No Good Deed - Marie Sexton Page 0,75
you feel up to seeing them now?”
Jonas looked at Charlie, wanting somebody else to answer for him. He was tempted to say no. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see them. He wasn’t doing this for them. But then he thought about Shelly. About how grateful he would have been if somebody had been there to give her a new lease on life. “Sure.”
The couple came in, both of them with tears running down their cheeks. The woman was crying so hard, she could hardly speak, overwhelmed with relief because her son was getting the kidney he needed. After two years on dialysis, his life expectancy had been only another two or three years. Now, his chances of seeing his eleventh birthday were higher than they’d ever been. He could get his driver’s license when he turned sixteen. He’d have a chance to attend his senior prom. He might someday walk down the aisle. A hundred possibilities that had seemed impossible only a week or two earlier now lay ahead of him, all because of Jonas.
“What can we ever do to repay you?” the father asked.
“Here.” Jonas handed the picture of him and Shelly to the sobbing mother. “Keep this, please. This is my sister, Shelly. She was on the transplant list when she died. And she’s the one I want you to remember. Not me.”
Shortly afterward, the nurse shooed the parents out of the room.
“Okay,” she said to Jonas. “Here we go.”
“Can Charlie come?”
She shook her head. “I’m afraid not, but he can be there the minute you wake up.”
Charlie kissed him on the forehead. “See you soon.”
Jonas gulped. “I hope so.”
The hallways seemed to swing around him as they wheeled the gurney out of the curtained room. This time, he noticed the other patients around him. The hallway was lined with curtained cubicles like his—some with the curtains opened, some with them closed. All these people, waiting just like him for some kind of surgery. He’d been so scared on his way in, he hadn’t seen them.
The anesthesia nurse walking next to him patted a syringe, visible in the chest pocket of his white coat. “I have a little cocktail here for you. You’re going to feel like you slammed three margaritas at the Rio.”
Jonas closed his eyes as the nurse inserted it into his IV. This one hit fast too, making him feel like he was floating, his whole body seeming to shiver in and out of existence. Jonas almost laughed. “Those are some good margaritas, Doc.”
“No hangover in the morning either.”
They wheeled him into another room, stopping him next to another gurney. The boy lying on it seemed tiny in that bed made for adults. This was the boy who was about to kiss dialysis goodbye, thanks to Jonas.
“We thought you two should meet,” the nurse said. “This is Bryce.”
Bryce was all smiles, as if he was headed to a party rather than surgery. Was he doped to the gills like Jonas, or did they skip the Ativan and margaritas for ten-year-olds? Jonas asked the first question that came to his mind. “Are you scared?”
The boy shook his head, still smiling. “I’m going to play baseball.”
Did he mean after this? Had he not been able to play before? Or was he talking about something bigger? Maybe he dreamed of playing in the Majors. Maybe it was only a little boy blurting out what he wanted to be when he grew up—a fireman, an astronaut, a pro ball player.
It didn’t matter.
“Good for you,” Jonas said.
His fear was gone. Whether it was all the drugs coursing through his system, or whether the logic of “doctors perform surgery every day and stuff rarely goes wrong” had finally soaked in, or whether it was only Bryce and his grateful parents, Jonas didn’t know and didn’t care.
This was what he’d come here to do, and it was going to be fine.
They wheeled him into the operating room and spent a few minutes getting everything situated.
“Are you ready?” somebody asked him.
“I am.”
“Nothing to worry about. The next thing you know, you’ll be waking up,” the anesthesiologist said. “Try counting backwards from ten.”
Jonas didn’t even get to nine.
Chapter 22
The nurse directed Charlie back to the waiting room. The surgery would take anywhere from three to five hours. Charlie wished he’d thought to bring a book to read, but he’d been so focused on Jonas that morning, he’d forgotten to grab one.
He was more than a bit surprised to find Warren, Gray, and Phil