she was home, why she seemed bloated, tired, overly attentive to Letty. I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid.

“Cora,” I said, nearly breathless with it. “Cora, are you pregnant?”

She just stared at me for a moment, and I felt delightfully smug, as if I had discovered her secret. But then she laughed, covering her mouth when it turned into a groan.

“What, Cora? What’s going on?”

“No, I’m not pregnant, Ali. And, you can’t use the embryos. Nobody can. I—Ali this isn’t easy. I, ah, I have a problem.” Cora cleared her throat and wiped her hands across her face, then spoke in a rush, her voice flat as if she’d rehearsed it too many times. “I have polycystic kidney disease, Ali. I’m losing my kidneys. I have to go on dialysis very soon, and if I don’t get a kidney transplant I will be on it for the rest of my life.”

I eased to a stop at a red light and turned in my seat, speechless.

She nodded. “Yeah,” she said softly. “Definitely
not
pregnant.”

The light changed, but I couldn’t seem to move. There wasn’t a car behind me, and Cora finally just pointed to the light. I faced forward and accelerated slowly.

“Where are we going?” I asked, aware that we were coming up on one of the streets on our directions.

“You’re going to go left at the next light.”

We were both talking as though we were in church, the music on the radio providing a strange, modern background to an atmosphere that had so suddenly grown reverential and cautious.

I eased into the left lane and took the turn.

“Right at the next street,” she said. “You okay?”

“Hang on,” I said, making the right. It was a long street, ending in a cul-de-sac, and I drove slowly, barely touching the gas pedal. “Okay,” I said, finally able to form a thought. “What do we do? What has to happen? You need a kidney? Is that the deal? How does it work?”

“Oh, Ali, no,” she said. “You don’t understand—” We both jumped when her cell phone rang. She picked it up and gave a little gasp, holding it out for me to see the Caller ID.

“It’s Letty!”

“Okay, answer it, answer it,” I said. “Don’t tell her you’re with me, she might hang up.”

She quickly flipped it open and said, “Hello?”

She listened and then turned toward me before saying, “No, no, she’s out looking for you. Letty, where are you?” She was quiet again for a moment.

“Are you okay?” she asked, and then listened and nodded at me, making me press my hand to my chest in relief. I pulled around the curve of the cul-de-sac and stopped the car, turning the radio off.

“Of course,” Cora said, making frantic scribbling motions at me. I dug in the console for a pen and a notepad, and she quickly wrote down an address, and then wrote
VENICE
in big letters and underlined it before turning the notepad toward me.

“No, I don’t think she’s called your dad yet,” she said. “Yes, I do, Letty, I have to tell her. I have to at least tell her you’re okay. No, there’s no argument about—”

I could hear Letty talking on the other end, panic in her voice.

“No,” Cora said, raising her voice to cut through whatever protestations Letty was making. “No, just stay there. It will take me less than two hours, just stay right there, don’t move, okay? Order something to eat, and I’ll pay for it when I get there.”

She pointed north, and I took off for the entrance to I-75, headed toward Venice and my child.

Letty had sounded about seven years old, and my chest actually hurt when I heard her. Ali took off for I-75 like a rocket, and I was reminded of the road trips we’d taken in high school, giggling and singing at the tops of our lungs up the road, waves of heat shimmering before us.

I told Ali everything Letty had said, repeating it several times before she calmed down enough that I wasn’t afraid for our lives as she sped through traffic.

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll drive by and drop you off so she doesn’t see me and run.”

“Okay,” I said, unable to manage a clever retort about rescue missions and undercover ops the way I once might have. Not only was I afraid of the fact that Ali only had half of the information she needed right now, but I was also afraid for Letty. I had thought Ali had been overreacting about Letty, but now I realized that she had been exactly right to panic.

Once we got past Lehigh Acres, Ali reached over and gripped my arm.

“All right,” she said. “Now, let’s talk about this. Start over, okay? I need to know everything.”

I sighed and leaned my head against the window, the glass chilly from the air-conditioning, belying the heat just an eighth of an inch away.

“I have kidney disease,” I said, my voice dull. I could say it no other way. “Autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease. PKD. It is irreversible, it has progressed quickly, and tomorrow morning I have to go in and have a tube installed in my arm that they will stick needles in to remove all my blood, clean it, and put it back in, three times a week.”

“But, Cora, are you—are they sure? I mean, have you gotten a second, third,
sixth
opinion? When did this happen? Why didn’t you tell me? Who else knows?”

I lifted my head off the glass and smiled at her. “They are sure. I’ve had plenty of opinions, and they all say the same thing. It’s a little tough to argue when even I can see the images.”

“Why? What’s on the images?” she asked, fear in her voice. I didn’t blame her. It scared me when I read about it, to picture it, but then seeing it on the ultrasound images, well, it was worse than I had prepared myself for. For about a month I had obsessively researched, and there are images and heartbreaking stories seared into my mind that I will never forget.

I’d stopped the research after that month and started concentrating on living my life until the inevitability of the hemodialysis stopped me.

“It’s, well, it’s really pretty awful, Ali.”

“Are you in pain?” she asked, taking her eyes off the road every few seconds.

“Drive, please,” I said, pointing toward the road in front of us. “Sometimes it’s uncomfortable, yes. It’s hard to be still for long. They, the kidneys, grow larger . . . because of the cysts.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. You getting a mental image?”

“I think so.”

“Well, try to block it now. I try to not visualize it anymore. It’s more important to know what it does than what it looks like.”

“And what does it do?” she asked.

“It kills your kidney function,” I said. “No kidney function means your body can’t clean all the toxins out of it, and if you can’t clean the toxins out, you die. It’s really pretty simple.”

“So the dialysis . . . wait, you said you were going
tomorrow
?”

I sighed.

“I know. I’ve been trying to find a way to tell you, a time. I’m sorry. It’s the reason I came, it’s why I’m here, to tell you. And look, tomorrow’s not a big deal, okay? It’s not for the dialysis, it’s just to get the access for the dialysis put in place. It’s really not a big deal.”

“How long have you known?” she asked, and there was no disguising the hurt in her voice.

“Six months,” I said, aware that it wasn’t a good answer. And, technically, I had known something was wrong for much longer than that. I just hadn’t known what. I heard her draw in a long, slow breath and assumed that a torrent of angry words was going to come riding along on the exhale. But I was wrong.

“Okay,” she said evenly, accepting it, but I was willing to bet I was going to hear more about it later. “So, you go in the morning . . . oh my God, and here I’ve just been going on and on about all of our stupid problems. How could you stand it? And now I’ve dragged you out—”

“It’s been wonderful,” I said.

She laughed. “Oh, clearly. This has been great fun for you, I’m sure.”

“Not fun, maybe, but it has been good for me, being able to spend time with you, with Letty, get to know her a little more.”

“Stop, Cora, you’re scaring me,” she said. “You sound like you think you’re going to die, like this was a good- bye trip or something. We’re going to fix this, okay? Okay?”

“Okay,” I agreed.

“So, what has to be done? The thing tomorrow, when is that?”

“I’m supposed to be there at seven in the morning. Keith doesn’t have a flying lesson until nine, so he’s going to take me, and bring me home the next day. But I’m supposed to have someone check in on me—”

“Well, Keith isn’t taking you, I am. And I’m taking you home, and I’m staying there until you’re better.”

“It will be fine, really, it’s not a big deal. They basically connect an artery to a vein by sticking a tube in my arm,” I said, holding my arm out, tracing a loop along the inside of my elbow. “It will be the spot where they put the needles in for the dialysis.”

She looked down quickly at my arm and then met my eyes before she looked back at the road.

“What, the tube sticks out?”

“No, no, both ends are in the arm.”

“Okay,” she said, and I could tell that it made her feel better, the idea that I would not have things sticking out of me, all signs of illness contained, hidden within my body. I didn’t point out that it didn’t make me any less sick, but that would be evident enough in time, and if it made her feel better about things now, so be it.

“What then?” she asked.

I shrugged. “When my blood tests get to a certain point, I go on dialysis. Three times a week for three to five hours.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound so bad,” she said, hopefully.

“It’s better than the alternative,” I agreed with her.

“But it’s better to get a kidney, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Well, sure,” I said. “For most people. Some people aren’t good candidates.”

“Are you?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t gotten that far along. I don’t know why I wouldn’t be, but that’s something to look at down the line. Right now I’m just coming to grips with going on hemodialysis.”

“But if you can do it earlier, then why wouldn’t you? What do we need to do?” she asked. “How do we do it? I assume I have to get tested, all that, but hey, I figure if I could carry one of your eggs to term in my body, a kidney should be a snap, right?”

And here was the tough part, as if it hadn’t been tough enough for both of us up until then. Because now she was determined Ali, Ali who would just forge ahead and make things better, Ali who had gotten through all of her heartbreaks and had plowed ahead and had a successful pregnancy and a healthy baby, and by God, if she could do that, she could do anything.

But she couldn’t do this.

“It’s not quite as simple as that,” I said. “You can’t give me a kidney, Ali.”

“No, actually, I can,” she said. “This is how this works, how this friendship has always worked and always will work. I’ll go with you tomorrow and while they’re doing their thing with your arm I’ll get the information—”

“No, Ali,” I interrupted her. “You don’t understand. You have to keep both of your kidneys, and”—I took a deep breath—“you can’t use the embryos.”

“Why?” she asked. “What does that have to do with it?”

I pressed my lips together as if I’d just applied lipstick, afraid to say it.

“It’s hereditary, Ali,” I finally said softly. “It’s hereditary. Even if you were a match, you can’t give me a kidney because if Letty has it, you’re going to need it for her. And you can’t bring another baby into this world with my genes.”

A small noise escaped her. And this time it was I who reached across the console and gripped her arm.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I am so, so sorry, Ali. I didn’t know, you know that, right? I didn’t know, I had no idea.”