He wasn’t letting her cajole him. Squeezing her eyes shut, she cradled her head in her hand. “What would you say if I told you I was dying of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease?”
“What?”
The words were out. They’d been trapped inside her for so long she could scarcely believe she’d released them.
“Could you say that again?”
“You heard me.” She couldn’t bring herself to repeat what she’d said.
There was a silence during which Baxter dropped, almost as if it were a physical object, the “you need to get your head on straight” attitude he’d wielded throughout the conversation so far.
“I hope...” He couldn’t continue, which led her to believe he’d choked up—and suddenly she was crying, too.
She held her breath so he wouldn’t know. She’d promised herself she’d be calm, cool and collected when she made this announcement, didn’t want to cause more sorrow by not handling it well. But there was no stopping the tears. They rolled down her cheeks and dripped off her chin as she stood at the window, wondering why, after maintaining her silence for so long, she’d blurted out her news to Baxter.
He was trying to talk again but was obviously struggling with his emotions. “I—I hope that was...just a cruel joke,” he managed to say, but she could tell he knew it wasn’t. The bomb she’d dropped explained too much. Everything he’d been questioning a few minutes earlier made sense.
But she hadn’t done enough to prepare him, and for that she felt terrible. She was bad at goodbyes. That was another reason she’d been putting off telling her loved ones the truth. From the moment word got out, she’d be facing one long goodbye.
When she didn’t confirm that it was a joke, he said, “How long have you known?”
She had to speak past the lump in her throat. “I found out on Valentine’s Day.”
“That was four months ago! It’s taken you four months to tell us? Or—” his voice grew louder, indignant “—was I the only one who didn’t know?”
In one way, revealing her condition was a huge relief. She no longer had to feel guilty for keeping it to herself. But Baxter’s reaction was just one person’s. Like the ripples caused by a rock thrown into a pond, the circles would widen and widen as more and more people found out. “I haven’t told anyone else. Not a single soul.”
“What about your parents? That doesn’t include them, does it?”
“I’m afraid it does.”
“Holy shit! I can’t believe it. But...maybe you won’t have to tell them. We’ll get you help, do whatever we have to.”
With a sniff, she wiped her cheeks. There was no use pretending she wasn’t feeling sorry for herself. The heartbreak of losing all the years she’d expected to have was too obvious to hide. “That’s just it. The doctors are already doing everything they can.”
“So why haven’t they been able to fix what’s wrong?” Suddenly, he sounded angry. “In this day and age, there have to be answers, options.”
“There’s one option.” She patted Rifle, who’d followed her to the window. “It’s called a liver transplant.”
He choked up again, so he had an even more difficult time speaking. “How do you get one?”
“You put your name on the list at various donor registries, and then you wait.”
“Maybe, if we pay the right people, we can make it happen faster.”
“Pay whom? Someone on the black market?”
“Whoever’s in charge of doling them out!”
“Your place on the list isn’t determined by ability to pay. It’s according to need.”
“Then we’ll find our own donor!”
“How?”
“We’ll all be tested to see if one of us is a match.”
“They do very few live transplants, Baxter. They’re complicated surgeries that can be life-threatening to the donor.”
He muttered a curse. “There has to be an answer. You said non-alcoholic fatty liver disease?”
“That’s right.”
“If alcohol didn’t cause it, what did? Is it genetic or—?”
“Some people develop a condition where their body stores too much iron or copper, which destroys their liver. If it’s copper, I believe it’s called Wilson’s disease. I’m not sure about iron, but both of those conditions have genetic factors. That’s not what happened to me. No one knows what went wrong in my case. My liver just...quit functioning properly.”
“I can’t accept that there’s nothing we can do,” he said. “There has to be something.”
She stared out at the barn. Without much of a moon tonight, it was a hulking dark shadow but, for some inexplicable reason, she felt better when she remembered Levi and how great he’d looked up on that ladder. “I guess we just enjoy the time I have left.”
“Shit...” A pause. “Kyle doesn’t know?”
She could tell it surprised Baxter that he’d been the first she’d told. But he felt safer, in some respects, than her girlfriends. Or Kyle. Baxter was less likely to tell the others. That made this sort of a practice run. “No.”
“I’m sorry.”
The window showed the reflection of her sad smile. “Thanks.”
“You have to tell your parents, though. You can’t...you can’t let it go any longer. They don’t know that they need to be more vigilant about the time they spend with you, don’t know that—”
“I’ll break it to them soon.” She’d been bearing the burden of her secret long enough to understand how heavy it was. She just wasn’t convinced that telling the truth would make the load any lighter. She’d be changing one set of worries and concerns for another. “But...not quite yet. It’s been hard enough telling you.”
“What about Eve and Cheyenne and the others?” His words were muffled, as if he’d dropped his head in his hands.
“I was waiting, in case...in case I had positive news about a transplant before I came out with my condition.”
“But then you’d be whisked into surgery with barely any notice. They can’t keep that...type of thing on ice indefinitely.”
What he said was true. She was listed with several different transplant centers. Her doctors said that should help her get the liver she needed. But there were no guarantees, not when twenty thousand people a year needed a transplant and only about five thousand received one. “Right.”