The call came around ten in the morning, and for a brief moment, after the call ended, I thought about calling my big sister and telling her. 

No, I can’t,  I thought and slowly released my held breath. 

The black and silver cordless phone trembled in my hands, and I carefully rested it beside me.

“Oh Lord,” I said, shaking my head, and the floodgates opened.

I cried, and my almost middle-aged body rocked back and forth. I hugged myself and continued to cry, and when no more tears came, my exhausted body slumped in the light blue upholstered chair I sat in.

I was cooking chow mien in the apartment’s kitchen when the phone, sitting on its base in the living room, rang. I quickly washed my hands and dried them on the peach table towel hanging on the cream door of the twenty-four-inch stove that came with the apartment. I hurried to the living room and snatched it off the base.

Who even uses landlines these days? The whole rave is about mobility, and if you do not have a cellphone, you are out of the loop and placed in something entirely different. What’s the something? Who knows, but what’s certain is that I’m out of a group, and I wish I could say that I didn’t care, but I do because I once had a cellphone, but I gave it up about two years ago. Why? The cel reception in the area of the city where I live is practically nonexistent. So, I had to give it up. I wish someone had told me how many drop calls, but a lot more blank screens, I would face. Nevertheless…

“Hello?” I answered into the receiver.

It was one of my nieces, and she had been trying to contact me for over two hours.

“I was out doing some errands, and when I returned home, I didn’t check my phone. What’s up?”

It was about my sister and another niece, her youngest of two children. There was a car accident, and they were in the hospital now.

“Aunty, it is not looking good,” my niece said, and before long, the stove was turned off, the door locked, and I was in the waiting room of the hospital with other family members.

We eventually got the news that my niece was stable and the next twenty-four hours were critical. My sister, on the other hand, was not looking so good, and even the next five minutes were not guaranteed.

They made it through the twenty-four-hour period and then the seventy-two hours with a family member always in the waiting room. We have a large family, but my mom passed away three years ago from ovarian cancer.

A few more days passed, and my niece would soon leave the hospital, but my sister, well, she was not. She needed a new kidney because they found out that one kidney was not working and the other one was damaged in the accident.

“Where do I sign up?” I asked the doctor, even before my brother-in-law could speak, and my dad, who was also in the doctor’s office hearing about the update on his daughter’s health, began sobbing.

I hugged him, trying to console him.

“It’s okay, Daddy,” I said, “We will not lose her too. She’s my big sister, and so she can have one of my kidneys.”

My dad cried harder.

I quickly found out that donating a kidney was not as easy as I thought. I thought I would go into surgery; the doctors would take out my kidney and place it into my sister’s body, and that was that. I was wrong.

First, I needed to be evaluated to see if I was a match. The possibility of us matching was only about twenty-five percent, whereas I took it for granted we would match one hundred percent because I was her sister.

A blood test and an overall assessment of my health were required, and after the surgery, if I were to match, I would be back to my usual routine in about three weeks.

I was ready to take the steps to help my sister, but her husband and my dad, who had stopped crying but whose eyes were still red and looking tortured, exchanged a glance.

What was that? I wondered, but my thoughts immediately went to “What floor is the blood test department on?”

My brother-in-law had his blood taken first, and then I followed. I did the paperwork I needed to do and went to see my sister, who was hooked up to machines and was in an induced coma. I spent some time with my niece too and could not wait for the doctor to discharge her.

My other niece drove my dad home, but before he left, he wanted me to stop by the home he and my mom shared for over forty years, and so I did.

When I left my dad’s home that night, I felt empty but still full of love. I wanted to cry, but I did not know why, but tears would not come. I drove home but could not sleep, although, surprisingly, I ate three large slices of pizza, a medium-sized bowl of salad, and a glass of water. 

After forty-six years of my birth, my dad revealed that my older sister, who was also my best friend, was not my biological sister. My mom, wanting to help her best friend and husband at the time and for financial gain, became a surrogate for their baby. However, while the sperm was her friend’s husband’s, the egg was from an unknown woman.

When my mom was carrying the baby for about six months, her friend got pregnant after an extramarital affair, and she ended her marriage. She later emigrated to another Caribbean island and married the man she had the affair with.

The ex-husband turned to drinking, but by the time I was born, he was in recovery, but before he began drinking, he asked my parents if they would adopt his daughter and give her a good home. They eventually agreed, and the man I knew as my father’s best friend was my sister’s biological father. We called him uncle, and both my sister and I loved him the same way we loved our parents’ siblings. 

Shortly before my mom died, she revealed these things to my sister, and I finally understood the glance between my father and brother-in-law.

“But why wouldn’t my sister tell me? She has known this for at least two years.” I asked my dad.

“Because you love her without question because she is your big sister. She’s afraid you would not love her the same way if you found out,” my dad replied tearfully.

“Is that why you guys never told us before?” I asked.

He nodded.

“And did her love for you guys change?” I asked.

“Yes, but she loves us more instead of less. I don’t understand it, but she loved us even more.”

The tears were knocking then, but I tightened my heart because I thought the chance of giving my sister a kidney was at least twenty-five percent, but now it was zero! I expressed this thought to my dad, but he said that strangers were also exact matches, and I could be that match.

False hope, I thought fearfully, but he was my dad, and he did not want to lose his daughter, especially after losing his wife not too long ago.

Sometime around three in the morning, I finally drifted off to sleep, and after washing up, I sat in the living room, willing the phone to ring. The hospital said it would call to give me the results of my test in the morning. 

I sat there waiting, trying to digest what my father revealed the night before. I thought my sister’s love could increase for our parents, but she’s afraid that mine would decrease for her. How could I do anything else but love her?

The phone rang, and I received the good news.

Thank you, Lord, I prayed, getting up from the chair. I needed to get ready because I was expected at the hospital in the next hour.

The End