The Heart Does Not Grow Back

by Fred Venturini

  “Sampsonite!”

  He had a backpack slung over his right shoulder, making it clear he meant to stay a night or two. I shook his hand and he pulled me into a half hug.

  We ate at the closest chain steakhouse, which to us was a fancy-ass restaurant. Dinner started out with small talk and beers that went down fast. We kept refills coming—he knew I was picking up the check and I simply needed the drinks, knowing that eventually we’d have to get down to the things we never talked about once we ran out of the things we always talked about.

  That moment occurred when he said, “You healed up good.”

  “Seems that way,” I said, making a fist, then opening it.

  “When were you going to tell me about it?” Mack asked.

  “When you noticed,” I said. “But you’ve never been the detail-oriented type. It’s not your hand, after all.”

  “I noticed,” he said, “at your mom’s funeral.”

  “I wore the bandage at her funeral,” I said.

  “I’m talking after,” Mack replied. “When everyone was leaving. I sat in my truck and hated how I left you. I mean, I hugged you and all, I told you I was sorry, but there always felt like something more to say, something to make you stop hurting. You stayed with her. By the time I got close, you were on your knees, your bare hands were pressed against her headstone, sobbing your ass off. You remember?”

  Like anyone could forget a moment like that. “You left, then,” I said.

  “I didn’t know what to make of it, what to say. I knew your hand was fucked up, but I saw it healed and whole, plain as day. Figured I might have been fucked up in the head myself or something, but seeing you now, it all came back.”

  “I should have told you,” I said. “At least you.”

  “Your hand ain’t my business,” he said. “Truth is, I didn’t want to know. Figured that God gave you the Reset button while he gave me the middle finger. Won’t be the first time. Fuck that dude.

  “So,” he added, sucking the swill out of the bottom of his bottle, “is it time to tell me about it, or we just going to get fucked up and bang some chicks tonight?”

  It was time. I told him about the hand, the ear, the tonsils. How I cut them off, and waited, and tested myself. Finally, “I’m about broke and the reason I’m limping is because I sold my toes.”

  Takes a lot to crack Mack Tucker’s veneer, but he went bug-eyed. It took him a long time to digest that one.

  “Just to try it out,” I said. “They’ll buy anything. But the big money is in organs—I’m not sure about those. I need a doctor’s help, so that’s why I’m here. I’ve got a guy that’s going to knock out a kidney. At least, I think he will. If it doesn’t grow back, no big deal, I can live with one. But if it does? I can cash one of those fuckers out for six figures or more. Set me up for life.”

  “Yeah, if life is a shit house, fucking ramen noodles, and ketchup,” he said. “Have you really thought this through?”

  “I guess.”

  “No, you haven’t. You’re a gold mine and you’re sifting through the wrong parts. The hard parts.”

  I had already thought about what he was getting at, and didn’t like the choice. “I don’t want to live in a lab,” I said. “It’s my body; I’ll portion myself out as I see fit.”

  “Do you get sick?”

  “Haven’t since I can remember.”

  “But you’re not invincible.”

  “My limp should tell you that. I’m just repeatedly vincible. Let’s just eat, okay?”

  We ate. Actually, we wolfed the steaks down, tearing chunks of flesh from the bone before the knife was even through with the cut, pausing occasionally to take a swig of light beer.

  “You look good, too, though,” I said, breaking the silence. “Healed up and fit.”

  “Steroids,” he said, waving his hand. “My shoulder is crap. I can barely work out. I lift more syringes than weights, but I can lift enough to get myself by. You’d be surprised how far a decent tan, a smile, and a big dick will get you.”

  “How far is that?”

  He took it as an insult. We both knew a reality-show wannabe/college dropout with no job was just as pathetic as a regenerating parts–selling food-stamp recipient, only slightly less interesting.

  “So after all this shit, you ended up with the talent,” he said with a smile.

  At this, I laughed. “I don’t … do anything.”

  “That’s the problem. If I could rebuild myself, man, what I would do.”

  “What would you do?”

  He tapped his shoulder.

  “Don’t tell yourself that,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you know you wouldn’t have gone to the show. That shit was a high school fantasy. The gunshot gave you an easy excuse to whine and cry and say why you didn’t make it. Don’t make that mistake. You got lucky, having it taken from you before it could disappoint you.”

  “Well, fuck you, too,” he said, and managed to pair it with a half-twisted smirk. “You’ve sort of got the right of it. But you don’t get it. It’s about the trying, about the ride. Sometimes almost getting there is just as good, you know? Having the shot, talking for years about how close I got. Now what am I? A survivor.”

  “That’s not so bad.”

  “It can be. Look at you.”

  He saw right through me and he didn’t even know that I handled my gun every single day without having the guts to shoot myself. That I wondered what morning I’d wake up with enough strength to finally fire it, to finally deserve it.

  “You always had the talent in that brain of yours,” he continued. “You know, when I was recovering, when it was all over I figured this saved you. I figured that if it didn’t happen and we went on normal-like, you would waste your own dreams on mine, and try to be an agent or something, when deep down you deserved to be a doctor or a scientist or something important. Now here we are. You’ve got that brain and it’s broken down by God knows what. Pity? Pain? You can actually, legitimately regrow parts of your body. You’re a fuckin’ miracle superhero badass motherfucker and instead of doing anything remotely important you’re selling your toes? You’re more than this.”

  “I’m moving up to kidneys.” It was all I could think to say.

  “You’re more than this,” he repeated.

  “You just want me to go somewhere and do something so I can take you with me,” I said, a bitter thing that I instantly regretted.

  He sat there for a good long time and finished his beer. When the waitress came over, he smiled and handed her a folded-up bill. “Keep the change,” he said, and winked. She smiled at him. Girls always did.

  “I said I’d get the bill.”

  “You said enough.” He got up. “You’re right, you know. I need you to take me somewhere. I got nowhere else to go. Not even down.”

  He left without saying good-bye.

  * * *

  “You have type O blood,” Doc Venhaus said. I had gone through various tests, a barrage of visits and needle pricks and questions and scrapes. I’d ask about my kidney and he’d dodge the question, just one more test, one more thing to check, we’ll talk about this later. Finally I was in his office for some results. “Type-O,” he said again, tossing the clipboard onto the countertop, as if to punctuate this point, which made no sense to me.

  “And?”

  He sat down, loosening his collar at long last. All the recent visits had been after-hours, done in privacy after he endured a long day of sniffling kids and wheezing old people and hypochondriac soccer moms.

  “Your blood has no antigens. You’re what we call a universal donor. Compatible with all blood types. Spotless general health, not one flag. And indeed, it appears that your tonsils have regenerated.”

  “So what now?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I kept thinking I’d find something wrong with you.”

  He got up and stretched. “You hungry?” He brought in some dr
ug-rep sandwiches and a six-pack of light beer. He took off his coat. I dug into the sandwich—turkey and Swiss again. Must have been a Doc favorite. The beer was cold. He was quiet and didn’t eat.

  “Are we going to test out my kidney or not?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s the best answer I can give you right now.”

  “I’ll go to someone else.”

  “You’ve got to be careful, Dale,” he said. “I’d almost bet you’ll regrow the kidney, as nuts as it sounds. The small amount of tissue I removed regenerated, so there’s no reason, logically, for me to doubt those results.”

  “So why won’t you do it?”

  “It’s not right,” he said. “The reasons aren’t right for either of us.”

  “Why don’t you think my reasons are right?” I asked.

  “Your gift can help people,” he said. “It’ll go to waste if you use it like this, and we’ll both be at fault.”

  “Thank you for wasting my time,” I said, and got up to leave.

  “Will you come by my place, Dale?” he asked. “Let me sleep on this a few days, then I’ll call you. You come over, I’ll feed you and we’ll talk about it.”

  “About what?”

  “All the shit that needs talked about,” he said with a wink.

  The toe money didn’t buy me a lot of time, but Doc was a careful man and I sensed a good nature in him. He didn’t rush into my talents and didn’t seem greedy to keep them to himself. At least, not yet.

  “You’ve got three days,” I said, “or I have to walk.”

  TWELVE

  I got to the Wal-Mart just before ten and took up my post near the soda machine. Raeanna shared her typical work schedule during our walk—she pulled mostly two-to-ten shifts, Saturday through Wednesday. I imagined she’d walk out any minute, see me, smile, and we’d head for the access road. The night was perfect for walking that road, cloudless and bright with a mild breeze that would help ward off my flop sweat.

  At twenty past the hour, I thought she might be working late. Another ten minutes and I feared she’d slipped out a back door to avoid the possibility of my presence. I went inside to check. When the near-mummified greeter offered me a cart, I waved her off, trying to act polite in spite of my pounding pulse.

  Checkout lanes one, two, and three were empty. Four, five, and six were lit up. A black woman, an old lady, and a teenage boy handled those posts. The rest of the aisle lights were dark, but I peered into them anyway, waiting for the customer service desk to come into view. A short, fat woman with black curls and too-big glasses stepped up to the counter. Her name tag said MARTHA in blue, bold letters.

  “Can I help you?” she said without looking at me.

  “Is Raeanna working today?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Was she supposed to?”

  “Look, sir, I’m not supposed to tell you that kind of stuff. You related to her or something?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Did she call in sick? Was she scheduled to work?”

  “If you’re related to her,” Martha said, “maybe you should call and ask her.”

  “I’m not related to her,” I said. “You saw her black eye. Right?”

  This got her attention.

  “I don’t think she fell to get that black eye. I think she might be in trouble. What about yesterday? Did she work yesterday?”

  “Day off,” Martha said.

  “And today, she didn’t call in sick, did she? I bet she didn’t. You can’t explain new bruises when you’re supposedly home eating chicken noodle soup.”

  “I didn’t take the call,” she said. “I didn’t hear firsthand, but she didn’t show for the start of her shift. She called around three to let the manager know she got in a fender bender on her way to work. She said she wasn’t hurt bad or anything, just a little bruised, but too shaken up to work. Something like that.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “She usually walks to work,” Martha said. “Doesn’t she?”

  I nodded. “Her address,” I said. “I know she lives on Marshall Lane, I just forget her house number.”

  Martha looked around, as if fearing surveillance. “I’d have to look it up,” she said.

  “I can wait,” I said.

  “If it’s not on Marshall Lane, I’m not telling you.”

  “Deal,” I said. She left the desk and came back after a few excruciating minutes.

  “Four hundred,” she said. “Four hundred Marshall Lane.”

  * * *

  The shrubs at 400 Marshall Lane were neglected and had a case of botanical bedhead, with wiry branches poking out in haphazard directions. A gold knocker rested in the middle of a dirty white door. Two peeling, ivory-white pillars held up a gray porch, and the mat on that porch said WELCOME!

  The paint on the porch was bubbled and worn away, leaving patches of bare wood. The welcome mat was smeared with grease, and a pair of black boots with fraying laces sat beside it.

  I took a deep breath and prepared to knock.

  “Don’t,” Raeanna said, startling me. She sat on the porch swing, hidden in the dark eaves of the overhang. “He’s home.”

  I leaned in, trying to get a look at her.

  “Are you okay?”

  “It’s my fault,” she whispered. “I never should have walked with you. I’m a married woman.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said, kneeling beside her. Her hand rested on her thigh, and I put mine over hers. She yanked hers away. I couldn’t see her full face in the darkness, but I caught enough light to see the swelling in her right cheek.

  “You have to leave,” she said. “If he comes out here, we’re in trouble. He can probably hear us, anyway. See us. I don’t know how he saw me with you the other night. I think he’s watching right now.”

  I put my hand gently on her cheek and she let it stay there. This time, she put her hand over mine.

  “If he’s watching—”

  “He’s not watching,” I whispered. “You’re safe as long as I’m here.”

  “We’re not safe,” she said.

  “Do you have someplace you can go?”

  “I’m waiting for my friend,” she said. “He’s going to let me stay with her tonight. Says he needs to cool off.”

  “You can’t come back.”

  “I don’t have anywhere else to go, Dale. And he’d find us.”

  Us. What a wonderful word. I knew what I had to do.

  “He’s coming,” she said. I’d heard it too—his heavy footfalls bounding down the stairs, approaching the front door. I wanted to kiss her, for him to see me being all the things he could never be, but it wasn’t the time. I jumped over the rail and huddled in the crease of darkness between houses.

  I heard the front door open. No one spoke. I heard a car pull up and saw headlights.

  “Go on, then,” he said in a hoarse voice. I heard the idle of an engine. I waited until I heard a car door open and close, then I heard the front door slam shut.

  I took a deep breath. I went home to prepare myself for what I had to do.

  * * *

  When I got home, I sat at the computer and stared down the search box for a long time. Finally, I found my hands steady enough to type.

  “Human regeneration.”

  According to the search results, I had to be part salamander. Salamander limbs are not that different from ours. Sure, the skin is a bit slimier, but there’s still skin and blood. Cut off a salamander’s tail, and a new one grows back. Same with his tiny legs or arms, same thing with some of his tiny vital organs. Except the heart. The heart does not grow back.

  So maybe there were others like me, maybe even a long time ago, primitive humans whose hands and arms would grow back again and again until tribesmen put a spear through their heart, finally and mercifully putting them down. Maybe these ancestors became the root of vampire stories—it would only make sense that regenerating people might crave or need human blood.

/>   But vampires were cool, and maybe I was giving myself too much credit.

  The search results also revealed that many animals, including humans, can regenerate as embryos. Their healing time and durability is incredible when they’re young. Over the course of development, the healing slows. After a while, scar tissue becomes the result, not new limbs. The inherent healing that these animals have in the initial stages of life naturally dissipates, leaving scientists obsessed with figuring out how to spark human regeneration. And make no mistake about it—they were obsessively searching for a spark. Articles abounded on the “key” to human regeneration—in fingernails, in starfish, in little macrophages and prions and other words I didn’t understand.

  When I finally made it past those results, I called Wal-Mart and asked for Raeanna Carpenter, and got a puzzled, “Who?” from the clerk who picked up the phone, who immediately said, “Do you mean Raeanna Stillson?”

  You’re more than this, Mack had said. It’ll go to waste if you use it like this, Doc had said. Every superhero badass motherfucker needs to start somewhere, and I was starting with Raeanna.

  I continued blazing through the Internet.

  I learned that Harold, as a domestic abuser, had an eighty percent chance of having a personality disorder. He had poor self-esteem and poor impulse control. The escalation potential of this violence was staggering. Repeating his physical abuse of Raeanna was almost guaranteed.

  Raeanna, suffering from battered-person syndrome or learned helplessness, was likely in denial. Her perception of Harold as omniscient was indicative of her condition. So she was blaming herself for the abuse. All of this, combined with the loss of her sister, put her at great risk for post-traumatic stress disorder, if she wasn’t suffering from it already.

  Mack was an aggressive narcissist, full of glibness, superficial charm, and grandiose self-worth. He was cunning and manipulative. But I give him a lot of credit for at least wanting to graduate to acquired situational narcissism, which is brought on by fame and celebrity.

  I, meanwhile, was still suffering from survival guilt, and a yet-to-be-named regenerative disorder that most people would not perceive as a disorder at all. In fact, my regenerative abilities would make me a god in many cultures.