She decided to tell him on his birthday, more as an instrument of procrastination than ceremony. Maturity wasn’t an issue – Justin no doubt had been capable of digesting the news five years ago, when he built his own telescope and taught himself conversational Spanish. Martha half expected him to tell her he’d already figured it out. That would be a relief. It would be far better than the response she feared, which was disappointment and possibly anger. Stoic Justin had amazing self-control and she hadn’t seen him truly angry since he was a small child, but this might be the kind of news that could set him off. If not the news itself, the fact that she had been keeping secrets from him. If she waited any longer it might just make the inevitable tantrum even harder to control.
Not that she could take him in a confrontation even now. Justin had grown taller than she and no longer looked like the runt of his class. He had more friends now, oddball types, admittedly, but they weren’t all the same kind of oddballs. They were nerds and jocks and stoners and band kids who, for some reason, were all drawn to her son. He was more popular with girls than he had been, especially smart girls, but the fact that he was three years younger than everyone else in the senior class made him pretty much off limits as far as dating went. He had the kind of quiet charisma that would make him a star as an adult, she was convinced, but it was lost on all but a few of his high school peers.
He’ll show them, she thought. One day he’ll show them all what he’s made of.
He had opened his presents – mostly books Martha couldn’t read for three pages without falling asleep. Michel Foucault was his latest obsession, and she had found some fine used hardcovers. Justin didn’t enjoy paperbacks to nearly the same degree. He liked to grip a book with both hands, as if the knowledge were entering through his fingers instead of his eyes.
“There’s something you should know,” she said, and motioned for him to come off the floor and sit next to her on the couch, where she could grab his arms if they started to flail, or wrap her elbows around an ankle if he started to flee. Then she told him, without much preface but with a brief rationalization having to do with heredity (which she knew he understood) and with Huntington’s disease (which had taken his grandmother and which would probably take her someday), and in the end she said she hoped the news didn’t make him unhappy because a natural-born son wouldn’t have been him and it was him whom she loved, him she couldn’t imagine life without.
Justin wanted to know about the procedure: where had it been done, how had it been done, who else knew? Does Dr. Keith know? He asked about the donor and Martha explained that he was dead, but that he had been a good boy who lived out east and he had died in an accident when he was very young, but in death he had given three very important gifts – his eyes to a blind person, his liver to a sick person, and a single blood cell to your father and me so that we could have you.
Justin could tell she was nervous, and he calmed her. He wasn’t upset. He was glad that she had told him. Did his father know she was going to tell him today? He did? Well, it’s no surprise he didn’t want to be here for this, either. They laughed. She cried a little. Never worry about telling me the truth, he told her, and she promised she wouldn’t. Never again.
It wasn’t the whole truth, and at the time Justin assumed his mother knew, as he did, that the story was a lie. Soon, he would find out differently and he would hate himself for mistaking her for a coconspirator. Even now, wondering if she was holding something back, he loved her for telling him. For giving him on his birthday the thing he had been searching for in all of those gift-wrapped books.