Let Him Live (14 page)

Donovan said, “I bought it for you and Brett. I
want you to have a home again. To make up for the other one.”

“But—”

He shook his head. “In a minute.” He opened his arms. Meg watched as his mother slid into them. Sunlight washed over them, bright and golden like a soft embrace. Meg blinked back tears as she heard Mrs. Jacoby begin to weep softly in her son’s arms. “I love you, Mom,” he said. “I love you.”

It took over an hour for Donovan and Meg to explain about the One Last Wish Foundation and for Mrs. Jacoby to begin to believe them. She had many questions, most of which neither of them could answer, but Donovan did have the original letter and a copy of the check that Meg had made on the hospital’s copy machine. Those things and the deed to the house were the only proof they could offer. In the end, it was enough.

Mrs. Jacoby went over every inch of the house, exclaiming over details that had escaped Meg even though she’d helped paint the whole thing. The size of the house almost overwhelmed Mrs. Jacoby, but she made plans for each room. They might have stayed longer, but Donovan wasn’t feeling well, so Meg drove them back to the apartment.

Mrs. Jacoby chattered nonstop all the way. “Maybe we can arrange to move next weekend. I’ll give notice to the landlord. I can rent a trailer. Do you think some of the people who helped you fix
the place up would help us move? I can’t pay anybody but I could make a big pot of chili …”

Meg saw that Donovan was pleased, but also tired. He leaned back against the car seat on the long drive and closed his eyes. Meg let them off, promising to call later. “I have my own mother to tell,” she told them. “Once she finds out I worked so hard on your house, she may put me to work on ours.” She made a face that caused Mrs. Jacoby to laugh, and waved good-bye.

Once she returned home, she found her mother relaxing by the pool. “Back so soon?” her mom asked.

“Donovan wasn’t feeling well, so we cut it short.”

“Cut what short?”

Meg dragged a patio chair over and sat down and proceeded to tell her mother the whole story. When she finished, her mother stared at her incredulously. “I can’t believe it,” she said.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t mention the One Last Wish Foundation and the mysterious JWC before, but it was Donovan’s money, and he asked me to keep it a secret until his mom got the house.”

“Does your father know?”

“No, not even Daddy.”

“And the two of you pulled this off all by yourselves?”

“Yes,” Meg confessed. “Are you mad at me?”

“Mad? I’m impressed!” Her mother’s face broke out in a generous smile.

“You are?”

“Your ingenuity is overwhelming.”

“It is?”

“Meg, I think what you did is wonderful. I want you to start at the beginning and tell me the whole story all over again. Every detail—don’t skip a thing. Then, I’m going to begin checking into this One Last Wish Foundation. I’d say they need to be approached for a
major
donation to the Wayfarer Inn.”

Meg stared at her mother open-mouthed. “Why, that’s exactly what I wanted to do!” she cried. “They should give to our cause.”

Her mother smiled more broadly. “Like mother, like daughter,” she quoted, then leaned forward, her eyes twinkling. “Scary, isn’t it?”

They spent the afternoon talking and laughing as Meg told stories of her adventures as a candy striper. It was after six before her mother realized that they needed to start dinner. “Your father promised to be home tonight.”

“Maybe we should go out to eat,” Meg suggested. “Daddy hasn’t taken the two of us out to eat in ages.”

“Good idea. I think we should both dress and pounce on him the minute he comes in the door. I mean, how could he possibly refuse an invitation from two gorgeous women like us?”

The electronic ring of the phone interrupted Meg’s reply. She tensed. Years of hearing the phone ring at dinnertime meant only one thing. Her father had an emergency and wouldn’t be home for dinner. She tried not to feel resentful.
Her mother picked up the receiver. Her smile quickly faded as she spoke to Meg’s father, and when she hung up, Meg braced herself for bad news.

“It’s Donovan,” her mother said. “He’s just been brought into emergency, and he’s unconscious.”

M
EG FELT MISPLACED
sitting in the familiar surroundings of Memorial. She wasn’t a candy striper this time. She was a visitor. A watcher. One who waited for news about someone who was critically ill. She felt helpless.

Her mother sat in a corner with Mrs. Jacoby, holding her hand and consoling her. Brett was slumped in another chair, staring down at his lap; his legs dangled, still too short to touch the floor. The sight of him looking so small and lost in the ICU waiting room caused a lump to lodge in her throat. He looked over at her forlornly. “Donovan fell down on the floor,” he said. “There was blood.”

Meg slid over to sit next to the boy and put her arm around him. “I’m sorry, Brett. The doctors are
trying to fix him up right now. Think about him getting better again.”

“Is your daddy going to get him his new liver now?”

Sadness almost overwhelmed Meg. She knew that Donovan had been delegated a Status 9—the highest priority for transplantation—but she didn’t know if the nationwide appeal for a liver had been answered. “I know my daddy’s trying his very best,” she told Donovan’s sad little brother.

“The last time Donovan got real sick, Mommy told me that he might have to go to heaven. But he got better and got to come home. Will he have to go to heaven if your daddy can’t find him a new liver?”

His questions, his innocence tore at her heart. Yet, his mother had discussed the possibility of Donovan’s dying, so Meg figured that it would be cruel to gloss over the child’s concerns. Still, she could hardly face the thought herself. “I-I don’t know. Maybe.” She turned her head and fought for control.

“He can have my liver,” Brett said. “I never liked liver much anyway.”

His cockeyed view of the situation brought Meg a brief smile. “Sorry, but one liver to a customer. You still need yours.”

She heard someone rush into the room and looked up to see Alana, Clark, and Lonnie. They swiftly surrounded Meg and Brett. “Mrs. Vasquez called and told me. Oh, Meg, I’m so sorry.”

“It stinks,” Clark mumbled. “We just returned his tux on Monday. He didn’t feel good, but I didn’t think much about it. He never feels really good.”

“I think he was holding on just so he could get the house finished,” Meg said, realizing that was probably the truth. Any mention of being sick, and he would have been put back into the hospital immediately. “Turning over those keys to his mom was everything to him.”

“Don’t give up hope,” Lonnie said. “I know what it’s like to lie in a hospital bed and think life’s over, then to get a reprieve. It can happen for Donovan too, if they only find him a donor.”

Meg hung on to Lonnie’s words as if they were a lifeline.
If they only find him a donor
. Suddenly, she wanted to see Donovan and touch him. Meg moistened her lips and stood. “Will you all wait here with Brett? I’ll be back soon.”

Clark eased into her vacated chair. “Hi, Brett, my man. I’m Clark, and I know your brother and we are pals.”

Meg left the waiting room, went to the elevators, and punched the button that would take her to her dad’s office. She had no reason to even hope that he was there, but she wanted him to be. She wanted to talk to him, wanted to hear straight from him how the search was going.

Because it was late, the halls were ghostly quiet. She walked swiftly down the long corridor and stopped in front of her dad’s office door. She
muttered a quick prayer, turned the knob, and stepped inside. “Daddy?” she said.

He swiveled the chair slowly to face her. “Hi, Meggie.”

Again, she felt coldness clutch her heart. “Why aren’t you down prepping for OR?”

“They just called me from the lab. Donovan’s in kidney failure.”

Meg’s knees felt wobbly. She crouched in front of her father’s chair and gazed up at him. “So, will you have to do a kidney transplant too?”

He didn’t answer right away, but took a deep and shuddering breath. “There won’t be any transplant. We’ve run out of time.”

She heard the sharp intake of her own breath. “Is he—is he—?”

Her father shook his head. “Not yet. I was just sitting here figuring a way to go down and tell his family.” He looked at her. “And you.”

It dawned on her that her father was truly sad. What good was all the technology if it couldn’t come through when it was needed? “Does Donovan know?”

“He’s semiconscious, but I don’t know if he’s aware of what’s happening. I don’t think so. He’ll go to sleep and slide from this world into the next. I can’t stop him.”

Meg had passed from acute pain into numbness. The pool of light from the lamp shone directly down on her father’s hands, clasped in his lap. His fingers were long and tapered, spotlessly clean, smelling faintly of antiseptic soap.
Surgeon’s
hands. Hands that healed
. It was as if she were seeing them for the first time.

His hands were beautiful, and they had the power to transplant life from one human being into another. And yet, now, for all his knowledge, for all his ability and surgical skill, his hands could do nothing. He had the power to sustain life, but not to restore it.

She stared at her own hands too. Smaller than his, with a few stubborn flecks of paint embedded under her nails. She thought of Alana’s hands, dark and nimble. She thought of all the hands that had reached out, that were still reaching out to Donovan and his family. Human hands, helping, healing, giving. Perhaps in the long run, that’s what life was truly all about—helping one another.

Meg reached out and covered her father’s hands with hers. “We broke the rules, didn’t we, Daddy? We got too involved.”

He nodded. “I’m afraid so, Meggie.”

“Can I see him alone? Just for a minute while you go tell Brett and his mother?”

He answered by taking her hand and leading her out of his office.

ICU was quiet and dark except for the lonely vigil of beeping machines and glowing monitors. On the bed, Donovan twitched and tossed restlessly, as if struggling to remain in place. Tubes and wires protruded from every part of his body. Meg stared down at him, thinking,
He’s tethered
—
these lines hold him to the bed
. If they weren’t in place, would he float away?

She felt detached, like an alien seeing something that made no sense in her world of health and wellness. Sickness she had seen, but death? Death wore a different face.

“Donovan, it’s me, Meg. I-I want you to know I’m here with you.” She had no way of knowing if he heard her, or even remembered her.

“Cold,” he mumbled. “So cold.”

His discomfort angered her, and she looked about for another blanket with which to cover him. There wasn’t one. She could go to the nurses’ station and ask for one, but she couldn’t bear to leave him even for a minute. She had so little time as it was.

The curtain in front of the glass partition was pulled back, and she could see a nurse bent over a chart, dutifully filling it in. A glass wall and twenty yards separated them. It may as well have been a chasm. Meg couldn’t catch her eye.

“Cold,” Donovan mumbled through chattering teeth.

Making up her mind what to do, Meg reached over and jerked the curtain across the glass window, sealing herself and Donovan off from the main desk. Very carefully, she moved aside wires and tubes, and gently, she crawled into the bed beside him so that his back was resting against the front of her body.

She realized she was breaking all the rules, but it didn’t matter. He needed her. With great care,
she slipped her arms around him and held him close.

She willed the warmth of her body to seep into his, hoping he might somehow absorb a portion of her life into himself. She would gladly give a few of her years to him. “I’m here, Donovan,” she whispered against his neck. “Right here.”

His trembling seemed to stop, and after a few minutes, his body seemed more relaxed. She hugged him tighter, filling her arms with the weight of him, and her memory with his smile. Tears slipped down her cheeks.

With one hand, she stoked his hair. “When you get where you’re going,” she said into his ear, “please don’t forget me. And once you’re there, look for a friend of mine. Her name is Cindy, and you’ll like her. Trust me.”

She whispered his name like a prayer, “Oh, Donovan. Oh, Donovan. Oh, Donovan.”