Free Let Him Live by Lurlene McDaniel Page B

certainly die. I know I shouldn’t borrow trouble, but that fear always lurks in the back of my mind.”
    Meg swallowed her own taste of fear. “I guess you’re right. Even though he’s sick, even though his own liver’s failing, at least he’s alive.”
    Mrs. Jacoby patted Meg’s hand. “I shouldn’t dump my doubts and fears on you. Forgive me. There are people here at the hospital—psychologists—I should be talking to.”
    “I don’t mind,” Meg said quickly.
    “No, it’s not fair to you. My only excuse is that you’re so genuinely concerned about my son.”
    “I am, Mrs. Jacoby. I care about him so much.” Meg felt her cheeks redden after her impassioned words. Donovan’s mother must think she sounded like a moonstruck child.
    Mrs. Jacoby smiled with understanding. “He had a girlfriend back home. I wish she’d been half as caring and sensitive as you. I’m afraid she really hurt him.”
    “It was
her
loss,” Meg said, realizing she wasn’t Donovan’s girlfriend in the sense Mrs. Jacoby meant. Still, she truly cared about him.
    “I agree. Have you heard anything more about building that special house where parents can stay and be near their kids while they’re being treated here at Memorial?” Donovan’s mother changed the subject. “Believe me, I sure wished for one theother night. I think that cab ride back to the apartment after I learned there would be no transplant was the longest ride I’ve ever taken. All I wanted to do was tuck Brett in and curl up and go to sleep myself, but I couldn’t. We had to traipse all the way back across town first.”
    Meg shook her head. “Sorry … I haven’t heard anything yet.”
    “Oh, well … It is a big undertaking.” She made a face. “Poor choice of words.”
    Undertaking
. Meg caught the meaning. Undertaker. She shivered, even though the playroom was sunny and warm.
    The next day, when Meg went to Donovan’s room, he was sitting up in bed, flipping through TV channels. Seeing him upright and alert caused a rush of relief. “You must be better,” she said, coming inside. “You’re scanning the TV wasteland.”
    He flipped off the screen and held out his hand to her. “I’m better,” he said. “Whatever that means.”
    She took his hand, noticing that his color looked strange—somewhere between yellow and pasty white. But his voice sounded strong and lucid once more. “It means that you’ll be hanging around until another potential liver donor comes along,” she said.
    “I was pretty out of it, wasn’t I?”
    “Do you remember anything?”
    “I remember being awakened in the middle ofthe night by some nurse promising me a wild and crazy time.”
    Meg giggled. “She didn’t lie, did she?”
    “They put me on a gurney and wheeled me down to the operating room. They did a bunch of tests and forced a Krom’s cocktail down me.”
    “What’s that?”
    “The most foul-tasting stuff ever invented by medical science. It’s a decontaminant for your intestinal area, you know—to kill off all the nasty germs lurking inside the body. That way, once you have the transplant, your body has a better chance of accepting the new organ.”
    “Too bad it was for nothing,” Meg said.
    “Yeah … too bad. But, then, I never did have much good luck.”
    She braced herself against a wave of pity for him. She’d learned that patients don’t want pity, they want understanding. “You’ve had some good luck. You met me,” she quipped.
    A smile softened Donovan’s face, and in spite of his gauntness, she felt her pulse quicken. “Okay, so I’ll give you that one.”
    “What else did they do to you?”
    “They gave me a preop shot that sent me off to never-never land, so I was kind of spaced out. I remember my mom coming in to see me. Then I don’t remember anything else for the next twenty-four hours. I just woke up in ICU. It took me a while to figure out that something had gone wrong with the transplant, because I knew