by Scott Martin
‘What happens if your body rejects the hands?’ His head cocked sideways like a curious pup as his eyes grew round.
He was trying to look merely curious, adopting an innocent façade, but I could see some of Nadia’s disapproving frown and Lauren’s anxious despair lurking in the depths of his expression. His eyes held the same uncertainty and fear which had shadowed his sisters’ gazes during our last conversation on the subject of the hands. Whatever concerns they were harboring, I wanted to be made aware of them. June was halfway through and I was on the transplant list. Any day could be the day, when I would get the call and have to rush to Pittsburgh. After that, I wouldn’t be here to reassure them and put their qualms to rest.
‘Here’s the short answer, buddy, ‘cause I need to take your sister to her match: if my body rejected the hands I would need to go back to Pittsburgh and talk to the doctors again.’ I looked over his head, catching Ellen’s eyes in the mirror and raising my eyebrows at her. She watched me, the faintest of shrugs twitching across her shoulder line.
Turning back to Andy, I said, ‘I tell you what, we’ll have a family meeting when I get back from Nadia’s match. Everyone needs to hear the long answer.’ I gave him a reassuring smile. He nodded, spinning on his heels to dash out of the room. With a sigh and glance at my watch to let me know I had made the right choice in postponing the conversation until later, I turned back to the closet and grabbed my UW-Oshkosh sweatshirt. Old favorites die hard.
~~~
I followed Nadia back into the house, watching that her mud-and-grass-sodden soccer cleats were removed before she tracked into the kitchen. She bounded towards the hallway, the black number 17 on the back of her gold jersey flopping up and down with her steps before she planted her feet to skid across the polished concrete.
17 had been my number, too.
Seeing her wear it always engendered a sensation of warring emotions in me: the grief at knowing it would never adorn my back again, and the pride and atonement at knowing it would live on regardless. Perhaps not on Nadia’s back – I knew soccer wasn’t her strongest passion – but on some kid, somewhere, 17 would thrive.
After a surveying glance of the kitchen and living room that turned up no occupants, I retreated to the master bedroom. Ellen was reclined against an affluent pile of pillows, her Seattle Mariners throw draped over her legs and the crinkled spine of a novel between her fingers. She glanced up as I walked in, looking at me as she lowered the book.
‘It was a tie.’ I leaned against the bed frame. She nodded and reached towards the nightstand beside her.
‘Should we do it?’ she asked, slipping a slender bookmark between the pages of her novel with the delicate flourish of laying a flower to be pressed.
‘Yeah.’ I waited for her to extricate herself from the blanket and settle the book on the nightstand so we could gather the gang together.
‘I’ll get them,’ I told Ellen when we caught site of the kids bouncing on the trampoline in a chaotic jumble. I went to the double glass doors opening to the backyard and cracked one enough to poke my head out. ‘Martin Kids!’ I hollered into the open air. They stopped giggling and let their bounces drift lower as they turned their smiles on me. ‘Time for a family meeting. Come on in!’
I left the door ajar and wandered over to where Ellen had settled herself on the sofa facing the floor-to-ceiling windows to wait for the gang to arrive. Lauren came in first, bounding across the Great Room (our name for the expansive, conjoined living and dining rooms) to sit beside Ellen, followed by Danny and Andy who plopped beside each other on the opposite sofa. Then came Kali and Nadia, The oldest and youngest scurried in, taking up positions on the armrest and end cushion next to their brothers. When all of our two- and four-legged family members were scattered about the living room, I sat beside Ellen and opened the conversation.
‘Your mother and I want to talk to you guys about what’s going to happen over the next few months regarding the hand transplants. Andy asked earlier why I will need to take medicine every day. The medicine will help my body accept the new hands.’ I took a breath and met each of their eyes, trying to think of a concise way of explaining how it all would work. I looked at the myos, then back at my kids before saying, ‘It’s possible that the two won’t get along. If that happens, the doctors will remove the hands and I’ll go back to wearing the myoelectric hands.’
‘So if you don’t take the medicine, you’ll lose the hands,’ Danny said matter-of-factly. I started to nod, smiling at his grasp of the situation but wanting to frown at the circumstances themselves. Without the medicine, I would probably lose the hands.
‘That’s right,’ Ellen assured him in my pause. ‘So we can’t let your father be an airhead and forget. Right?’ I watched small smiles whisper across the kids’ faces.
After a moment of breathing easier, Nadia looked at me and said, ‘I read about the medicine. Is it true that it may make you more vulnerable to illness?’
I felt my eyes widen and that smile I had given Danny turn twofold as I nodded in baffled surprise at these precocious children of mine. ‘Oooh,’ I told her, turning my head slightly to shoot an assessing gaze her way. ‘So very Perry Mason-esque. I’m impressed by your research. That’s correct. I have to wash my hands regularly, watch for infection if I’m cut, and wear a mask if someone else in the house has an illness.’
Andy jumped to chime in, ‘So your body will be unable to fight off a more serious illness, right?’
And just like that the mood went still. Nadia shot Danny a look from the armrest of the sofa, tipping her head down and to the side so all I could see was a sliver of her profile and the top of her brow. Danny looked back, his eyes, at first wary and questioning, turned uncertain before becoming afraid. Whatever he was seeing in Nadia’s expression, it was bringing him no amount of solace.
Danny turned to catch Andy’s gaze beside him, and Nadia followed suit, eying both her brothers meaningfully. Silence burgeoned between us, blanketing the room in a palpable tension. I could feel it accumulating in a wall between me and my family. They weren’t telling me something.
I scanned the room again, hoping one of them would break the silence, and found Kali and Lauren locked on each other. I followed Kali’s apprehensive gaze to Lauren on the other side of Ellen where I was confronted by such an intent and piercing expression on my daughter’s face that I could take it no longer.
‘What’s up with you two?’ I asked my two youngest daughters.
When Kali turned to me, it was with teary eyes full of desperation and heartbreak. ‘We don’t want you to die!’ she cried, her voice hitching on the word die like a hiccup.
‘Oh!’ Ellen gasped softly. She hurried from her seat to the opposite sofa and drew our youngest into her arms. I had no words. There was but one coherent thought in my mind: How could I? How could I, when they had already endured the losses of their biological parents, force them to live in fear of losing me, too?
Lauren turned to me, her expression drifting from sorrow and pain to thoughtfulness as she spoke over her sister’s gentle sobs. ‘Tata. . . Do you wish you had never become sick and lost your hands?’
Tears pooled in my eyes, casting a watery haze over the scene of my family – the people I loved most torn by anguish at the thought of losing me. I stared at her through the burning in my eyes and the clog accumulating in my throat. Something was clawing at my chest. But I ignored it. There wasn’t enough oxygen in the room. But suddenly I didn’t need as much. I scooted over to sit beside her, wrapping my left hand around hers with minute care as I drew my right hand across her hair then reached up to tenderly stroke the worrisome dimple in her brow. I watched her smooth the concern from her forehead as my prosthetic fingers fell to her shoulder. This was all I needed: right here, in this room. How could I ever have believed anything else mattered?
Somewhere within me a pendulum completed its upward swing and even the clouds obscuring my vision couldn’t prevent me from seeing cl
early. ‘If I hadn’t been sick, we never would have met.’
As I’d done with Gonzaga, I contacted Pittsburgh and told them ‘Thanks, but no thanks’. Lauren’s question made me realize life is all about moving forward, but sometimes it must be done in reverse.
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