When she wondered why he would do such a thing, Jeremy said he had asked him the same thing. Tristen replied, “For the LULZ.”
Jeremy told her what that meant too.
—
Derek saw an opportunity.
When he learned of Tristen’s improbable donor status, he immediately brought to the doctors’ (and Larissa’s) attention a recent conversation with his son in which Tristen had expressed “his wishes” that Derek be given his heart “should anything ever happen.” Overamped and high on painkillers, he gilded the lily by saying the boy had even written a letter to that effect.
After taking Derek’s dictation by phone, Beth printed out the informal “instrument” and brought it to the CCU. (He made her do it over again because she spelled Tristen with an a, as in “I, Tristan Dunnick…”) He told her to initial it but she had qualms so Derek hastily scrawled a TD. He kept telling her no one was going to bust him for forgery. Jumping the donor queue was a victimless crime (kind of), a noble white-lie fraud perpetrated to save a life. Nobody in their right mind would question the “document” except maybe Larissa and even she would see the pointlessness of crying foul. They were going to take everything else — lungs, liver, kidneys, and corneas — what difference would it make where the heart wound up?
He panicked on realizing that in his haste, he hadn’t factored in whether Tristen was a donor match. Then Derek remembered what the doctor said weeks ago: “You’re a universal recipient.”
Anyone’s blood would do.
—
Larissa saw an opportunity as well.
She told Jeremy they couldn’t afford the thirty-five-hundred-dollar cremation fee — a lie, because the Neptune Society was taking care of it, but she knew he wouldn’t probe. He was so tortured by guilt over the car and the driving lessons that he happily gave her ten thousand.
Larissa sat alone in the viewing room. He died on Tuesday and now it was Sunday. Tomorrow, the body would be burned at a facility in Van Nuys. Tessa, her only real friend, was in Cabo. Rafaela was full-on camping at the hospital with her dad. When she learned of her brother’s death, the force of the girl’s grief took Larissa by surprise.
In the cool stillness, her son on the other side of the room, she regretted not having asked Jeremy to come. It would have been nice to have had another human being there who loved him. Tristen had been so unloved in this life, or loved improperly, yes, that was it, been so poorly, wrongly, egregiously loved, unworthy of his roving, prickly, lionhearted, rebellious, brutally loyal and generous nature. I should have left Derek when I was pregnant with him. Why didn’t I leave? Or at least why couldn’t I have just shut my effing mouth? She’d confessed her affair in a moment of psychobabble fervor and Human Potentialist delirium, after having convinced herself that people—family—could forgive, that anything could be healed by the truth, and love only grew stronger when secrets couldn’t thrive.
Here was the truth: telling Derek that Tristen wasn’t his had killed her son as surely as that telephone pole. The police said he’d probably been reaching for a dropped cell phone when he crashed, and Larissa had done a little investigating of her own. Beth (who fled to Portland right after Derek’s surgery, this time for good) had already shared with her that Derek was obsessing over health insurance that night, trying to reach his son. Derek later told Larissa that when the two finally spoke, “the kid was insanely pissed,” he wasn’t even sure about what, because Tristen “wasn’t making sense. He just started screaming at the top of his lungs. He got so crazy he hung up on me — loaded, no doubt. Toxicology will establish.” But the evidence showed that he hadn’t hung up on Derek at all, merely fumbled his cell during the rage-out; when he tried to retrieve it, he lost control of the car. Larissa wondered what he could have been so mad about and kept pressing her ex. What did you SAY? What did you TELL HIM, Derek, that he got so ANGRY about and Derek just said Nothing! I said Nothing! but she kept pressing until finally he said uh, well, maybe it was something about where he came from, you know, maybe I think it was something about where he might have come from and when she said what are you talking about Derek said uhm maybe it was something about who his father was and Larissa said what the fuck do you mean what did you SAY what did you TELL him and Derek finally blurted out that the kid maybe somehow learned the “reality”—ferociously snarling the word — learned what the reality was and she asked her ex point-blank did you tell him and Derek said NO, I never told him, he was super-emphatic about it, maybe too emphatic, he said why the fuck would I tell him then reiterated that he never told him EVER, and not while they were on the phone either, and besides, he wouldn’t have been able to even if he wanted anyway because he couldn’t get a fucking word in edgewise, not that he didn’t feel like telling him, the thought always crossed his mind (though not on that fateful night), but even if he wanted to he would never have had a fucking chance because the kid was foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog. None of what he was saying made sense to Larissa, all this shit about wanting to tell him but not telling him, none of it added up, it was beyond passive-aggressive, it was just more bullshit and she didn’t believe him, not for one second. So she just kept saying Oh my God while Derek did his usual number of if you never wanted me to know then you should never have done what you did and he would never have fucking been born! and of course both of them thought of the hacking thing right away, that Tristen might have hacked his way into finding out the reality of his bastardhood, Derek remembering the email he sent to Beth a while back, one would think he wouldn’t have because of the state he was in during its composition… he’d never tried to retrieve or restore the damning note or whatever, hadn’t looked at it since, not once, but knew the content was incriminating. No way would he have hacked into my shit. The kid told me he’d never do that, my shit was sacrosanct, and I believe him. Believed him… That stoned email moment with Beth was literally the first time he ever “talked” about it, the reality of Tristen, or even shared it with anyone—anyone (except Father Wayne) — but of course he wouldn’t divulge that to Larissa. For a nanosecond he even thought maybe Beth told Tristen as some kind of payback but no, too improbable, Beth could be a bitch but she wasn’t malicious. Had a good heart. Larissa wracked her brain some more about Tristen hacking his way into the truth but knew there wouldn’t have been anything to hack into, not on her end anyway, knew she had never breathed a word on the topic, not a drunk-text, not a bare-her-heart email, not a single poignant, bitter journal entry that she hadn’t burned long ago… and confident as well that it was one of those totally taboo things that Derek would never write or speak to anyone about, it was all too painful for him, too shameful for his fucking elephantine ego, not just that he’d been cuckolded but that he’d kept the boy in the fold and family after knowing what he knew: that Tristen was of another man’s blood. Instead of giving him props for being nobly compassionate, his sick junkie editor friends would have called him out as the ultimate Ashley Madison’d Blue Angel pussy. Then suddenly she thought she knew… of course! — Pastor Wayne! It would had to have been him — the man Derek confided in during his/their darkest hours — and so she asked Derek if Tristen ever talked to Pastor Wayne or if he thought they’d have maybe been in touch but Derek got testy and said how the fuck would I know and she said Oh my God then rather bombastically announced that maybe she’d reach out to the man herself then immediately couldn’t bear the thought of it, even the fantasy she couldn’t bear, no, just now she couldn’t bear the thought of anything—