“Fear can paralyze people. One reason recipients don’t write is because they are afraid they will hurt or harm the family somehow by ‘bringing up something they don’t want to think about,’ the loss of their loved one. Of course, what they don’t realize is that this is a loss that you carry every day. . . . Another deterrent to writing is the time it takes for the recipient to heal physically and psychologically from the transplant. A recipient has to take a myriad of drugs to avoid any possibility of rejection. This procedure of balancing the amounts needed of the drugs can take months or longer. The trauma to the body and spirit is immense.”
—Karen Hannahs, Intermountain Donor Services: “Why Don’t They Write?”
FEAR IS A hard, heavy knot in my stomach when I pull up to the kayak shop. I have to force myself out of the car. The door to the shop is propped open with a scuba tank, and the sign says OPEN, but when I poke my head through the doorway, I don’t see anyone behind the counter. I hover there, neither in nor out, my sister’s words running through my mind.
You have to tell him. He deserves to know.
I knew these things before she told me—it was the fear of losing him that kept me quiet. But standing here now, I realize what I fear even more is hurting him. I picture his face when I say the words, and my resolve to tell him starts to drain out of me. It takes all my strength to hold on to it. After a long moment I take a deep breath and cross the threshold into the shop. Its racks of equipment are clean and bright in the early-afternoon light, and a fan oscillates slowly, blowing the now-familiar smell of plastic and neoprene my way. I glance around, half expecting Colton to come from the back room carrying a full scuba tank or a set of life jackets and wearing a wide grin, but he doesn’t. Nobody does.
I take a few tentative steps toward the back room, and that’s when I hear a voice, just above the low whir of the fan.
“Would you stop already?” I barely recognize it as Colton’s, the way it cuts through the words. “It was a mistake,” he says, “and you need to let it go.”
I go still right where I’m standing.
“Please don’t get mad at me, Colton.” The other voice is Shelby’s, and there’s an edge to hers too. “I just want to make sure you realize you can’t make that mistake. You don’t get to. The second you start missing your meds, you risk going into rejection—don’t you get that? You could die.”
I don’t dare move. I try not to breathe.
Shelby goes on. “So you never get to make that mistake, Colton—not because you’re tired, or they make you feel crappy, or you’re . . . distracted.” She sighs.
The knot in my gut twists itself tighter.
“Distracted?” Colton spits the word back at her. “By what? A girl? Living? It’s been over a year. Am I still supposed to sit around and take my vitals and watch the clock for my next dose, and think about the fact that it’s all on borrowed time? Should I focus on that?”
Shelby’s voice turns angry. “Do you realize how selfish you sound right now? How ungrateful?”
No, no, no.
If her words knock the air right out of me, I can’t imagine what they’ve just done to Colton. The silence that follows is excruciatingly long, and it takes everything in me now not to creep closer and step in between them.
“Wow,” he says finally. His voice is flat. Cold. “You really just went there.” He clears his throat. Laughs, but it’s joyless. Angry. “I’m done.”
There are footsteps. The quick shuffle of his flip-flops over the floor, heading toward the doorway. My fear unravels into panic at being discovered, and I look around for a place to hide—not just from Colton and Shelby, but from all the things I came to tell him.
“Really? You’re done?” Shelby shoots back, and the footsteps stop. “What about that letter? It’s been over a year for that too, Colton.” Her voice has gone all calm again, but it’s false, the kind you put on when you know you’ve fired an arrow that’ll win you the fight.
She has no idea how far that arrow reaches.
The rising panic in my chest turns into something heavy and thick that spreads out all at once, my heart pumping it into every last cell of me, like blood. It sits there, rooting my feet to the cement floor as the room begins to spin.
I sink down against the wall behind me. That letter.
“I’m sorry,” Shelby says. Her voice is softer now, regret creeping in at its edges, but she goes on. “I get that it’s hard. And I know you’ll write his parents when you’re ready. But you should at least answer the letter you got. That poor girl lost her boyfriend, and tried to reach out to you, and you can’t just leave something like that unanswered. Do you know what that must feel like?”
That poor girl.
There is no air in the room. Not where I sit, eyes squeezed shut against tears that want to spill down my cheeks. That poor girl who tried to reach out to you. Who found you when you didn’t answer. Who’s been lying to you since the day you met.
It’s silent for what feels like an eternity, and the tension stretches so tight between the walls of the shop, I know it’s going to snap any second.
Shelby pushes on, even as I beg in my mind for her to stop. “Maybe it’ll make you feel better, to answer it,” she says. “Maybe it’ll remind you that it’s a gift, Colton. Not a burden.”
I feel Colton snap before he even speaks.
“Do you think I need a reminder?” His voice is all sharp edges and open wounds. “You don’t think the med schedule, or the cardio therapy, or the biopsies are enough? Or the scar on my chest? You don’t think that’s enough?”
“Colton, I—”