‘Shall we open a bottle of wine?’ Duncan suggested.
‘There’s a non-alcoholic cabernet sauvignon in the wine rack. After all, it is a Thursday, Duncan.’
*
Keeley pushed a forkful of her meal into her mouth but tasted nothing. However, she knew, if she didn’t keep eating, if she didn’t wait for her mum to ‘settle’ she might not find out what was at the bottom of all this slightly tight and nervous sitcom behaviour. And she needed to know tonight, at this dinner table, before all her imaginings of more visits to the hospital grew into giant grotesque Grinch-like gargoyles and swallowed her entire thought process.
‘How’s your food, Keeley?’ Lizzie asked. Her mum was still wearing the sweatband and had already told them an entire story of one woman’s fight against the Sh’Bam trainer’s dodgy sound system and her even dodgier inferior quality Spandex.
‘It’s nice,’ Keeley replied. ‘The chickpeas have… a nice texture today.’
‘Crushed soggy nuts, they always remind me of,’ Duncan piped up. ‘Terry at the pub dropped a whole bag of Planters into his pint once. Refused to fish them out and, once he’d finished the beer, he ate them. I had a couple and they tasted just like this. Nice.’
‘Fascinating,’ Lizzie remarked, shaking her head.
‘OK,’ Keeley said. ‘I think we’ve done all the necessary small-talk now.’ She put down her fork and looked at each of them in turn. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I can’t,’ Lizzie breathed immediately. ‘I just can’t.’ There were tears in her mum’s eyes and Keeley watched as Duncan reached for his wife’s hand. This was serious. Was her body somehow rejecting the kidney and she didn’t know? Surely she would know. She’d be ill, wouldn’t she? She was sure the doctor said she would be ill if that happened.
She swallowed, then ploughed on. ‘Dad?’
‘Duncan,’ Lizzie bleated. She seemed to be pleading with her eyes.
‘Keeley, love, we’ve had an email today,’ Duncan began, squeezing Lizzie’s hand in his. ‘It was from a lady called Silvie Durand.’
The name rang no bells with Keeley. Should it? Her dad was looking at her now like Silvie Durand might be the keeper of the secrets of the universe or the real mastermind behind Oreos. Lizzie let out a whimper.
‘Who is she?’ Keeley asked, her tone a little tentative. If this woman was making her mum cry then she didn’t like the prospect of what came next. Shit… was she adopted? That was the tone of this conversation. She held her breath. Was this Silvie Durand her birth mother? She shuddered. No, that only happened in books… didn’t it?
Duncan cleared his throat and picked up his glass, downing the contents of the alcohol-free wine like he was hoping for a hit akin to Jack Daniels.
‘She’s… the mother… of your kidney donor,’ Duncan said, the words forced out. ‘Her daughter. She was called Ferne. She was the girl… the woman… whose kidney you received after the accident.’
Not adopted then. But it was ground-breaking, life-shifting stuff and she wasn’t prepared. Keeley held her breath, as the shock rose up from her chest to her head, her eyes prickling as she tried to keep looking at her parents. Her donor now had a name. A woman. A woman who had passed away on the same night Bea had. A woman who had chosen to give life to others after she died. A woman who had saved her. Her name was Ferne.
‘What did she say?’ Keeley whispered. ‘In the email.’ For some reason the one thing at the forefront of her mind was the possibility of someone asking for the kidney back like it was a present they regretted giving and now wanted to return to the shop for a refund or give to someone else. Someone more worthy maybe. She tried to shake those thoughts out of her head. The counsellor hadn’t suggested that action would work with regard to clarity of thought process, but Keeley always felt a little better after she had done it.
‘This Silvie wants to take you away from us,’ Lizzie jumped in. ‘She will think, that because you’ve got a bit from her daughter, that you’re partly her daughter now and, if you go, you’ll like it better there and then you’ll leave here and then you’ll… you’ll divorce us… because we haven’t coped well with losing Bea and we’ve jumped between being overprotective, to being dismissive, and all the things in between. And I don’t ask you enough about what’s going on in your life because I’m always too busy filling my life with things so I don’t have to think. Because if I think then… I hurt.’
Keeley watched her mum burst into a flood of tears that could have washed over the Thames Barrier and sent the city whirlpooling to the bottom of the riverbed. She didn’t know what to do. Why didn’t she know what to do? Because she was in shock. Both from this news of her donor’s mother making contact and her own mother breaking down and being open for the very first time.
‘There’s a lot to take in there,’ Duncan said, breaking the sobbing with words. ‘A lot to take in.’ And Keeley still didn’t know what to say. She’d asked what the email had said and no one had answered her question.
‘What did she say?’ Keeley asked again. ‘Please.’
Lizzie was still eyes down towards the contents of her concoction, hair almost touching the plate. Keeley wasn’t sure she was going to get any more conversation from her mum at the moment. She moved her gaze to her dad.
‘Well,’ Duncan said softly, pouring himself another glass of wine, ‘she sounds very nice. She said… that over the past year, after her grieving, she had done a lot of thinking. And, she has decided, that she would really, really like to meet you.’
Lizzie tried to muffle her sobbing with a tissue she had plucked from her sleeve, but Keeley could still hear. Her donor’s mother wanted to meet her.
‘I…’ Keeley began. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘She wants you to visit her… in France,’ Duncan carried on. ‘Paris, actually.’
‘Paris,’ Keeley said, nothing really sinking in.
‘That’s where she lives,’ Duncan said. ‘That’s where… Ferne was from.’
Keeley shook her head. This was all too much. She now wished the wine was alcoholic. She reached for her glass anyway and took a sip. Her donor was from France? She had never known any details of who had donated her kidney. Her mum hadn’t been able to donate after a small brush with cancer some years ago and although her dad was willing and able, the match wasn’t as perfect as it might have been. Then, almost magically, someone on life support at the very same hospital Keeley had been admitted to, someone who was not going to recover, had provided a lifeline. Amazingly, they were a high marker match in blood type, tissue type and cross-matching. Keeley had got incredibly lucky that one night while someone else’s world was splitting at the seams.
Lizzie raised her head a little. Her eyes were red and still leaking tears, the serviette pressed hard to her nose.
‘Keeley, it’s completely your decision what happens next,’ Duncan told her.
‘I don’t know,’ Keeley said. A shiver ran over her and she felt a pull from inside of her. That also happened now and then. It wasn’t like the ache or the pain, it was almost like an acknowledgement. Some sort of internal ripple effect when she thought about how her life had altered from the night of the crash.