After your hit-and-run you go to the grocery store in a different town. No one knows you there. You can buy plum tomatoes and squeeze lemons and compare the prices of bulgar wheat in a place where no one used to rub your belly. You are grateful that the bus goes to this town.
You are sometimes grateful that you survived. Other people didn’t, so gratitude feels like a mandatory emotion at this point. That’s something you think about as you put your items on the conveyor belt and you wonder if the checkout girl can see these thoughts racing through your mind.
“Are you walking or driving,” the bagger asks with concern. You can tell he takes pride in his job. He tosses the lemons from one hand to the next as he ponders which bag to put them in. He wants to know how heavy the bags should be because a walker needs an even distribution of weight, but a driver can test the limits of the bags.
“I’m taking the bus,” you say because you are going to start telling the truth and you want to see if he can tell that your license has been suspended. You don’t know if your license is suspended forever, that’s not a question you asked. Forever seems too far away.
As you watch the bagger gently place your twelve eggs in the top, VIP section of the grocery bag, cradled between the bread and the chips, you stare at him and in your mind you confess your sins: “I drank while I was pregnant. I got in a car. Someone was crossing the street. Only I made it to the hospital alive.” It becomes a surrendering chant that you say whenever you get a moment to look at a stranger. You don’t apologize because that would let you off the hook slightly and no one, not even in a nonverbal chant, wants to hear you feeling sorry for yourself.
He looks over at you and you wonder if he can feel your chant, but really he is just giving you the groceries that you paid for. He says come again like he’s in an old-timey movie, a person not of this era or reality. He doesn’t know how bad you are.
The person in the crosswalk, the lovely 24-year-old woman whose obituary said that she volunteered and baked and ran marathons, was a kidney donor. Of course she was. And as you were lying unstable in the hospital, they gave you a kidney, not her kidney, but the kidney of another generous person. That person saved your life so that you can now spend the rest of your years thinking about the body on the pavement that you tried to drive past.
You unload your groceries. He really did a magnificent job bagging. If the bagger knew who you were he would have smashed the eggs underneath the milk and jars of whole tomatoes and told you to never come back.
Everyone used to rub your belly and now you are too ashamed to look at any part of your body. You woke up in the hospital with a hangover and you assumed you gave birth, because that was your next planned trip to such a place. You don’t know who hates you more, her family or your family or your husband.
If your baby was going to be a boy it was going to be named Isaac. If your baby had lived he would have been taken away from you. If your baby had lived he would have grown strong in your belly thanks to the kidney.
When you lost the baby, it was just you again. No one gave up their seat for you on the bus because it’s just you. No one felt a moment of sympathy, no one wished you pulled through because it was just you.
You like to imagine that it was her kidney. You don’t know why that is, but you find yourself rubbing your back and saying hello to her kidney. All you have now is the kidney. This is the only thing you speak lovingly to. You were told that this kidney will keep you alive for five years. The countdown begins.
“Good afternoon, Kidney. What shall I make us for lunch today? Are you hungry? I can make you a snack.”
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