by Jodi Picoult
I know she thinks I abandoned her, but maybe I got back at just the right time. I’m the only one who has the power to let her be a kid a little while longer. To make sure she doesn’t have herself to blame for a decision she might second-guess for the rest of her life.
I can’t do this, my sister had said.
I just want it to be over.
Cara needs me. She doesn’t want to talk to the doctors and the nurses and the social workers anymore. She doesn’t want to have to make this choice.
So I will.
The best day I ever spent with my father was nearly a disaster.
It was just after Cara was born. My mother had been reading parenting books, trying to make sure that a little boy who’d been the sole focus of her attention for seven years wouldn’t freak out when a baby was brought home. (I did try to feed Cara a quarter, once, as if she was an arcade pinball machine, but that is a different story.) The books said, Have the new baby bring the sibling a gift! So when I was brought to the hospital to meet the tiny pink blob that was my new sister, my mother patted the bed beside her. “Look at what Cara brought,” she told me, and she handed me a long, thin, gift-wrapped package. I stared at her belly, wondering how the baby had fit inside, much less a present this big, and then I got distracted by the fact that it was mine. I unwrapped it to find a fishing pole of my own.
At seven, I was not like other boys, who ripped the knees of their jeans and who caught slugs to crucify in the sunlight. I was much more likely to be found in my room, reading or drawing a picture. For a man like my father, who barely knew how to fit into the structure of a traditional family, having a nontraditional son was an impossible puzzle. He didn’t know, literally, what to do with me. The few times he’d tried to introduce me to his passions had been a disaster. I’d fallen into a patch of poison ivy. I’d gotten such a bad sunburn my eyes swelled shut. It reached the point where, if I had to go to Redmond’s with my dad, I stayed in his trailer and read until he was finished doing whatever he needed to do.
I would have much rather had a new art kit, all the little pots of watercolor paint and markers lined up like a rainbow. “I don’t know how to fish,” I pointed out.
“Well,” my mother exclaimed. “Then Daddy needs to teach you.”
I’d heard that line before. Daddy’ll show you how to ride a bike. Daddy can take you swimming this afternoon. But something always came up, and that something wasn’t me.
“Luke, why don’t you and Edward go test it out right now? That way Cara and I can take a little nap.”
My father looked at my mother. “Now?” But he wasn’t about to argue with a woman who’d just given birth. He looked at me and nodded. “It’s a great day to catch a fish,” he said, and just those words made me think that this could be the start of something different between us. Something wonderful. On television, dads and sons fished all the time. They had deep conversations. Fishing might be the one thing that my father and I could share, and I just didn’t know it yet.
We drove to Redmond’s. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “While I’m feeding the wolves, you’re going to dig up worms.”
I nodded. I would have dug to China for worms if that were a prerequisite. I was with my father, alone, and I was going to fall in love with fishing if it killed me. I pictured a whole string of days in my future that involved us, bonding over walleye and stripers.
My father took me to a toolshed behind the cage where the gibbons were kept and found a rusted metal shovel. Then we walked to the manure pile behind the aviary, where all the keepers carted their wheelbarrows daily after cleaning the animal cages. He overturned a patch of earth as rich as black coffee and put his hands on his hips. “Ten worms,” he said. “Your hands are going to get dirty.”
“I don’t care,” I said.
While he checked on his pack, I carefully plucked a dozen worms out of the soil and confined them in the Ziploc bag my dad had given me. He returned with a fishing rod of his own. Then we ducked out the back gate behind the lions and I followed my father into the woods, parting the green fingers of ferns to walk down a muddy path. I was getting bitten by mosquitoes and I wondered how long it would be until we were there (wherever we were headed), but I didn’t complain. Instead, I listened to my father whistle, and I imagined how awesome it would be to show my fishing pole to my best friend, Logan, who lived next door, and who couldn’t stop bragging about the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 game he’d gotten for his birthday.
After about ten minutes the woods opened up to the edge of a highway. My father held tight to my hand, looked both ways, and then jogged across the road. Water sparkled, like the way my mother’s ring sometimes made light dance on the ceiling. There was a fence, and a white sign with black letters.
“What’s NO TRESPASSING?” I asked, sounding it out.
“It means nothing,” my father said. “No one owns the land. We’re all just borrowing it.”
He lifted me over the fence and then hopped it himself, and we sat side by side at the edge of the reservoir. My father’s fishing rod was rusty where mine was gleaming. And mine had a red and white bobber on the line, like a tiny buoy. I sat on my knees, then on my bottom, and then got up on my knees again. “The first rule of fishing,” he told me, “is to be still.”
He showed me how to release the hook from the eye where it was safely tucked, and then he reached into the plastic bag to pull out a worm. “Thank you,” he said under his breath.
“For what?”
He looked at me. “My Native American friends say an animal that gives its life to feed another animal should be honored for the sacrifice,” my father said, and he speared the worm onto the hook.
It kept wriggling. I thought I might throw up.
My father knelt behind me, and put his arms around me. “You push the button here,” he said, pressing my thumb against the Zebco reel, “and you hold it. Swing from right to left.” With his body flush against mine, he swayed us in tandem, and at the last minute he let go of the button so that that line arched over the water, a silver parabola. “Want to try?”
I could have done it myself. But I wanted to feel my dad’s heartbeat again, like a drum between my shoulder blades. “Can you show me one more time?” I asked.
He did, twice. And then he picked up his own fishing rod. “Now, when the bobber starts going up and down, don’t pull. There’s a difference between a nibble and taking the bait. When it goes down and stays down, that’s when you pull back and start reeling in.”
I watched him thank another worm and thread his hook. I held my rod so tightly my knuckles were white. There was a wind coming out of the east, and that made the bobber bounce around on the water a little bit. I worried that I might miss a fish because I thought it was the breeze. But I also worried that I’d reel in my line too early; that my worm would have given its life for nothing.
“How long does it take?” I asked.
“Rule number two of fishing,” my father said. “Be patient.”
Suddenly there was a yank on my line, as if I had woken up from a dream in the middle of a game of tug-of-war. I nearly dropped the pole. “Itsafishitsafish,” I cried, getting to my feet, and my father grinned.
“Then you’d better bring it in, buddy,” he said. “Nice and slow . . .”
Before he could help me, though, he got a fish on his line, too. He stood up as the fish zipped further into the middle of the reservoir, bending the tip of his pole like a divining rod. Meanwhile, my fish broke through the surface of the water with a splash. I had reeled as far as I could; the fish was thrashing and flailing inches away from my chest.
“What do I do now?” I shouted.
“Hold on,” my father instructed. “I’ll help you as soon as I get mine in.”
The fish was a perch, tiger-striped, with tiny jagged edges along its fins. Its eyes were glassy and wild, like those of the porcelain doll that used to belong to my mom’s grandma and that she said was too old and special to do anythi
ng but sit on a shelf. I tried twice to grab the perch, but it slithered and flapped out of my grasp.
But my father had told me to hold on, and so, even though I was afraid those spikes on its fins would poke into me, even though the fish smelled like the inside of a rubber boot and slapped me with its tail, I did.
My fist closed around the fish, which was no bigger than six inches long, but which seemed huge. My fingers didn’t fit all the way around its belly, and it was still struggling against me and trying to dislodge the hook in its mouth, which broke through the silvery skin of its throat and made me feel sick to my stomach. I squeezed a little harder, to make sure it wouldn’t get away.
But I guess I squeezed a little too hard.
The eyes of the perch bulged, and its entrails squirted from its bottom. Horrified, I dropped my fishing rod and stared at my hand, covered with fish guts, and at the dead perch still hooked to the line.
I couldn’t help it; I burst into tears.
I was crying for the fish and the worm, which had both died for no good reason. I was crying because I had screwed up. I was crying because I thought this meant my father wouldn’t want to fish with me again.
My father looked at me, and at the remains of the perch. “What did you do?” he said, and in that single moment of distraction, his own line snapped. Whatever huge fish he’d been reeling in was gone.
“I killed it,” I sobbed.
“Well,” he pointed out. “You were going to kill it anyway.”
This did not make me feel any better. I cried harder, and my father looked around, uncomfortable.
He was not the parent who held me when I was sick, or who calmed me down when I had a nightmare—that was my mother. My father was as out of his element with a terrified kid as I was with a fishing pole.
“Don’t cry,” he said, but I had crossed the line of panic that small children sometimes do, where my skin was hot and my breath came in gasps, a punctuation of hysteria. My nose was running, and that made me think of the slime of the fish between my fingers, and that made me cry even harder.
He should have hugged me. He should have said that it didn’t matter and that we could try again.
Instead, he blurted out, “Did you hear the joke about the roof? No? Well, it’s probably over your head anyway.”
I don’t know what made him tell a joke. A bad joke. But it was so awkward, so different from what I needed at that moment, that it shocked me into silence. I hiccuped, and stared up at him through spiked lashes.
“Why do doctors use red pens?” he said, the words fast and desperate. “In case they need to draw blood.”
I wiped my nose on my sleeve, and he took off his shirt and used it to gently wipe my face and settle me on his lap. “Guy walks into a bar with a salamander on his shoulder,” my father said. “The bartender says, ‘What’s his name?’ And the guy says, ‘Tiny. Because he’s my newt.’”
I didn’t understand any of the jokes; I was too young. And I’d never really thought of my father as a closet comedian. But his arms were around me, and this time there was no casting lesson involved.
“It was an accident,” I told him, and my eyes filled up again.
My father reached for the knife he carried in his pocket and snipped the line, kicked the remains of the fish into the water, where I wouldn’t have to see it anymore. “You know what the dad buffalo said to his kid when he went to work in the morning? ‘Bye, son.’” He wiped his hands on his jeans. “Rule number three of fishing: what happens at the pond stays at the pond.”
“I don’t know any jokes,” I said.
“My grandfather used to tell them to me when I got scared.”
I could not imagine my father, who thought nothing of wrestling with a wolf, being scared.
He helped me to my feet and picked up my rod and his. The wisps of loose fishing line flew through the air like the silk from a spider.
“Did your dad tell you jokes, too?” I asked.
My father took a step away from me then, but it felt like a mile. “I never knew my dad,” he said, turning away from me.
It was, I realized, the one thing we had in common.
I’m sitting in the dark in my father’s room, the green glow from the monitors behind him casting shadows on the bed. My elbows rest on my knees, my chin is cupped in my hands. “How do you know Jesus likes Japanese food?” I murmur.
No reply.
“Because he loves miso.”
I rub my eyes, which are burning. Dry. Tearless.
“Did you hear about the paranoid dyslexic?” I say. “He’s always afraid he’s following someone.”
Once, bad jokes had distracted my father enough to stop being scared. It isn’t working for me, though.
There is a soft knock on the open door. A woman steps inside. “Edward?” she says. “I’m Corinne D’Agostino. I’m a donation coordinator with the New England Organ Bank.”
She’s wearing a green sweater with leaves embroidered on it, and her brown hair is in a pixie cut. She reminds me of Peter Pan, which is ironic. There’s no Neverland here, no everlasting youth.
“I’m so sorry about your father.”
I nod. I know that’s what she’s expecting.
“Tell me a little bit about him. What did he like to do?”
Now that I’m not expecting. I’m hardly the most qualified person to answer that question. “He was outside all the time,” I say finally. “He studied wolf behavior by living with packs.”
“That’s pretty amazing,” Corinne says. “How did he get involved in that?”
Did I ever ask him? Probably not. “He thought wolves got a bad rap,” I reply, remembering some of the talks my father used to give to the tourists who swarmed Redmond’s in the summertime. “He wanted to set the record straight.”
Corinne pulls up a chair. “It sounds like he cared a lot about animals. Often, folks like that want to help other people, too.”
I rub my hands over my face, suddenly exhausted. I don’t want to beat around the bush anymore. I just want this to be over. “Look, his license said he wanted to be an organ donor. That’s why I asked to speak to you.”
She nods, taking my lead and dropping the small talk. “I’ve talked to Dr. Saint-Clare and we’ve reviewed your father’s chart. I understand that his injuries were so severe that he’s never going to enjoy the quality of life he used to have. But none of those injuries have damaged his internal organs. A donation after cardiac death is a real gift to others who are suffering.”
“Is it going to hurt him?”
“No,” Corinne promises. “He’s still a patient, and his comfort is the most important concern for us. You can be with him when the life-sustaining treatment is stopped.”
“How does it work?”
“Well, donation after cardiac death is different from organ donation after brain death. We’d begin by reviewing both the decision you made with the medical team to withdraw treatment and your father’s status as a registered donor. Then, we’d work with the transplant surgeons to arrange a time when the termination of life support and the organ donation could be done.” She leans forward, her hands clasped between her legs, never breaking my gaze. “The family can be present. You’d be right here, along with your father’s neurosurgeon and the ICU doctors and nurses. He’d be given intravenous morphine. There would be an arterial line monitoring arterial pressure, and one of the nurses or doctors will stop the ventilator that’s helping him breathe. Without oxygen, his heart will stop beating. As soon as he is asystolic, which means his heart has stopped, you’ll have a chance to say good-bye, and then we take him to the operating room. Five minutes after his heart stops, he’ll be pronounced dead, and the organ recovery will begin with a new team of doctors, the transplant team. Typically in donations after cardiac death, the kidneys and liver are recovered, but every now and then hearts and lungs are donated, too.”
It seems almost cruel to be discussing this, literally, over my father’s unconsc
ious body. I look at his face, at the stitches still raw on his temple. “What happens after that?”
“After the organ recovery, he’s brought to the holding area of the hospital. They’ll contact whatever funeral home you’ve made arrangements with,” Corinne explains. “You’ll also receive an outcome letter from us, telling you about the people who received your father’s organs. We don’t share their names, but it often helps the family left behind see whose lives have been changed by the donor’s gift.”
If I looked into the eyes of a man who had received my father’s corneas, would I still feel like I didn’t measure up?
“There’s one thing you need to know, Edward,” she adds. “DCD isn’t a sure thing, like donation after brain death. Twenty-five percent of the time, patients wind up not being candidates.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s a chance that your father will not become asystolic in the window of opportunity necessary to recover the organs. Sometimes after the ventilator is turned off, a patient continues to breathe erratically. It’s called agonal breathing, and during that time, his heart will continue beating. If that goes on for more than an hour, the DCD would be canceled because the organs wouldn’t be viable.”
“What would happen to my father?”
“He would die,” she says simply, honestly. “It might take two to three more hours. During that time he’d be kept comfortable, right here in his own bed.” Corinne hesitates. “Even if the DCD isn’t successful, it’s still a wonderful gift. You’d be honoring your father’s wishes, and nothing can take away from that.”
