The Trucker I Fed Twenty Dollars of Diner Food in 2011 Just Bought My Daughter’s Kidney
The scream was the wrong kind.
I’ve been a mother long enough to know the difference between a nightmare scream and something is actually wrong.
This was the second one.
High and thin and cut off in the middle like she’d run out of air.
I was up the stairs before my mother finished saying her name.
Ellie was sitting up in bed with both hands on her stomach and her face the color of skim milk.
Her lips were blue.
“Mama,” she said.
“Mama, it hurts.”
“Where, baby.”
She pointed to her side.
The side of her fistula.
The place where they access her for dialysis.
I pulled up her pajama top.
The skin was swollen, hot, streaked red up toward her ribs.
“Mom,” I called down.
“Call 911. Now.”
I’ve replayed that night maybe a thousand times.
The ambulance ride to Elkhart General.
Them saying she needed Riley Children’s in Indianapolis, which was two hours south.
The transfer.
My mom driving behind us in her Camry with a duffel bag of underwear and phone chargers.
The ER doctor at Riley using the word sepsis.
Ellie’s fistula had gotten infected.
The infection had gone into her blood.
Her body was fighting it and losing.
They put her in the pediatric ICU at 4:17 in the morning.
I know because I stared at the clock on the wall for what felt like an hour before I could make myself sit down.
At six a.m.
a resident came in and told me she was stable but critical.
They had her on three antibiotics.
Her blood pressure was low but holding.
“We need her stronger before we can even talk about a transplant workup,” the resident said.
“This infection is aggressive. And if she’s not on the active list, and something opens up in the meantime, we can’t take it.”
“How do I get her on the active list.”
“You need the deposit at the transplant center in Indianapolis. It’s a separate facility, separate paperwork. And she needs to be infection-free for at least seventy-two hours before they’ll even evaluate her.”
I nodded like I understood.
I didn’t understand anything anymore.
At seven a.m.
I remembered Ronnie.
I stepped into the family lounge, which was empty except for a coffee pot and a jigsaw puzzle that someone had left with the sky pieces missing.
I called him.
“Rachel.” He picked up before it even rang.
“I’ve been up. What’s happening.”
I told him.
All of it.
The scream.
The blue lips.
The sepsis.
The three antibiotics.
The transplant center being a whole separate thing I hadn’t even known about.
He didn’t say a word until I was done.
Then he said, “What’s the transplant center called.”
“Indiana University. IU Health.”
“Okay.”
“Ronnie, they need more than fifteen. The whole workup, the pre-approval, the—”
“Rachel.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t need to know the number. I need to know who to call.”
I gave him the transplant coordinator’s name and the main line.
He wrote it down.
I could hear the pen scratching.
“Go be with your kid,” he said.
“I’ll handle the money. Don’t think about it again today.”
“I don’t know how to thank you.”
“You already did. Eleven years ago. We’re square.”
He hung up.
I went back to Ellie’s room and sat next to her bed and held her hand, which was small and cold and dotted with the little round scars of every needle stick she’d had since she was seven.
At eleven a.m.
my phone buzzed.
A number I didn’t know.
“Mrs. Halloran? This is Denise from IU Health transplant coordination. I’m calling because we just received a wire transfer on your account and I wanted to confirm some paperwork with you.”
“Okay.”
“The wire was for forty thousand dollars. Is that the amount you were expecting?”
I sat down on the linoleum in the hallway.
“Yes,” I said.
“That’s the amount.”
“Wonderful. So this fully covers Eleanor’s listing deposit and pre-approval workup, and there’s a substantial credit toward the surgical costs. Once she’s cleared medically, we can move her to active status immediately.”
“Thank you.”
“Mrs. Halloran, there’s a note attached to the wire. From the sender. Would you like me to read it?”
“Please.”
“It says: *For Ellie. From an old friend of her mama’s. Marlene would have loved her.*”
I don’t remember hanging up.
I remember sitting on the linoleum for a while.
A janitor came by with a mop and asked if I was okay and I told him yes.
I went back into Ellie’s room.
My mother was there, holding her other hand, reading her a book about a girl who had a pet dragon.
Ellie’s eyes were open.
Barely.
“Mama,” she said.
“Who’s Marlene?”
I froze.
“Where did you hear that name, honey?”
“You just said it. When you came in. You said, *Marlene would have loved her.*”
I didn’t remember saying it out loud.
I looked at my mother.
My mother looked at me.
I sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Marlene,” I said, “was the wife of a man I met a long time ago. Before you were born. When I was pregnant with you.”
“Did she die?”
“Yes, baby. A long time ago.”
Ellie was quiet for a minute.
The monitors beeped.
Somewhere down the hall a child was crying and a mother was singing.
“Mama,” she said.
“Am I going to die?”
There is no preparation for a nine-year-old asking you that question.
“No,” I said.
And I said it like it was a fact, like gravity, like the sun coming up.
“You are not. There is a man named Ronnie who I helped a long time ago and he is helping us now. And he is going to help us until you are better. And you are going to be better.”
“Why is he helping us?”
“Because that’s how it works, honey. When you’re kind to somebody, it doesn’t disappear. It just waits.”
She thought about that.
“Even for eleven years?”
“Even for eleven years.”
She closed her eyes.
The fever broke that night at 2:14 a.m.
I know because I stared at the clock again.
Her temperature came down from 103.8 to 100.2 in three hours.
The nurse said it was the antibiotics finally getting ahead of it.
I said it was Ronnie.
The nurse smiled and said whatever works.
Three days later she was infection-free.
Six days later they moved her out of the ICU.
Nine days later she was on the active transplant list.
And then we waited.
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