“Yes,” I say.
“You wouldn’t just be changing your story because a suicide attempt would automatically bar you from receiving a new heart?”
“No.”
“Okay,” Amanda says agreeably. She looks back down at her notes, which I’m sure is a ploy since there are only a few lines written there.
“So . . .” She turns a page. It’s covered in writing; I spot the names Jones and Faber.
“You talked to the medics?” I blurt. Shanna’s sudden charging inside me forces the words out before my brain pulls the plug.
“Yes,” Amanda says. “How do you feel about that?”
“Fine,” I lie. I’m very good at keeping a straight face under all circumstances, but since my face’s new default is definitely un-straight I have no idea if I look confident or not.
“How would you feel if I told you that as an advocate for mental health, I’m not in agreement with the concept of those with mental issues being denied working organs?” Amanda asks.
I shrug. But I’m listening.
“Sasha,” Amanda leans forward, drops her voice. “You need a new heart; that’s the cardiac center’s job. My job is to help you, and judging by what you said to the medics, you could use it.”
“And whose job is it to monitor you?” I ask. “Someone who wouldn’t be cool with you withholding such information, I bet.”
“That’s true,” Amanda says casually. “But to be honest, I’m not terribly happy with my boss right now. Apparently your dad made a sizable donation to the ad campaign for our next tax levy. I get to rearrange my schedule—and my other patients—to fit yours.”
Amanda says get to in a tone that informs me she’s not thrilled about it, and I get the feeling Dad probably made that donation out of my college savings once he realized hospitals were my better bet in the short term.
“So I was reassigned from a court hearing today for someone I’ve been working with closely for six months to be with Sasha Stone, who answers my questions with monosyllables and sarcasm.”
“Also, I requested you,” I say quietly, eyes on the floor. I’m guessing Amanda hasn’t been requested for anything since eighth-grade lab partners, and I’m right. Her anger deflates like one of my welcome balloons, now hanging limply around knee height.
“I know,” she says, but her voice has a key change, the sharps removed. “Which I would assume means you’d rather talk to me than someone else. So let’s do the actual talking part, and skip the bullshit.”
I like the way she swears; it reminds me of Brooke.
“Okay,” I say.
Amanda resituates herself on the chair and looks back at her notes. I’m expecting her to come at me with something impressive next, a bit of medical terminology or something self-affirming to show me that she knows what she’s doing. Instead she snaps her folder shut.
“So what’s going on with you?”
It throws me. I had my shoulders squared, ready for a verbal sparring match in the thirty minutes that are left in our session. Instead she asked me a simple question, and while my mind ponders the longer answer, my mouth pops out the simple one.
“I’m dying.”
Amanda nods, doing me the courtesy of not insisting along with the rest of the cardiac center that everything will be all right if we put a happy face on.
“A week ago I was alive, and now I’m dying,” I go on. “In a few days they’re putting a machine in me that will do what my heart won’t.”
“Yes,” Amanda says, flipping her folder again briefly. “An LVAD. It’s to assist your left ventricle with pumping.”
I feel a small smile, maybe a three on the pain scale of happiness. Amanda smiles back. “What’s funny?”
“I was thinking of my friend Brooke and how she accidentally googled pump king instead of pumpkin. Or maybe it wasn’t an accident. It’s hard to tell with her.”
“Brooke?” Amanda repeats. “She’s a friend of yours?”
“Yeah, she’s . . . yeah.” I think she is, anyway.
“Can you tell me about your sister?”
Amanda’s folder is shut, her eyes on mine. But I’m willing to bet she’s got every word of my conversation with Jones and Faber memorized.
“I don’t know.” I say. “Can I?”
“Yes.”
I study her, something most people can’t take for long. A liar is easy to spot, and lying is easy to do once you’ve learned how badly others do it. But Amanda isn’t a liar, and all the truth that’s in me comes out, heading for her like a magnet.
“I did jump out the window,” I say. “But it wasn’t me, it was my sister.”
Amanda opens her folder again, writing perfectly on the lines even though she keeps her eyes on me.
“My sister was upset about something and she felt that was the most logical reaction. She’s very emotionally driven. Her name is Shanna,” I tell Amanda, and spell it out for her. “I absorbed her in the womb and her heart took the place of mine.”
Amanda glances up at me, pen still. “What can you tell me about Shanna?”
I feel a small shudder deep inside, a life stretching back into wakefulness at the sound of her name. I hold Amanda’s eyes, waiting for her to contradict me as I speak.
“She likes sex and boys who will give it to her; she likes the smell of cigarettes and beer mixed with exhaust fumes. She likes to be shocking and say lewd things. She likes cold night air. She likes to have her way.”
“Is that the only thing you have in common?” Amanda asks, head still down. I stare at the uneven part in her hair, wondering if she knows it looks bad or just doesn’t care.
“Other than an entire body, yes,” I say.
“But only the heart is hers?” Amanda’s pen scratches away, the pad of paper shifting up and down on her knees.
“Yes, only the heart, but sometimes she uses our whole body for whatever she wants.”
“And she wants things like . . .” Amanda’s pen hovers, ready to record my sister’s dark leanings with cheap ink and a yellow legal pad. It feels good to see it there, an inanimate object about to take witness to my truths.
“A boy. Isaac.”
“Isaac,” Amanda repeats, tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth while she writes.
“He’s why she jumped,” I explain. “They got into a fight. I guess. Kind of. He wanted something more from me—her—than I was looking for with him. And then we—I—sent him a nasty text while he was waiting for me down in the driveway and he took off. So she kind of panicked and . . .”
“. . . and took the fastest route down,” Amanda says. Which actually makes my sister sound logical.
“Shanna’s bones come up out of my gums sometimes,” I tell her.
Amanda nods like that’s to be expected. “Tell me more about Shanna’s bones.”
“I used to think they were pieces of clarinet reed,” I tell her. “But then Shanna said it’s actually her bones working their way out of my system from when I absorbed her.”
“Shanna said this?”
I consider my answer for a long moment, wanting to get it right. “She didn’t say it. She wrote it down.”
“That’s how you two communicate?”
“That and when she throws us through storm windows to express dissatisfaction.”
Amanda raises an eyebrow to let me know I’ve violated the sarcasm rule. I have to admit she’s got the eyebrow raise down.
“Yes, that’s how we communicate,” I amend.
“And when did this begin?”
Like everything else it falls somewhere on the timeline of my life where the biggest demarcation is losing my virginity to Isaac Harver. “I think it was after,” I say.
“After?”
“No, sorry—just before.”
“Before what, Sasha?”
I feel a flush, my heart still capable of shoving all the blood up to my face. “I’d rather not say.”
“That’s fine,” she says agreeably. “Bu
t if you’re not open with me I’m not going to be a terribly effective therapist.”
I think I’m going to be very open to plenty of people next week when they put the LVAD inside me, so I leave that barrier in place. Amanda allows it, giving me the space of a quarter rest before continuing.
“Do you want to add anything more about Shanna right now?”
There’s a blip on the screen, my heart rate monitor disagreeing with this line of questioning. “No.”
“How about Brooke?”
“I miss her,” I say, apparently an embolism not being the only spontaneous thing that can happen.
“When is the last time you saw Brooke?”
I can fudge this one a little, since I last spoke to Brooke the other night over messaging, but I haven’t technically seen her since . . .
“The night of the accident.”
“So she knows about it?”
“She saw it happen,” I tell her, gratified by the surprise on Amanda’s face as the professional mask she was attempting to mold slips a little.
“She was there?”
“No, I was Skyping with Brooke and Lilly,” I explain. Amanda nods and leaves space for me to go on, but I don’t know what to say.
I’ve thought about it while I stared at the reflective roof in the back of the squad, the cracked ceiling above my bed at Stillwell, and now the artfully decoupaged tiles of the cardiac center. I don’t know how I had my laptop tilted, if my friends would have only seen me run off screen and heard the crash, or if they actually saw me unravel right before their eyes, leaving behind a chunk of my hair on the remnants of the broken window.
“Did something happen during this chat?” Amanda asks.
“Lilly said something I didn’t like, and Brooke agreed,” I say stiffly.
“And what was that?”
“A word I won’t repeat.”
“Was it directed at you?”
“Yes.”
“And how did that make you feel?” Amanda pauses. “Is that really why you jumped out the window?”
“No,” I tell her. And it’s the truth. “Because I didn’t—”
“—jump out the window,” Amanda finishes for me. “Shanna did.”
I nod in agreement. “And trust me, Shanna doesn’t care what those two think.”
“What does Shanna care about?”
I glance at the clock just as the second hand ticks into place.
“Time’s up,” I say.
twenty-two
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.
&nbs
p; “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.