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“Please,” the girl pleads. I step around so that we’re face-to-face. Her eyes are wild. “Please don’t let them do this.”
“It’s going to be okay,” I say. I don’t really know this, of course. But sometimes you have to lie in order to tell a greater truth.
“No,” she cries. Her hair is matted. She’s put up quite a fight, Ann says. “I’m sorry,” the girl says. Her breath is ragged, and her face is as white as the lights shining down on her. “I’m going to die, aren’t I?”
“Shhh,” I whisper, patting her hand. “Are you in pain?”
She shakes her head from side to side to the extent that she can. “That’s good,” I tell her as my fingers brush against her restraint. She flinches. It’s subtle, but we both notice. I release her hand and walk around the table in order to have a word with Paul, as much as I’d rather not. “What is going on?”
“Come with me,” Ann says, and she’s whisking me back around to the other side where the patient is crying. “Paul needs to focus.”
“I don’t want to die,” the girl says. I don’t tell her she isn’t going to die, because the truth is, I don’t know. The best I can offer her is a reassuring smile.
“It’s funny,” Ann says. “All they can think about is dying, and then you get them on the table, and it’s the last thing they want.”
“Who
is she?”
“Kelsey,” she replies hollowly. “From the hotline.”
I watch as Ann injects more drugs into her IV. Paul leans over the partition and offers a furtive glance, a knowing look. He’s good at reading facial expressions and mine asks why she isn’t asleep. Mine asks what the hell is going on.
“Why?” the girl manages around sobs. “Why me?”
Ann watches me carefully. She tells me not to worry. She says they always ask these things. “Don’t worry,” I say to Kelsey. “The doctor is very good. He’ll take care of you.”
Her eyelids flutter before they close completely. Maybe it’s the drugs, maybe it’s resignation. Only time will tell. “This is what I had to show you,” Ann exclaims. “It’s the final secret between us.”
I’m not sure I follow. She senses this. “This is the reason for the hotline,” she motions toward the girl’s head. She’s
very pretty. Her face is nearly angelic when she isn’t crying. “We’re traders.”
“What’s a trader?”
“We give those who want to live the chance.”
I know there’s more. “And?”
“And the ones who don’t—the ones who call seeking a way out—they give their organs.”
“What my wife means to say is—we’re matchmakers.”
“But Kelsey isn’t dead.”
“She’s one of the lucky ones,” Ann tells me. “Sometimes, we give repeat callers something to be grateful for.”
“Like a new lease on life,” Paul interjects.
“Or we help them die,” Ann shrugs. “It depends—it’s an art—not an exact science.”
“It’s pretty exact, dear,” Paul counters.
They have an entire argument, as Paul cuts and sucks and extracts, about the exactness of medicine in the modern world. It lasts an age, and at the end, even I am not sure who came out victorious. Ann says life is like that. She then goes on to explain how they can’t save everyone but they can save someone. Someone, she tells me, who is a fighter, someone who has the will to live.
The girl doesn’t speak again. Paul echoes his wife. She’s a lucky girl, he assures me. He says he’s only taking a kidney. It could have been worse. I’m lucky too, Ann wants me to know. Lucky that it wasn’t.
I ask what I’m doing here. I ask her what will happen if the girl talks. She won’t, Paul says. He doesn’t expand on why, and I don’t ask him to.
