“Last time we saw each other you were telling me about Brooke and Lilly,” Amanda says, scanning her notes. She’s wearing corduroys today, but they’re about an inch too short so when she sits down she looks like a little kid in time-out. Her hair is up in a messy bun that some girls can pull off. She is not one of those girls.
“And what did I say about them?” I ask.
I’ve decided to try a new tactic with Amanda, answering her questions with a question. She complies, flipping a few pages back in her notebook, which kind of makes me uneasy because I know I didn’t say that much during our session at the cardiac center.
“You had some concerns about the fact that they may have witnessed your fall.”
I snort at her choice of words, and she lets the pages fan back into place.
“I understand that Brooke came to see you at the cardiac center before your surgery. How did that make you feel?”
“Did my mom tell you that?”
“Yes. Were you glad to see Brooke?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“And what did you two talk about?”
“What do friends usually talk about?”
“So you consider her a friend?”
“Is there a reason that I shouldn’t?”
“Who else is your friend?”
“Not Lilly.”
Whoops. She got me on that one. It was like a hammer into my kneecap and I reacted. I should probably give Amanda more credit. Just not when it comes to personal grooming.
“Why isn’t Lilly your friend? Because she called you a name?”
“That, and she stole my boyfriend.”
Amanda nods at me, and I know I’m supposed to say more. I don’t want to, but apparently the void inside me that Dad is wising up to filled with words while I was dead to the world.
“Heath,” I explain. “He’s the guy I’ve been dating forever. And apparently he’s with Lilly now. So no, not my friend. Either of them.”
Amanda nods and makes some sort of note on her legal pad. As usual it’s very short, which makes me wonder about the pages and pages that she references later on. When she writes them. What she writes.
“And how does that make you feel?”
I don’t have a good answer for that. Well, I actually do, but I know it’s not the right one.
“I’ve got a lot going on right now,” I say instead.
In the big picture, this is true. In the day to day, this is a patent lie. I have very little going on other than ice chips and IVs.
“Your mom says a boy came to the house looking for you after the accident. Was that Heath?”
“No.” I shake my head. “That was Isaac.”
“So the LVAD surgery was successful,” she says. It’s a good tactic. She just changed subjects and made a statement instead of asking a question.
“Yes.” I lift my shirt to show her my cord and the little battery pack at my side.
“Was this the first time you had surgery?”
“No,” I tell her, easily pulling all my medical data up since it’s what I’m quizzed about most these days. “I had my wisdom teeth out when I was in junior high.”
“And how does the LVAD make you feel?”
I consider telling her about the butterfly in my chest that needs electricity to work, how it reminds me of the beetle with a pin through its living body, something I did, the big, bleeding red A on that science project. How that wasn’t terribly fulfilling because it was just another in a long line, before and after, my grades a long vowel-filled exhalation of superiority.
But she’s waiting with her pen and paper, ready to put it all down permanently. And these are dark things that need to stay inside. So I lie.
“Alive,” I say.
Alive Awake Aware /Alpha\ Aspire Atone Alone
I have the weirdest sensation when I finally return to the cardiac center: I’m glad to be back.
The heart wing of the hospital I had my LVAD surgery in was nice enough, as hospitals go. Which means that the floors were even and most of the nurses didn’t use scrunchies to hold their hair back. Other than that it was greatly lacking. By my second day in recovery they informed me they were short on space and I was going to have a roommate.
The first part of that compound word is correct. The second carries an implication of affection that was inaccurate at best. I shared a space with another person; we listened to each other breathe, roll over, and urinate for a period of two weeks. I can’t say that I would recognize her on the street, and we didn’t share so much as a good-bye as I was rolled past her bed in my wheelchair on the way out.
I spot a new girl in the cardiac center common room as I make my way down to 211, the SASHA STONE nameplate still in place there. The new girl is folded into an armchair, staring out the window like someone has appointed her to that task. I don’t know if she’s here because she already got a new heart and was moved here for rehab, or if she’s like the rest of us: waiting. She doesn’t notice me, but I knock on Layla’s door the moment Mom and Dad are convinced that I am appropriately settled and I won’t die from sadness the second they leave.
“Who’s the new girl?” I ask.
“Brandy,” Layla says. “And hi.”
“Hi.” I settle onto her bed, since she’s on the couch, tablet across her knees. She looks better than she did when I left, which isn’t saying a lot, but I won’t have to worry about my supply of Oxy for Angela running out anytime soon.
“What did I miss?”
“Not a lot. Nadine lost three more pounds. She’s not allowed to give her desserts away anymore, so all the underground calorie betting has been shut down pretty hard.”
“Nuts,” I say, wrinkling my nose. Our entertainments are small but we cling to them.
“And the new girl doesn’t have a foot.”
“That’s—wait, what?” I immediately hate myself for stealing Lilly’s stock phrase but there are times when it’s appropriate.
“A foot,” Layla holds up one of hers to clarify. “She’s missing one.”
“How did that happen?”
Layla looks at me over the edge of her iPad but I push. “You asked me on my second day here what was going on with my face, so I’m guessing you went after someone’s missing appendage with equal grace.”
She tries to look offended but can’t hold on to it long. “Okay, yeah. And I got a cup of peaches off Josephine for being right about the cause before Karen shut down the illegal food swapping.”
“And the cause?”
“Not all that exciting. Nadine bet that she lost it in an accident of some sort, but I made her get more specific in case she tried to plead technicalities when it came down to parting with her sugar-free cookie.”
Layla has a point. People use the word accident for all kinds of things. Death. Betrayal. Peeing your pants. Babies.
“So she said car accident, Josephine went with bear attack—which was a stupid bet, but she said she doesn’t like peaches anyway—and I chose the obvious.”
I spin my hand in the air.
“Bad circulation,” Layla says with a shrug.
“Ouch.”
“Yeah, so like, no foot plus no good story to go with it.” Layla flips the cover shut on her tablet. “So how do you like the LVAD?”
“Like is a strong word,” I tell her, and she smiles.
“Hey, it’s keeping you alive.”
“Yep,” I say, suddenly conscious of the straps across my shoulders that hold my battery pack in place, and then even more irritated by the fact that I’ve grown so accustomed to them, I had forgotten they were there.
“You staying here?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your LVAD,” she says. “If you respond well, they might let you go home until you get a heart.”
“Doubt it” is all I say as I keep my face straight, ignoring the rest of my body as it descends into panic. The flutter in my belly. A muscle jumping in my back. My throat closing up.
The last time I left my house was in the ambulance after exiting through a window. It feels like an irreversible act, something that can’t be undone simply by walking in through the front door and announcing that I am home, if I can even claim that space anymore. I try to imagine climbing the steps, stopping to catch my breath every few, and easing open my bedroom door. In my mind there is still glass on the carpet and a tree branch has grown through the unclosed hole, a leaf brushing against the strands of my hair clinging to the sill.
“No, I don’t think I’m going back,” I say.
“You have to eventually, you know.” Layla’s voice is quiet, barely louder than the combined noise of our mechanical hearts.
“Unless I die,” I tell her.
“Weird goal.”
“So what’s Brandy like?”
Layla rolls with my subject change. “She’s pretty cool. Didn’t get huffy about me asking about her foot. Oh, and she beat Nadine at chess first night here, and insisted on calling it chest instead. So she’s my new best friend. Sorry.”
“So she’s better at chest than Nadine?”
“Way. Better.” Layla holds her hands about three feet out from her top.
I laugh, the sound bouncing around inside me, scratching against the soft tissue still swollen around my sternum.
“I miss anything else?”
“Josephine’s parents said she sleeps too much and that she needed to come off the intravenous painkillers, so she was switched out to pills instead. She woke up long enough to be pissed off and say some words that I hope they didn’t hear down in the kids’ wing.”
“What’s she on?”
“They gave her Xanax for her fibromyalgia, and she said it was like using a cotton ball to soak up Niagara Falls, but Karen put her foot down and her parents started tossing the a-word around so she shut up.”
“They called their own daughter an”—I glance around and drop my voice—“asshole?”
It’s Layla’s turn to laugh, the sound much larger than her sickly frame. “Addict. But are you even serious right now? You can’t say asshole in a normal voice? Oh no, wait, let me guess.” She raises a hand to stop me. “You’re the good twin.”
I feel a finger of anger worming through me, burrowing down next to my LVAD.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Layla said, but she’s still laughing a little. “I’ve just never met someone so lily-white, and I don’t mean your skin.”
“Thanks,” I say, snuffing out the anger.
“And FYI Angela’s brother already has a good line on Xanax, so I wouldn’t bother trying to bum any off Josephine in the name of your illicit love affair. Besides, I doubt she’d give them to you anyway. Brandy told me she walked into Jo’s room to say hey one day while Jo had the bottle out and she basically hunched up over it and started growling like a dog with a T-bone.”
It’s a funny visual but raises a question.
“Brandy walked in? I thought she was missing a foot.”
“She’s got one of those fake things.”
“A prosthetic?”
“Yeah, pretty realistic too. First time she pulled her foot off in the lounge Nadine screamed so hard her oxygen nodes popped out.”
“Nice,” I say. “Sorry I missed that. Why would she take off her foot though?”
“She wanted me to paint the toenails.”
“Huh.” I think about that while Layla yawns and stretches out, wondering what it would be like to just take out the part of you that doesn’t fit.