Between Friends (36 page)

I did, I suddenly got it. I don’t know exactly how I thought it worked. Or no, I did, I did have a vision of how I thought things might go, but this wasn’t it.

I thought they would do the exam and then let me and Letty say good-bye, and then everyone would leave except me. Then they would turn off the machines and I would hold his hand when he breathed his last. It would be peaceful. I would stay in there a moment, maybe say a prayer, kiss him, and then I would let the doctors know I was ready and they would come get him.

A few hours later Letty and I would be there when Cora came out of surgery, and then it would all have meant something real and right, and if this wasn’t how it was going to work, then I didn’t even know if I wanted any of it.

And then I realized the worst thing of all.

None of it mattered.

None of it.

Because Benny was gone.

Gladys and Cora were looking at me, waiting for me to speak, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t possibly make enough sense of my thoughts to explain them to them.

“I have to find my daughter,” I said, my voice hoarse.

Cora got up, “Okay, let’s go.”

I followed her back to Benny’s room and found Letty and Drew there, Letty dispiritedly eating a small croissant and drinking a soda. Drew stood hurriedly and offered me his chair, while Letty smiled wearily at me. Her face was puffy, her hair lank around her face. She looked older than her fifteen years, and if my beautiful girl looked like this, I could only imagine what I looked like.

“So, how’d things go?” Drew asked.

“I don’t think this is a conversation we need to have right now,” Cora said, flicking her gaze toward Letty.

“What?” Letty asked. “What’s happening?”

“Nothing you need to worry about,” Cora said.

“I don’t think that at this point we need to keep anything from her,” I said. “It’s just that things are a little different than what I expected, that’s all.”

“Different how? What do you mean?” Letty looked back and forth between us.

I dropped my head into my hands. I didn’t know how to explain this to her.

“The process for organ donation is complicated,” Cora said, her voice stronger than I’d heard it in days. “And it presents some challenges your mom didn’t realize she would face.”

“Like what?” Letty asked.

“Here’s the thing,” I said, able to take over now that Cora had shown me the way. “Your dad wanted to be an organ donor, and that’s what we’re going to do. It means that we’ll have to say good-bye to him here, sometime tonight, I suppose, and then they’ll take him to the hospital where they do the transplants.”

“Oh,” Letty said in a small voice. “What about Aunt Cora?”

“I don’t know,” I said, realizing, at last, that Cora was beyond my control, that nearly everything was beyond my control. “You’ll have to ask her.”

Dr. Tulley, of course, concurred with Dr. Young.

Benny was gone, truly . . . gone.

Cora said no.

And I, while I couldn’t agree with Cora’s decision, did finally have to accept it.

And then I said good-bye to my husband.

FIVE YEARS LATER

 

I heard the plane before I saw it and searched the sky over the Gulf of Mexico until it came into view.

“Look!” I cried, pointing. “There she is!”

BJ—short for Benny Junior, against my protestations, though even I was slipping into it more often than not—his construction paper birthday crown firmly snugged down on his head, followed my finger and he dropped his pail onto the sand, delighted. Cora clapped her hands and stood, and Seth swooped BJ up into his arms and situated him on his broad shoulders.

Within moments Letty was zooming by, trailing a banner that read
HAPPY BIRTHDAY BENNY GUTIERREZ JR!!!!
behind the little plane.

We all clapped and hooted and BJ squealed, clutching Seth’s hair in his sandy, beautiful fingers as the plane roared down the length of the beach.

“Dude,” Seth said, trying to loosen his grip, but laughing all the while. I held my hands out, and Seth bent at the waist, allowing me to pull BJ into my arms. As soon as I put him down he was off again, headed for the water. I started after him, but Seth waved me away.

“I’ll go,” he said, and I smiled gratefully at him, still astonished at how he’d grown. He was home, at Cora’s, for the weekend from school in Miami. He didn’t come home every weekend, but he wouldn’t miss BJ’s birthday.

We all thought he had a girlfriend over there, but he only blushed when we teased him about it. I still caught him looking at Letty once in a while, but it was less filled with longing than it had been in the year after his father and Benny died.

They clung to each other at first, of course. What form that comfort took I didn’t always know, but then nothing in the years after Benny’s death was remotely like anything that had gone before, and I admit that whether my daughter had sex wasn’t even on my radar for a while.

We slowly came back to the world of the living. There were so many things to attend to, so much paperwork, so many legalities.

Cora stayed.

And Drew stayed as long as he could, and he was a tremendous help in the time he was here. But his life, his home, was in Seattle, and Cora’s was here, with us. She secured a position with the local college teaching environmental policy, and she spent her weekends teaching others, including Letty, to fly. The college was thrilled to have her. As we all were.

Her numbers stayed steady, in what I came to believe was a superhuman show of control over her body’s rebellion. She attributed it to her strict diet. Whatever we owed it to, she didn’t have to begin dialysis for almost six months.

Seth coming to live with her was a small series of inevitable steps. He grieved on the periphery of our devastation for the first week, staying with a friend’s family, and then Cora couldn’t seem to stand the fact that he was as alone as she had been at one point in her life. In a grand tribute to Barbara, she became his foster mother.

Cora, to nobody’s surprise except her own, proved to be an excellent mother. And Seth didn’t make it easy on her. An angry, grieving sixteen-year-old boy is a force to be reckoned with, but once Cora was on dialysis, Seth seemed to slowly recognize that he wasn’t the only person in the world. She hadn’t been able to persuade him to go back to school, but between Letty and Cora he did get his GED. Now he was in school in Miami, learning how to be a phlebotomy technician.

We figured so many months of seeing Cora’s blood drawn and replaced had given him an edge in that particular field of needles.

In the months following Benny’s death, Cora and I had considered merging households, thinking it would be easier on all of us. But I couldn’t bring myself to leave the magnolias and the memories that Benny and I had made in the only home we had known together.

And with Seth moving in with Cora, and Letty nearly obsessively determined to take care of the birds her father had loved so much, we allowed that plan to recede into the background.

And Letty, up in the sky, my winged girl, seemed to grow up overnight. It broke my heart, but in some ways it was also a relief. Cora had been right, and so had Benny; I had spoiled her. But it took Letty herself pointing it out to me that made me realize it.

She began working in the store with me after school to save money for flying lessons, which she started with Cora on her sixteenth birthday.

I still gave her a car.

A safe, dependable, used car; she paid for the insurance and gas. And at seventeen, when she came to me about joining the Sheriff Explorers program, I said no.

For a long time.

But eventually Cora and Seth convinced me that I couldn’t keep her from doing what she was determined to do, and so now Letty was working toward a degree in criminal justice in Tampa. She was rooming with Emily, who was hoping to eventually teach in her and Letty’s old elementary school.

Letty wants to return to Naples, too, to work in the field that Benny so proudly served, as a police officer and, eventually, as a helicopter pilot. The certification process for that was insanely expensive, but Benny would have been thrilled, and so I was, too. I looked at her sometimes and was amazed that she was my child. Benny would have been so proud of her.

Now, as she swooped past one more time, with little BJ and Seth waving wildly from the water, I found myself gazing at Cora, wondering if she was as amazed as I was. But she was, of course she was.

The first years on hemo weren’t easy, but as Dr. MacKinnon kept explaining and finally got her to understand, she had end-stage renal disease, not end-stage Cora disease. The death of her kidneys did not signal her death, and eventually she was able to move to peritoneal dialysis, a more independent form of dialysis that she could do at home.

And in two more months she would undergo another change.

A year after Benny’s death, when life began to almost make sense again, we tested Letty for PKD. And our miracle girl surprised us: She didn’t carry the gene. After the rejoicing died down, Cora and I began to talk seriously of a transplant again.

This time the tests didn’t fall in our favor.

We were not compatible. Our blood type was fine, but few of our antigens cared for each other, and the odds of rejection were too high to move forward.

We were both so shocked that it was as though another death had occurred. It did not seem possible that after all we had gone through that we were not, on this basic level, compatible. We wallowed in the grief of it until first Letty and then Seth approached us about being tested.

After weeks of intense discussion, Cora and I decided that they were too young to make the decision. We vetoed it, assuring them that Cora was doing very well on dialysis, and promising that if they still felt the same way when they were twenty-one, we would discuss it again.

They bargained us down to twenty, and Seth presented himself on his twentieth birthday.

He wasn’t a match.

By the time Letty turned twenty last year, we were prepared for a third letdown. But it didn’t happen. Letty and Cora were perfect for each other.

Letty was ready to do it the same day we got the results, but Cora eventually persuaded her to wait until summer, when she wouldn’t have to interrupt her schooling.

And so, in two months, Letty would give Cora one of her kidneys.

Letty and Emily could see them all down there: BJ in the water with Seth, her mom and Aunt Cora on the quilt, as they made their final pass. Their faces were tilted up, shining in the sun, and Letty knew they were as excited about it being her guiding this plane as they were by the
Happy Birthday
banner it was hauling.

In two more months she would give Aunt Cora back the life she’d once given her, and that feeling was the same feeling she’d had when Cora took her on her first flight, like helium filling her belly, making her want to scream her blissful, newfound freedom to the world.