No name.
No photograph.
Only a diagnosis and a question.
Would he proceed?
The mother leaned forward.
“You could have said no.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you think about it?”
The biker was honest.
“For maybe thirty seconds.”
The girl looked offended.
“Thirty seconds?”
“It’s a serious thing.”
“What did you think?”
He smiled.
“Mostly that I hate hospitals.”
She laughed.
Then his expression softened.
“But I also thought somebody’s kid was waiting.”
The mother looked away.
That sentence hit too accurately.
Somebody’s kid.
Her kid.
At that exact time, she had been sleeping upright beside an isolation-room bed because lying down made her feel too far from her daughter.
Her daughter’s immune system had been failing.
Chemotherapy had stripped away the disease and almost everything protecting her from infection.
The mother remembered the physician saying:
“We have a donor.”
She had cried so hard she frightened her daughter.
Across the country, perhaps hundreds of miles away, a man she would never have imagined had simply said yes.
The little girl stirred her milkshake.
“Did it hurt?”
The biker considered.
“They took stem cells from the marrow in my hip.”
“How?”
The mother started.
“You do not need procedural details.”
The biker laughed.
“The doctors did the hard part.”
He told the child only that he had been asleep during the procedure and sore afterward.
“How sore?”
“Like I lost a fight with a very angry staircase.”
The girl smiled.
“You ride motorcycles. You probably fall all the time.”
“I have dignity.”
Her mother said, “You admitted five minutes ago you folded a crane that looked like poultry.”
The biker pointed at her.
“Uncalled for.”
They laughed.
For half an hour, the conversation remained light.
School.
Motorcycles.
The transplant.
The biker’s dog.
The girl’s hatred of peas.
Then the mother asked the question that had been sitting behind everything.
“Did you ever get our letters?”
The biker nodded.
“Every one the registry forwarded.”
Her daughter looked surprised.
“What letters?”
The mother stared.
“You wrote him several.”
“I did?”
“With help.”
The girl thought.
“I don’t remember.”
“You were five.”
The biker smiled.
“I remember.”
The first letter arrived five months after donation.
No names allowed.
Only:
Dear Donor,
Thank you for helping my daughter. She is still recovering, but yesterday she laughed for the first time in weeks. I thought you should know.
The biker had read it inside his truck at a construction site.
Then read it again.
Then locked himself inside the cab because he did not want coworkers asking why a fifty-something-year-old man was crying before breakfast.
The second letter included a drawing.
A little purple stick figure beside a giant blue figure.
The giant had arms extending almost to the ground.
The note beneath it said:
THIS IS ME AND THE PERSON WHO GAVE ME GOOD CELLS.
The biker laughed remembering it.
“I still have that.”