Chapter 13: Ten Seconds

I didn't take the page.

I stood up from the bench and walked toward the glass door, and my mother followed me with the page held out in front of her.

"Inés. Think about what you are refusing."

Gael opened the door without a word and held it.

The corridor of the transplant unit was long and bright, with a nurses' station in the middle and a row of chairs along the wall.

Seven or eight people sat there with paper cups and phones, and a boy of about ten was doing a puzzle on his mother's lap.

My mother stopped under the lights.

She raised her voice just enough to carry.

"Everyone here has a child," she said. "So perhaps someone will understand me."

"I am offering to give my daughter my bone marrow, and all I ask in return is that she writes down one true sentence."

The boy's mother looked up from the puzzle.

A man with an IV pole turned his whole chair around.

My mother let her eyes fill, which she could do whenever she needed to.

"She would rather die than write it," she said. "I don't know what else a mother can do."

I turned to the nurse behind the desk.

"Do you have a cheek swab kit?" I asked. "The kind for donor typing?"

The nurse looked at my mother, and then at me.

She opened a drawer and took one out in its paper sleeve.

I carried it across the corridor, and I held it out to my mother with both hands.

"Ten seconds," I said. "No page. No cheque. Right here, with all of them watching."

My mother looked at the swab.

"After you sign."

"You said daughter."

"What?"

"Just now. You told the whole ward you were offering to give your daughter your marrow."

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