This Darkness Mine

  “You staying here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your LVAD,” she says. “If you respond well, they might let you go home until you get a heart.”

  “Doubt it” is all I say as I keep my face straight, ignoring the rest of my body as it descends into panic. The flutter in my belly. A muscle jumping in my back. My throat closing up.

  The last time I left my house was in the ambulance after exiting through a window. It feels like an irreversible act, something that can’t be undone simply by walking in through the front door and announcing that I am home, if I can even claim that space anymore. I try to imagine climbing the steps, stopping to catch my breath every few, and easing open my bedroom door. In my mind there is still glass on the carpet and a tree branch has grown through the unclosed hole, a leaf brushing against the strands of my hair clinging to the sill.

  “No, I don’t think I’m going back,” I say.

  “You have to eventually, you know.” Layla’s voice is quiet, barely louder than the combined noise of our mechanical hearts.

  “Unless I die,” I tell her.

  “Weird goal.”

  “So what’s Brandy like?”

  Layla rolls with my subject change. “She’s pretty cool. Didn’t get huffy about me asking about her foot. Oh, and she beat Nadine at chess first night here, and insisted on calling it chest instead. So she’s my new best friend. Sorry.”

  “So she’s better at chest than Nadine?”

  “Way. Better.” Layla holds her hands about three feet out from her top.

  I laugh, the sound bouncing around inside me, scratching against the soft tissue still swollen around my sternum.

  “I miss anything else?”

  “Josephine’s parents said she sleeps too much and that she needed to come off the intravenous painkillers, so she was switched out to pills instead. She woke up long enough to be pissed off and say some words that I hope they didn’t hear down in the kids’ wing.”

  “What’s she on?”

  “They gave her Xanax for her fibromyalgia, and she said it was like using a cotton ball to soak up Niagara Falls, but Karen put her foot down and her parents started tossing the a-word around so she shut up.”

  “They called their own daughter an”—I glance around and drop my voice—“asshole?”

  It’s Layla’s turn to laugh, the sound much larger than her sickly frame. “Addict. But are you even serious right now? You can’t say asshole in a normal voice? Oh no, wait, let me guess.” She raises a hand to stop me. “You’re the good twin.”

  I feel a finger of anger worming through me, burrowing down next to my LVAD.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Layla said, but she’s still laughing a little. “I’ve just never met someone so lily-white, and I don’t mean your skin.”

  “Thanks,” I say, snuffing out the anger.

  “And FYI Angela’s brother already has a good line on Xanax, so I wouldn’t bother trying to bum any off Josephine in the name of your illicit love affair. Besides, I doubt she’d give them to you anyway. Brandy told me she walked into Jo’s room to say hey one day while Jo had the bottle out and she basically hunched up over it and started growling like a dog with a T-bone.”

  It’s a funny visual but raises a question.

  “Brandy walked in? I thought she was missing a foot.”

  “She’s got one of those fake things.”

  “A prosthetic?”

  “Yeah, pretty realistic too. First time she pulled her foot off in the lounge Nadine screamed so hard her oxygen nodes popped out.”

  “Nice,” I say. “Sorry I missed that. Why would she take off her foot though?”

  “She wanted me to paint the toenails.”

  “Huh.” I think about that while Layla yawns and stretches out, wondering what it would be like to just take out the part of you that doesn’t fit.

  twenty-seven

  TODAY AT THE CARDIAC CENTER!

  11:00 a.m.—Stitch in the Snow! Join a knitting class with Nurse Karen by the windows in the common room and celebrate the first snowfall of the year with a new scarf! (Note: This is an indoor program.)

  In case you were wondering.

  2:00 p.m.—Scrap your Crap! Crafty Nurse Karen continues to share her skills in this scrapbooking class. Turn your pixels into pics and make something to remember.

  Or, leave behind something for others to remember you by.

  4:00 p.m.—Meditation with Melody! Relax before dinner with guided meditation.

  Apparently Nurse Karen’s craftiness doesn’t extend to cassette tape players.

  I put my schedule on the breakfast table next to Layla as she stirs her tea. “Want to meditate again?”

  She pulls it toward her and glances at it before taking a sip of too-hot tea and having to spit most of it back out. “I will if you will.”

  “Deal,” I say as we’re joined by the new girl.

  “Hey,” she says, pulling out the chair across from me. “I’m Brandy.”

  “Sasha,” I tell her, giving her a once-over. She’s pale and skinny but doesn’t have an IV tree following her around or any permanent machines attached to her like Layla and me. And Layla wasn’t lying about her having Nadine beat at chest.

  “Want to do meditation with us later?” I ask her.

  “What’s it like?” Brandy picks up a piece of her unbuttered toast and eyes it the same way she had been the window the first time I saw her, like maybe it has something important to share with her and her alone.

  “Lame,” Layla warns her. “But Nadine doesn’t go, so I never miss it.”

  “Sure.” Brandy reaches across the table and snags my schedule, turning it around so she can read it right side up. “Except it can’t be that lame. There’s an exclamation point in the title.”

  “Makes it even lamer,” Layla says around a mouthful of apple.

  “No, you’ve just got to say it emphatically,” Brandy says. “This is meditation with MELODY!”

  She yells the last word, slamming her palm when she does. Over at another table, Nadine and Jo both jump and Nadine knocks her plain yogurt over.

  “Footless freak,” Nadine mutters toward us as she goes to get some napkins.

  Brandy ignores her, pulling out the pager that we’re all too familiar with and setting it on the table. She’s decorated hers with sugar-skull stickers.

  “I hate carrying this thing around,” she says, spinning it with one finger. “It’s like waiting for a boy to call, but if he never does it will actually kill me.”

  My hand goes to my hip, where my own pager is pressed against my skin. Like my LVAD, sometimes I forget it’s there, but for a different reason. I can still feel the flutter in my chest, but that along with the low hum of the motor have faded into the white noise of my daily life. I forget about the pager because it is eternally silent.

  “Does Sasha know the game?” Brandy asks Layla.

  “What game?” I ask, but Layla’s mouth is full of tea, and she points me over to Brandy.

  “I came up with something to kill some time, so to speak,” Brandy says, tipping me a wink. “It’s a little twisted, but if you’re not into knitting or scrapbooking it does the trick.”

  “Uh, it’s a lot twisted.” Layla tosses the rest of her apple across the cafeteria to land in the trash. “But if Karen comes in here with puppy dog eyes and tries to hand me knitting needles I might cave.”

  We slip out through the common room, avoiding Karen’s glance from the windows, where she is surrounded by the preteens and a few of the littler ones. Layla’s room is warm, and I strip my sweatshirt off as soon as we’re inside, realizing the cardiac center is probably the only place I’ll ever be able to wear a tank top in public again without my scars and LVAD attracting stares.

  Layla sprawls onto her bed and I follow, tucking my legs in so Brandy can fit too.

  “If there’s not enough space I’ll take my foot off,” she offers. “Perks of the prosthesis.” br />
  “So what’s the game?” I ask.

  “All right.” Brandy hands Layla her tablet. “Layla said you’ve got a fussy side. So don’t get all puffed up on me.”

  “A fussy side?” I ask Layla, who shrugs, flipping open the cover.

  “You’ll see. This game, it’s not . . . well, it’s like fun, but not funny. Get it?”

  “Like my joke about all of us waiting for someone else to die?” I ask.

  “That’s so dead–bang on,” Layla says. “You don’t even know.” She pulls up the local news station, scanning through recent articles. “Two dead on interstate crash this morning,” she reads aloud.

  Brandy whips out her phone. “Where?”

  Layla scrolls a little more. “Vinton County.”

  I watch as Brandy pulls up a map on her phone, her eyebrows drawn together. “Probably too far away. Time?”

  “Uh . . . six thirty-eight this morning.”

  Brandy checks the clock and shakes her head. “No good, even if they were donors we’re past the four-hour beating-heart limit, and that’s not allowing for travel time.”

  “Travel time?” I ask, though I’m pretty sure I know what she means.

  “Yeah, for one of those poor bastard’s hearts to come to us,” Brandy says, nodding toward Layla’s screen. “Next.”

  “This one looks promising,” Layla says. “Shooting in the suburbs, one dead, one in critical condition. Younger guys in their twenties.”

  Brandy tilts the tablet toward her. “Does it say where the dead guy was shot?”

  “Reynoldsburg.”

  Brandy smacks Layla lightly in the back of the head. “No, like his body.”

  “Uh . . . it just says gunshot wound.”

  “Assume chest then,” Brandy shakes her head. “No good. Got the name of the guy who was in critical?”

  “Lawson Harris.”

  “Spell the first name,” Brandy directs Layla while she taps out a text.

  “Who are you texting?” I ask her, but she shields her phone away from me.

  “Friend of mine at the DMV,” she says. “He can tell me if this guy is an organ donor.”

  I glance at Layla, who is scrolling for more fatalities. “Isn’t that kind of illegal?”

  “Probably more than kind of,” Brandy says, tapping her phone when it buzzes in her hand. “Nope. Not an organ donor. Next.”

  In my waistband, my own phone vibrates.

  From Heath

  Coming to see you today after school.

  Oh boy.

  I have a twinge of regret after I send the text because I need a favor from him.

  Hey could you bring me my clarinet that’s at school? Cage 22 Combo 9-15-5. Don’t want to get rusty.

  Sure.

  “That your lover?” Layla asks.

  “Ex-boyfriend,” I correct her.

  “Where we at here?” Brandy nudges Layla with her fake foot, but Layla minimizes her news feed.

  “I got nothing. Just the two on the highway and the guys who got shot.”

  “Slow day,” Brandy says, tossing her phone aside. “So how screwed up are we?”

  “Very,” I have to admit, but there’s a methodology at work here that appeals to me, an arrangement of facts and figures that my bored brain reaches for. I mentally scan the available information, looking for holes.

  “If you don’t know their blood type, it doesn’t matter anyway,” I tell the girls. “We don’t know if the heart will be a match. And technically agreeing to be an organ donor at the DMV is an advance directive, but the family has to agree at time of death.”

  “Facts, facts, facts,” Layla teases me, shoving my arm. “It’s just something silly to pass the time. Don’t make it all serious, or I’ll unplug your LVAD.”

  “Actually . . .” My voice fades out while I ponder, and Layla leans in toward me.

  “Uh-oh,” she says. “That’s the thinking face.”

  “Which side?” Brandy asks.

  I pull my phone back out of my waistband, tapping in some searches. “There’s a relationship between blood type and ethnic group, so if you know the race of the person in the news story we could probably take a decent stab at their blood type. I might even be able to find a distribution map of blood types in the area of the accident if I dig. Combine that with travel time from hospital to hospital, factoring out any major heart transplant facilities that are closer to the accident than we are . . . and yeah, we might actually be able to come up with a viable percentage on whether one of us gets the heart, as long as I know your blood types.”

  I look up to see both of them staring at me, mouths open. “What?”

  “She’s way more twisted than she looks,” Brandy says to Layla. “Or, how I imagine she looked before, you know”—she points to my scar—“that.”

  “So are you going to tell me your blood type?” I ask, phone in hand.

  “A positive,” Layla says.

  “B positive,” Brandy says. “And I can’t tell you how many jokes I get.”

  “Lucky,” I mutter under my breath, plugging in their types beside their names in my Notes app.

  “Why, what’s yours?” Brandy asks.

  “O neg,” I tell her, not looking up.

  “O neg as in oh shit,” she says.

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  There’s a tentative knock on Layla’s door and Josephine pokes her head in. “What are you guys up to?”

  “Life and death situations,” Layla says. “Close the door behind you.”

  We all scoot in even closer as Jo joins us on the bed.

  “No knitting for you?” Brandy asks.

  “Not sure I want to be around that many kids with sharp objects,” Jo says. “Plus Nadine is being a bitch today.”

  “Just today?” Layla asks, then looks to me before asking her next question. I nod.

  “So what’s your blood type, Jo? And don’t say Xanax.”

  A ping goes off on Layla’s tablet, an alert of a fresh news story. Brandy gets to it first and flips it open, her face lighting up.

  “Yes! Suicide by hanging. We can work with that.”

  twenty-eight

  Heath shows up about fifteen minutes before we’re supposed to start meditating, so any kind of zen I might have achieved is instantly screwed. I’m in the common room in an overstuffed chair, my legs hanging off one side. Layla sits on the couch next to me, reading another trashy romance that her mom brought her. I’m swiping through my notes and running averages on blood types in my head when he finds me.

  “Hey,” he says, setting my clarinet case on the floor by the chair.

  “Hey,” I say back, and sit up. I still have on the tank, since they keep the heat pumped pretty high in here for the comfort of everyone with poor circulation. I know my chest scar is bright and eye-catching, but I still hate that it’s the first place his eyes go.

  “You, uh . . . you doing okay?” He points at it like I don’t know what he’s referencing.

  “No, you idiot, she needs a heart transplant,” Layla says.

  “Heath, meet Layla,” I say. “Layla, Heath.”

  “Hi.” He nods at her, and she nods back.

  “So what are your odds on getting one?” he asks, and while others might find it insensitive, it’s a huge relief for me.

  This is Heath and me, facts and figures, streams of data. We rely on the concrete and let the impulsive evaporate, which explains a lot about why we were together so long, an investment of our time we weren’t willing to bail on yet.

  “It’s complicated,” I tell him. “We don’t really know the actual algorithm they use, but when a heart becomes available it’s determined by blood type, greatest need, and proximity of the recipient.”

  “Oh.” Heath’s face falls a little bit. He knows I’m O neg because we coordinated the local blood drive for the past three years, the Red Cross volunteers’ faces lighting up when they saw my paperwork.

  O is the universal donor, but
O neg can only receive from other O negs, which make up about 7 percent of the world’s population. So they’d treat me like a queen and pump me dry. Getting that attention seemed cool then. Now it’s a death sentence.

  “How’s Lilly?” I ask, and he has the grace to blush.

  “She’s good.”

  “Is she?” I say, and Layla makes a noise in her throat. “Well, thanks for bringing my clarinet.”

  “Sasha, listen. I . . .” Heath looks around the room. “Can we go somewhere and talk?”

  “I have to meditate in like five minutes.”

  Heath’s jaw tightens, something I’m familiar with. “Then give me the five minutes.”

  I get up and he sees the LVAD battery pack at my side. “What’s that?”

  “Life support.” I slip past him and he follows me to my room, where I close the door behind us. We stand, awkwardly facing each other.

  “So Brooke told me about . . . him.” He can’t say it, and I’m not helping him. I stare blankly.

  “About who?”

  “Seriously, Sash? C’mon. This isn’t easy for me either, you know.”

  I’m about to tell him that it isn’t my job to make it easier, but whatever there was between us, no matter how thin the string, it pulls taut in the moment that I see tears standing in his eyes. Somewhere, my heart responds. But I can barely feel it.

  “About Isaac?” I provide.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I didn’t think you were the cheating type.”

  I’ll be sending Brooke a text later. But right now Heath is the one in front of me, and the rational part of me knows he deserves an explanation.

  “Do you want to sit down?” I ask him.

  He shakes his head. “You said five minutes.”

  “This will take longer than that,” I say, and motion him toward the bed. He sits and I remain standing, eyes closed, hoping that somehow not looking at him will make this easier.

  “I don’t know if this will help at all, but I think it explains a lot,” I say, pushing the chair in front of me and spinning it with my hands while I speak.

  “What do you mean?”