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.
twenty-six
“Last time we saw each other you were telling me about Brooke and Lilly,” Amanda says, scanning her notes. She’s wearing corduroys today, but they’re about an inch too short so when she sits down she looks like a little kid in time-out. Her hair is up in a messy bun that some girls can pull off. She is not one of those girls.
“And what did I say about them?” I ask.
I’ve decided to try a new tactic with Amanda, answering her questions with a question. She complies, flipping a few pages back in her notebook, which kind of makes me uneasy because I know I didn’t say that much during our session at the cardiac center.
“You had some concerns about the fact that they may have witnessed your fall.”
I snort at her choice of words, and she lets the pages fan back into place.
“I understand that Brooke came to see you at the cardiac center before your surgery. How did that make you feel?”
“Did my mom tell you that?”
“Yes. Were you glad to see Brooke?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“And what did you two talk about?”
“What do friends usually talk about?”
“So you consider her a friend?”
“Is there a reason that I shouldn’t?”
“Who else is your friend?”
“Not Lilly.”
Whoops. She got me on that one. It was like a hammer into my kneecap and I reacted. I should probably give Amanda more credit. Just not when it comes to personal grooming.
“Why isn’t Lilly your friend? Because she called you a name?”
“That, and she stole my boyfriend.”
Amanda nods at me, and I know I’m supposed to say more. I don’t want to, but apparently the void inside me that Dad is wising up to filled with words while I was dead to the world.
“Heath,” I explain. “He’s the guy I’ve been dating forever. And apparently he’s with Lilly now. So no, not my friend. Either of them.”
Amanda nods and makes some sort of note on her legal pad. As usual it’s very short, which makes me wonder about the pages and pages that she references later on. When she writes them. What she writes.
“And how does that make you feel?”
I don’t have a good answer for that. Well, I actually do, but I know it’s not the right one.
“I’ve got a lot going on right now,” I say instead.
In the big picture, this is true. In the day to day, this is a patent lie. I have very little going on other than ice chips and IVs.
“Your mom says a boy came to the house looking for you after the accident. Was that Heath?”
“No.” I shake my head. “That was Isaac.”
“So the LVAD surgery was successful,” she says. It’s a good tactic. She just changed subjects and made a statement instead of asking a question.
“Yes.” I lift my shirt to show her my cord and the little battery pack at my side.
“Was this the first time you had surgery?”
“No,” I tell her, easily pulling all my medical data up since it’s what I’m quizzed about most these days. “I had my wisdom teeth out when I was in junior high.”
“And how does the LVAD make you feel?”
I consider telling her about the butterfly in my chest that needs electricity to work, how it reminds me of the beetle with a pin through its living body, something I did, the big, bleeding red A on that science project. How that wasn’t terribly fulfilling because it was just another in a long line, before and after, my grades a long vowel-filled exhalation of superiority.
But she’s waiting with her pen and paper, ready to put it all down permanently. And these are dark things that need to stay inside. So I lie.
“Alive,” I say.
Alive Awake Aware /Alpha Aspire Atone Alone
I have the weirdest sensation when I finally return to the cardiac center: I’m glad to be back.
The heart wing of the hospital I had my LVAD surgery in was nice enough, as hospitals go. Which means that the floors were even and most of the nurses didn’t use scrunchies to hold their hair back. Other than that it was greatly lacking. By my second day in recovery they informed me they were short on space and I was going to have a roommate.
The first part of that compound word is correct. The second carries an implication of affection that was inaccurate at best. I shared a space with another person; we listened to each other breathe, roll over, and urinate for a period of two weeks. I can’t say that I would recognize her on the street, and we didn’t share so much as a good-bye as I was rolled past her bed in my wheelchair on the way out.
I spot a new girl in the cardiac center common room as I make my way down to 211, the SASHA STONE nameplate still in place there. The new girl is folded into an armchair, staring out the window like someone has appointed her to that task. I don’t know if she’s here because she already got a new heart and was moved here for rehab, or if she’s like the rest of us: waiting. She doesn’t notice me, but I knock on Layla’s door the moment Mom and Dad are convinced that I am appropriately settled and I won’t die from sadness the second they leave.
“Who’s the new girl?” I ask.
“Brandy,” Layla says. “And hi.”
“Hi.” I settle onto her bed, since she’s on the couch, tablet across her knees. She looks better than she did when I left, which isn’t saying a lot, but I won?
??t have to worry about my supply of Oxy for Angela running out anytime soon.
“What did I miss?”
“Not a lot. Nadine lost three more pounds. She’s not allowed to give her desserts away anymore, so all the underground calorie betting has been shut down pretty hard.”
“Nuts,” I say, wrinkling my nose. Our entertainments are small but we cling to them.
“And the new girl doesn’t have a foot.”
“That’s—wait, what?” I immediately hate myself for stealing Lilly’s stock phrase but there are times when it’s appropriate.
“A foot,” Layla holds up one of hers to clarify. “She’s missing one.”
“How did that happen?”
Layla looks at me over the edge of her iPad but I push. “You asked me on my second day here what was going on with my face, so I’m guessing you went after someone’s missing appendage with equal grace.”
She tries to look offended but can’t hold on to it long. “Okay, yeah. And I got a cup of peaches off Josephine for being right about the cause before Karen shut down the illegal food swapping.”
“And the cause?”
“Not all that exciting. Nadine bet that she lost it in an accident of some sort, but I made her get more specific in case she tried to plead technicalities when it came down to parting with her sugar-free cookie.”
Layla has a point. People use the word accident for all kinds of things. Death. Betrayal. Peeing your pants. Babies.
“So she said car accident, Josephine went with bear attack—which was a stupid bet, but she said she doesn’t like peaches anyway—and I chose the obvious.”
I spin my hand in the air.
“Bad circulation,” Layla says with a shrug.
“Ouch.”
“Yeah, so like, no foot plus no good story to go with it.” Layla flips the cover shut on her tablet. “So how do you like the LVAD?”
“Like is a strong word,” I tell her, and she smiles.
“Hey, it’s keeping you alive.”
“Yep,” I say, suddenly conscious of the straps across my shoulders that hold my battery pack in place, and then even more irritated by the fact that I’ve grown so accustomed to them, I had forgotten they were there.