This Darkness Mine

  I ignore Lilly’s assertion that she will try to come see me. If she brings it up I’ll tell her I tried to text her, but I had a lot going on in between therapy and surgeries. Which leaves me with the last text that came in, from Isaac. I tap my thumbs against the screen.

  From Isaac

  Is it b/c of me?

  Hey. Not your fault. I’m at the cardiac center in the city. Surgery scheduled for tomorrow.

  Just like with Heath, my response is immediately followed by the ellipsis inside a bubble. But I don’t picture him the way I did Heath, someone looking to be absolved. Instead I can see him keeping his phone nearby, needing to hear from me because he actually cares. And that’s kind of terrifying.

  What kind of surgery? U scared the shit out of me.

  I’m getting an LVAD . . . it helps my heart work. Mom says it’s a good thing I fell out the window b/c that’s how we found out I need a transplant.

  My answer to Isaac is longer than my texts to anyone else, mostly because there was no planning involved. With everyone else what I texted was designed to procure a specific response. A breezy thank-you to Brooke so that she wouldn’t worry, a quick jab for Heath, one he could choose to respond to or not. If I ignore Lilly completely she won’t have the guts to text again, easily excised from my life. But with Isaac I’m just typing, saying what I think, and he’s answering the same way.

  U gonna be ok?

  Don’t know yet . . . I have to stay here until I get a heart and don’t know when that will be.

  I pause, thumbs hovering over a new text, unsure whether I’m giving up on future Sasha Stone, waiting on rewards that I might not live to reap. Like with my clarinet, my hands make the decision.

  Come see me?

  Tonight? Can be there but it’d be late. Have to take dad to work.

  Visiting hours are over at five, but rules are the last thing on my mind when I reply. Tomorrow morning Mom and Dad are coming to help me pack up loose clothes and my toothbrush, all the little things that have become my life. Then we’re going to drive over to the hospital and a doctor is going to slice open my chest and put a machine in my heart. After tomorrow I’ll have a scar between my breasts and a power cord underneath them. I have to see Isaac before then.

  Yes. Text me when you get here.

  And while I know it’s Shanna’s heart that wants him, it’s my fingers shaking when I hit send.

  Layla is stirring her oatmeal with suspicion, as if it might have an ulterior motive, when I sit down next to her at lunch.

  “I am so sick of this,” she says, watching a chunk slide off her spoon to plop back into the bowl. “Every night I tell God that if I’m going to go, make it before another bowl of oatmeal, not after.”

  “I need to ask you something,” I say, cutting right to the chase.

  “Yes, you can have my oatmeal,” she says, shoving the bowl toward me. “Done.”

  I push it back. “I want to know how to get out of here after hours.”

  Her eyes get big, and she lowers herself to taking a bite of oatmeal in order to buy time before answering. She chews with exaggeration, holding her finger up to let me know to wait.

  “Was that good?” I ask, when she finally swallows.

  “As an evasive maneuver, maybe. On the acceptable food scale it’s like a two.”

  “It’s a bad evasion too,” I tell her. “I’m still here.”

  “Uh-huh, I see you.”

  “So?”

  She takes a drink of milk, eyes on me over the rim of her glass. “So why are you asking me?”

  “Because you’ve been here the longest, I know you the best, and you like a good romance story.”

  She puts the glass down with a thump. “Oh, you do know me. You want to get out and see a boy before you get your LVAD, don’t you?”

  I nod and she glances around the cafeteria. Some of the smaller kids are huddled in a corner peering over one boy’s shoulder at his iPad, but other than that we’re alone.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” she says, leaning in closer. “If all you want to do is get outside, that’s easy enough, because Angela’s the nurse on duty tonight. But I’ll do you one better, since I know where there’s an empty bed maybe you can make good use of. No dirty sheets to explain in your room, right?”

  Before Shanna I would’ve told her to shut her dirty mouth, blushed, dropped my eyes, done anything to keep a veneer of cleanliness and respectability about myself. Now I just nod, all pretenses dropped. I want to know where this bed is and how I can get Isaac into it without getting caught.

  “So Angela,” Layla goes on. “She’s got a brother who pulls in some decent cash on the side by selling off pills. She gets them to him, he splits the profits with her. This is a fancy place we’re in, but that doesn’t mean the nurses make bank. I heard Karen telling somebody just the other day she could probably make more at McDonald’s if she didn’t mind the grease in her pores, and at least there the teenagers aren’t dying.”

  “She said that?” I’m surprised, remembering the hug Karen went in for the second she met me.

  “Hell yes, she said that. Sucks to be us, but how would you like to be our nurses? Once we die we’re gone. They’ve got to stay behind and look at the next face, smile at us the whole time until a new one comes in needing to be told everything is going to be okay when everybody knows it isn’t.”

  “Point taken,” I say. “So Angela makes cash on the side by selling off our pain pills, and I can bribe her to look the other way. But the only thing I’m on right now is antibiotics and immune-suppressants. I doubt they have a high street value.”

  “Got you covered,” Layla says. “I’ll slip you a couple of Oxy, but you’ve got to tell me your love story. And don’t leave the good parts out either.”

  “Done.”

  The text comes in from Isaac that he’s in the parking lot, and I slip down the hallway to the back exit, shoving a stone in the crack between the double doors so they don’t lock behind me. I’m wearing the best thing I could put together in my limited wardrobe, a pair of pajama pants that hang a little low on the hips and a worn T-shirt thin enough to be kind of sexy. I don’t have real shoes, just the flip-flops Mom gave me for the shower, so I’m smacking my way across the parking lot toward him when he looks up.

  He’s leaning against his bike, backlit by a security light and a halo of smoke around his head. He looks like everything I should never want, but somehow I’m walking faster, my mouth splitting into a smile.

  “Hey,” I say, as I step into the circle of light he’s parked in.

  “Hey,” he says back, his eyes roaming over my face.

  I still haven’t looked in the mirror, because if I did I know I would have told him not to come. The nurses keep telling me it’s improving, but I’m nowhere near what I was the last time he saw me. I can part my hair so that the half that’s still growing in isn’t as obvious, but the stitches across my forehead can’t be hidden. So I don’t even try, instead meeting his eyes boldly.

  “Shit, lady,” he says, his hands going to my face. He runs his thumb over the stitches softly, and I lean into his touch. “You look badass.”

  “Badass, huh?” I say, a tear slipping down one cheek. He wipes it away without comment.

  “Thought it’d be worse, after everything I heard.”

  “And you still came?” I ask, wondering what he could have imagined that looked worse than I do now, yet still brought him here in the dark of night.

  “I’m here, right?” One hand slips under my cascade of hair to feel the bristles underneath. “What’s going on with this?”

  “They had to shave a lot of my hair off,” I tell him. “Part of my scalp was just . . .” I stop talking as his thumbs brush against my lips, his forehead touching mine.

  “Why’d you go and do that?”

  I press back, our faces close. I want to tell him that I didn’t do it, Shanna did. Then I think of our names together at the glyph, my sister nowhere in
between them. “I know where there’s an empty room,” I say, tugging on his hand.

  He follows, but there’s enough hesitation to make me wonder if he was only being polite about my face. I slip through the door, kicking the rock aside and still holding his hand. We tiptoe through the darkened hallway, and I wave at Angela when she looks up from the station desk.

  “Um, is this a good idea?” Isaac whispers.

  “It’s okay,” I tell him. “I paid her off with Oxy.”

  I find the room number Layla told me would be empty, a transplant patient who had come back to the cardiac center for her recovery time and shipped out before I showed up. We go inside, and I leave the lights off, leading him over to the bed.

  “Listen to you, Sasha Stone,” he says, as I wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark. “A punk haircut and bribing people with drugs. What’s next?”

  “This,” I say, and press myself up against him. He kisses back, his hands wandering under my shirt for a second before he pulls away. My body knows what to do because it’s done it before, but I’ve never been fully present in these moments with him. My skin wants to leap off my skeleton, wrap itself around him.

  “Is this a good idea?” he asks again.

  “I told you, I took care of the nurse. She’s on shift for the rest of—”

  “No,” he cuts me off. “I mean this. You and me doing . . . this.” He tightens his hands on my body like he’s not sure what he wants the answer to be.

  “Yeah, it’s fine,” I say, leaning in again.

  “I won’t hurt you or anything, right?” he asks, pulling back.

  “No, it’s okay,” I tell him, and then I’m on the bed and he’s with me.

  We’ve never done it in a bed, and it’s different. All my hazy memories from Shanna are desperate, wind in our faces and dirt on our backs. But here and now Isaac is different with me, like maybe he knows it’s actually me, not her. He’s cautious and sweet, gentle in a way that changes how I respond. It’s not the crazy, grasping, defiant competition like it is for Shanna. It’s soft and kind and we lie together afterward, something new as well. I curl against him, the prickles of my shorn scalp probably tickling his chest, but he doesn’t ask me to move.

  “This is nice,” he says, one hand toying with the hair I have left.

  “Yeah,” I have to agree, even though part of me doesn’t want to. I feel like every time before this was for Shanna. But what I just did . . . that was for me. And I liked it. Sasha Stone liked having sex with Isaac Harver. It feels like graffiti in my mind, something I can’t unsee.

  “So what’s the surgery tomorrow?”

  “It’s called an LVAD,” I tell him. “Basically it’s like a pump in my heart they put in to keep me going until a transplant becomes available.”

  “How long does that take?”

  I shrug, my naked shoulder moving against his chest. “Depends. You’ve got to have the same blood type as the donor, and be roughly the same age and weight. Plus the heart can’t be far away, because it can’t have stopped working within the last four hours. So you have to hope that someone near your age, weight, and with your blood type within a certain mile radius dies, and agreed to be an organ donor when they got their driver’s license. Even if they did, their family still has to approve and agree.”

  “That’s fucked-up.”

  “Yep,” I agree. “I have a pager that will go off if a heart becomes available for me, and I get rushed to the hospital for the transplant. I’m supposed to wear it at all times.”

  Isaac’s brow furrows. “At all times?” He lifts our blanket to peer underneath.

  “I think it’s in the pile of clothes on the floor,” I tell him.

  “I guess you better go get it then,” he says, rolling over to pin me to the bed.

  “You get it,” I tell him.

  Neither of us gets it.

  I walk Isaac to the back door afterward, where there’s a bit of lingering and kissing despite the cold rain starting to fall. I say something about him riding all the way back home in the weather but he shrugs it off, tells me it’s worth it and disappears into the dark like the antihero I have to remind myself he is. There’s a light coming from under Layla’s door, so I keep my promise, knocking before slipping into her room.

  “Hey.” She looks up from her book, eyes heavy with the sleep she’s denying herself as she waits up for me.

  “Hey,” I say back, trying to keep my tone light as I take the chair by her bed.

  Layla looks awful. I didn’t know black people could go pale, but she definitely isn’t her normal skin tone, and her fingers are trembling in a way I don’t like as she sets aside her bodice-ripper paperback.

  “So, dish,” she says, but I shake my head.

  “You sure? You . . . sorry, but you look rough.”

  “Says the girl with half her face sewn back on,” she shoots back.

  “Which should carry even more weight,” I say.

  “Meh.” She waves aside my concern. “I stayed up too late last night. Had to see if the heroine got her hero. Same story tonight, just in real life.”

  “If you’re sure . . .”

  “Yep, but first things first. Did you take care of the dirty laundry?”

  “Literally and figuratively,” I nod.

  “Okay.” She leans back in her bed, eyes closed. “Tell me your love story. What’s his name? How did you meet?”

  I start slow, telling her about how my sister fell for him first, but I might be following suit. Her eyes get big and I know she assumes that’s why my twin threw me out a window, and I let her think it. I talk about Heath and our antiseptic relationship, how nothing he ever did touched me—and I mean that in all the ways.

  Layla smiles at that. “So this Isaac, he your first?”

  “Yeah,” I say, laying claim to it. “You ever?”

  She smirks. “I wish. Mom’s been helicoptering me since I was in fifth grade. Even if there was a boy interested in having sex with a flat-chested girl who might die right in the middle, he’d also have to be okay with my mom standing right there with a defibrillator.”

  I snort—there’s no other word for it—and Layla laughs along with me, though it leaves her short of breath.

  “There’s somebody though, right?” I ask, and Layla shrugs, her stick-thin shoulders poking against the blanket as she does.

  “Maybe there’s a boy,” she says. “Maybe I met him at a camp for kids like me, the kind where you don’t go for long hikes or do trust falls, because we were all fragile things. Maybe we write each other letters instead of texting, so that we’ve each got something that the other actually touched, in case it’s the last one that’ll come. Maybe he got his heart, and it’s a fine, strong one. Maybe he’s waiting on me so that we can meet again someday, the same people we were before, but now with more time ahead of us than what’s behind. Maybe that’s why I haven’t decided to die just yet. Maybe that’s my love story.”

  “Yeah,” I say, thinking about my life, two stark columns of good and bad, yes and no. “Yeah, maybe.”

  twenty-five

  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 ha
d 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.