Cold Hands, Warm Heart

by Jill Wolfson

  The space between his eyebrows bunched as he considered the offer. I saw his mind turn even further inward. “Skeletons,” he said without much inflection. “Everywhere.” He pointed to Wendy’s mom. “A skeleton eating a bran muffin.” He pointed at Henry’s father and then at Henry. “A skeleton worrying about insurance and another skeleton worrying about a date for Saturday night. Skeletons with their legs crossed and skeletons scratching their heads and picking their noses.”

  “I wasn’t!” Wendy shouted.

  Milo laughed again, an actual ha! as his eyes settled on Christine. She went pale. “And a skeleton who thinks God can keep her flesh from rotting and her bones from turning into dust and blowing away.”

  Everyone was thinking the same thing: Milo had just turned into a psycho. I could see it in their eyes. Even the social worker was fumbling for the right thing to say. Milo’s gaze moved steadily around the circle. When it landed on me, his mouth opened, then closed. Mom took my hand and squeezed it. Mr Nutley placed a calming palm on his son’s shoulder, but Milo whacked it away.

  He tried then to back his wheelchair out of the circle and swivel it in the direction of the door. But there wasn’t enough room. He kept banging it into the baseboard. “Shit!” he cursed.

  To leave, he needed to pull back into the group, move clumsily forward, and cut a diagonal across the circle. The social worker put out an arm to stop him, but Milo shook him off and kept going. You could hear his hard, sarcastic laugh as he struggled to open the door. Finally, it opened and then slammed behind him.

  Christine’s face pinched in horror. Wendy shook her finger, pronouncing Milo to be “a very, very bad boy.”

  But they didn’t know him.

  They hadn’t noticed what I saw in the corners of his eyes and in the tremble building at the sides of his mouth.

  Nobody there knew Milo. They only thought they did.

  One minute more and his laugh would have turned into something else, into what it really was. Opposite emotion, same intensity. He had to get out of that room. Fast. Before his eyes turned red and wet. Before all the future skeletons came toward him and surrounded him with a group hug.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “THE PATHOLOGY DEPARTMENT KEEPS them around for tests.” Brianna the nurse placed it on a silver surgical tray, then wheeled the cart close to me.

  This is my heart. This was my heart.

  When she said “make a fist,” I clenched my fingers, felt the nails digging into my palms. “See the size of your fist? That’s the size a healthy heart should be. And this old one of yours is what? Three times the size! In the world of hearts, big doesn’t mean strong. This heart had to work overtime to keep you alive. Would you like to hold it?”

  I wanted to.

  I didn’t want to.

  I wanted to.

  I didn’t want to.

  I unclenched my fist. Blood rushed back into the fingertips; two had gone almost white from pressure.

  Mom gave me an encouraging nudge with her shoulder. “Go on.”

  Nurse Brianna handed me a pair of purple rubber gloves.

  I could do this. I think I wanted to. Yes, I wanted to. The rubber gloves tightened over each finger and snapped around my wrists.

  I held my hands together like I was going to drink water from a stream. The muscles in my upper arms tensed with anticipation. My elbows dug into my sides. Afraid to move, certain that something terrible would happen if I did. What if I jostled the heart? Or dropped it?

  “Relax,” the nurse said. “This puppy isn’t running off anywhere.”

  And then without any ceremony, as if it were the most common thing in the world, she placed my own heart in the palms of my own hands.

  There.

  I was holding it.

  It wasn’t slimy, more the texture of a rubber ball.

  I waited for something. For what?

  I expected to feel something, a sensation related to electricity. A shock, a twitch, a vibration. But there was nothing like that. There was just this weight in my hands, with no more connection to me than baby teeth after they had fallen out.

  The heart had been biopsied and the two halves dropped apart like a cut piece of fruit, a firm peach maybe, only gray and rubbery. All the songs written about it, the poems, the greeting cards. Here it was, the core of a human being, the core of me. But there was no magic, no mystery. A wave of disappointment. I didn’t know what I wanted to feel. Anything, I guess. Anything but nothing.

  Mom was the one with the charge. Giggly and euphoric, she rocked back and forth heels to toes. “Dani, oh my gawd! How does it feel? I can’t believe you’re doing this.”

  “So, young lady, what are you thinking?” Nurse Brianna asked.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say, except a lame “it’s cool.”

  “The coolest! Let me give you the guided tour.”

  My eyes followed her finger as she pointed out the specifics of everything that had gone wrong. I had to bend really close to see what she was talking about because even though this heart was huge and swollen by human heart standards, everything about it was so small. And so wrong.

  Up until then, I guess there had been a part of me that still wondered if I had really needed a transplant. Now the evidence sat in front of me. How everything was broken beyond repair.

  How it had never been any good.

  How it cheated me out of being a regular baby, a regular kid, a regular teenager.

  How it failed me.

  How I almost died.

  Wendy had a name for her old kidneys. I finally had one for my old heart.

  Humpty Dumpty.

  Busted. Shattered.

  The worst heart that any human being could be born with.

  Now came the feelings, a flood of them. A sensation spread through me, hands to arms to shoulders to chest to throat to forehead, a surge that felt like it would explode and leave two giant holes where my temples used to be. Shame and horror that this thing had been cut out of my body. Anger.

  I glared at the heart: Do something! Beat!

  But why would it do that now? It had never done its job before. Never.

  Who did this heart think it was?

  I wanted to slap it and make it apologize for being the inferior, shoddy piece of body merchandise that it was. Apologize!

  But no, it remained silent. I opened my hands and let the heart drop a few inches back onto the tray. Drop, like the piece of raw meat that it was. “This is what happens when you don’t do your job. You get sliced in half and stuck in a drawer.”

  “Whoa. Didn’t expect that reaction,” the nurse said.

  I turned my back, didn’t give a flying fart about that old Humpty Dumpty heart. “Put it in the garbage, for all I care.”

  “No!” Mom insisted. “Dani, I’m so grateful to your heart. It kept you alive so long. Please? Let me record this historic moment.”

  For Mom’s sake, because I didn’t ever like disappointing her, I picked it up again. She held up her cell phone and danced around trying to get the perfect angle. Finally, she snapped a picture and sent the image through the phone to everyone we knew. I wasn’t smiling.

  Dear Donor Family,

  I didn’t hear back from you after my first letter. That’s totally understandable. But to be honest, I’m kind of disappointed. No guilt trip intended. My mom and friend Milo said I should write down my thoughts and questions, even if I never go ahead and mail this letter.

  So, okay.

  I want to tell you about one day this week, the day I held my old, broken heart.

  I guess there were a lot of choices of how I could have felt about that. Excited. Nervous. Happy. Sad. Maybe a little grossed out, even though my extensive medical history has made me practically immune to that kind of thing.

  But what I actually felt surprised me. And I don’t totally understand it. I felt angry. And the anger still hasn’t gone away. I’m not normally an angry kind of person, but I know enough to understand
that you don’t get this pissed off at something you don’t care about. You can only be angry at something when it’s connected to you, when it’s part of you, when it still holds power over what and who you are.

  So what I’m saying is that I must feel like that old busted heart still belongs to me. Even though it’s sliced and diced and not beating and never beat very well to begin with. I guess I still consider it to be my heart.

  So, then, whose heart is in my chest?

  There’s only one thing I do know about it: It’s somebody else’s heart. Heart of a Stranger.

  But what stranger? Who?

  I didn’t send that letter either. The version I sent was more polite.

  Dear Donor Family,

  I want you to know that the heart continues to work beautifully. I imagine it came from a very beautiful person.

  A week later, Mom brought in a letter that the transplant network had sent to her. It was addressed to Dani. Heart Recipient. When I opened it and unfolded the paper, it contained only two words: Amanda Schecter. The letters were slanted, big and loopy. This wasn’t a parent who wrote back. I recognized the sloppy penmanship of a teenage boy when I saw it.

  I had a name for my old heart. I now knew what to call this new one. Amanda’s heart.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  HOSPITALS AREN’T BIG ON helping organ recipients snoop into the personal lives of their donors. They make sure any communication goes through proper channels. As you can imagine, there’s high risk of an emotional meltdown. But Milo said on the phone, “Screw proper channels. We’re not hurting anyone. It’s my laptop. Come over after lunch.”

  It took me about an hour to decide what to wear. Jeans always look good, but what with them? I didn’t have a lot of choices. There was the dorky striped turtleneck bought by Mom at some second-hand store. Or the gorgeous blue shirt that showed off my eyes but also showed off the top four inches of a raw, red scar. Lovely.

  I changed back and forth three times. Then in complete fashion frustration, I buzzed for Nurse Joe. He was a guy, and I needed a guy’s opinion, even a middle-aged one. “Glad this was an emergency.” He studied the two choices. “In my humble masculine opinion, the blue.”

  “But what about … you know?”

  “Dani, you can’t wear turtlenecks the rest of your life. You earned that scar. Wear it proudly.”

  I still wasn’t convinced, but went with the semi-plunging neckline. If anybody would appreciate the craftsmanship of my stitches, it would be Milo. With the letter from the donor family in my pocket, I dashed the short distance to his room. I had been doing my exercises on the rehab treadmill, and the results showed. Standing in his doorway, I didn’t make a single unladylike, out-of-breath wheeze. That’s how good I felt.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey, nice—” I waited for Milo to say shirt or scar, but his voice dropped and his eyes went back to the computer screen.

  Awkward moment number … too many to count.

  Would this feeling I got around Milo ever go away? I was suddenly self-conscious about everything – my bloated face, my hairy arms, the cold sores throbbing on the corners of my lips. I shifted right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot and coughed nervously into my fist. He looked up, confused, but then he caught on. I was relieved when he said, “Don’t be such a dork,” and pointed to the chair by his bed. I sat. He smelled nice, like soap and something else, which made me wonder if he had put on cologne especially for me.

  On the computer screen, the search engine was all ready to go.

  “Name,” he said. “Spell it.”

  I opened the letter. “S-c-h-e-c-t-e-r. Amanda.”

  Milo typed, but as soon as his index finger moved toward the Enter key, panic kicked in. My hand darted out and tightened around his wrist. I thought I had wanted to know more about her, about Amanda. But now that it was a real possibility, I wasn’t sure.

  No! I was sure I didn’t want to know. I wanted to go back and unsend those letters I wrote and undo the letter that came back. If I let Milo take this next step, it could never be undone. Like when you’re a little kid and go to a lot of trouble to prove that the Tooth Fairy doesn’t exist. You finally have the truth, but then you’re not sure you want it. What have you really gained?

  “What?” Milo said, sharp, annoyed.

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “You wrote the letters. Someone finally answered. Don’t be a baby. What are you afraid of?”

  “I’m not sure exactly. I—”

  Milo shook off my wrist and tapped the Enter key. My mouth dropped open at the hinge, and the word “don’t!” rolled off my tongue. The whole world took on that slow-mo feeling. His finger pulling back slowly from the keyboard. His head swiveling toward me, like it was a science fair project demonstrating the principle of hydraulics. For what seemed forever, nothing changed on the screen. It was excruciating. But still, I knew that time – real time – was moving at its ordinary lightning speed. I could feel the evidence, the heart pounding away in my chest.

  And then her name was everywhere.

  She was real.

  There was an article in the sports section of the local paper: Amanda Schecter flips and spins her way to the top score in the regional gymnastics meet. Amanda Schecter makes the eighth-grade honor roll. Amanda Schecter, one of three youth volunteers at the Humane Society, honored for two hundred hours of community service.

  “It’s so strange,” Milo said. “When you die, you’re not here anymore. But your MySpace profile lives on forever.”

  He clicked on the MySpace link, and my eyes dashed madly around the screen, grabbing on to words and icons, names and pictures. Her favorite music. Her best friends. Photos. Is that her? Her wall was filled with messages:

  Amanda, we’ll miss you!

  Amanda, you were the best!

  Amanda, I will never, ever, ever forget you.

  The whole page seemed to buzz, each new piece of information about Amanda humming a different note in a different key. No melody, no harmony, just all these different clashing sounds trying to be heard, trying to come together as a whole.

  Who was she?

  I couldn’t take it anymore. I reached across Milo’s lap, and before he could stop me, I clicked off the site. I shut my eyes, sank back into the chair. A moment later, he said, “One more?” He didn’t wait for my answer.

  “It’s the obit in the local paper. Beloved daughter of Robert and Claire, sister of Tyler, died today—”

  “Stop!” I ordered, my eyes squeezed closed.

  “There’s a picture of her.”

  “I don’t want to see it. I can’t.”

  Dear Tyler (That is your name, right?),

  Wow, Amanda sounds like an amazing person. Really amazing.

  I guess that’s all I planned to say in this letter, and then thank you again and sign off.

  But I can’t stop there because … I don’t know why exactly. I need to say this to somebody, and I picked you, which doesn’t make sense because I don’t even know you. Or maybe that’s exactly why. You can’t see my face. I can’t see yours. Maybe that’s why I can just blurt this out to a stranger.

  I’m freaking out. I read about Amanda’s life online. And then I compared it to my own. To be honest, if we were both at the same school, I’d probably be mega jealous of all her awards and her obvious self-confidence. I’d probably hate her and obsess on her at the same time, if you know what I mean.

  What have I done with my life so far? Not much. What am I going to do? I don’t have a clue. I never really had to think about that before. For my whole life, I was the sick and dying kid. And when you have that kind of built-in identity, that’s who you are. You don’t have to earn it or work at it. You don’t have to do anything special. Nobody expects anything from you. You get credit for just staying alive.

  But who am I when I’m not the girl who might die any minute?

  Who am I when I don’t have an excuse?

  Wh
o am I when I have an actual future?

  The answer is … I don’t know who I am, only who I’m not. I’m not a great athlete or a musician. I’m not the popular kid with a million friends. I’m not gorgeous or a science genius or a member of the debate team. I’m just completely and totally ordinary. Chances are, I’ll never do anything that really matters in life.

  I keep picturing myself grown up. And you and your family and everyone else will look at my life and be disappointed. “Well, that was a waste of a heart. She never did anything worthwhile…”

  I want to earn this second chance. I want to deserve Amanda’s heart. But I don’t know where to begin.

  TWENTY-SIX

  FOR TYLER, RETURNING TO school was miserable. His first few weeks back, kids and teachers he didn’t even know made a big fuss over him or, worse, went silent and awkward when he walked by. That’s him, the brother of the dead girl. His new identity.

  But then a couple of juniors almost died from overdoses and the big buzz immediately shifted from Amanda. In a perverse way, Tyler actually felt grateful to those kids. The pressure was off. He could go back to being just Tyler, pretty much anonymous and forgettable. He noticed with a sinking sense how the horror of his sister’s death simply faded in the bloom of another horror. Tragedy replaced tragedy, like they were nothing more than a series of TV shows. The same kids who had been hugging and crying and whispering about Amanda were now high on this latest drama, desperate to fill up the shallowness and boredom of their own lives. It made Tyler feel disgusted and more disconnected from people than he usually felt.

  Each day, the minute his last class let out, Tyler headed directly home. At least the house was empty. His mother had gone back to teaching, and she immediately buried herself in her class and students, staying as late as possible at school to grade papers and make lesson plans. Tyler opened the front door, tossed his backpack on a chair before checking the mail. There was a large envelope from the transplant network. He knew what was in it.

  Upstairs in his room, he locked his door even though no one was home.