I could die today.
Technically I could die any day, for no reason at all, so it seems like the chances will be much higher when my veins are full of chemicals, my senses unresponsive, and my torso splayed open like the frog I dissected in seventh grade.
Mom and Dad do a great job of not talking about it when they pick me up from the cardiac center, grabbing my bag like we’re going on a camping trip, except this one happens all indoors and under sterile conditions. Nobody says this could be the last time I am outside, this could be the last time I ride in a car, this could be the last time I bite my fingernails, this could be the last time I take a drink of water.
But I’m thinking it with every small thing, all the little insignificant moments that make up an hour, a day, a life. All those things I took from Shanna with a kick of my fetal foot, tearing her umbilical cord away from her body and making sure she never had any of those moments. Until she took them back from me. A life for a life. I’m angry with my sister and her crappy heart, but I’m worried about her too. I don’t know how the LVAD will affect her, if it will give her strength or sap what she has left.
Dad proudly shows me his own scar, somehow thinking that seeing a red streak across his white, fish-belly, weird-hair-patterned chest would make me feel better. His pacemaker went in last week and he keeps insisting to me that it works like a charm, and he feels better than he has in years.
He might feel better, but he looks like hell; Mom too. Between me and Dad she’s been living in hospitals and drinking bad coffee since my accident—which is what they keep referring to it as. Like a crane falling, or a car hydroplaning. Certainly not their only child choosing to jump through glass and fall to the ground.
They’re doing what they think is best, putting on brave faces and manufactured cheer. But it’s still a relief when the doors to the surgery wing swish shut behind me and I’m left alone with strangers who are all business.
The anesthesiologist does give me a quick smile, asks me to count backward from ten. I start, thinking how ridiculous it is that with everything I know, all the things I’ve accomplished in my life, the last thing I might say will be an exercise from kindergarten. It’s not fair and I don’t like it. So instead the last thing the world gets from me is a plea, something I hate myself for as I sink into oblivion.
“Ten . . . Nine . . . Wait . . .”
When I wake up I am high and freezing. Recovery rooms are cold by design. Bacteria and viruses can’t breed as easily, and my incisions won’t bleed as easily either. People always say the room is spinning when they’re screwed up, but I feel quite the opposite, bolted down through my chest, as if a rod ran through the ceiling down into the ground, me halfway between.
My mind is liquid, sliding from present to past, this place to others. I remember freshman science and a bug project we did. I partnered with Brooke because I knew she would have no problem catching them, and she knew I’d have zero compunction about jamming needles through their slim thoraxes, pegging them in place just as I have been here in this room.
They were anesthetized first, of course, just like me. For them it was a cotton ball in their glass jars, a hazy death before being impaled. Except for one; a huge beetle Brooke snagged off the sidewalk as she came into school. I hastily scrawled a tag for it, plunging the pin through its chest before the teacher came in before the first bell. No time for pity.
It wiggled. All day. Some of the kids poked it to watch it squirm, but most held back, eyes on me. They said things, I remember now.
Said I was terrible.
Said I was psychotic.
Said I was heartless.
There’s a sound, a whir I can’t place. I turn my head and my brain feels like it will keep sliding, pool out of my ear and provide a second pillow. The one I have now is flat, shapeless, cold. My brain would be warm, soft, and comfortable. An excellent pillow.
I am very, very fucked-up right now.
The sound comes again, and I turn the other way to see a nurse reading a book, and the world must be a very small place because it is the same one Layla had last night. Either that or I am both here and there at the same time, but that is not true because I am held in place by this great weight on my chest. Amazing that I can breathe. That my lungs can go up and down against this impossible pressure.
Maybe I’m not breathing, or perhaps my brain isn’t getting the signals because they were never my lungs in the first place. Maybe they were always Shanna’s too. How much of me is her? What can I lay claim to when we move with the same body, talk with the same mouth, bleed the same blood?
I don’t know if I’m thinking these things because they are true or because I am high. I will ask the nurse; she will know. It is her job to assess how messed up I am. Layla told me that. She said the person sitting with me in the recovery room will gauge when I can be wheeled out, trusted to not tell my parents that they are robots and daisies grow from my face, that my lungs are now my sister’s too and the tombstone needs to have both names on it, but no birthdate for Shanna.
They definitely don’t want to hear that.
I try to say something to the nurse, make a noise, hold my breath, wiggle a toe. My mouth falls open and a wheeze comes out, similar to the sound I’d heard before. The weight on my chest shifts with the exhale and I feel something new, the flutter of a small butterfly trapped inside my chest, a piece of my science project resurrected and left behind when they sewed me up. It’s in there with Shanna, wanting out.
My hands go to my chest to help it, to tear open myself and make amends for the beetle. But they are weak things, my fingers, and all they can do is feel the stitches, follow them down. Down to the cord that exits my body, right below where the butterfly is trapped.
And it’s not a butterfly after all, but the new pieces of my heart, which was never mine in the first place. It pumps away inside me, whirring and working, making noises and pushing my blood, wrapped around Shanna in this life-giving embrace that she must endure to keep us going.
I don’t know what is her and what is me, what is us and what is machine. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
I. Things I Know
A. N/A
II. Things I Don’t Know
A. If Shanna hurts
/Fuck/ing hurts / you asked w!f! password hea®th-urts. Pocket full of posey. You’re high I’m /hi!/gh We all fall d-ow-n. what now? This now. (ME)TAL
From Brooke
How’d it go? Ansr if u didn’t die
PS send pic of ur cord
From Isaac
Thinking bout you
C you soon
From Heath
I hope all went well today.
Whether you believe that or not.
My phone is a weight in my hands, one I can barely lift. I stashed it in my hospital bag, tucked into a side pocket with tampons on top of it so no one would go digging. It’s dead by the time I’m out of ICU, five days after the surgery. I’ve been moved to a regular room in the hospital, and much like my phone I have to be near a power source at all times.
I’ve been complimented on odd things since coming out of surgery, how quickly I learn how to clean the exit cord on my own, how good my appetite is, how often I poop. I am like a baby, except one who menstruates, which is terribly inconvenient, though it does drive Dad out of the room at the mention of it, taking his pacemaker with him.
Mom asks if I need help, which creates an awkward moment when I ask exactly how she expects to help me putting a tampon in, and she follows Dad, telling me she’ll see if she can find more ice chips. I take care of everything in their absence, my IV tree and heart monitor following close behind, as I am once again part of a system and not whole on my own. My phone is charging and hidden under my pillow by the time they return, its cord anonymous among the many that create a web around me.
There is a line down my center, like a fish that has been gutted and then someone changed their mind, tried to fix everything with needle and thread. The stitches are very dark against my untouched skin, the wounded flesh an angry red. Now I understand why they would not let me see my face right away. Mom keeps redirecting my hands, my gaze, anything to keep me from touching and looking at where I once was open and am now closed again.
She asks me how I am feeling constantly, and I answer. I consider showing her my sister’s messages, scattered things that they are. But to do so would mean showing her the phone Brooke smuggled to me, or the laptop they think I only use for reading. I don’t tell her that we’re both still sulking a bit from the use of the word psychotic.
Because if that’s accurate then I’m crazy and she doesn’t exist.
Unacceptable.
For both of us.
My heart is still working in the morning. I know because I can hear it.
Mom is asleep in her chair, folded over to one side with her finger stuck in the pages of the DSM I slipped back into her bag during a visit to the cardiac center. I don’t know if she’s searching for more things that might be wrong with me or if she’s just one of those people who can’t not finish a book.
Dad is at the window, watching the sunrise. His eyes flick over to me when I move, and we stare at each other for a second.
“How are you feeling?”
“Like a machine,” I answer. “How are you feeling?”
“Like a human, but with a pacemaker,” he says.
I’m the first to look away.
“I thought it was my fault,” he says, his words directed at the window and the people pouring into the building to come and see their loved ones. The sick and the dying. The new ones who just came out of other people. Ones who haven’t done anything irrevocable yet that they can’t be forgiven for.
“It’s genetics.” I shrug.
He shakes his head. “I’d like to say that you’ll understand someday, Sasha. But I don’t know if you will.”
I press the button on my med line, the one that gives me a little more painkiller if I think I might need it. Dad’s talking, so I definitely think I might need it. He’s still looking out at the parking lot, like maybe someone out there is holding up cue cards.
“You’ve really done a number on your mom. You have no idea what it was like for her, losing that baby.”
“Shanna,” I correct him.
“And now you’re putting her through it again,” he plows on. “Twice over, because she could lose you too.”
I notice he doesn’t mention that he could lose me, maybe because that’s already been done.
“Technically you’re putting her through it,” I say. “If we’re operating under the assumption that my heart problems are from you.”
“Jesus.” Dad puts his head in his hands, and is so still that I wonder if he got too upset and the pacemaker blew.
“How did you get to be so cold, Sasha?” he asks.
“How are you just now figuring it out?” I shoot back.
“I knew,” he says quietly. “Your mom, she doesn’t want to see it, but I’ve always known. For your fourth birthday we took you to the zoo, and in the gift shop all the other kids were grabbing stuffed animals, hugging them, naming them right there on the spot. You picked out a set of dead bugs, suspended in glass cubes. It came with a magnifying class so you could study them.”
My pain meds are doing their job, floating my body away from the whir of my heart, my mind unmoored and fixated on odd things. The bell of a lily that faces me; the flower of resurrection. The baby’s breath nestled next to it. It’s all very nice except someone needs to invite an exterminator to that flower shop because there’s a stinkbug nestled deep inside the lily. Also, baby’s breath is poisonous.
What an odd name for poison.
Dad said something, and I should answer him. The thing about the bugs and the magnifying glass. I remember that toy, remember peering down at little body parts for hours, trying to figure out how they worked.
“So I can manipulate them,” I say, not realizing my thoughts are flowing outward now. “If I know how they work, I can make them do what I want.”
Dad sighs, rests his forehead against the window.
“You graduated to people though, didn’t you?” he asks. “When you found out about . . .” He doesn’t finish, doesn’t say her name, whoever the woman is that he’s cheating on mom with. “When you found out you didn’t get mad, didn’t run to tell your mom. You held on to it, used it against me.
“I don’t know how many surgeries it would take to make you a nice person,” he says, his voice a whisper that comes back from the glass, as cold as the surface they just hit. “How many hours of therapy. They can give you a new heart, but they can’t fix something that isn’t in there. What’s missing from you, Sasha?”
My tongue is a lead weight, so I can’t ask him if there were cameras in the surgery, or if someone in there ran their mouth. Everything I was afraid of has come to pass. They opened me up and found nothing inside.
“Dad,” I say, forcing my breath to come, my tongue to work, my trachea to vibrate. The drugs are strong, but my brain is stronger and I will speak. “Can we talk about this sometime when I’m not fucked-up?”
“And when will that be?”
I have to admit as I slide into unconsciousness that it’s a valid question.