The Winner's Game (27 page)

F
OUR DAYS
. That's how long we've been at the hospital. Not straight through—we've gone home a couple times to change clothes and stuff—but mostly we've just been here hanging out with Ann and Bree.

I hate hospitals.

I hate hospital food.

I hate seeing wheelchairs in the hallway that I'm not allowed to sit in.

But mostly, I hate seeing my sisters the way they are.

They say Ann is stable, but she looks a lot weaker than she did when she was at the beach. I think if she was really as good as she was before, they'd let her go home. But it sounds like they are going to keep her until they can “harvest” an organ from a donor.

A donor like Bree.

I really hate hospitals.

Ann looks bad enough, but compared to Ann, Bree looks
awful.
It's nice that they're in the same room and stuff, so we can all be together, but I kinda don't like to look at Bree, because her face is all messed up. They've shaved several spots on her head where they had to drill into her skull to release the pressure.

Gross.

Every time I look at her injuries, I remember how sick I felt when I saw that speeding car. I can't get the image out of my head—watching her shoes fly and seeing her body bounce.

“Can I go for a walk?” I ask my parents early in the evening of day four. “I need some fresh air.”

“You won't get lost?” asks Mom.

I roll my eyes and drop my chin. “I could give tours of this place.”

“Just…be careful,” says Dad. “And don't be gone too long.”

While I'm wandering the halls, I stop by a vending machine and drop three quarters in for a pack of gum. Then I continue my journey. I know where I want to go, but it's on the other end of the hospital and down several floors. Along the way, I am reminded over and over again how life isn't fair. Each room I pass has some other sorry soul who is right in the middle of lots of unfairness.

In one room there is an old man with tubes hanging out his nose who looks like he's already dead. The most unfair part is that there's nobody there with him.

In the next room there's a baby in an incubator with thick scars down her chest like Ann's, only newer. Two young parents are crying over her.

A couple rooms farther, a priest is saying a prayer beside a bed, with family members gathered around.

In a waiting room, I hear a crying husband asking for news about his wife. His two teenage daughters are clinging to him. All of their faces are wet from tears.

The elevator is superslow. On my way down, my thoughts return to Bree and Ann. Everyone wants Bree to live, and yet…if she dies, it's good news for Ann. Everyone wants Ann to live too, which she will, for sure, if Bree dies.

Talk about unfair!

When the elevator opens, I'm in the lobby of the emergency room. I've been itching to get down here for a couple of days now, but my parents made me stay with them. I take a seat near a window, open up my pack of gum, and start to chew.

After a little while I build up the nerve to ask one of the nurses at the desk about something that's been on my mind. “Excuse me. Um…can you tell me, like…how many people die here each day?”

She looks horrified. “What? That's an awful thing to ask, young man. Go find your parents. You shouldn't be up here at the desk.”

Is it such an awful thing to ask? I just want to know what the odds are of a new heart coming in for my sister. Someone's heart other than Bree's, I mean.

I take a seat again near the window. Maybe thirty minutes later, the nurse behind the desk stands up all excited and makes a call for assistance. A minute later several people in medical scrubs begin gathering by the ambulance entrance. A minute after that I see the lights of an ambulance zooming up the road. It pulls right past me and stops at the door. A teenage girl is pulled from the back of the ambulance and wheeled into the hospital, where she is quickly carted off, surrounded by the blue scrubs.

Five minutes later, another ambulance pulls up, only this one doesn't have its lights on. Only one person from the hospital goes outside to help the medics. The gurney is covered up with a thick white sheet. Nobody is hurrying. Then the nurse asks, “Is that Mr. Donor?”

The medics look at each other, confused for a moment, and then they get what she's asking. “Yeah, his license says he's a full organ donor. He's all yours.”

A donor?

This is what I came downstairs for, what I hoped to see, only now I don't want to see it.

A dead body.

Staring at the sheet as it passes by, I suddenly wish I hadn't come to the ER, or wanted to know how many people die here each day. It really doesn't matter to me anymore. As far as I'm concerned, one is too many.

Especially if that one is my sister.

Or my other sister.

W
HERE HAVE YOU
been?” I ask Cade as soon as he comes into the room. I am reminded that Ann is asleep on her bed, so in a quieter—but firm—voice, I add, “Your father is out looking for you right now. You're in big trouble when he gets back. You've been gone over an hour.”

“I was looking for…something.” The way he says it tells me there's definitely more to this story.

“What ‘something'?”

“You'll be mad.”

“I promise I won't.”

“Can I ask a question first?”

I wave him over to sit next to me. “Anything.”

“OK. Does God pick and choose?”

“Pick and choose what?”

“
People
. You know…who lives and dies.”

“Well…yes, I suppose he does. Why do you ask?”

“'Cuz you're always saying that life's not fair, and people dying is like the unfairest thing of all. But you also say that whatever happens, we have to trust God, because he has a plan that we don't always understand. So…maybe life's not really unfair at all. Maybe
God
is unfair.”

His comment hits me like a load of bricks. I pull him closer, wishing he didn't have to witness all of this
unfairness
in our lives right now. There's so much I want to say to him, but as I look at my daughters lying peacefully on what could very well be their deathbeds, the words are slow coming.

Like a flash before my eyes, I am reminded of the story I told the kids about the train engineer who had to choose between saving his own son and saving a whole trainload of strangers. With unbelievable grace, he chose to save the strangers on the train, sacrificing his only son in the process. As the image dissipates in my mind, a strange sense of peace courses through me. Before, when I first told the kids about it, I was so sure that I could never do that—never pull the lever that would send a train plowing into my own little child while I stood helpless and watched. But now, seeing both of my daughters side-by-side on their beds, is this so much different? What if instead of lying in bed, one of my daughters was on the train and one was on the tracks, and I knew that either Ann or Bree
had
to die so the other could live? Could I make that call? How on earth could I choose which one should live?

Or what if that trainload of people weren't strangers to me at all? What if they were my family? What if Dell and Cade and Ann were on the train, and it was Bree alone on the tracks?

It would still be unbelievably hard…but the choice would be clear.

Through a fresh round of tears, I tell my son, “I was wrong, Cade. I've been wrong all along. Life
is
fair, it just doesn't always seem so in the moment. And God is fair too, though I'll admit he has to make some very tough choices every single day.” I squeeze a little harder, until he finally resists.

“Maybe you're right,” he says at length, “Because he did finally find a donor for Ann.” He pauses and sighs. “But I doubt that guy's family is going to think it's very fair.”

Now I sit straight up and square his face to mine. “What are you talking about?”

“I went down to watch for ambulances in the emergency room. I saw them bring in a dead body, and they said he was a donor.”

“You sure they said ‘donor' and not ‘goner'?”

“Uh-huh.”

My anxiety is shooting through the roof! “Well, that doesn't mean—Cade, just because someone is an organ donor doesn't mean their genetic makeup will be a good match for Ann.”

“But it would be cool, right?”

I glance at Ann, then at Bree. “Yeah. The coolest. But don't get your hopes up, kiddo.”

“Yeah, I know. But I'm kinda pretty sure, Mom. After they took the dead guy away, I came back upstairs, and I was passing the nurses down by their little station and I overheard them talking. Someone mentioned Ann's name and she said they just got a heart in that'll work.”

I can't breathe
.

If my pirate-child is playing some sort of a joke, I may never forgive him.

“Cade, are you sure?”

He nods. “I bet they'll be here any minute.”

My own heart leaps when the door flies open thirty seconds later. Only it isn't the nurses or a doctor. It's Dell. “Oh good, he's back,” he says, sounding at once relieved and excited. Then his eyes light up as bright as they will go. “You guys are never going to believe this…”

My face is suddenly dripping with the happiest tears I've ever cried. “They found a heart,” I tell him.

“How did you know?”

I squeeze Cade as hard as I possibly can. “I have my sources.”

My eyes bounce from Dell to Ann and finally land on Bree—sweet, precious, broken Bree.

Now we just need one more miracle…

I
REMEMBER MY
doctor sitting on the chair beside my bed, way back before summer started, when he first told me I would need a transplant. He said it was natural to be scared, and that I might even feel uncomfortable with the thought of having someone else's heart beating inside me. But he promised me, in no uncertain terms, that once I had a new heart, I would not feel any different.

My doctor was wrong.

When I came out of surgery three days ago, the first thing I felt was the weight. Not the weight of the heart, exactly. Physically it feels the same. It's more like a weight on my soul, reminding me with every pulse that someone else's life is over, and mine just sort of rebooted.

So yes, I feel different now. I feel lucky and humbled, and at times a little sad and guilty.

I found out just today that the guy who “donated” his heart was in his twenties. No wife or kids, so that's good…I guess. He was riding his motorcycle on some country road when a teenager drifted lanes and hit him head on. Apparently Cade saw both of them when they arrived at the hospital. The girl is still in bad shape, but word is that she's probably going to make it.

Bree, on the other hand, remains a question mark. We're still sharing a room in the ICU, so at least I can be close to her, but she still hasn't woken up. The doctors claim the swelling in her brain has gone down a lot. If Bree's still “there,” we should start to see progress soon.

Mom and Dad seem a little torn at the moment, and I can't blame them. They're superhappy that I'm on the mend, but nervous to death about my sister. Laughter and tears—that pretty much sums up every moment that they're here in our room.

After dinner Mom takes Cade home for a good night's sleep. Dad wants to stick around a little longer.

“How you holding up?” he asks after they're gone.

“Ah…you know. I'm OK.”

“I want the truth, Ann. What's on your mind? You've been kind of up and down today.”

“Not just me,” I point out.

He smiles and nods, then glances at Bree and all of her machines and monitors. “True. I suppose we all have.”

I watch for a moment as Bree's chest rises, then falls. Then rises again, and falls. “Actually…there is something.”

He scoots closer to my bed. “I'm all ears.”

“I was wondering about the Winner's Game. Are you and Mom still playing?”

With a grin, he pulls his little notepad from his back pocket. “We've been focused on other things this week, so we've stopped scoring—or at least I have. But after we get through this stuff with you girls, I really want to start up again.”

“But what if Bree doesn't make it?”

“She will.”

“But what if?”

“Then we'll still play. I don't want anything to ever come between your mother and me again.”

I gently run a finger down the outside of my chest, feeling the bandages beneath. “You mean like last time, when me and my heart came between you?”

He gives me a puzzled look. “Why would you say that? What happened to your heart was out of your control. Your mother and I didn't need to drift apart like we did just because of that. Our problems were our problems, not yours, Ann.”

I nod that I understand, though part of me is reluctant to believe it.

“Anything else?” he asks.

I look at Bree again. There's a scar on her forehead that may never go away. If she ever wakes up, she'll have that as a constant reminder that when she tried doing something nice for me, it backfired. I've had so many questions since she got hurt, I don't even know where to begin.

If she lives, will she resent me?

Will she regret what she did?

Will she still love me?

Will she want to finish our game?

If she dies, does that mean our Winner's Game has no winner?

“Ann? You're kind of zoning out.”

Yeah, I guess I am.
My gaze moves from Bree's face to her heart monitor. It's a graph I am all too familiar with from past and present experience. “Sorry. I was just thinking.”

“About…?”

I shrug. “About
why
? When it was me whose life was at risk, I thought I understood. I'd already died once anyway, so I was kind of OK with the fact that I might die again. But now that it's Bree? It just doesn't make any sense anymore. Why does it have to be like this? Why did I have to have a heart problem in the first place? And why didn't my earlier surgeries fix me? If they had, Bree would be fine. We would never have gone to the beach for the summer, I wouldn't have met Tanner, and Bree wouldn't have gone running off looking for him.” I place my hand over my new and improved heart. “Just…lots of whys.”

He nods. “Is that it?”

“Well…no. I've been thinking a lot about my new heart. I'm struggling to understand why that guy had to crash on his motorcycle. Why did the girl have to hit him? Why am I the lucky one who is sitting here with a beating heart, while he's having a funeral?” I pause to take a breath, then finish with one last question. “Why does one person have to die for another one to live? I used to think I knew the answer, but now that it's more real—now that someone is actually dead and I'm still breathing—I'm having a hard time remembering what I thought the answer was.”

Dad is smiling patiently. He reaches up and takes my hand. “Perfectly reasonable questions, Ann. I guess I don't know the answers to all of them, but I will say this.
Life is tenuous at best
. It's fragile. And it's impossibly short, no matter how long you live. The thing that's easy to forget is that nobody was meant to live forever—not in this life anyway. We're here, and then we move on, some of us faster than others. But once in a while, those who are leaving are able to give a wonderful gift of life to someone else, like you getting the heart. But that doesn't change the fact that everyone—you, me, your mother, Grandma Grace, and yes, the guy on the motorcycle—we're all going to die sometime.”

“And Bree,” I moan, getting choked up.

“Yes,” he whispers. “And Bree.”

I can feel my cheeks getting hot. And wet. “I think that's what's been bothering me the most. I wouldn't mind if it was me dying—Heck, I thought for sure I was going to die when I went out in the ocean after Cade. But every time I look over at Bree, I worry that maybe it's her turn instead of mine, and I'm just not sure I'm ready for that.”

“Me neither,” he says, as much to himself as to me.

Dad hangs out until the nurses come around for their nine-o'clock checks on me and Bree. I think he's thinking—or wishing—that their assessment will show that Bree has improved, but no such luck.

“Status quo,” says the chief nurse with a grimace after she's taken all of Bree's vitals. “Sorry, Mr. Bennett. You probably hoped to hear something else, but hang in there. You never know what tomorrow brings.”

So true.

Heck, you never even know what today brings, let alone tomorrow! Like, one day you wake up hoping to set state swimming records, and later the same day you end up drowning at the bottom of a pool.

Or one day you go in for a routine checkup, just to see if your medicines and therapies are working, and you find out you're going to need a transplant.

Or one day you're riding your motorcycle down the road, enjoying the sun and the wind, and the next thing you're lending your spare parts to the sick girl on the sixth floor with the bum heart.

Or in Bree's case, one day you wake up with some brilliant plan for how you're going to win a game, and you don't even realize it but you've easily done the best job truly loving your siblings and making them feel special, but you wind up broken and bent in the back of an ambulance, then lying in the ICU beside your sister, just waiting to die.

So, yeah…you never know what tomorrow brings…

Usually I feel like the nurses wake me up every hour throughout the night and by the time morning comes I'm more tired than when I fell asleep. But not this time! Somehow I manage to sleep though their overnight checks, which is a miracle. For the first time since Cannon Beach, I wake up feeling completely rested.

These past few days I've gotten used to wishing Bree a good morning as soon as I wake up, even though she never responds. So first thing I do is rub the tired out of my eyes and roll over to face her. “Hey, Breezy, good—”

She's gone. Her bed. Her monitors. Everything…gone.

In a panic, I hit the red button next to my bed.

A minute later, I'm still alone in my room.

I can't take it. I climb out of my bed, exit the room in pajamas and bare feet, and rush down the hall.

Toward the end, before the hallway turns, I see Mom and Dad talking to a doctor outside the waiting area.

What are they doing here so early? This can't be good…

As I pick up my pace, the doctor turns and leaves in the opposite direction. Mom is breaking down in tears. Dad is crying too. He wraps his arms around her in a tight embrace.

“Where is she?” I ask tentatively as I approach. “Where is Bree? Why did they take her?”

My questions catch my parents by surprise. Mom unwraps herself from Dad's arms and opens hers up for me. “It's OK,” she whispers in my ear while we're hugging. “It's going to be OK.”