They Called Me Selfish. My Kidney Saved Her Life. novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Second Gurney
Cosima lies behind a curtain while her family prays over her sister, and wakes to find her engagement over.
At seven forty on a Tuesday morning, the nurses wheeled my little sister Cora toward the operating room.
My whole family walked beside her down the hall.
I watched them through a gap in the curtain of the next pre-op bay.
I was lying on a second gurney, thirty feet away, in a paper gown with an IV in my hand.
Nobody looked over.
My fiancé, Reed, kept both of his hands around Cora's. At the double doors he bent down and kissed her forehead.
"Nobody is braver than you," he told her.
Cora gave him a thin, sweet smile. She is twenty-five and she still looks lovely in a hospital gown.
My mother was crying into my father's sleeve.
"The donor's already in prep, honey," my father said. "The nurse told us."
"I know." Mom wiped her face. "I keep thinking Cosima should be here."
My father laughed once, and it was an ugly sound.
"Here to take over the day? She wouldn't give one vial of blood for her own sister."
"I'm done defending her," Reed said.
I pressed my hand over my mouth so they couldn't hear me breathe.
My mother asked the nurse who the donor was. My father asked. Reed asked.
The nurse said the donor had chosen to stay anonymous, and they all nodded and thanked God for a stranger.
Cora didn't ask. She just smiled at the ceiling.
Then the double doors swung shut behind her, and they went to wait.
A man in a gray surgical cap stepped around my curtain. It was Dr. Justin Tarrant, the doctor who looks after donors.
He checked my wristband and kept his voice low.
"You can still say no, Cosima. Right up to the door. Nobody will ever hear why."
"I'm not saying no."
"Your family's twenty feet from here."
"I know where they are."
He nodded, and wrote something down, and did not say anything else.
Three weeks earlier, the morning after Cora's diagnosis, I had driven to St. Agnes before work and given four vials of blood.
I told no one. I didn't want to promise my family something my body might not allow.
Two days later, at Sunday dinner, Cora put down her fork and said I had refused. She said she had begged me to get tested and I'd said no.
I tried to explain. Nobody let me finish a sentence.
My mother slapped the table. My father called me heartless.
Reed took a long time to look at me.
"I can't stand that I'm going to marry you," he said, in front of everyone.
I was wearing his grandmother's ring when he said it.
Sixteen days ago the results came back.
I sat alone in Dr. Tarrant's office and read the page twice. It said I was a perfect match.
I could have taken that paper to the dinner table and watched them fall on their knees.
I didn't want their love bought with a kidney.
I wanted somebody to believe me without proof, and nobody had.
So I kept my name off the chart.
The next thing I remember is a ceiling, and a nurse saying my name, and a dull pull low on my left side.
My phone was on the tray beside me.
There was one message from Reed, sent at 6:10 that morning, before surgery.
"We're done. Your parents agree. Have your things out of the apartment by Sunday."
It was our apartment. My name was the only one on the lease.
I turned the phone over without answering.
I pulled his grandmother's ring off my finger and set it on the tray.
On the third day they let me go.
I walked slowly down the hall with my discharge papers and a paper bag with my clothes in it.
In the main lobby, my family stood in a ring with a chaplain and two strangers, holding hands.
"Bless whoever she is," my mother, Bernice, said, with her eyes shut. "Bless her for what she gave us."
I stopped three feet from her.
My mother opened her eyes, looked straight through me, and shut them again.
I kept walking.
Someone caught up with me at the revolving door, and a hand touched my elbow to slow me down.
It was Dr. Tarrant, in his white coat, holding my chart against his chest.
"Your sheet says you live alone and can't lift anything for six weeks," he said. "Who is driving you home?"
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