And then I died.
For a little while anyway. The numbers are a bit gray, but I think the EMTs in the squad on site to transport me probably have the most accurate data. Typically such things are judged by when the heart stopped beating, but since mine has been replaced with a new one, my time of death is a little fuzzy.
I didn’t get the whole heart, to be honest. I didn’t even get a decent chunk, I guess. What I actually gave to Isaac was a handful of soft tissue and gristle, the cord from the LVAD and a few bone chips from my sternum. But it did the trick, scared him so badly that he didn’t notice that I put the knife in his other hand before I passed out. He ended up in jail for a few days before I cleared his name, but no sane girl would carve herself up like that. So he had to wait there until my new heart was where it belonged. Somewhere they couldn’t take it back out of without serious ethical issues and lawsuits.
My new heart likes me, and I like it. It’s found a home, burrowed down into the gaping hole I left for others to fix, taking to the reattached arteries as if they were reunited instead of patched together. I could feel it, strong and capable, as soon as I gained consciousness in recovery. It pulsed inside me, flushing all the bad things Shanna brought along with her from my system.
I thumb across my phone, reversing the camera and taking a picture of my chest to send to Brooke, the only person who is returning my texts. I’ll never be able to wear a tank or a revealing dress again. What’s left of my chest looks like offal from a butcher shop, the bits that end up in the alley Dumpster for the rats. My left breast hangs lower than the other, since I decimated too many pectoral muscles in the attack on my sister.
I slip the phone back under the pillow out of habit, not for secrecy. Mom and Dad were pissed to discover it in my bag, under Layla’s favorite coverless paperback and the hospital-issued underwear. But I got to keep it, because as Dad said, “What more can she do?”
Oh, I can do lots more, Dad. Lots and lots more.
But first I need to rest, allow this heart to find its place in the orchestra of my mind and body. I glance over at Mom, who is on the couch, doing the same.
I told her it was okay when I came out of recovery, that I was good Sasha again and everything was going to be fine now that Shanna was gone. Somehow this made things worse. I saw it in the tightening of the skin around her eyes, almost translucent with stress, saw it in Dad’s mouth, now in the constant downturn of three on the pain scale. Mild concern, mixed with discomfort.
There’s a knock on my door, all knuckle, the sound of a person who is not asking for permission to come in but letting you know that they are. Mom stirs on the couch as Amanda shuts the door behind her, her face the sort of calm that only comes after a major storm. I’ve always been impressed with her grim determination, the passive neutral she holds on to by her badly trimmed nails. But right now she’s not calm—she’s empty. Washed-out. Done. She’s been crying, though she tried to hide it.
“That was certainly something, Sasha Stone,” she says, ignoring my sleeping mother and plopping into the remaining chair. Mom mutters something in her sleep, then turns her back to us, no doubt aided into serenity by the Xanax her doctor has been giving her.
“It needed to be done,” I tell Amanda. “Shanna would have killed me eventually.”
She closes her eyes and presses her fingers against her temple and I take the moment to give her a once-over. Something is different, and it’s not just the new posture she’s taken, a slump that collapses her spine and pulls her shoulders inward.
“You’re not wearing your lanyard,” I say, finally spotting it. It had been blue, with smiley faces, the effervescent number one. It used to be clipped onto her ID, a picture with too much flash that had illuminated the oil output of each pore for closer inspection.
“I’m not exactly here in a professional capacity,” she says. “I got fired.”
“What?” I’m honestly surprised. “That’s crazy. You’re good at your job.”
“Yeah, I know,” Amanda says. “Then you came along.”
I don’t have anything to say to that. She tried to heal me with a microwave box and a compact mirror, so I’m not sure this is all on me.
“But it’s kind of a relief too, you know?” Amanda goes on, leaning toward me now, elbows on her knees. “Since I’m not your therapist—or anyone’s—I can say to you exactly what I think.”
“Oh boy,” I say.
“You’re a terrible person, Sasha Stone,” she says, eyes closing down into tiny slits. “There’s an ugliness inside of you that can’t be dug out, not with the knife you used, not with talk therapy, not with anything I know of. You’re so far gone you won’t even acknowledge it, claiming it all comes from someone else, somewhere else, never inside of you.
“You take the people who care about you most and manipulate them. You get your friends to lie for you, cut yourself up, and blame it on a boy who will probably never recover from seeing that, send your mother down an unstable path and your father trying to stop her so that he won’t get in your way. You got me fired and my license is up for review—do you understand what that means? I worked my whole life to help others and now I’m not going to be able to, because of you.”
She’s close to me now, the hot breath of another drive-through meal wafting in my face. I sit up, all my cords coming with me, and lean toward her so that we’re almost nose to nose.
“And how does that make you feel?” I ask.