A Little Heart Brings Two Tearful Families Together

Gingerly, Tracey York cradled Nick Draper in the crook of her left arm.

“Hi, baby,” she said. “Hello, baby.”

She looked down at his round cheeks and deeply into his soft gray eyes, as if she were searching for his soul. There were tears in her eyes.

“Baby, can I hold your hand, please?”

She rocked him gently, she kissed his forehead, she held her right hand over his chest and stroked it. Then she handed him to his mother, placed a stethoscope over Nick’s heart and listened.

Can you hear it? someone asked.

A single tear trickled down her cheek.

Yes, she nodded. She could hear it. His heart beat strong, sure and steady -- just as she had hoped. This heart was special. It had been her son’s before it was Nick’s.

Tracey York’s son, Jordan, 4 months old, had died four weeks earlier in Pensacola, Fla., after he accidentally suffocated under a pillow on his grandparents’ bed. In that terrible moment, Tracey York, 27, and her husband, Russell, 28, decided to donate his heart and other organs.

The heart was flown to UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, where it was transplanted into Nick Draper’s chest. Nick, 7 months old, and his twin, Nate, suffer from rare and fatal dilated cardiomyopathy.

Jordan’s tiny heart was the gift of life.

Now Nick is nearly ready to leave the hospital. Nate, behind him on the transplant list because he was sicker at first, is still waiting for a new heart.

Because of stories in The Times, the twins’ parents, Nicole Draper, 32, and her husband, Mike, 33, discovered the Yorks, and they met for the first time Friday. The Yorks and the Drapers spent most of that evening and all of Saturday together.

“We wondered about this,” Nicole Draper said. “We were really anxious. You wonder if you are going to have anything to say, if meeting this other family is just going to be too hard, if it’s going to be OK. But we felt we had to do it.”

Especially the mothers, she said. “We had to have a connection.”

On Friday, as they waited for the Drapers in a small office at the hospital, Russell and Tracey York struggled to contain their emotions. They sat on a brown couch, their 7-year-old daughter, Mariah, between them. Russell York fidgeted. He rocked back and forth and rubbed his knees with his hands.

He said that he might not have come to Los Angeles if not for his wife. Now, he was about to be jolted by hard reminders of what they had gone through. Waiting to meet the Drapers, he said, felt like “waiting to get kicked in the groin.”

To Tracey York, it was different. She knew she wanted to have a relationship with the family whose little son got Jordan’s heart. She needed this. She looked at her husband and tried to calm him. She smiled and caressed her daughter’s hair. Getting to know the Drapers, she said, would ease her pain.

A door opened. The Drapers came in. Nicole went straight to Tracey. Mike went straight to Russell. Everyone hugged. The mothers wept. The fathers tried hard not to.

The two families sat on the couch and in big leather chairs. At first, there was small talk. “There’s a lot of similarities between us,” Russell said, rubbing his knees again.

“That’s what I keep saying,” Mike said, a grin on his face. They both had been raised in the South. Both loved pro football. What’s more, Mike and Nicole were devout Mormons. Russell York had been raised Mormon, and he and Tracey occasionally let missionaries stay at their home.

Within minutes, the conversation turned to what had brought them together. Russell spoke of days in the hospital with Jordan, before doctors took him off life support. “I almost gave up,” he said.

“Thanks for not giving up,” Nicole replied, choking back tears.

The Yorks showed pictures of Jordan, a chubby baby with big ears, being held by his parents, or lying contented in a baby carriage. They offered a gift to the Drapers: a silver jewelry case, shaped as a heart. It bore a simple inscription: “From Jordan, To Nick, 2-16-06.”

Nicole Draper wept again as she held the case in her palm. Inside, she would say afterward, her emotions swirled. “I just lost it. Thinking about Jordan and his little spirit living inside of Nick. Thinking about how they were so thoughtful to bring us a gift after all that they have done and gone through.”

After nearly an hour, the Drapers and the Yorks headed for the third floor, where Nick and Nate have lived for most of their lives. The families were followed by camera crews from ABC-TV, which paid for the Yorks’ trip to Los Angeles.

First the families visited Nate, struggling so hard that doctors had given him a blood transfusion just days before and increased the powerful medicines that help keep him alive.

Then they visited Nick. With the gift of little Jordan York’s heart, he should be able to live a normal life, at least until he is a teenager, when he might have to have another transplant.

The fathers stood behind the mothers as they looked at the baby in his small bed. Russell York stood straight and rigid. He couldn’t bring himself to touch Nick. He said afterward that he had been overwhelmed with joy and pain.

But Tracey York swooned over the little baby, so weak from the long months in the hospital that he had a hard time holding his head up.

It was then that she picked him up and held him delicately against her chest. She kissed his reddish cheeks. She felt his heartbeat. She heard it through the stethoscope.

“Isn’t that cool?” she asked.

Russell York listened next. Nick’s round eyes opened wide. He looked straight into their eyes.

“Right then, it was almost like I saw Jordan,” Tracey York would say later. For a moment, at least, all the pressure she had been carrying around lifted away. “That was a strange and wonderful thing. He was looking at me, and it was like he knew -- he knew that I was Jordan’s momma.”

Kurt Streeter can be reached at kurt.streeter@latimes.com.