The test results came back nine days later.
Dr. Patel called me at work. I was cleaning a patient’s teeth. I had to take my gloves off and step into the hallway.
“Mrs. Cole,” she said. “I have your HLA typing results.”
I leaned against the wall.
“There’s about a twenty-five percent chance a full sibling is a perfect match,” Dr. Patel said. “For a half-sibling, it’s lower. Much lower. We don’t usually see it.”
“I understand,” I said. My voice was shaking. “I’m not a match. That’s okay. I knew it was a long shot—”
“Mrs. Cole,” Dr. Patel said. “You’re a ten out of ten.”
I slid down the wall.
All the way to the floor. In the hallway of Lakewood Family Dentistry. In my scrubs.
“A ten out of ten,” I whispered.
“A perfect match,” Dr. Patel said. “Every single marker. I’ve been doing this for nineteen years. I’ve seen it with half-siblings maybe twice.” She paused. “Your brother is a very lucky man.”
The transplant was on December twelfth.
I spent two days at Hillman Cancer Center getting injections to boost my stem cells. Then four hours hooked up to a machine that drew out my blood, separated the stem cells, and put the rest back in.
It didn’t hurt much. My bones ached. I was tired.
Mom sat next to me the whole time. Knitting.
A baby blanket. Yellow. With ducks.
“Who’s that for?” I asked.
She smiled.
“Lucy’s going to have a baby,” she said. “In June. Sam’s granddaughter. My great-granddaughter.”
She kept knitting.
“Margaret would want me to do the ducks,” she said.
They gave Sam my stem cells the next morning.
They come in a bag. Like a blood transfusion. Dark red. They hung it on an IV pole and dripped it into his chest catheter.
It took an hour.
I sat on one side of his bed. Mom sat on the other. Carol stood at the window.
Sam watched the bag drip.
“That’s you,” he said to me. “That’s actually you. Going into me.”
“That’s me.”
He looked at me.
“Sixty-three years,” he said. “Sixty-three years I didn’t know you existed. And now part of you is going to be inside me for the rest of my life.”
“However long that is,” I said.
“However long that is,” he agreed.
He reached over and took my hand.
He reached over with the other hand and took Mom’s.
And we sat there, the three of us, holding hands, watching the bag drip.
It’s been ten months.
Sam’s in remission.
His blood type changed. Did you know that happens? After a stem cell transplant? He was O positive. Now he’s A positive.
Like me.
“I’ve got your blood,” he told me on the phone in March. “Literally. My doctor says I’m basically half Annie now.”
“God help you,” I said.
He laughed.
His hair grew back in April.
Dark. Curly.
Like mine.
Mom’s gained back thirty-two of the forty-one pounds.
She’s baking again. Cinnamon rolls every Saturday. Apple pie every Sunday. Banana bread whenever a banana gets a brown spot.
She wears her own cardigans again. The ones that fit. Not Dad’s old sweaters.
She hasn’t missed a Sunday dinner since November.
And now, every other Sunday, there are more chairs at the table.
Sam and Carol drive up from Pittsburgh. Two hours and fifteen minutes. They come for Sunday dinner. Pot roast or roast chicken or meatloaf.
Sometimes Jenna comes too. With Lucy and Max. Lucy’s baby was born in June. A boy. They named him Daniel.
After Danny Reilly. The boy from Plum Street who went down with the Thresher in 1963 and never knew he had a son.
Mom held him at the christening. In the yellow blanket with the ducks.
She cried so hard Father Mike had to wait.
Dave and Sam watch the Steelers-Browns game together. They yell at each other. They’re both terrible losers.
Tyler and Jenna figured out they’re both into the same podcast about true crime. They text constantly.
Grace, my daughter, the nursing student, asked Sam if she could interview him for a paper. About being a stem cell recipient. She got an A.
And Mom sits at the head of the table.
In her own cardigan. Pink. With pockets full of tissues and butterscotch candies.
With both of her children.
And she cuts the pie.
Ten slices now. Not eight.
She always gives Sam the biggest one.
“You were the first,” she says. “First one gets the biggest slice.”
I don’t mind.
I’ve had fifty-four years of the biggest slice.
Last Sunday, after dinner, after the pie, after Dave and Sam went into the living room to yell at the football game, Mom and I washed dishes together at her kitchen sink.
She was washing. I was drying. Like always.
“Annie,” she said.
“Yeah, Mom.”
“Do you know what I thought about? In the motel? In Erie? For those three nights?”
I shook my head.
“I thought about Sister Agnes,” Mom said. “Taking him out of my arms. On the third day. And I thought about what she said to me.”
“What did she say?”
Mom stopped washing. She held a plate under the running water.
“She said, June, the kindest thing you can do for this boy is let him go and never look back. Pretend he never happened. It’s better for everyone.”
She turned off the water.
“I believed her for sixty-three years,” Mom said. “I pretended he never happened. I never looked back. Not once. Not even when I wanted to so badly I couldn’t breathe.”
She looked at me.
“And it wasn’t better for everyone,” she said quietly. “It was worse. For me. For him. For you. For all of us.”
She picked up a dish towel. She dried her hands.
“Secrets don’t protect anybody, Annie,” she said. “They just make everybody lonely.”
I put the plate I was drying in the cupboard.
I looked out the kitchen window. At the backyard. At Dad’s old maple tree. At the bird feeder.
“Mom,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”
“Anything.”
“Why Margaret?” I said. “Of all the lies you could have told me. Why did you say you were visiting Margaret?”
Mom was quiet for a long time.
“Because she was the only one who was there,” she said finally. “In the laundry room at St. Brigid’s. Folding sheets. Knitting ducks. Crying together every night.” She swallowed. “She was the only person in my whole life who knew both of my children existed.”
She looked at me.
“And I thought, if I said her name,” Mom said, “if I told you I was going to see Margaret, it would be the truth. In a way. Because I was going to see the only other person she ever knew about.”
She smiled.
“I wanted her to come with me,” Mom said. “Even though she was gone. I wanted my best friend there when I finally met my son.”
I keep the black suitcase in my closet now.
Sam told me to keep it. He said he’s not going to any more science teacher conferences. He retired in June. He says he wants to spend the time he has left getting to know his family.
The leather luggage tag is still on the handle.
SAMUEL J. REINER.
But underneath, Mom tied something else to it.
A little pink ribbon.
The same pink ribbon from her blue bag. The one that broke. In Room 612. On the day she found her son.
She said she wanted it on the suitcase that brought her home.
And in the bottom of the suitcase, wrapped in tissue paper, is the little silver Canon camera.
I charged the battery.
There are more than four pictures on it now.
There’s Sam’s first Sunday dinner. Sam and Dave yelling at the TV. Sam holding baby Daniel in the yellow blanket. Sam and me at the Hillman Cancer Center on transplant day, both bald-headed in solidarity, because I shaved my head the night before. Mom laughing so hard she had to sit down.
But I still look at the first four sometimes.
Mom and Sam in Room 612. Holding hands. Crying.
The yellow blanket with ducks.
The family around the bed. A little girl hugging my mother’s waist.
And the last one.
HI ANNIE. I’M SAM. I’M YOUR BROTHER. I’D REALLY LIKE TO MEET YOU.
(PLEASE HURRY)
I did hurry.
It took me two hours and fifteen minutes and a stop at Cracker Barrel.
It took my mother sixty-three years.
But we both got there.
People ask me sometimes how I feel about it. About my mother lying to me. About keeping a brother secret for my entire life. About Margaret. About the black suitcase.
They expect me to be angry.
I tell them the truth.
My mother was seventeen years old. Her boyfriend was dead at the bottom of the Atlantic. Everybody she knew told her she was a disgrace. They took her baby out of her arms on the third day and told her to pretend he never existed.
So she did.
For sixty-three years, she carried it alone. Under her sweaters. Under her pie crusts. Under her Sunday dinners.
And when she finally found him again, and he needed her, she was so scared she stopped eating for five months.
She lost forty-one pounds hiding the truth from me.
And then a man she’d held for three days in 1963 put a camera in a borrowed suitcase and said, If you can’t find the words, maybe these will help.
She couldn’t find the words.
So her son found them for her.
HI ANNIE.
I’M SAM.
I’M YOUR BROTHER.
That’s all it took.
Four photographs.
And a yellow blanket with ducks.
THE END..!
