The Winner's Game(104)
Emily
WHERE HAVE YOU been?” I ask Cade as soon as he comes into the room. I am reminded that Ann is asleep on her bed, so in a quieter—but firm—voice, I add, “Your father is out looking for you right now. You’re in big trouble when he gets back. You’ve been gone over an hour.”
“I was looking for…something.” The way he says it tells me there’s definitely more to this story.
“What ‘something’?”
“You’ll be mad.”
“I promise I won’t.”
“Can I ask a question first?”
I wave him over to sit next to me. “Anything.”
“OK. Does God pick and choose?”
“Pick and choose what?”
“People. You know…who lives and dies.”
“Well…yes, I suppose he does. Why do you ask?”
“’Cuz you’re always saying that life’s not fair, and people dying is like the unfairest thing of all. But you also say that whatever happens, we have to trust God, because he has a plan that we don’t always understand. So…maybe life’s not really unfair at all. Maybe God is unfair.”
His comment hits me like a load of bricks. I pull him closer, wishing he didn’t have to witness all of this unfairness in our lives right now. There’s so much I want to say to him, but as I look at my daughters lying peacefully on what could very well be their deathbeds, the words are slow coming.
Like a flash before my eyes, I am reminded of the story I told the kids about the train engineer who had to choose between saving his own son and saving a whole trainload of strangers. With unbelievable grace, he chose to save the strangers on the train, sacrificing his only son in the process. As the image dissipates in my mind, a strange sense of peace courses through me. Before, when I first told the kids about it, I was so sure that I could never do that—never pull the lever that would send a train plowing into my own little child while I stood helpless and watched. But now, seeing both of my daughters side-by-side on their beds, is this so much different? What if instead of lying in bed, one of my daughters was on the train and one was on the tracks, and I knew that either Ann or Bree had to die so the other could live? Could I make that call? How on earth could I choose which one should live?
Or what if that trainload of people weren’t strangers to me at all? What if they were my family? What if Dell and Cade and Ann were on the train, and it was Bree alone on the tracks?
It would still be unbelievably hard…but the choice would be clear.
Through a fresh round of tears, I tell my son, “I was wrong, Cade. I’ve been wrong all along. Life is fair, it just doesn’t always seem so in the moment. And God is fair too, though I’ll admit he has to make some very tough choices every single day.” I squeeze a little harder, until he finally resists.
“Maybe you’re right,” he says at length, “Because he did finally find a donor for Ann.” He pauses and sighs. “But I doubt that guy’s family is going to think it’s very fair.”
Now I sit straight up and square his face to mine. “What are you talking about?”
“I went down to watch for ambulances in the emergency room. I saw them bring in a dead body, and they said he was a donor.”
“You sure they said ‘donor’ and not ‘goner’?”
“Uh-huh.”
My anxiety is shooting through the roof! “Well, that doesn’t mean—Cade, just because someone is an organ donor doesn’t mean their genetic makeup will be a good match for Ann.”
“But it would be cool, right?”
I glance at Ann, then at Bree. “Yeah. The coolest. But don’t get your hopes up, kiddo.”
“Yeah, I know. But I’m kinda pretty sure, Mom. After they took the dead guy away, I came back upstairs, and I was passing the nurses down by their little station and I overheard them talking. Someone mentioned Ann’s name and she said they just got a heart in that’ll work.”
I can’t breathe.
If my pirate-child is playing some sort of a joke, I may never forgive him.
“Cade, are you sure?”
He nods. “I bet they’ll be here any minute.”
My own heart leaps when the door flies open thirty seconds later. Only it isn’t the nurses or a doctor. It’s Dell. “Oh good, he’s back,” he says, sounding at once relieved and excited. Then his eyes light up as bright as they will go. “You guys are never going to believe this…”
My face is suddenly dripping with the happiest tears I’ve ever cried. “They found a heart,” I tell him.