Heart & Soul

  Heart & Soul

  Copyright © 2015

  Nicole Williams

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events of persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical without express permission from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages for review purposes.

  Cover Design by Sarah Hansen of Okay Creations

  Editing by Cassie Cox

  Formatting by JT Formatting

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  About the Author

  A Preview of Three Brothers

  SHE WAS MY heart. She was my soul. She was everything that resided in between.

  I guessed that was just another way of saying she was my everything. That was what my mind kept circling back to ever since we’d scheduled the surgery. It was still a month out. I knew it was considered fairly low risk compared to other kinds of heart surgery, but when a doctor detailed what was involved—opening up my wife’s chest, digging around inside to find that vital, pumping organ, moving on to repair what’s wrong before closing her back up and sewing her shut—nothing about that sounded low risk. Low risk was stitching up a gash or setting a broken arm, not open heart surgery.

  I’d struggled with nightmares for most of my life, but they’d always been the same. After the word “surgery” spilled out of the doctor’s mouth though, I started having a different kind of nightmare. One still having to do with pain and blood and loss, but I wasn’t starring in my night terrors any longer. It was her. Rowen.

  Chained to an operating table instead of a rusty water pipe, her screams filled my head instead of my own. I could see her blood staining my hands when I lifted them in front of my face. Her life slowly drained out of her, seeming to puddle at my feet, while I stood there, frozen in time or in shock, unable to hold on to her as she slipped away.

  It was a nightmare I’d become far too acquainted with, and one that woke me up too many times, the sheets tangled around me and sweat dripping down my body. The images always took too many moments to clear from my head. I didn’t want to wake her, but sometimes I couldn’t help it. If she didn’t jerk awake from my screams or from my body flying up in bed—if by some miracle she managed to stay in her peaceful place—I found myself gently pressing my hand to her back, waiting to detect the faint beat. Sometimes it would take a moment for me to feel it, and in that panicked moment, I heard my own heartbeat thrumming in my ears, seeming to fill the entire room.

  Every time, I’ve felt her heart’s beat. Sometimes it takes me longer than other times to find it, but to date, I’ve always been able to make out that steady, confident beat fluttering inside her. Sometimes all I needed to feel was a few beats before it lulled me back to sleep. Other times, I’d see the light from the sunrise filter through the window before I could pry my hand away from her back to crawl into the shower and get started with the day.

  The more a person thought about a heart and how it just kept going—beat after beat, hour after hour, decade after decade—the more of a miracle it became. The more of a mystery it seemed to be. This thing that pumped blood through our body, keeping it alive—it never stopped, never faltered, could endure extreme amounts of stress and abuse . . .

  Right up until it gave out.

  That was what I’d been thinking about lately. A heart. More specifically, Rowen’s heart. It was fine and healthy and strong until it wasn’t. That was the way it was for all of us, I fully understood that, but it took on a different meaning when someone close to you was told their heart wasn’t right. The words the doctor said kept replaying in my head, over and over. Words like ventricles and narrowing and operating and risks of stress. Words that were, on their own, unthreatening, but when tied to the woman I loved, they took on material form. Almost as if surgery shifted into the shape of a gun and all the other words materialized into bullets, one after another being loaded into that gun before it dropped to the temple of the person I cared about most in the world.

  I’d heard it said that words were only words, but that wasn’t true. At least not all of the time. Words had power. Words had more power than a man’s fists or a woman’s stare. They had a hundred times more power than people gave them credit for, and that was what a portion of their power was derived from—humanity’s aversion to ascribing power to those seemingly innocent things we called words.

  I knew better though now. I knew just how much power words had after enduring countless hours in waiting rooms, patient rooms, and doctors’ offices over the past couple of months. I knew words might not be able to take Rowen away from me, but they were responsible for paving the path.

  “Words don’t have power,” people still tried to tell me. Then why hadn’t I gotten a good night’s sleep since the day I rushed Rowen to urgent care after she passed out in the middle of the track we were running on? Why hadn’t I had a half a day of peace since the tests they ran that day were explained to us?

  If words didn’t have power, why had I been holding my breath for her heart to give out at any second?

  The answer was simple, so I didn’t know why everyone seemed to refuse to accept it. Words were the single most powerful thing on the planet. I wouldn’t forget that. Especially when a doctor told me we were just going to discuss the options and go over the risks associated with those options. I’d make sure to cut him off when he started listing what could happen before, during, or after surgery when a person had a heart defect like Rowen’s. I’d make sure to lift a hand to silence him when he, in so many words, said my wife had a bad heart.

  How could that be? How was it even humanly possible that this person who was the very definition of love and heart and soul to me could have a bad heart? How was that for the most cruel, morbid form of irony?

  Rowen had a bad heart.

  That was a load of bullshit.

  Rowen had the truest, most pure, good heart I’d ever known. That was what I tried to comfort myself with when I felt the stirrings of a panic attack creeping up from my stomach. I knew the heart I saw in Rowen and the heart the cardiologist saw in her were wholly different things, but that didn’t stop me from trying to grasp onto whatever strand of hope I found dangling above my head.

  I didn’t know how long I’d been sitting behind the wheel in Old Bessie, staring through the windshield and seeing nothing but my fears seeming to take real shapes and forms before my eyes. I saw tragedy blooming in the flowers lining the walkway to our new condo. I saw death shoving through the soil, growing into the grass edging the sidewalk. I saw a life void of love and color and laughter in the wisp of clouds dotting the blue Seattle sky. I saw death where there was life. I saw darkness where there was light. I saw pain and heartache and tragedy on a beautiful summer day . . . and I wanted it to go away. I wanted to believe the best and hold on to so much hope I was drowning in it, but even all my supposed optimism was struggling to see the good in this. From a husband’s standpoint, there was no good in finding out my wife had a heart condition that required surgery sooner rather than later. No good side at all.

  I shifted in my seat and blinked a f
ew times in an attempt to clear the images from my head. They were only flowers. Only grass. Only clouds. It didn’t work, so I turned my attention to the cab and took a few deep breaths. Everything would be fine. Rowen would be fine. She’d have the surgery, recover without a glitch, and we could go on with life as if this had never happened.

  Instead of reassuring myself by focusing on the familiarity of Old Bessie’s cab, I saw Rowen sitting beside me, dangling her arm out of the window. That faded, and I found the seat empty again, but the image was still seared in my brain. I wondered if that side of the truck would one day go unoccupied, the spot where she sat never to warm again, the pictures she liked to scroll into the windows after spending a night steaming them up having been drawn for the last time. Rowen saw the world as her canvas, and she never wasted an opportunity to leave her mark, even if it was just on a plate of steamed up glass.

  I shook my head, realizing it was hopeless. It didn’t matter where I looked or where I tried to seek solace. Even Old Bessie couldn’t provide a measure of comfort anymore. The threat of losing her was too real. I couldn’t find comfort when there was none to begin with.

  Then something caught my attention from the corner of my eye. In an instant, the weight pressing on my chest lifted and I could breathe fully again. In the span of one breath, I had a flash that everything would be okay. How could it not be? To watch her casually pedaling down the sidewalk, her face angled toward the sky as the corners of her mouth pulled up . . . how could anything happen to her? How could anything happen to one of the earth’s greatest creations? It couldn’t. It wouldn’t be possible.

  She lived in shades of black and gray—sometimes a dark purple will slip in in the form of shoelaces or a headband—but she painted the entire world with color. She painted my entire world with color. It was as if before her, I was going through life in black and white, not realizing there was this whole other world filled with texture and color and unspeakable beauty.

  She painted the whole world for me, and if she was taken away from me, the color would leave with her. My world would go back to black and white, except this time, I’d know the difference. I’d know there was something so much better, and I’d want it back. I’d want it back, but if she were gone, I could never have it back. I could never have her back.

  The weight heaved back down on my chest, spilling the oxygen from my lungs.

  She still rode that same bike I used to cringe at when she first moved here, but I’d added so many bells and whistles and baskets to it that we’d managed to strike a somewhat happy medium. When we first found out about Rowen’s heart, I said the bike had to go and that we finally had to break down and buy a second car. Her tale of that story is that I flat-out ordered her, but I preferred the term “begged without abate.” Of course the harder I shoved my heels into the ground, the more she did, and really, she’s much better at heel digging than I am. She said it was because she’d had more practice, but I was inclined to believe it had more to do with my inability to say more than a string of a few nos to her before giving in, giving up, or letting go. In short, she won twice as many points of contention as I did.

  She claimed she won the bike battles—all of them—but I preferred to see it as reaching a mutually satisfactory conclusion. Kind of. The bike remained her main mode of transportation because she agreed to wear a heart rate monitor and promised to keep her heart rate below sixty percent of her max. She said that was overkill and didn’t want to strap on some giant watch that read her pulse everywhere she went, but the doctor admitted my idea wasn’t a bad one, so with the help of what Rowen had dubbed her doctor’s and my “Dark Side,” she gave in and strapped on the giant, ugly watch before she went anywhere on her bike.

  She said it wasn’t only a fashion faux-pas but a waste of money to boot, because she’d been riding her bike for years and hadn’t had any problems with it straining her heart. She’d likely been born with her condition and had managed just fine until she’d decided to give running a try. Two decades she’d been living with this, and it took trying to run wind sprints, followed by passing out, for a doctor to diagnose her.

  The bike slowed as she neared our condo. I found myself glancing at her wrist to make sure she had it on. She did. It wasn’t so ugly to me. Yeah, it was big enough that it seemed to take up a quarter of her forearm, but that device would keep her from straining her heart. It would alert her if she was pushing herself too hard. It helped keep her alive. That made it worth every single hour of overtime I’d worked last month to pay for it.

  When she reached the bottom of the apartment stairs and chained her bike to the rail, I found my motivation to pry myself from the confines of Old Bessie. When I shoved the door, it whined open. It didn’t wail as it had before Rowen got it all cherried out for me a couple of years ago, but it was an old truck. It deserved to creak and whine and moan.

  Rowen must have heard the telltale sound because her head whipped in my direction, her smile moving higher when she saw me weaving through the condo’s parking lot toward her. “Hey, cowboy! I didn’t think I’d see you for another few hours. They’ve been keeping you so busy I’ve almost forgotten what that fine ass of yours looks like.”

  Of course that was the moment our neighbors in the condo below us opened their front door. Their brows first lifted at us before lifting a degree higher when they looked at each other.

  Noticing them and their pronounced eyebrows, Rowen tilted her head at me, a smirk in place. “I mean your aesthetically pleasing backside.” She winked at me as I crossed the last few steps toward her.

  Our neighbors kept going as if they hadn’t noticed us, but I was figuring out that that was the big city way. People were stacked on top of each other, but they all pretended they didn’t notice the person two feet in front of them. Although, based on Rowen’s assumptions, our neighbors knew everything about us and were probably keeping a diary of complaints for the manager, including how long our showers were; when, how long, and how loud we made love; and how often we walked down the hallway in the middle of the night. She called them the Nosey Newburgs, but they didn’t seem so bad. Or so different from the rest of the people I’d met in Seattle.

  “Hi yourself, beautiful.” I shot a wave at the Newburgs, but if it was acknowledged, it didn’t get returned.

  Rowen crossed her arms as I leapt onto the sidewalk. “I know you didn’t just call me beautiful. I know you didn’t just stoop to some lame, generic identifier meant to objectify and go against pretty much everything I stand for. Right?”

  Instead of answering her, I hitched an arm around her waist and pulled her close. I knew better than to jump into this kind of discussion with her, mainly because she always won.

  “Call me edgy, call me spunky. Rough around the edges even. Anything but pretty or sweet or beautiful.” She wrinkled up her nose and attempted to shiver, but the closer I pulled her to me, the more fake the act became.

  When she lifted an eyebrow, clearly waiting for my response to come in some form other than winding my arms around her, I shrugged. “Sorry. When I look at you, that’s all I see. Beauty. I can’t change what I see, and I wouldn’t want to either. You’re beautiful, whether you refuse to see it or not.”

  She tried to glare at me. She failed big time. She gave up with a sigh and rolled her eyes. “Fine. But you are the only one who can call me the b-word.”

  I gave her a squeeze then kissed her forehead before moving toward her bike to grab the shopping bags stuffed into the baskets I’d fastened to the bike. “You know, most girls mean a totally different word when they talk about a ‘b-word.’”

  “And the day I can be grouped in with ‘most girls,’ then maybe I’ll bat my eyes and go all wobbly-kneed when someone calls me beautiful. In the meantime, use it sparingly.” She nudged me as she shouldered up beside me, reaching for one of the bags.

  “I’ve got it,” I said, slipping the bag away from her.

  “Please don’t make me feel like an invalid.
We’ve talked about this.” Rowen glanced at the bags in my hands and waited.

  “You just rode your bike lord knows how far and have to climb a steep set of stairs to our condo now. I think you’ve stressed your body enough without heaving twenty pounds of groceries up said stairs.” I stepped back when she reached for one of the bags. I wasn’t giving in. I wasn’t. I gave in all the time, but this was important. Where her health and life was concerned, it was critically important.

  She threw her arm in the direction of the stairs. “Why are you acting like trudging up a flight of stairs is like scaling K-2 in a pair of Keds?”

  “Why are you acting like climbing them is like taking a nap under a tree in the summer?” I would have waved at the stairs too, but my hands were too full with the groceries.

  “Because they’re stairs. Twenty of them, the last time I counted. Hardly enough to get my heart rate up any more than if I was taking that nap under that tree.” Her voice was level, calm almost.

  Rowen was as used to getting into these kinds of squabbles as I was. We had plenty of them. Daily, sometimes hourly. I’d gotten used to it and had accepted that the reason we argued our point was because we cared. If I didn’t care so much about her, it would be much easier to just give in and wave her up the stairs with bags of groceries about to tumble out of her arms. If she didn’t care so much about me, it would be much easier for her to just let me turn into an anxious creature who had watched her every step since the words “heart condition” filtered through that doctor’s office.

  We argued because we cared. Seemed kind of backward, but not once I’d really given it some thought.

  “Let me help. Please, Rowen. I’m here. Last time I checked, I’m pretty damn strong.” I curled my arm so my bicep pressed through the material of my T-shirt. She tried not to notice, but her eyes lingered. “Not to mention I’ve got close to two decades of experience carrying groceries. I can get through this, but I need you to let me help where I can.”