Raina's Story (14 page)

The wistful tremor in Vicki's voice almost made Raina cry. “Maybe it's because she's happy.”

Vicki smiled pensively. “Maybe.”

Her mother stopped talking and as the silence lengthened, Raina heard the grandfather clock ticking in the hallway and the faucet in the kitchen dripping into the sink. The refrigerator hummed and the central heat cut on. Everything around Raina seemed ordinary. But nothing was
ordinary. Not anymore. She saw her laptop on the coffee table and wondered how she could write about this conversation to Hunter.
Somewhere I have a half sister
. Raina stared down at her hands. All the color was gone from them and they felt cold. “Why didn't you tell me this before now?”

“I wanted to tell you many times. I tried. I almost said something when the thing with Tony happened, but you were so hurt, so sad. I just couldn't.”

Angry, hurt, Raina jumped up. “Why didn't you tell me when I was five, or six? It would have been easier if I'd known all my life.”

“I was trying to keep life and limb together, Raina. It was just the two of us and that was fine with me. I didn't want to think about her. Don't you know how it hurt to pretend she didn't exist? She was born in April, and every April for the past twenty-six years, I've thought of her. But she isn't
my
child, Raina.” Vicki leaned forward, her face a mask of pain. “I gave her up. She belongs to another family. But
you
belong to
me
.”

Raina wanted to hit something, or throw something at the wall. She was furious. “So why tell me now? What's so special about
now
?” And then in an instantaneous flash, like pieces of a puzzle falling into place, her mother's story took on fresh meaning. Goose bumps ran up her arms.

“The woman in Virginia…Is she… could she be…?”

“Yes. She is.”

Raina felt as if the wind had been knocked out of her. She dropped to the sofa like a lead weight. “How do you know? The registry's so secretive.” She could scarcely get the words out.

“I thought nothing of it when the first hit came and you were asked to send in a second sample. But when those tests came back and so many factors matched …” Vicki let the sentence trail off.

Hadn't Dr. Portera told Raina that very afternoon how unusual it was to have so many factors match in unrelated donors? She'd taken it as a sign that she was destined to be this woman's donor. In reality, it was an announcement that she had a half sister.

“When I suspected the truth,” Vicki continued, “the registry was more forthcoming, especially once their unrelated donor was, in fact, a related donor.”

Raina's head was swimming. How could this be happening? How could she have lived all her life and not known? How could her mother have lied to her for so many years? Wasn't there some law about keeping this kind of secret? It was cruel. It was hurtful. And she'd always thought of Vicki as a best friend!

“But you tried to talk me out of being a donor. Would you have let your own daughter, the other one, not me,
die
?” Raina asked cruelly.

“Stop it!” Vicki slapped the chair arm with her palm. “You go too far, Raina.”

Raina snapped her mouth shut and sent her mother a blazing, defiant look.

“Don't you ever say that to me,” Vicki went on. “You can't imagine the hell I've been living through in the past few days knowing that one child is needed to save the other.”

“But you tried to talk me out of it. You kept harping on me going under a general, and missing school, and it may not work, and—”

“And I had to know that you
wanted
to be a donor, Raina. I didn't want more pressure on you to become one just because you were related to the recipient. You had to make your decision independent of that issue. And you had to be told of the ramifications. Not just for yourself, but for her too. Your bone marrow may not save her.”

Raina squared her chin. “I think it will. I want to do it.”

Vicki nodded slowly. “All right. I believe you. And now that you know this story, you may as well hear the rest of it.”

Raina's reeling emotions spun out of control. “You mean there's
more
?”

“There's more,” Vicki said, leaning back in the chair. “Oh yes. There's more.”

Holly lay on her bed staring up at the ceiling and feeling more bored than ever before in her life. She was totally caught up with her schoolwork— in fact, she was several projects ahead in most of her accelerated classes. Sometimes being smart was a curse. She knew that her mother was sitting downstairs, knitting and listening to amazingly boring music, and her father was at his desk preparing for the adult Sunday school class that he would teach later in the week. The television was off because her parents only allowed it to be on a couple of hours a day, and only if they approved of the programming. Truly, hers was the most boring existence on the face of the planet.

It didn't help that Hunter was away. Without his comings and goings, the house felt tomblike. She'd someday get even with him for running off and leaving her to face this monumental ennui by herself. She couldn't wait until she could drive. But when she could drive, her parents would probably ration that time also. To the corner and back? Maybe to the store to pick up milk? She could see her father writing down mileage in a notebook.
“Now, don't dally,”
he'd say. “
It's five point two miles to the store. One traffic light. Three minutes to park. Ten inside the store. Back home. I'll be looking for you
.” Holly shuddered. She was a prisoner.

Holly reminded herself that she should be
more charitable toward her father, because life could turn on a dime. Just last week she'd reported to pediatric oncology only to find the nurses' station in turmoil and Susan, her favorite nurse, gone. “What happened?” Holly had asked.

Cheryl, one of the other nurses, had said, “Susan got a call this morning—her father dropped dead of a heart attack. She couldn't believe it. It was totally unexpected. I mean, the man was only fifty-five years old. And he and Susan weren't on good terms either. She was totally shook. Grabbed her things and rushed home to pack and fly out to Denver, which is where she's from.”

“He just died?”

“Keeled over at his office desk. He had no history of heart problems.” Cheryl shook her head. “Really sad. I feel sorry for Susan. She kept saying, ‘Why wasn't I nicer to him? I can't even remember what we were arguing about.’ ” Cheryl looked knowingly at Holly. “I guess it just goes to show you that life is short and no one knows when the grim reaper will show up for a person.”

Guiltily, Holly said a quick prayer, asking God to forgive her for grousing about her own father. Susan's dad was less than ten years older than Holly's.

She sat up. Where were Kathleen and Raina? Neither was answering her phone. She decided
to send them an e-mail. Maybe they were doing homework and needed a break. She went to her desk and hit the screen refresh button on her computer. The parental controls warning popped up. She rolled her eyes.

She opened her e-mail program, and the friendly voice told her she had mail. Good. It was the most excitement she'd had in the past two days, she decided. But when she saw the list of e-mails, none was from Kathleen or Raina. And one was from an unfamiliar name: kn-u-cme.
Can you see me. Who's this?
She pondered for a moment, considered lab partners at school, but they had never used this name. She knew she shouldn't open it. Her parents had warned her about opening e-mail of unknown origin because it could contain a virus. But she had a firewall on her machine.

“What the heck?” Holly opened the e-mail.

Holly sat staring at the screen and rereading the message.
Who in the world …?
She revisited
the address line, but it revealed nothing except the time it had been sent. Could it be for real? Should she reply?

Just then, her bedroom door flew open and Kathleen ran inside and threw herself across Holly's bed. “This is the worst day of my life,” she wailed.

H
OLLY FORGOT
about the message on her screen and moved to console Kathleen. “What happened?”

Kathleen stammered out her tale of driving to Carson's and seeing Stephanie's car in the driveway.

“You should have called first,” Holly said.

“Why? So he could
lie
to me?”

“He likes you, Kathleen. Don't keep throwing up roadblocks.”

“Why do you always want to think the best about people? Take off your blinders.”

“And why do you always think the worst?” Holly felt her patience growing thin. She had half a mind to call Carson herself and talk to him about Kathleen. Except that Raina would strangle her because she believed that noninterference in friends' lives was a prime directive.

Kathleen sniffed, but Holly saw that she was calming down. “I'm not wired like you and Raina. The two of you are confident and outgoing.
You can talk to anyone about anything. I'm just not that way. I'm shyer. I wish I weren't, but I am.” She looked as if the confession embarrassed her.

The word “shy” brought Holly back to her mysterious e-mail. She wanted to talk to Kathleen about it, but now wasn't the time. “I know you're shy.” Holly sat beside her friend and put her arm around her. “That's okay. You're probably better off, because I charge in like a bull in a china shop”—that was what her mother had often told her—“and Raina speaks her mind too much. But isn't that what helps us all be friends? We're alike, but we're different too.”

Kathleen's thick red hair bobbed up and down as she nodded in agreement.

Holly bounced off the bed. “Have you talked to Raina yet?”

“Raina's missing in action. I've left three voice messages on her cell, and her home phone must be off the hook, because it's been busy forever.”

“I can't reach her either.” Holly frowned. “But I couldn't get ahold of you earlier either.”

“I just probably didn't hear my phone ringing in the bottom of my purse. I was preoccupied, you know.”

“What if your mother had tried to call?”

“Mom's on a date. While, I, her daughter, am sitting here feeling sorry for myself.”

“Pity parties are my strong suit, but I know just what to do to cheer us up. Come downstairs and I'll dish up some ice cream. Mom got some chocolate fudge sauce for Christmas that's to die for. She hides it, but I know where.”

Kathleen cracked a smile. “Do you always eat your way to happiness?”

“Whatever works.” Holly led the way downstairs toward the kitchen. “Let's try to call Raina again. Maybe she'll want to come over for the pig-out.”

Raina's head hurt. Her brain felt overloaded, and she was afraid that if she tried to cram in one more thing, it would explode. She heard Vicki rattling around the kitchen making a cup of tea for herself, taking a break from their long, lifealtering conversation. Vicki had promised that there was “more.” Raina was uncertain that she could handle “more.” She felt like Pandora trying to stuff all the miseries from the fabled box back inside. She was like the Trojans, wishing they'd never pulled the huge wooden horse into their walled city. If she had never signed up with the registry… Then her half sister would have little chance of beating leukemia, she reminded herself.

“Are you sure you don't want anything? A cola?” Vicki returned to the chair, balancing her cup of tea.

“No,” Raina said. “Just finish.”

Vicki sat, joggled the tea bag a couple of times, squeezed it out with the back of a teaspoon and dumped it on the saucer.

Raina realized that her mother was procrastinating. How horrible could the next part be?

“So back to the family history,” Vicki said. “After the birth of the baby, I couldn't return to my old high school. The principal didn't want me there—I was a bad influence, you see. But I didn't want to go back anyway. The place seemed frivolous to me. Girls were planning for proms. I was trying to survive.

“Dustin was finishing school in Michigan, so he was gone. My parents refused to speak to me. I had no real friends. I got a job as a clerk and an apartment with one of the other girls from the home where I'd stayed while I was pregnant. My life was awful. I was so miserable, I thought about… well, let's just say, it was a dark time for me.”

Suicide. Raina knew that was what her mother had been about to say. She sat still, felt the rush of blood through her vessels, her breath pressing against the inside of her lungs.

“Eventually, I took the GED and got my high school diploma. Then everything was pretty much as I've always told you. I got into a community college and landed a job in a local hospital.”

Raina had been told this part all her life,
about how her mother had worked her way through college and a nursing program. She'd just never told Raina the other details. The details that totaled the sum of all her parts, that rounded her out, the good, the bad, the ugly. A lapse, Raina thought bitterly. She should have been told all this years earlier.