by Jill Wolfson
“That would be fucked. Fucked and foolish. I collect stories like that.”
“Like what?”
“Fucked and foolish ways that people could die.”
“Who says I would die? There might be a miracle. Miracles happen. And what’s so bad about being dead anyway?”
“Yeah, what’s so bad about not eating and not thinking and not talking?” He actually snorted through his nose. “Here’s one of the most fucked and foolish stories in my collection. Want to hear it?”
I nodded.
“Let’s say you have a date with someone you like, and you really get into the kissing.”
“Tongue and all?” I can’t believe I blurted that out. But Milo didn’t hesitate, just went on with the story.
“Tongue and all. Only he had eaten a peanut-butter cracker and a few crumbs were still in his mouth. He doesn’t know that you’re allergic to peanuts because you didn’t tell him. You thought it would make you seem kind of lame. So while you’re kissing, you go into allergic shock. What’s the name of that kind of shock?”
I said, “Anaphylactic,” and he said, “Yeah, that. And you die. You die from a kiss.”
“That would really suck. That’s the worst. I can’t think of anything more—”
“Fucked or foolish. I have one that’s worse. Wanna hear it?”
“Sure.”
“It takes a while.”
I made a show of settling back into my pillows.
“Okay. It starts with some poor guy with two little kids who dies in a car wreck, and his wife, in the middle of the worst grief you can imagine, decides to donate his liver. Everyone feels good about that, because even though a father is dead, someone else gets to live. Someone is reborn in a way. Only one day, the person with the new liver decides that he’s bored of doing all the stuff he needs to do – like taking a dozen pills every day and living a clean, sensible life. He just wants to be, you know, a normal, wild, selfish teenager.”
“Milo, I have a question. This teenager—”
“No questions! For a long time, this teenager did everything right. A good, proper patient. He ate right and slept right and drank water and took all his pills and went to all his doctor appointments. Only after a while, he wanted to not do everything so right. His friends kept telling him how great drinking is and how you forget all your problems. That’s why God invented fermentation. So he decided that more than anything, he wanted to have that teenage experience. He wanted to stop taking his pills. He wanted to drink and drink until he got so happy and shit-faced that he forgot everything, especially how he was different from everyone else.”
“So that’s what he did?”
“You bet. He spent so much time staring at death, he wanted to make the most out of his life. He lied to his parents and doctors. He ignored all his symptoms. Until one day, the liver from that poor dead dad shut down from all the abuse. His whole body went into rejection, and now it looks like he’s going to die. He’s going to die ’cause he didn’t feel like taking a few pills and ’cause he wanted to get drunk. Which, when it comes down to it, isn’t two percent as much fun as it’s cracked up to be. So, how’s that for fucked and foolish?”
I didn’t know what to say. I wondered, What did he look like before, when he was wild and drunk and selfish? I crossed my arms against my chest and was squeezing myself tight. That was probably to keep me from reaching over and hugging Milo so hard that he would have to peel my arms from around his neck.
I tried to mentally transmit that hug to him, but he didn’t seem to get it. He kept staring down at his own clasped hands.
THIRTEEN
THE LATEST CALL FOR Gus Sanchez’s services came when he was picking up his son Miguel from morning soccer practice. Gus had just buckled the boy into his seat when his cell phone rang. It was the dispatcher at MTS – Medical Transport Services. “What’s up? Delivery?” Gus asked.
“Package will be ready in about an hour. Pick up at Dominican, deliver to Children’s Hospital. Not worth using the helicopter. You can make the run just as fast, faster probably.”
Dominican to Children’s Hospital was ten miles at the most, but there was no way to anticipate a stalled truck or a three-car pileup on the freeway. In a crunch, Gus could improvise along the city streets, saving five minutes here and there, the difference between a live organ and one that would be tossed aside as useless.
“I can make the run in a half hour tops. I’ll call when I make the pickup and give you an ETA.”
When Gus dropped Miguel at home, the boy pushed his father in the small of his back. “Go, Daddy. Hurry. Drive the heart.”
Dr Alexander came into my room all smiles. “We just got the call. The heart’s a good one.”
Mom squeezed my hand. Dr Alexander listened to my chest. The nurse attached a new bag of liquid to my IV pole. “Here’s your happy juice. It will make you drowsy, maybe a little loopy.” She opened my hospital gown. As if my chest was her canvas, she painted it yellow orange with antiseptic, the color of a summer sunset.
Mom and I waited.
We talked about all the things people would be doing while I was getting my new heart.
“Some people will be doing their job,” she said.
“Some people will be taking math tests.”
“Watching TV and being bored out of their minds.”
I said, “I wonder if anyone will think, Gee, I wonder who got a new heart while I was having sex.”
“Dani!”
“What? I do wonder that.”
“Dani!”
We kept on like this to keep us suspended in the world of medical miracles, where everything was going to lead to my eyes opening, to me going home, back to school and a normal life. We didn’t want to talk about all the things that might still go wrong. The infections that could set in. The heart that might be too big or too small. The heart that was perfect in every single way, except that once in my chest, it wouldn’t start ticking. No one could predict that. The doctors wouldn’t know why, but it just wouldn’t start. Things like that happened. And then there was nothing more that anyone could do.
I shuddered. Mom covered me with an extra blanket. Then she leaned over and put her hands on both my cheeks like my whole face was in parentheses.
Gus pulled up in front of Dominican Hospital, where a transplant coordinator waited for him. While exchanging pleasantries about the weather, she placed a red cooler in the back seat and snapped the belt into place. He was surprised when she showed him a second cooler, this one blue. “The heart,” she said, and buckled it into the adjoining seat.
Gus signed his name on the form next to the words Received One Heart, One Kidney.
A druggy dreaminess settled over me. My eyelids shut, flickered open, shut again.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.
The number of years alive of my toes, my chin, my elbows, my eyelids. My heart was the first part of me to start forming. I was minus thirty-one weeks old when my heart first came alive. Its beat echoed the rhythm of Mom’s own heart.
First, it had been a tubelike thing, but it grew so fast that it needed more space. I pictured it bending and twisting back, forming the familiar shape of chocolate candy boxes.
When a human heart develops, it goes through stages where it resembles the hearts of other animals. The single-chambered heart of a fish. The two chambers of a frog heart. The three chambers of a snake or turtle. The four chambers of a human.
As Gus drove, he wondered about his backseat passengers, not their shape, color and texture, but where they were going. Into whose life? Into what future? As usual, he had been given only the most basic details – the type of organ and the address.
That felt frustrating, like he was being denied some crucial truth.
Another game to pass the time. We created a Frankenstein-type monster from people we knew. Mom started: “The mouth of my boss, who speaks out of both sides of it.”
“The lungs of Wen
dy,” I offered weakly.
“The heart of my boss. His cold, black heart.”
I managed to move my lips. “Beth, Mom, you’re obsessed. You should get another job.”
“You’re right.”
She checked her watch. Her eyes flickered to the clock on the wall, as if that would tell her something different. “Maybe I should go ask at the nurses’ station. Maybe they’ve heard something more. Nurses are always the first to get the news.”
Gus pulled up to Children’s Hospital, where a nurse took away the coolers and signed her name – Brianna V. – next to Received One Heart, One Kidney. She patted the side of the red cooler and said, “Wendy.” Then she held up the blue one and said, “Big thanks from Dani.”
“Danny? Little boy?” Gus asked.
“Girl. Fifteen.”
“How’s she holding up?”
The nurse laughed. “That Dani will be giving this heart a good workout. She’s been flirting up a storm with Milo, the boy in the next room. He’s waiting for a liver.”
They wheeled me down the hallway, into the elevator and down another hallway to the operating room. Nurses passing by wished me luck. An orderly wheeled me in. Mom didn’t let go of my hand.
Maybe it was the drugs, but I started seeing all the things in my life I had lost. At age three, I dropped my favorite stuffed animal, Leon, out of the stroller and went nuts and thought I couldn’t live without him. But I could. I did.
Lost books, a scarf, my temper, weight, a parakeet, weeks of school, a best friend, a normal childhood.
All these things, I learned it’s possible to live without.
But now maybe I was on the cusp of losing everything.
The anesthesiologist told me to count backward from one hundred. There was music, some kind of opera, and the firm tips of Mom’s fingers keeping time with my count: 100, 99, 98…
A pattern appeared before me, swirls of color like a giant lollipop you get at the boardwalk … 97, 96, 95 … I spiraled down.
When Gus got home, he took his family out for pizza and told them about his workday. He said that he bet Dani liked pizza, too. What teenager doesn’t?
His wife wondered aloud if maybe Dani and the boy next door would fall in love for real.
“Mushy.” Miguel made a gagging sound and mimed sticking his finger down his throat. He imagined Milo looking exactly like the assistant soccer coach, who said that if Miguel kept his focus, he definitely had the stuff to play high school varsity one day.
All three decided that Dani, Wendy and Milo were great kids who – with help from Gus – would go on to live long, healthy lives.
FOURTEEN
THE SCHECTERS HAD NEVER been a religious family. They were Jewish, but they didn’t keep kosher or even go to synagogue, except when one of their cousins had a bar mitzvah or once a year on Yom Kippur, when they were supposed to be fasting but never actually did.
When it came down to it, Tyler didn’t have a clue how his parents felt about their religion or about the questions that plagued him. Did they believe in life after death? Heaven and hell? An immortal soul? Sometimes when his father talked about work, he would say something like, “That house on Woodrow Street is finally going to sell this week, God willing.” Or his mother, rolling her eyes skyward and clasping her hands together in prayer, said, “I have only two ADHD kids in class this year. Someone must be looking out for me.”
Hearing stuff like that drove Tyler crazy. It made him want to scream in their faces, Do you really believe that your prayers influence class schedules? Do you think God gives a fuck about your real estate deals? What about war and cancer and little kids burning up in fires? And now Amanda? How about her? How can anyone worship a God who allowed that to happen?
God.
If there even was a God. The big if.
And if there was no God, what was the purpose of anything then – school and friends and family and work and caring and trying – when everyone and everything was just a pathetic fleck of cosmic dust all alone and pointless in the universe?
Did this kind of thinking make Tyler an atheist? Maybe he was.
So it pissed him off that after Amanda died, seemingly the minute Amanda died, his parents turned full-tilt Jewish, up to their eyeballs in rituals nobody explained or probably even understood. Plus, they insisted on dragging Tyler, yarmulke on his head, along with them.
Amanda wouldn’t be cremated because that went against Jewish tradition. Her body would be washed from head to foot and then she would be buried quickly because that was Jewish tradition. At the funeral itself, no one wore dress shoes because Jews in mourning don’t wear leather. What was that about? And his mother didn’t wear perfume, and his father didn’t shave.
At the cemetery, the funeral service was as blurry as the unfamiliar Hebrew prayers. All three of them wore strips of black fabric pinned to their shirts to symbolize their loss. Tyler sat in the front row between his parents, his mother’s right hand holding his, his father’s left arm draped around his shoulders, heavy as a tree branch. More blur, more feelings of being totally disconnected. At his mother’s prompting, Tyler tossed a handful of dirt into the grave. He turned away quickly before he could see the clump explode on the lid of the coffin. There was lots of crying and hugging. A couple of old men wrapped in prayer shawls rocked forward and backward like they were on a boat.
And after all that, Tyler didn’t get to go home and lock himself in his room. He had to deal with this sitting shivah thing. For three days, dozens of people would be filing in and out of their house, offering food, prayers and condolences. Per tradition, all the mirrors in the house were covered. There was a poster by the front door filled with photos of Amanda under the handwritten words IN HONOR OF HER LIFE.
Ever since returning from the cemetery – it was hours now – his mother had been sitting on a stool in the middle of the living room. Another Jewish tradition. Her eyes were strangely bright and darting, too alert. Aunt Jen and other women relatives hovered around her, handing her tissues and trying to get her to eat something.
“Claire, just a little taste of this corned beef.”
“Claire, you need to keep your strength up.”
Tyler’s father and his Mom-Mom Florence, his mother’s mother, sat on the couch together, holding hands like they were dating. That went beyond weird. Those two hadn’t talked to each other in years, not since the divorce, when everyone was forced to take one side or the other. From an end table, Tyler grabbed a glass of wine that someone had left half full. He finished it off in two gulps.
Every annoying relative, every nosy neighbor, every mother who had ever carpooled with the Schecter kids made an appearance that afternoon, and they each eventually homed in on Tyler. Their neighbor Mr McCoy, whose flower beds Tyler once destroyed by biking through them, put his hands on each of the boy’s shoulders and said, “I will so miss your sister. A lovely girl.”
When his fourth-grade teacher, the dreaded Mrs Sugihara, showed up with a box of store-bought cookies, Tyler tried to duck away. She was too quick for him. She took his hand, leaned in and said in a sticky, sincere voice, “God works in mysterious ways, Tyler.”
One of the little gymnasts – Tyler immediately recognized the sway-backed posture – was pushed toward him by a guy in his twenties with ridiculously broad shoulders, Amanda’s coach, Dave. “I’m, you know, sorry about your, um, Amanda,” he said, and the little girl added, “She taught me to do a front walkover.”
Tyler muttered a cross between “oh, yeah?” and “thanks” and walked away. On a windowsill, he noticed an abandoned glass. Ignoring the red lipstick stain, he swallowed an inch of something sharp and alcoholic.
His great-aunt Minnie, who always smelled vaguely of cooked celery, was next to corner him by the sweets table. When she placed her cold palm flat on his cheek, he felt the hard boniness of the skeleton that lay just below the surface of her wrinkled flesh.
Slightly drunk now, Tyler held up his own hand, whic
h was backlit by the sunlight coming in through the window. An outline of bones, tendons, not much more. He imagined his own skeleton, white as a dried-out seashell. And next to it, he saw his organs like chunks of meat on a sheet of butcher paper at the market. It was a horrible vision.
He stumbled away from his great-aunt, not caring one iota if she thought he was rude. Of course he was rude; he was Tyler. He pushed through the crowded living room, bumped into people without apology, causing some of them to spill drinks. Passing through the kitchen, he grabbed a bottle of wine that had been left open on the counter and kept moving. He wasn’t even sure where he was headed until he got there. In a far corner of the house, he entered the sanctuary of the guest bedroom and shut the door behind him.
Alone, quiet.
This was where his mother normally stored junk waiting to go to the charity shop – old sports equipment, obsolete computer components, outgrown clothing in bags. The room was now storage central for the shivah. Every surface held stacks of paper plates, unopened bags of chips and company serving china.
Tyler shook his head the way a wet dog shakes off drops of water, trying to rid himself of images of skeletons and organs. Tilting back the bottle of wine, he chugged a mouthful and gargled loudly before letting the liquid slide down his throat. It was the Jewish stuff, Manischewitz, thick and sweet like alcoholic Kool-Aid. He took another drink. His forehead and chest expanded with warmth. As he dropped backward onto the bed, a slant of sunlight settled on his face. All that brightness hurt. He twisted around and tugged on the cord of the blinds, turning the room a flat, dim gray. That was better.
“Shivah. Sitting shivah.”
He said the words aloud, exaggerating the annoying tone of piety that he’d heard from the adults. The phrase was something that a group of really drunk friends would dare each other to say ten times fast. He took the challenge and amused himself by repeating “Sitting shivah. Sitting shivah.” The words had just deteriorated into “shitting sivah” when he heard an appreciative laugh erupt from the other side of the room.