Our Year of Maybe

PETER

WE CAN SEE SOPHIE’S HOUSE out our kitchen window, so it’s almost like her family’s having dinner with mine.

“A lot of cars over there,” my mom muses, aiming her fork at the window.

“Her sister’s having a thing,” I say to my plate.

“A Thing, you say?” my dad says in the most dadlike way. He could open up a school to train fathers-to-be in the art of bad jokes and gentle sarcasm, but his sense of humor suits him as a dentist, too. “That explains it! I’ve heard Things are very popular these days. Especially with the young people.”

Years ago, my family would’ve been invited to the party Sophie forgot about. But somewhere in between hospital visits and mortgage payments and Sophie’s younger sister’s pregnancy, our parents slipped away from each other. What initially brought them together—proximity and religion, my dad being Jewish along with both of Sophie’s parents—was no longer enough. They keep to their separate homes, pinballing Sophie and me back and forth between them.

“How was your day, Peter?” my mom asks. A community college writing professor, she’s always been tremendously empathetic, more sensitive than my dad. If I was having an especially difficult day, she’d hold a hand to her heart like it caused her physical pain too. For the past ten years, she’s been working on a novel. I’m not sure she dreams of publication, necessarily—she just wants to finish it. After dinner, like she does every night, she’ll retreat to the couch with a glass of wine, her laptop, and a furrow between her brows.

“Not bad.” I spear a hunk of stuffed eggplant. On our fridge is a list of kidney-friendly foods. “One more paper due tonight, and then I’m free for the summer—well, after the recovery period.”

“Overprotective” doesn’t even begin to describe Benjamin K. Rosenthal, DDS, and Holly Porter. Until I begged her to stop last year, my mom tracked the times of all my exchanges on a spreadsheet. Strict bedtimes, which I never questioned because I was always exhausted anyway. No long vacations, which meant no travel beyond the state’s borders. No driver’s ed. No driving with Sophie until she had her license a full year and was accident-free. I wasn’t even allowed to take the city bus until last year because what if an infection stunned my body the exact moment I sat down, as infections are known to do? No trips anywhere they didn’t approve first, which didn’t make sense because how was I supposed to get there if I couldn’t drive, take the bus, or ride with Sophie? Shockingly, I didn’t own a bike, either.

My parents trade a look, and after several seconds that send me into only a mild panic, they make some kind of silent agreement to allow my mom to speak first.

She stretches across the table to cover my hand with hers. Her nails are pale blue and filed into claws. It’s the one luxury she allows herself: a different color and design each month. “Baby, we’re all crossing our fingers for the best. But we don’t want you to be devastated if we don’t get the outcome we’re hoping for.”

“I—I know.” The reality wraps its cold fingers around me. There are never any guarantees. Sophie’s kidney could fail. My body could reject it. I know all the risks, everything from infection to death.

But, God, it could also be a whole new life for me.

My mom smiles tightly, thinly. We all have sparkling teeth; my dad has us go to the dentist every four months instead of the typical six. “We have to be cautiously optimistic.”

Those words could define my entire life. A new expression appeared on my parents’ faces after Sophie and I went through all the tests, and they’re wearing it tonight. Extreme hopefulness tempered by realism, like they won’t give in to joy because there’s always a chance something could go wrong.

We’ve been through it before—when the major thing that could go wrong, did. I had one transplant when I was five, from a nonliving donor, but my body rejected the kidney. That failure made it a thousand times harder to find another match. Made it something of a miracle that the perfect person was living across the street from me this whole time.

I came to terms with my life, however short it might end up being, a long time ago, after periods of both anger and depression that I worked on with a therapist

. There was dialysis. Constant fatigue. Doctor’s appointments. Blue pills and pink pills and green pills, pills so large I worried they’d never slide down my esophagus. Iron pills after I developed anemia. Pills I choked down when I couldn’t eat anything else, pills that made me even sicker with side effects.

Sometimes I wonder if Sophie’s parents wish she’d latched on to a healthier friend. Someone whose idea of a wild Friday night involved more than a Star Wars marathon and the weird salad my dad used to make all the time, a combination of foods good for the kidneys: cabbage and red bell pepper and cranberries and garlic, drizzled with olive oil. Sophie claimed to love it, but I wonder if she said so just to make me feel better about it. Especially when it gave us both garlic breath.

Truthfully, Sophie with garlic breath could never bother me.

“You promise you’ll check Mark’s water every day while I’m in the hospital?” I ask my parents. “And you’ll give him a dust bath at least twice a week?”

“We raised a teenage boy,” my mom says. “I’m pretty sure we can handle a chinchilla.”

“Though it’s hard to tell who’s hairier,” my dad dad-jokes.

My mom laughs and I groan, but the moment of levity won’t last long. In our family, it never does.

Apparently, I’m a medical marvel. I was born with renal dysplasia, which means one of my kidneys wasn’t working. Sometimes the normal kidney can do the work of both kidneys, the same way someone healthy can live with one kidney. But my working kidney wasn’t normal. I should have died before I was born.

My condition progressed to chronic kidney disease before I even started kindergarten. A kid suffering from an old-person illness. Doctors explained to me in the most basic terms how kidneys functioned: like little trash collectors that removed waste and extra water from the blood, which was then sent to the bladder as urine. After my good kidney and then my first donor kidney failed, I went back on dialysis. The kind of dialysis most people are familiar with involves being hooked up to a machine for hours at a time, multiple times a week. But I hated going in for it. Being surrounded by machines only made me feel sicker. I was surviving—but not actually living.

Now I’m on peritoneal dialysis. A few years ago, a surgeon placed a soft tube called a catheter in my belly, and I do “exchanges” five times a day. I pour dialysis solution into a bag that flows through the catheter. The solution soaks up extra fluid and waste, and after a few hours, I drain it and begin the process again. Each exchange takes about fifteen minutes. At the beginning, my parents did it for me, but as I got older and my body fell into a prolonged awkward stage, I grew embarrassed. A milestone in any young boy’s life: learning to clean his catheter site.

You can still have a normal life, all my doctors said. But some days it felt impossible. I played baseball for a year, but I missed too many practices and the coach was too freaked by my condition to let me play in the games, even after my mom yelled at him. Instead, I lifted weights to keep up my strength. Dialysis was supposed to be painless, but sometimes it made me nauseous and stole my appetite. Food could taste metallic. Occasionally my legs would swell. If I didn’t get twelve hours of sleep, I couldn’t function.

My parents kept me on a tight leash after an infection landed me in the hospital the summer after sixth grade. They suggested homeschooling. It made sense, and I was too tired to fight it.

The transplant list never sounded entirely real to me. As a kid who read too many fantasy novels, I imagined an actual list scribbled on parchment. A wizard who used a quill to cross off names would get to mine and twirl his mustache. “Peter Rosenthal-Porter? I don’t think so,” he’d say, and move on to the next name. He was like the Dumbledore of organ donation.