Alive

by Chandler Baker

  I scramble out after Henry and we do exactly what the man says. We get out of there. Fast.

  I lie on my bed, staring up at the ceiling, scatterbrained with sickness. Unable to form complete thoughts.

  At five oh eight on the dot, the splitting pain had once again racked my body with seizures. Knives and needles and fire all wrapped up into one. This time I didn’t even attempt to wash myself of the sweat when my heart rate slowed. My weak limbs lie limply on the mattress, begging for a reprieve. But even with the worst of it gone, what’s left is still devastating. It’s like trying to be relieved that the bombing has stopped, when the city is in smoking ruins.

  How many days since my surgery have I been suffering? I start to count on one hand and then two and then I have to add in my toes. The torture is so complete that I wonder if I’d have chosen to die if I’d known.

  Deliriums, nightmares, visions that haunt me in broad daylight—I want nothing more than a moment of relief.

  Every so often, as the seconds tick by, I’ll summon all of my focus. I’ll close my eyes, concentrating, until I can imagine for the span of one breath the sensation of anguish lifting out of my body and away. It’s beautiful. Freeing. Like running my hands through a cloud. But I can only hold the illusion for a single instant before it wobbles and fades like a mirage.

  After that I crash back into my own body, filled with its nails and saws and sharp things that scrape my soul and it’s then that I always realize what it is I’d been thinking about to give me such a small break from reality.

  Levi.

  Dark thoughts swarm me. My mind is a cobweb for the gloomiest of ideas. Sticky, it nabs and cocoons them so that my conscience has time to toy with them before gobbling them up. Several times I contemplate whether it’s worth it to live at all. If this is the quality of life I can expect—and so far I’ve seen no evidence to the contrary—then why should I fight so hard to stay? But then again, how could I ever overcome the guilt of wasting the gift of someone else’s heart?

  When I can no longer stand the clawing, hollowed-out sense of my torso and limbs, and when my brain is so fuzzy and disenchanted that nobody could convince me there is an ounce of good in the universe, I make a decision. I need to know. I need to understand why.

  I type the words into my phone and hit send. There. It’s done. It’s reckless and stupid and ill-advised, but I don’t care. My heart has made me into someone who can’t care.

  I’ve spent two years, I realize, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Ever since my diagnosis, my days have been filled with the possibility of more bad things to come. The bad things have never failed to come. And I’ve never failed to wait for them. But I’m bone-tired from the waiting. I can’t take the suspense. This time, I’ll make the first move.

  It’s an hour before I get a response. I walk a trench through the carpet in front of my windowsill, the tempo of the rain picking up. I push my fingers into the base of my jaw and rub hard.

  At last there’s a tap on the window. I listen for my parents or for Elsie. When I hear nothing in return, I jostle open the glass and Levi shimmies through, a gust of cold air and rain following him. Here he is, my moment of weakness.

  “I didn’t realize it was raining that hard,” I say to the boy who is now dripping onto my carpet. As if on cue there’s a rumble of thunder. The downpour sprays me in the face as I wrestle the window back shut.

  He shakes his hair out. Droplets fly in all directions. “Just a shower.” He winks. Not all guys can pull off a wink. Levi Zin can.

  A flash of lightning brightens my room for a split second. Five seconds pass and then another crash of thunder.

  I hover, unsure of what to do now that I’m deep into the process of doing it.

  He blots his face and arms. “Someone’s had a change of heart.”

  “Or lack thereof.” I stiffen. He has the type of chest I’d like to bury my face in and breathe in for life. Just being near him makes me feel equal parts better and worse. Better because his presence eases my discomfort, worse because the craving to touch him is so strong it’s unbearable.

  I should be afraid. I should be terrified. But I only feel ready.

  He continues brushing rain droplets from the shoulders of a black overcoat and I continue watching him more greedily than I should. The torrential downpour volleys against the window. I take a deep breath. He raises his eyebrows as if to say, Oh?

  “Who are you, Levi?” It’s a rush to ask him.

  He crosses his arms and leans against the far wall. “Levi Zin.” Lightning illuminates half of his face.

  I take a step closer. “Levi Zin’s dead.”

  I can’t read his eyes behind the shadows. “I’m clearly not dead.”

  “There’s nothing clear about it.” I jump as thunder rattles my shelves. “You look like him. I saw. You look exactly like him.”

  It’s his turn to take a step closer to me. “You’re being ridiculous.”

  “I know things.”

  His glare cuts like stone. “Haven’t you had blackouts, what, like four times now? And those are the ones that we know of.”

  “What are you?” I say it as much to myself as to Levi.

  “You’re as crazy as they say you are.” Our toes are nearly touching. I watch his chest rise and fall. Real breaths. Don’t listen to him, I will myself. It’s not real.

  I close my eyes, try with everything I have to shut his words out. Lies. What he’s saying, it’s all lies.

  I squeeze my fists closed and press them tight to my sides. “No,” I say at last. “I saw that you died. I saw how you died.”

  His lips tighten into thin lines.

  “Tell me what you are, Levi.” The shake won’t come out of my voice now. I think that I’m standing at the point of no return, that we have nowhere to go from here but down. And yet my heart still claws for him, storming the prison made from nothing but the bones of my rib cage. It beats so hard that I know it’s trying to fracture my skeleton. I wait for the first shard to puncture my skin or lung.

  Levi tilts his head a small segment of an inch and I swear he’s listening to my heartbeat clamoring for him. He takes a step closer to me, the fabric of our clothes brushing together. I stand my ground, knees trembling underneath a body they are too weak too hold up. Every particle inside me screams along with my heart.

  “Does it matter?” Levi asks, moving his thumb under the tip of my chin and pulling my jaw up so that I’ll look at him.

  A crack of lightning strikes and then the blue light of the television turns black. The hum of the heater stops. The power is dead.

  I let him run strong hands through my hair, then down my neck. My skin lights up wherever he touches. The pain in my chest vanishes.

  He doesn’t say anything, but scoops me up and repositions us on the side of my bed.

  Relief washes through me as his hands travel up the outside of my legs until they loop around the small of my back. He rests his head on my chest. Just one moment longer, I promise silently.

  He lifts his chin from my breast and stares up at me. In one swift motion, he’s up and twirling me around. He pulls me onto the bed and slips off my shirt.

  The pain feels farther and farther away as he kisses me. Our hips push together and we’re so entangled in one another it’s hard to tell where one of us begins and the other ends. The only coherent thought I can formulate is, Don’t leave.

  Our foreheads press into each other; I’m tugging at the edge of his shirt, pulling it up and over his head.

  All at once this moment feels strangely familiar—it’s how I imagined things would go the night of the party, before everything came crashing down. And that’s when I know: I can’t lose myself to this, to him. Not again. Not ever. I dig my fingers into the comforter before looking up at him and saying a single word: “Tess.”

  It’s not a question. I’m not even sure that it’s what I meant to say, but the moment I do, something predatory flashes in his eyes and I know
without a doubt that he is responsible for her murder.

  Lightning goes off like a flare and it’s only then that I see it.

  An angry scar, thick as a rope, nearly identical to mine, cuts down the middle of his chest. His muscles go rigid. I dart to the other side of the mattress. Scramble off the side of the bed, trying to put space between us. It can’t be.

  But all I have to do is look down and study my own chest to know that he has the unmistakable mark of a transplant. Five oh eight.

  “You.” I grasp instinctively at my own mark. The reporter’s words ring in my ears. Her heart, they said, was missing. My mouth goes dry. “You—you took—”

  He reaches for me, but not gently. “Come here, Stella.”

  I leap backward. “Why? Why should I come to you? Why would I ever come to you?”

  He edges off the bed, one foot planted and then the other. I’m conscious of the wall behind me. “Oh, come on. Don’t act like you don’t feel it too.”

  I shake my head. Hair flies over my face.

  “We’re both stronger”—I notice his shoulders curved inward, his head lowered: the posture of a killer—“when we’re near, Cross.”

  “No.” The realization crashes over me. The constant ache in my chest. The relief only when he’s near. My heart. His heart.

  He lunges for me. I jerk to the side. He smacks into a bookcase. I have one more instinct. And it’s to scream.

  I fill my lungs and let out a bloodcurdling bellow sure to wake everyone within a five-mile radius.

  Levi narrows his eyes, swipes at a row of books on a shelf and knocks them to the floor, breaking a framed picture of Brynn and me in the process. I can hear my parents yelling. “Stella! Stella?” I don’t stop screaming.

  Wordlessly, he glares at me. He snatches his shirt and I only catch one more brief flash of his scar before I avert my eyes.

  “Go,” I say, in the spare moments just before the door bangs wide open and Levi has slipped through the window.

  “And you just stayed there? He could have come back, Stella.” Henry’s pacing his bedroom. He throws his hat on the ground. “And, what, you think he took Tess’s heart then?” He shakes his head. “What would he have done with it? That sick bastard.”

  “I have a few ideas.” I sit cross-legged on Henry’s bed, watching him walk off his nervous energy like a windup toy. He picks a Rubik’s Cube up off his desk, a three-dimensional puzzle made of smaller cubes. The smaller cubes are all covered in different-colored stickers on every side. The goal of the game is to rearrange the puzzle until each side has stickers of a single, uniform color. Henry fiddles with it, twisting the small cubes over and over.

  “None of which I like to dwell on in particular detail,” I say.

  It’s not even seven yet. I’d been too scared to leave the living room until closer to daylight, and after my “nightmare” Dad had agreed to stay with me, drinking hot cocoa and playing a board game until he nodded off in his old recliner. As soon as I dared, I came to Henry’s, where he insisted on excusing himself to brush his teeth. I stay at a safe distance so that he doesn’t catch on that I forgot to do the same.

  “I have his heart, Henry. And he wants it back. That’s why he’s still here.”

  Henry stops pacing and stares hard at me. “How did you see the scar anyway?” The question hangs between us. I’d skated over that part, hoping that we’d both agree to leave it at that. But as the crease leaves his forehead, I watch as he grasps the full picture on his own.

  “Henry, it was one moment, I swear. That’s it. I—”

  He holds his hand up to stop me. My mouth snaps shut. I can see his pulse beating at the base of his jaw. He cuts his gaze away and stares at the carpet.

  “So what do we do now?” he asks, voice low.

  “You believe me then?” I’m not sure if this is the appropriate time to ask, but my sanity—already thin and threadbare—depends on it.

  He halts midway to scooping up his ball cap. The remnants of sleep have faded from him. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  I lower my eyes, a lump forming in my throat. “I don’t know.”

  He slumps down, back to his unmade bed, and folds the brim of his cap in his hand. “One too many Stephen King novels for us,” he says darkly.

  I half laugh and half cry. It comes out as a hiccup.

  He shakes his head. “Bag of Bones. This has Bag of Bones written all over it.”

  “Great. My life isn’t even one of his good books.”

  “We need a plan.” He replaces the hat on top of his head and mashes down the curls.

  “We have a plan. Step one: You’re going to go to school,” I say.

  “Like hell I am.”

  I pick at a thread on his comforter, trying to decide whether it’s worth it to argue. “It’s senior year,” I say.

  “Stella, stop it. For someone who’s smart, you can be a real idiot.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  He leans his head back on the mattress and stares up at the pale, unlit stars on the ceiling. “How many years have we spent laughing at all those callers on Lunatic Outpost?”

  “Serves us right. Now we’re them.” In the quietness of Henry’s room, I listen to the typical sounds of morning. Sputtering sprinklers. Barking dogs. The slamming of car doors. All so utterly normal and suburban that our conversation feels like that between two kids playing pretend.

  And that’s exactly what I would think it was if it weren’t for the swelling ache in the cavity of my chest. If I didn’t feel the pressure of my lungs pushing in on my bleeding heart.

  I crawl to my feet. The fetid taste in my mouth and the never-ending throb have produced in me another wave of nausea. “Do you have a spare toothbrush?” I ask, because brushing my teeth will give me something to do.

  “You can use mine.” Henry blushes. “It’s on the sink.”

  I seal my lips together to repress a smile. I’ve never borrowed a boy’s toothbrush before, and the idea feels adult. Not something that high school couples typically do. Not that Henry and I are a couple.

  I wave the blue toothbrush under the water and try not to chew on the bristles like I do with my own. I’m totally swapping spit with Henry. I want to laugh, but when I stare into the mirror, what I see is a girl haunted.

  Literally.

  And not by my past or my illness or the choices I’ve made, but by a spirit with a vendetta.

  If I repeat it enough times, maybe it will stop sounding so ridiculous.

  When I return, minty fresh, Henry has his backpack straps over his shoulders and his laces tied.

  “I thought you weren’t going to school,” I say, unable to hide my disappointment.

  “I’m not, but we can’t stay here,” he says. “My parents need to think we’re going to school.”

  “Do you think he knows where I am?”

  “We’ll figure it out.” He tosses me my book bag. “Together. In the meantime, where to?”

  I pause, looking around the room filled with books and DVD sets, that smells like Henry and feels safe and known and secure, and I know that I won’t have this feeling again until I win, but if I’m taking bets, let’s face it, I wouldn’t put the odds in my favor.

  A wave of sadness moves through me. “I need to see it for myself,” I say. “I want to go to the cemetery.”

  It may be naive, but I’ve always believed the carvings on headstones. Anything etched in stone has the ring of both finality and truth and there’s something particularly comforting about those three short words rest in peace.

  A sort of send-off, a fond farewell, like people waving from the shore to a departing ship.

  But who knows if any of that is true? With so little peace in the world, why do we suddenly expect to stop on a dime at the threshold to death’s door?

  I don’t. Not anymore.

  It’s as if I’ve been walking around beneath the cover of a veil for my entire life and now that it’s been lifted I can see the circus of si
deshow freaks lurking in all of the world’s nooks and crannies.

  In the silence, I wonder if Henry now feels the same way.

  I follow him out of the car. Our slamming doors ring out with a loud aluminum echo in the open air. Together we stand, shoulders touching, and stare up at Sacred Heart with its steeple that tickles the clouds in the sky and stately graveyard that stretches for a mile back.

  “Church twice in one month?” I say, thinking back to the day of Elsie’s christening, where I’d slinked into the back pew, scared to go anywhere near my sister for fear I’d try to hurt her again. I thought that I’d hit rock bottom. Little had I known I was still on the fifth floor. “I ought to be sainted.” I slide my hands into my back pockets.

  Henry starts off toward the side of the church. “Somehow I doubt that.”

  “Oh, right.” I trot after him. “I’m sorry, that’s you, Saint Henry of Seattle. Patron saint of sick girls everywhere.”

  He smirks. “Not everywhere. Just one. Just here.”

  At that, my heart skips like a stone. “Okay, then, Saint Henry of Stella. It has a lovely ring to it.”

  I lead Henry around to the back of the chapel, over a path made of misshapen stepping-stones. A bell in the steeple tower tolls ten times over. I look up at it. The large brass bell swings like a pendulum. My dad took me up there once when I was a kid so that I could see the whole city on one side and the water on the other. There’s a small lookout with a railing, and he held onto the back of my shirt while I gripped the railing and looked down at the tiny figure of my mother waving up to us.

  When the last bell chimes, I find myself in a garden looking out over the church cemetery. I love that Henry didn’t ask why I needed to come here or how it would help anything to see a rock with a few words carved into it. He just came.

  Gray headstones stretch away for a mile. I stare out at the field, decorated with the physical remnants of death—some arched, some rectangular, others flat squares planted in the ground—all lined up, an army of graves. I push my side into Henry’s to soak in his warmth. He slides his hand up to the back of my neck and gives it a comforting squeeze.