Between the Seams

by Aubrey Gross

  Jo sighed. Rolled her head to look at Matt. “What about you?”

  He nodded. “The family’s known since he was a teen, and then he found out in his early twenties, I think, that he had Chronic Kidney Disease.”

  Jenn gasped. “He’s been sick that long and never told me?”

  “Don’t get mad at him, Jenn. He probably kept it from you to protect you,” Matt said.

  “Kind of how he just broke up with me to protect me, you mean?” Jo asked. Bitterly.

  “My brother’s a fucking idiot.”

  “On this, I wholeheartedly agree with you.”

  Jo sniffled, and Matt handed her the box of tissues. “So I take it the CKD’s gotten worse?”

  She nodded her head. “From what he just explained to me, yes. His doctor thinks he’ll probably need a transplant within a year.”

  Jenn asked, “Hold on. He’s sick enough that he needs a fucking transplant? And he never told me? I’m his best friend!”

  Jo closed her eyes, a tension headache forming at the base of her neck. “I’m his girlfriend. Was his girlfriend. Fuck if I even know what I am anymore. And he just now told me. So join the club.”

  The three of them fell silent, each lost in their own thoughts. Matt finally broke the silence by asking, “So what are you going to do?”

  Jo sighed. “I don’t know. I have to be back in Austin early next week for work, when what I want to do is stay here and show him I’m not that easy to push away.”

  In other words, it was a lose-lose situation.

  ~~*~~

  Chapter Twenty

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  Chase looked up from the bottle of beer he’d been nursing for the past thirty minutes, noted the anger on Matt’s face and looked away.

  He shrugged, not even bothering to ask Matt what he was talking about. Jo. It all came back to Jo. “Probably.”

  Matt sat down in the patio chair across from him. “You’re seriously just going to let her walk away? No, screw that. You’re seriously just going to push Jo out of your life when now and the next few years are when you’re going to need her most?”

  Chase stared blankly at the swimming pool, numb. “You don’t understand, Matt.”

  “No, I really don’t. First, you don’t tell anyone how bad it’s gotten, and then when you do you break up with your girlfriend and shut everyone out. Then you throw a pity party—population one—and sulk like a sixteen-year-old who had his car keys taken away. And now you’re sitting there looking like the poster child for a Prozac commercial. That’s not like you, Chase, so no, I don’t understand.”

  He wanted to be angry. Hell, he was kind of irritated at least. But Matt was right—his behavior since he’d gotten the latest diagnosis was completely not like him. Logically, he knew that. Illogically, though, he just wanted to shut down.

  “What would you know, Matt? You’ve barely been around the past ten years,” Chase goaded.

  Instead of getting angry, Matt simply shook his head. “No, you don’t get to use that card right now, because you and I both know it’s bullshit. What’s up with the poor pitiful me act anyway?”

  Chase’s shoulders sagged as if a giant weight had suddenly settled upon them. “Fuck if I know, Matt.”

  “I think you do.” Matt paused before continuing. “So you’re going to need a transplant?”

  Chase nodded. “Not immediately, but sooner rather than later. The doctor thinks it’s only a matter of a year or two.”

  “When are you going to tell Mom and Dad?”

  “Soon. I don’t know why I haven’t yet. How’d you even find out?”

  Matt waved his hand as if to indicate his answer didn’t matter. “I was at Jenn’s when Jo came in earlier bawling her eyes out. She hit me then got snot all over my shirt.”

  Chase finally took a good look at Matt at that, narrowed his eyes. “What were you doing at Jenn’s?”

  He shrugged. “I sometimes go over there and hang out to give you and Jo some privacy.”

  “At Jenn’s?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So I thought you two hated each other for some reason.” This was much better than thinking about his own mess of a life.

  “I wouldn’t say we’ve ever hated each other,” Matt evaded.

  Chase raised an eyebrow.

  “There was just a bit of a misunderstanding years ago. It’s been cleared up now.”

  “I swear to God, Matt, if you hurt Jenn…” Chase let the implied threat hang in the air between them.

  Matt raised his hands, palms out. “Not my intent. She’s just nice to hang out with sometimes, that’s all. We’re friends.”

  “I’ve never known you to be friends with a woman.”

  “I’m friends with Jo. But I’m not the subject at hand here—you are. You and your idiocy.”

  “It’s not idiocy.” Yes it is.

  Matt shot him a look that clearly said, “You’re an even bigger idiot than I thought you were.”

  Chase swallowed past the idiot-sized lump in his throat.

  “Since when are you in to heart to hearts? This is starting to feel like some Lifetime movie.”

  Matt snorted. “Hardly. As far as I know of neither of us has slept with a fifty-year-old woman who’s twenty-year-old son slash lover wants to murder us.”

  “You know far too much about Lifetime movies.”

  “I had a lot of time to sit and watch cable TV in the hospital.”

  Chase felt a smile tug at his lips. He shook his head, wondering at the turn his and Matt’s relationship had taken over the past month. “The truth is,” he swallowed, picked at the label on his beer bottle, “I’m scared shitless, Matt. I’ve always been a bit of a loner, mostly because I’ve been in love with Jo since I was a kid, along with having the possibility of renal failure looming over my head. Finding out I was going to need a kidney transplant so soon…it’s not fair to her. She’s gone through so much, man. She’s already lost both her parents. I can’t do that to her.”

  “I don’t think you’re giving her enough credit.”

  “Probably not.”

  “That woman loves you, bro, and when you find something like that you don’t just throw it away like last night’s leftovers. You hold on to that and don’t let go.”

  Chase glanced up at his brother. “Where’d this philosophical side come from?”

  Matt shrugged and looked slightly embarrassed. “It’s always been there. Everyone’s always seen what they wanted to see is all.”

  “So there’s more to you than womanizing and a ninety-eight mile per hour fastball is what you’re saying?”

  Matt snorted. “To the public and my adoring fans? No.”

  Chase assessed his brother with new eyes, feeling kind of bad for assuming the worst about Matt just like everyone else always had. “How is it I’ve never seen this side of you until the past month?”

  “I guess I never wanted you to. Facing your own mortality kind of gives you a new perspective on life, though.”

  Matt’s comment hit home, and Chase rubbed his chest. “Point taken. Were you this scared when you came-to on the mound?”

  Matt nodded, once. “Absolutely. I couldn’t move for a few minutes. My ears were ringing and I could feel blood trickling down my face and neck. My head hurt like nothing I’ve ever felt before. Luckily I didn’t know how bad it was at the time—just that the situation wasn’t good. And when I woke up later, in the hospital,” Matt shook his head, “I remember feeling lost and worried, mostly about Mom and Dad. It wasn’t until a couple days later that the uncertainty of my baseball future really hit me, and that scared me, too.”

  “That’s why you really came back home, isn’t it? Because you were scared,” Chase said with sudden clarity.

  “Yeah.”
Matt sat back and sighed. “I was scared. I still am. Sure, my head seems to be healing fine, but baseball? I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to play again. I’m thirty-five and I’d already been thinking about retiring in another year or two, but I’d wanted to go out on my terms, y’know?”

  “I had no idea you’d even thought about retirement. You’ve seemed so oblivious to the fact that you’re kind of old for a pitcher.”

  Matt glanced at Chase and shook his head. “Again, everyone sees what they want to see. I’m not an idiot—I did graduate summa cum laude from Texas, y’know.”

  “Wait. What? But you were taken in the first round after your junior year. When did you go back and get your degree?” How had he not known this?

  “In the off-season and through online courses. I finished it in 2008.”

  “Jesus, man. What other secrets do you have hiding out in there? I don’t know if I can take much more.”

  Matt rubbed a hand over his jaw, looked at something over Chase’s shoulder for long moments before turning his gaze back to him. “You know when you need a transplant I’ll be the first one to offer a kidney, right?”

  Chase sucked in a deep breath, blinked against the stinging in his eyes. He was not going to cry in front of his brother. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I know I don’t, but you’re my brother. We’re the same blood type and siblings tend to be the best matches. My kidneys are in great shape, I’m healthy, and if I can do something to keep you alive as long as possible I’m going to.”

  He nodded, unable to speak past the lump in his throat.

  “In the mean time, I suggest you figure out how you’re going to apologize to Jo and grovel appropriately. You need her now, and you’re going to need her in the future. Don’t be a dick and make decisions for her—it’s her choice to make, whether she wants to stick with you through this or not.”

  Chase sighed. “Do you know what the statistics are like for kidney transplant recipients? How long donor kidneys last? The complications, not to mention the cost involved?”

  Matt crossed his arms over his chest. “Most donor kidneys will last on average fifteen years, with some lasting for twenty, possibly more if it’s a really good match and the recipient takes their meds and takes care of themselves. That means you’d probably need another kidney in your fifties, and another in your sixties or seventies. Obviously, they’re hard to come by the older you get, but it’s not impossible. As for cost, the anti-rejection meds are incredibly expensive, but good insurance plans will usually cover at least a portion of the cost, and once you hit your out of pocket you pay nothing for the rest of your plan year. And yes, there’s a risk involved with being on anti-rejection medications, including cancer, but most cases are skin cancer that’s easily treated. You just have to be careful—wash your hands, use hand sanitizer, clean regularly, stay away from anyone who has the flu, that sort of thing. In other words, it’s nothing insurmountable.”

  Chase was flabbergasted. All this time, he’d thought Matt was oblivious to everything outside of baseball and women, and yet he’d been getting a degree and apparently researching kidney transplants. “I feel like I owe you an apology.”

  Matt shrugged. “Nah. Like I said, people see what they want to see, and I don’t do anything to dispel that image. It’s more comfortable that way, honestly. But don’t think for a minute I don’t care, or that I haven’t done research. You’re my brother.”

  That damned burning feeling in his eyes was back. “I don’t want to tell Mom and Dad.”

  Matt nodded. “I would imagine not. They can handle it, though. We’ve all known it was going to happen sooner or later.” He grinned. “But wait until Mom finds out you broke up with Jo. You might wish you were dead then.”

  Chase rolled his eyes and flicked his bottle cap at Matt. “Shut it, asshole. I already know I screwed up big time in that regard.”

  “So what are you going to do to fix it?”

  He cocked his head to the side. “You think you could help me with something?”

  ~~*~~

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Jo sat back in her chair, rubbed her eyes and looked at the clock in the bottom right corner of her laptop screen.

  2:47 a.m.

  How had it gotten to be so late?

  Yawning, she stood up and stretched, trying to remember how long she’d been sitting in front of the computer. It seemed like only a couple of hours, but felt like centuries.

  Tired, she walked around her house, turning out lights, checking to make sure doors were locked and the alarm system was armed. She’d been back in Austin for a week, and hadn’t heard from Chase since the night he’d broken up with her just over a week ago.

  Of course that meant she’d thought about him every second of every day. And of course, she was up way too late, especially considering the school year officially began tomorrow. Once again, though, she’d gotten sucked in to the online world of CKD, ESRD, dialysis and transplants.

  In an effort to better understand just what Chase was dealing with, she’d taken to Google every night since she’d been back home. The amount of information available was unbelievable, from research studies to online cookbooks to forums. She’d learned that while Chase’s condition was incurable, it was treatable and he could have a pretty normal life even if he had to be on dialysis until he was able to get a transplant.

  He just had to choose to have that normal life.

  Apparently vesicoureteral reflux was rare, affecting only about one percent of children. Developing later problems in life was even less likely. In other words, Chase had won the childhood illness lottery.

  She’d also found that transplanted kidneys were lasting longer and longer these days, thanks to modern medicine and better anti-rejection medications, but the chance of rejection or failure was always there. Most transplant recipients lived a completely normal life, going to work, having children and going on vacation.

  Obviously, there were no guarantees, but from everything she’d read over the past week the road ahead for Chase wasn’t necessarily easy, but it sure as hell wasn’t hopeless, either.

  Sighing, she climbed into bed, made sure her alarm was set and pulled the covers up.

  The online forums had helped to shed some light on Chase’s behavior and emotional withdrawal. Reading about the experiences of others who had gone through this before, or were currently living with End Stage Renal Failure and were on dialysis or waiting for a transplant, made it slightly easier for Jo to see things from Chase’s point of view. Perusing the caretaker forums made it obvious that she wasn’t the only one who’d been pushed away by the sick person.

  Knowing those things, though, didn’t make her heart ache any less. She closed her eyes, words and phrases dancing against the backs of her eyelids as she settled in to go to sleep, hoping that maybe tomorrow would be the day that Chase broke his silence.

  ~~*~~

  A knock on Jo’s office door the next morning pulled her attention away from the email she’d been reading to the unexpected interruption. When she looked up, she saw Rita, the school’s receptionist standing at her door, flowers in her hand. Jo raised an eyebrow.

  “Hey there. Come on in.”

  Rita walked in and set the flowers on Jo’s desk. “These just came for you.”

  “For me?” Who the hell would send her flowers?

  Chase, maybe?

  But no, that wouldn’t make any sense, considering he’d broken up with her.

  Jo mentally shook herself and smiled, “Thanks, Rita.”

  “No problem,” the older woman said before leaving her office.

  Jo counted to ten before walking around her desk to get a better look—and to find the card.

  The arrangement itself was beautiful; fat sunflowers and miniature orange roses in a squat, clear vase. It was simple and che
erful and pretty—exactly the kind of arrangement she would have been drawn to if she were buying them herself.

  She searched and searched for a card, and couldn’t find one, just a business card for the florist. Maybe she should call the florist, see if they’d accidentally not included one?

  Jo rolled her eyes, situated the flowers just right on the corner of her desk and sat back down. The florist was a reputable one in the Austin area, so she was pretty sure the card hadn’t been dropped or forgotten. She wanted to believe Chase had sent them, but if he had, why the anonymity?

  ~~*~~

  The flowers were not the only anonymous delivery Jo received her first week back to school.

  Tuesday she received a box of cookies from Tiff’s Treats, which she’d shared in the teacher’s lounge after stealing a few for herself.

  Wednesday she received a dozen red velvet cupcakes from Hey Cupcake!

  Thursday was a bottle of what an internet research revealed to be a very expensive bottle of wine.

  And Friday? Friday was a little box in a gift bag from a local jeweler, with a note. Finally, a freaking note. Except, no, her mystery gift giver didn’t finally reveal himself (because, seriously, who else would send her gifts other than Chase?). Instead, he just gave instructions.

  “Do not open until 5:00 p.m.”

  So now she was sitting at her desk, staring at the gift bag rather than answering emails and getting any work done. Granted, she was on her lunch break, but still, she hadn’t been able to work all morning because of that silly gift bag.

  “So who do you think it’s from?”

  Her closest friend in Austin and teacher of tenth-grade English, Heather, sat on the other side of Jo’s desk and nodded towards the gift bag. Jo swallowed the bite of the sandwich she’d just taken and sighed.

  “I think it’s from Chase. I think everything this week has been from Chase.”

  Jo had told Heather about her summer romance the first day of teacher in-service. Heather, being a hopeless romantic, had been both jealous and sympathetic, and had even cried when Jo had told her about the break up. No doubt the perky teacher was even now getting romantic notions in her head about happily ever afters.