I. Things I Know
A. An LVAD looks like plumbing around my heart, plumbing that requires a power source.
1. I will have a power cord exiting my body near my belly button.
2. I will wear a controller and battery pack at all times, which looks like backpack straps, minus the backpack.
3. “I will continue to lead a full and rewarding life.” (This is a pull quote from the brochure.)
B. LVAD is close to Vlad and is fitting since it will in fact be impaling me.
II. Things I Don’t Know
A. If it will hurt Shanna
B. If I’ll ever see Isaac again
C. If he’ll find me disgusting when I do
(on)c(e) there was a girl[s] made of (me)tal—is it me or is it y-ew-?
Amanda very helpfully left the activities schedule with me after our therapy session, a list of the varying social and recreational opportunities that promise to be invigorating but better not go too far or else it could kill the participants. I give it a hard look, well aware that between her and the nurses I’ll be pestered into doing something, and trying to figure out which will require the least of me.
TODAY AT THE CARDIAC CENTER!
9:00 a.m.—Fun with Watercolors! Local artist Shyane Wergei shows you how to take what’s inside and get it out using a paintbrush.
Probably not the best wording for a heart transplant center.
11:00 a.m.—Bond Over Books! Bring your favorite book and share a passage that matters to you with the group.
I’ll take Mom’s DSM that I swiped and read everyone the entry about my supposed psychotic disorder.
2:00 p.m.—Share the Love! Hop in the cardiac center van for a trip to the Humane Society, where a special dog or kitty is waiting to steal your heart.
Seriously, whoever wrote this did not consider their audience. Also most of us are medically prohibited from hopping.
4:00 p.m.—Meditation with Melody! Relax before dinner with guided meditation.
This one actually has my attention, although I’m not sure an exclamation point has any place near the word meditation.
As predicted, my nurse makes a big show of talking about how bored I must be “all cooped up” in my room all day with “no one to talk to.” She has no idea that I’m continuing to carry on plenty of conversations with both Brooke and Shanna over the laptop, and I’m not in a hurry to enlighten her either.
After my daily maintenance is attended to—weight, blood pressure, temperature—I’m given my privacy back, but Brooke is at school and Shanna won’t answer direct questions so I’m faced with the fact that it’s time to go make some friends.
I’m not good at this. Lilly and Brooke are my friends, but I’ll be the first to admit that this may be a force of habit more than anything. We bonded in kindergarten because Brooke liked to find dead birds at recess, Lilly liked to scream about it, and I liked lecturing them both about germs and keeping their voices down. We were odd children, effortlessly seamed together by our oddness, our parents relieved that we’d found each other, even if our combined personalities alienated everyone else.
Everyone here is dying, which means I have to be nice to them. It’s not one of my better areas, and I know it. I waste ten minutes getting dressed even though I’m wearing nothing more complicated than pajama pants and a hoodie, try to part my hair so that some of the damage is covered, take a deep breath, and pull open my door.
There’s a girl sleeping in a wheelchair by her doorway, legs off to one side, knees pressed together, IV tree keeping guard. I’m untethered, no longer needing constant hydration or pain meds. In their place I have a lineup of orange pill bottles in the bathroom, the myriad of sentinels required to keep me going every day.
I slip past the girl in the hall, making my way to the common room where I find one girl teaching another how to play chess, and a third patient curled into an overstuffed armchair with a novel. I walk over to one of the bookshelves to pick through the offerings, surprised to find some books that would be more appropriate on Mom’s nightstand.
“Careful with that one,” someone says, and I turn to see the girl who had been reading has joined me. “It’ll get your blood pressure up and you’ll be on a low-salt diet. I tore the cover off so it wouldn’t be taken away from us, but if you have to explain your spike and blame the book I won’t forgive you.”
I watch her carefully, trying to figure out if she’s serious or not while I fan the well-worn pages under my thumb.
“You’re new,” she goes on, her eyes roaming my face until they settle on the stitches I couldn’t quite get my hair to cover. “Oh, you’re that girl.”
“Which girl?”
She snorts. “We all come in here looking like we’re dying. You’re the only one to show up looking like somebody tried to kill them.”
I put the book back, my hand going up to finger my stitches.
“Hey,” she says. “What’s the difference between this place and a nursing home?”
“I don’t know.”
“Everybody in a nursing home is waiting to die. We’re all waiting to live.”
One of the girls playing chess turns in her wheelchair. “Layla, how many times do I have to tell you that joke isn’t funny?”
“How many times have I got to tell you it isn’t a joke?” Layla shoots back, and the chess player huffs, returning to her game even though it looks like her opponent might have hit the painkillers a little hard and blacked out early.
“What about, everybody here is waiting for someone else to die?” I suggest.
“What’s that?” Layla’s attention is back on me, her eyes following the curve of the stitches that arch around my neck as my hoodie shifts.
“Your joke,” I explain. “What’s the difference between this place and a nursing home? Instead of ‘Everybody at a nursing home is waiting to die, and we’re all waiting to live,’ you could say, ‘we’re all waiting for someone else to die.’”
I wait for a reaction, but she’s still staring. “You know, so we can get their heart.”
“Right,” she says. “I get it. I just think it’s even not-funnier than my version.”
“Oh.” I go back to looking at the books.
“Which means Nadine over there will hate it,” she adds. “So I kind of love it. Hi, I’m Layla by the way.” She offers her hand to shake.
“I gathered,” I say, taking it. “Sasha.”
Her hand is bony in mine, and I find myself making a terrible assessment of how long she has left, how much time I should invest in this friendship. Then I see the belt around her waist.
“Is that an LVAD?”
“Yeah,” she says, lifting her sweatshirt so I can see. “Mark of the last resort.”
“I get mine next week,” I tell her, and I swear I can see the same computation going on behind her dark brown eyes, a weighing of the free time she has left and if she wants to spend it with someone who won’t be around to remember anything she said or did.
“Dilated cardiomyopathy?” she asks, and I know we’re going through our second round of introductions, an exchange of diagnoses and not names.
“Yeah. Sickle cell?”
Her eyebrows shoot up. “Just because I’m black you think I’ve got sickle cell?”
“No, I . . . no,” I say, immediately backpedaling and trying to name any other heart condition I can think of, and coming up with none. “I’m . . . did I just really screw this up?”
“No, you’re just really white, that’s all.”
“Sorry,” I say. “It’s not like I’m racist or anything.”
“Not on purpose anyway,” she says, but her eyebrows have come back down so I think I might be forgiven.
“So . . .” I dig into the waistband of my pants to pull out the folded schedule of the day’s events. “Are any of these actually decent? I was thinking about the meditation one.”
Layla looks it over. “If we’re lucky, the watercolor lady might smoke a joint before she comes in and we can try to get a contact high off her hair. She thinks we like her a lot because we invade her personal space.”
“I think I’ll pass on getting high.”
“The Humane Society trips seem cool but I’m allergic, so I can’t go.” Her eyes shift to me, maybe hoping that if she’s out then I am too.
“What about the books thing?” I ask.
She shrugs. “It’s okay. Mostly a lot of people bring stuff that’s got to do with somebody dying and talk about how they can relate. I’d rather read about people falling into crazy love, something I don’t know the first thing about.”
She lets the sentence fade out, eyes still searching me. “You ever been in love?”
I let a little smile answer for me, no words necessary.
“So . . . the meditation?” I say.
Layla nods at me. “Meditation it is. You get breakfast yet?”
And suddenly I have a friend.
Meditation with Melody! turns out to be guided by a cassette tape player, not someone actually named Melody and certainly nothing resembling real music. Layla takes a mat next to mine, and we lie side by side, staring at the tiled ceiling. Another girl joins us, the one who Nadine had been attempting to teach chess. She takes a mat to the right and promptly goes to sleep. A nurse comes in and starts the tape, dimming the lights and clicking the door quietly shut behind her.
Something like a pan flute begins, tripping over a few bars to be joined by a soft male voice that encourages us to picture a safe, quiet place in our minds. Over by the wall, the girl who joined us lets out a long, protracted fart.
“Oh my Lord, Josephine,” Layla says, but the other girl doesn’t respond.
The voice from the cassette player urges us to concentrate on a calm memory, but my entire focus is on the fact that the pan flute in the background wasn’t tuned properly. It’s soon joined by the sound of running water.
“Great. Now I’ve got to pee,” Layla says, and I turn to look at her. “I don’t think I can meditate myself out of peeing.”
“You’re not into this at all, are you?” I ask her.
She sits up, her LVAD cord slipping out from under her shirt. “Nope, but you seemed interested so I thought I’d give it a shot.”
“I thought it would be better,” I admit. “Like with real music.”
“You into music?”
“It’s my whole life,” I tell her, my fingers going to the edge of the mat where some stuffing has poked through. “Used to be, anyway. I played the clarinet.”
“So what happened to your face?” Layla asks, waving away my startled look. “The other girls have a dessert bet going and if I can get the real info and an extra sugar cookie out of the deal, I’ll split the cookie with you.”
“My sister threw me out a window,” I tell her. “And you can keep the cookie.”
Layla lets out a whistle. One that starts high and ends low, like a bomb falling. “Damn girl. Is she your stepsister, half sister?”
I shake my head. “Twin.”
“No shit.” Layla crosses her arms, resting her head on them. “Is she in juvy now?”
I pick at the hole at the edge of my mat where the seams have come apart, digging my index finger inside as I wonder how much to tell her. “I don’t really like to talk about it.”
“Ohhhhhh . . . ,” Layla says, her voice making the same high pitch to low that her whistle had earlier. “She dead?”
“Why would you think that?” I ask.
“Honestly?” She cocks her head to the side like the question is more for herself than me. “Josephine read your visitor’s name badge the other day and we googled her. Didn’t take a genius to put together that a mental health worker coming to talk to a girl who was Humpty-Dumptied back together again means you’ve got issues. That’s still a doozy of an issue though, I’ll give you that.”
“My sister’s not dead,” I say, the warm pulse in my wrist agreeing.
Layla lowers herself back down to the mat, throws an arm across her eyes. “What’s her name?”
I pull my finger out of the mat and blow away some of the stuffing that snagged on my jagged nail. I lay back down next to Layla as the meditation tape switches over to the tide and seagulls, interrupted occasionally by Josephine’s snores. I swear I can feel the hollow bit in the mat under my shoulder blade where I pulled stuffing out.
“Shanna,” I tell her, thinking of darkness and sounds my throat can’t possibly have ever made, but my ears miss hearing.
“So you’ve definitely been in love before,” Layla says, and I start, wondering how she followed my thoughts.
I look over at her and she shrugs. “It’s all over you. Moony looks, vacant stares. You might be in a safe place right now, but I bet it’s not quiet.”
I laugh, causing Josephine to roll over in her sleep, arms covering her ears.
“Sure,” I admit. “I’m probably in love.”
“Nope. It’s you are or you aren’t,” Layla insists. “My mom always says you just know, and you can’t probably know something. You know it or you don’t.”
I think of all my lists of things I know, and things I don’t know. I don’t have a list for maybes, so Layla could have a point.
“Then how do you know?” I ask.
“According to books I have to tear the covers off of, or according to my own personal experience?” Layla asks. “Because I can tell you anything you want to know about the first. The second . . . guess I need a working heart first.”
“Why’s that?”
“Being near death scares them off.”
I giggle, my noise blending in with the pan flute. I do her the favor of not arguing with her about being near death. I could probably pick Layla up and throw her, and I’m not exactly the picture of health myself.
“So you know by”—Layla takes a deep breath, and closes her eyes—“feeling a little empty if you’re apart more than a day or two, like half your self wandered off without permission. By needing them closer even when they’re right inside you, by knowing the smell of their skin and being able to sort it out from your own, by sharing a glance and saying the world, by feeling like nobody will ever know you like they do, but being a little sad that there’s nothing more you can share. Because in the end it’s just you who has to be enough.”
She opens her eyes and smiles at me, slow and quiet, and I think she’s either read all the romance books in the world or there’s someone out there she needs to say something to before she dies. Either way, she’s put words to something I couldn’t, no matter how many lists I made. And maybe I need to add something to my last column of things I know, and that is that I messed up everything.
Heath didn’t want me by his side; he wanted whoever the girl with the highest GPA was, something to balance his own with. He wanted a girl who wanted the same things he did—to look like the best, the brightest, a clean, shining example of a good teen.
Isaac didn’t care about that. He wanted me, actually me, with the hard edges and all. He wanted it enough to scratch our names in rock next to pictures that had lasted a thousand years. And our names probably would too, for the people after us to read. And the people after them. Isaac and Sasha, next to each other. Forever. It looks like that’s the one bit of me that is going to be around for a while; all the supposedly good things I’ve tried to do are captured on a grade card for a girl who won’t make it to college, while a bad thing a boy did for me is going to say I existed beside him.
And I tried to erase it.
Layla is still watching me, waiting for an answer.
“Yeah,” I finally say. “I think I am in love.”
The words feel heavy, like a deep B flat. They’re powerful and all-encompassing, demanding my throat close up, threatening to make me cry. They matter more than a lot of things, I realize now. More than the bloodred As on my papers or a weighted GPA or Sasha Stone always being number one.
I smile again, thinking of Isaac with his middle finger up in the air, which leads to thoughts of his hands, and my mind wanders further. Future Sasha Stone and all her plans have been derailed, a train gone off the track as surely as if it tried to use the trestle bridge and collapsed into a burning heap of twisted metal at the bottom of the ravine. And if Sasha Stone doesn’t need to worry about being rewarded for anything, maybe Shanna Stone should have her way, in the little time we have left.
My breath catches in my constricted throat, a small sob emerging. Layla reaches over to squeeze my hand in the dim light, and I finally do relax, sliding down into meditation not to the sound of the sea breeze, but the quiet clicking of her mechanically pumping heart.
Will the LVAD hurt you?
Don’t k[no]w
Are you scared?
Not s(ur)e.