Starry, Starry Night Read online

  His tired gaze softened and he smiled. “Think of it as a graduation. From most favored little daughter to most favored grownup daughter.”

  Melanie laid her cheek against her father’s chest. “I’m right, though, aren’t I, Daddy? Jennifer’s life should count for something, shouldn’t it?” She saw it clearly. Although it was impossible for Jennifer to live, it needn’t be impossible for other babies. By giving her organs to others, Jennifer could, in a way, continue to live through them.

  “You’re right,” he answered. “Everybody’s life should count, regardless of how short it may be.”

  Melanie went to bed that night feeling better than she had since Jennifer’s birth. And standing at her bedroom window, as she gazed up at the stars in the night sky, she wondered if they were as cold and void of life as science surmised. Or were they special places in the vast regions of space where God housed the souls of his little ones?

  Nine

  “Your offer is kind, generous, an act of love and understanding. And yes, infant organs are urgently needed all over the country. Over fifteen hundred babies die each year waiting for transplants. But we can’t accept Jennifer’s organs.” The man who spoke, Mr. Lawrence, was head of organ-donation services at the hospital. Dr. Singh had brought him into the private conference room where Melanie and her parents were gathered late the following morning.

  For a moment Melanie sat staring at Mr. Lawrence in stunned silence, not positive she’d heard him correctly. At breakfast that morning, she and her parents had talked again about giving permission for Jennifer’s organs to be harvested. They were in agreement—it was the only option that made sense in this entire tragedy.

  “I lay awake thinking about it all night,” her mother had said tearfully. “I know it’s the best thing to do.”

  They had hugged each other, then headed for the hospital. Now they were being told they couldn’t do it.

  “But why?” Melanie heard her father ask. “There’s a need, but we can’t help fill it? This is crazy.”

  Mr. Lawrence leaned forward across the table, his expression both kind and sad. “It’s the law, Mr. Barton.”

  “Perhaps I can help explain it,” Dr. Singh offered. “Let’s begin with the legal definition of death. A patient must be declared brain dead before he can be taken off a respirator and his organs removed for transplantation—”

  “But you’ve told us that Jennifer has no brain.” Connie broke into the doctor’s explanation.

  “She has no upper brain, but she has a functioning brain stem. Her heart is beating, her blood is circulating … until her automatic responses cease, technically, she is alive under the law.”

  “But she’s on a respirator. A machine is breathing for her. And you told us that despite the respirator, her heart will fail.”

  “Yes, that is true,” Dr. Singh said.

  “Why can’t you use her organs once she dies?” Melanie’s father asked, looking baffled and frustrated.

  “Because as her organs fail, they begin to deteriorate. Once she dies, her organs also die and therefore are useless for transplantation. Which is also why even if a baby is stillborn, its organs can’t be used.”

  “So you’re saying that you would have had to take her organs the moment she was born in order for them to be used for transplants?”

  “That is correct. For organs to be viable, a physician would have to expedite the anencephalic baby’s death. And that cannot be done.”

  “How confusing,” Melanie’s mother said, her voice flat and emotionless. “I could have aborted her, and that would have been legal. But I can’t give permission for you to help her die quickly so that her organs could be used to save another baby. That would be murder.” She shook her head in confusion. “It makes no sense to me.”

  “Nevertheless, that is the law,” Dr. Singh said.

  Melanie listened carefully, keeping her opinions to herself. She wished she could open the door or a window and breathe fresh air. The air in the room had become stale and heavy, weighted down with words and principles that confused her and felt like lead in her heart.

  “Let me add something,” Mr. Lawrence said, pressing his fingers together. “It’s true that infants such as Jennifer are profoundly compromised by their birth defect, but they are still real live human beings. We can’t destroy them, even though it might bring good to another. Where would we draw the line? Who would decide how much damage is appropriate before a person’s life could be terminated? The mark of an advanced society is how well it treats its very young, its very old, its sick and handicapped.”

  Melanie’s father raised his hand. “Enough. Please, we understand what you’re telling us. We can’t donate Jennifer’s organs.” Frank stood, and so did the others. “Then I guess there’s nothing further to discuss.”

  “Except to say thank you,” Mr. Lawrence said. “Not every family is as caring or as thoughtful as yours. Donating one’s organs is an act of profound giving. I’m only sorry that in this case, we can’t accept the gift you’re offering.”

  “We’d like to see Jennifer now,” Connie said, starting for the door.

  The group left the room, but in the hall, Melanie’s father stopped her. “Did you understand everything that was said, Mellie? It’s important that you do. We’re a family and we’re in this together.”

  Melanie nodded. “He said that Jennifer’s organs can’t be used to help others because technically she’s still alive. And that even after she dies, her organs can’t be used because they’re dying right along with her.”

  “Yes,” her father said, shaking his head. “How tragically sad.”

  What Melanie didn’t say was that now it appeared Jennifer’s brief existence was for nothing. That her short life was without purpose and had absolutely no meaning at all.

  The call from the hospital came at eight o’clock on Christmas Eve. Jennifer’s tiny heart was failing. Melanie and her parents hurried to the hospital and the neonatal ICU. Dr. Singh was already there, gowned and waiting.

  Inside the unit, Jennifer’s incubator had been pushed against a wall along with the machines keeping her alive. Jennifer’s chest moved up and down to the rhythm of the respirator, but the heart monitor told a different story. The green line, once steady and predictable, appeared erratic and frenetic. Jennifer’s heart seemed to be beating itself to death.

  Connie wrung her hands. “She’s suffering! Do something!”

  “She’s in no pain,” Dr. Singh said, “I assure you.”

  “What can we do?” Frank’s voice sounded strained.

  “Let me turn off the respirator,” Dr. Singh said. “It’s time to let her go.”

  Melanie saw her parents look deep into each other’s eyes. Then her mother turned and looked at her. “Is it all right with you, Mellie?”

  Not trusting her voice, Melanie could only nod.

  Dr. Singh opened the incubator, then reached over and shut off the respirator. Jennifer’s chest rose, fell, rose, fell again, then stopped moving. Seconds later, the green line slowed and went flat. The heart monitor let out a piercing whine. Dr. Singh clicked it off, too.

  “Can we hold her?” Connie asked.

  Dr. Singh reached in, untaped the respirator hose from the baby’s mouth, and pulled it out of her throat. He unhooked her IV line and removed the heart-monitor pads from her chest. He lifted the baby out and laid her in Connie’s arms.

  Melanie watched her mother nuzzle Jennifer, whisper something to her, then pass her body to Melanie’s father. He held Jennifer to his cheek, against the stubble of his beard, and kissed her forehead. He looked at Melanie. “You don’t have to hold her if you don’t want to.”

  “I want to.” Melanie was beyond feeling. She was numb, her mind blank, her reflexes on automatic pilot. She took the lifeless body of her sister. Jennifer felt almost weightless, as if her skin were made of paper, her bones of sticks. Her skin was already growing cool, her color turning ashen, her lips and fingertips bluish
. Melanie wondered what color her eyes might have been. “Goodbye, baby sister,” she whispered. “I’ll miss you.”

  Dr. Singh took Jennifer’s body. “She was quite lovely,” he said. “You should be very proud to have given her life.”

  Melanie and her parents had turned to leave when he asked, “Do you want her hat?”

  Melanie did want it. She would put it with her Big Sister Kit from her friends. She’d store it with the family tree chart, and someday, if she ever had children, she would take it out, show it to them, tell them all about her sister—their aunt—and her brief life. “Thank you,” she said, taking the hat from him.

  She rubbed it against her face. It was warm and soft and smelled of Jennifer Lorraine Barton, who had lived only four days, but who had changed the course of all their lives forever.

  Ten

  Melanie sat in the front pew of the darkened church. Recessed spotlights set high in the rafters cast the stone altar in soft, pale yellow. She stared at the altar, at the rows of poinsettias set across the steps, and at the Christmas tree decorated with Christmonds—symbols of the Christian faith.

  Behind the altar, a magnificent stained-glass window rose tall and glowing. In the balcony, the organist was practicing for Christmas morning service. He played “Silent Night,” and the familiar words kept running through Melanie’s head. “Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright.…” She forced them away. Inside her heart, nothing was calm and the world was dark.

  On the red-carpeted steps leading to the altar, Melanie saw pieces of straw from the children’s pageant earlier that evening. The church must have been packed with families coming to see the Sunday-school children perform the annual telling of the Christmas story. When she’d been a child, she often performed in the play while her parents sat beaming in the pews. At this moment, she wished with all her heart she could be a little child again, untouched by sadness and death.

  The music finally ceased and Melanie heard the organist gathering up his things and leaving. Alone. She liked it better this way. She heard the sound of the church door opening and someone’s muffled footsteps coming down the carpeted aisle.

  “Melanie? What are you doing here?”

  Surprised, she looked up and saw Coren. “Jennifer died tonight,” she said.

  Coren sank into the pew beside her. “Oh, no. Oh, Mellie, that’s so sad. I’m really sorry.”

  “She never had a chance, you know.” Melanie twisted a shredded tissue in her hands. “Anyway, Mom and Dad wanted to talk to Pastor Hitchings, to make arrangements for Jennifer’s funeral. He told them to come by his office tonight. They’re talking to him now. I didn’t want to go in with them.” Melanie looked at her friend, realizing that it was late on Christmas Eve and that Coren should be home with her family. “Why are you here?”

  “My brother left his watch behind the preacher’s podium and Mom was afraid someone would step on it. He forgot to take it off for the pageant. He was an angel.” She rolled her eyes. “Talk about miscasting … anyway, his teacher noticed it just before he was to go onstage and suggested that perhaps the angels weren’t wearing watches when they made their big announcement to the shepherds, so he took it off and put it—” Coren interrupted herself. “I’m sorry, I got carried away. I didn’t mean to.”

  In spite of her sadness, Melanie smiled and waved aside Coren’s apology. “Remember the year I got to be Mary?”

  “Yup, and I had to play Herod because we didn’t have enough boys in the class. I was so jealous of you. Mary is the starring role.”

  “It must have been hard on her … on Mary, that is. You know, to go all that way to Bethlehem, and not have reservations anywhere, and to end up having her baby in a stable. No neonatal ICU if anything went wrong.” Melanie sighed. “But at least she got to watch her baby grow up.”

  “Sure, Mary got to watch Jesus grow up, but she had to watch him die, too. Remember? She went to his execution.”

  “We watched Jennifer die.” Fresh tears filled Melanie’s eyes.

  Coren shook her head. “It’s just too sad. Whenever I think about it, all I do is cry.” She eased out of the pew. “My dad’s waiting in the car. I’d better find that watch and go.” She got down on all fours behind the podium, feeling around on the carpet. “Here it is. No one’s stepped on it yet.” She stopped next to Melanie on her way out. “Will you call me about the funeral? I’d like to come, and I know the others would, too. We don’t know what to do or say, but we’re your friends, you know.”

  Melanie nodded. Coren said goodbye, then hurried away. Again Melanie was alone. Minutes later her parents emerged from the pastor’s office and sat beside her, seemingly not in a hurry to leave. Her mother said, “Pastor Hitchings said you could come talk to him if you ever want to.”

  “What’s the point?” Melanie asked. “Talking won’t change anything.”

  “It may make you feel better. I know it made me and your dad feel better.”

  “Yes, it helped,” her father echoed.

  “When’s the funeral?” Melanie asked.

  “On the twenty-seventh. We’ll go pick out a casket the day after Christmas.”

  From an incubator to a casket in four days, Melanie thought. Jennifer had come and gone without ever seeing sunlight, or hearing music, or smelling a Christmas tree. “Four days doesn’t seem like much of a life, does it, Mom?”

  “Four days,” her mother repeated. “Was that all? It seemed like a lifetime.”

  Melanie shook her head. “Not to me.”

  “Maybe because I experienced a lifetime of emotion in those four days.”

  Melanie’s father nodded in agreement. “I know I did.”

  “I still don’t get it,” Melanie said. “Why was she even born?”

  “Why are any of us born?” her father asked.

  “I’m glad she was born,” her mother said. “I got to hold her and kiss her goodbye. I wouldn’t have missed that part for anything. She died in my arms, surrounded by us—her family.”

  Melanie realized that was true. They’d been together as a family through all of it—her mother’s pregnancy, Jennifer’s birth, Jennifer’s death. Melanie had experienced the cycle of life in a way that took most people seventy or eighty years. She saw, too, that as long as any of them were still alive, Jennifer would be remembered. And the memory of her brief life would always be theirs to share. For they were a family. And what remained of their family was different, changed, somehow made bigger, stronger, deeper by Jennifer’s existence.

  “We should be going,” Melanie’s father said.

  “Yes,” her mother said. “I want to go home.”

  Melanie rose with her parents, and slowly the three of them walked up the aisle, into the vestibule, and out into the frigid night air. The world lay silent, a thin crust of snow on the church lawn sparkling in the moonlight. “Mom, Dad, we loved her, didn’t we?”

  “Very much,” Connie said.

  “More than I ever imagined possible,” Frank added.

  “Me too,” Melanie said. “I’ll never forget how much we all loved her. And if she’d never existed, we would never have loved her. We loved her because she belonged to us. To our family.”

  Melanie stepped between her parents, took their hands, and felt the warmth and comfort of their touch through her gloves. Together the three of them walked to the car, keeping a reverent silence in the starry, starry night.

  Book Two

  LAST DANCE

  One

  “Thanks for coming with me. You’re a lifesaver.”

  “It’s no big deal,” Brenda Scolari assured her friend, Julie. “But I sure wish you could find another place to meet this new dream guy of yours. The hospital isn’t exactly the world’s most romantic setting, you know.”

  “True,” Julie Hanover said, flinging open her car door and stepping out into the parking lot of the huge Atlanta hospital. “But you’ve got to admit, coming to visit my uncle is the perfect cover.”
<
br />   Brenda dutifully tagged alongside her friend into the entrance that led to the physical therapy wing, where Julie’s uncle was chief of the department. It was also the place where Alan—Julie’s heartthrob—worked. Alan was a freshman at nearby Emory University, so Julie rarely got to see him unless she came to the hospital. In Brenda’s opinion, as great as her friend Julie was, she was only a high-school junior like herself. So why would Alan care to get involved? He had a college campus full of girls!

  “You couldn’t find one guy in our high school to like?” Brenda asked. “I mean, you’ve got nearly a thousand to choose from.”

  “The same thousand you’ve looked over,” Julie reminded her. “You know all the good ones are taken.”

  Brenda couldn’t argue that point. She’d thought her junior year was going to be spectacular, but her steady boyfriend, Tyler, had moved away over the summer. Now she was right back in the dating game. And pickings were slim.

  Julie skidded to a stop in front of her uncle’s office and knocked on the door.

  “Come on in,” his voice called. When they entered, he smiled, put down the file he was reading, and said, “Well, if it isn’t my favorite niece and her best friend.”

  “Hey, Uncle Paul.” Julie kissed him on the cheek. “Just stopped by to say hi.”

  Paul Hanover’s eyes twinkled. “This is the third visit in nine days. I can’t believe it’s me you’re really coming to see.”

  “Of course, it’s you,” Julie said with wide-eyed innocence.

  “You can’t fool me. I know there’s more to your visits.” Paul glanced over at Brenda. “Do you have a crush on somebody here, too?”

  Brenda felt her cheeks grow warm. She hated being put on the spot.

  “Oh, all right. It’s Alan Boyd I’m coming to see,” Julie said sheepishly. “But you know Mom wouldn’t let me drive across town without a good reason. And when Brenda comes, it’s easier to talk Mom into giving me the car keys.”