Breath.
We were fourteen. Strangers until that moment. Until those two words.
As I sat in Trent’s house with his mom, on the couch where he and I used to watch movies and eat popcorn out of the same bowl, it was a stranger’s words, and the gratitude within them, that shook me out of the dark, lonely place I’d inhabited for so long. Her letter, written in a shaky hand on beautiful paper, lifted something in me that day. It was humble. Deeply sorry for Trent’s death. Profoundly grateful for the life he’d given her.
I’d gone home that night and written her back, my own thank-you for the moment of lightness she’d granted me with her words. And the night after, I wrote to another recipient, and another—five in all. Anonymous letters to anonymous people I wanted to know. And when I sent them to the transplant coordinator to forward on, it was with the tenuous hope that those people would write me back. That they would notice me like he did.
I glance over my shoulder and he’s there, smiling, gripping a sunflower that’s taller than me, its stem trailing behind him, roots and all.
“I’m Trent,” he says. “Just moved in back down the road a little ways. You must live close, right? I’ve seen you run by every morning this week. You’re fast.”
I bite my bottom lip as we walk. Smile inside. Try not to confess that I’ve saved my speed for the stretch of road in front of his house every day since the moving truck pulled into the driveway and he stepped out.
“I’m Quinn,” I say.
Breath.
Writing the letters made me feel like I could breathe again. I wrote about Trent and all the things he’d given me when he was alive. The feeling I could do anything. Happiness. Love. The letters were a way to honor him, and a hope for something more. An anonymous hand reaching out into the emptiness, looking for a connection. An answer.
I laugh, because he’s still out of breath, and because he doesn’t seem to remember the giant sunflower dangling from his hand.
“Oh,” he says, following my glance, “this was supposed to be for you. I . . .” He runs a nervous hand through his hair. “I, um, I got it over there, near that fence.”
He holds it out to me and laughs. It’s a sound I want to keep hearing.
“Thank you,” I answer. And I reach out to take it. The first thing he ever gave me.
I got four answers from the people he gave to.
After 282 days, multiple letters back and forth, consent forms, and premeeting counseling, his mom and I drove to the Donor Family Services office together and sat side by side as we waited for them to arrive. To meet them face-to-face.
Just as Norah had been the first to reach out with words, she was the first to reach out her hand, and in spite of all the times I’d imagined meeting her, nothing could’ve prepared me for the way it made me feel to take that hand in mine, and to look in her eyes and know that there was a part of Trent there too. A part that had saved her life and given her a chance to be a mother to the curly-haired little girl who peeked out from behind her legs and a wife to the man who stood crying beside her.
When she took a deep breath with Trent’s lungs and brought my hand to her chest so I could feel them fill and expand, my heart filled right along with them.
It was the same with the others I met—Luke Palmer, seven years older than me, who played us a song on his guitar, and who could do that now because Trent had given him a kidney. There was John Williamson, a quiet but warm man in his fifties, who wrote beautifully poetic letters about how his life had changed since receiving his liver transplant but who fumbled to find the right words to speak to us in that little reception room. And then there was Ingrid Stone, a woman with pale-blue eyes so different from Trent’s brown ones but who could see the world again, and paint it in vibrant colors on her canvases, because of them.
They say time heals all wounds, but meeting those people that afternoon—a makeshift family of strangers brought together by one person—healed more in me than all the time that passed in the days that had come before.
It’s why, when day after day went by with no reply from the last recipient, I started looking for him. It’s the reason I searched—matched up dates with news stories and hospitals—until I found him so easily, I almost didn’t trust it. It’s also why, around anyone else, I’ve pretended like I understand the reasons he hasn’t responded. That, like the woman at Donor Family Services told us, some people never do, and that’s their choice.
I’ve acted like I don’t think about him every day and wonder about that choice. Like I’ve made peace with it. But alone, in those endless hours that stretch to eternity before the morning, I always come back to the truth: that I haven’t at all. And I don’t know if I can unless I do this.
I don’t know what Trent would think if he knew. What he would say if he could somehow see. But it’s been four hundred days. I hope he would understand. For so long, I was the one with his heart. I just need to see where it is now.
CHAPTER TWO
“The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.”
—Blaise Pascal