He holds it out to me and laughs. It’s a sound I want to keep hearing.
“Thank you,” I answer. And I reach out to take it. The first thing he ever gave me.
I got four answers from the people he gave to.
After 282 days, multiple letters back and forth, consent forms and premeeting counseling, his mom and I had driven to the Donor Family Services office together and sat side by side as we waited for them to arrive. To meet them face-to-face.
Just as Norah had been the first to reach out with words, she was the first to reach out her hand, and in spite of all the times I’d imagined meeting her, nothing could’ve prepared me for the way it made me feel to take that hand in mine, and to look in her eyes and know that there was a part of Trent there too. A part that had saved her life and given her a chance to be a mother to the curly haired little girl who peeked out from behind her legs, and a wife to the man who stood crying beside her.
When she took a deep breath with Trent’s lungs and brought my hand to her chest so I could feel them fill and expand, my heart had filled right along with them.
It had been the same with the others I met—Luke Palmer, seven years older than me, who played us a song on his guitar, and who could do that now because Trent had given him a kidney. There was John Williamson, a quiet but warm man in his fifties, who wrote beautifully poetic letters about how his life had changed since receiving his liver transplant but who fumbled to find the right words to speak to us in that little reception room. And then there was Ingrid Stone, a woman with pale-blue eyes so different from Trent’s brown ones but who could see the world again, and paint it in vibrant colors on her canvases, because of them.
They say time heals all wounds, but meeting those people that afternoon—a makeshift family of strangers brought together by one person—had healed more in me than all the time that passed in the days that had come before.
It’s why, when day after day went by with no reply from the last recipient, I’d started looking for him. It’s the reason I’d searched—matched up dates with news stories and hospitals—until I found him so easily, I almost didn’t trust it. It’s also why, around anyone else, I’ve pretended like I understand the reasons he hasn’t responded. That, like the woman at Donor Family Services told us, some people never do, and that’s their choice.
I’ve acted like I don’t think about him every day and wonder about that choice. That I’ve made peace with it. But alone, in those endless hours that stretch to eternity before the morning, I always come back to the truth: that I haven’t at all. And I don’t know if I can unless I do this.
I don’t know what Trent would think if he knew. What he would say if he could somehow see. But it’s been four hundred days. I hope he would understand. For so long, I was the one with his heart. I just need to see where it is now.
“The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.”
—Blaise Pascal
CHAPTER TWO
THERE ISN’T A place to turn around on this road, even if I wanted to. Just a steep drop down a hillside of moss-covered oak trees that rise up out of the tall, summer-gold grass. The road goes on for miles like that, winding its way all the way to the coast, where he’s been all nineteen years of his life. Thirty-six miles away.
When the trees finally give way to the wide blue expanse of ocean and sky at the edge of his town, my hands are shaking so badly I have to pull into the Scenic Overlook on the shoulder of the highway. A thin swath of fog clings to the cliff’s edge, melting beneath the morning sunlight that spreads over the water beyond. I turn off the car but don’t get out. Instead I roll down the windows and breathe. Slow, deep breaths in an attempt to calm my conscience.
I’ve been here, to Shelter Cove, lots of times before. Driven past this spot and headed into the little beach town on countless spring and summer days, but today feels different. There’s none of the giddy anticipation that used to bubble between me and my sister, Ryan, in the backseat as we drove over with Mom and Dad, our trunk packed full of beach towels and boogie boards, cooler bursting with all the junk food we were never allowed to eat at home. There’s no thrill of freedom that came when Trent first got his license and we’d drive over in his truck for the day, feeling grown-up and romantic. Today there’s just a grim sort of determination, and the tense feeling that comes along with it.
I look out over the water, and a startling thought occurs to me. I wonder if, any of those times I’d been here, I ever saw Colton Thomas. If Trent and I ever walked past him on the street, eyes catching for half a second before moving on without another thought, the way strangers do. Completely unaware that one day there would be this link between us. Before everything. Before Trent’s accident, and writing letters, and meeting the others, and before I spent so many nights hoping to hear back from Colton Thomas and wondering why I never did.
It’s a small town. Small enough that we could’ve seen each other at some point on one of my trips over. But then again, maybe not. He probably didn’t spend his summers the way the rest of us did. I’ve studied the careful time line his sister kept on her blog, which is what eventually led me to him. Though she didn’t start it until he was put on the transplant list, I know that he was fourteen when his heart began the excruciatingly slow process of failing him. He made the transplant list by the time he was seventeen. And he would’ve died had he not gotten the call in the eleventh hour of his eighteenth year. On the last day of Trent’s seventeenth.