Seasons Under Heaven (22 page)

Daniel Dodd couldn’t sleep that night. Sylvia heard him walking down the stairs, and she rolled out of Brenda and David’s bed, pulled on her robe, and followed him down. “Daniel? Is something wrong?” she asked.

He headed into the kitchen and turned on the light. His eyes were sleepy and his hair ruffled, but he didn’t look like the twelve-year-old child he was. He had changed in these past few months, just as Leah and Rachel had. He was older. Sylvia could only guess at the thoughts that went through his mind. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said.

“Are you worried about Joseph?”

He didn’t answer. For a moment, he just looked down at the floor. “I was thinking about his shoes,” he said finally. “He couldn’t get them on his feet when he left for the hospital because his feet were swollen. I thought maybe he could wear mine. But they’re so sweaty and dirty, I thought I’d wash them. We could take them to him tomorrow. He likes my shoes.”

“Then what will you wear to school?” Sylvia asked.

He shrugged. “My flip-flops, I guess. Doesn’t matter.”

She remembered when her children were twelve. Shoes had mattered a lot. Sarah had gone through a stage where she’d wanted black sneakers that she’d neon-painted herself. Jeff had insisted on a certain brand of high-tops that he swore enabled him to make the junior high basketball team.

Neither of them had suffered through sleepless nights over a sibling whose shoes didn’t fit.

“Do you know how to wash them, Miss Sylvia?” Daniel asked. “I know how to wash jeans and underwear and stuff, but not sneakers.”

“Sure,” she said, taking them out of his hands and heading into the small laundry room. She dropped them into the washer, poured the soap in, and started the cycle. When she turned back around, Daniel was still staring at the floor.

“What are you thinking, Daniel?”

Again, he shrugged. “Just that I wish I could miss school tomorrow and go to the hospital. There are things I need to tell Joseph when he wakes up.”

Sylvia pulled the chair out from the table and sat down. “What things?”

“Things like…what a cool little kid he is. I never told him that. I just called him dumb and stuff.”

She watched him standing there in a baggy T-shirt and gym shorts, his feet bare. “I’m sure he knows you didn’t mean it.”

“I’d still like to tell him.” He was struggling with the emotions pulling at his mouth.

She knew he would never allow her to do what came most naturally—pull him into her arms and hold him. She felt helpless, inadequate. “How about some warm milk?” she asked finally.

He nodded.

She warmed it up in a saucepan, then poured two glasses, praying it would help him sleep. When he’d finished, she set her elbows on the table and gazed at him. “Feel pretty helpless, don’t you?”

He stared down at the empty glass and nodded.

“Me, too,” she said. “I’ve been praying and praying. It’s like my mind won’t let me rest. It keeps saying that we have to keep praying.”

“We do,” Daniel said. “Joseph needs us to.”

“That’s what I was doing when I heard you on the stairs.”

He gave her a half-smile. “That’s what I was doing before I came down.” He got up and put his glass in the sink, then slid his chair back under the table. “Thanks for the milk. Guess I’ll go try to sleep.”

“Okay.” She watched as he padded to the kitchen doorway. “Daniel?”

He stopped and turned back around.

“Lots of others are praying, too, you know. Joseph’s pretty well surrounded with prayer.”

“I know,” he whispered. Then he headed back into the darkness upstairs, where she knew he would pray some more.

Brenda was exhausted and emotionally drained as the last of the doctors filed out of the room. Joseph had been revived. He was alive, but she knew it was just a matter of time before his heart failed for the last time. He looked as if his soul had already left his body—or as if it would flee again at any moment.

It was the longest night Brenda and David had ever shared together, yet the moments seemed so short. When morning came, she realized that Joseph hadn’t stirred since he’d been revived. She went to his side and found his hand under the covers. It was cold as ice. His fingers were blue. She remembered when his hands were hot and his palms were sweaty, when his cheeks would get red after running from Daniel or chasing the dog.

Hours passed. Nurses moved Joseph, gave him injections, changed his IV, checked his monitors. He never woke up. David didn’t leave the hospital. He left ICU only to get them food,
which neither of them could eat. Neither of them had showered, and Joseph’s breakfast tray went untouched. When the lunch tray came, they took the breakfast tray, then at supper, replaced the lunch. Still, Joseph did not wake up.

When he had been asleep for twenty-four hours, Brenda bent over his bed. “Where is he?” she asked David. “Why won’t he wake up?”

David, draped across the rail on the other side of the bed, looked ragged and exhausted. She was exhausted, too, but could not take the chance of resting again.

She thought of her son’s questions yesterday about death and heaven, and suddenly the thought of his dying here was unbearable. Old people died in hospitals, suffering people that saints were praying home. Not children. Children needed to be in their own homes, with things that gave them comfort.

“The last thing he said to me yesterday…” she whispered to David. “He told me he wanted to go home. Sleep in his own bed.”

David closed his eyes, and tears plopped onto Joseph’s sheet.

“David, Joseph’s going to die, isn’t he?”

He nodded, unable to speak. She covered her mouth and bent down to press her forehead against her son’s. “What if we took him home?” she asked.

There was a moment of silence, and finally she looked up and saw the tragic look on David’s face.

“What do you mean?” he asked painfully.

“I mean…if he’s going to die…let’s take him home, David. Let’s let him die in his own bed. Not in a cold hospital room with tubes and alarms. Not here.”

Again, silence. “But the children,” David whispered finally. “It would be too hard on them.”

She covered her face with both hands, wishing she knew what to do. “I’m thinking of them, too. They need to say goodbye to him. He’s their brother.”

He stared down at the boy, his face twisted as the thoughts turned in his mind. “But Brenda, as long as he’s here, there’s still a chance he’ll survive until—”

“David, I
don’t
want my son to die here.”

“What difference does it make where he dies?” he whispered harshly, the corners of his mouth trembling with the words. “Here or there—what difference does it make?”

“He wanted to go home. He wanted to be in his own bed.”

“But there’s still a chance…” His voice trailed off as despair flooded up in him, rendering him unable to finish.

“We could take the machines with us,” she said. “We could take him home in an ambulance. Get a private nurse. We would keep giving him what he needs. But he would be home, in his own room, with his own family. Harry would be right across the street. If they
do
find a heart, we can have him back here in just a few minutes. And if they don’t—he’d be at home, David. His own home.”

David stared at her for a long moment, turning the idea over in his mind. She could see the turmoil the suggestion created in him.

“What if his heart stops again?” David whispered at last. “Who would revive him?”

The words came so hard that she almost choked them out. “How many times do we want the heroics, David, if there’s not a heart? Joseph may be suffering. Maybe there’s a time…to let go.”

The rims around David’s eyes reddened, and he sucked in a sob and covered his face with a callused hand. He wept for a moment, as hard and as deep as she. But finally, he raised his head and met her eyes. “Okay,” he whispered. “Maybe I can catch Dr. Robinson before he leaves the building. And I’ll call Harry.”

David left the room, and Brenda looked down at her son, wanting so much to hold him, to cradle him in her arms, to let him feel the love she had for him. So she climbed onto the bed next to him, careful not to pull any of the tubes coming out of him. Carefully, she slid her arm under his head, and held him as she wept against his face.

Joseph never moved.

After a few minutes, David came back in. “They’re still waiting for Dr. Robinson to answer his page,” he said softly. “I called Harry, and he tried to talk us out of it. But when I explained, he said he understood. He said he’d help all he could.”

Brenda squeezed her eyes shut. “We’re taking you home, Joseph. Can you hear me? You’re going home.”

But Joseph didn’t respond.

He just lay there, limp and gray.

Harry couldn’t sleep after David’s phone call, and with Sylvia at the Dodds’ house, he saw no reason to stay in bed. He spent some time praying for Joseph, and for Brenda and David, then decided to go to the hospital and see if they needed help getting Joseph ready to go home.

He tapped on the glass at the side entrance and waited for the security guard to let him in. As the door opened, he heard the sound of a woman wailing.

“What’s that?” he asked the guard.

“Big accident on the interstate,” he said. “Some lady’s losin’ it over in ER.”

Concerned, Harry detoured through the emergency room. Ambulance lights flashed just outside the glass doors, but the patient had already been brought inside. A woman wept loudly, uncontrollably, in her husband’s arms. Her legs gave way, and he bent with her until she was on the floor, balling up as if that could assuage her grief. The man wept, too, but more quietly, in
a way that was perhaps even more tragically helpless. Clearly, someone they loved had died. No matter how many times Harry had seen it, he’d never gotten used to it.

Outside the emergency room, two paramedics turned and moved slowly down the hallway, a look of defeat on their faces.

Other patients—a man with a broken arm, a woman with a cut on her foot, a teenaged boy with asthma—all quietly watched the family’s anguish. Harry, too, stood watching, wishing there was something he could do. He thought of approaching the family, but he saw that someone was already there, urging them into a conference room. He wasn’t needed.

Whispering a prayer for them, he started through the swinging doors that would take him to the elevators. As he pushed through, he ran into Dr. Robinson, rushing out.

“Chris! What’s the rush?” Harry asked.

The man looked shaken, distracted, and his eyes sought out the weeping parents. “I’m glad you’re here, Harry,” he said quietly. “I may need you.”

“For what?” Harry asked.

“To talk to these parents,” he said. “They just lost their eightyear-old son. But, Harry—there was no injury to his heart.”

Half an hour later, Harry left the room with Dr. Robinson, feeling drained of every ounce of energy. The parents were distraught to the point of needing sedation, but they had refused any.

At first, they had rejected the idea of giving up their son’s heart. They hadn’t yet accepted his death, and the idea of donating his organs was more than they could bear. So Harry had begun to tell them about Joseph—lying upstairs, hours, maybe moments, from death himself. He told them about Brenda and David’s intentions to take Joseph home to die.

Finally, they had realized that their son’s heart could spare another family the pain they were suffering. It could keep another child alive.

Reluctantly, miserably, they had agreed to sign the papers.

Drained, Harry followed Dr. Robinson to the elevators. “What now?”

“I’ll contact the transplant team. We have to make sure it’s a match for Joseph. If it’s not, we transport it to a recipient who does match. If it’s a good heart for Joseph, we’ll operate within a few hours. Right now, we have to tell the Dodds.”

The elevator doors opened, and they both stepped on.

“What if it doesn’t match?” Harry asked. “Is there any way to keep from getting their hopes up?”

“No,” Dr. Robinson said. “We have to start prepping Joseph. You might start sending up some of those prayers you’re so popular for. Joseph is going to need them.”

Brenda and David heard a flurry of activity outside Joseph’s room. She looked into the hall and saw Dr. Robinson and Harry at the nurse’s station. Dread constricted her throat. She was sure they had come to help them get Joseph ready for his last trip home. Then she saw that the nurses seemed to be celebrating, hugging each other and smiling. She looked back at David.

“What is it?” he asked, stepping to the doorway behind her.

“I don’t know.”

Harry and Dr. Robinson started toward them. Both of them seemed breathless, though they seemed less celebratory than the nurses.

“What’s going on?” David asked as they reached them.

“Brenda, David, I may have good news,” Dr. Robinson said. “We may have a heart. We’re running some tests now, and the transplant team will determine soon whether it’ll work for Joseph. If so, we’ll do the surgery in the next few hours.”

Brenda stepped back, trying to process what Dr. Robinson had just said. She couldn’t speak. Hope flooded her—she had almost forgotten what it felt like. Stunned, she turned to David.

“Doctor, how long will it take for the heart to get here?” David asked.

Dr. Robinson hesitated a moment. “It’s already here. The transplant team is on their way.”

Brenda saw the beginnings of the first smile she’d seen on David’s face in days. “There’s hope, David,” she whispered. “There’s hope.”

But both of them knew it could be false hope, so they settled in for a long, anxious wait as the nurses began to prep their son.

Within two hours, Dr. Robinson was back in their room. This time he was smiling. “It’s a go,” he said, and they sprang to their feet and threw their arms around each other. “We’ll start the surgery soon.”

“We’ve got a heart! We’ve got a heart!” Brenda squealed, nearly dancing.

A nurse who was painting Joseph with iodine laughed. “I’ll bet you have some phone calls to make,” she said.

“Yes!” Brenda said. “We’ve got to get everybody praying.”